Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [15]
Religion completed the circle of Mary’s neatly contoured life. She joined the local Baptist church. There was prayer meeting on Wednesdays, and both morning and evening services on Sundays. Mary also taught Sunday school, which her children attended right up through high school. At home there were prayers at dinner—as the children got old enough, they would be called on to recite—and prayers before bedtime. Mary conducted a mini-Bible study session at home each day after school, complete with a small blackboard on which to list Bible verses. Mary encouraged her kids to “plant a seed,” urging Joy, the eldest and the first to go to school, to “tell the kids about Jesus.”
Her view of religion was eclectic, quilted from a variety of sources including the Southern Baptist roots of her earliest church experiences, her mother’s fire-and-brimstone admonitions, her own later church exposure, and the ubiquitous drone of evangelists on the religious radio station she loved to listen to. She relied solely on Christian-oriented books to guide her in child raising, and read little else.
She held certain beliefs sacrosanct: all humans are born sinners; original sin may be redeemed only through the transformative acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior, usually through baptism; the Bible is the revealed word of God and as such the unquestionable authority on pious or sinful conduct; Satan is a living presence of enormous power, capable of luring the unsuspecting victim into sin; an unrepentant sinner—which includes anyone who has not accepted Jesus Christ—faces eternal damnation. Conversely, those who accept Christ and lead godly lives will reunite with their loved ones for eternal life in Paradise.
These elements, an approximation of traditional orthodox Protestant doctrine, defined the realm within which Mary could ensure both her family’s safety and its immortality. Indeed, for Mary, accepting Christ was a way of finding self-acceptance. She used the Bible and its verses—one for every occasion—as sentinels against the fearsome agents of Satan, who she knew must be contriving to infiltrate her comfortable suburban bubble.
As it was for her mother before her, religion was a weapon of control, but Mary wielded it less like a general, more like a zealous shepherd.
She was comforted by the belief that God and his guardian angels would always keep her husband and children out of harm’s way. Yet a contradiction was always present: she admonished her children daily with the statement “God cannot protect you from Satan if you are disobedient.”
One evening a tearful Joy, then five years old, came to her mother. “I want to be saved,” the child pleaded. “I’m afraid I won’t go to heaven.” It was 7:30, but Mary insisted that Bob drive them to the church. Somewhere she had learned that a child was not accountable for her sins until twelve years of age, but she wasn’t taking any chances. At the church, Joy accepted Jesus as her savior and was baptized by the minister.
The missing link in all this was Bob, who resisted all of Mary’s efforts to get him baptized. He saw religion as based on ignorance at best, and founded on intimidation and fear. Characteristically, he tolerated it as long as it didn’t interfere with his life. He watched Mary’s emotional involvement with a kind of detached bemusement. He could never fathom the depths of her immersion, but he never chose to argue about it. And he never interceded when his children became involved. He reasoned that they were intelligent enough to draw their own conclusions.
Mary worried that Bob would be denied the kingdom of heaven, but, after initially making a pest of herself, she settled for subtle nudgings. (But she didn’t give up. When Bob suffered a painful ulcer attack in 1980 and required an operation, she accompanied him to Kaiser Hospital’s surgery prep room. As he was about to be wheeled away, Mary leaned over and asked, “Bob, do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?