Rocking with the Saints at the Holy Roller

“What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats

Every Wednesday night and Sunday morning, Aunt Yvonne entered the holy roller church and became a saint. She sang, shouted, clapped, and danced her praises to God in ecstatic abandonment. Her efforts, combined with other saints who had gathered for the service, moved the earth. The floor jumped with divine revelry, assuring that even those small bodies wanting to sit still, unnoticed amid the unfamiliar passion, also swayed to the rhythm of the tambourines. The shouts and singing and powerful pounding piano held enough strength to testify to the awesome and infinite presence of a terrible God. At times it seemed as if the roof would blow and lift all within directly to paradise. No one tired as the service meandered to its unclocked conclusion. I thought the saints would march until judgment day.

MamaGran’s Methodist church wasn’t nearly as enticing or entertaining.

The woman wearing sensible shoes and Aunty Vonne’s Sunday dress danced in the seat next to me, punctuating the sermon and the songs with calls on Jesus for help with an unvoiced affliction. Her tambourine kept the primeval rhythm against her hand or shot its bells in the air with a well placed, “Help me, Jesus!” Because I’d adjusted to the heady ambiance and the familiar stranger next to me, I no longer jumped out of rhythm. Until, without warning, the tambourine flew by my face and my hand, of its own volition, grabbed it from the air.

I hadn’t quite registered my acquisition before the strange Aunty Vonne next to me leaped from her seat to sprint up the aisle. “Yes!” she shouted to unseen spirits in the low rafters. Her face glowed with pure joy and I dared not disbelieve in that moment that she had indeed been touched by holy fire – but I still would not concede its location.

With eyes closed, she tap-danced a quick dash to the steps of the altar, kowtowed towards the cross, hugged her arms about her body, and began a slow turn towards the congregation. The saints reached a crescendo as my aunt’s joy slowed to a moaning song, hummed to a tune I’d never heard from my aunt. When she turned her face in my direction, the light illuming her face burned into my memory. It was not joy but I couldn’t call it sorrow; it was too peaceful. The sisters took up her rhythm from the pews, the mothers from their corner. Children sat surprisingly silent, men were struck dumb. The music was suspended as the women moaned their wordless sorrowing song. The cry seemed to rise up through the cracks in the floorboards, growing from the dirt just below. How did they know? Where had they learned their unrehearsed tune? It was clearly older than anyone present, than anyone I knew.

As suddenly as she’d started, my aunt threw up her hands, raised her face once more to the rafters and shouted a final, “Help me, Jesus!” Then she walked painfully down the aisle to the seat beside me, limping on arthritic feet. The preacher started a prayer and the choir responded with a song but my aunt did not reach for the tambourine I held. Her body swayed to the rhythm of the new song and her hands clapped and her feet danced where she sat. Her mouth smiled but she let me keep the tambourine. It wasn’t long before my hands found a rhythm I invented for myself. I could hold Aunty Vonne’s tambourine and even play some music but I could not hold her faith nor sing her song.