The Ten-Week Experiment

continued

We'd emerge with ink-blackened fingers and the account of a tornado ... a factory fire ... a missing child. In Virginia we went to see a man who'd been lost in Dismal Swamp. In Alaska, a teenage boy blinded by a bear. Though the news stories didn't mention faith, we'd found, in interviewing for Guideposts, that every survivor has spiritual discoveries to share.

The homeward leg of the trip was different. No interviews, no combing newspaper files, just long hours in the car as we pushed to get back for the start of school. To the drone of the tires, all three children would often stretch out on the mattress in back and fall asleep. And John and I found ourselves with that rarity in the lives of young parents, time to talk.

We discussed upcoming book projects. How to stretch our budget to include guitar lessons for Scott. What would happen when President Eisenhower met face-to-face with Khrushchev. Montana ... North Dakota ... Minnesota ... Could Liz wear Donn's outgrown snowsuit this winter? Would my brother's job with General Electric in Havana be affected by this new name in the news, Fidel Castro?

We were in Pennsylvania, almost home, and the topic of religion - religion as it affected us personally - had not come up. By this time we'd been writing for a religious magazine for eight years without ever making that personal connection. But since we'd covered the important subjects, we got around even to this one. We hadn't been inside a church, I realized, since the apron episode more than two years earlier.

"What do you believe now," I asked John, "about-well, God and everything?"

"I haven't really thought about it. What about you?"

I hadn't thought about it either. "If only there were a church somewhere," I mused aloud, "where people would leave you alone. Let you have your own experience, if you're going to have one."

An unfriendly church, John agreed, was what we needed. Five miles passed in silence. "How about Episcopalians?" John said. "Aren't they supposed to be 'God's Frozen People'?"

But were there any in our area? There was a handsome stone church in Mt. Kisco, just past the statue of the Indian chief who gave the town its name, that we thought might be Episcopalian. We hadn't ventured into it during our months of church hunting - the parking lot seemed to be full of Bentleys.

Signs for resorts in the Poconos. We'd be home by nightfall.

"Why don't we try it for a couple of weeks?" I suggested.

"Maybe," said John, "two weeks isn't long enough."

And on the last few miles of the long trip, we established two rules for the new experiment. We'd go to the church by the Indian, start­ing that coming Sunday, for ten weeks. That would be ... we counted up. Till Thanksgiving.

And, the all-important second rule: We wouldn't talk about it. Like all verbal people, we could wring an experience dry with words. Just as we hoped no one in the stone church would talk to us, we agreed not to discuss our reactions with each other either, until Thanksgiving.