The Churchgoer
by Patrick Coleman
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2019)
When I first saw Cindy Liu standing on a street corner in Oceanside, trying to thumb a ride out of town, I wondered why a young woman like her was hitchhiking.
Page 1.
Women can feel old eyes on them, and I didn’t like being reminded of what I’d become.
Page 4.
I had a feeling she was never not conscious of being watched.
Page 4.
There’s a lot going on inside a person in a given moment.
Page 6.
All interactions are more or less a self-gratifying manipulation.
Page 9.
I thought of my younger self, never once skeptical of what he wanted and why. It made me shudder, that stranger.
Page 9.
“I don’t make a rule of anything beyond being just decent enough.”
Page 13.
Everything I said made me feel like a burnout turned Little League coach.
Page 19.
People with certainties were the problem.
Page 29.
Having committed to this plan, there was a new tension in the air.
Page 30.
“I don’t get a lot of guests, and I’ve stopped trying to impress myself.”
Page 33.
Having a fire lit under me was the last thing I’d ever needed.
Page 35.
Every room was devoid of signs of her. With the sense of emptiness came sadness. I didn’t know what kind of sad this was, but like all sadnesses it was complicated.
Page 37.
She was being charming. She knew she was being charming, was working that angle again. It made sense. She was good at it. But sometimes it made her seem like a drunk socialite trying to flirt her way out of a DUI arrest.
Page 39.
Sometimes a story is stronger than a person. Especially a story someone tells about you. Especially if others agree on it.
Page 74.
More talking doesn’t always lead to more trust, but sharing a drink, I knew from enough direct experience, could get someone talking.
Page 84.
I didn’t like being around familiar people, even people who only seemed familiar. I didn’t trust them. Strangers, at least, were honest.
Page 90.
I didn’t like coming into contact with my pat. I didn’t like anything that would return who I was to the view of who I am.
Page 94.
Time is the final at of a tragedy that never ends.
Page 101.
Forgetting is what I do best.
Page 109.
I waited. Sometimes silence is the best way to get more information, being present and silent and paying attention.
Page 110.
Confession usually pulled up well short of the deeper truth.
Page 123.
Sometimes obsessive self-scrutiny makes a person disbelieve what he knows in his bones.
Page 126.
I looked around and felt out people’s soft spots - their weaknesses, their points of hypocrisy and failure. There was no shortage of options: People-pleaser. Attention-grabber. False piety. False humility. Disguised vanity. Power hungry. Self-absorbed. Sex absorbed, it’s wonderful how many looks of frank sexual appraisal you can catch at a funeral, if you’re watching.
Page 136.
Screwtape’s voice, I could see through its representative standing before me, was the voice of American success.
Page 138.
The wish for certainty was a wish for death.
Page 140.
I’d never fully understood someone being gone, how something that had been was now nothing.
Page 140.
Tomorrow is coming for us. And not to hand us an award.
Page 148.
“Don’t pretend like you know what you need.”
Page 153.
There’s a kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t resolve.
Page 155.
Help is better than isolation.
Page 165.
Everything terrestrial I could see stank of cheap development and high rents.
Page 166.
People love a new comer. It means a potential notch one their belt of saved souls.
Page 168.
The kind of love that holds a person captive is an abusive one.
Page 180.
The woman looked at me. Maybe the formality of my clothes caused her to fold her hands over her belly, a Victorian pose of ladyness, a living person holding herself in the marbled image of good womanhood.
Page 185.
I thought of the way her hands, when she heard Emily’s name, fell but stayed together.
Page 187.
Deep down, I just didn’t like the guy and couldn’t stand the thought of leaving here without him knowing it.
Page 190.
This guy wasn’t a monster, I thought. Just a dipshit. Not too unlike the rest of us. A bigger platform, sure, but that just made him a dipshit on a stage.
Page 199.
He just wandered back to base camp and reloaded, grinning like a fool doing good, which is just what most fools think they’re doing.
Page 216.
I knew how these California churches, so sun-glossy welcoming on the outside, were fed by a steady stream of westward-ho Baptists and Methodists, lapsed Catholics, fallen Mormons, and fed-up Episcopalians, warming their hands around the Christian talk radio campfire.
Pages 223-224.
I’d tried to kill myself to annihilate what I knew.
Page 225.
Since the 1950s, bit business had been using the pulpit of purse strings to push a message on US churches, drawing a fat, shiny halo around individual liberty, hard work, and family values. The enemy? Communists, New Deal socialists, regulations, taxes - threats to the established order or at least to that order’s ability to make products by whatever means necessary and keep us all aligned to the true Good of purchasing our way into progress.
Page 234.
Speaking was his way of control, his lifeblood.
Page 243.
I’d been distracted for just about my whole miserable life.
Page 256.
I was being chased, possibly about to be murdered, for poking my nose into some kind of trouble, all because I’d been friendly with some hitchhiking lesbian Christian.
Pages 256-257.
I had an absurd faith in the nest step.
Page 257.
People needed something better to do with themselves. People probably included me.
Page 259.
Everything ached, and aches didn’t matter.
Page 266,
Something in my lie to Esme must have been like most lies: ashamed truth peeking out form under the bedsheet.
Page 270.
There was nothing to do but wait, it seemed, so the science of getting comfortable had been a worthwhile distraction.
Page 280.
You can’t build a community on a message of scathing and endless self-scrutiny, on bottomless skepticism of each person’s goodness and motivations, or doubt about the ultimate meaning of the workings of the world and its evils.
Page 281.
Secrets want to stay secret.
Page 285.
How quickly our senses integrate the new into the expected and thus unperceived. Most of the world streams by like that. Dark matter.
Page 286.
The mind has trouble with darkness. Our brains will see even if there’s nothing to see and will hear even if there’ nothing to hear. When the senses can’t forage, they farm.
Page 287.
My ashes would cause steam to rise up from where they were poured into the ocean. The ashes of an angry man.
Page 295.
Forgiveness was the hangover the entire Western world, Christian or not, couldn’t shake.
Page 295.
Leaving is what people do.
Page 297.
Everything worth going back to was gone.
I couldn’t get past that. The longer I couldn’t get past it, the angrier I grew. Time taught me I couldn’t hold on to a thing.
Page 304.
The only independent, original thought is darkness, silence. As soon as light is cast or a sound is made, there is recognition and imitation and mistake, and you’re made dependent on everything that came before, everything around.
Page 305.
If death was coming for me, I could at least hail it on its approach.
Page 310.
I hated how much of what I’d wanted to be true was false.
Page 324.
Maybe there are two kinds: the dark we fear and the dark we rest in. and so it’s the same with light. One warms us and gives us color and form, beauty, but the other gives us other people to see and lets us be seen - it exposes us to judgment and shame, with rest - and makes us hunger to know everything we see, and then even that which we can only infer or imagine.
Page 330.
A crumbled edifice was still a structure.
Page 334.
Alcoholics, like pastors, maybe, are never recovered but always recovering.
Page 336.
Goodbyes should be formal.
Page 346.