Praise Team

TIM AND CARRIE ARRIVED FORTY-FIVE MINUTES EARLY FOR SUNDAY meeting. The lot was nearly empty, but they parked several rows back from the main entrance, leaving the closer-in spaces for old people, families with small kids, and anyone else who had a hard time getting around.

Despite its impressive-sounding name, the Tabernacle wasn’t a grand religious edifice, a marble-and-stained-glass monument to the glory of God. It was, in fact, a bland commercial building, a two-thousand-square-foot storefront—it had been a Fashion Bug in its previous incarnation—in Griswold Commons, a once-thriving outdoor mall that had fallen on hard times since the glittering Stonewood Arcadia Retail & Entertainment Center had opened less than a mile away, on a stretch of land along the railroad tracks that had formerly been home to a chemical plant, a cardboard box factory, and a manufacturer of inflatable pool toys.

Considering that the Tabernacle’s attendance and revenue had more than doubled over the past year, Pastor Dennis could probably have afforded a move to classier digs—the local archdiocese was actively seeking evangelical tenants for some of its recently mothballed facilities—but he showed no interest in relocating. Aside from the thrill of preaching to a packed house every week, the Pastor appreciated the ample parking—only a couple of the neighboring stores were open on Sunday morning—and the fact that curious passersby and nervous first-timers could watch the service through the plate-glass window before making the momentous decision to step inside. He also liked the symbolism of a church in the mall—one more Temple of Greed reclaimed for the Lord—and did his best to exploit the possibilities it offered for creative proselytizing. This morning, for example, there was a bright orange banner taped across the front window.

“PUT SATAN OUT OF BUSINESS!” it said. “DON’T MISS OUR BIG SAVINGS!”

BEYOND ALL the practical advantages of the current location, though, Tim and the rest of the congregation knew that Pastor Dennis had a more personal reason for staying put: he believed Griswold Commons was sacred ground. It was here, just a few short years ago, that he’d first heard the call of the Lord and begun his career as a preacher.

He’d told the story in a sermon delivered during one of Tim’s first visits to the Tabernacle, and referred to it frequently in the months that followed, always striking the same note of quiet wonderment at the fact of having been struck down on the Road to Damascus.

The way he described it, he was a lost soul at the time, a man in his late twenties with a low-paying job, living in the basement of his mother’s house. It was especially embarrassing because he’d been a boy of great promise, the salutatorian of his high-school class, winner of a partial scholarship to the prestigious Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

But something had gone wrong when he got to college. Almost immediately, a darkness settled over him. He felt foggy and tired all the time; he slept badly and couldn’t concentrate on his schoolwork. The doctors called it depression, but that didn’t seem right. Depression comes from inside you; this had come from outside, like someone had dropped a heavy blanket over his head.

He lived beneath this blanket for ten long years, working part-time when he could, taking a class here and there. He had few friends and suffered from a debilitating loneliness that could only be soothed, temporarily, by pornography or violent video games.

Not long after his twenty-eighth birthday, for reasons no one could explain, he began to feel a little better. He took a full-time job in the computer department of the old Best Buy in Griswold Commons (the store had since relocated to the Arcadia Center), where he impressed his supervisors with his positive attitude, technical know-how, and strong communications skills. There was talk about management opportunities, a long-term future with the company.

And the cool thing was, he liked Best Buy; he felt at home there. It was a privilege to be surrounded by all these amazing products—big-screen TVs, audio components galore, wafer-thin laptops with ultrafast processors, pocket-sized digital cameras, rack upon rack of movies, music, and video games—the accumulated bounty of the world’s hightech wizardry. It was, he often thought, like working in a Museum of Wonders.

At least that was how he felt for about six months, until the old man showed up late one Saturday afternoon, a burly white-haired guy in a shabby suit, gimping around on a bum leg. He came hobbling up to Dennis with a sly smile on his face, as if they were pals from way back when.

“There he is,” the old man said. “Just the kid I’ve been looking for.”

“Can I help you?” Dennis asked.

The old man held out a fat paperback.

“The boss told me to give this to you.”

Dennis accepted the book, surprised to see that it was a Bible.

“This is from Kenny?”

Kenny was the Assistant Manager on duty, a middle-aged frat boy who always headed straight to a bar when he was finished with work. Dennis had tagged along a couple of times, but once he had a few drinks in him, all Kenny wanted to talk about was how he loved women with huge bottoms, the bigger the better. He could hold forth on the subject for hours.

“I told you,” the old man said. “It’s from the boss.”

“You mean Phil?” Phil was the weekday manager, Kenny’s direct superior.

“It’s not from Phil,” the old man scoffed. “Phil’s not the boss.”

By this point, Dennis was losing his patience.

“I’m a little busy right now. Is this some kind of joke?”

The old man looked offended.

“I traveled a long way to bring this to you. Believe me, I would’ve been happy to stay home.”

“I think you got the wrong guy,” Dennis told him.

“That’s not possible,” the old man replied.

“But I don’t want a Bible.”

“That’s not my problem. I just said I’d deliver it. What happens after that is your business.”

The old man gave him a searching look, then turned and walked away, moving at a pretty good clip for a guy whose right foot never quite made it off the floor. Dennis would have followed him—he still wanted to clarify this issue about the boss—but he was waylaid by an imperious young woman carrying a handwritten list of questions entitled, “Wireless Networking Problems/Solutions.”

Dennis wasn’t sure what to do about the Bible. He didn’t want to take it home, but he didn’t feel right throwing it away. In the end, he just stuck it on a cluttered shelf beneath the Computer Information desk and forgot all about it.

But the Bible didn’t forget him, though it took him a while to realize it. All he really knew at the time was that the store suddenly began to feel strange. He’d always thought of it as a humming hive of useful machines and ingenious works of art, but now it struck him as soulless, vaguely malignant. The customers didn’t seem excited so much as dazed, pod people hypnotized by flickering images, stupefied by all that shiny metal and molded plastic. Sometimes, walking down the DVD aisle, he was almost certain he could smell something putrid, as if rotting flesh were hidden inside those elegant little boxes with pictures of handsome men and beautiful women on the front. He’d watch kids trying out video games on the in-store consoles and have to suppress an urge to rip the controllers out of their hands and scream for them to run for their lives. On more than one occasion, he found himself on his knees in the employee restroom, puking up his guts, although he didn’t feel the least bit sick.

He wondered if he was losing his mind, if he was going to have another episode like the one that had knocked him for a loop in college, but this seemed different. Back then he’d felt thickheaded, two beats behind the rest of the world, but this time around he was lucid, hyper-aware. It was the store that was messed up, not him; he was sure of it.

He thought seriously about quitting to preserve his sanity, but he didn’t want to alarm his mother. She was so thrilled to have him working, to be able to believe that her son had recovered, that everything would be all right. He didn’t want to take that away from her, to do something that would make her frightened again.

One busy Thursday night, he crouched down below the Computer Information desk to get a manual for a Handheld Organizer when his eyes landed on the Bible the old man had given him. What he saw struck him with amazement. The book was glowing like a beacon, pulsing with energy, calling out to him. All at once, as if the knowledge had been poured into him like a fiery liquid, he understood who the Boss was, and what he was required to do.

“Oh Lord,” he said, placing his hand on the book. “You found me.”

His own memory of what happened after that was dim and fragmentary—all he really knew was that the Spirit had entered his heart and irrevocably transformed him—but he’d been able to reconstruct much of it from the police report, conversations with sympathetic eyewitnesses, and the amateur video taken near the end of the incident.

By all accounts, he had emerged wild-eyed from below the counter, holding the Bible aloft with both hands, and babbling in a language that had never before been heard in Best Buy. He stepped out from behind the desk, knocked a flat-screen monitor to the floor, and proceeded to kick over a display of knockoff MP3 players.

The Spirit was still overflowing from his mouth, though a few people claimed that there was intelligible speech mixed in with the divine gibberish, warnings to specific customers to turn a blind eye to the sinful works of man and fix their gazes on the Lord.

Dennis was not a big man, and he had never done much exercise, but the Spirit made him strong. He tossed all-in-one printers through the air like they were empty boxes, toppled a shelf of home-theater components, scattered CDs like playing cards. A couple of his fellow employees tried to stop him, but they were too weak. A gaggle of customers—some moved by his passion, others excited by the possibility of violence—began to follow him as he made his way, inevitably, it seemed, to the back of the store, where he planted himself in front of a three-thousand-dollar, sixty-one-inch, wide-screen flat-panel plasma TV that was playing Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

“Whore!” he shouted. “Abomination!”

There was some uncertainty about where the boombox came from, whether he’d picked it up on the way or someone had handed it to him just then, but there was no dispute about the fact that he raised the sleek black tube overhead—it was a JVC with built-in subwoofers—and hurled it at the screen, causing Angelina Jolie to disintegrate in a rain of shattered glass. Screams of protest and cheers of approval mingled as Dennis fell to his knees and called out to God.

Some witnesses believed he was about to demolish a second TV, but he never got the chance; two security guards jumped him from behind and began attacking him with fists and billy clubs, delivering a savage and prolonged beating that was captured by a customer on a display model camcorder. Tim remembered seeing the grainy video on the TV news—he was going through his divorce at the time and was a long way from God—and thinking, “Big deal, the jerk had it coming to him,” which he later realized, with a feeling of deep shame, was exactly what lots of “good” people must have thought two thousand years ago, watching a half-dead man getting whipped by soldiers as he dragged a wooden cross up a hill in the desert.

INSIDE, THE Tabernacle didn’t look like much: a big open room with a low ceiling, white walls, and gray industrial carpeting. Two smaller areas—the lobby and the Young Apostles’ room—were carved out of the larger space by temporary office partitions. Tim said good-bye to Carrie just inside the main entrance—she was on the Loaves and Fishes Committee, which served refreshments in the lobby—and continued into the Sanctuary.

It was quiet in there, a field of empty white folding chairs, and Tim paused at the back of the room, as he did every week, to savor this moment of homecoming. No matter what else was going on in his life—how distracted he was by problems with Abby, Carrie, or Allison—he never failed to be cleansed and lifted up by these first few breaths of sanctified air. He could feel God’s presence surrounding him, a calm but still mighty benevolence radiating down from the ceiling and up from the floor, and his heart swelled with a mingled sense of awe and gratitude and humble pride that a man such as himself could have his own small part to play in the ceremony that was about to unfold.

He headed down the center aisle toward the altar, a low wooden platform that also served as bandstand for the Praise Team. His fellow musicians were already onstage, tweaking their amps and instruments and glancing over the set list, professionally oblivious to the Prayer Squad meeting taking place directly in front of them. About a dozen church members were swarming around Alice Palmiero, a mother of two not much older than Tim, who’d recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It looked from the outside like a loving rugby scrum, hunched bodies pressing close together, hands wrapped around shoulders and resting on backs, a low murmur of supplication rising from the group. Tim knew what it was like to be at the center of all that powerful energy—the Prayer Squad had taken up the cause of his sobriety shortly after he’d accepted Jesus—and he hoped Alice was drawing the same comfort and reassurance he had from the knowledge that he wasn’t alone in his trials, that good people wanted him to get better, and wanted the Lord to know it.

A little off to the right of the prayer huddle, Youth Pastor Eddie and Elise Kim were standing with their arms outstretched, their ecstatic faces tilted toward the ceiling. Tim wasn’t sure if they were satellites of the larger group or bystanders with a separate agenda. He slipped between them as unobtrusively as he could and stepped onto the stage, nodding hello to Bill Spooner, the lead guitarist and bandleader, who was down on his knees fiddling with his pedalboard, an elaborate miniature city of metal boxes and multicolored wires.

“Brother Mason.” He spoke softly, acknowledging Tim’s arrival with a sardonic salute. “Rock on.”

“Amen,” Tim muttered in reply. “Turn it up to eleven.”

FOR TIM, Sunday worship was an easy gig; all he had to do was tune up, plug in, and play. His Fender Jazz Bass and Peavey amp were already up on stage, right where he’d left them last week, and the week before that. He didn’t bother taking them home anymore.

Unlike a couple of guys from the Praise Team—Bill fronted a popular oldies band called Gary and the Graybeards, and the drummer, Ben Malinowski, played in a jazz trio that had a regular Saturday night booking at the Red Roof Inn in Gifford Township—Tim no longer had a musical life outside the Tabernacle. That world was just too fraught with temptation. He wasn’t the kind of reformed alcoholic who could spend the night in a bar drinking nothing but Diet Coke, nor was he the kind of reformed pothead who’d have an easy time passing a joint to the next guy without taking a toke for himself, or the kind of responsible married man who remembered to mention the existence of his wife the instant a pretty woman started flirting with him. He wished it were otherwise, but he’d never figured out a way to separate the rock ’n’ roll from the sex, drugs, and booze that always seemed to come along with it, the good and the bad tied up in a thrilling, sloppy, ultimately toxic package. He remembered laughing about Little Richard years ago, thinking how pathetic it was for a performer of that stature to have found it necessary to denounce “the Devil’s music,” but he’d reluctantly come to accept the possibility that Mr. Tutti Frutti had a point.

Which was sad, because Tim loved to rock, and knew how good he was at it. A bass player who could sing harmony, he’d been recruited by all sorts of bands over the years—Southern Rock, New Wave, blues, punk, rockabilly, funk—and still got calls from musicians who knew of him by reputation or remembered him from shows stretching all the way back to the mid-eighties, and he always had to fight down a surge of excitement before regretfully declining their invitations to audition.

Luckily, Bill Spooner had remembered him, too; they’d played a lot of the same clubs in the early nineties, back when Tim was in a grunge band called Placenta, and Bill was the main songwriter and lead shredder for Killing Spree, a locally famous death metal trio that had released a couple of well-received albums on an indie label out of New Brunswick. Bill had called out of the blue a year and a half ago to ask if Tim could bail him out for a single gig on Sunday morning.

“It’s at my church,” he said. “Just four songs. I can teach ’em to you in half an hour.”

“You go to church?” It didn’t even occur to Tim to hide his amusement. Killing Spree had done the whole Slayer trip—studded bracelets, gratuitous references to Satan, pictures of dead animals projected onto a screen behind the band—without offering the slightest hint that they might just be kidding around.

“Dude,” he said. “This church saved my life. You know, after Jill died. I was in a dark place.”

“Jill died?” Tim felt like an idiot. “I didn’t know that. I’m really sorry.”

Bill and Jill had been a famous rock ’n’ roll couple back in the day. Black leather, tattoos, hair hanging in their faces. They went everywhere on Bill’s Harley, wore matching fringe jackets with the Killing Spree logo on the back, a skeleton with a cigarette in its mouth, blasting away on a tommy gun.

“Three years ago,” Bill said. “We were living out in Pennsylvania. She was having a baby, and something went wrong. They saved the little one, but not her. Can you imagine? The guy I was, with a dead wife and a newborn baby to take care of?”

“Not really,” Tim said.

“I came home to live with my parents.” He gave a soft laugh of amazement. “Man, I was a mess. Then this guy invited me to his church.”

“And now you’re inviting me,” Tim said.

“You don’t have to believe,” Bill assured him. “You just gotta play a couple of songs. And besides, it’s all the donuts you can eat.”

“What the hell,” Tim had said. “I’m not doing anything on Sunday.”

TIM AND Bill went out to the lobby after sound check to grab a cup of coffee. It was just starting to fill up, and there was a cheerful cocktail party vibe in the air, lots of hugs, handshakes, and how are you’s. Ever since his first visit to the Tabernacle, Tim had been struck by the warmth and fellowship he found there; almost without exception the church members were kind and openhearted, nothing like the grim Puritans he’d expected. It had been the same with the punks and Deadheads he’d known in his wilder days: despite their fearsome reputations in the outside world, they usually turned out to be surprisingly normal once you got to know them.

Carrie was standing behind the snack table, trying to console Evelyn Braithwaite, who’d lost a son in Iraq a year ago, but was still mourning as if it had happened last week. Tim raised an eyebrow in commiseration as he passed—Carrie had complained more than once about what a trial it was, having to listen to Evelyn recount the same half dozen memories of Jason every week—and she replied with an inconspicuous flutter of her fingers, as if she were typing a brief message on an invisible keyboard.

Bill’s wife, Ellie, arrived just as they were finishing their donuts, a big-boned, flustered-looking redhead with a three-month-old baby cradled in her arms, and her four-year-old stepdaughter in tow. Little Gillian was a delicate, slightly unnerving child, eerily reminiscent of her late mother, a black-haired waif with pouty lips and an expression of lofty disdain for the world. Tim felt a small shock of recognition every time he saw her, a window into a crazier time, drugs and motorcycles and shrieking feedback from a Marshall stack, glassy-eyed chicks with white makeup and black lips.

Bill hurried over to greet his family, lifting Gillian into his arms, then planting a hard, lingering kiss on Ellie’s mouth. Maybe it was just for show—Tim didn’t always trust married couples who carried on like teenagers—but it didn’t look that way. Bill was at peace with his new life, liberated from the past. He didn’t seem to mind that he’d lost his hair and put on weight, or traded in his biker’s vest for an outlandish Hawaiian shirt with hot dogs and hamburgers printed on it, just like he didn’t seem to mind that Ellie couldn’t hold a candle to Jill; he accepted his second wife the way he accepted Jesus—unquestioningly, with delight and gratitude for the gift he’d been given, and no apparent desire to look back. It must have helped that Jill was dead, Tim thought. Maybe Bill wouldn’t have found it so easy if he had to see her every week with another man and remember what they’d been to each other.

Bill kissed Gillian on the forehead and set her back down on the floor. Then Ellie handed him the baby, and his face lit up with happiness. Tim didn’t feel jealous so much as guilty; he still insisted on wearing a condom with Carrie, postponing the child he knew she desperately wanted. He told her it was because he wanted to save some money, get them on their feet financially so she could afford to stay at home with the baby, but that was only part of it. Something else was holding him back, a stubborn reluctance to take that final irrevocable step, to create a new family that would forever supersede the old one.

His eyes strayed back to Carrie, who still hadn’t managed to extricate herself from the conversation with Evelyn. It wasn’t much of a conversation, really—Evelyn did all the talking; Carrie just nodded or shook her head, occasionally touching the older woman on the arm. Even so, Tim could see how intently Carrie was focused on her, and how comforted Evelyn was to be enveloped in the cocoon of her sympathetic attention. He felt a surge of respect and affection for his wife; she was a good woman, and he was a fool for letting himself lose sight of it. He made up his mind to join her, to take some of the burden of consoling Evelyn off her shoulders, but he received a hard slap on the back before he’d managed to take the first step in her direction.

“Hey, coach!”

Tim turned to see his friend John Roper, a man of alarming girth, looming over him with a big Sunday morning grin on his face. Tim returned the smile, momentarily startled—he reacted the same way every week—by the sight of his assistant coach in a suit and tie. Until a few months ago, Tim had only ever seen him in sweats.

“How’s Abby?” John inquired.

“Okay. A little woozy last night, but she felt fine this morning.”

“Praise God.” John stepped toward Tim, spreading his arms wide. “Gimme a hug.”

With a reluctance he hoped he managed to conceal, Tim submitted to the larger man’s embrace. It wasn’t that he was squeamish about hugging other guys—it was standard practice at the Tabernacle—but as a smallish man, he found it embarrassing to be crushed in the arms of a big lug like John, a former offensive tackle at Montclair State who had to outweigh him by a hundred pounds. It made him feel childish, like a little boy who needed to drink more milk.

John kept his arms wrapped tightly around Tim well after the two men had exchanged the obligatory three thumps on the back. These extralong hugs were a habit of John’s, his way of saying thanks. It was Tim who’d invited him to the Tabernacle over the summer—he’d seen an opening after a conversation in which John had complained about middle-of-the-night panic attacks, a dizzying sense of peering down into an endless void—and Tim who’d acted as his spiritual guide and sponsor in the subsequent months, much as Bill Spooner had done for him. Pastor Dennis called it the Rescue Chain: I save you, you save the next guy, and he’ll save someone else.

“That was an awesome game yesterday,” John said, giving Tim a final, anaconda-like squeeze before letting go. “I’m still on cloud nine.”

“Well, we’ve got this one to thank.” Tim nodded at John’s daughter, Candace, who was standing next to her father, nervously plucking at the Livestrong bracelet on her left wrist. “That was an amazing goal. I can’t believe how fast you got upfield.”

Candace blushed; she was a lovely girl with the long neck and regal bearing of a ballerina. Tim caught himself gazing at her with a little too much interest—she wasn’t even twelve, for Pete’s sake—and hastily shifted his attention back to her father, who wasn’t nearly so pleasant to look at.

“She almost flubbed it,” John said with an affectionate chuckle. “For a second there, I didn’t think the ball had enough juice to make it across the goal line.”

He reached out to muss his daughter’s hair, but she swatted his hand away.

“Daddy.”

John drew back in mock surrender.

“Sorry.” He rolled his eyes for Tim’s benefit. “I keep forgetting. The hair’s off-limits.”

Tim shook his head in parental solidarity. He wondered if it was weird for John, watching his little girl grow into such a striking young woman, a long-legged blonde who, within a year or two, wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without causing a physical disturbance in every man and teenage boy within a hundred-yard radius. It wasn’t nearly so complicated for Tim, at least not yet. Unlike Candace, Abby still seemed a long way from puberty, even if she was disconcertingly adolescent in some of her behaviors and attitudes.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tim said. “By that point, I didn’t really care if we won or lost. I was just so proud of the girls for not giving up.”

John’s face grew solemn. He dropped a beefy hand on Tim’s shoulder.

“That was a gutsy thing you did after the game.”

“It was no big deal,” Tim muttered.

“Yes, it was,” John insisted. He spoke softly, looking Tim straight in the eye. “It was a very big deal. You stood up for the Lord, and I want to thank you for it.”

PLAYING MUSIC was a bit like making love, Tim thought, as the Praise Team launched into “Marvelous,” the upbeat kickoff to their three-song opening set. Sometimes you were right there in the thick of it, completely at one with your partner, your entire being submerged in the act. Other times you were oddly detached, floating above yourself, watching with mild interest as you phoned it in, thinking how you were overdue for an oil change, or wondering when it was, exactly, that you’d lost your taste for chunky peanut butter.

Today, he could tell, was going to be one of those half-there days. His fingers were hitting the right notes, and his voice felt strong as he leaned into the mic, smiling at the lead singer, Verna Deaver, as they harmonized on the chorus:

But his mind was far away, drifting insistently back to the prayer at the end of yesterday’s soccer game, the nagging sense—only compounded by John’s praise—that he’d done something foolish, or at least gotten himself into something a little messier than he’d bargained for.

He’d never asked the team to pray with him before, had never even considered it a possibility. But it had been an emotional game, and when the girls gathered around for the final cheer, a feeling of such love came over him—all those sweet, flushed, youthful faces gazing up at him—that he spoke from the heart, without premeditation.

“Let’s hold hands,” he’d said, “and give thanks to God.”

None of them complained or even hesitated; they didn’t seem to feel threatened, or even the least bit uncomfortable about what he’d asked them to do. They linked hands and sat down on the grass as naturally as if they prayed together every day. It wasn’t until Maggie’s mother came running up with that look of horror on her face that it occurred to Tim that he might have overstepped his bounds.

He’d known she was there, of course. They’d met at halftime, and had a nice chat—she was friendlier than he’d expected, with a surprisingly girlish laugh—so he had no excuse for not anticipating her reaction. In fact, he wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking he’d orchestrated the whole incident simply to antagonize her.

But the truth was, he’d forgotten all about Ruth Ramsey by then. The latter part of the second half—everything after Abby got knocked out—had been a blur to him. He’d been so terrified to see his daughter lying motionless on the grass—there was one nauseating moment when she’d honestly looked dead to him—and so overcome with relief when she finally opened her eyes, that he still wasn’t thinking straight when Maggie’s mother showed up and started screaming.

He’d tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t listen. She just yanked her daughter away from the team, with all the other girls watching, and told him that her child’s days on the Stars were over. Maggie burst into tears when she heard this—she was a tough little girl, and he remembered thinking she cried like a boy, angrily, like she’d been betrayed by her body—and that was the thing he couldn’t get out of his head.

He wasn’t sorry about saying the prayer, and he certainly wasn’t sorry about offending someone like Ruth Ramsey, but he was deeply sorry about putting Maggie in that awful position, embarrassing her in front of her teammates, taking what should have been a nice moment for all of them and turning it into something ugly and confusing.

And now he was going to have to apologize to Maggie’s mother, as much as he hated the idea. Because he’d be heartbroken if Maggie left the team, and not just because she was his best player. He’d be heartbroken because she was a great kid who loved the game, and because she shouldn’t have to stop playing it because of a dispute between adults, something that didn’t involve her at all.

TIM STARTED to perk up a bit on “Jerusalem,” the final song of the opening set. He could tell from the moment Verna Deaver hit the first note that autopilot wasn’t going to cut it; he’d have to step up his game if he didn’t want to get left behind.

“My soul is weary,” she called out, the richness of her voice frayed by a ragged edge of grievance. “And my body is tired!”

Tim and Bill Spooner supplied the baritone response.

“Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

“But my faith is burning with a heavenly fire!”

“Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

A large black woman of indeterminate age, Verna was the newest member of the Praise Team. Tim didn’t know much about her, except that she worked at the KFC on Route 23, seemed to be raising a couple of grandchildren on her own, and suffered from some kind of chronic foot ailment that forced her to rehearse while sitting in a chair. On Sunday mornings, though, she always stood straight and proud at the microphone, waving her arms and swaying gently from side to side, as if God had granted her a temporary waiver for the relief of pain.

There weren’t a whole lot of black people who belonged to the Tabernacle—even by the most generous standard, Stonewood Heights could not be considered a diverse community—but their number had been increasing steadily over the past year, as word had spread throughout the surrounding area of Pastor Dennis’s charismatic leadership and uncompromising denunciations of immorality.

Verna had been among the first wave of African-Americans to join the church, a core group of a dozen or so mostly older women who’d arrived last winter, around the time Pastor Dennis began appearing on a weekly cable access TV show called The Good Seed. Tim had a vivid memory of the first time he’d seen her, because she’d been accompanied by a gorgeous young woman with dreadlocks, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes—she wore a tight skirt and shiny knee-high boots—who didn’t return the following week, or ever again, though Tim still hadn’t stopped looking for her.

Verna asked to audition for the Praise Team in late spring. The guys were skeptical at first; she had no previous experience as a singer and didn’t seem like she’d fit in very easily with a group of veteran musicians who’d been playing in rock bands since they were teenagers. But these objections disappeared by the time she finished the first verse of “Amazing Grace”—it was instantly clear that Verna was a natural, endowed with a big expressive voice and an instinctive sense of how to use it. There was none of the stumbling you expected at an audition, the newcomer following the band instead of leading it. Verna just stepped in and took over, and no one begrudged it for a second.

“Let the first be last and the last be first, uh-huh!”

“Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

“Help me, Lord! Lift me up now!”

“Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

Over the summer, the Praise Team had undergone a major transformation, changing from an ensemble of equals—up to that point, Bill, Tim, and the keyboard player, Gary Rawson, had traded off on the lead-singing responsibilities—to a backing group for a virtuoso vocalist. Or, as Bill liked to say, “We used to be Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; now we’re Big Brother and the Holding Company.”

“My feet are sore! But I got to keep on walking!”

“Goin’ up to Jerusalem!”

“Oh, Lord! I’m right here at your side!”

“Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

During the same period, their repertoire had shifted slowly but decisively away from the slightly bland pop/rock that had been their default mode toward more traditional gospel music, which was what Verna sang best. The longtime church members had been mystified at first, especially by the ecstatic improvisational runs built into the end of the songs, during which Verna sometimes worked herself up into quite a lather, clutching her head and punching herself repeatedly in the leg as she testified, but lately they’d come around. In the past few weeks, the worshippers had begun clapping along with the music, making a tentative but still joyful noise that was new to the Tabernacle, and surely pleasing to God.

THERE WAS no applause when the song finally ended, nothing to suggest that anything in the way of a performance had occurred. The musicians just put down their instruments—Tim and Bill each took one of Verna’s arms as she stepped down from the stage, breathing hard, her eyes wild and unfocused—and took their seats among the worshippers.

For Tim, this was one of the most satisfying moments of the service, the one that captured what it meant to be a Christian. It wasn’t a question of Us and Them—the band set apart from the audience, the special people lording it over the drones—they were all one, the believers, the people of the Tabernacle.

For as long as he could remember, Tim had been drawn to this feeling of community; it was something he’d sought, at very different points in his life, from both punk rock and the Grateful Dead, and in each case, for a little while, he’d found what he was looking for. But it hadn’t lasted, and in any case, the communities in which he’d claimed membership were disappointingly narrow and homogenous compared to this one. The punks and the Deadheads were overwhelmingly white, suburban, and young; almost everyone wore similar clothes and hairstyles, and had had more or less the same experience of the world. Not like here, where you saw grandmothers and little kids, people in wheelchairs, whole families, interracial couples, immigrants who barely spoke a word of English, college teachers, twelve steppers, cancer patients who’d lost their hair, lonely people who didn’t have a friend in the world until they stepped through the door of the Tabernacle.

Tim nodded at the familiar faces and patted a couple of acquaintances on the shoulder as he made his way to the empty aisle seat next to Carrie, who was watching him with the usual mixture of affection and worry. She squeezed his hand and gave him a quick smile before turning her attention back to the podium, clearly curious, as he was, about who would be delivering this morning’s sermon.

Tim wasn’t sure why, but Pastor Dennis had been cutting down on his preaching this fall, and not because he was sick or out of town. For three out of the past four weeks, guest speakers—a missionary who’d worked among the poor in Guatemala, a nurse who spoke about Christianity and medical ethics, and an ex-gay man who’d renounced his homosexuality and was now a married father of two—had addressed the congregation while Pastor Dennis listened intently from the cheap seats.

This phenomenon had caused a great deal of discussion among the people of the Tabernacle, who couldn’t help speculating about the reasons behind the Pastor’s uncharacteristic retreat from the spotlight. Was he feeling burnt-out? Was he worried that the church had become a “Cult of Personality,” as a disgruntled letter writer had charged in the Bulletin-Chronicle? Or was there some broader, subtler purpose behind his choices that would gradually make itself known over the next month or two? While different people gravitated toward different explanations, there was a near-unanimous feeling among the congregation that the guest speakers had not been very good, despite their interesting life experiences. It was one thing to talk about yourself; Pastor Dennis had the rarer talent of inspiring others, using his words to connect with his listeners and draw them closer to God.

The ex-gay man—he introduced himself simply as “Troy”—was the most problematic speaker for Tim, and not only because there didn’t seem to be anything “ex” about him. Tim understood that it was unfair to stereotype, but he was pretty sure he could recognize a gay guy when he saw one. It wasn’t just Troy’s effeminate voice, or his exaggerated gestures, or his suspiciously buff body, or even the flirtatious way he put his hands on his hips, cocked his head to one side, and said, “People, I am sooo not proud of my behavior.” Any one of those things could have been pure coincidence, but taken together, the whole package just seemed to scream, “I’m still gay!” Tim wondered how Mrs. Troy managed to convince herself that everything was on the up-and-up when she stood before him in a filmy negligee and saw the look of profound indifference on his face, unless she happened to be a recovering lesbian herself, in which case she was probably more relieved than anything else.

Most of the time, Tim did his best to be a good Christian and toe the biblical line, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get himself all worked up about the sin of homosexuality. It just didn’t seem that bad to him, certainly not worth banishing someone to hell for, and probably not worth all the time and energy Pastor Dennis and lots of other people spent obsessing about it, especially since Jesus didn’t have a single word to say on the subject in the Gospels.

It seemed like a glaring omission, considering that Jesus had a fair amount to say on other points of sexual morality, including one that was particularly inconvenient for Tim: “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery.” You couldn’t get much clearer than that, and yet Pastor Dennis hadn’t objected to Tim’s marriage to Carrie, far from it. He’d just let the whole remarriage-adultery thing slide, tempering God’s harsh law with a dose of human compassion. Tim couldn’t help feeling like gay people deserved a similar break, a recognition that a choice between a life of sin and a life of celibacy was no choice at all.

IT WAS amusing for Tim to find himself so squarely in the camp of sexual tolerance because it was a long way from where he’d started out. He’d been a teenager in the late seventies, part of the last generation of American boys who could say the word “fag” with an air of innocence, without it even occurring to them that someone somewhere might have a right to be offended. The mere thought of two men getting it on was enough to send him and his buddies into paroxysms of disgust. At the same time, they joked about it constantly; it was the rare conversation that ended without the ritual invitation to “suck my dick.” They devoted lots of fevered speculation to the nightmare of prison rape, especially the variety in which a large black man claimed you as his steady girlfriend.

His homophobia survived intact through a good part of college—Stockton State in the early eighties was no hotbed of progressive thinking—until he met Scott D’Alerio. This was in the spring of his junior year, at a time when Tim had stopped going to classes and pretty much resigned himself to flunking out. Scott was his neighbor, a stoner goofball with long hair and a mellow personality; he wore a black watch cap indoors and out, twelve months a year, and hosted a late-night jazz fusion show on the college radio station. They ran into each other all the time around the apartment complex—Scott seemed to have as few academic obligations as Tim—and gradually fell into the habit of hanging out together in the afternoons, smoking dope and listening to music at Scott’s place.

One day, out of the blue, Scott put his hand on Tim’s leg and asked if he could suck him off. Tim sat up in stoned bewilderment—he’d been sprawled on the couch, contemplating the monstrous genius of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—his mind lagging a second or two behind the action.

“Dude,” he spluttered. “What did you just say?”

Scott was kneeling on the rug, gazing up at Tim, his face bold and vulnerable at the same time.

“I asked if I could suck you off.”

A dopey, one-syllable laugh escaped from Tim’s mouth. “That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking,” Scott assured him. He had these long pretty eyelashes that Tim had never noticed before. “Nobody else has to know.”

“You’re wasted. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It’s just a blowjob,” Scott replied, in a weirdly peevish tone. “Just close your eyes and pretend I’m a girl.”

Tim grabbed his weed and rolling papers off the coffee table and stood up.

“Dude,” he said. “I better go. You’re freaking me out.”

“Oh shit.” Scott clapped his hand against his forehead and started moaning. “Fuck. I’m really sorry.”

Tim took a couple of uncertain steps toward the door.

“Don’t go,” Scott called after him.

“I think I better,” Tim replied.

“Come on,” Scott pleaded. “Don’t do this to me.”

Tim wasn’t sure what made him turn around. Maybe the shakiness in Scott’s voice. Maybe just an unwillingness to be the kind of person who walks out on a friend when he’s begging you to stay.

“Please.” Scott sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “I really didn’t mean to offend you.”

“It’s okay,” Tim told him. “I’m not offended.”

He was surprised to hear himself say this, and even more surprised to realize it was true. He was shocked and embarrassed for both of them, but he wasn’t angry.

“It’s just—” Scott stood up. He tried to smile but it didn’t really work. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Like all the time. Sometimes, I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m in love with you.”

“I didn’t even know you were gay.”

“I don’t wanna be,” Scott assured him. “I just fucking am.”

They went into the kitchen, drank a couple of beers, and talked for a long time. Scott said he’d known the truth about himself since he was a little kid, though he’d resisted it as best he could. He’d even had a couple of girlfriends in high school, but it was all for show, like acting in a play. He said he’d never had a real boyfriend, but that he went to bars sometimes, places where straight-looking college guys were pretty popular. When Tim finally left, they assured each other that everything was cool between them, that they were still friends, and that they’d go on as if the whole episode had never happened.

It didn’t work out that way, of course. They tried hanging out a handful of times after that, but there was always a thick cloud of awkwardness following them around, a troubling new set of possibilities in the air. In the past they’d sat together for long periods of time without talking, content to be stoned and grooving on the music—at least that was how it seemed to Tim—but now they felt compelled to break the silence with lame stabs at conversation, each one trying to make sure that the other was okay, wasn’t feeling self-conscious or uncomfortable. After a while, it just got easier to make excuses. Tim started playing a lot of ultimate Frisbee; Scott suddenly had a shitload to do at the radio station.

Tim dropped out of school at the end of the summer, and never saw Scott again. But he thought about him a lot in the years that followed, whenever anyone made a fag joke or said that gay men deserved to get AIDS. Sometimes, if the circumstances were right, Tim would challenge the speaker, ask if he—in Tim’s experience, it was always a he—had any friends who were gay. Almost always, the guy would say no.

“Wait till you do,” Tim would tell him. “That’s when you’ll realize what an asshole you used to be.”

PASTOR DENNIS normally began the sermon right after the Praise Team vacated the stage, but this morning there was some sort of holdup. After two or three minutes of staring at the empty podium, people began checking their watches and glancing around uncertainly, wondering if somebody should do something, or at least make an announcement.

The audible sigh of relief that greeted the Pastor’s sudden arrival—he came hustling down the center aisle just as Youth Pastor Eddie was shuffling onto the stage with a grim expression on his face—quickly dissolved into murmurs of confusion and concern at his disheveled appearance. Instead of the neatly pressed khakis and light blue polo shirt that had been his preaching uniform for as long as Tim had been coming to the Tabernacle, he was wearing a rumpled, ill-fitting gray suit with a torn sleeve. His striped tie was loosened and askew, his shirttail partially untucked; he could have been a businessman slinking back to his hotel after a night of hard carousing in a strange city. The fact that he was limping slightly and cupping his hand over his right eye only added another layer of mystery to an already unsettling situation.

The two Pastors embraced on the stage. After a brief whispered conversation, Youth Pastor Eddie retreated to his seat, while Pastor Dennis took his accustomed place behind the microphone.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t get to sleep last night. I was at a wedding, and there was a lot of drinking going on.”

He took his hand away from his eye, revealing a hideous green-and-purple shiner in full bloom.

“As you might suspect, this was not a Christian wedding. Oh, don’t get me wrong—if you asked the people there if they believed in Jesus, most of them would have said yes. But you and I understand that they only say that because they don’t know Jesus, not like we do. In fact, they wouldn’t recognize our Lord if he rang their doorbell, wearing his dazzling white robes—you know, the clothes the Gospel of Mark describes as being ‘whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.’ He could introduce himself as the Son of God, and explain that He’d died for their sins, and these Christians would just slam the door in His face and go right back to watching Desperate Housewives.

“So what was I doing there, you might ask? The easy answer is that I had no choice. The bride was my wife’s cousin, and she’d asked Emily to be one of her bridesmaids. So I went to the wedding with my wife, because we were invited. But the better answer is that I belonged there, among those drunken fools and faithless believers. This is exactly what Jesus told the Pharisees when they demanded to know why a holy man would stoop to break bread with sinners: ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.’

“Just so you understand the situation, I should explain that the wedding party got to sit at a big long table in the front of the banquet hall. That’s where Emily was, which meant I was flying solo. It turned out there were a fair number of unattached men at the wedding, enough that we actually got assigned a table of our own, stuck way in the back of the hall, by the kitchen. The stag table, that’s what the guys were calling it.

“My tablemates were just regular guys—one was an electrician, another sold cell phones, a couple worked with computers. All they really had in common was that they all liked sports and they all had come to the wedding with the goal of getting as drunk as possible. And I’ll tell you what, they succeeded. By the time dinner was served, a couple of my companions were already pretty intoxicated, and the others were well on their way. So maybe it’s not too surprising that they started discussing strip clubs right there at the wedding reception, though I have to admit I was taken aback, not having realized that this was an acceptable subject for conversation at the dinner table. Nobody seemed to think there was anything shameful about it—far from it. My tablemates weren’t ashamed! They were proud of themselves! They were so macho, so sophisticated, such men of the world!

“You wouldn’t think it could get much worse than that, right? But there was this one loudmouth at the table—Jay was his name—who couldn’t stop talking about Jenna Jameson. Now it’s my hope that most of you have never even heard of Jenna Jameson, and if that’s the case, I’m sorry to be the one bringing her to your attention. Suffice it to say that Jenna Jameson is the biggest whore in the world, and that she gets paid very well for her services. And this pathetic man couldn’t shut up about her. ‘I love Jenna,’ he said. ‘She’s the only girl for me.’

“Now, you can imagine how I felt about this vile nonsense, but I held my tongue, for as Jesus said, ‘I did not come to judge the world.’

But Jay must have sensed that I was withholding myself from the conversation, and it made him nervous. After a while, he turned to me, and said, ‘So, uh, Denny, you a big Jenna fan?’

“I told Jay I was happily married to a flesh-and-blood woman, and that I loved her with all my heart. ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘What possible use could I have for a pig like Jenna Jameson?’

“Well, the other guys seemed to think this was hilarious, as if it were a sissy thing for a man to say he loved his wife more than some piece of trash from a dirty movie. ‘Who is this jerk?’ one of them asked another. I took the opportunity to tell them that I was a man of God, and that I preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen. And these idiots laughed even louder. Except for one thing. I noticed that Jay wasn’t laughing. He was staring at me with this angry, wounded expression, like I’d just insulted him.

“After dinner the dancing started up, and I would have been more than happy to shake the dust of that wedding off my feet. But I sat tight and bided my time. And when Jay got up to go to the men’s room, I followed him in. When he was in no position to run away, I stepped up beside him, and said, ‘Jenna Jameson doesn’t love you, but I know someone who does.’

“Jay told me he was in no mood for my Christian garbage, though, believe me, he used a stronger word than garbage. He even went so far as to suggest that I was gay. Can you imagine?”

Pastor Dennis paused, allowing the absurdity of this charge to sink in with the congregation. Tim couldn’t help chuckling, along with several other people around him.

“I assured him there was not a homosexual bone in my body,” the Pastor continued, “and that if there was, I wouldn’t hesitate to pluck it out, as the Lord commands. But he didn’t believe me. ‘If you’re not gay,’ he said, ‘why did you follow me into the men’s room?’

“‘Because I care about you,’ I told him. ‘Because I don’t want you to burn in hell.’

“He didn’t like that one bit, and I can’t say I blame him. His voice got all whiny, like I’d hurt his feelings. ‘Why would you say something like that? Here I am at my friend’s wedding, minding my own business, and you come into the bathroom to tell me that I’m going to hell? It’s just rude, that’s what it is.’

“‘I only say it because it’s true,’ I explained. ‘And because I have some good news for you.’

“He walked away from me, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. I followed him to the sink. ‘I can see you’re in pain,’ I told him. ‘You hate yourself, and you hate your life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.’

“Well, Jay lost his temper. He grabbed me by the shirt and slammed me up against the wall. ‘I’ll tell you who’s gonna be in pain,’ he said.

“I told him that hell was a place of eternal torment. ‘Think about that,’ I said. ‘The fire never goes out. You will just suffer and suffer and suffer.’ He screamed at me to shut up. I told him that the worst day of his life would be a picnic compared to one second in the lake of fire. And that’s when he hit me.”

Pastor Dennis reached up, gently probing the lurid flesh around his eye.

“It was a pretty good shot, too, definitely the best punch I’ve taken since I’ve started spreading the Word of God. But I’ll say this for Jay, he felt terrible about what he’d done. Before I could even offer to let him hit me again, he started apologizing. I told him that it was okay, that people who loved Jesus had been beaten and cursed and spit upon for two thousand years, and that we welcomed the punishment. And I quoted: ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Jay got a bag of ice for me from the kitchen, and we went outside and had a good long talk. I told him about my life, and he told me about his. We got to know each other pretty well. And when the sun rose this morning, we were on our knees in the empty parking lot of the Pinehurst Manor.

That’s why I was a little late for our meeting today. And that’s why I stand before you right now, and say, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’”

Pastor Dennis peered out at the worshippers.

“Jay, my friend, will you come up here?”

Tim turned, along with the rest of the congregation, and saw a prematurely balding guy in a suit as rumpled as the Pastor’s rise from a chair in the back row. Jay was younger than Tim had pictured him, in his late twenties at the most, a broad-shouldered ex-jock with a weak chin and a big belly. It was easy to imagine him sprawled on a couch in his boxers, staring slack-jawed at Jenna Jameson.

Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he made his way toward the altar, but he was smiling like a bride, nodding and saying thanks to all the well-wishers who were reaching out and touching him as he passed, offering their congratulations. Tim recognized the complicated emotion on his face. It was joy, the sudden knowledge that you have a chance to start over and do better, to salvage some hope and meaning from a life you thought you’d screwed up beyond repair. He leaned into the aisle and held out his hand so Jay could high-five him as he passed.