There Had to Be Something Else
Dear Eugene,
Do you like the word "conversion," as in one holding up one's hand, "saying Yes to Jesus" when the music and moment feels right, as if the human heart changes like a flick of a switch, salvation a matter of having faith in one's faith?
My question is too laden for it to be anything but rhetorical, I know. And I am not trying to be cynical, even less to trivialize any Yes that is given to Jesus; we all rejoice with the angels with our own Yeses resounding in heaven when we see a life, any life, turning from darkness to light, from dying to living.
But I suppose it is precisely because of how much we care about others, that we want to take a closer, honest look at the nature of how the Yeses are being called out.
I know you love Anne Tyler's novels; so I assume you must have read Dorothy Allison's "Bastard out of Carolina"? What an amazing novel, isn't it?
When the protagonist of the story Ruth Anne tried to "convert" her rough-hewn uncle, this is what he said:
"I gave up churches—all churches—because I saw what they were," he told me. "Take a look at those oil color paintings on the wall of every Sunday school in South Carolina. Jesus in the mountains. Jesus in the desert. Jesus against the night sky. Jesus got the lost one in his arms. Jesus wants you, each and every one of you. He'll climb mountains, walk the hot sands, brave the night winds, search among the many for the one not found. And you are never so valuable as when you stand outside the fold, the one God wants. Oh, don't I know! Don't I know?
"They want you, oh yes, they want you. Till they get you. An't nothing in this world more useless than a hardworking religious fool. It an't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hereafter. I live in the here and now, and I need my sleep on a Sunday morning. But I'll tell you, Bone, I like it that they want me, Catholics and Baptists and Church of Gods and Methodists and Seventh-Day Adventists, all of them hungry for my dirty white hide, my pitiful human soul. Hell! None of them would give two drops of piss for me if I was already part of their saggy-assed congregations."
Many a truth come out of filthy mouths.
Is it not our fault to frame the Gospel, the "Good News" as something that only has to do with the afterlife ("What you'll get in the hereafter"), that people who are stuck in the "here and now" (and who isn't?) would see our religion as nothing more than an escapist fantasy that has nothing to do with our earthly life, the "here" where God places us "now"?
We seem to see and offer no way out of our personal troubles, even less the world's troubles. We seem to go along with the world's narrative, that "having God in our life" is part of our self-actualization, often chronic denial, an App to add an instant halo to our face, a footnote to tie up some loose ends. Often we have not even the intention to care for the plight of others, those who are suffering in the here and now. No wonder people are disillusioned about church and religion.
That's exactly what happened to Ruth Anne a few pages after:
"Since I was getting nowhere saving my uncles, I fell back on the only capital I had—my own soul. I became fascinated with the idea of being saved, not just welcoming Jesus into my heart but the seriousness of the struggle between salvation and damnation, between good and evil, life and death. God and the devil were the ultimate arbiters, and everyone knew what was being fought over. It was just like Uncle Earle had told me: if you were not saved, not part of the congregation, you were all anyone could see at the invocation. There was something heady and enthralling about being the object of all that attention. It was like singing gospel on the television with the audience following your every breath. I could not resist it.
I came close to being saved about fourteen times—fourteen Sundays in fourteen different Baptist churches. I didn't fake my indecision, the teary-eyed intensity and open-mouthed confusion that overtook me when the preacher turned his glance on me. There was something about the way his face looked when he cried out for all those who felt the "call" to come forward, something in the way the old women in the front pew turned around to look up and down the aisles. The music would come up and the choir would start half-humming, half-singing "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling," and a pulse would start to throb in my temples. Tears would pearl up in the corners of my eyes, and my tongue would seem to swell in my mouth. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted something—Jesus or God or orange-blossom scent or dark chocolate terror in my throat. Something hurt me, ached in me. I couldn't tell if it was the music or the eyes or the waxed smell of the hardwood floors, but everything ran together and drew me down the aisle to the front pew, where the preacher put his hand on my head and some stiff-necked old woman came forward to hold my hand.
Once there, I would cry silently and hold on while a few other people came down too. Then we would all pray together. I could not have explained, but it was not actually baptism I wanted, or welcome to the congregation, or even the breathless concentration of the preacher. It was that moment of sitting on the line between salvation and damnation with the preacher and the old women pulling bodily at my poor darkened soul. I wanted that moment to go on forever, wanted the choir to go on with that low, slow music. I wanted the church to fill up with everyone I knew. I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.
When the music stopped and the sweaty preacher sat down with his little notebook to talk to me, my face would go rigid and my voice sink to a whisper of shame and nervous terror. Every time that moment was the same. The smell of watery ammonia would blot out the orange blossoms and whatever old woman was hugging me would flake pancake makeup on my bare arms. I would start to gag and have to run off to the girls' room in the basement to wash my face. Then I would stare into my eyes in the mirror and know I wasn't ready. It wasn't right. The magic I knew was supposed to wash over me with Jesus' blood was absent, the moment cold and empty. I would stumble out into the sunshine guiltily, still unsaved, and go on to a new church the next Sunday.
I'd begun to think about trying out the Church of God or the Holy Church of Jesus' Disciples when Mama caught on to me. She took me to Aunt Ruth's church at Bushy Creek and had me baptized beneath the painting of Jesus at the Jordan. When my head went under, my throat closed up and my ears went deaf. With cloudy water soaking my dress and my eyes tight shut, I couldn't hear the choir or feel the preacher's bruising grip. Whatever magic Jesus' grace promised, I didn't feel it. I pushed up out of that dirty water, shivering, broke out in a sweat, and felt my fever rise.
I sneezed and coughed for a solid week, lying limp in my bed and crying to every gospel song that came over the radio. It was as if I were mourning the loss of something I had never really had. I sang along with the music and prayed for all I was worth. Jesus' blood and country music, there had to be something else, something more to hope for. I bit my lip and went back to reading the Book of Revelation, taking comfort in the hope of the apocalypse, God's retribution on the wicked. I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication."
Ruth Anne read the right book and got it almost right: God promises vindication in Jesus, and that's exactly what God's Story, the entire His-story, is heading towards, as made clear in the final book of the Bible.
But when she went to church, like many of us, that's not what she's been told. She was led to believe "salvation" is only a personal matter, about how God snatches our soul from our no-good physical body out of the fiery furnace after we die. Eventually. Not today. Not here yet. If you are good enough when the moment of snatching happens. False gospel.
Fake good news is worse than real bad news.
"There had to be something else, something more to hope for..." Ruth Anne asked.
The world is asking. Do we hear the cry?
Yours, Alex
Do you like the word "conversion," as in one holding up one's hand, "saying Yes to Jesus" when the music and moment feels right, as if the human heart changes like a flick of a switch, salvation a matter of having faith in one's faith?
My question is too laden for it to be anything but rhetorical, I know. And I am not trying to be cynical, even less to trivialize any Yes that is given to Jesus; we all rejoice with the angels with our own Yeses resounding in heaven when we see a life, any life, turning from darkness to light, from dying to living.
But I suppose it is precisely because of how much we care about others, that we want to take a closer, honest look at the nature of how the Yeses are being called out.
I know you love Anne Tyler's novels; so I assume you must have read Dorothy Allison's "Bastard out of Carolina"? What an amazing novel, isn't it?
When the protagonist of the story Ruth Anne tried to "convert" her rough-hewn uncle, this is what he said:
"I gave up churches—all churches—because I saw what they were," he told me. "Take a look at those oil color paintings on the wall of every Sunday school in South Carolina. Jesus in the mountains. Jesus in the desert. Jesus against the night sky. Jesus got the lost one in his arms. Jesus wants you, each and every one of you. He'll climb mountains, walk the hot sands, brave the night winds, search among the many for the one not found. And you are never so valuable as when you stand outside the fold, the one God wants. Oh, don't I know! Don't I know?
"They want you, oh yes, they want you. Till they get you. An't nothing in this world more useless than a hardworking religious fool. It an't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hereafter. I live in the here and now, and I need my sleep on a Sunday morning. But I'll tell you, Bone, I like it that they want me, Catholics and Baptists and Church of Gods and Methodists and Seventh-Day Adventists, all of them hungry for my dirty white hide, my pitiful human soul. Hell! None of them would give two drops of piss for me if I was already part of their saggy-assed congregations."
Many a truth come out of filthy mouths.
Is it not our fault to frame the Gospel, the "Good News" as something that only has to do with the afterlife ("What you'll get in the hereafter"), that people who are stuck in the "here and now" (and who isn't?) would see our religion as nothing more than an escapist fantasy that has nothing to do with our earthly life, the "here" where God places us "now"?
We seem to see and offer no way out of our personal troubles, even less the world's troubles. We seem to go along with the world's narrative, that "having God in our life" is part of our self-actualization, often chronic denial, an App to add an instant halo to our face, a footnote to tie up some loose ends. Often we have not even the intention to care for the plight of others, those who are suffering in the here and now. No wonder people are disillusioned about church and religion.
That's exactly what happened to Ruth Anne a few pages after:
"Since I was getting nowhere saving my uncles, I fell back on the only capital I had—my own soul. I became fascinated with the idea of being saved, not just welcoming Jesus into my heart but the seriousness of the struggle between salvation and damnation, between good and evil, life and death. God and the devil were the ultimate arbiters, and everyone knew what was being fought over. It was just like Uncle Earle had told me: if you were not saved, not part of the congregation, you were all anyone could see at the invocation. There was something heady and enthralling about being the object of all that attention. It was like singing gospel on the television with the audience following your every breath. I could not resist it.
I came close to being saved about fourteen times—fourteen Sundays in fourteen different Baptist churches. I didn't fake my indecision, the teary-eyed intensity and open-mouthed confusion that overtook me when the preacher turned his glance on me. There was something about the way his face looked when he cried out for all those who felt the "call" to come forward, something in the way the old women in the front pew turned around to look up and down the aisles. The music would come up and the choir would start half-humming, half-singing "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling," and a pulse would start to throb in my temples. Tears would pearl up in the corners of my eyes, and my tongue would seem to swell in my mouth. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted something—Jesus or God or orange-blossom scent or dark chocolate terror in my throat. Something hurt me, ached in me. I couldn't tell if it was the music or the eyes or the waxed smell of the hardwood floors, but everything ran together and drew me down the aisle to the front pew, where the preacher put his hand on my head and some stiff-necked old woman came forward to hold my hand.
Once there, I would cry silently and hold on while a few other people came down too. Then we would all pray together. I could not have explained, but it was not actually baptism I wanted, or welcome to the congregation, or even the breathless concentration of the preacher. It was that moment of sitting on the line between salvation and damnation with the preacher and the old women pulling bodily at my poor darkened soul. I wanted that moment to go on forever, wanted the choir to go on with that low, slow music. I wanted the church to fill up with everyone I knew. I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.
When the music stopped and the sweaty preacher sat down with his little notebook to talk to me, my face would go rigid and my voice sink to a whisper of shame and nervous terror. Every time that moment was the same. The smell of watery ammonia would blot out the orange blossoms and whatever old woman was hugging me would flake pancake makeup on my bare arms. I would start to gag and have to run off to the girls' room in the basement to wash my face. Then I would stare into my eyes in the mirror and know I wasn't ready. It wasn't right. The magic I knew was supposed to wash over me with Jesus' blood was absent, the moment cold and empty. I would stumble out into the sunshine guiltily, still unsaved, and go on to a new church the next Sunday.
I'd begun to think about trying out the Church of God or the Holy Church of Jesus' Disciples when Mama caught on to me. She took me to Aunt Ruth's church at Bushy Creek and had me baptized beneath the painting of Jesus at the Jordan. When my head went under, my throat closed up and my ears went deaf. With cloudy water soaking my dress and my eyes tight shut, I couldn't hear the choir or feel the preacher's bruising grip. Whatever magic Jesus' grace promised, I didn't feel it. I pushed up out of that dirty water, shivering, broke out in a sweat, and felt my fever rise.
I sneezed and coughed for a solid week, lying limp in my bed and crying to every gospel song that came over the radio. It was as if I were mourning the loss of something I had never really had. I sang along with the music and prayed for all I was worth. Jesus' blood and country music, there had to be something else, something more to hope for. I bit my lip and went back to reading the Book of Revelation, taking comfort in the hope of the apocalypse, God's retribution on the wicked. I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication."
Ruth Anne read the right book and got it almost right: God promises vindication in Jesus, and that's exactly what God's Story, the entire His-story, is heading towards, as made clear in the final book of the Bible.
But when she went to church, like many of us, that's not what she's been told. She was led to believe "salvation" is only a personal matter, about how God snatches our soul from our no-good physical body out of the fiery furnace after we die. Eventually. Not today. Not here yet. If you are good enough when the moment of snatching happens. False gospel.
Fake good news is worse than real bad news.
"There had to be something else, something more to hope for..." Ruth Anne asked.
The world is asking. Do we hear the cry?
Yours, Alex
Comments
Post a Comment