April 20, 2007
Friday

I was driving south on Progress Avenue yesterday, in the middle of a busy day moving from one appointment to another. I was talking to Ron on the phone, telling him how to get into my e-mail so he could read the note Lynn had alerted me to via text message. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. It’s nothing bad. Just read it.” I passed our street (no time to stop and read the note myself) and then came parallel to the Faith Church/Iglesia de Fe property that borders ours. And there, right in the driveway, was a For Sale sign. Five acres. Zoned R-2.

It’s really good that what Lynn is asking for is a new laptop to replace her aging and sputtering desktop, a year earlier than we’d planned, instead of maybe dropping out of school for a while to go find herself in a California commune or marrying some boy with attractive facial hair and a dream to own his own head shop. Because I couldn’t cope with anything outrageous after contemplating the implications of the imminent sale of the five acres that border my back yard, the western edge of which I regard as my own personal meadow. (I was there more than fifteen years before the church was built. The field was planted in barley — a field of gold — for those years.)

The church was originally the new suburban home of an old city congregation of the Church of God of Anderson, Indiana, a conservative nondenominational anabaptist group. They have an active mission to Spanish-speaking people, and a small group of Spanish speakers held services over there about once a month. About two years ago there was (we heard) some kind of brouhaha in the congregation, a schism developed, and those who wished to remain members of the Church of God structure withdrew from membership. That’s when the name changed and the dual language sign went up.

Both congregations are small. You can tell that from the number of cars there on any given Sunday and the sparse use the picnic pavilion gets.

Someone was mowing the grass on my vista around lunch time. Ron saw that it was the Spanish congregation’s pastor he talked to from time to time about such things as drainage problems along the property line. So he went out in search of information.

It’s the Anglo congregation (the owner of the property) that wants to disband and sell, Pastor Phil said. A developer has offered them a million dollars with the intention of demolishing the church and building apartments. The township has allegedly put the kibosh on that, as well as any use that would involve businesses or shops. (R-2 calls for medium-density single family homes and protected greenways. Part of the property that borders our house is a protected wetland.) The Spanish congregation has another group interested in buying the property with them and continuing to use it as a church.

I don’t even want to think about this. I’ve been in my house since 1976. I’ve always said I am going out of it in a box. There’s been enough development in and around our neighborhood, taking out trees that provided a soundbreak and increasing the traffic (both its density and its speed) on Progress Avenue. I do not want to cope with the noise and the dust and the destruction of the vista that any change in the use of the property would entail. I cannot cope with even the thought of moving, now or in the foreseeable future.

I know that things like this — the sale of a property with a large, unusual building sitting in the middle of it — can take a long time. This is not something I really have to think very much about now.

But I do have to think about it.

I am writing this from a place where deep thinking, as well as deep feeling, is both encouraged and facilitated. I’m at the Jesuit Spiritual Center in Wernersville for the next ten days, two spiritual development programs bookending three days of quiet and solitude for me to work on my fiction.

This experience is beginning with a study of John 4:3-15, the story of the woman at the well, the one of all bible stories I believe speaks directly to me. “I’ve just met a man who told me everything I ever did.” It has eating and drinking, hunger and thirst, an encounter with a stranger, a woman burdened with some “issues” who is called to change.

We’ll see if she has any signs for me.