Pour Me A Presbyterian No. 2 (I’m Having A Bit Of Trouble With The Rules)

I was browsing the cocktail menu in a hotel bar with an elaborate ceiling and steps you have to be careful descending when you exit in high heels after midnight. It doesn’t take reservations, but you will be welcomed and seated on arrival. It reminded me of church. I was just having a quick look really. I knew I’d be having the martini because I’ll always have the martini. Gin not vodka. “Would you like lemon or olive?” they’ll say. “Lemon,” I’ll say. “Excellent choice,” they’ll reply. “Would you like lemon or olive?” they’ll say next time. “Olive,” I’ll say. “Excellent choice,” they’ll reply. I like that. No judgement.

They’d tried to streamline their offerings from a thick novel into a slim pamphlet. The bar manager wanted to make it easier for his mum¹. She was sticking to familiar favourites in case she got it wrong. He wanted her to be happy pointing at something unfamiliar and saying, “I’ll try that one”.

The classics were still there. The Bellinis and the French 75s. But there was experimentation too - Chianti Cobblers and Champagne Negronis and something called a Jimmie Roosevelt and on p6, the Presbyterian No. 2. It was spicy and peaty and intoxicating, a modern incarnation of the original Presbyterian cocktail, created by a forward-thinking 19^th century Scottish minister to “help his congregation circumnavigate the strict rules of the Church”. Even though there may have been a slight dishonouring of the truth around the origins of the Presbyterian, I totally got his thinking.

Recently, I’ve been having a bit of trouble going to church. I wish I could just whisper this but words on a page don’t whisper. I’m not sure if it’s all to do with the many complicated rules and the intellectual gymnastics and the failure to fit in, there are a variety of reasons, but I’m finding it awfully hard to sit down and relax in a pew. I am tense, somewhat angsty, battling feelings of overwhelming suppression, and I’m definitely not myself. I lurk at the back and hope they leave the door open. “Do you think I’m claustrophobic?” I said to my husband on the way to a religious building one Sunday in August after I’d avoided them for the whole month of July. But I’ve no problem with any other small spaces, like aeroplanes and saunas or my mother’s kitchen. It’s only there. And it’s not anxiety, because I’ve had that before, and it doesn’t limit itself to the Sabbath.

“Could you talk to one of your minister ‘friends’?” suggested my husband because he’d done his best listening and maybe it was time to bring in expert help. But I don’t want them to say they’ll pray for me or tell me to pray for me, like handing me a prescription for forgiveness without investigating the underlying causes. And then there’s the shame. I can’t tell people I have to psych myself up to enter a sanctuary. It’s corporate worship. I’m not supposed to be afraid of it. It’s meant to be the highlight of the week. Plus, when it all boils down to it, I don’t want to draw attention to my absence and say, “hey have you missed me?”. I would like someone to notice I am missing and ask me why.

I was reading a book called The Secret Lives of Church Ladies². I was way too innocent for it. It made me over-blush. Their sinful lives really needed to stay secret. I would not be recommending it to any church ladies I know who are dealing with layers of repression and only ever trying to get better at being better. Although Jan Carson³ did say, as a former church lady, that she had been waiting to read a collection like this for an awfully long time. There was a story in it about a woman who was in love with a physicist but mainly haunted by her mother.

“My mother speaks longingly of Judgment⁴ Day and the final accounting of who’s allowed past the pearly gates, certain that God’s accounting will mirror hers. “It will be a very small number,” she’s fond of saying. “Only those who walk the straight and narrow path shall see the face of God”. And you realize that if God were to welcome everyone into heaven, your mother would abandon Christianity immediately”.

Maybe I should be worried that somebody, somewhere, as they read this is already accounting for me.

I’ve been reading The Blue Parakeet too, even though I said I would never read any books by scholars and theologians ever again and especially not ones about leadership. Instead, I would stick to the Bible. The blue parakeet is a nomadic bird but the author⁵ found one in his garden. It was someone’s pet. It had escaped its cage and was now a free bird. The sparrows were terrified of it, but it refused to adjust its strange ways and become a sparrow. I’ve been focusing on the behaviour of that neotropical parrot even though I’m supposed to see it as a metaphor to describe passages of Scripture which are a bit wild and don’t fit into whatever theological framework we use. Rather than set them free, we cage them to suit us, to preserve whatever it is we need to preserve. The blue parakeet “had been caged, got loose, and it wanted to keep its freedom,” said Scot.

Maybe I am kind of the blue parakeet. I guess, if I plot what has happened to me over the last few years, it’s no coincidence that there was a pandemic in the middle of it. Leaving and refining and decluttering and becoming truer to myself in other areas of my life was always going to extend to my church life too.

“Why did you like me?” I’ll say to my husband because It's been twenty-five years now since he first met me and occasionally, I need a reminder of her, the original me. “You were funny,” he’ll say. But, I’m not one bit funny at church. My wings are clipped, my personality caged. I am quiet. It is my greatest honour to make people laugh but the church does not need female comedians who enjoy martinis. I am operating within an environment where ultimately, I am not free to be me.

Aaron, the bar manager in the hotel bar with the elaborate ceiling, said that when guests were presented with the old menu and its fifty choices, “you’d have noticed them looking at it and then going, ‘You know what, I’ll just have an Old Fashioned or a Mojito’. They weren’t exploring”. He wanted to make freedom more accessible.

“The previous menu was all classics,” he said. “But times have changed, and people are looking for a bit of personality behind their cocktails”.

Can I bring a bit of the personality behind me to church? Would that feel like freedom? Pour me a Presbyterian No. 2 while I decide. I might have to circumnavigate the rules.

P.S. I haven’t finished processing yet and will be doing a follow-up to this⁶ called ‘Was I Burned or Was I Burned Out?”.

1. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/food-drink/how-a-radical-rethink-of-the-merchant-hotels-cocktail-menu-was-inspired-by-the-bar-managers-mum/a1270340435.html

2. Deesha Philyaw (2020) The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

3. Northern Irish author.

4. US spelling. Don’t judge.

5. Scot McKnight (2008) The Blue Parakeet.

6. Not next week or the week after, but some time.