Pastor Patty Is Reading You

Pastor Patty has been reading all week. That's what preachers do, they read. They read people.

She was walking to the bathroom in the church building and overheard the women in the sewing room. Each week they gather to make quilts for orphanages around the world. Lucille Shambarger said she was worried about her upcoming colonoscopy and what it might reveal.

At the mall she watched Mary Canoli trying to start a support group for people whose pets have died. She calls it "Compassionate Best Friends." Nobody took Mary very seriously, which only added to her grief over losing Mr. Fuzzles. So Mary started a petition to require Buddy Mutts Cafe to admit people with cats as well as dogs. But most people prefer pets who stay on the floor in restaurants, so that wasn't going very well, either.

Pastor Patty knows Del Ecklor fell off the wagon this week. He doesn't know that Pastor Patty knows he is a secret alcoholic. But her mother was a secret alcoholic; she reads the signs. She knows who is drinking and who is not.

She has read the shoulders of school-bus driver, Rob Parkons, knows how he worries about the kids on his bus, especially about first-grader Tami. Tami picks up all the stress of her home and brings it onto the bus, so Rob lets her sit where she's not allowed, right behind him, so she can lean over his shoulder and tell him things he would rather not hear, and ask him questions for which he has no answers. But when Tami has put her stress onto Rob's shoulders, then it is off of hers, so he is glad he gets to walk with that slump.

The Newlands college grand-daughter is in some sort of trouble. They haven't said anything about it, but she knows they haven't walked Franklin and Eleanor, their minature pot-bellied pigs, all week. The only thing that can cause them to neglect F&E is a problem with Allison.

There are others. All week long she's been watching them, and reading their stories.

Now it's Friday, so Pastor Patty is sitting in the back booth at The Mills of the Gods Coffee Company, pulling together the notes for her sermon. That's what preachers do after they have read, they write. They read the stories of the people, the stories they see in their presences and in their absences, and they write them into the story of God.

Pastor Randall Nathan, [Retard], knows he will find Pastor Patty where the mills of the gods grind exceeding fine. He goes to find her on Friday because he has been watching HER all week. He has read HER. He knows she doesn't have much faith in the church to help people with real problems anymore, because the people who are loudest about being Christian are those who are most intent on causing problems rather than solving them. He knows it will be a hard story for her to write this week.

In public he wears a slouch hat with brandy-soaked press passes in the band, and Groucho nose and glasses, with a candy cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, so no one will know who he is. When he entered The Mills, Barry Cobbler, the proprietor, pointed at the back booth.

"I need an area of concern I can use as an illustration Sunday, but I can't use any of the real ones," Pastor Patty said. "What have you been worrying about this week? Since you're in disguise, no one will know your worry is a real one."

"I can't understand why Blogger doesn't have a sphelczhek," he said. "It's very embarrassing to misspell 'embarrassment' or 'misspelling.' That's what bothers me."

"That's not a real problem. You can get your granddaughter to take care of that for you. I'm talking about real problems. I don't know why I even try, though. Nobody pays attention to what I say."

"What do you have faith in?" her quasi-mentor asked. "Something God can use on real problems."

"I have faith in love. Except 'love' is so generic. Maybe a word like 'nice' would be better. It's more specific. People can qualify love, like when they say 'tough love' to justify being mean. Maybe if we would just be 'nice' to everybody, things would get better. But theologians already accuse us Methodists of having no theology except being nice."

"Well, we believe in free will," he said. "You have free will to choose to be nice or to be nasty. Think about that, though. Methodists have always turned insults into ministry; that's how we got our name. What's a better doctrine than being nice? Wouldn't the world be a better place if people were just nice instead of theological? God gives us theology for fun. When we begin to take it seriously, we use it to divide ourselves over against one another, and then we can't be nice. The Niceness creed instead of the Nicene Creed, maybe that would be an improvement. We could be the Nicenists."

"Yeah, but we're not even very good at being nice. The Kitchen Nazis and the Bleeding Hearts are at it again." [The KNs are a Circle of MLW, Methodist Ladies and Women, and The BHs are a Sunday School class that meets on Tuesday night at The Whistle & Thistle Biker Bar and Tea House.]

"And people know I want to be called Rev. Niebuhr, but they insist on calling me Pastor Patty. They do it just because I'm little and cute. If they call me Rev. Niebuhr, they can't treat me like I'm their cute little pet. Calling me Pastor Patty is a way of saying they respect my office but not enough to pay attention to what I say."

Rev. Nathan was sure Barry Cobbler didn't even need his espresso machine anymore. The steam coming out of Rev. Niebuhr's ears could take its place.

"No," he said, "they call you Pastor Patty to bring you down to where they can hear you. Yes, you're little and cute when you're pulling Gracie in her wagon, or dropping Remington off at school, or hitting it over the outfielders in the church softball league, but in the pulpit, you're ten feet tall, and very scary, because they know you've been watching them and that you've read their stories. Go with your faith, your faith that God can use love. Be nice."

Rev. Niebuhr didn't look like she was convinced, so he pulled out the big trebouchet, the real theologian in the family, his wife, Claire.

"Here's something I learned from Claire. When you're in that pulpit, you have only one job. Regardless of how you do it, just remind us that God loves us, that we're still in the Story."