The people seemed friendly. Wherever I looked I got a nod and a smile. In a minute I was approached by two men. One told me I was welcome. The other said they’d just begun their summer schedule here. Therefore, the first told me, this wasn’t Bible Study, as I’d probably expected.
I didn’t bother telling them I’d expected nothing, or anything but this: I’d stumbled into Sing Night. They were some sort of religious fellowship, and this building was their church. One of my hosts led me into the large room, which was filled with many dozens of rustic wooden pews and fronted by a podium. We stood in the back while my companion, a man as small as I but more solid, in jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, surveyed the place. One wide center aisle cut the room in half. The rows were filling up, women in the left-hand section, men in the right.
My host addressed me as a needy spirit, a groping soul. “We aren’t about doctrine so much. We do have a pamphlet, but we aren’t about doctrine, like I say. Did you get a—” The other man reappeared and handed me their pamphlet. “Here,” my friend said. “You’ll see in the first part right here where it says the important thing is — well, just take a look. The important thing is a—” He couldn’t get himself to say it. It made it seem all the more important, whatever it was.
We three sat down together on the men’s side of the room. I recognized that the crowd around me was one of those Protestant sects descended from Rhineland Anabaptists, like the Mennonites or the Amish. I might have seen any of them in town and never noticed, but in this large group it was plain they kept to a mode of dress. The women all wore skirts or dresses, rather long ones, and flat-heeled shoes and socks, and they kept their long hair in thick braids or pinned up. All of the men wore mustaches or beards. They’d picked me out right away, my face scraped bare, arms naked in my short sleeves, while theirs, both the women’s and men’s, buttoned at the wrists.
Very soon the rows were almost full. The voices quieted. We sat still, all facing forward. Nobody said a word. I heard no coughing, no clearing of throats. Birdsong, very faint, carried in from the fields. For five minutes or even longer the wooden podium at the front of the room stood solitary, and we watched it.
Then a man, just a voice from the crowd, suggested, “Let us pray.”
The assembly couldn’t have hit the floor quicker if someone had opened up in their midst with a machine gun. With one motion, all leapt down onto their knees facing backward, elbows on the pews. I acted as decisively as they, yanked by a human gravity, blown off my tail to cower with my elbows on the seat and my forehead against my knuckles, shocked out of my wits.
Somebody said a prayer, but I heard none of it.
Then, as if nothing had happened, as if the multitude had never suffered this astonishing collapse, we climbed back onto our seats. Again we had silence.
After a while a man’s voice said, “Brother Fred, why don’t you pick out a hymn?” I have no idea how this voice’s owner, whom I couldn’t see, was suddenly given the confidence to speak up, or what made him choose Brother Fred to lead us.
A young man stood, struggled down along the pew past a series of knees, and went quickly up the aisle to open a hymnal on the podium. He looked like all the others, with long sideburns, almost sidelocks, and a mustache and a white shirt. Around me everybody was taking hymnals from slots in the pew-backs. “Number two thirty-eight?” he said. “How about two thirty-eight?” The cover of the one I took up bore only the name Friesland. I found the hymn—
Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer,
That calls me from a world of care
And bids me at my Father’s throne
Make all my wants and wishes known.
In seasons of distress and grief,
My soul has often found relief
And oft escaped the Tempter’s snare,
By thy return, sweet hour of prayer.
Their song astonished even more than their praying. They sang in multiple harmony, in a fullness and with a competence that didn’t seem studied, but perfectly natural, innate, all talent. I heard none of the usual bad voices, none of the people you want to go up to and ask, “Could you please not sing?”
I kept my eye on Flower Cannon. She sat in the middle of the women, as I in the middle of the men. I wished I’d sat close enough to distinguish her voice, and let me go stronger and admit that I painfully regretted not hearing her sing. She looked very different from the others around her. They wore skirts and she wore slacks. No other woman had her head uncovered, none let her hair fall free or bared her arms. Flower’s long red hair flowed down her back. Her blouse was sleeveless and her armpits stained with wide blotches of sweat. I made a note to myself — I had to get to a chemist someday, and ask if sweat is the same substance as tears.
The blond boy she’d been talking to sat two rows ahead of me. Once again it occurred to me — it more than occurred, the insight knocked the breath out of me — that the boy lived in a silence. Why on earth had he come? He sat quite still, completely self-possessed and perfectly alienated. For all he heard, he might have been in this chapel alone at midnight. Perhaps he was sensitive, in some tactile way, to an atmosphere thickened by hundreds of blended voices — how many? As the hymn swayed around me like wheat in a wind I found myself counting the house. Fourteen rows, about a dozen folks on each side of the aisle: nearly three hundred people, all singing beautifully. I wondered what it must sound like out in the empty green fields under the cloudless blue sky, how heartrendingly small even such a crowd of voices must sound rising up into the infinite indifference of outer space. I felt lonely for us all, and abruptly I knew there was no God.
I didn’t think often about that which people called God, but for some time now I’d certainly hated it, this killer, this perpetrator, in whose blank silver eyes nobody was too insignificant, too unremarkable, too innocent and small to be overlooked in the parceling out of tragedy. I’d felt this all-powerful thing as a darkness and weight. Now it had vanished. A tight winding of chains had burst. Someone had unstuck my eyes. A huge ringing in my head had stopped. This is what the grand and lovely multitude of singers did to me.
I’m one of those who believes he can carry a tune, and so I sang, too, and nobody stopped me. Until just past six, for exactly an hour by my watch, we praised the empty universe. I felt our hearts going up and up into an endless interval with nothing to get in the way. All my happy liberated soul came out my throat.
Outside after the singing I stood talking with my self-appointed host, who explained that the sect was called the Friesland Fellowship, after its birthplace in the north of Holland, if I got it right. While he explained they didn’t believe in insurance companies, military service, or state-supported education, I looked around for Flower.