of Unleavened Bread; Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets; Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles; and Shavuot, or Pentecost. We also observed the Sabbath on Saturday, not Sunday.
We were the only family in the ocean of Catholics and Lutherans in our county who belonged to the Worldwide Church of God, believing that we had found the authentic, first-century Jesus.
In 1965, when I was four years old, my younger sister Sarah—the tenth of ten at that time—was born with what appeared to be a life-threatening abnormality. Her esophagus led into her lungs instead of her stomach, and from the X-rays the doctors determined that an operation offered her a fifty-fifty chance for survival.
My mother remained in the hospital recovering from a Caesarean section, and my Catholic grandmother came over to our house. “Let’s pray for Mommy and the baby,” she said to us. We knelt by the couch. My grandmother bent her head low. With fingers interlaced, she prayed with her rosary beads hanging from one of her hands. I had no idea exactly what it meant to pray, but I knelt too, and bowed my head, keeping an eye on my grandmother so I knew when we were finished.
While we prayed, my father and my mother’s sister, my aunt Shirley, drove the baby an hour and a half to a bigger hospital in Evansville. The new set of doctors took X-rays and declared that there was nothing wrong and the baby could be taken home. My parents believed that not only had God performed a miracle on our behalf, it was their faith in this new religion that was responsible for it. The prayers of my Lutheran and Catholic relatives were completely discounted.
A few months later, I suffered a near-fatal bout of double pneumonia. It felt like a hot air balloon was pressing against my chest, preventing me from breathing. My mother put cold washrags on my forehead and a mustard compress on my chest. It was winter, and a well-meaning friend of my parents brought us a Christmas tree, unaware that we didn’t celebrate Christmas. Because I was sleeping in my parents’ bed, I overheard my father say to my mother, “We can’t keep this thing, we got a sick girl in the house!” as if the Christmas tree carried the plague and might kill me. In the middle of the night, my father hauled off the Christmas tree.
I awoke to a minister from the Worldwide Church of God placing his hands on my forehead. There was a jumble of “Our Heavenly Father . . . in Jesus’s name, Amen,” then a dry, white prayer cloth was pressed against my forehead. That night, I fell deeply asleep. The hot air balloon pulled me up into the air and out of bed, and I drifted above the room, looking down at the bundle of blankets on the bed and at my parents huddled nearby. Then, with a thump, the hot air balloon collapsed. I landed hard in my bed. Though it was still a struggle to breathe, I could get air into me. I’d turned a corner.
My father attributed my recovery both to the minister’s prayers and to the fact that he hadn’t allowed the pagan Christmas tree to remain in our home.
God, through the ministers of the church, had performed two miracles in quick succession. Thus, my parents realized they had found the right religion, the Worldwide Church of God. They were baptized shortly thereafter and viewed it as a rebirth, the beginning of a new relationship with God, the beginning of traveling the path to God. Eschewing the spiritual soil in which they were raised, while remaining firmly planted in the physical soil of their youth, they had crossed spiritual boundaries heeding God’s call, similar to the biblical Abraham who had left his idols behind to follow God’s call to the Promised Land.
CHAPTER 2
Five hundred years after Martin Luther split with the Catholic Church, the descendants of both the Lutherans and Catholics whose blood ran through my veins agreed on one thing: this new church was crazy.
What kind of Christian didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter? Or eat pork or shellfish? For the past 2,000 years, Jesus’s death on the cross effectively nullified all of the Hebrew Bible’s laws, including its holidays. Christians believed that the New Testament was a new covenant. You received salvation by belief in Jesus as your Savior, not by fasting on the Day of Atonement or observing Saturday as the Sabbath.
Despite their disapproval, we didn’t shun our parents’ families, as the church told us we should. None of my grandparents were cozy and warm, and I didn’t recall them ever kissing any of their grandchildren except as babies. But they were family, and the blood bond was deep and heartfelt, even if it was not expressed outwardly.
Every Sunday we visited my grandma Himsel, who lived in a white clapboard farmhouse a few hundred yards from the old log cabin, which my father and his parents and two siblings had moved into when he was seven.
Uncle Robert was typically in the kitchen listening to either The Lutheran Hour or Billy Graham on the radio. He greeted us with “Hey, you little squirts!” in an almost affectionate manner. Robert spent each weekend feeding his dogs bologna sandwiches, chopping wood for the black, wood-burning kitchen stove (used both for cooking and to heat the downstairs), and wiping down the kitchen table with rubbing alcohol. If he wasn’t armed with Lysol, attempting to single-handedly rid the world of germs, Robert was gargling with Listerine or gripping a container of Dristan or pushing a long iodine-saturated Q-tip up his nose, pulling it out, then looking at whatever it had caught, a scene by which I was for some reason transfixed. Never married and living with Grandma, Robert had loved to draw as a child but was teased for it. Only sissies did art. Or girls. He gave it up and worked at the power plant.
Robert wasn’t quite certain what to do with the tribe of boisterous children who clamored to gather eggs, feed the chickens, pump the well water into the tin coffee can on the wooden fence, and investigate the log cabin, with its patches of faded, floral wallpaper from the Depression. During the hot summer months, my father, his parents, and his siblings had slept on the porch. “We’d fall asleep to the music of the crickets and cicadas,” he once said, his voice nostalgic. The log home was a reminder of the two different eras that my father witnessed. He was born into a horse-and-buggy world in which peddlers came around to sell knives, thread, and pots and pans, gypsies were accused of stealing children, and neighbors made moonshine during Prohibition. He went on to witness atomic bombs and space shuttles and the possibility of obtaining any commodity in the world simply by punching keys on a computer. He liked to recall the past—the father he lost too young and the world he grew up in that had changed so very much.
My father once told me about a little wren that had made its home in a wooden shoe worn by one of his ancestors. His grandmother had sternly admonished him to leave the wren alone, but not because she felt an emotional attachment to it. Rather, wrens killed the bugs on the crops. My father, however, did feel emotionally attached to the birds. And to the old log cabin. To all of his old cars. And most of all, to the way things once were, and the way they still should be. He didn’t view it as inconsistent that he’d broken with his past and his traditions when he took on a new faith. He believed he’d found the truth, an objective truth, and everyone else should likewise believe it.
On Sunday mornings, Grandma returned home from her Evangelical Lutheran church often still singing “Come, Holy Spirit, God and Lord”—or the German version of it: “Komm, Heiliger Geist, Herre Gott”—in her clear, beautiful soprano voice while she was working in the kitchen or the garden. She sang with such joy and sincerity, the notes floating in the quiet of the farm, that I couldn’t imagine that God didn’t hear her just because she was Lutheran. But should such a perplexing thought cross my mind, I quickly chased it away. I didn’t want to be one of those people in the church who had doubts.
One day when Grandma was bending over the hoe in the garden, humming and singing German words I didn’t understand, her long dress rode up in the back. I saw that Grandma’s legs were a map of her life’s journey. Above the knees, her legs were sophisticated, big city, white and pale where the sun didn’t hit them, remnants of her life in Hamburg where she’d never planted so much as a flower. Everything she’d left behind. Below her knees, her skin was brown and leathery from constant exposure to her new life on the farm, plowing, baling hay, and sowing beans. Grandma, in many respects, was a transplant who didn’t quite take to the new soil she’d been stuck in.
Invariably,