One of the deals with the Lutheran Church was that after you slogged your way through Catechism and Confirmation, you had to start serving another sentence of working more during Sunday service.
You could no longer nod off in the rear pews of the church because you were now drafted into the altar boy/girl society. That meant working as acolytes, lighting and extinguishing the altar candles, helping with the communion production line by trailing behind the pastor and collecting the little wine glasses, and other exciting duties.
But there was an upside to us having been through the Lutheran education mill of memorizing Bible verses, the whys and wherefores of the commandments and a slew of creeds, and other various and sundry checkboxes we needed to tick off on the way to salvation. And that positive was hanging out together as friends rather than as fellow prisoners.
One activity I enjoyed was our annual Trick-or-Treat collection for UNICEF. We’d aged out of hitting up folks for candy. Now we would hit them up for cash.
The first year I paired off with one of my best friends. I’ll call him Matthew. Matthew and I would go door to door for UNICEF on Halloween for several years to come. I think the last time we did it must have been 10th grade, but I’m a little foggy on that. We’d go through our assigned section of Makiki rattling our cans for money while all the kids around us were scoring big time with the candy.
Why, I do not know, but we were instructed not to ask for candy. Maybe it would work against the seriousness of our intent, our mission, or – I don’t know. From time to time folks would offer us candy, but we’d very adult seriously say, “Oh no, I’m sorry, we can’t accept any candy.” It sucked.
One guy one year said, “How do I know you people are really collecting for UNICEF? How do I know you didn’t steal those cans and are going to keep the money for yourself?”
Matthew and I looked at each other, shrugged instead of flipping him off or telling him to go f**k himself, and turned to go down the front stairs.
“Wait wait wait,” the man said. “I’ll give you some money if you can tell me what the letters of UNICEF stand for.”
I said, “It’s the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.”
“Well well well,” said the man, “that’s correct. I now believe you young men are doing the good you say you are. Here,” he held out his hand.
I went back and lifted my can. He dropped in a quarter. For all that grief?
Damn. He should have at least put in a dollar. On the way to the next house, Matthew and I were talking stink about the guy. Matthew said, “That fuckhead is lucky we’re not going to do something to his house.”
“Well we could come back after we’re finished,” I said.
Then we both just laughed. “Nah nah nah,” we said, both agreeing to be good Christians as we moved on. What a dick.
Post-Catechism class life in the church was good. We had pizza parties, sleepovers, movie nights, and lots of activities that were a lot of non-religious fun.
Once the senior year of high school kicked in, however, we suddenly hardly saw Matthew at church anymore. One movie night, I asked his brother what was up, and he said that Matthew had taken on a weekend job. He was working for a construction firm.
And then that Sunday came when, in an instant, all the fun got sucked out of everything having to do with that church.
Matthew’s parents, his brother, his grandmother, and a girl I didn’t recognize were sitting near the entrance to the church when I arrived. The grandmother, the mother, and the girl were crying, the grandmother sobbing, and his brother and father did not look well.
People were filing past them, talking to them, shaking their hands. I asked another friend what was going on.
“Oh, didn’t you hear? Matt was working last Sunday morning at a construction site. They’d put up some concrete staircases, and they were knocking out the wooden supports because they thought the stairs were set. They weren’t. One fell on Matt. He was crushed under tons of concrete.”
I’d never had someone that close to me die. And crushed to death under all that concrete. It was horrible to think about. I joined the line. As I was getting closer to the family, I began to hear what people were saying.
If it had only been words of condolence, that would have been fine. But that was not the case. I heard people asking why Matthew had to be working on a Sunday. Did he need a job that badly? Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d been in church on Sunday morning?
God. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I went through the line. It was awful. The girl was Matthew’s girlfriend.
I fumed thinking about all the good times he and I had shared while I listened to all these good Christians rip wider the wounds of grief for this family. Good Christians.
Any upside, any good times there had been, they were over. That was the last day I attended that church, and I’ve never practiced any kind of religion since then.
Even today, right this moment writing about it, the times I shared with Matthew, and especially thinking about the things that were said to his family that day, I get angry. And writing about it does nothing to heal me.
Lanning Lee 