Rabbit Box Blog

My best friend Brad lived across the road from Alexis Baptist Church, and he struck up a friendship with our pastor, Stan Howard, almost as soon as the Preacher (as almost all Baptist ministers were called) moved into the parsonage beside the church. By tagging along with Brad, I was privy to many of the Preacher’s and the church’s secret goings-on. In addition to being a fully educated Baptist minister, Stan Howard was also an accomplished ventriloquist, chalk artist, ham radio operator, and pilot of his own plane.

Preacher Howard did not believe in idleness, and he expected Brad to help with any task that needed doing. In exchange for teaching Brad about ham radio and letting him help with his plane, Pastor Howard had Brad do all sorts of work around the church and parsonage. When Brad complained that he was tired, Pastor Howard replied simply, “No rest for the sinful, and the righteous don’t need it.”

But he also came to trust Brad – and indirectly me because I was Brad’s sidekick – to do what he asked responsibly without supervision. That trust was essential in our explorations of the church and its more exotic inner workings.

When I arrived on the church bus for the opening of Bible School’s week-long course in the summer, Brad was nowhere to be found. I marched into the sanctuary with my other classmates. We sat in the pews grouped by age and grade in school. The preacher  sat in the Preacher’s chair behind the pulpit, preparing to conduct a brief service to get us in the correct religious state of mind before he handed us over to our volunteer teachers for age-appropriate Bible lessons and handicrafts.

As we waited, I saw the door at the front of the sanctuary open, and Brad’s head appeared. His gaze combed the crowd of kids, until he found me. He waved quietly to make sure I saw him, then motioned for me to come to him. Even though he was clearly visible to everyone in the sanctuary except maybe the Preacher, he acted as though he was unseen by anyone but me.

As quietly as I could, I slipped out of the pew and walked quickly down the carpeted aisle, with artificially long strides, stooping to keep my head low so as not to attract attention. It didn’t occur to me that Groucho Marx used a similar walk to  attract attention. But either my pre-teen cloak of invisibility apparently worked or everyone saw Brad and assumed we had an officially sanctioned mission. Whatever the reason, no one came running to intercept me, so I kept going. When I made it safely through the door into the hallway, Brad closed the door behind me with exaggerated caution while signaling me to be quiet.

When the door was finally closed, he relaxed and turned to me.

“You want to help ring the bell?” he asked.

“Yeah,” was all I could say as joy and anticipation numbed my brain.

The bell was housed in the church steeple, over the entrance to the sanctuary at the front of the church. It rang mysteriously before and after services, but as far as I knew, it was operated by secret angels. No kid, I thought, was privy to how it worked or where the machinery lay. When the Bible talked about the Holy of Holies in the Temple of the Old Testament, I imagined that was where Solomon kept the bell. I assumed there was a modern equivalent to the Holy of Holies hidden deep within our church, and from there only a select few, specially anointed men – probably deacons because Baptists don’t have High Priests – rang our bell.

“Well, come on,” said Brad. “We’ve got to ring it when the service is over. The Preacher says it has to be timed perfectly, right at 9:15.”

I nodded and followed Brad as he went into the classroom behind the sanctuary. Through a door that I had never seen opened before lay a hallway. To one side were three steps leading up to the baptistry. A large sign urged “Caution: High Voltage. Do Not Enter.” I instinctively drew back, wondering how the preacher managed to do all those baptisms without getting electrocuted.

The Old Testament talked about the Holy of Holies in the Temple. This almost-secret passageway had the feeling of a Baptist Holy of Holies. I also knew what happened to people who violated the sanctity of the temple in biblical days, so I wondered if we might be in danger of God’s wrath of electrocution.

“It’s okay,” Brad reassured me, obviously seeing my hesitance to pass the sign. “It’s only dangerous if the heater’s on, and they only turn that on the Saturday before a baptism.”

I followed Brad a short distance down the hall, and he opened a rather ordinary looking closet door. Inside were shelves stacked with Sunday School quarterlies and other church literature, and to one side, some two-by-fours nailed to the wall about every sixteen or eighteen inches. A thick cotton rope with several knots tied in it dangled in front of this makeshift ladder.

“Here it is,” Brad said proudly.

“What?” I didn’t understand. I peered up the rope and saw what looked like dark attic space, but no bell. If this was a Holy of Holies, it looked pretty mundane.

“We’re not allowed to go up there,” Brad said. “Unless,” he added with a glint in his eye, “the rope gets loose and slips off the pulley.”

I still didn’t understand what he was trying to say, and I looked at him blankly.

“It gets loose pretty often,” he added with a hint of promise in his voice.

Brad looked at his watch, then asked me what time I had.

“9:14,” I said, looking at the Timex watch strapped to my wrist. I had got it for last Christmas, well within its normal lifetime, so it still kept decent time. Timex watches came with a one-year warranty, so you could count on them for about thirteen months.

“Yeah, me too,” Brad said, peering up the rope into the darkness and tugging lightly to get the slack out. “One more minute.” Following a practice we learned from watching war movies on TV, Brad and I synchronized watches once or twice a day, so it was no surprise we agreed on the time.

“Here, hold onto this and pull when I tell you,” Brad said as he grabbed high on the rope and nodded to the section dangling below his hands. I latched on and waited for the signal.

Brad held out his left arm dramatically to display his watch and counted down the last few seconds. As the second hand on his watch clicked to 12, Brad called “Now!” and began to put his weight on the rope. I joined in, matching my movements to his as best I could.

The rope moved down a bit, then pulled up with some force.

“Pull again!” Brad said when the tension on the rope started to ease. 

It took a few cycles for me to realize that bell ringing requires timing, but together Brad and I got the rope moving smoothly up and down. Way up in the steeple, the bell began to ring.

After a few joyous peals, the bell was moving largely on its own.

“Now let go and watch!” Brad called out. I released the rope and stepped back. 

Brad jumped high when the bell rope pulled up, and sank almost to his knees on the downward swing. He repeated the maneuvers a couple of times, then let the rope go and held his hands out wide and gazed heavenward into the darkness above us, almost as the Preacher did while leading prayer.

“Oops,” he said, grinning widely.

The end of the bell rope snapped upward and disappeared into the darkness above.

“Now somebody’s going to have to climb up and get that bell rope,” he said ironically, casting a triumphant, conspiratorial look at me. He grabbed one of the planks on the side of the closet, planted his foot on the lowest one, and started up.

“Come on,” he said. 

I followed Brad up the ladder.

At the top, I peered into semi-darkness. The roof was higher and the square footage was bigger, but it looked for all the world like the attic in our house. Ceiling joists stretched across the structure, spaced just as the ones in our house. Having been in our attic several times, I already knew to be careful to stay on the joists.  I thought how disastrous it would be to fall through the ceiling of the sanctuary and break my back across one of the pews twenty feet below. Not only would I be dead or crippled, but my crime would be obvious to God and everybody.

As he always did in church services, the Preacher  was just now offering a dedicatory prayer with his arms spread wide and his head tilted toward heaven as he asked God to look down on our human endeavors with favor. I knew how magnificent a figure he must be presenting, because I had studied him ever since he came to our church.

Even though looking around during prayer was one of the worst offenses a young Baptist could be guilty of, the sight of the multi-talented Preacher gazing at the high ceiling of our church and speaking directly to God was too much to resist. So usually on Sundays, I peeked to watch him as he called to heaven for a blessing upon the congregation. Something about the dramatic way he addressed God above fascinated me. God was in heaven, of course, but when Stan Howard called upon Him, He seemed to be residing just above us.

When the Preacher closed with “We ask all these things in Thy Name, Amen,” I always quickly put my head down and then raised it slowly, blinking a few times as if I had been deep in prayer with everybody else, just in case anyone was looking. 

From our exalted but apparently empty position above the ceiling of the sanctuary, I felt no need to bow my head or close my eyes. In fact, remembering how easy it would be to fall, I concentrated on finding a safe perch.

The Preacher’s prayer sounded muffled and much less authoritative coming through the Ceilotex. In fact, he sounded just as my family did when I heard them from the attic of our house.

The end of the bell rope lay within a foot or so of the ladder. Brad retrieved it and threaded it back through the pulley at the top of the closet, letting it drop back where it belonged.

“Want to see the bell?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t we get back down?” I said, worried that if the Preacher was looking for us we’d be in trouble.

“Nah, everybody’s busy for the next hour,” Brad said with the confidence of one with experience in managing the risks of adult anger. “We’ve got time as long as we get back before everybody goes to the hut for refreshments.”

Brad squat-walked across the ceiling joists, and I followed him. There was plenty of room above us to stand straight, but it was somehow difficult to step from joist to joist without crouching. After we had gone about halfway across the top of the sanctuary, we stopped to rest and straighten our cramping legs. 

“Have you ever done this before?” I asked Brad.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “As long as I can say I came up to get the rope after it broke loose, nobody cares.” Like most kids I knew, Brad seldom told pure lies. But the art of shading the truth without crossing into prevarication was considered a survival skill for most of us. And Brad was one of the best at it.

“Once I came up during a service. You ought to hear it up here. Everything sounds weird, kind of muffled. Even the choir. When the Preacher prays, it’s almost like it must sound in heaven.”

I nodded, unconvinced. He might be the Preacher’s favorite, but Brad was about the most religiously skeptical kid I knew.

“Yeah, I just heard him praying.” I had no desire to hear the Sunday choir.

It felt vaguely sacrilegious to call what I had heard heavenly, so I started out across the remaining joists between us and the base of the steeple. When we got there, Brad took the lead again and showed me where it was easiest to work through a gap in the framing, up into the narrow wooden tower that held the bell under the steeply sloping metal roof of the steeple.

Just like the closet that housed the rope, this didn’t look like a Holy of Holies. There was no gopher wood or cedar, much less any gold or silver. Instead, it was pretty basic carpentry using ordinary building materials and sprinkled with years of accumulated dust and dried bird doo.

The bell, a simple cast iron design a little bigger than the one my grandma used to call everyone to supper on the farm, was just hanging there. I tugged at the ringer and found it moved easily.

“Don’t ring it,” cautioned Brad. “It’ll be so loud it might bust our eardrums.”

I had seen the same movie on television, so I quickly released the ringer.

“I was just trying to figure out why it’s so easy to move here but you can barely pull the rope when you ring it,” I said a little defensively.

“I wondered about that, too,” Brad answered. “For one thing, the rope goes all the way across the church, and it weighs a lot. And, too, the rope is tied to the top of the bell, not to the ringer. You have to move the bell till it hits the ringer, and the bell is a lot heavier.” Brad grew up to be an engineer, by the way, and he was good even at a young age at analyzing things.

His explanation made sense, so I turned from the bell to the slats of the stationary shutters that ventilated the bell tower. They angled downward so I could see the lawn around the church. But the slats were so narrowly spaced that I could not see beyond the parking lot. Any hope of seeing my house, just a half-mile away, was dashed.

Once it became obvious that the steeple was more interesting from the outside and it was useless as a watchtower, I began to tire of the place. Not only was there nothing to do, but you had to hold yourself in odd postures to keep from falling through the framing.

“Well, let’s go down,” I said.

“I was just waiting for you,” Brad said. “This is your first time. I’ve been here lots.”

So we worked our way back across the top of the sanctuary and climbed down the closet ladder to solid flooring. Brad was right about not being in trouble over our adventure. We got to the hut in plenty of time, and no one seemed to care if we’d broken through the Holy of Holies.

But from then on, I kept my head down and my eyes closed when the Preacher or anyone else prayed in church. 

Heaven turned out to be a lot farther away than I had thought, and I figured it took all our concentration to get the word up to God.