Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the door, and here are the people.

Over and over, the toddler wanted to play the new game, folding inward – and under – his tiny fingers and then opening them for me. He can’t yet master the steeple, but he’s got the church’s finger-people down pat.

So I thought of him Sunday as dozens of us filed through the open doors of the summer chapel and knelt – one by the other, friends or strangers – on oval kneelers covered in colorful needlepoint designs, each unique, which were donated lovingly by church members.

The rustic chapel situated in a small coastal community is one of many where doors and windows are flung open in July and August, and the oak pews are filled with summer residents who have packed their spiritual needs along with their boat shoes or Talbot dresses before coming to Maine for the season.

Most of these churches, shingled gray or brown, smell of wood planks and fresh-cut peonies; the light filters through stained-glass panels, and the warm breeze – as well as a few mosquitoes – enters from unscreened windows.

Perhaps the organ sounds tinny or the tower bell flat, but as the summer flock lifts its collective voice in song, there’s no mistaking “here is the church and here are the people.”

In one village after another, these chapels – modest, weathered, and serene – have been primarily supported by generations of summer residents who leave behind their home churches and denominations and join in fellowship, however briefly, to worship in their seasonal community.

They walk to the chapel from their cottages around the corner, or they park their cars with their telltale license plates along the narrow roadsides overhung with cedar and spruce. They come in all ages, and a thread of history connects their families as summer traditions are passed like marathon batons.

They organize church “committees” for everything from finances to flowers, from liturgy to communion linens, from rectory repairs to recompense for the visiting minister, from altar pads to acolytes.

They may be at leisure – enviably so, to some of us – but they don’t take a vacation from church -inspirationally so, to some of us. And they certainly disprove a segment from Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”:

“There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.”

Many folks do go to church even when they don’t have to. Even in summertime; even when it’s too hot for hogs.