At a Crossroads
429 Lyon
I saw a broken cross on Lyon.
It decorates the building façade of the MT Hermon Missionary Baptist Church. The presiding Reverend (according to the sign above the gated off entry door) is Leroy Williams Senior.
The cross was missing an arm. From the looks of it, it would not be a sturdy crucifixion tool, although it would be that much lighter to carry around if you had to.
The cross was of classical construction made up of two perpendicular wood beams. Now it is constructed with one and a half of them. The right portion of the horizontal beam rotted off and the left side does not look far behind.
It was a sunny blue sky morning when it caught my eye. I was walking around with nothing to do other than wander until I did not feel like it anymore. It was a striking sight, because the sun was out and abandoned looking churches in the middle of the city that share a wall with an apartment building are not something I have encountered often.
I wondered about how Rev. Leroy Williams SR and his congregation let it get like that? I thought about all those past Sundays. The ones I spent standing, sitting down, kneeling, standing again, kneeling for the third time, holding hands, genuflecting, saying “and also with you” and then having to say “and with your spirit”, I thought about “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys”, bread and wine and flesh and blood, and the word amen.
The next day it was raining and I was making my way down Fulton and stumbled upon another boarded up place of worship. This one is called New Stranger’s Home Baptist Church. It has an awning over a stair case that leads to a pair of doors. Both wooden with crosses and wood peeling at the corners. I wondered what a new stranger was, because aren’t all strangers new?
When Lyon met Fulton, I turned left and headed towards MT Hermon. I had to see the cross again today, because I just saw two other neighboring ones that weren’t as rotten as the one I saw yesterday.
The white planks against a strip of white blue panels. Nothing had changed except the weather. I saw three crosses on a rainy day. I saw the exterior of two sacred spaces flanked by failure or neglect or mold. Rotting crosses on a locked up church. I’m not sure what it is supposed to mean: boredom or a crisis of faith?
It made me wonder about having adoration for things. Whether that be for ourselves or God or the past or a nice leather jacket.
Another day went by and it was sunny again. I went to the beach to escape into the sunshine. Leonard Cohen was on the radio and it felt like I heard him tell Marianne So Long for the first time again. He sang, “I forget to pray for the angels and the angels forget to pray for us.” I thought of my friend Joe because he has quoted that line so many times and I never really cared to figure where it was from. Then the subsequent verse went, “You held onto me like I was a crucifix.”
I am not sure what seeing a dilapidated worship center really did or did not do to me. Sure, I thought about being raised with beliefs concerned with what happens when you die and how forgiveness is important, so are bread and wine. I guess it was something about the past and how in the most tie-dye shirt wearing peace sign way, I realized I am in my past already. Like the Charles Dederich mantra, “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.” Although cliché, it rings true in certain capacities. My time Right Now is sacred and so are the people and places around me. The places I was and the people from then, were too. Maybe it is really just a broken wooden beam and nothing else, but maybe there is something to having faith in the fact that everything will work out. Not that it will work out well, but it will get worked out. What goes up, must eventually come down.
