There Was a Bat in Church

There was a bat in church the other morning. We were all sitting there, minding our own business, listening to the sermon, when—and you don’t really expect to see this, do you?—there was something flying around. A rather large something.

To set the scene, I attend the early service, the one with fewer people who know each other really, really well. It’s a formal service, but a very informal group…which is my way of telling you that what happened is not nearly as out of line or as weird as it sounds.

The flying thing took a couple of passes through the sanctuary before anything happened. Then I said out loud, “Is that a bird or a bat?” Now, before anybody wonders if I really interrupted the priest mid-sermon: Yes, I did. I did do that.

The couple in the pew across the aisle looked at me, and one of them said, “It’s a bat.” And then, without any fanfare at all, the whole group moved into action. Our priest stopped and said, “Oh, well, here’s what we do.” Someone said, “We need to find some brooms,” and somebody else said, “We need some towels or a box.” And that was it. That was the entire amount of managing the problem. Nobody assigned roles, nobody was in charge. People just said what they knew to do, and then they did it.

In full disclosure, what I did was… sat there. Now rationally, I know that bats are basically harmless. I know they do good ecological work, and I know they’ve gotten really bad press. Still, I am completely creeped out by bats. So I stayed there for a few minutes while people gathered their bat-catching supplies, and tried to act like I was fine.

Then, because I was creeped out, I got up and moved to the little vestibule off to the side, just to get out of the way. Ours is a small building, and the problem is that the place I was moving turned out to be exactly where the bat started moving. Somebody cheerfully said, “Oh, Carrie, good idea. Prop those doors open.”

Good sport that I am, I propped the doors open, and then I promptly scampered to another set of double doors across the church. The bat went that direction too. So this time I went out the double doors, and I… hid. That’s what I did. I found a little room close to the sanctuary, and I hid.

I could hear people helping with the bat, and at some point I poked my little head out to check in the sanctuary, where people were directing one another about what to do with the brooms and the boxes and the towels. Then I realized the bat was coming in my direction. So I started to move towards another set of double doors.

And this is important: as I was walking away, the bat flew past me. It’s a low ceiling, so when I say it flew past me, I actually felt, maybe not the bat, but certainly the air its wings were moving.

Now, I do not mind telling you that the sound coming out of me was something between a quiet shriek and a cry. I wasn’t loud enough for people in the next state to hear me, and nobody checked on me, because I was not in any distress. I was just being loud about the fact that I was a little bit creeped out, because I was.

I got myself to the kitchen, fairly far away from the scene of the bat, and waited there until the noise died down. Then I called out, “Is the bat gone?” I didn’t hear anything.

So I went back into the sanctuary and saw that my priest had moved away from the pulpit. The sermon had ended, and I was disappointed. I said out loud, again, to my priest, “Did I miss the end?” Somebody said, “Oh, yeah, he finished it.” And I laughingly said, “Well, I was helping fight the bat.” People laughed, and then he, without asking, went back and finished the sermon. It was lovely. A beautiful message, and I’m really glad that I asked.

At the very end of the service, our priest chose, extemporaneously, to read the Prayer of St. Francis, who is the patron saint of animals. It’s in our Book of Common Prayer, and it fit the morning. You might think we were praying for the bat, but we were really praying inspired by the bat. That prayer is about loving and being loved, and apparently that extends to our fellow bat.

After the service I went to coffee hour, and people kept coming up to me, hugging me and thanking me for catching the bat, which I had absolutely not done. I had run from the bat extensively, through several rooms, making noises.

So I found the person who had actually caught the bat, clapped my hands, and got everybody’s attention. I asked him whether he was getting the credit he deserved. He laughed, sort of fake pouted, and said, “No.” So I said to the entire room, “I did not catch the bat. This nice man caught the bat. I was the girl running and shrieking.” Somebody said, “Well, you were the bat bait, which was a very important role.” Given that the bat kept following me from room to room, that’s probably a completely accurate description. We all laughed and hugged about that.

Here’s what I keep turning over. We had a disruption, a bat flying around mid-sermon, in a room full of people who had absolutely no plan for what we would do if we were invaded by a bat. No one, absolutely no one, moved to do anything until somebody spoke up. Once somebody spoke up—me—somebody else took the lead—our priest—with nothing more than “Well, here’s what we do.” Then the rest of the congregation just started contributing. “Oh, we could do this. We could do that.” Not in a boss-each-other-around sort of way. In a we-could-do-this-together kind of way.

There were also people who simply sat in the pews patiently, observing, knowing this would be handled. People with enough experience to be calm and happy that somebody else was taking the lead. And then there was me, of course, running.

All kidding aside, what I was actually doing was taking care of myself: recognizing what I was and was not capable of doing, and feeling safe enough in my little community to do that without anybody needing to talk me into it. And I especially want to note that it wasn’t that everyone was heroic. It’s that there was room for the people in the room who were not.

The whole thing was over in a few minutes, and it turned into something we still joke about at coffee hour. It reinforced our little sense of community and our relationships with one another. We got to know the bat catcher a little bit better. And in a congregation that’s pretty small, I discovered things about the people I worship with that I never would have known.