How to Befriend a Former Church / Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

An almost month-long life/art experience

I dedicate this writing to Alanna Lockward

Watching Eréndida, the film version based on Gabriel García Márquez’ novella, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother, brought into my ears my mother’s, and her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s voice straight from Latin America to the suburbs of Connecticut where I was at the time: posh Westport. In the film, Eréndida’s grandma remarks to the abused youngster how in their household each object has a specific place; therefore, when cups and the like are left in the wrong spot, they are prone to suffer. In spite of my complete empathy for Eréndida and her harsh living situation, I related to the statement of her wicked elder. As much as my heart went out to the exploited young woman, the grandmother’s animistic approach found fertile ground in my mind. Many hot nights in the Caribbean of my youth I felt guilty about making my pedestal fan work all night long. I also pondered on the harsh labor conditions of the appliances forced by my family to perform uninterruptedly. I would have liked it if I could have pulled out the refrigerator’s plug to give the poor thing an hour or so to take a nap after lunch; a siesta. I should have rejoiced every time the electric company in Santiago, the city where we lived in the Dominican Republic, lost power, granting all appliances a deserved break. But I cannot seem to remember feeling any happiness during the occasions we were deprived of electricity and left out in the silent dark.

The night the sudden storm broke at the place where I was staying in the spring of 2010, the wind carried, besides the voice of my mother, and that of her mother, and that of her mother’s mother, a chorus made out of other relatives and neighbors from the Dominican Republic and into rural Pennsylvania. The typed directions to get there said, “The white church at the corner where Hunter Road meets the road between Meshoppen and South Auburn. About 2.8 miles up Rattlesnake Hill…” I was moving to a former sacred site. I was there to draw inspiration from nature, perhaps not literally, as part of an artist residency with Soaring Gardens. However, I must say that it was the actual nature of the building, a repurposed Methodist Episcopal Church, and not the one acre surrounding the property that initially kindled my creative work. Yet nature always manages to find its way to us when we least expect it. As the wind was at play with the trees during my second night there, the electricity went out and left me wandering in the dark nave of the building, alternating between a flashlight and a yellow candle to get a sense of my whereabouts. I blew out the candle and retired the flashlight before going to bed. Darkness brought forth the voices again, and these kept me awake until the early hours of the morning. I had no internet and could neither use the stove nor the microwave. Heat, hot and even cold water were out of the question, since everything in the space was powered by electricity. All appliances were granted a respite.

Energy exchange is a discussion that I cannot have whether in wealthy Westport, or in the Pennsylvania countryside without opening my ears to my mother’s words, even if from afar. Although not exactly aligned with Eréndida’s ancestor and her statement regarding the placement of dishes and spoons, my mother has developed her own theory on how unattended appliances as well as buildings fall into decrepitude when not in direct touch with so-called human beings. My mother illustrates this with stories of brand-new CD players breaking down with no apparent reason, or new windows falling out of their frames, just because. For example, abandoned pipes cry out rusty water to express what the longing for contact inflicts upon them. Curtains tear at the slight pull of a hand to let people witness the emotional vacuum that solitude inflicts upon them. With nothing left to offer, the fabric simply falls apart into pieces. Insomnia during the storm at the church offered me room to ponder on the weight that the past of this building was already imposing upon me, certainly heavier than the weight of my head on the two pillows at my disposal. Intuition guided me to seek a relationship with the building, which although well-cared for, spent many months of the year by itself. The voices came back again telling me how objects that are now gone shall not be forgotten; this too applied to structures and any parts they have lost as a result of renovations: architectural phantom limbs.

Although at this church there were no vestiges of religious symbols, I was committed to embarking regularly on contemplative periods during which I interacted with the building by caring for it physically: dusting its walls, getting rid of abandoned cobwebs, and wiping any window pane within reach. During one such session I relocated in silence the several boxes of sheet-rock, as well as the old mattress that crowded an entrance. Stripped of all ornamentation, the altar proved to be the less demanding part to deal with. A plain sweep easily restored the order to this area. At the bare altar questions emanated from the cracks on the floor boards, while I caressed the surface unhurriedly with a piece of white remnant gathered from an old bedsheet I tore. Behind my use of white damp fabric to clean was the intention to co-create paintings with dust in collaboration with the space; the building itself. The soiled rags were meant to archive, at a visual level, the interactions between the church and I. The specific use of “paint” was determined by the circumstances rather than by a deliberate approach to any techniques or styles. I was at the mercy of dust, creatively speaking. To give you an idea of this, an unused foyer helped generate an artwork resembling a discolored Rauschenberg. Soiled rags were saved as relics of a developing friendship: one, two…., eight of them.

I am aware that I have not explained in detail my reasons for getting to know the church. Nor have I addressed the emotional weight that the contemplative moments, which I intuited as artistic prayers of some kind, were putting on me. Going in circles is something I thought of doing when I moved to the place, circumambulating the perimeter of the building as an active form of architectural courtship, a walking meditation. I thought of the nature of the space, a plain Methodist house of worship built in 1901 with support from the Ladies Society. My flirting was then possibly out of alignment with the ethics of the Protestant faith that erected the building, and so were what would be the aimless routines performed on my knees for art purposes, although there was more to that. Other than sprucing up my temporary abode and art studio, there were no direct results arising from my efforts. None of my deeds would translate into heavenly rewards. A reply to any of the remorse lodging in me presented itself as I was in the midst of discarding bucket after bucket of soiled water. There and in this act, I sensed the purgative effect of the solitary tasks I was performing.

“Pull the curtains all the way closed on this side when you shower, otherwise water gets on the floor and we get mold.” The sign by the tub reminded me of the constant upkeep that life is, toss art into that and the chores multiply by the hour. If Ajax would work cleaning moldy hearts, I thought! There was a girl who lived across from my childhood home in the Caribbean, and who splashed her blue eyes with bleach. I am not sure why, and I have learned that detergents won’t do the job with hearts. The church in Pennsylvania was becoming a reflection of my mortal body, which made me ponder on the Catholic teachings I grew up with: the Church being the Mystical Body of Christ, and thus a theological concept pointing to the relationship between Christ and his followers, where the Church as a gathering of people is understood as the body of Christ on earth, and where Christ is the head. I could see the sacramental connection between all of this, including the cleaning, the rags, the kneeling, the silence, and not necessarily in religious terms. Living alone demanded less and less preoccupation about my physical appearance. I hence allowed my beard to grow freely to become my corporeal clock and calendar.

Artists do laundry like everyone else, and when the weather is nice, they hang their clothes out to dry. Neighbors, I hope my underwear did not clash with your bucolic landscape. Artists paint, draw, and roll up their sleeves to work with everyday challenges. That the church where I was living was part of a larger community made me wonder about my involvement with the outside, first with the church’s immediate grounds, and then with the wider acreage surrounding the building. My contact with locals accounted for the sporadic visits their non-human animals made to my yard. Goats and ducks stopped by on day one or two, I think, to get a sense of what was happening on the premises. On day three or four, I spotted a cow running loose in circles. Someone had already pursued my plan to circumambulate the building. A balding beaver, a handful of cute robins and a nesting sparrow, I assume none of them minded much my stay. Three blue jay eggs were abandoned by a mother who never returned to hatch them, and eventually I stopped making predictions about her probably tragic fate. The conjectures about her disappearance were overridden by my mother’s telephone calls at the exact moments when I checked on the nest one more time; or when digging out the weeds that choked the blooming irises.

There was a guy wearing a Bronx cap doing some gardening. That was me playing with earth and bulbs in the open. I took several days off from the contemplative exercises to travel to New Berlin, in upstate New York, where I gathered the majority of the plants that I used to extend an outdoor conversation with the church of this story. Words spilled from floorboards to flowerbeds. I planted two hostas by the side entrance on the ground floor; and then moved to dig holes around the place for stalks of wild purple phlox, lambs’ ears, ornamental onions, plus the cardboard box full of iris’s rhizomes gifted to me at a yard sale. If everything went as planned, by the date of my departure all of these life forms would be rooted into the ground. The neighbors had goats, one of which I found with an iris rhizome in her mouth. Artists shop for food and put out the garbage. Some of us pray, meditate or contemplate. Some artists like me when sojourning at a church eat canned peaches and baby carrots. Again, some artists till the soil and wrestle with underground stones. A few artists, I would guess, not that many, hear their mother’s, and her mother’s and mother’s mother’s voices and unearth relics from the mud. A rusted bathtub piece or maybe a woodstove leg revealed itself to me in the process of making a home for a hosta. I took this as a misplaced object like in Eréndida’s story. But was this metal leg really longing to be relocated to its original locus or to whatever lost it?

Twice at the church the landline telephone rang and it is not my mother:

Nicolás: Hello (I almost answered in Spanish)

Operator: Hello this is the electric company are you the homeowner?

Nicolás: No

Operator: Do you know when he […the owner…] will be around?

Nicolás: I am not sure. I am a guest. Would you like to leave a message?

Operator: No, thanks, we’ll try to reach the homeowner at another time.

Nicolas: Thank you. Bye

In my dialogues with the church, I reflected more than once on the appropriateness of disclosing or not all details of my contemplative exercises. I was reminded of this conundrum by the retreat’s handout mentioning the neighbors’ friendliness, yet asking guests at the church to respect their privacy. Dusting the cover of a book, I got pulled into the table of contents. Folding blankets proposed the question of whether or not to repair torn sections in them. Objects mixed of their own volition. No voices today. No telephone calls from the electric company. I listened to the silence of the church.

Bring a pot of tap water to the stove. When the water is boiling throw a bag of chamomile tea in. Let the infusion get cool, but not cold. Avoid using any plastic utensils throughout the whole process.

The last days at the church I gave attention to the entrances; the portals. They constituted a total of four. I wiped the slabs by the main and the side doors with a pristine piece of white remnant. When I was done with the scrubbing, I sprinkled chamomile tea on the slabs, transferring the liquid from a measuring cup into my hands. The next day I dipped a strainer containing several dried Jamaica flowers into a pot of simmering water and looked for it to get light pink, and pulled the strainer out before the liquid turned dark red. I poured this brew into a glass container that I placed outside overnight. I went to bed in a Hawaiian shirt. In the morning I bathed the two back entrances with the potion. Warm chamomile is said to be good for soothing mild cramps, calming nerves, and warming up the hearts of cold stones. Hibiscus or flor de Jamaica is said to assist with keeping the systolic blood pressure low, and in raising up the creative spirits. I let these concoctions do their thing.

I had a last remnant of cloth saved for the space I avoided getting in touch with, that housing the heater, the breaker box, and brooms in all state of aging. The area where rags were stored next to dried up sponges. The utility closet was the place within the building where I should have gone first before engaging the altar, and where I needed to untangle defunct cobwebs: call this a journey into the unconscious. Here was where I found the bar-b-cue fluid, good enough to ignite a lukewarm heart. Cosmic powder produced by fallen Comet was meant to hold some chemical magic. I wish I had a facemask. “Mom, please call me.”

I was determined to conclude this account before I leaving for New York City, but not without paying a visit to one of the residents from the area I have been told might be able to give me information about past life of the church. The neighbor I rode my bike to was cleaning her outdoor furniture. A small bucket of water rested on top of her patio table. Semi-clear liquid. The neighbor had called this place home for sixty years. Her house was surrounded by a garden with dinner-plate dahlias and hypnotizing clematis. No goats to threaten new shoots. The neighbor came to the area two years after the Methodist Episcopal Church closed, but she recalled the crumbling Scranton Corner School nearby. My departure was prompted by the mailwoman’s arrival. The neighbor’s black cat showed up one day, starving, and decided to stay. My good-bye knew that this was the first and last time we might see each other. Her flowers muffled the feeling of impermanence for me.

The last night at the church I decided to camp at the altar: flip phone, flashlight, St Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, a blood-red Rosary and a water bottle. No chamber pot. The altar was on a raised platform that elevated my campground 18 inches off the main floor. Out of precaution, I padded the surface with a mattress in case I fell off. It was just hours before my departure from the building when the moonlight broke through one of the church’s windows and bathed my head. A second baptism for me? A sign of forgiveness? I tried to trick myself to sleep by closing my eyes until the sun’s shift. It did not work. The altar I rested upon was certainly a vortex. I gave up and rode with the energies.

This is a ritual for overcoming separation anxiety from a relationship with a former church:

The morning of your departure date walk slowly around the building with your eyes fixed on the structure.

Meditate, contemplate, pray or resort to any form of communication with Spirit as it relates to your own background.

Shave your beard or any other part of you body.

Shower. Dry thoroughly. Get dressed.

Open all building doors for fifteen minutes.

Leave the premises.

Go inside and pack your belongings.

Close all doors and before departing give each one a kiss.

Get into your car and look at the church until it disappears from your sight.

Do not turn your eyes away from the building until it is completely out of view.

To those who have befriended:

* A herd of cows: Anti-Cool

* A fox: Le Petit Prince

* An unknown grave in Santiago, Dominican Republic: Bernardo Mejía.

With gratitude to Linda Mary Montano for her teachings, Soaring Gardens for its hospitality, and David Wayne for his care