Sometimes a dogwood is just a dogwood*
I took a guided wildflower hike yesterday. Unknown factors prevented all other registered participants from showing up, so I had the guide all to myself. The walk is up, over, and down a steep ridge rich with overlapping ecosystems: it begins with meadow, orchard, and pond; strolls along a drystone slave wall and creekbed; takes a mini detour through a cedar glade, and then climbs from beech-maple to oak-hickory forest along a burped-up bit of the Highland Rim. I’ve been here before, and have had guides eager to name and explain every bud, leaf scar, petal and tree: the type to never leave base camp without at least one authoritative wildflower manual in hand. Yesterday’s guide was not this type. He was pleasant, and no doubt excellent for introducing inner-city kids to Nature on field trips, but he was not eager to explain much, if indeed he knew much to explain. Which I doubt. Which he admitted as he said, “I know some of the flowers, but trees, butterflies, birds. . . I let all that go.”
After I realized I was the wildflower expert of our duo, I gave myself up to the wind and the trees and each wet, leafy footfall. My chatting skills are poor, but I made an effort to listen and rattle off seemingly easy replies.
And then it happened. Just as I was marveling at a gold and white swathe of dwarf dandelion and false garlic it came, as surprising and as expected as it always comes: “So, what church you go to?”
Even at the crest of the Highland Rim, surrounded by leaf litter and fallen hickories, accompanied by only one other person, I am right smack in the buckle of the bible belt. I hate to sound paranoid, but sometimes I feel I am the eyelet of the belt itself, pierced by the same stabbing questions again and again. Why, oh why is “So, what church you go to?” a standard conversational opener?
The question feels automatic, perfunctory, as if it part of an old etiquette catechism bred in the bone. Old may be the key word. In my experience, only older folks have this question at the ready. My guide was 75, which fits the demographics of this phenomenon like a white glove at Easter. It is as if older folks still live in a Nashville small enough to imagine a two-degree separation between all people. It is as if they know someone at any church–pick a church, any church–and are prepared to link any stranger to a friend or associate at the particular church named. Trouble is, Nashville has a lot more churches than any one person can know. About 700. And nowadays, we have them in all flavors. Including mosques, Hindu temples, and get this: six synagogues.
So, what did I answer this pleasant man? I’d like to think I employed my intended response protocol: counter a question with a question. I am supposedly prepared to respond with: “Why do you ask?” or “What brought that question to mind?” But no, my brain froze and I answered with the statement asked for: the name of my church, which happens to be a synagogue. Shocked silence, followed by launch of “Jews I have known,” which lasted all the way down to the paw-paw patch. The usual.
I suppose there is nothing really wrong with the question of what church I go to, but I find it distracting at least and unsettling at worst. I’ve been told to make the situation a “discrepant event,” a teachable moment for the person to whom all strangers are Christians they haven’t met yet. That would be great, but sometimes I just don’t feel like being a light unto the nations. Sometimes I just want to know the name of that purple flower over there (fringed phacelia. I looked it up in the car after the hike).
I see two puzzles here: the puzzle of being asked about my church again and again, and the puzzle of my discomfort at being asked. I felt it percolating in the back of my head the rest of the day, the night, and all next morning. And then, as I sat with my wildflower manuals and checklists, trying to identify all the plants neither the docent nor I knew, I solved the puzzle. Or rather, I named it. The man was doing precisely what I was trying to do. I wanted to identify, name, categorize the flowers, to know them. He wanted to do the same to me. And for him, the church question is the first step. Where I look for color or flower shape or leaf type, he goes straight for the name of my church. No doubt the tactic does work sometimes, or else I wouldn’t hear it so often. It must occasionally lead to the discovery of a common acquaintance, and the reward of categorizing a stranger as friend of a friend.
So, next time I get the question “What church you go to?,” I will try, try, try to remember my wildflower metaphor and remain unruffled. As long as the questioner is as pleasant and harmless a chap as this fellow, I will allow myself to be sorted and entered into a taxonomy over which I have absolutely no control.
*Do you know the legend of the Dogwood? I should, since I’ve heard it eleventy million times.
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