It turns out the picture I had in mind was not in fact of Papo, but was of Uncle Ralph. The first time I saw him after my mom’s hurried description was at a baby dedication at church. I sat perfectly still in my chair, only moving my eyes, too scared to say anything. I started to sweat, and despite my utter horror, in the back of my mind I worried about it showing up on my gray dress. Church was a strange and mysterious place, and so when I saw my dead Papo, it didn’t cross my mind that I might be confused about who that man was. My first thought was that the dead had been raised again. I ran—too rationally, I think—through the options of what this could mean. First, the rapture may have occurred and somehow that led to dead people walking about. Second, perhaps I was the only one seeing him—no one else was acting strange or surprised—and he had come back, or down, or whatever, to give me faith or otherwise fill up a lack in my soul. Third, maybe I had died and was in heaven. I suppose that I should have been disappointed that there weren’t many mansions or streets paved with gold, but I had the vaguest sense of relief that heaven was exactly like earth.
“Mom.” I finally forced the word out.
“Soph. We’re supposed to be praying.” The presence of the Lord was there, thick and heavy, the pastor told us. We were giving the Lord time to have his way.
“Momma. Why is Papo sitting over there.” My voice was shaky and I would have been crying if I weren’t so scared.
“Papo is dead, now shush.”
“I know, but he’s sitting over there, by the Litherlands.” In an effort to quiet me, Mom glanced up.
“That’s Uncle Ralph. He’s here to see Ruth’s baby get dedicated.”
I waited for the relief that should have come with that knowledge to flush my body. But it didn’t and the terror crushed down on me with even more force now that it was unexplained. The altar call came after the sermon. All my friends went down to the front to confess their sin of pride, but I didn’t. I tried to follow them. Even though I consider myself too full of anxiety and too lacking in confidence to ever be seriously threatened by pride, I always went down, to keep up appearances and in the off-chance that there was unconfessed pride that I didn’t know about. This time, I stayed in my seat, keeping the old bald man in my line of vision, pleading to God that no one would have a prophetic word that would expose my lingering terror to the whole congregation.
3 comments:
This is beautiful. It sort of reminds me of what I like in Peace Like a River (i.e. a description of Pentecostalism from an awe-filled child's perspective--neither fully embracing, nor rejecting).
The relief that heaven is just like earth makes a ton of sense. I wonder where this concern comes from--from an ecstatic vision of Christianity that makes you imagine community dropping away in heaven? I wonder if Calvinism's lack of analogy between God and man (our senses of justice, among other things are quite different) could lead to this fear as well.
Or an incomplete understanding of the Beatific vision. As a child, I always found fear of eternally burning in hell to be a much more effective incentive than heaven--even if there were mansions to be had. But is there is a way to make the idea of heaven both honest and attractive to a child?
I think you're right that we need to be able to predicate terms or attributes analogically of God and man to be comfortable with the idea of heaven. What if the terms meant exactly the same thing, as in Scotus' doctrine of univocity? Would that creep us out even more? It seems that we want to preserve at least a little mystery.
It makes sense to me... it's easy to imagine pain, and not having what you love (since everyone has experienced both of those, at least to some extent) and it's easy to be afraid of that.
It's much harder to imagine anything better than what you love.
What is a baby dedication?
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