For a moment the vision of her garden paradise distracted her thoughts, but then a breath of air brought her the distinctive scent of Earl Grey tea, and she was pulled back. Sunshine, tea, a clean window, thriving, green plants and a promising plot of well-tilled earth couldn’t drive the melancholy from her heart.
John would forgive the sin. At least she hoped he would. But the silence .... Every day it grew more foul, and every day she tried harder to believe that if she ignored it long enough it would go away. But she wasn’t nearly wicked enough to suppress the voice of her conscience, and it cried out day after day, insisting, never yielding, never accepting any excuses for long.
With a deep breath she set her mug on the table. It had to end, and it had to end now. But a phone call wouldn’t do, and she feared her resolve would weaken by the time John came home. She had to end it right his minute, one way or the other.
She reached for her stationery and addressed a letter to John at the office. It would take two days to get there, which gave her a firm deadline, and no turning back.
* * *
The kitchen phone didn’t ring loud enough to be heard over the sewing machine, so it wasn’t until 5:30 that Jillian got the news from the answering machine that John had to take a client out to dinner, but that he would be home in time for the meeting with Wayne and Amy. Jillian had hoped to tell him her secret over his favorite dish, but that was ruined now. It would have to wait.
At least it gave her more time to clean up for their guests, and maybe prepare a nice appetizer.
Chapter 5 – Peering into Mysteries
“Amy, what an attractive outfit,” she said, barely suppressing her joy at the sight of her at the front door. Amy was single, not very attractive, and desperately wanted to marry.
Amy looked down at herself, pleased at the compliment.
“Do you think so?” she asked as she came in and gave Jillian a hug. “What do you think it is?” she asked again, stepping back a pace. “Is it the color, or the cut, or what?”
“Hmm,” Jillian said, putting her finger and thumb to her lip and chin, eyeing the dress with professional detachment. “I think it’s the cut around the waist, which makes a nice contrast with your hips, and the modest slit in the back. But the neckline is very good for you, too,” she added, grabbing the slim collar with her free hand and giving it a tug.
“Where did you get it?”
“Well, I splurged and had it made. There’s this shop over on ....”
Her voice trailed off as she heard the sound of a car door slamming. She looked at Jillian and shrugged.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Jillian said with a friendly wink.
It was John’s car, and Wayne’s was right behind him. By the time they came to the door, Amy had excused herself to the kitchen and put together some of the things Jillian had prepared for the evening.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” John said after a kiss. “I had to be positively rude to get out when I did. MacPherson can talk the leg off a chair.”
“Late to John is on time to most other people,” Jillian explained to Wayne as she caught John’s eye and gave him a “what were you thinking?” look.
“Come into the living room,” John said. “Can I take your jacket?”
Wayne noticed that Amy was dressed nicely and decided to keep his jacket on, although he loosened his tie at John’s insistence. Jillian found that Amy had already arranged the freshly baked cheese balls on a tray, so she brought them into the living room while John offered drinks. Amy accepted a glass of white wine and Wayne tried his best not to look too longingly at the bottle of Glen Fiddich on the corner bar. John laughed and poured them both an inch.
After a few minutes of casual, get acquainted talk, Wayne asked John and Jillian some pointed questions about why they had joined St. Anne’s.
“We know Ed and Anne,” Jillian began, “which was good enough for me. But don’t get John started on this unless you’re ready for a long theology lesson.”
Wayne looked at John with interest, but John shook his head, almost sadly. “It’s actually quite a short theology lesson. I wanted to join the catholic church, and neither Rome nor the Orthodox appealed to me, for various reasons.”
“And what makes a church ‘catholic,’ John?” Wayne asked with that tone of voice that said he wanted to compare notes.
“Faithfulness to the creeds, the liturgy and apostolic succession. That sort of thing.”
“And do you think St. Anne’s is faithful to the historic faith?”
“St. Anne’s, or Fr. Devlin?”
Amy laughed and rolled her eyes.
“How about both, since you bring it up,” Wayne said.
“Well, confessionally the Episcopal church has stayed basically true to the Christian faith, but there seems to be a prevailing attitude that encourages lip-service to the creeds and heart-service to the world. I wouldn’t say that I’ve found many genuinely converted people at St. Anne’s, and that troubles me.”
“But John, not everyone converts as an adult, like you,” Jillian objected.
“I don’t mean that. It doesn’t seem to me that conversion is a one-time thing and then you’re done with it. There ought to be an attitude of conversion – of seeking the will of God for your life and doing it.”
“And changing to do it,” Amy added. “I know what you mean, John. It’s as if people don’t really care what God wants. They just say the words, and we hope they believe most of it, but it doesn’t have any practical impact on their lives.”
Wayne nodded his head thoughtfully for a moment and set down his glass on the coffee table.
“What kind of impact would you expect a real conversion to have on people, John? Practically speaking.”
Jillian immediately thought of her own “conversion” to Christianity, such as it was. John’s struggle through agnosticism and into Christianity had brought her face to face with the kind of “reality” Wayne was asking about. It had torn John’s life apart from the roots. She followed along and went through confirmation with him, but she wondered if she had been truly converted, or if she was just riding on John’s coat-tails.
Jillian remembered the way books about the craft had excited her in her pagan days. She had longed to learn a new ritual, or just watch someone else perform one. Her heart had burned within her as she heard stories from other pagans about their spiritual experiences.
She looked at her hands in her lap and in her mind’s eye she saw her Book of Shadows there. She could feel it, smell it, and still experience that longing to pierce the mysteries she had hoped to write in it.
Back then she had been in love with an idea. Back then she had been converted.
She had met John right at a time when Wicca was starting to lose its luster. She had hoped to find something deep and meaningful in paganism, but it was starting to feel more like a cheap imitation. Following John into the church seemed like an easy thing to do.
But she never felt the zeal that John experienced. She never felt about Christianity the way she had once felt about Wicca. It didn’t excite her. She was sure it was her fault: her heart had become numb to religion. She had been wooed, betrayed and left at the altar by an idol, and her heard was too hard to love another god.
She’d been feeling that way for months, but now she wondered if there was another answer. Maybe she had never truly embraced the faith of Christ. Maybe St. Anne’s was just the right place for a cold, unconverted heart. For somebody who only wants a veneer of religion as a salve.
They were not entirely new thoughts to Jillian, but they came into focus with Wayne’s question, and she listened with a well-tuned ear to John’s answer.
“Practically? Do you mean something I can measure, like contributions?” He paused for a moment, but Wayne offered no help, so he continued. “I don’t think that’s getting at the root of the matter. What I expect is religious affection. A love for the things of God.”
He paused for a moment an
d glanced at his book shelf, which was in the other corner of the room, near his eye-sore of a chair. He couldn’t make out the titles from that distance, but he didn’t need to. A burgundy and white dust cover caught his eye and sparked a thought.
“The Puritans were always talking about the ‘sweetness’ of this or that doctrine. You get the impression that they enjoyed their religion. It roused their mind and their heart. They were passionate about what they believed. That’s what I expect out of a converted heart. I can’t tell you how that passion will play out in real life, but it seems to me you can tell when it’s missing.”
Jillian put a hand to her breast as if she wanted to hide her heart. Yes, the passion was missing, and she knew it quite well. She wondered if John suspected.
“But how about you, Wayne?” John asked. “What excites you about your faith?”
Wayne took a sip of his whisky and settled more deeply into the couch.
“Have you ever read any Hal Lindsey, John?”
John scowled and Amy suppressed a giggle.
“Just a little,” he said in a sour tone.
“More than enough, eh?” Wayne laughed. “No, I don’t think much of that stuff either. But I wanted to set up a contrast in your mind. What effect do you think people like Hal Lindsey have on the mind of the church?”
John looked both puzzled and slightly embarrassed. It was a perfectly reasonable question, and he wondered why it had never occurred to him. Amy rescued him with an apt question.
“You’re an architect, aren’t you, John?”
“No, a draftsman,” he said, annoyed by the distraction, but when he saw the look on her face he realized she was expecting him to make a deeper connection.
“Oh, I see,” Jillian said, reading the subtlety of Amy’s suggestion. “If you think the world’s going to end in ten years, it influences what kind of structures you build.”
Almost immediately a series of scenes from various design textbooks raced through John’s head. Flying buttresses. Cathedrals. Grand, stone structures that had stood for hundreds of years, and would probably stand for hundreds more. Modern structures were things of rice paper and paint by comparison.
Jillian’s memory was stirred as well. She thought for a moment of a childhood trip to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. She remembered the awe she felt in the presence of that majestic church, and for a moment she recaptured that ineffable feeling, the longing to peer into mysteries, the sense of being part of something that was there before she was born, and would be there after she was gone, and against which all her efforts were vain, but into which it would be pure joy to fit, if she could, like a leather-bound volume on a scholar’s shelf.
It was an overpoweringly sacred feeling, and the memory of it sparked another image. She was in a Wiccan meeting. She almost couldn’t contain the thrill she felt when a friend read the oath of initiation into an ancient Egyptian cult. It was as if something from the past had been made present, and would be resurrected anew, bringing some hidden power with it. But she also remembered the doubts she had felt that same night. The cult had passed away, and the rite was uncertain. Did it really convey the spiritual reality it promised, or was it just a silly dream?
What she felt that night with her Wiccan friends was similar to what she felt in St. Patrick’s, but only in the way that a shadow is similar to the reality. Being in that cathedral made her long to be part of the stream of tradition it represented. It was something secure and tangible. An anchor. A reference point for the rest of life. A surety in the midst of confusion.
“And that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Amy said, drawing her back to Hal Lindsey and church architecture. “If you think the world’s going to end soon, you plan for it. Planned obsolescence may work for computer software, but it’s a bad idea for a religion.”
Obsolescence. That was the word, Jillian thought. The mysteries she had longed to unveil as a pagan were obsolete. They had worn out.
“To get back to what you said earlier, John,” Wayne said, “there are Christians out there who have that same passion the Puritans had, but it’s misdirected. I picked on Hal Lindsey only because I figured you’d have heard of him. Believe me, he’s Mr. Orthodoxy compared to some of the nuts in the church nowadays.”
“But what does this all have to do with education?” John asked.
Wayne laughed. “Why do you think the Puritans had that passion for the things of God, John? Or let me put it this way: about how long are the sermons at St. Anne’s?”
“Ten or fifteen minutes, which is usually more than I can stand.”
“Why? Jillian’s told me you’ll sit in that chair over there and read for hours on end.”
John glanced at his books and shook his head. There was no comparison. “Fr. Devlin has nothing to say. It’s tepid drivel.”
“Have you ever listened to decent sermon? A long one?”
John scratched his head and considered.
“Nope. I’ve read a few.”
“And you, Jillian?” Wayne asked.
“I had my share of long sermons growing up as a Catholic. But I wouldn’t say it was a pleasant experience.”
Wayne nodded. “Do you know there are churches around here that have 45 minute sermons every Sunday, and mid-week services besides?”
John shook his head and looked at his watch. The evening was getting on, and he was tired.
“Wayne, what does this have to do with education?,” he asked, but as soon as he said the words he saw the smiles on Jillian’s and Amy’s faces.
“What does a sermon have to do with education?” John repeated in a slightly mocking tone.
“Can you imagine a Puritan asking that question, John?” Amy asked.
“No,” he said. “But I don’t want to hear Fr. Devlin drone on for 45 minutes.”
“Neither do I,” Wayne agreed, “and that’s not my point. My point is this: where there’s real education going on in a sermon, the time flies. It’s enjoyable. An hour is no hardship. But when the preacher is just getting things off his chest, or spouting talk-show quality platitudes about being nice and lovey dovey, or telling us that we all need to feel this or feel that, then five minutes is tedium beyond belief.”
“Sure,” John said. “It’s like college. A good professor can make you wish the lecture was two hours every day.”
“But more than that,” Jillian added, making a connection with her experience in St. Patrick’s, “he drew you in to something that seemed bigger and more exciting than the bare facts. Each new piece of information was like a prized piece of a puzzle. You listened carefully to fit it all together, and at the end of class you had an image of something that made the world a bigger place ... something that put it all in perspective.”
Jillian allowed the image to fill her mind. She tried to imagine how it could fit together – the thrill of unfolding mystery, the grandeur of St. Patrick’s, and the image of a celestial city, painted in her mind by a skilled priest. And then she would be called to the altar to participate in the greatest mystery: the One in whom all the pieces fit together would offer Himself to her under the appearance of bread and wine.
She shivered.
But it was all lost on John. His practical mind was wondering how they could get someone else to preach at St. Anne’s, or how they could convince the worship committee to schedule even a half hour for the sermon.
“Maybe it would help if you actually saw what good preaching could be like,” Amy said, pulling a brochure out of her purse and handing it to John.
“‘Christian Apologetics in a Post-Christian World?’” he read aloud, with obvious skepticism. “What does this ...”
Wayne interrupted. “Okay, the theme isn’t exactly on target, but that’s not the point. If you’ve never been to a Christian conference before, you’ve simply got to go. This one’s a Friday evening and a full Saturday packed with solid, serious teaching. You’ve got to experience it. We can’t talk about Christian educat
ion until you’ve seen what it can be.
“But I warn you,” Wayne continued. “Once you realize what’s out there, Fr. Devlin’ sermons are going to be even more intolerable than they are now.”
* * *
They talked with Wayne and Amy far into the night – much later than John liked to stay up on a weeknight, so they hurried to sleep after seeing their guests out and tossing a few dishes in the sink. Jillian’s preoccupation with thoughts of the night’s conversation made her forget that she needed to talk to John, so when he said he wanted to slip off to bed, she didn’t object, and when she remembered it was too late.
As she put on her nightgown and slid under the covers next to her sleeping husband, she was glad she had mailed the letter. The issue was going to be settled, one way or the other, and it gave her peace to know the internal battle was over. One way or another the secret was out. But she had only one more evening to talk to John. The letter would surely arrive by Friday.
Chapter 6 – Jillian Leaves
The coffee pot on the lamp stand next to his drafting table reached that final stage where steam seemed to blow out of the top like an old locomotive. John picked up his cobalt-blue cup – a match to his cup at home – and poured the first dose from the two-cup pot.
Someone stepped half-way into his cubicle and put a few papers in his in-box. John was facing the other way.
“Good morning, John,” she said.
“Good morning, Susan,” he said, turning around in his swivel chair. “Some coffee?” he offered.
“Not today thanks,” she said with a smile and something like a wink.
Dating Jillian had given John a completely new appreciation for Susan, the office New Age nut. She was almost a caricature of some of Jillian’s most endearing qualities, as if the Mona Lisa had been cartooned by one of those for-hire artists on the boardwalk.
Jillian seemed to have the earthiness of a Druid, where Susan seemed to be crazy enough to worship a tree. Jillian had a studious knowledge of herbs and gardening, where Susan thought she was tapping into her Goddess power by drinking the right brand of Celestial Seasonings. Jillian was as honest as a spring rain, and as refreshing. It was frequently embarrassing to be around Susan when she decided to be honest, and almost always amusing.
The Five Lives of John and Jillian Page 15
