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Show Moon -173 long silence, and then she wrote back saying I had disobeyed Jesus and was not a true believer after all. She never wrote me again, not even after I sent our wedding announcement. I saw that she'd been so loving with me for only one reason: to save my soul, which seemed to me an outrage, a kind of rape. But seen from the missionary position, so to speak, I suppose hers was the highest act of love. Why, though, had she felt it necessary to turn her back on me for all time? The loss was appalling. No one comes to her door when I knock. I feel a pang of disappointment, but then enormous relief. The yard beside her house slopes gently and I lie down on the grass, hold a sprig of thyme to my nostrils. The tomato plants are set in perfect rows, tied to fake bamboo rods set rigidly in the earth. Something, beans I suppose, are beginning to climb a series of strings attached to poles. The strings are perfectly aligned like the insides of a piano. Such order tires me. I do not understand how people can manage that symmetry, that absolute control. The fact is, I want my soul saved. That is, I want to find my Father, I want to find what's real, to go home, really home. But I can't bear it that Alice took me in for such an impersonal reason as converting me to Jesus and then abandoned me in His name. How could I ever be a Christian after that? There is also the problem of social and political embarassment. Jesus is associated with TV demagogues wearing diamond cufflinks, with book burning, sexual hypocrisy, Total Woman, corporal punishment. How to speak of Him in a world where the Intelligent-among whom I am supposed to be counted- have so little to say about God that might balance out the picture? And what happened to Mary, who spread out her arms over the candles like the wind on the stars and |
