HEAVEN WILL have to wait. On Garrison Boulevard at Liberty Heights Avenue on Sunday morning, the houses of worship are bustling, but so are the cops. God may be in his heaven, but all is not right with the world, not in a time when police have just hauled more than $50 million worth of drugs from a battered old house around the corner.

What a gathering of faiths we have here to battle the forces of the devil: St. Mark's Methodist Church and the Adams Chapel, two gorgeous structures facing each other across Garrison Boulevard, and the Calvary Baptist Church just up the street. It's beautiful to watch the worshipers spill happily onto the sidewalks, their souls full of celestial grace.

Across Liberty Heights, in the building that was once the Forest Theater, a movie house that featured every dreadful horror flick ever made, there's the Muhammad Mosque No. 6. Across the street from the mosque, a man in a suit holds up a handsomely printed sign. It's about nonbelievers. It's about Jesus Christ. It is intended as a finger in the eye. The man is holding up the sign so that all those emerging from the Islamic mosque can take in his Christian message.

So much religion, and so much competition for everyone's everlasting souls, and so much trouble in the midst of it. You drive along Garrison Boulevard and there's one lovely church after another. Progressive First Baptist and Bethlehem Church of God. Then, in the former Beth Tfiloh Synagogue, there's Wayland Baptist, which is just across Fairview Avenue from the Forest Park Community Church and just around the corner from the storefront Glorious Church of Jesus Christ Inc. on Forest Park Avenue.

The thing is, at the moment, the cops aren't worried about people's souls so much as the killer stuff some of them are putting in their bodies. Last week's drug seizure was made at 3710 Liberty Heights Ave., a block below Garrison Boulevard, in the very shadow of all these houses of worship.

The cops seized dozens of gallons of chemicals, including 30 gallons of phencyclidine, the hallucinogen known as PCP. When all the chemicals were mixed, Drug Enforcement Administration officials say, the PCP might have brought in $50 million, or maybe $100 million.

Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris called it "one of the biggest [PCP] labs of its kind on the East Coast." Yesterday, a local judge called it "a state-of-the-art PCP lab." Neighbors expressed astonishment. A PCP lab in Northwest Baltimore? Nah. Heroin, sure. Cocaine, sure. But PCP?

Police entered the house without a warrant. They said they did this because they worried about conspirators blowing up the building to destroy evidence. Police evacuated 3710 and several neighboring homes.

For the record, there wasn't much to save at the house next door. Nobody's home there. The sign out front says the house is going to be auctioned. It's a big old shingled house, not much different from 3710, where police found the PCP.

But the auction sign on the front tells us a little about the history of this street, and this section of the city. The sign says the house has "three large units separately metered." In other words, what long ago housed one family has been housing three within the same confines.

That's the way things went in a lot of places several decades back, when white families fled to suburbia and black families moved in. This was a crossroads in history. Whites fled so frantically, they looked to cash in however they could. Black people were hungry for housing they'd been denied, while simultaneously reaching for middle-class jobs, also long denied them, that would support such housing.

It became easier when landlords broke the houses into separate apartment units. Rents were lower. But the houses themselves eventually suffered from the overload, and then entire neighborhoods reflected it. The middle-class folks who first moved in took money from their new jobs and found better housing. A lot of these places around Liberty Heights, already showing some age before the racial turnover, now began to fall apart.

A new kind of desperation took hold: shabby houses with low rents taking in people going nowhere with their lives. Renters who stuck around for a few months, until the bills came overdue, and then disappeared. Or, as it now appears, people who arrived not to live in one of these old houses, only to exploit it.

At 3710 Liberty Heights Ave., they had a lab for making PCP. The cops say they had ties to a South Baltimore motorcycle gang and a Jessup business, and they expected to do business all over the city. So we can add PCP to heroin and cocaine on the list of drugs that tear apart neighborhoods and ruin people's lives.

Sometimes, in the very shadow of houses of worship. In this neighborhood, the churches are filled on Sundays. But heaven will have to wait.