On the Sundays when my husband Blake plays bass for worship service, I arrive an hour early and read while he rehearses. I have read manifestos and short stories in this time, Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer. Before service, my church’s office lounge seems to me a sort of borderland, a transitory place where the things that will become holy have not yet been infused, touched, zapped to life with God’s animating bolt. There are no instruments of worship or baptismal fonts; there are guitars, bowls. There is my pastor, Will, covering a stack of gluten free pita pockets with a creased white napkin, filling small cups with a plastic dispenser. He presses the dispenser’s red button and out flows port; he releases the button and it cuts off. Half an ounce in each cup, not a drop spilled. I’ve lost my place in my book admiring the precision.

A Sunday service is a rich mixture of the holy and the human.