Pulley: The trouble with church pews and a search for compassion

Churches can be chancy places. Take the time my poor father sat in church one Sunday morning minding his own business and probably worrying about how to keep my mother calm the next time someone brought up infant baptisms. She believed in adult full dunking and nothing else would do.

My father never said much, which told me he was probably worrying most of the time, even in church. Perhaps he was calculating how best to send me to college and whether I was worth two cents in the first place. Probably not college material. Dad might have been wondering if he’d be able to take his usual Sunday nap without some farmer pounding on our door to discuss a possible auction and the value of a rusted piece of farm equipment that hadn’t been used since the Coolidge administration. His Sunday naps were sacrosanct.

Church was a fine place to worry, and my dad deserved his time alone to stew, without what was about to happen.

Many Protestant churches have communion cup holders attached to the back of pews so after congregants knock back the shot of grape juice (never real wine that the Episcopalians sip from a common chalice — and don’t get my mother started on that!) they merely place the glass in the handy holders. Clever pew designers, those Protestants.

My father, serenely involved in his weekly worries, was innocently poking his finger in and out of the cup holder when — Heaven rescue the man — a digit got caught in a hole, and the more he tried to free the thing, the more the finger swelled into place. He was latched onto the pew before him. And now he was engulfed in a major worry.

What must enter a man’s head in that situation while spiritual solemnities proceed around him, with worshipers seized in holy contemplation, while hymns march majestically through the air, while his wife, my mother, plays the organ?

Did he envision the Rapture taking place, being left behind, forever bound to a piece of furniture? Did he imagine the church burning down while he dragged a church pew out the door behind him?

But the man had a plan. His buddy, Donald, sat at his side, so my father showed him the situation, telling his friend to get a screwdriver after the service, whereupon he could release himself from the pew, under cover of the usual commotion following the final Amen. Later, Dad told my mother and me that Donald sat for the remainder of the service shaking in nearly uncontrolled, fidgety amusement.

Shouldn’t a trapped man trust a friend? Did Donald secretly find the screwdriver and follow my father’s request? No. Instead he directed the congregation to my father’s side with hilarity and catcalls ensuing, desecrating the service’s previous grandeur — all because of a friend’s childish reaction to a man desperately stuck, in need of compassion.

Donald, the supposed friend, caused my father's plight to live in infamy not only in the church but in the town; the local newspaper editor reviewed it for the reading public.

Dad would have had a safer Sunday taking his worries to the golf course, praying over long putts or petitioning the Almighty for a straight 7-iron to the green — a place where before menace strikes, considerate golfers at least yell, “Fore!”

But my father rallied and shared the town's amusement with good cheer. Yet, in his silent way, I've always wondered if he worried from then on about the dangers of darkening a church's door. And upon entering perhaps he heeded the universal warning: Keep your hands to yourself.

Michael Pulley lives in Springfield. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Michael Pulley: Sometimes a friend is the last thing you need