More About Sodom

  The Church of the Little Flower sits catty-cornered across the road from a Baptist church. Jane, a Sodom-raised acquaintance of mine told me her memory of how the young people there at the Catholic church for mass would hear the Baptist congregation begin to sing and would squirm on the hard benches, eager for the Latin service to be over so they could dart across the road and join in the Baptist singing.

Singing's important in Sodom. This little community is the home place of ballad singers who preserve the old songs their forebears brought over from England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Sheila Kay Adams is one of the seventh generation to sing  those stories of love and death.  She's a talented musician and storyteller and her "Come Go Home with Me" is a series of charming vignettes, from funny to heart breaking,  about growing up in Sodom back in the Sixties.

Sheila tells a delightful story about religion in Sodom.  First she and all the other kids would go to the Church of the Little Flower, where the service was all incomprehensible Latin. As soon as that was over, on to the Baptist Church where, though the service was in English, the pastor had no teeth, which made his words equally unintelligible.

"We all grew up, " says Sheila, " thinking that religion was one of the great mysteries of life that we mere mortals weren't supposed to understand."

 

Sodom and the Church of the Little Flower

Yesterday I went with friends to Sodom -- a little community not far from our farm as the crow flies, but, as the car travels, about 45 minutes away -- high up and reached by a very winding road.

According to the story, Sodom got its name about a century ago when a visiting Methodist minister, appalled by the free and easy ways of the inhabitants, said that they were no better than a bunch of Sodomites.

Officially. the place is called Revere but the residents cling proudly to the old name.

This trip came under the heading of research -- in my chapter of the collaborative novel I'm currently working on, my characters pay a visit to Sodom. And since it's been about thirty years since I was there, I thought I ought to take a look again before I wrote about it.

The Church of the Little Flower is kind of unexpected. It was the home of a Roman Catholic mission that operated from 1931 into, I think, the seventies --  here in this mountain fastness where the majority of churches are some flavor of Baptist.

In fact, today the church is owned by a Baptist. But he was evidently so moved by the feeling the building invokes, that rather than turn it into a vacation home, as had been his original intent, he restored it. And today it's available for meetings or special events.

I have a lot more to tell you about Sodom -- but as I doubt I'll be among the elect raptured away tomorrow, I'll save it for another post.