After Church, the Pastor's wife, Sister Jean, corals up the married ladies who are staying for services afterwards.
Sister Jean is grey-haired and happily wrinkled and full of love and Christian cheer. She favors cottons and wools and soothing colors in her clothes. A modest gold cross around her neck.
Services have ended, those who depart process to depart.
Pastor Bob receives them, Sister Jean receives them. The congregants talk amongst themselves, filled with the Spirit, filled with Unity.
The unadorned, utilitarian church reflects and resounds with dozens of joyful conversations. Friends meeting in good cheer, sharing close spiritual bonds.
The church is non-specifically denominational. Simple white walls and wooden pews and accents; part of a larger church-and-school complex built decades ago for one denomination and having changed hands through many flavors of faith since.
Sister Jean's husband, Pastor Bob, has pastored up and down the First Coast and the Big Bend for decades. But using his Masters in counseling and his Doctorate in social work paid the bills for Pastor Bob and Sister Jean. Sunday services were a bonus.
Sister Jean knows which women will be attending after. "Ladies, wives, sisters," she greets them.
The mothers in the group have supervised their children's departure with this week's Sunday School Teacher, who leads the little ones downstairs to the Sunday School Room where they will be safely chaperoned with juice and crackers and taught Bible Stories.
Meanwhile, their parishioner parents, adults all and wise, follow Sister Jean and Pastor Bob out the church, through the breezeway, to the first floor of the small building connected to the church and previously both offices and school for the various denominations that denominated the plain church-and-school complex. Now, it is meeting rooms and storage for Pastor Bob and Sister Jean's simple Church of the Sunday Morning.
Some mornings, Sister Jean sings as they procession in casual order to the meeting room chosen for the after-meeting. Sister Jean prefers to gather up her "ladies, wives, and sisters" in big, interlocked chains of hands and arms, walking entwined together as they go with Sister Jean entangled amidst them, leading these women, some as young as their late twenties, but most in their thirties and forties.
Jean's energy and positivity and innocence is contagious, and often her "ladies, wives and sisters" sing with her.
"It's good to sing, Sisters," Jean often tells the women in her and her husband's flock. "Singing opens the mouth, opens the throat, and opens the heart."
Singing is an essential part of these sunday services. Pastor Bob and Sister Jean have not much to offer in terms of scriptural interpretation and sermons, but they make their sole Service on sunday full of music.
Bob plays piano and a number of other instruments, Jean sings and plays harp and other strange string instruments popular on the county fair circuit in the South East United States during the nineteen-seventies. Two of the younger fathers in the congregation play guitar and drums and bass, and two of the mothers sing and keep rhythm. It is thus these small-town neighbors, mostly strangers until they met on Sundays (to which they were mostly recruited by Pastor Bob and Sister Jean's work in the community as social workers), let their hair down, chill out, open their selves to unity and to things bigger than themselves built from that unity, by being together, by singing, by reflecting together, and when the adults were separated together, to celebrate what Pastor Bob and Sister Jean called the communion of the man and his wife.
This was the only time the congregants, never more than a dozen couples, thought that Pastor Bob's interpretation of scripture was insightful.
It was a ritual of Pastor Bob and Sister Jean's creation.
As Sister Jean would corral the women and seek to lead them into the after-meeting room together, so would Pastor Bob do to his "Brothers, Brothers! So good to see you after another week!"
The men of the church had never found a man such as Pastor Bob before who made it so easy to feel this spiritual connection. To understand the shared connection they all possessed as Brother Men, and the connection that each had to the pair-bonded woman in his life. Each couple having a similar bond, but each one different. "We can celebrate the differences or we can celebrate the shared, so for once why not celebrate the thing we all have in common?" Pastor Bob would ask them rhetorically, and it would make sense to their male ears and male hearts.
As their Fellowship would teach them in short order, Pastor Bob understood the true sacred rites, the ones that need not be spoken of and, as Pastor Bob would counsel, "truly, they cannot be, because they are so spiritual, it is only the experience itself that is high enough--that is, words are not high enough to even describe such sublime spirituality and connectedness, only the experience itself, the ritual itself speaks for itself. And it ain't talkin'!"
Pastor Bob would laugh then. He had a ready smile and a sense that most of creation was humorous. But the ritual he always took seriously.
Sister Jean took it seriously, but playfully. She preferred when Bob had all the men lined up shoulder to shoulder on either side of the closed after-meeting room door.
Then Jean liked to take her "ladies, wives, sisters" with her, past all the husbands and serious boyfriends standing there, opening the doors to the meeting room, and then closing the doors behind them, stranding Pastor Bob and the men outside.
The women usually laughed, or shared some shared joke that the men on the the side, Pastor Bob included, would strain to hear but never be able to quite make out.
Inside, the women would be putting the chairs into a circle, if no one had done so prior to Service, though Sister Jean usually had.
Once the chairs were in a circle facing inward, Sister Jean would open the doors, and each woman streamed out, one by one, slowly, find her man (always the one in pair-bond with her, there was never any casual exchange), and take him by the hand, leading him gently to the chair she chose for him.
She would then stand behind him, touching his shoulders. Sister Jean was always last, and when she lead Pastor Bob into the meeting room, he always closed the door behind him.
Jean, after she lead her husband to the last open chair, instead of standing behind, would then slip to her knees in front of her husband.
This was the sign that the other "ladies, wives, sisters," were attending on, that is, the signal they were waiting for, the ritual beginning they cherished, and as Sister Jean sunk to her knees before her husband, so would each lady before hers.
The chairs were arranged in a circle tightly enough to fit all of the men around the circle, seated facing in, and all of their pair-bonded women, kneeing in their church clothes, facing out, close enough to give them just enough room for comfortable movement, but close enough to always be aware, out of the edges of peripheral vision, what the couples to their left and right were doing.
"Amen, Brothers and Sisters," Pastor Bob would begin. He would speak a few well-chosen Bible verses to meditate on, often tongue-in-cheek ones.
He would talk about the way spiritual lovers struggled to maintain a spiritual connection in the modern world. "Too often, Sister Jean and I would hear from Parishioners that they struggled to make time to be together like a man and a woman ought. So many years ago, Sister Jean and I realized that to help these people most, we would make them make the time!"
He would talk about all that this Fellowship gathered and present had already shared that morning in receipt of God's communion and covenant with them, "God's communion with man, and now is time for man's communion with woman. Let's all take a deep breath."
And all these responsible, spiritually-seeking, sexually healthy adults would breathe the same air together. Hold that breath together. Exhale it together.