Throwback Thursday: ‘Take This Cup’ by Susan Pieters

At Easter, when I was a child, the residents of my small town would dress up and present their souls for inspection at either the big Catholic church or the little Presbyterian church. If you were picky about your denomination, you paid the price of driving ten to fifteen minutes out of town and sitting with strangers. So, at holidays, most people became flexible and accommodating in their religion.  

The farmers and ranchers, and those farther out, were not usually persuaded to come into town for church, reserving that honour for weddings and funerals only. Their ways were different.  No one expected them to attend, and when a preacher was new to town and asked about this, an old timer would simply explain, “Their God’s in the hills.” That was the sum of it, and there was a more powerful truth in that statement than could be fathomed by a newcomer. Indeed, the longer a preacher stayed in town, the more he viewed a rancher in his pew like a wild animal in a cage, boxed in and out of place.

For my family, the rules were also a little different. My mother and stepfather were city-bred, both of them born in another state. And we were here only by virtue of my first father, who had died. My parents didn’t realize that they, as outsiders, were exempt from attending. They thought of an Easter service as a social obligation, a civic duty like voting or setting up a folding chair to watch the town parade each September. Besides, my mother owed her gratitude to the little community that had helped her through her widowhood, and she never missed an opportunity to show everyone that her new husband was being a good father and doing his duty by me.