Dale came to us to die. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to figure this out. Once I did, it seemed more glaringly obvious than the most elegantly simple utterance of Christian doctrine ever to start my head nodding in assent. It became a credo of my pastorate. Sometimes, people come to the church in order to die.
On the face of it, Dale's arrival made great sense and no sense whatsoever. He was as staunch a Pentecostal as any whose arms ever quarreled with gravity in the frenzy of prayer 'til they shook hands with the rafters or the Holy Ghost or more likely both. He had been attending a large apostolic church so far across town from us it was almost in another time zone. But he lived near our church. So while I doubted that the Spirit, blowing where it willed through Pentecostal flesh, instructed many of their number to switch to a Baptist church closer to home, I gave the matter no more than passing thought for his first month in the pews.
Dale cut a very fine appearance from those pews. His satiny baritone and winning smile began to earn him the unsolicited admiration of our single women ages forty to seventy-five. Soon we learned that he tickled the ivories as ably as he did the middle-aged women's fancies. This quickly landed him a seat at the worship keyboard. Every Sunday morning at 10:25 sharp, Dale serenaded the congregants to their places while the choir and organist launched one final assault on the anthem well out of earshot. His specialty was revival hymnody with all the arpeggiated embellishments over which our seniors had been raised to swoon. Such had been denied them of late due to the more classical tastes of recent ministers, especially myself. They slurped up this musical offering the way a winter-worn gathering mobs the first juicy watermelon of the picnicking season. To deny that Dale gained a place of veneration in the hearts and minds of the faithful would be like calling Calvary a minor blip on the screen of Christian history. Dale brought new life to us.
It was haltingly that Dale invited me into his secret world. He lived in a three- bedroom bungalow, fully appointed and immaculately kept. He lived there alone, but the scale and polish of the place confided that something or someone was missing. We sat on matching loveseats separated by a coffee table with glass top and sleek legs of cast aluminum. Dale owned more Christian tapes and CD's than a gospel radio station. To the sentimental strains of “To God Be The Glory,” he told me of his lover's death to AIDS.
When Dale first came to Ashgrove Church, John was not long gone. He had not shared Dale’s enthusiasm for “the things of the Spirit,” nor had he attended church. They resembled many couples whose discreet upbringings issue in irreconcilable habits and tastes. In rare instances one or the other manages to cross the bar. Most of the time, the best they can hope for is some mutual accommodation. Husband drives wife to Sunday school. Wife polishes husband's bowling ball. Lovers alternate dining preferences on nights out. Dale was born and raised in the church and so, whatever else he chose or was chosen for him, Dale was destined to die there.
In every other way, Dale and Pentecostalism were a match made in heaven. But, according to the doctrine of his own church, gays were excluded from the dispensation of grace. Dale could no more approach that celestial altar of heaven than exchange wedding vows at the front rail of some church sanctuary back on earth in Indiana. This fact had been reinforced with repetitive zeal by a preacher insensible to the wounding power of his own words. They were intended as armor for the faithful to carry into the world. Instead, they were a dagger, piercing the heart of an otherwise ardent follower of the way. After two years of this, Dale had gone Sunday shopping. He had come to us. It was true that our worship didn't quite sizzle the senses, but neither did anyone get burned alive. Dale made his home with us and his peace with God.
In time, Dale divulged what I had come to fear as imminent. He was HIV-positive and had begun to display the first symptoms of full-blown AIDS. Dale was fit and fifty, ruddy of complexion, and retained a full head of hair with as congenial a mix of salt and pepper as age ever cooked up. The manifestations of his illness were thus all the more transparent, even to the ignorant and unsuspecting. Sallow, sunken cheeks, offset by a pronounced jaw line and naturally high cheekbones; brown, facial blotching, faint but on the move like the merciless blemishes of puberty; frequent absences from worship, tarnishing a previously unblemished attendance record; hoarseness in the now rare offerings of a once splendid solo voice.
The dawning truth was itself like a cancer, spreading through a church body caught off guard and ill-equipped to respond. People burned up energy trying to mind their own business. It was a case of don't ask, don't tell, a lamentable, ineluctable course for a people on uncharted ground.
Dale was in a nursing home the last time I saw him alive. He had arranged for a small TV on a swivel arm that would bring the picture right up to his straining eyes, by now exploding from their sockets. His breathing was pained and frequently erupted in a violent spell of coughing. He followed intently the animated worship of some electronic church extravaganza, as if he planned to absorb its essence into every vesicle of shriveling skin, like a dried-up sponge dropped in a bucket of water. Just what was being said or sung as I sat quietly by his bed I cannot recall. No doubt it was a message of spiritual power and miracle and some genuine wishful thinking. But these tidings, in all their truth and falsehood, did not matter. Dale had long since breathed in deeply the only message of consequence to a man so reduced by love's scandal: Jesus came to die for Dale. God's own audacious love claimed him as son.
One week later on a Wednesday morning in May, people came. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't watched them file in with my own eyes. Suited deacons with conservative ties, innocent youths caught in the web of his charm, elderly couples from another moral universe, and of course the full entourage of his middle-aged women admirers, all victims of Dale's contagion of delight. The whole Baptist, heterosexual kingdom of God, it seemed, came out to the sanctuary Dale had come to call home.
And together the young, the old, the songsters and the screechers, the tone deaf and stone-cold deaf, the humble and the high and mighty, joined in a chorus of “To God Be the Glory.” We extolled the God who conquers death, and brings to all new life.