I grew up in a church, but to me it was just a house.
A house with a two-story vaulted ceiling, gothic arches and an eighteen-foot-tall, stained-glass window; but a house none-the-less.
The man who built it was a lunatic with his own cult which, apparently, didn’t believe in nails or proper carpentry. There were upside-down doors, odd angles everywhere and the whole building was held together by wishful thinking.
The chapel attached to the side of the main building wasn't a chapel to me and my older brother, Duncan. We knew it as the TV room. To us the central step leading up to the stage wasn’t a notch designed to fit a pulpit, it simply offered the comfiest place to curl up when it was time for the Bionic Woman.
It wasn’t just that we lived in a church. It was that we, of all people, lived in a church.
“Aren’t you guys Jews?” my friend Aaron asked one evening, as the setting sun glowed through the stained glass window.
“…and atheists?” he added, gazing up at the glass depiction of a dove in a garden with an olive branch in its beak. The window had some sort of symbolic, God-related meaning that didn’t interest me. But it seemed to mean something to our friends and neighbors.
Yawn.
