The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  Jillian sat up slightly straighter in her chair. “What was that, father?” she asked, trying to accent the last word.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said as he glanced at her face. “But let’s try to look at these things objectively, Jillian. What do you have here? Two knives. Some brass carvings. Some candles. Some medallions. None of these are things that haven’t been used in worship at times.”

  A laugh erupted from somewhere deep inside her, but she managed to convert it into a gentle huff. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose,” she said aloud, her tone of voice betraying her mirth. “Yes, there have been ‘brass carvings,’ but not brass pentacles. And not medallions like this,” she said, holding up a silver image of a six-armed Goddess.

  “You might be surprised,” Fr Devlin said, reaching behind him for a magazine on his bookshelf and leafing quickly through the pages to a series of color photographs. “Take a look.”

  Jillian did, and she could barely believe her eyes. The article was about an archeological dig in Israel, and one of the objects unearthed at this presumed place of Jewish worship was a carved, stone statue, remarkably similar to her amulet.

  “Speak of the devil and she shall appear,” Jillian said quietly.

  “So it’s not quite as unusual as you think – having such things in a place of worship.”

  Jillian recalled something she had written in her Book of Shadows, more than two years ago. The divine is always manifested in masculine and feminine imagery, and where one image is denied, the other will try to come out. One of her Wiccan friends had taught her that the more patriarchal a religion, the more likely that Goddess worship would spring up to challenge or subvert it.

  “Okay, so maybe they did strange things in Israel, but that doesn’t mean we should do it in the church, does it?”

  “What I’m trying to say, Jillian, is that sometimes we can get more uptight about these things than God is, and more than He wants us to be. We create this image of a jealous God who is offended by anything outside of a very narrow, restrictive religion. Are you so sure that things are really that way? God’s people have always incorporated new things into their worship from the surrounding pagan cultures. Just think of Easter and Christmas!”

  Jillian nodded her head slightly, although it surprised her to hear these things from Fr. Devlin. He was a new priest, and she didn’t know him that well, but she specifically remembered a conversation where one of the members of the call committee referred to him as a conservative. But compared to what? she wondered.

  “So you don’t think I should worry about it?” she said aloud.

  He shook his head. “We’re not going to sacrifice children on the altar. You’re just going to show us how some other people manifest their faith in God.”

  Their faith in God? she wondered, and pulled back slightly with a trace of a scowl. Can he really believe that? Wicca is their rejection of God.

  She was just about to say something when her cell phone rang.

  “Pardon me, father,” she said as she retrieved the phone from her purse. “Business calls.”

  * * *

  The lunch, elegant and expensive as it was, didn’t bring in the new customer she had hoped for, so Jillian came home early and decided to prepare a nice meal for her and for John. Cooking kept her busy enough not to dwell on her disappointment, and allowed the feelings a chance to work themselves out.

  As the broth simmered on the stove, she sipped a mug of tea and absently picked at some of her in-door plants. The afternoon was getting along, and John would be home soon, so she set the table and started the rice and vegetables. Puttering around the kitchen eased away her tension, and she liked the opportunity to cook for John. He usually remembered to thank her for dinner, but it was more than that. There was something wholesome about it, and it made the world seem right, somehow.

  The chicken came out of the oven just as John’s car pulled up the driveway, so he had hardly taken off his jacket when it was time to sit down. The candlelit table was set with their finest china, and a bottle of chilled white wine sat in the center.

  John was duly surprised and appreciative, and fell to with vigor.

  They caught up on what they had each done that day, and Jillian recounted her disappointing lunch. John tried to encourage her, but Jillian shrugged it off and changed the subject.

  “Do you often think about having kids, John?” Jillian asked when they were halfway through their meal.

  They had agreed to avoid the fertile times of the month, which was quite a bit harder than the woman who taught them natural family planning had said it would be. After a little more than a year and a half of marriage, it was still working. John wanted to have children, but he was in no hurry. They were young, and he didn’t think they could afford kids just yet.

  “Every time I see you in that dress, or in your bathrobe, or in your aerobics outfit, or ...”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said, a little too seriously.

  John set his fork down and took her hand across the corner of the small kitchen table.

  “Is something bothering you?”

  “Huh? Oh, no. I just thought I’d bring it up again since it’s been a while.”

  With any other woman, John would have asked again to be sure there wasn’t some hidden agenda. Some women he’d known insisted on being asked twice before they answered a question. Jillian wasn’t that way. If she said nothing was bothering her, then nothing was bothering her. At least nothing that she knew about.

  John stabbed another piece of chicken with his fork.

  “I’d like to have children, but it can wait until you’re ready. Has anything changed that I should know about?”

  Jillian smiled, reached across the table and ran her fingers through his hair.

  “No, nothing’s changed. Just hurry up and finish your dinner.”

  John set his fork down.

  “It’s very good. But it can wait.”

  * * *

  The following Sunday afternoon they had to make a trip to St. Anne’s, and it caught Jillian in an odd mood. It seemed strange to have a business meeting on Sunday in the sanctuary. Not that she thought the place itself had any special sanctity. She often wished she could feel that way about the church, but the popular piety of St. Anne’s was neither Eucharistic nor formal.

  Her Wiccan outlook, which still peeped out from time to time behind the Christian exterior, wanted to find something sacred in every blade of grass and every dewdrop. That part of her didn’t need a church, because the whole earth was her church. Yet that had proven unsatisfying. If everything is holy, then nothing is really holy. But something ought to be set apart and sanctified. She wanted to feel that way about the church. But she never did.

  The place looked churchy enough, with the stone walls, stained glass and the big, red, wooden door. It reminded her of ancient churches from English mythology, as if St. Patrick or Arthur might find the style welcoming. But something wasn’t quite right. It was like an imitation of an ancient church. As if an architect had tried to copy the form but lost something important.

  No, Arthur couldn’t come to this church, and certainly not Patrick. He’d expect holy water, and incense, and reverence towards the altar.

  Jillian wanted the church to convey some of that sanctity to her, so she could carry it with her into the world. She didn’t yet love holiness for itself, but she was in love with the idea of holiness. She wanted to take the sacred into her heart and sanctify the rest of her life. Then she’d bring it all back to the sanctuary to be sanctified anew. Somehow it should all fit together into a beautiful tapestry.

  Hand in hand she and John walked in. He opened the wooden door noiselessly and they slipped quietly into the sanctuary. They sat in one of the middle pews and didn’t mind the silence. After a few formalities, the meeting got under way, five minutes behind schedule.

  After a perfunctory opening prayer, the uneventful minutes from the last meeting were approved, and eac
h of the church committees reported on their uninteresting program for the coming year.

  When “new business” came up, the woman in the pew directly in front of Jillian said, in a voice intended to be heard, “Here it comes. Every voters’ meeting, Wayne’s got to stir up something.”

  Mrs. Martin knew other people could hear her, and she looked around to see that they were dutifully nodding their heads or sniggering in agreement. John broke with the pack and showed his disapproval with a frown.

  “As some of you may know,” Wayne began, “my oldest will be going into kindergarten this fall. I’ve started looking around for school options, and there aren’t very many. I know several other parents who are in the same situation. We were talking about the possibility of starting a school, and St. Anne’s has the most likely facility in the neighborhood. With some modest changes to bring some of the classrooms up to code, we could be ready by fall.”

  He let that hang in the air for a minute, and then continued in a more serious tone. Almost lecturing, John thought. “We make certain promises to the parish children when we baptize them, and I don’t think those promises are consistent with packing them off to the government schools. Scripture says, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,’ so we can’t expect our children to be wise in the ways of the Lord if they are taught in a school system that systematically suppresses anything about the Christian faith.”

  Mrs. Martin had been fidgeting the entire time Wayne was speaking, but when she started moving her arms as well the president of the congregation couldn’t help but notice.

  “Are you going to make a motion, Wayne?” he asked.

  Wayne gave the president of the congregation a look that might have started a fight in a bar, but then his countenance softened and he shook his head.

  “It was my understanding that members had a right to discuss the reason for a motion before making it, but yes, I am going to make a motion, Mr. President. I move that St. Anne’s parish appoint an investigative committee of three people – myself, John Matthews,” John started at the mention of his name, “and Amy Brennan – to look into starting a parochial school.”

  Two hands shot up immediately. The president called on Mrs. Martin.

  “I’m against this motion,” she said in her most indignant voice. “This is just what’s wrong with some Christians today. We’re not supposed to cloister our children in our own, segregated, ‘Christian’ schools.

  “You can’t shelter children like that,” she continued. “They need to learn what the real world is like. They need to socialize with regular children. Besides, how else are they going to witness to the faith? No, I think this whole ‘Christian school’ movement is very un-Christian. And finally,” she added as she sat back down, “I doubt we have the money for the renovations.”

  Amy Brennan stood up, nervously, to speak in favor of the motion.

  “Whether we can afford it would be something the committee would look into, I suppose. But,” she turned in Mrs. Martin’s direction, “I think it’s inappropriate for you to characterize the whole Christian school movement as ‘un-Christian.’ And you speak as if the only ‘real’ children are to be found in secular schools ....”

  “She’s good,” John whispered to Jillian.

  “... And you use such charged words. ‘Cloister.’ ‘Segregated.’ Well I can use charged words too. The government schools are violent, vile and godless, and I wouldn’t send my children there. To me, it’s just a question of what other alternatives I have, and if St. Anne’s isn’t interested in helping members of the parish be responsible, Christian parents, then I don’t know what good it is.”

  Amy’s words carried Jillian back to a spring morning in her youth. She remembered the first time, in an elementary school history class on World War II, that she understood why men chose to go to war. It had always puzzled her before. Why leave your family? Why go where you could be killed? But something had stirred in her heart that day. She realized that some principles mattered – that some things were more precious than family, or peace, or even life. The romance of dying for a cause had never seemed so real to her as at that brief moment in Mrs. Beaton’s class.

  Whatever effect Amy’s words had on Jillian, they put an itch in Fr. Devlin’ pants, and he rose to reply.

  “Of course we want to help you be a responsible parent, Amy. But there are legitimate differences of opinion about how that’s to be done. And sometimes the people who advocate parochial schooling can get a holier-than-thou attitude towards Christians who choose to use the public schools.”

  “Were the puppet strings starting to pull there, father,” someone behind John muttered, to muted chuckles.

  Mrs. Martin seemed to think it was John who had spoken, and she stood up to speak, not waiting to be recognized by the congregational president.

  “So why are you involved in this conspiracy, John? You haven’t any children.”

  “John didn’t know anything about this until today,” Wayne said, speaking out of turn himself. “I thought he would be a good member of the committee precisely because he has no children, and because he hasn’t been around long enough to seem partisan.” A few people chuckled. “But mostly I recommended him because he knows about architecture and building codes, so he would be qualified to help us decide what we’d need to do to the facility.”

  John rose to speak. “I’m indifferent whether I serve on this committee, but it seems to me that it would be unreasonable to reject a motion that simply asks the congregation to consider a proposal – and, I might add, a proposal to do something that churches normally do. Churches do start schools, after all. It’s not as if Wayne is proposing to build a basketball court. So I speak in favor of setting up a committee, but I don’t care if I’m on it.”

  John’s comments seemed to settle the matter. The president was obviously relieved to get past such distasteful controversy and the meeting moved on to a discussion of the previous year’s snow removal contracts.

  Chapter 3 – The Hidden Box

  Visitors to the Matthews house immediately noticed an eyesore in the otherwise immaculate living room. The home had been Jillian’s before she and John married, and the furniture fit so well with the house, and the brass lamps, and the wooden beams, and with Jillian herself, that any intrusion seemed like an infection. Still, there it was. John’s plaid, fabric reading chair stuck out like a tuft of onions in a field of Kentucky bluegrass, even from its exile in the back corner.

  That was where John had staked his claim. They had sold all the furniture he had used in his apartment, except this chair, a book shelf, a reading lamp, and the computer table. These displaced Jillian’s smaller bookshelf and an assortment of indoor plants – basil, oregano, and chives – which were now nestled on the bay window sill in the kitchen.

  The small house was about as full as either John or Jillian wanted it to be, which was why they had contracted to build an addition onto the back. Aside from the problem of the chair, John’s mother’s eyesight was failing, and they expected she would have to move in before too long.

  John designed the addition himself: there would be a bedroom and bathroom just off the kitchen on one side, and another bedroom – a nursery, they hoped – off the master bedroom at the other end of the house. Once the additions were complete, the house would form a ‘U.’ John planned to build a brick patio in the space between, with plenty of flower boxes for Jillian’s herbs, and a vegetable garden. Construction was set to begin in a few weeks. It was going to be a strain on their finances, but they thought it was the right thing to do.

  In the meanwhile, the plaid chair ruled the corner, and that was where John settled himself and continued his study of the patriarchs. He was having a very difficult time with the Book of Job.

  As John dug into ancient mysteries, Jillian sat ten feet away on the couch, sketching some notes for her upcoming Sunday School class. It unsettled John to see her sitting there with her Wiccan tools in her lap, but it
wasn’t worth an argument.

  After more than 45 minutes of looking and pondering and thinking, she hadn’t made much progress. She knew more than enough to fill 40 minutes of class time, but she felt as if she was missing the big picture. Random facts – that’s all she had now. Bits of information, vaguely strung together, adding up to no overall message or point.

  “John,” she said after a few minutes, and then waited a full ten seconds for the sound to register in her distracted husband’s ears. “Do you think I should bring these things as props for my class?”

  John struggled with the irritation he always felt when he was pulled away from a train of thought, but this was something he wanted to talk about with Jillian.

  “You know I don’t like that stuff at all,” he said, evasively.

  She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean,” she said, slightly annoyed. “I’m not asking how you feel about these things. I want to know if you think there’s something wrong with taking them into the sanctuary as props for my presentation on Wicca.”

  John shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I’ve got reservations about the whole thing. Fr. Devlin is .... Well, I’m not sure what he’s trying to do with these classes on other religions. It’s not as if the parish is so well versed in Christianity that he’s run out of things to talk about.”

  Jillian shook her head. “Not everyone approaches an intellectual puzzle with your energy and determination, dear.”

  “You mean my obsession?” he asked with a wry grin.

  “I think you’re one or two notches below obsession,” she smiled reassuringly. “But you have to admit that you are ... different. Not many Christians know Thomas Aquinas, Hooker and John Calvin.”

  “Not many Christians know St. Paul and Moses, for goodness’ sake!”

  “We’re straying,” she said, taking a slow sip of her cinnamon apple tea. “I went to see Fr. Devlin about this, and he brushed it off. He even said that people have used these kinds of things in worship before.”