Sleight of Hand (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)

I stood before a crowd, strong in size but silent in sound. There was no one there to see me.

It was my last sermon.

There had been no dinner conversations erupting into group glee over someone saying, "We're going to see Matt preach!" I’m sure of that. The crowd was there for god, a need to fill belief in structured hearts; some were there, I know, because they stared at me with cannibal eyes born out of a season of starvation, to see the head pastor, my boss. The camera crew was there for that reason — religion and reality TV was all the craze that spring — they were not disappointed that the main attraction was just going to be sitting front row. They told me they had a need for footage of me on the pulpit. There was no disappointment in the air over the last minute switch of who was preaching. I always thought it was comforting to know my own presence didn’t bring remorse for not having better places to be.

Joining me was an old bastard, a forgotten nemesis that sleeps inside of me. The shakes came back to greet me; the glue holding me together was starting to crack. My legs were fluttering and my hands twitched, but a good speaker knows how to hide these elements of a panic attack.

Being the hip church that this was, we met at a bar on the bottom floor of a layered club; our room was called hell, something very funny and ironic for a church, I know; that joke was never lost on anyone. I'm sure a hangover from the pervious night’s show, a hybrid of punk and metal, still remained. Rumpled flyers and empty cups that once touched the lower lip of the tap surrounded the pulpit, which stood just below the stage, still sticky from the night before. I opened a tab before I became the preacher of the night.

My left hand shook as I spoke, so I concealed it with my notes and played hide-and-go-seek with it behind my big black bible whenever necessary. My right hand had a growing quiver that began in my elbow and gyrated all the way to the tips of my fingers. I hushed it with the movement of beer sipping and emphatic hand gestures that transformed my hand into a holy wand used to spread god’s magic over everyone’s head.

To my knowledge, I was the only one who knew it was over, that this was to be my last sermon, but sometimes I wonder if others knew that night would be my final prayer over a group, the final time what I said would be called words from god and not my own inventions. I spoke on the Bible’s historic text, which I took to disbelieve a few months after I let go of preaching, and unanswered questions covered in dust heralded themselves back to me. I spoke on doubt, which was what I always spoke on, and I still get letters to this day where someone tells me how I said the words, quoted the verses, and told a heart clutching story that put concrete filling on their faith so it would never move again. I never write them back telling them I no longer believe, unless they ask. But I prefer not to.

After I left the pulpit, I shook hands and held onto some conversations.

The camera crew had come to my house after a phone call. "We haven’t seen you around in quite a while," the producer asked over the phone, "can we come over and talk?" Camera crews don’t talk, they film. "Yes," I said.

Within an hour, I was standing in my backyard staring into the selfish black lens of a television camera. I kept my hands behind me as if they had been bound. The shakes had come back and I wasn’t sure if the focus of the camera was my face or my whole body.

"Are you still a part of Revolution Church?" the producer asked. It was the first time I had heard that name in so long. It had been three months since I had preached, a month since any staff member had called me. I was a ghost, one who still picked up a paycheck and checked its e-mail.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, though I think I said I didn’t know. They would have to ask others to tell me if I was still a part of the church, the Revolution Church. I did not want to misquote myself, knowing that cuts from reality TV exist.

The sun stood strong; some clothes hanging on a line inched back and forth with the breeze. The next day I got a phone call. Without thought, "I’m resigning," fell off my lips, almost accidently. There it was, the end. No grand exit or even a farewell in which questions of what I was to become were asked.

I found my hands were frozen in place.