Oh well, I thought to myself, it’ll be over in two minutes.
Dutifully, I stepped from my pew and held out my hand to the man in the pew before me. He took my hand in two of his, looked me deeply in the eye, and said, “How nice it is to have you here.”
I was confused. He didn’t know me.
The woman next to him took my hand. “We’re so very glad to have you with us today.” Maybe I was wrong; maybe I did know these people from somewhere after all. Ours is a tiny town, placed at the end of a long peninsula out into the ocean. Might I have seen these people at the school, perhaps? Maybe the store?
We were thirty seconds into the greeting period. Another man took my hand. “It’s a real pleasure to see you here this morning. How are you?”
“Um, fine.”
Around me, people had debouched from their pews and jammed the aisles, hugging one another, shaking hands, kissing, laughing.
What was going on? This was like nothing I had experienced before in a church, or in a synagogue for that matter. It went on and on. By the time the pastor waved us back to attention, seven or eight minutes had passed, and I was ten pews away from my seat. I’d been greeted—truly hailed—by twenty people, each equally delighted to have me—me!—here at church with them. Also, somehow, by that time, I was greeting them back as though I knew them!
This was cordiality of a quality I had never experienced before in a holy setting. It was beyond mere amiability. Something else was active here, something else was—well—something else was walking in those aisles.
I sat back down. I recalled my seminarian past and remembered Jesus and that unnamed disciple, whom Jesus loved the best. I’d always been interested in that fellow, whom the evangelist John fails to name: Who was that man? Most scholars assume that he was John himself, but suddenly I had a new idea of who else he might be. Though a stranger, I had just been sincerely welcomed by this Christian community. Maybe that disciple, the one who is unnamed, can’t be named. Maybe that disciple can’t be named because no one knows him yet. Maybe that unknown disciple, whom Jesus loves the best, is always just the newest one to come.
We were a mere fifteen minutes into the service, and—the newest one to come—I felt a hook sink in, which is a metaphor appropriate to our fisherman community. Peter was trolling for me, and I was caught.
But I am a Jew!
I admonished myself: Dikkon, you are a Jew. This Christianity stuff is not meant for you. This whole Christianity stuff is—well, I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t for you.
But then why am I here?
There was that hook in my mouth. I could feel it.
So what was I to do? Could I shake myself free of the hook?
After only fifteen minutes at this church I could see myself shaking up our family’s entire existence. Everything would need to change.
Dikkon, I said to myself, what’s wrong with you? Get a grip!
But Channa—I pointed this out to myself—Channa was deeply interested to volunteer as a counselor with a pregnancy help center, Care Net. While going through the training, which included a practical introduction to Christian theology regarding how a counseling volunteer might interact with a frightened young woman, Jewish Channa asked the director how someone who is not Christian could possibly do this job. Channa wanted to help these clients. How could she do so if she didn’t have the faith that the director believed was essential? The director responded that it was a good question and she was praying about it. At the time, Channa took this response to mean, “I’m thinking very seriously about it.” But—really—it meant much more than that.
For me, of course, intellectual diffidence had always been the comfortable cloak that protected me from the impact of any big new concept that might come swaggering up and force me to alter my ideas. All my intellectual arrangements were precisely set in their careful places, like object d’arte on my mantel piece, to be regarded with satisfaction.
I have a PhD after all!
Yes, I had begun this March morning by crossing our road to this church, but I was not consciously aware of any hankering I might have for some swaggering new idea with its ruffian insistence that I pay attention!
A woman—not Channa—once challenged me thus: “You’re so cerebral, Dikkon. The highest compliment you can pay anything is that it’s interesting! Interesting, ha! Why don’t you ever do something instead?”
Hooked, now I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know how to wonder about how.
Next in the service came prayer requests. The pastor knew of some, and others were raised from the floor. I listened to them all: this person had decided finally to have the operation, and it was scheduled for next week; that person was traveling to see grandchildren; another was struggling because the pains had returned; a ten-year-old requested prayers for her teacher who had a cold; one man tearfully thanked the congregation for its prayers for his son, an army rifleman deployed in Iraq, whom the father reported to be in greater spirit now than he had been before, when the father had first solicited prayers.
For ten minutes, we discussed the medical and emotional urgencies of the congregation. This, too, was new to me. Who were these people—what was this congregation—that it should so commonly share these intimate details?
The world Channa and I knew shared such details neither so publicly nor so effortlessly. The world we knew—partially Jewish, partially secular—that world validated Thoreau’s statement that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
I myself lived a life of quiet desperation. And yet, in this church this morning, I sensed that these people around me, somehow or other, these people around me were free from quiet desperation.
From their prayer requests, I knew they had troubles, plenty of them. They spoke about their troubles out loud in this place—odd enough. But by doing so, they invited their community to support them in their troubles. I watched the faces of the others who were listening to the prayer requests. Suddenly, I had a new thought.
Regarding those others who were listening, they did not appear to be unnerved by the troubles of the others, or embarrassed to hear of them. Perhaps—it suddenly occurred to me—those others instead were grateful to be trusted to help, to be given the opportunity to help.
About that, theologically, here’s what stunned me. That whole dynamic of support within a community would make sense only if it were under the aegis of a God who personally knew these individuals and who personally cared. Otherwise the whole dynamic could not work.
Now the pastor gathered us into prayer. Responding to the requests, the pastor was plainspoken in his prayer. Completing my theological astonishment, he prayed as though he were speaking, seriously but familiarly, with a trusted, knowledgeable, and wise counselor before whom all the details might usefully be laid.
But how could God—actual God—know us personally? It did not compute.
We were twenty-five minutes into the service, maybe thirty. After the prayers, we made an offering, and we sang one more hymn. The church had a good choir of local singers with a few particularly graced voices; it was led by a woman who was evidently the pastor’s wife and who played the piano. I was grateful to see one face in the choir I knew, a lobsterman friend. Then, finally, we settled down to hear the pastor’s sermon, which—I learned later—is called a “message” at this church, a much more downscale and modest term than what I had been accustomed to using as a youngster.
At that time, as a Jew, I believed Jesus was a wise man, a stimulating teacher, etc., etc., but that he wasn’t, you know, a manly man. In my understanding of him at that time there was something too elusive, too ethereal: he wasn’t like the rest of us men are. The rest of us men—if you’re a man, you’ll know this, and if you’re a woman, you will too—we men run on die-hard batteries of sex and competition. Whatever smooth ways we have learned in our lives, those are just ways that advantageously channel our power and keep us out of social troubl
e. Whoever Jesus may have been to those who “got it” about him, he was fey to me.
Yet here was this pastor, preaching from 1 Peter. Later, he told me it must have been part of God’s plan, but that very Sunday morning he broke off from his prepared remarks and made an analogy that turned upon army discipline. In the course of his discursion, I learned he had come to the pastorate after a fourteen-year career as a master sergeant and jumpmaster in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. Here was a man who had trained to the peak of perfection in leading and protecting men who jump out of airplanes into combat, and he spoke of being called by Jesus instead to preach.
You may be sure his résumé caught my attention.
Pastor Dan delivered a thirty-minute message that was intelligent, direct, biblical, and plain. He was not hortatory; he was inviting. All together, his message was a compellingly attractive occurrence, and others of them have been so since; he is a winsome master of homiletics.
One thing that both thrilled and mystified me: in that message, Pastor Dan made reference to several verses from the Hebrew Bible, known to his congregation as the Old Testament. He incorporated the experience of the Jews into his New Testament message as naturally as one incorporates salt into eggs. I felt disoriented. Here was a Baptist preacher who took Torah seriously and who placed it, with accurate nuance, in its proper context!
What was I to do?
There came one final hymn, and then the service ended with what I have learned is the pastor’s signature exhortation, “Have a great week in the Lord!”
Ninety minutes into my acquaintance with this pastor, I felt compelled to confess to him. Not that I expected absolution; I didn’t know much about Baptists, but I knew I shouldn’t expect that.
During the pastor’s introduction, before the service began, he had invited any visitors to fill out a card. This I never do. However, after the service, I got one of the cards and filled it out. Then, instead of slinking out the door—this I always do—I approached him, handed him my visitor card, and introduced myself. Awkwardly, I blurted something about being Jewish, and living right across the road, and wanting—maybe—some time to speak with him, and would that be all right?—all in one sentence. “That would be fine,” he responded. We had a vigorous conversation of ten minutes—oddly, it felt as though he already knew me—and then I hastened myself home in a hurry.
A half hour later, I concluded my excited report to Channa by saying, “I’m going to call him sometime,” meaning later. Knowing her diffident husband and aware, therefore, of what I meant, Channa said, “No, call now.”
Pastor Dan answered my first ring, and without preamble, he said, “Hi, Dikkon. I was sure you would call this afternoon.” How had he been sure? How had he pronounced my name correctly?
We made a date for a visit to our home. I assumed it would be a visit of half an hour for a cup of tea and a cookie. I assumed it would have a cool, New England austerity about it. Not so. Three hours after Pastor Dan sat down on our couch, he had elicited the details of both Channa’s and my spiritual journeys. Also, he had offered a first answer to my plaint, “But still I don’t get it about Jesus.”
“Jesus,” he said, “is the love in the fellowship.”
“Oh!”
I said no more, but I made what was the beginning of a connection. That’s who had been passing among the pews.
Goodness.
What a predicament.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
During the next several months, Channa and I became regular attendees at South Point Baptist Church. The posture we took with ourselves was that we were attending church across the road merely because we liked being there and the people were welcoming and the preacher was dynamic and the commute was short and the messages were a mixture of Torah and the New Testament. And, after all, we didn’t need to be Christians to go there.
We also began to develop friendships with Christians—of course, just because they were there. While our new friends had their individual personalities and problems, of course, as a general characteristic they seemed to brood less and to keep their chins up more than we were accustomed to experience among the denizens of our skeptical, sophisticated, worldly, Jewish circle.
As I had experienced at church that first Sunday, our new friends were entirely open about their problems. I was shut about our problems. My understanding was that our problems were not to be spoken of until we had solved them . . . and not then, either, because we had solved them. Channa is a much more natural sharer than I am, but even she was accustomed to employ a decorous reserve when discussing our troubles.
I particularly remember an electrician who wired our barn office: he cast off downheartedness when he was blue. He just—cast it off. When questioned about this odd nonchalance, he reported to me that he gave his troubles over to the Lord. “God’s in charge,” he averred, “not me.”
How charmingly innocent, I remember thinking.
And then I remember thinking: But what if he’s right?
One day I woke with an idea. It had formed itself during a dream, the sort of dream one retains after awakening. I was excited because this idea seemed to be a breakthrough. I didn’t speak of it to Channa right then; I needed time to let my idea rise, like bread when left alone in a warm spot. It was Sunday. The church would be just such a comfortable nook.
After church, Channa prepared dinner and then nestled into a corner of the couch with her Charles Colson book and a glass of wine. She wore a fitted red cotton blouse with a scoop neck, decorated with gold threading around its neck and wrists, and she wore clinging black velour pants—as always, both colorful and simple at the same time. Her earrings were dangling gold and onyx ones I had bought her for a recent birthday—pretty against her neck.
I came in from mulching the gardens for winter and sat down in the rocking chair, rather winded. “I’ve thought of something.”
Channa put down her book and looked at me over her glasses. “Yes?”
“This has to do with Jesus. I think I’m getting it.”
Channa removed her glasses and bedded them among the black curls on the top of her head. “Tell me.”
The house smelled good from cooking. It was autumn, the leaves were at their peak of gorgeousness before dropping for the winter, the day was windy and bright. None of the children were at home just then, so it was comfortable to discuss these things in the living room, things that were always on our minds but especially so after church.
I was quiet for a moment. Outside, a brisk, dry wind stirred the trees. Soon enough, the year would hunker down, draw in on itself, prepare to be still; it was time for us to focus.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “Jesus is like the translation, that’s what I’m thinking.” I spoke slowly. I wanted to present my idea clearly, so Channa would understand. “I was thinking this when I woke up. I never got it about Jesus before. God, sure, I could get it about God. That’s one of the things I liked about Judaism. You didn’t need a translation. You could wrestle with God in the desert, cheek to cheek, sweat to sweat. Or talk with Him outside your tent, like Abraham. It’s very manly, Judaism, that way. You don’t need Jesus in between you.” I laughed.
I sat in the rocking chair but did not rock. “What I’m thinking now is that it turns out God is just too ungraspable for us mere humans. We all of us yearn to touch God, to grab hold of Him for dear life.”
I looked at Channa, who nodded. “You know how a youngster shakes and pummels his father?” I smiled, remembering wrestling with James in our Connecticut house. “Like when your son is angry or scared, and he needs to know you’re stronger than he is, no matter how hard he struggles in your arms?”
“Yes.”
“We’re like the youngsters. But we can’t get our arms around God’s neck. It’s too far to reach. God’s too—other. We’ll get burned if we actually touch God. So what we need is exactly what God gave to us. He gave us Himself in a way that we can grasp Him and struggle with Him. He gave
us Himself, but as one of us. He made Himself man but was actually God at the same time. That is, God became Jesus.
“So Jesus is the translation. He’s God we can grapple with. And when we do, we are held so tight by Him that we know—we absolutely know—there’s something stronger and bigger and more powerful than we are, no matter how angry or frightened we are, and that the stronger and bigger Thing loves us enough to wrestle with us, and to test us, and that we are therefore safe.”
Channa thought about this, sipped from her glass, and then she said, “That’s very good. But the way you describe it is a man thing. I like it, and I think you’re right—for you. We women don’t fight so much, I don’t think. We want to protect and be protected.”
“There’s nothing about Jesus that isn’t protective. That’s one of the foundations.” I stood up. “I’ll have wine too.” I returned from the kitchen with the liquid, deeply red, in my glass. Rich, fragrant: maybe this was what they drank at the Last Supper.
“And here’s the other side of it. Much as we want to wrestle with God, and we have Jesus instead to wrestle with, we also hate that we need His protection. We want to do everything all on our own. So we hate Jesus as much as we love Him, and we kill Him. But we can’t get rid of Him—the guy just won’t stay dead. And that fact proves He was God after all, in the first place. Then there’s nothing left for us to do but to worship Him.”
I looked at Channa. She was taking it in. I like it when she takes it in.
“I used to think I understood God. All you need to do, I used to think, is you just listen to what the prophets say, and you read about them in the Bible, and you interpret history as being God’s message. And the sum of those things is God. That’s what I used to think.
“But what’s happening to me now is that God is getting harder to understand for me, not easier. And as He gets harder, Jesus is stepping forward for me. Because He is more necessary now than ever, as the translation.”
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 20
