The church of the Golden Flake clown's mother

    My grandparents on both sides were southern Baptists. They attended Southside Baptist Church in the Five Points part of Birmingham. My grandfathers were deacons in the church. 

    My mother and father attended the church in their youth. 

    My mother didn't care for the Baptists, and she stopped attending church. 

    I was maybe 10 when Mt. Brook Baptist church was built near our home on Montevallo Road. 

    My father and I had a Sunday morning ritual. 

    He drove us to a local drugstore, where I got a soda fountain Pepsi Cola, and then we took a drive. 

    Then, he drove us to Mt. Brook Baptist Church, where he attended a Sunday School class for men and I attended a boys class. 

    I really liked the teacher and the students. 

    Driving home from the church, my father and I talked about what was discussed in my class. 

    I seldom attended church services. The sermons went on and on, and bored the shit out of me. And, tortured me.

    A young Episcopal priest named Lee Graham started a parish church in an old farm house across the street from the Mountain Brook Fire Department, Police Station and City Hall. My mother started attending Sunday services at St. Luke's. She really liked what minister was saying. His name was Lee Graham. 

    My mother told my father, if he didn't get serious about church, she was taking their children to St. Luke's. My father and I kept up our Sunday morning ritual. My mother decided that wasn't good enough.

 

    She took me with her to St. Luke's, and made me sit through morning worship services, which consisted of songs, recitations from a prayer book, chants, long boring sermons, songs, communion, which I could not take, because I was not confirmed, more chanting and song. 

    I went places in my imagination.

    My grandparents on both sides and their minister at Southside Baptist went haywire. 

    My.mother held her ground.

    One Sunday night, my father asked me what that day's sermon was about? What could I say? I had no clue, because I had not listened to the sermon. 

    My father gave my mother the look, 

    My mother me a much worse look. 

    I supposed she had hoped I would prove to my father and their parents that she had done the right thing by joining St. Luke's and taking her children there with her.

    It apparently didn't occur to them that I should be in a Sunday school class with my peers, instead of attending church services;

    When I was 12, mother enrolled me confirmation class, so I could be confirmed by the bishop and take communion. 

    Every Saturday afternoon, for 2 hours, I endured confirmation class, while being forced by my mother at home,s to memorize the Ten Commandment and a lot of stuff from the prayer book, including the Apostles' and Nicean Creeds. 

    I hated grammar school, viewed it as prison. Saturday's were my days out of jail. Now I was in a different jail for two hours every Saturday afternoon.

    I completed the confirmation training. 

    The Episcopal Bishop of Alabama came to St. Luke's to confirm our class at a Sunday service. My mother and father and their parents were there.

    The bishop spoke a while, about what, I doubt I remembered much. 

    Our confirmation class all went to the rail and knelt. 

    The Bishop passed by us one at a time, putting in our cupped, open palms a thin, white, wheat wafer, the body of Christ, for use to lap up with our tongues and hold in our mouths until it dissolved and we swallowed it. 

    The bishop returned with a sliver chalice filled about half way with red port wine. He offered us the chalice and helped us tip it up so we could take a sip.

    My first sip ever of alcohol, which the bishop had called the blood of Christ, went down my throat wrong. 

    It burned, and it was all I could muster to pretend all was great and wonderful. 

    I felt like I was choking to death, and needed to gag and throw up. 

    Summoning every ounce of my will, I shakily walked back to the pew and pulled down the padded knee rest and kneeled with my eyes closed, begging God to save me. 

    It passed, but it did not seem God had anything do with it.

    I didn't tell anyone. 

    When I was 14, my mother pushed me to become an acolyte, and wear a white robe and carry a gold cross on a pole and a silver candelabra to light candles in the church nave during Sunday services. 

    I was not interested, and she kept pushing, and I was not interested. 

    At church one Sunday, my mother asked the curate to persuade me to become an acolyte. He faced me, saw my pleading eyes and head shaking, and told my mother I didn't want to do it.

    Time passed, and I grew resistant to attending church. 

    I much preferred playing golf, fishing, or anything, to attending church. 

    That really upset my mother, and I felt guilty. 

    Maybe I was going to hell, but I didn't want to go to church much.

    Over the years, I went back to attending church for a while. I was sincere, but it didn't stick.

    At Vanderbilt, my sweetheart, Dianne, and I consulted with a school chaplain, who was an Episcopal priest, and he told us to get married, if we wished. 

    We already were doing every thing married men and women do, but live together. 

    After my son died of crib death when I was in law school, Dianne and I attended a little Episcopal church for a while, but it didn't stick for me.

    When it got rough for Dianne and me, we attended a small Episcopal Church called The Church of the Transfiguration, or, Trans Fig. 

    It was a pretty far out church, even for Episcopal. 

    Then, I didn't attend church much.

    After I tried out the New Age, which was interesting but didn't fix anything, angels got a hold of me, and turned me every which a way but loose, and that's when I started wondering when was I never not in church?

    I attended churches sometimes, but it was not the me who had attended church in the past. I didn't I fit in. I said things that were not always well received. 

    I stopped attending church.

    During the black night early 1987- June 1998, I attended South Side Baptist Church, and was baptized, again. I attended a progressive Sunday school class, which I liked.

    The minister's wife asked me to speak with him. We met privately. I took him into a soul alchemy ritual. He said he saw eagles. He was moved. His wife said she hoped I would keep meeting with him.

    By then, I was so down that I quit attending that church.

    I began hanging out week day afternoon's in St. Luke's nave, hoping for a miracle. 

    The black workers, who kept the church clean, seemed to grasp I was in a horrible soul struggle. When I fell asleep sitting or lying on a pew seat, they left me alone, until it was time to close the church. The white people in the church never approached me.

    I started attending Sunday Services at St. Luke's. I met a man in the congregation, who was fascinated in mystics, but himself had not, to his knowledge, had a mystical experience. 

    He was fascinated by my personal pre-black night experiences. He offered me a bedroom in his home, if I felt I needed to leave my wife, Deborah.

    When I left her, the black night began to lift. I took him up on his offer. 

    I kept attending Sunday services at St. Luke's. 

    One Sunday before the morning service began, a woman in the foyer outside the nave called out, "Sloan, is that you?" I didn't recognize her.

    She introduced herself, said her and my children had once played together. I remembered her then. We sat together during the service. After it was over, I asked her if she would like to go somewhere for lunch? She said, yes.

    Over lunch, I told her a little about what I had been though and was coming out of. I told some of my mother and St. Luke's. 

    My lunch "date" said she was raised Southern Baptist and had come to view that as too severed and judgmental. 

    I told said I might still be really messed up, l but I knew the hand of God in something, when I saw it.

    Really?

    Yeah, really. 

    Where it went from there for us is a l-o-n-g story, which I have told elsewhere, but do not know if it's to be part of this tale. 

    Suffice to say, it was by far the most physically passionate and unearthly romance I had experienced (or would experience). 

    But, she was so sure she would die and burn in hell if she did not attend church every Sunday...

    And she was so just as sure I had to be a successful capitalist to be her man...

    And she just as so sure kept ignoring, or forgetting, God, she said, repeatedly telling her to leave me alone about that, I was doing God's work...

    Until, finally, God told her in her sleep, lying beside me on my bed in my apartment, "You are not the one,"

     And she woke up terrified, and fled.

    On the refrigerator in her kitchen was a "We Plan, God laughs!" magnet.

    I had told her a few times that was a message from God to her, and she had agreed.

    I didn't hear any laughing after she fled, only my heart and guts wrenching and angels weeping.

    When I was homeless, mostly, 2000-2005, I went into quite a few churches, and often I realized I was encountering the devil where most Christians never would think to look.

    When I addressed what was in front of me, unseen, it seemed, by any one else, it was not welcomed with smiles.

    When I was in Birmingham after my father died, I dreamed of my St. Luke's girlfriend one Saturday night, and I went to St. Luke's the next morning, and there she was, sitting in the same part of the same pew where we sat the first time.

    I said it was good to see her, I hoped she was doing well. 

    She said I was looking well, and she was not interested. 

    I said, ok, I didn't wish to cause her discomfort. 

    I got up and left the nave, and my mother's church.

    What seemed the trigger for our break up had come at St. Luke's in the summer of 1999.

    The priest preached hard for, and vestrymen then got up and begged, the congregation to give the church more money, because it was struggling financially.

    They quoted Jesus in the Gospels, "Be a generous giver, good measure pressed down." But Jesus had meant, give to people in need.

    My girlfriend already had concluded, if the church was doing God's work, then God would provide what money the church needed. 

    I had been told in a dream a year earlier, that I had two adversaries with her: the Baptist and the capitalists, and the capitalists were the tougher adversary.

    A budding anti-capitalist, I suppose I had no chance, even though she made very good money.

    She really a good salary with a tech company, and had really good benefits. She was was doing well in the stock market.

    I told her to ask God for investment tips. She blanched, and I said, just do it and see what happens.

    She asked, received investment tips from the ethers, and the stocks she bought which went up nicely, quickly.

    But I wasn't a capitalist.

    Nor, according to my mother, was Lee Graham.

    She told me that he refused to use sermons to try to raise money for St. Luke's. Only one time a year, when the Episcopal Diocese required it, did he make such a sermon, and he clearly did to like doing it.

    My mother also told me, that during the time of the troubles, when Birmingham Blacks sought the same rights, privileges and treatment that Whites enjoyed, Blacks started pop-calling at White churches, to worship. That cause quite a stir.

    At a St. Luke's Vestry meeting, the vestrymen (deacons) discussed that situation and decided to hire off-duty Mt. Brook police officers to stand guard at St. Luke's on Sunday mornings, and turn away any Blacks who came there to worship.

    As the vestrymen adjourned the meeting, Lee asked them if they wanted to hear what he thought about what they had decided? 

    Oh, well, er, yes. What do you think Reverend Graham.

    Reverend Graham said, he had built St. Luke's from scratch, it was its pastor, and if Blacks came to St. Lukes and were turned away, he would end the service and close the church.

    Chi-ching.

    No Blacks ever came to St. Luke's to worship during that time. Mt. Brook was all-white, except for Black servants and yard workers.

    Not long after that, Lee told my mother that he work at St. Luke's was done, and he was taking a small parish outside of Tallahassee, Florida. 

    After my mother died in early 1967, my father sent his company plane to bring Lee to say last words over my mother's casket at Elemwood Cemetery, where my son woyld be laid to rest on September 12, 1968.

    Lee's eulogy was brief. He walked down the family line, shaking hands with my father and my brother, I was looking down and he passed me by.

    I think Lee served that small Florida parish until he passed on.

    If asked what I would say today over my mother's casket ...

    I would say she loved life. She had more friends than anyone I knew. All my friends and my brother's and my sister's friends loved her and being in my home, and they called her Nelle, and she loved them. She was devoted to her children and loyal to her friends. She and my wife loved each other like older and younger sister. She was devoted to St. Luke's Episcopal church and its pastor, Lee Graham. She withstood horrible firestorms from her parents and in-laws and their Southside Baptist Church minister for switching to St. Luke's and taking her children with her. She was a saint for not divorcing her womanizing husband, and she told me the reason she didn't was because her mother told her, "If you divorce Sloan, it will kill me!." So, she got a divorce from her mother and my father, and here we are, telling her goodbye.

    I don't think. my mother wanted me to work for Golden Flake, and perhaps if she had not died, she would have helped me find enough spine to practice law in Troy, Alabama, instead. She and my Great Grandmother Bashinsky were very close. But then, perhaps I would not even exist, if she had not written my father a letter when he was at Princeton, telling him if he didn't leave Princeton and come home and marry her, she would marry the first man who would have her, to save her from her Puritan parents. 

    She told me that. too.

    In the mid-1980s, I was moving toward not practicing law. My father and I had lunch in local restaurants about twice a month.

    During one of those lunches, I asked him, if the reason he had pushed himself so hard in business and investing, was to make it up to his father for dropping out of Princeton to marry my mother?

    My father said, "You know me pretty well."

    His father had graduated from Princeton, and from all I could tell, that was his father's crowning life achievement. 

    His father tried several times to persuade me to go to Princeton, and he would pay for it. It didn't feel right to me, and I declined. 

    Much later, Major told me that our Grandfather Bashinsky had made him the same offer. Even later, I learned the same offer had been made to the male children of my father's brother Leo.

    None of us went to Princeton.