By Tom Poland, A southern writer.
From church to home, an antique pew escaped Helene and found new life.
Sunday service is a time when the pulpit, piano, and organ assume major roles. Add Bible and hymnal to the list. Pews, however, get overlooked. Thus, I turn my attention to this unsung hero.
The pew in my home long sat in New Hope Baptist Church, est. 1830. Shields symbolic of protection embellish its ends. I like to think I sat on that old pew during training union, revival, or Vacation Bible School. It’s not where I sat with my family many a Sunday. Back then families sat in the same pew. Even now, I close my eyes and see where the Ivys, Partridges, the Guillebeau sisters, Normans, and others sat. All those backsides sitting in the same pew Sunday after Sunday gave me a sense of stability in an unstable world.
And unstable is right. In my rambles I cross paths with abandoned churches where pews sit beneath a collapsing roof. My pew long sat in a beautiful church safe from the elements until church elders decided to replace the old pews with new pews with foam cushions. My old pew found a new home with my parents. When Mom died I inherited it. My brother-in-law, Joe, beautifully restored it but Hurricane Helene blew a big hardwood onto his woodworking shop. My pew was spared but exposed to the elements, and at long last I brought it to my Carolina home. The ancient longleaf pine that it was, where did it reach for the sun? Who cut it? Who crafted the beautiful pew we see today? I’ll never know, but we can learn a bit about this thing we call the pew.
Words evolve. My name, Poland, comes from old English “pulling,” as in pulling a wagon. “Puye,” it’s said, comes from the Latin word “podium” but the Dutch “puye” means the enclosed front of a town hall, where proclamations were made. From puye comes pew. Yes, words evolve and so do things. Wooden pews first became widespread in Europe in the 1500s following the Protestant Reformation. Before that, the congregation stood, though some churches provided stone benches for the elderly. In time, wood replaced stone and members bolted benches to the floor.
There was a time when families bought pews and handed them down from one generation to the next. Maybe that led to families sitting in the same pew Sunday after Sunday. I hear, too, that some courtrooms have pews. Seems pews witness a lot of judgment days.
For sure a pew bears burdens all its own. There’s the burden of sin and the burden of weight. There’s an old Southern home sitting empty whose kitchen countertops were once the benches of old pews. When the light slants through the kitchen window just so, lean back from the light just so and you can see depressions where faithful women sat side by side for many a Sunday.
The next time you settle onto an unsung hero, consider what that old heart pine pew experienced. It lived once upon a time with wind and red cockaded woodpeckers among its branches, rain in its boughs. When men found a use for it stout mules skidded it to a sawmill, and woodworkers planed fine-grained longleaf into handsome benches with backs.
Music, messages, tears, joy, and silence became its companions. It witnessed weddings, christenings, communion, and memorials to the dead. It accommodated souls through homecomings and revivals. True, it’s wood is long dead but it’s filled with life nonetheless, holding you and others as it does. And someday down the road, after enduring the years and waiting to be passed down yet again, it will find life anew as home décor, a reading nook, daybed, bookcase, or a peaceful place to sit and remember.
