This reminds me of when I was a teen and my family's church hired a new pastor. I'll call him Pastor Luke. He was on the younger side, and handsome in a (fittingly) youth pastor sort of way: tall and slim, white, tawny-haired; teeth slightly crooked above an awkward soul patch. Everyone seemed a little bit in love with him, but the old church ladies were particularly obsessed. I overheard chattering about how pretty he was, how they wished their late husbands had looked more like Pastor Luke. They thought there was something especially noble about someone attractive choosing to devote their life to the church.
To get to know the congregation, Pastor Luke wanted to spend his first few months with us making home visits. Everyone wanted to host him for dinner as a show of generosity. (Weird competitive protestant nonsense, ya know.) My mom complained about how long we had to wait to host him, but his schedule filled up so quickly with adoring parishioners wanting to feed him their home-cooked specialties.
Meanwhile, there were the potlucks where he had to try some of everything to be polite: mac and cheese, potato au gratin, stuffed portobello mushrooms, homemade bread and butter, cloyingly sweet ambrosia salad. When he made his rounds during post-worship fellowship hour, his hands and mouth were kept full of blueberry muffins, chocolate chip banana bread, and cheese danishes. Someone was always there to top off his coffee with a generous splash of cream.
By the time he got around to having dinner at our house, the way the old church ladies talked about him had changed: Pastor Luke is looking well-fed, isn't he? He looks much more... comfortable. Looks less comfortable in his clothes, though, doesn't he?
His clerical collar, especially, seemed uncomfortable. His facial features were noticeably softening, the definition of his jaw lost to the plushness of his neck. The clerical collar dug into this new neck fat, and a double chin had started to obscure the square of starched white linen. During church, the vestments obscured his body. But afterward, out of his robes, his belly pressed obviously, indecently, against his button-up shirts.
I was anxious when Pastor Luke came to dinner. I was a closeted church kid with major daddy issues and was full of amorphous yearning. The pastor easily finished one plate of food, then two. I had fried sliced cornbread with cheese, so it melted into the cornbread's dry crumb, but also got crispy at the edges. When he had eaten all of it, he asked if there was more. I apologized that though there was still some cornbread left, it wasn't fried. He excused himself.
When he'd left the table, my mom whispered, No wonder he's getting so fat.
I ferried dirty dishes to the kitchen, and discovered Pastor Luke standing there, bent over the stove, dredging the unfried heels of cornbread through the pan of oil I'd used for frying. There was a sheen of grease from his mouth to his undefined chin. He laughed when he saw me, unbothered.
It's just so good, I couldn't help myself.
And he shoved the rest of the cornbread, dripping with oil, into his mouth. When he chewed, I could see a yellowish grease stain on his collar.
Pastor Luke's transformation didn't lose him any affection with the congregation. If anything, it endeared him to us. He was no longer a novelty; because he wasn't new anymore, yes, but also because he better matched what the old church ladies expected a pastor to look like. He was no longer remarkable in his youthful prettiness. He looked older with the added weight, jowls lending seriousness to his expressions, his movements slower and more deliberate now that he was weighed down. It was not such a great sacrifice for him to have devoted his life to the church, not now that the congregation had fattened him into something only really suited to this particular lifestyle.
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