If you go fishing with Baptists, be sure to go with at least two. If you go with two, neither of them will drink any of your beer. If you go with one, he’ll drink all of it.
A friend of mine told me that a few years ago, partly as a joke but partly as a legitimate warning. I didn’t know what he was talking about, really. When you live in New England you don’t have much truck with Baptists, there just aren’t that many of them. And if you do happen to run into any, they seem pretty much like everyone else.
After the past week in Jacksonville, I now understand what he was trying to tell me: hypocrisy is a way of life for Southern Baptists.
Jacksonville is owned by Baptists – literally. The First Baptist Church owns a sizable chunk of the property downtown Jacksonville sits on, including the building housing the police station. The church itself takes up 6 square blocks of prime real estate. It takes 2 sq blocks just to house their two 3-story parking garages. The “church” is enormous – 2 sq blks just for that. Another sq block for their 4-story religious school, and the last for their offices – a towering highrise. Duets of good-looking female devotees prowl the bus station all day asking if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. The missions subject the homeless to hr-long sermons before they’re allowed to eat. The sermons are mandatory and if you tell them you’re a different faith, as far as they’re concerned that’s all the more reason for you to attend, you heathen.
In Jax, and I suspect the rest of the South, the Christian religion is big business. There is one small church (it barely looks big enough to seat more than 100 people) whose Rev Pastor owns a Hummer. On one block I walked down, there were three churches. There were two more on the next block. Five churches in less than a quarter-mile. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being tossed into collection plates all over the city every day – not every Sunday, every day. Lord knows what the take on Sundays is but the police have to shut down the part of town that surrounds the FBC to make sure traffic doesn’t grind to a halt as thousands of people leave the parking garages after the service.
Meanwhile, in the park across from the main Jax library, river rats skitter between the benches and fountains. Meanwhile, hundreds of homeless people sleep in the 3 crowded shelters and hundreds more all over the city in parks, empty lots, on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, according to the alternative paper, Jax’s state reps just voted for a $4M appropriation for PR, an attempt to sell the beauties of Jax to tourists. To help pay for it, they cut $2M from the children’s health program.
I sold everything I own to wind up here.
The Last Days
I’m in a fever. I pack, I sell whatever I can, I wonder constantly what’s going to become of me. One of my brothers hands me a couple of hundred dollars worth of winning lottery tickets, which I promptly lose while trucking things around to their new homes of their new owners. I tear the car apart looking for them. They are nowhere to be seen. The other brother offers to put me up for a couple of weeks while I “get my bearings”.
I take him up on it, and when everything is gone except the smidgen he can fit in his overcrowded barn, I take myself onto an air mattress he has laid down in his den after removing the oversized recliner and his desk. He leaves the tv, and it’s cable! Unfortunately, it only gets 12 channels as he only pays for the basic service and that’s all $35/month buys. 12 channels, including the shopping channel, the Spanish channel, two channels specializing in 24-hr infomercials, and Fox.
$35/month seems steep.
It’s a nice couple of weeks, though. My brother is 10 years younger than I am and we’ve never had much chance to talk. I left the house just about the time he became sentient, and I know him mostly through family hearsay.
He’s tall, quiet, centered. Nothing much fazes him. He has a wife and two great teenage daughters. They make me a chocolate cake to honor my visit, though I have some trouble imagining what that “honor” might be. The honor of my presence after years of absence, perhaps. Not something one would think earned celebration but I accept their misplaced joy and for a little while revel in what I obviously don’t deserve.
My other brother thinks I’m being crazy, and he’s probably right, but this one says he can understand my yearning for adventure and risk.
“You had cancer. You might have died. It makes sense that you’d want to really live the time you’ve got left.”
His take strikes me as a tad mordant at first, but later I can see both the sense and the truth in it. He’s right. My first reaction to the news that I had cancer wasn’t just terror of dying but regret for everything left undone and the lack of accomplishment that marked – or rather, didn’t particularly mark – my life. I suddenly wanted nothing in the world but more time. More time to do what I hadn’t done, more time to try once more to do what I’d never managed to do before. Another chance, is what it boiled down to. I wanted a second chance to muff it.
When I realized finally that I wasn’t going to die, that I had a decent chance of recovery and a very decent chance of living out my full allotted time, I sort of forgot about all that “second chance” junk. Or thought I had. But my brother was right. Somewhere inside me that “second chance” junk had survived, had even taken root, grown, sprouted wings. I did want my “second chance”.
Maybe, I thought as I walked down the frozen road past my brother’s house one afternoon, maybe this homeless thing is some kind of way of getting the second chance I wanted.
In Jax, they tell the homeless they’re “blessed”.
Well, maybe.
The day I leave, the lost lottery tickets turn up, sitting right in the open on the car’s passenger seat. My brother swears he didn’t put them there.
There are blessings, and then, I guess, there are blessings.
