What does redemption look like? An Alabama church offers a glimpse.
When your great-great-great-grandma was still knee-high to a grasshopper, a writer who called himself Mark Twain once described a summer Sunday morning in a Missouri church. Twain viewed it all from a child’s perspective—the hypnotic cadence of the minister’s voice, the dull, predictable rhythm of the service, and Tom Sawyer’s mortal battle to sit still. At one point Tom experiences an intrusion of nature upon the formal scene:
…a fly had lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with the body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they had been coat tails; going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it knew it was perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom’s hands itched to grab for it they did not dare—he believed his soul would be instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going on.
I thought about Tom and his fly today as I taught Sunday School outdoors on a clear April morning. Indoor services in our small Alabama church would seem familiar to Tom Sawyer, except for air conditioning and praise choruses. Preachers are still incomprehensible. Pews are still uncomfortable. Nature sometimes burrows in, to great fanfare—once, a sparrow perched on the cross above the pastor’s head and completely spoiled his third point. But since the beginning of the pandemic last year we have been holding services outside, gathering each week in a field that was once a swamp and still behaves like one when it rains.
Children sit with families on camp chairs and blankets until the pastor dismisses them before the sermon. Then they toddle, stroll, strut, storm, lollygag, or sprint fifty yards through clover and mud, with their arms thrown out, in sync with the sycamore and pine branches waving above our heads. They flop down on tarps and we teachers hold forth. I lead the children in a study of the life of Jesus. They lead each other in a study of the clover, scanning the grass for giant ants waddling toward stray goldfish crackers, or even a shining green caterpillar buried in a mound of leaves, doomed to perish (unless I step in) from their loving attention.
The park itself is swamped in story—a big story. In 1999, engineers for the county of Jefferson began to bore a great sewage tunnel in the Upper Watershed of the Cahaba River. The plan, conceived in ignorance and born in recklessness and greed, was to cross beneath the riverbed at twelve points. The Cahaba is Alabama’s great environmental treasure, home to countless fossils, rare flora, and more species of fish than any other river in North America. Meandering for 194 miles from the Appalachians to the Alabama River south of us, it provides the drinking water for one-fifth of the state’s population, including most of Birmingham. The creation of a giant (so-called) “super sewer” beneath the Cahaba was projected to cost over 140 million dollars and be financed through byzantine bond schemes.
Three billion dollars, several lawsuits, and more than a dozen crooked city councilmen later the digging came to a sudden halt. New engineering studies had discovered that the weakened bedrock of the Cahaba could collapse into the sewer and introduce raw sewage into the aquifer below. An environmental disaster of such magnitude would ensure economic catastrophe for a region already struggling to grow past its national reputation as “Bombingham,” the epicenter of state-sanctioned anti-Black violence in the mid-twentieth century.
The super sewer debacle led to the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, yet another unhappy distinction for little Birmingham. Multiple city leaders were convicted for bribery, including Chris McNair, the city councilman with oversight of the Environmental Services Department. McNair was the father of Denise McNair, one of the little girls who died in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. He was let out of prison in 2013, in time to honor the fiftieth anniversary of his daughter’s death.
Meanwhile, the enormous boring equipment was left to molder underground, not far from its first planned pass beneath the Cahaba. It lay under churned-up earth that had once been a swampy forest of pines and sycamores, across the street from a small church that needed more parking on Sunday mornings. A heap of “drill cuttings,” dead trees, and other waste material, the property was considered unsuitable for development.
The church bought it on the cheap. Gradually, with much sweat and toil they (we) turned it into a green space with an area for parking. We added topsoil, planted trees, allowed for better drainage, made walking paths, and cleaned up the creekside. It’s a pretty and peaceful park now. Nothing grand, but green and pleasant. Neighbors walk their dogs and children ride bikes, sometimes disturbing the prayer of confession. Few people know about the strange fossil under their feet, the remains of a terrible and dangerous idea.
A story about a sewer-and-bribery scandal is guaranteed to contain both tragedy and farce. But as I sit with my class in what was once a threatened place, watching breezes ripple over sun-soaked mounds of green, and I think of Tom Sawyer and his fly, my inner cynic is quieted by the beauty of the park itself, as well as the joy in the children’s faces. Watching them thrill over caterpillars and ants reminds me that we human beings worship our creator well when we love the world well. When we make gardens out of cuttings and waste. When we sit in the grass and listen to a creek. These are things little children don’t need to be taught. They are young enough to rush toward nature and want to stay there without needing a reason.
It will be a few years before my students become adults who fuss over air-conditioning, who see caterpillars as a nuisance, who prefer speeches to clover. By then the pandemic will be long over. But I hope some of them will remember Sunday School among the sycamores and be thankful for living things.
M. Elizabeth Carter is a counselor and writer living in Alabama.
M. Elizabeth Carter is a counselor and writer living in Alabama.