COFFIN NAILS

 I suspect my posts are going to be all over the map for awhile. For this one. I was born into and raised a Methodist. Was sent off to Sunday School. Baptized at seven. They handed me a Bible I didn't know how to read yet. It had some pretty pictures. It didn't survive the purge when we moved. Later I sang in the choir and sat through more boing sermons over the years than I can possibly remember or even care to. 

Don't remember much about Sunday School really. Except being bored to tears in the Jr. High class. Going back a little to fifth grade we had a great pair of teachers, a married couple. That year our class sponsored a little boy in Africa. I think we brought an extra dime or quarter a week. I suspect the teachers made up the difference. This was the "church" I knew in fifth grade. 

At least until the powers that be in the main office stepped in and announced that we couldn't do that because our congregation hadn't fulfilled the quota for support of the missions so our class couldn't do what we were doing. Looking back that may have been the first chink. There were more. By the time I was a junior I was out of the choir and not sttending regularly. Note: Methodists used to shift their pastors every seven years or so. 

Anyway I missed it when the new guy came in. At least I think I missed it. Anyway I did not miss the night our new pastor presided over the Baccalaureate for the senoir class. Sitting on a stool,  playing a guitar and coming out against the war in Viet Nam in the spring of 1968. By end of the week he was history. After all this was a logging town in rural Oregon. I don't know who they hired to replace him. We moved back to Springfield right after I graduated. 

I do remember the Sunday after he was gone when the service was led by one of the laywomen and the wife of a retired postor. We got a long sermon about tithing. Nobody said anything but it probably didn'tgo over very well in a community where almost no one worked a full year. Especially if you were on the cutting crew. It was either too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry. Or you got hurt every few years. Or finally disabled when dad blew out a knee in '67. I do not say these thngs to complain just to note that the divide between the folks in the pulpit and the folks in the pews seemed pretty wide sometimes. 

I guess one of the final boots in the ass came in the mid eighties. You remember the mid eighties. At least some of you. AIDs was in all the papers. The Reagan administration was humming real loud over in the corner, we knew next to nothing about how the disease worked or how it was passed. One fine Sunday morning three different fine upstanding members of our Springfield congregation got up in front of God and everybody and blamed the gays for whatever had recently gone wrong in Sweden, Frisco and a third place that I don't remember.

 And nobody, including me or or the pastor, said a damn thing. My excuse? A complete brain fart. I had never witnessed anything like this. Me I could kind of understand but the pastor? Anyway that began the tap dance on the line that has gone on for nearly forty years. Well at least I've walked through the door. We'll see where it leads. Including oddly enough big Douglas firs and the Oregon Coast.