The Church Basement
Usually sitting beneath a white frame church, reached by a flight of stairs that was often narrow and sometimes steep. We had not discovered ‘handicap accessible’ when those old basements served as the church’s fellowship hall. Sometimes in those days the folks who made it up and down were nearly as rickety as the stairs—but Sunday after Sunday, morning and evening, and often Wednesday evening as well, and for weddings and funerals in between, the whole body of the faithful found upstairs in the sanctuary for worship could also be counted downstairs afterwards for coffee.
The coffee seldom stood alone and, considering the quality of the coffee, that was another feature of the basement fellowship that could have qualified as a blessing.
If you have been in one of these basements, you have been in most all of them. They seldom varied much in appearance or accoutrements. At one end, the kitchen, often spacious enough to accommodate an island or table down the middle, and spotless as the same ladies’ kitchens at home.
The tone of the whole life of the congregation could be seen in what was chosen to be hung on the walls or pinned to the bulletin board. A calendar, of course, probably with the name of the local mortuary that supplied them. But the undertaker’s advertisement didn’t keep the kitchen from being a happy, welcoming place. It was a second home to the women who worked in it, and even to the men who helped them tote their covered dishes and picnic baskets up and down the stairs and were told to hush when the women wanted to hear what was being said upstairs. They were welcoming to children, too, who often saw their drawings posted in the kitchen or near the “window” from which food was served.
And there would be more children’s art down near the Sunday School classes that met around one or more tables at the far end of the room, barely set much apart by portable dividers that doubled as bulletin boards. The table could double up to seat overflows of guests on occasions like weddings and funerals, or would be where the children sat, away from their parents and unhindered by the slow pace at which the parents ate and talked.
In a corner would be a set of small restrooms, often as spotless as the kitchen, but it was along the walls that you could find the most fascinating of the basement’s decorations, starting with the portraits of Jesus, often a considerable number of them. There was Jesus at the door with no handle, Jesus in the Temple as a boy, Jesus in the Garden. About the time the day of the church basement was passing, there might have appeared a laughing Jesus, a Jesus surrounded by happy children.
These Jesus portraits often appeared with a halo about Jesus’ head. The halo was a mystery. The figure of Jesus was nearly always white and, of course, and bearded. In one of history’s ironies, it was these portraits as much as anything that boys in the ‘60’s held up to their father’s when they complained about their sons growing beards. Many of the sons confused their beards with halos.
Then you might spot yet another calendar, sometimes a “flower calendar” that listed the volunteers to bring Sunday flowers, sometimes a calendar supplied by the hardware store or seed corn supplier. On occasion there would be an old hymn board that no longer listed hymns. Down near the Sunday School tables, you’d find an old upright piano, its bench scarred and scratched, its keys yellowing and chipped. The basement might have held a silent story of the woman who’d taught lessons on that piano and left it to the church, of the men it had taken to lug it down the stairs. It was enormously heavy and, so, unlikely ever to ascend.
Somewhere there sat a book case. Despite its somewhat disheveled appearance, it bore few signs of use. The books were mostly hardbacks, all quite old, including past books of worship and multiple copies of what had once served as a study bible for some group or hardy souls. It was probably fortunate that no one drew on the books’ contents for their theology, possible fortunate that many who declined to read from the library were not keen on any theology beyond “Jesus Love Me, This I Know.”
These basements must one day pass from use. Many of them are in towns where the last institution to fall will be the local church, now served again as it once was early in its history by a circuit preacher. Some of the towns are so small there is only one church left, certainly only one with regular Sunday morning services. It will possibly be a Methodist or Lutheran congregation, or possibly a “community church.” Where there are two, the other might be Roman Catholic. In only one little town I know of is it Episcopalian. But denomination seems to have little effect on the basement. Something of the basement overshadows all the differences on which the members once seemed so keen. Only long disuse diminishes the presence of those who once shared in the fellowship there.
But what a shame their passing will be. Without the color map of the Holy Land in Biblical Times that takes center place on one of the Sunday School dividers, how will anyone know where the Land of Goshen was, or the Land of Midian, or where the twelve tribes staked out their territorial claims? Who will be able to see how Paul got to Damascus?
Without the hymn board, how will anyone keep track of how many people attended last week and this, and how much the offering was this Sunday and last?
Who will stop to reckon how differently Jesus looked when he was our friend and when he was suffering for our sake? What will happen to the art of cleaning the clear plastic covers that lay over the table cloths on the tables?
How will we take note that there was nowhere to be found a call to partisan political action, no sign up sheet for letters to the editor, no tracts beyond A Guide to the God and Country Award or How to Live after the Loss of a Loved One.
You may want to argue that those things are not very important to us anymore, and you would likely be right. Maybe they are all just the quaint features of a time we can gladly put behind us. Life moves on, after all, and churches accommodate to changing cultures around them.
Still, it could be more than a coincidence that about the time church basements in particular and even church in general ceased to attract our interest, the old, friendly hangings came down in many a more modern church kitchen and church hall, where the Sunday School has been moved off to where it is not seen, where children’s art work has been replaced by signs telling users what they can and can’t leave in the refrigerator, how they were supposed to clean up after themselves, why they should not put the pots with the pans or mix the old flat ware with the new.
Is it coincidence that members have begun to float away to some other church with more pizazz and more political action until another church with even more pizazz and even more ‘righteous’ politics attracts them, and they are assured there is little about themselves that needs to change, assured that God wants only their success, and divisive rancor and spiritual vacuity lead their disillusioned children off into churchless Sundays where they get no hint why their hearts seem empty and their world seems so torn by disruption and fraud and violence.
Unless you could call it a hint when, should they happen to return to the old church basement, possibly for a grandparent’s funeral, they overhear one of their children ask, “Who’s that, and what’s that funny ring around his head?”
Chuck Peek June 2015
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