Church

Ok. I work at a Christian school. Along with grading papers, I am required to go to church– but not at the same time. For a while, I went to a bilingual church in Miraflores near the Malecon. It met in a four star hotel, lets call it Holiday Heaven, where I hoped to sneak in a buffet breakfast before Spanish verb conjugates would miraculously enter my brain. Neither happened. Instead, I’d sit thru the sermons, peep WORDLE and pray: is there a patron saint of languages?

There is, and it’s not the Duolingo owl but St. Jerome.

So I switched to an Anglican church, one with stained glass windows that they worship. Yes, these church parishioners worship the windows. Let me explain. There’s always a fundraiser for the windows. The church is always in dire need for money for the windows. Not money for the impoverished, not a sole for those on the city’s fringes suffering from tuberculosis. Just money for the windows featuring a blue-eyed baby Jesus.

If you aren’t familiar with an Anglican service, it’s not one you can snooze through. There are manuals and instructions, the service as complicated as assembling an IKEA bookcase. So I sit in a wooden pew that’s not nearly as comfortable as the four-star hotel chairs, sing ancient hymns and read prayer requests for the sick, making me regret throwing out my COVID masks. Am I in a holy place or a cesspool of sickness? Will I get out of here alive? Then it’s the part of the service where everyone stands up and shakes hands. Old hands, young hands, working hands, calloused hands, and all I can think about is germs. I want to retract my hand like a turtle, but am pestered by this elderly man who reminds me of my dad. I hear him yell in my head, “For crying out loud, be polite already!”

Of course the hand shaking happens before communion, where I get a wafer from the vicar with my germ covered fingers. I contemplate tucking it in my Kleenex, fearing putting the holy host in my mouth, thinking of the host of microbes. I dunk it into the wine-filled challis, praying the alcohol will kill my fears.

But the Anglican church isn’t where I was last Sunday.

This is– Rapagna Laguna, a Poor man’s Patagonia. It’s about three and a half hours out of Lima, give or take two hours, depending on the traffic.

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The altitude of this hike is comparable to Laguna 69, making me 4,600 meters closer to God, relieving some of the guilt I felt for skipping a Sunday service.

But there is penance to be paid for playing hookie at church.

Altitude sickness.

My body didn’t have time to adjust to the thinner air, in spite of the handfuls of coca leaf candies I devoured. My lungs reminded me every ten steps that it was low-fat oxygen, as visions of friends who’d died of grabbers danced like sugar plumbs in my head.

Needless to say, I was the caboose of this hiking group, a far cry from the Little Engine that Could. A seasoned trekker stayed back with me, hoping that yelling in Spanish would transform me into a mountain goat. She glared as I unzipped my backpack to retrieve a slightly squished peanut butter sandwich.

“No Mani!” she barked, explaining how peanuts (mani) would make sick. A fact learned the hard way: thin air plays havoc with your gut, shutting down your stomach and causing lots of gas.

Well that sucked. I had nothing else to eat and thirty thousand steps to go. I wish I was eating a germ covered communion cracker.

I looked at the immense challenge in front of me. I didn’t want to fart up a mountain only to have a heart attack on the way down and harassed by St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, “You shouldn’t have ditched church.”

I turned around and bit into my sandwich. Instead of concentrating on if I could still breathe, I looked around and was flabbergasted by the beauty. The birds, the streams, huge chunks of jagged rock, and this shaggy tree with arm-like limbs. It looked like an extra from the Wizard of Oz, the scene where the apple tree starts throwing apples at Dorothy.

The majestic scenery of Rapagnes penetrated my being, a loofa sponge that scrubbed away NYT headlines, the ungraded stack of papers on my desk, the guilt from skipping church. Cows chased away others concerns.

As I hiked alone back to the starting point, memories from my previous life unearthed in my brain, from the days when boom boxes were the size of refrigerators and shoulder pads were the size of mattresses. I took a hiatus from advertising to be a youth leader in London, my gift to me for turning thirty-five. The congregation met in a dilapidated church off Oxford Street near Hyde Park, a forgotten structure that was home the only stained glass windows that survived the bomb blasts of WWII. A homeless woman with a horn-like growth on her forehead slept by the door, my landmark for finding the obscure entrance in the days before GPS.

Along with discovering teens in London bellyache about being bored as much as kids in Chicago–just with a better grammar– I was in awe of the windows, even the blue-eyed baby Jesus. I approached the pastor, an American, asking if could write a few letters to save the crumbling building, so others could enjoy the windows. He agreed.

I wrote various foundations and historical societies in London, and for kicks, even wrote the Queen and Queen Mum. I learned there are specific grammar rules for addressing royalty, many dependent if you are a subject of her power or from another country.

The Queen Mum wrote back, her letter without a postage stamp but enclosed was a check for 200 pounds and a note: the Queen Mum remembers those windows. That barely was enough to repair the toilet in the building yet alone the structure. Who cared? I had one doozy a fundraising letter for my portfolio.

The church never repaired the windows, but decades later, a non-religious group restored the entire structure, it now being a hub for libations more potent than thimbles of grape juice.

As memories, worries and altitude sickness drafted away, I completed, the hike feeling closer to God, 4,600 meters to be exact. That’s something not always accomplished on a wooden pew.

So what did I learn?

Stained glass windows are for tourists. Mountains are for a real spiritual experience.

And don’t pack a peanut butter sandwich.