In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [93]
I worked at these questions the way I had once worked at my father’s riddles, testing each word for truth, weighing the logic, taking into consideration the perspective. Why would God leave me in terror if I were honestly trying to be good? Man could only strive toward Christ’s example of perfection; as humans, we were inherently flawed—and so the hourly battle to keep our robes spotless. But if we were doomed by our Maker to sin, it seemed to me that the rules of the game were woefully unfair: the chances were good Christ would come during the time when you were successfully walking the straight and narrow, but what if He dropped from the sky during the one second or hour when your guaranteed failure was manifesting itself?
A Sunday school teacher once told us that even cheating the telephone company out of a dime was enough to send us to Hell. If Christ were to return at that moment, before we had time to hang up, acknowledge our sin and repent, we would be doomed to burn in Satan’s eternal fire.
And the pain that would be endured! For years I had listened, petrified, as one preacher after another detailed his version of perpetual punishment: a lake of fire into which the unsaved and unforgiven were cast screaming and writhing; souls tearing their hair, gashing themselves with bloody nails, forever devouring each other’s flesh with the teeth of cannibals.
The preachers gloated on the details. They loved to see the congregation bent forward and shivering, some with fear for their own souls, others with a kind of eagerness, as though they yearned to imagine what punishment awaited those who had spent their earthly lives drinking and fornicating while the forgiven had denied themselves the body’s pleasures. Burn, burn!
I knew that even to question God’s purpose was a weakness, a sin. To question his existence, hiding in one’s heart a broken faith, some fundamental doubt, would most certainly be enough to bring on damnation.
I closed my eyes against my thoughts. I imagined the fingers curling over the gaping wounds, the hands turning into fists, the fists themselves curling against wrists and drawing away, like the feet of the Wicked Witch disappearing beneath Dorothy’s fallen house.
No! I threw back my covers and fell to the floor. Forgive me, forgive me my doubt I will never question, never again ask for reason. Let only my heart lead my steps and never my mind. But even as I prayed, I knew something had changed. The driving fear seemed dulled, my actions mechanical, too well learned. For many nights to come I would find myself beside my bed, kneeling on the floor and praying to a god I was no longer sure would listen. I had betrayed Him with my thoughts, unable to control the workings of my brain any more than I could the desires of my body.
Slowly, over the next several weeks, the tenor of my prayers changed, settling into a kind of contract, an acquiescence of both faith and reason: if God could not take me while I searched for some truth, if the quest itself were a sin, then so be it. Whatever faith I had left, compromised as it was, was mine. I possessed it, had forged it. It was all that I could offer any man or god.
The full realization of this washed over me in the early hours of one morning’s prayers, and I felt as I had when baptized—fully submerged and floating, touched by grace. I fell into sleep, sagged against my bed, where my mother found me later that morning. She woke me for school, tenderly and without question. What I carried with me to the table, where I ate in silence, must have seemed to her a necessary burden. What my father saw as he handed my mother his empty pail and sat to unlace his boots, I’m not sure, but there was something that passed between us, understood and determined, and I knew then that what came after that morning would be between the two of us