As I promised in the last post here is the following excerpt from my novel The River Caught Sunlight, a passage that came to me like a vision where I imagined my dad finding me on the cliff edge as I sat in Liberty Baptist church, hearing an awful sermon, hours away from getting the news he’d died. I was on a cliff alright, because I was escorting Francis and Edith Schaeffer on a three week author tour. I flew home the next day started walking the long walk of grief, with my parents gone, that isn’t finished yet. The bombing Janice refers to had just happened that morning at an abortion clinic.
Here’s the excerpt:
An hour later, Janice sat in the pew with Dennis Manley listening to Jeremiah give his spiel about fighting abortion and the godless media. He said nothing about the bombings. People applauded when he was through. Then as a transition to the sermon, the congregation turned to the hymn, “I Love to Tell the Story,” the only hymn Janice remembered hearing her mother sing, a hymn she’d chosen for her funeral. “Of Unseen things above, of Jesus and his glory. Of Jesus and his love.”
The tears streamed down. Good thing Jeremiah was sitting up there on the podium because he would have leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Janice, I’m telling you, you need to knock off that Diet Coke.” She smiled to herself as she looked at her mother’s engagement ring on her right ring finger, where she could see her blurred reflection in a facet, the tiny prism she could flash at the pew in front of her, making a rainbow colored spot. She wanted her mother back. She wanted her integrity, where she didn’t have to let people like Dennis think she was a true believer when she wondered if all their souls were in danger. Or was it just hers? And now her silence had blood on it. People had died in this morning’s bombings.
If this was Christianity, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. It seemed like all these men were trying to control God and everyone else. Dennis reached his arm behind her shoulder. He squeezed her close. He was trying to be kind, she knew that, but his arm felt like he’d swung rope after rope after rope around her arms and shoulders, and tied it tight, so she was like one of those women in the old movies just before the bad guy dropped her on the tracks to wait for the locomotive.
A woman sitting behind Janice tapped her with a tissue. Janice took it and wiped her eyes. Dennis leaned down and said, “Great stuff.” Janice knew he thought she was crying because the preaching was so powerful.
If this was Christianity, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. It seemed like all these men were trying to control God and everyone else. Dennis reached his arm behind her shoulder. He squeezed her close. He was trying to be kind, she knew that, but his arm felt like he’d swung rope after rope after rope around her arms and shoulders, and tied it tight, so she was like one of those women in the old movies just before the bad guy dropped her on the tracks to wait for the locomotive. She hated it.
“I’m going to preach on the definition of true Christianity,” the tall, skinny Harry Thewell said. His face was as pointy as the black Justins he wore. He looked like a man capable of whipping his daughter for not living his true definition of Christianity. He certainly was whipping up the congregation with his words. Janice didn’t trust the demon look on his face. His words came out of his mouth, not his heart and he didn’t speak with the authority born of words from the Lord, words that soothed and encouraged a broken spirit, but with shouts that clawed after authority like a runner clawing after a finish line tape.
“If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, the man’s religion is vain,” he read from James in the King James.
Janice wiggled her mother’s ring around to the front of her finger and closed her fist over it, so it bit into her flesh. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unpolluted from the world,” read the tall skinny Harry Thelwell with the demons on his face.
She looked up at the chandeliers in the sanctuary, sparkling like her mother’s diamond. The church was so smooth with soothing light blue walls with cream trim. The seats were like theater seats and easy to sink into and listen to long sermons. Janice smelled the rotted mud smell of death and saw again the fine rib bones lying on top of the mud and leaves, the long narrow skull with pointed teeth and holes where the eyes and nose had been.
Dennis leaned over and said, “Excuse me. My wife’s burritos playing havoc.”
Jeremiah glared at Janice from the podium as she buried her nose in the tissue trying to make the laughter sound like coughing.
The preacher’s voice shouted, “I remember when I was a boxer and was in the ring against an athlete that outclassed me. I swung at him, and he just stepped back. This went on for ten rounds. Then when my arms were too weak to defend myself, he hauled back, and I could see his swing coming, as if in slow motion.”
Janice watched the man raise his arm and slowly swing it through the air.
“There was nothing I could do to stop it. Pow!” His voice echoed against the blue walls and cream trim.
“That’s like some Christians who are exhausted keeping the faith against the assaults of the devil. They swing and swing until they can’t swing anymore and get knocked down by sin. They’re neutralized. They can’t do anymore. They’re no good to God.”
Janice bowed her head and closed her eyes. She felt her mother’s ring against the meat of her palm. “Pow! I should have called the FBI. Pow! If I had, maybe some people would be alive today. Pow! My mother died of cancer. My dad sounds so tired. My brother won’t speak to me. Pow, pow, pow.
She heard Thelwell shout, “Repent of your sin. Don’t be knocked down, useless to God. Get back to the winning side.”
Janice didn’t know being in the fight was a sin. Or that being wounded in the battle was her fault. That God judged her for her wounds, wounds hurting so much her eyes blurred with the pain. Isn’t that what Christ was for? Salvation not the judgement? Didn’t he come to seek and save that which was lost?
While Thewell’s face fell to something more soft, beckoning people to come forward for extra prayers, or even a commitment to Christ. Janice flipped open her Bible to Matthew 18. “Children, don’t keep them away from me,” Christ had said. “If you cause one to stumble, it’d be better for a millstone to be wrapped around your neck.” The terrible responsibility. What happens if you’re the child who is stumbling? What about the children of the people who died this morning?
If this is Christianity, Lord forgive me, I don’t want it.
Janice imagined herself on the rock ledge outside her brother, Lucian’s cave. She pushed her hands back from the rock and rose to her knees. The sun was going down, and it was cold. She’d climbed here, but she couldn’t go any further. She’d forgotten the nuts and bolts to secure to the rocks, so she could rappel down. Janice wept for someone to belay her.
She read on. “Don’t look down on one of these little ones. Their angels in heaven face God.” Janice bowed her head, eyes smeared with tears, “God send me an angel to lift me out of this desire to reject you, this nausea to puke what these men call ‘things of the Lord’ right out of my system. Send me an angel. One with marvelous wings, four pair, with hands underneath to hold me, and angel who shines because he faces God. Send me an angel to stand over and shield me from all this spiritual battle raging overhead. One with a flashing sword to slice the pinions reaching down for my shoulders.”
She read more of Jesus’ words. “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in Heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”
Janice imagined herself still on the rock ledge. Somewhere beyond the lip, a man was coming; she could hear the ropes and pitons clanking as he walked. He was calling her name. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him. If he hears you, you’ve got him back. If he doesn’t get someone to go with you. Confront him then. What you forgive, you forgive. What you curse will be cursed.”
Then a rush of rope hurled, snaking over the rock ledge. “Knot it around your waist,” the man whose voice sounded like a rifle shot across a creek, shouted. Jim? The man Jeremiah and Dennis hated? “Keep coming up.” My God the view. Like the drive she took to northwestern Illinois, where the land glowed from inside—luminescent greens and blues, the sky bubbling with white clouds that were about sunlight, not yet about rain. Like cultivated fields rolling up and rolling down, men’s handiwork, working the land, making her yield food and beauty. Something about a garden that could put a woman’s soul back into her body. She’d made the right decision. She was going home.
“Keep coming,” the voice said, quietly.
Janice imagined she stood up and grabbed the rope, the fibers burning her palm. She pulled it into herself. Of all people, it was her father, who rappelled down to her, and showed her how to wrap it and tie it to make a sling for her butt, to keep herself upright and balanced despite the pure, raw, terror she felt. Janice stepped over to the rock wall, began feeling for handholds, footholds. He said, “Here, put your foot here. Trust the tread on your boot.” She lifted her foot as if she were mounting a horse, stretched out her fingertips to a tiny hold. She pulled herself up, the rope pulled along with her. “I didn’t know you knew mountains,” she said.
“Ski troops, 10th Mountain Division, same thing. I was well trained.” Her dad as a young man, all power and force, exuding virility, a man who’d seen adventure. A hero. A warrior defending freedom and all that. And she’d never known. She’d only wanted to get away. He patted her cheek and grinned, her own frightened face reflecting in his mirrored sunglasses. “You’ll find your way to the top.”
Janice opened her eyes. She saw the diamond imprint on the meat of her palm from her mother’s ring. She pushed it back to where it was supposed to be, showing the world its icy beauty, the commitment her father made to her mother, and that he made to her.
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The River Caught Sunlight is available here.