Rainy, the narrator in Leif Enger’s novel I Cheerfully Refuse, throws a birthday party for his wife, Lark. Friends, neighbors, and even strangers have gathered at Rainy and Lark’s home to celebrate. While his band performs for the gathering, Rainy reflects on what he once hoped the church might be like.

We stayed with the blues and Francie sensing a vein of covenant sang in her scratchiest aching voice, the reason we cajoled her into the band to start with, and it began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

— Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse (New York: Grove Press, 2024), 74.