He left the lectern to the next speaker. A careful woman with a voice tuned for lullabies, hymns, and obituaries. She started her section with a bright “Let us reflect,” and the room followed her lead, receding into their well-practiced fog. The ritual unspooled: three words from the front, three words from the crowd. Call, response. Muscle memory, not prayer.
She, the cantor, stepped forward, looking at the rows of breathless and apprehensive faces, and began the familiar cadence:
Cantor: “Lord, have mercy.”
There was an expectant hush, then the people responded: “Lard, have mercy.”
Cantor: “Christ, have mercy,” she insisted, clearly and with distinction.
People: “Cripes, have thirsty.”
Cantor: “Lord, have mercy,” she tried again, punctuating with all her effort.
People: “Low, half murky.”
He lingered in the back. “Do you even hear yourselves?” he wanted to fill the church with his baritone. She turned around, giving him a subtle, undetectable shrug. She did her best. He acknowledged.
The sanctuary’s air grew thick with that old familiar glaze, enveloping everyone in shared anesthesia, a sacrament of sedation. People sat with their hands folded on their phones, face down and silenced, eyes fixed forward but seeing only the insides of their skulls. Someone coughed, someone else snapped a peppermint from a crinkly wrapper. The only other sound was the slow, steady drone of the air conditioner, its fans rotating, stirring nothing.
He watched them, the faces he’d greeted for years. There was Marlene, who rewrote reality for her children each Sunday, whispering that the world would be better next week. Near her, Stan and Helene, married for twenty-eight years, took turns checking the time, each hoping the other would crack first and admit they’d rather be somewhere else. Behind them, the retired choirmaster, Mr. Bell, nodded in and out of hypnogogic micro-naps, mouth ajar. Everyone was here for the same reason, though that reason had long ago been lost to the slow accretion of habit. They all just kept coming, week after week, as if the accumulation of hours could wear down the sharp edges of the world.
The cantor finished her section. Relieved, she stepped down from the altar steps. The congregation blinked awake for the next verse, flipping pages, mumbling tunelessly through a song that had been written to sound indistinguishable from a hundred others. The music faded, replaced by the soft, aimless shuffling of elbows touching elbows and feet on carpet.
He found himself staring at the light above the altar, a light too bright for a hot summer day; he wondered if he would catch fire if he stepped directly under it. The previous pastor, a man of unstable optimism, had insisted on "caring for the little things" as a spiritual discipline. It was a philosophy he’d always found appalling, to yoke the divine to the tedium of janitorial tasks, as if God Himself would one day slip on a wayward Werther’s Original and curse the lack of diligence. His predecessor had insisted on tidying up the pews after each service, replacing all the Bibles in perfect alignment, spines upright and dusted. But that was before sermons started competing with the 24-hour news cycle, smartphones, and when parishioners were expected to also livestream communion for followers who never showed up in person. Before pulpits echoed cable news talking points, and faith became about messaging, not mystery. What once was sacred had become an encroachment of spectacle, a commodification of belief.
He imagined shouting: “You don’t need a savior. You need a hazard signal. This is a call to consciousness.”
But he didn’t.
Instead, he whispered to himself, “Deliver us from numbness.”
He closed his eyes. He counted the seconds until the service ended. But time here was designed never to run out, only to be subdivided into finer and finer increments, all of them equally pointless.
Communion, then. A procession of the faithful, orchestrated in two grim lines. He watched them trudge forward, hands cupped for wafers that tasted of cardboard. He imagined an alternate version of the ritual: the bread, sourdough or ciabatta, warm with butter, the wine tongue-shocking, with notes of plum and tobacco; something that might actually rouse a person from the inside out. Instead, everyone just took their portion, chewed with sleepwalking precision, and drifted back to their seats, heads bowed, shoulders hunched against some worldly burden. They filed past him, not meeting his eyes, and he wondered how many of them remembered his name anymore.
He thought of the first time he’d stepped up to the pulpit, hands trembling, voice brittle with hope. He’d believed then that it mattered, that a word from him could spark some tiny fire in another person, kindle even the smallest change. Now he saw the faces lined up before him and understood that hope was an affliction, contagious and at certain, unique times, fatal.
“The Lord be with you,” he drew the service to a close.
People, “Awn…dossa…yooouuu….”
Then he boldly gave a final blessing, “May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
People: “Aaahhh…mmn.”
“Go in peace,” he said, his voice steady, almost laconic. “And may you be delivered from yourselves.”
The congregation responded, reflexively: “Thnnx….beeuhgaw.”
But no one looked up. No one noticed. No one cared.
The service ended. He watched the congregation dissolve, phones turned back on, eyes already tracking the quickest route to their cars and answering texts along the way.
The lobby filled with the hollow roar of post-church chatter, a clamor built from nothing: the weather, the buffet line at Golden Corral, the latest moral outrage in the news.
He waited by the door, waiting for the stragglers, the persistent widows, the insomniac drunks, the ancient men whose loneliness coagulated into anecdote. He let them talk. He nodded, offered the prescribed gestures. Smiles, a hand-squeeze, the brief benediction of touch. He wondered, as he often did, what would happen if he simply stopped, if he let the ritualized stories and conversations droop into silence, if he quit pretending to care about the casseroles on meal trains, the grandchildren, and the dilatory chemo treatments. He suspected no one would notice. They would keep talking, keep filling the void with the frictionless hum of their own voices ranting on and on and on. About the news, the ungodly politics of the town, or otherwise. Would they even realize he’d left the conversation behind?
Outside, a low stratus sky loomed over the parking lot. He watched a woman herd her toddler into a battered sedan. Another kid wailing as if the world itself had turned hostile. Another child was being spanked for not obeying quickly enough, or perhaps just for being inconvenient in public.
He envied the child’s forthright misery, the purity of his complaint—the power in his defiance. Within a few years, he knew, the child would grow the practiced shell, become another soft-shoed civilian in a world that punished candor. Even the mothers learned to hush their pain, modulate it to acceptable frequencies, let it leak only at the edges, and never during church. So, he never saw it. The real of it. Only the performed theatrics of stillness under glass, as if the church were part museum. Every week, he bore witness to how people pressed themselves into perfect frames, still-life prayers, and groupings of curated joy. But beneath it, he sensed the negative space, the omissions, the rehearsed sincerity, the slow erosion of something human behind the glass. He couldn’t name exactly what had worn away, only that its opposite had once been called presence.
He loosened his clerical collar, fingers worrying at the starch. Sunday afternoon, the church returned to dormancy.
All that remained was to recite one’s lines and keep straining “the Word” through a sieve, to the end.
*Inspiration from Tod Harper, “Saying The Words.”