Deaf Church
From The Encyclopedia of Pointless
In a nearby town there is a church for deaf people. It's said youth is the time for exploration and new experiences, so since I'm yet fairly young and chronically curious I decided on a whim to check it out. I've been to churches that took steps to accommodate deaf people, but I wondered what a church specifically for deaf people would be like.
I had no idea what I was in for.
The building itself was tiny, only about 1000 square feet on the main floor. It consisted of a small foyer area and a slightly larger sanctuary. In the foyer a stairway went down into the basement with a sign indicating the bathrooms were down there. Presumably there were other rooms down there for meeting or the like. Perhaps children's church, though there were no children there that I saw. I would have poked around more, but the people there were too friendly.
They tried talking to me with sign language, which didn't work since my experience with sign language ends shortly after the words to "Jesus Loves Me". Turns out it's not entirely unusual for curious people to show up from time to time, though, so we got by with a blend of reading lips and writing. After the oddest small talk I've ever experienced it was time for the service, so we all filed into the sanctuary.
The first things that struck me when I walked into the sanctuary were the massive speakers on each side of the small stage. They were easily the most expensive things in the entire church, followed closely by the sound board tucked away into a corner of the room. Naturally I was perplexed by this, since up until this point I sort of figured deaf people didn't need massive, expensive sound systems. A close second on the weirdness scale was what looked like a massive cauldron directly behind the pulpit, which was little more than a music stand emblazoned with the initials of a local school. I couldn't guess at the time what the cauldron was for, I just figured it looked like it would have been more at home in the middle of a cannibal village with a couple of missionaries boiling away inside.
I sat in the back pew and wondered what exactly was going to happen next. My pew was unoccupied except for a rather cute girl that ran into the sanctuary and sat on the opposite side of the pew as the service started. Our eyes met briefly and we both smiled at each other, again reinforcing my earlier impression that the church was friendlier than a lot of normal churches I've been to.
Worship was... odd. At the start of service they turned on an aging overhead projector and put up the words to a standard church chorus. Then a guy probably only a little shorter than me but more muscular walked up on stage and grabbed an enormous couple of timpani mallets. He walked behind the cauldron, raised them over his head, and suddenly I realized the last piece of the puzzle.
The sound of him pounding that massive drum was, if you'll excuse the term, deafening. I understood the reason: It was so loud that while the deaf audience couldn't hear it they could FEEL it, rattling their teeth, bouncing their bones, and presumably turning their internal organs into putty. The windows rattled in their frames. It took me rationalizing that if the building went through this treatment every week it probably wouldn't collapse around me, but that was about the only comfort I could take. I've fired plenty of different kinds of guns, and I'd say it was about the same volume.
Every ear cell I had screamed at me, demanding I clap my hands over my head in an effort to keep them intact. I refrained, though, since I didn't want to look cocky. I had not up until this point considered that I'd need to bring earplugs to a deaf church. Looking at the guy on stage made me want to grab an oar and start rowing, so I tried to focus my attention elsewhere. It dawned on me that though this was a deaf church some of the people here were still singing, presumably people that had lost their hearing later in life and still recalled the tune of the song. Or at least, a tune that marginally resembled the song. Being deaf does nothing for singing on key. I joined in to try to get my mind off the fact it was slowly liquefying in my skull.
About halfway though the second I was actually almost getting used to the pounding, despite the dawning realization that I was going to leave the church with a splitting headache. It was another song I knew well, and I was actually really getting into it, despite my bizarre surroundings. Then from the opposite side of the pew that cute girl I mentioned earlier started yelling such a vile and anatomical string of expletives that even my Trades-deadened sensibilities were shocked. Maybe it was the fact I was in a church, maybe it was just that everything else bizarre I'd been experiencing left me off balance, but I could do nothing but stare at this girl in open-mouthed shock. She glanced at me and immediately realized I had heard her little tirade and flushed deep crimson. At this point I realized what I had been doing and equally embarrassed I looked down at my feet. Singing didn't seem that appealing to me any more so I just grinned and bore the rest of the pounding which thankfully didn't last much longer.
The sermon, compared to the rest of the service, was actually almost normal. I didn't understand anything the pastor said, since he spoke purely in sign language, but between the handout I got when I first arrived and the overhead projector's notes I pieced together the basic gist of the service, about Abraham's near sacrifice of Issac and the parallels to Jesus' sacrifice. I can't say it was eloquent, but it was graceful. The girl across the pew had two more outbursts during the sermon, but they were both subdued, spoken more quietly between clenched teeth.
The strangest part of the sermon had to be when the pastor made a series of sweeping gestures and then pointed directly at me. There were only about twenty people in the room with me, but it's still quite disturbing when everyone in the room turns and stares at you in complete silence. I still don't know what that was all about, probably just referencing how tall I am or something.
After the service ended I was planning on making a quick getaway, but was surprised when the girl stopped me. I figured the best thing for her embarrassment would have been to get out of there, but she wanted to apologize. She explained (aloud) her Tourette Syndrome made it hard for her to fit in normal churches, so she went to the deaf church where she wouldn't disrupt the service. It all made sense to me, so I told her not to worry about it, it just caught me off guard. We chatted for a bit more, and I found out that yeah, earplugs are pretty much mandatory, and it's a similar situation regardless of what deaf church you go to. She had something important to go to right after church, so she apologized again that she couldn't stick around and pressed into my hand the last, and perhaps biggest, surprise I had during my visit.
Huh. Maybe there's something to this deaf church thing after all. Oh, and whoever said curiosity is a bad thing?
