House of Prayer No. 2 (30 page)

Pastor Ricks's wife gets a good deal on pews. She's found a church that is installing the more modern stadium-style seats, and she gets a good price on their old oak pews. The oak pews perfectly match the oak trim inside the church, the blue cushions perfectly match the blue carpet she also found a good deal on, furthering in her mind that the handiwork of God is to be seen throughout the church and its construction.

IT WILL BE A PACKED HOUSE
the day of the dedication. You and your sons and your mother and your sister and your niece will be there. There will be many songs and there will be two sermons and Pastor Ricks will sing “Never Would Have Made It,” and you will not have realized until now what a voice of quiet power he has. There will be testimonies and there will be congregants slain in the Spirit, receiving God's anointing sleep that He might heal them, change them, reach within them, so that they will awaken in a better place; Adam in the garden yawning out of his rib-robbing divine slumber, opening his eyes to Eve; Mary the virgin rousing from her chaste bed conceived with the Christ; Jacob the wanderer, a rock for his dreaming pillow, his feet finally set on the pathway home.

The man sitting in the pew in front of you will begin to shiver
and to shake, and he will fall out into the aisle, anesthetized by the Holy Ghost. A deacon will come over and cover him with a blanket. Your Cub Scout middle son will lean into you and ask if you need to give the man first aid. It's just God at work, you tell him.

But for you, God's grace comes in the last regular service the week prior to the dedication, when there is still some spackling and painting to be done, when there is a ladder leaning behind the sacristy and a light hangs by its wires from a hole in the ceiling above the pulpit. That previous Sunday, Pastor Ricks's mother, Mother Ricks, a child of the Great Depression, is giving her testimony, walking and sometimes hopping in the aisle as the Spirit moves her. She says she is going to tell something she has told before, she is going to tell of a dream she had many years before, a vision, way back when. She says the elders of the church may remember the first time she spoke of it, and Pastor Ricks's sisters nod their heads, they remember. She says she had a dream of a time when the church would need to be rebuilt, and in her dream, a white man comes into their church and helps make it happen, and she says when she saw you first walk into House of Prayer fifteen years ago, she said,
Praise the Lord, it's him
, and with that, Mother Ricks lays her hand on your shoulder, and you, at last, are
slain in the Spirit
.

The author would like to thank Mom, God, Jen for the boys, George Parker for being a brother, Adam Atlas for being a cousin, Nan Talese for the patience, Denise Shannon for back-watching, Dr. Ted Firestone for the excellent carpentry, Casey and Denise for the tax and trombone loan, Jim Dees for being cool, the very benevolent Geoffrey Wolff, and these truly holy men of the cloth—the Very Reverend Ben Duffey, the Very Reverend Canon Robert W. “Father Bob” Cornner, Pastor Charles Stanley Ricks, and the Reverend Dr. Ira D. Hudgins, aka The Preacher.

Visit Pastor C. S. Ricks and the saints at House of Prayer

Holiness at
www.hopchurchinc.com
.

Mark Richard is the author of two award-winning short story collections,
The Ice at the Bottom of the World
and
Charity
, and a novel,
Fishboy
. His short stories and journalism have appeared in a number of publications, including the
New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, GQ
, the
Paris Review, Vogue
, and the
Oxford American
. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writers' Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. He has been visiting writer in residence at Texas Tech University, the University of California Irvine, Arizona State University, the University of Mississippi, Sewanee: The University of the South, and the Writer's Voice in New York. His television credits include
Party of Five, Chicago Hope
, and
Huff
, and movies for CBS, Showtime, and Turner Network Television. He is the screenwriter of the film
Stop-Loss
. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Jennifer Allen, and their three sons.