Is the Sky Falling or Are We Rising Towards the Lord?

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Is the Sky Falling or Are We Rising Towards the Lord? Mike McClelland (bio) The first church to ascend rose in rambling loops, slow but determined, a beanstalk growing towards the sun. Many followed, sometimes as many as forty or fifty churches in a day, though it appeared only one church per town made the cut. This seemed terribly unfair, particularly when Bezaleel, New Jersey’s one rickety steeple took off on the same day as Manhattan’s 23rd Street Synagogue. News channel helicopters desperately chased the churches into the sky, but no one ever discovered where they went. Satellites didn’t see them leave the Earth; no rubble was ever found. Rather than fade away, an ascending church simply became harder to detect. Then it would be gone. _______ Church is the wrong word, really. Place of worship would be more accurate, perhaps. Churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals were taken. Some groups who will remain nameless (okay, it was the Baptists) were offended when the numbers were crunched and it was found that the distribution of religions among those chosen was very close to that of the general population. The numbers got a bit muddled when agnosticism was factored in, but the truth was there simply weren’t many places agnostics gathered as agnostics. After a week of ascensions, the consensus was that the most devout place of worship in any particular municipality was the one chosen to rise up. And even though this argument had plenty of evidence to back it, there was, of course, evidence to the contrary. Isn’t there always? The methodology for measuring devotion varies greatly from person to person. It all happened that autumn, which had a certain romance to it, but the Christians, particularly those whose churches hadn’t ascended, [End Page 63] feared that the coming Easter season would be anticlimactic. Jesus had ascended forty days after his death, which sent armchair theologists and historians into a frenzy of Internet sleuthing as they tried to figure out what had happened forty days before the first church rose out of Est-court Station, Maine, but nothing they could find seemed to warrant such an astounding shift in the balance of what was known to be possible and not. _______ Can a phenomenon have anomalies? Isn’t a phenomenon an anomaly itself? Can smaller wonders sprout from larger wonders like the eyes on a potato? Because there existed a few of both. No churches rose from the village of Charlemont, Massachusetts. Instead, a mass of roots, soil, and rock erupted out of the nearby Mohawk Trail State Forest. Only a few grainy photos of this ascension exist, but witnesses claim to have seen a furry, oak-sized, hoofed leg kicking furiously out from within the ball of earth as it sped into the sky. In Poughkeepsie, New York, the rising church was The Father’s House, which sat in a strip mall between the Serenity Grace Beauty Parlor and a long-abandoned Radio Shack. It was the basement of The Father’s House that rose first, breaking out through the parking lot, causing The Father’s House to plunge backwards before it was dragged, upside down, into the heavens. The Father’s House took the rest of the strip mall with it, twisting the ugly stretch of the shopping center like DNA. Horrified shoppers watched from the ground as the patrons of Serenity Grace—many of them mid-perm—clung to their styling chairs for dear life. The thing is, no one knew—or admitted to knowing—that The Father’s House even had a basement. On Newport, Rhode Island’s Ascension Day, the members of the Newport Country Club sipped morning scotches and mimosas as they eagerly waited to see what kind of establishment would float away. A few people placed bets. It should have been a surprise, but it wasn’t really—at least not to those watching from the Newport Country Club—when Newport’s International Tennis Hall of Fame erupted into the sky, along with all twenty of its tennis courts. [End Page 64] _______ Dear Parishioners, It is my pleasure to inform you that, in light...