The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

But maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it's not doing you any favors.

You can't save me, because I'm not in peril.

Don't ask me to repent because I regret nothing. You can't save me because I'm not in peril.

And you realize that if God were to welcome everyone into heaven, your mother would abandon Christianity immediately

Is it better to have the one big hurt of your father not being around and not all those little hurts that come when he disappoints you? Or is it better to have a piece of a father, hurts and all?

Even Einstein wasn’t an atheist,” he says. “He talked about God all the time. Now, he didn’t believe in a god that was concerned with human behavior, which is the church’s obsession and the reason it uses guilt and shame to enforce Christianity.

Because he was a man who took without giving, he left us nothing to grieve.

How do you make love to a physicist? With your whole self, quivering, lush, unafraid.

You didn’t tell him how, one by one over the decades, you’d lost all your good girlfriends to marriage and motherhood, your friendships reduced to children’s birthday parties and the rare Girls’ Night Out.

You chide yourself for walking too far ahead, for regressing into 80s song lyrics territory so soon. But then he says, "The supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way recently sparked 75 times brighter over the course of a 2 hour period, and twice as bright as it's ever been in the 20 years astronomers have been monitoring it." By now you're used to him talking Science, but you're not sure where he's going with this. "One theory," he continues "is that the event was caused by a star about 15 times bigger than the sun getting close to the edge of the black hole disturbing some gasses, heating things up, increasing the infrared radiation from the edge. But get this, we observed that star getting close to the black hole about a year before we observed the affects on the black hole." "That just shows how vast the universe is, how enormous the distance," you say. "Exactly! Distances, plural. The distance between the star and the edge of the black hole, and the distance between the black hole and Earth. So, I say all of this to say that sometimes wheels are set in motion long before the spark is manifest. Is that the same thing as fate? I don't know but...I do know that rare brilliant events take time.

And as your body begins to feel like a home, your courage grows. It grows bigger than you mother's chastisement in the parking lot after the service the first time you go to church unbound. She asks why you aren't wearing a girdle, why you aren't sucking in the way she taught you thirty years ago, and how dare you come into the house of the Lord that way. Your mother, who complains of women in the church nowadays committing the sin of visible panty lines, reminds you that she raised you better than this. And you say, 'I'm tired of holding my breath.' Then you promise you won't come to church that way again. And you'll keep your word because you won't go to church again at all.

The Bible is the inerrant word of God,' Eula whispers, as defiantly as a whisper can be. 'And you only believe that because of how another group of men interpret the first group of men. People say you're supposed to put your faith in God, not men.

You, the infantilized husbands of accomplished godly women, are especially low-hanging fruit. Ripe for the picking with little effort on my part.

Careful you go looking for something, you just might find it.

sometimes wheels are set in motion long before the spark is manifest. Is that the same thing as fate? I don’t know, but I do know that rare, brilliant events take time.

Why do you turn me on? It’s that you want me when there are so many reasons you shouldn’t. That turns me on. Your hunger, your deprivation turn me on. I don’t care why your wife won’t fuck you properly; it’s satisfaction enough simply knowing she won’t. All the risk is yours, but I’ll wade out into it with you. I’ve always enjoyed playing in the deep end.

She understood how your heart was still connected to your mama, even if she hurt you sometimes.

10-9-8... I am speaking in tongues. 4-3-2... Eula has her prayers and I have mine.

you think heaven is a real place? She said, Of course it is. Then I said, I think heaven is a lie. And she sat up in the bed and said, God is going to strike you down for talking like that, Jael! I just laughed and told her God is just a white man stupid niggas made up, like Santa Claus. Well, she didn’t like that one bit. She folded her arms across her chest and said, Well if there ain’t no God, then answer me this. Where do people go when they . . .

Seem like saved folks don’t like to do anything but talk about being saved, complain about sin, and go to church. And church be boring as hell, so I just watch Sweet Sadie and think about her sexy body and her secret past.

They had led the poor unwed mother of three to the Living Water, as church folk referred to Jesus. But she wasn’t their kind of people.

I guess a person could have heaven right here on earth

Lifting my eyes to meet his, I felt like Sissyphus pushing that rock.

Here's someone else who both welcomes and dreads death as it loiters in the wings, an unpredictable actor.

But like a beautiful quilt in summertime, my mother’s love was the suffocating kind, the kind you chafe against and don’t miss until the seasons change and it’s gone.

And you say "I'm tired of holding my breath.