The Church of Twitter

What I believe to be a microfiction

Dear Reader. Please find here a very short piece of fiction I began several years ago and recently revised. I can’t imagine finding a home for it anywhere in the publishing industry, so I decided to push it out into the world here instead.

I have extremely complicated thoughts about both “traditional” church as well as the reaction against it. That anxiety is deeply embedded in this story.

“The Church of Twitter”

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

It ended where it began. 

Bart’s life of isolated chaos had withered him, body and soul, and the day he stepped in the Agape Church of God, he could feel spirit rage through him like a dam-broken river. 

The bricklayer had come to shore up a retaining wall in crisis, aging, thin, and crumbling. It was familiar, steady work these days. 

His labor under the August sun meant frequent trips to the church’s water fountain, a finicky machine that required the thirster to crack a code before it would satiate. Bart, an engineer of sorts, learned to press the wobbly chrome button on the spout at the same time he stood on the foot pedal at the floor, above the fraying carpet. With the ritual mastered, the water received by the worshiper was the standard sort -- hydrogen, oxygen, fluoride, clear, a vague metallic taste. 

But for Bart it was a magical new agua. For this tanned, stocky drinker, the city water flowing through Agape’s rusting pipes was a bright, terrifying signal from the godhead. At first the metal spring gushed nothing more, nothing less, than the usual liquid product. Then its divine nutrients seeped into his body, condensing into a river that whirled into a frightful natural force, the kind that brings destruction in front of the healing waters. 

The empty chaos and tohubohu was driven away, far to the east, by a tsunami of salvation. In its wake, Bart made his peace with the Agape Church of God’s traditions and cold rituals. He felt at one with the place. A humming harmony. And it was good. 

Until it wasn’t. The frantic righteousness of a purpose-driven life revealed to Bart that Agape’s floors and insulated walls were lacking.  His faith, explosive and authentic, eventually spilled out and overwhelmed the pews and bulletin boards of the mid-century house of worship. The people trembled in his presence. 

Eventually, the old attendance-tracking sign which had hung in the back of the sanctuary, taunting the shriveling sectarians with math’s dirty truth, was ripped from the wall and carried away in the flood of Bart’s sacred covenant with the God of the Old Testament.  Finally, the old rugged retaining wall gave way. And the rising torrent of Bart’s visionary faith was unleashed into boundless life itself.

But there had to be a “where” in the everywhere. He knew in his soul, that “All things, even those of the spirit, must exist in space.” Yes. Infinite truth in 60 characters. He stared at the blinking truth on his screen. His words hung neatly together even as they cascaded across the whole human race, far beyond the decimated walls of Agape. 

He knew it then, the infinite beyond was a place. Capital-T Truth puddles in words. The words will be read and in the reading shall burst forth with indignant disregard for geography. Cyberspace. A place. The place shared by all. Limitless. “The life of faith cannot be lived alone.” Community yes. Community inside the hashtag, where all are welcome. Unbound and free. “And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common” //RT if ur in// #truth 

It began at the end.