In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [54]
We moved our few pieces of furniture into the house, and still our voices echoed off the walls. Above the fireplace, a huge gilt-edged mirror reflected the emptiness. The dining room was sad, I thought, because we didn’t own a real dinette, although there was a certain holiday flair to throwing a colorful sheet across the borrowed redwood picnic table and setting places for the family beneath the sparkling crystal chandelier.
There was no place for a television. My father thought it better to read, and our faith held that Satan’s influence had manifested itself via the auspices of ABC, NBC and CBS. On any given night one could witness the decay of Christian civilization on Channel 3: uncensored hells and damns, women wantonly exposing their midriffs and cleavage, couples engaged in passionate kissing. And the music! Young people gyrating on the stage of American Bandstand, flailing about as though possessed.
This is how it would happen, just as it had at Sodom and Gomorrah, just as it had at the fall of Rome: all the sins of the flesh, the drinking and gluttony and adultery, the unnatural couplings, the orgies, the idolatry, everything was coming to pass just as the Bible predicted. Soon, very soon, we believed, Christ would return. Weren’t we already seeing the final preparations, the crime and disregard for God’s law, the wars and famines, earthquakes and persecution of the chosen people?
We awaited the Rapture, longed for it, prayed for it, several times a day looked to the sky to be the first to see the clouds separate, the golden light shine through, Christ descend with his army of angels. “Please, God,” we prayed, “come now and deliver us from this world of despair, this den of evil, fly us to Heaven to live forever in the light of your love.”
We were prepared, ready to enter our new bodies, to hear our names called, to receive our rewards. We would leave the nonbelievers behind to face the Tribulation—that time when the Antichrist would make himself known (even now, we believed, he may be alive, biding his time, eating and drinking with mortal ease), when every man, woman and child must be branded or tattooed on the wrist or forehead with 666—the Mark of the Beast. The Seven Seals would be opened, false prophets perform wondrous signs and miracles, and for seven years those yet willing to denounce Satan would be tormented and tortured beyond seeming human endurance. Even the Jews would turn to Christ, and for doing so would incur the greatest outpouring of Satan’s wrath.
Until that time, true Christians must gird their loins with abstinence from worldly things, lest they too become mesmerized by the profane offerings of Satan bent on increasing his army, determined to take as many as he could with him in his final fall into the fires of hell. Each day presented new trials and temptations—lies to tell, money to covet, bodies to lust after. To be free of all desire was to be free of potential sin.
Having left Luke’s presence, I thought I might exist in a state blessed by moral continence. I was twelve, and I had no idea what the world might yet lay on the table before me; I never imagined that what might tempt me was not desire for wine or food, money or sex, but desire for something even more insidious: some sense of myself as a girl becoming a woman, coming to age in a landscape empty of anything that might define her worth except as a good daughter and future wife.
These were my horizons: to remain virtuous, to marry a modest man, to provide him with a clean house and an attractive body, to bear his children and raise them accordingly. To want anything else was an act