The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  “I thought you would,” she said.

  Just then, Fr. Devlin stepped up and smiled at Jillian – a practiced, formal smile.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You do a good job with a group. Some of the things you mentioned today caught my interest. In fact, we have a family in the parish that is worried about a young girl who has been taking an interest in pagan things.”

  “Oh, would you like me to speak with her?” Jillian offered.

  “That’s kind of you to offer, but it’s really my responsibility to stay on top of these things, you know. I thought I’d do a little research before talking to her.”

  “I can give you a couple books, but the best thing would be to talk to a real witch. I know a couple. In fact, John works with one. John,” she said, turning to face him, “can you give Fr. Devlin Susan’s number?”

  Chapter 16 – The Scholar and the Skeptic

  On the walk out to the car, John discreetly pinched Jillian and said, “I thought you gave up being a witch.”

  “What do you mean?” she protested, innocently. “You saw me throw it all in the trash.”

  “Asking me to give Susan’s number to Fr. Devlin was positively evil.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think is going to do more damage to Fr. Devlin, a sane, reasonable Wiccan like Kathy, or a fruitcake like Susan?”

  John shook his head. “It’s hard to say. Fr. Devlin is a young man, you know.”

  Jillian did that pretend slap on the arm that some women do when they want to express their distaste, and John laughed. But it did make her think of her odd meeting with the priest in his office. Maybe John was right. Maybe Susan posed a down-to-earth threat to the spiritual life of their pastor.

  She frequently wondered why the man wore a collar at all, since he would fit in better teaching religious philosophy at a liberal arts college. It was clear that he was well read, and he was a pretty good speaker. He simply didn’t believe. Everything was vague and uncertain to him. Nothing could be trusted in the final analysis.

  Sure, the bread and the wine were Jesus’ body and blood, but was the chalice of the pagan any less sacred? Fr. Devlin didn’t think so. Yes, Jesus rose from the dead, but did His body really rise, or just His spirit? And didn’t the corn god also rise from the dead? The good father didn’t seem to care.

  He never said any of these things outright, but a sneaking irreverence lay behind all his words. She mentally contrasted him with the speakers at the conference she had just attended with John.

  Two images formed in her mind. There was the faithful Christian scholar, and the doubting skeptic. She knew there were always difficulties with knowledge and with faith, but she couldn’t accept the idea that God had left mankind without any realistic hope of knowing the truth. Skeptical minds could find a way to doubt anything, of course, but to a reasonable person, some things actually were certain. Unless you had a predisposition to disbelieve.

  But even as these thoughts played in her mind she realized she was being unfair to Fr. Devlin. For all his unorthodox ways, he wasn’t a crass skeptic. He did believe in Christ, he just believed in Buddha and Hare Krishna and probably ET as well. All in their own place. He was a skeptic of a different sort. He believed in a very tolerant way. He wasn’t sufficiently convinced of anything to say that someone else’s perspective was wrong.

  What she didn’t understand was how a man with such a personality could make it into the ministry.

  * * *

  The afternoon sun shone over the house and onto the leveled dirt that would eventually become their patio. It was littered with construction debris – two-by-threes, nails, a bit of siding or insulation, a shingle here or there – and set in the middle, like an odd bit of order in the midst of chaos, lay two lawn chairs and a small table. John reclined in one, swigging a mug of tea from an enormous glass pitcher that sat on the table. Jillian sat upright in the other, alternately looking over what remained of her back yard and planning her gardens, or peering through John’s binoculars at the birds chattering away on the edge of the woods.

  The twin structures that loomed on either side of them had gone up quickly and without a hitch. They had to put a temporary halt to construction, awaiting final inspections from the county, and then the finishing work could begin.

  Jillian’s little cottage in the woods looked the same from the front – a place that seemed to come right out of a Thomas Kinkade painting – or perhaps a place where a gnome or an elf might not seem out of place – and the inside would continue to look homey and small, but the additions doubled the square footage, the number of bedrooms, and the number of baths. It also provided lots of new storage space in the walk-in attics. It was no longer the quaint cottage in the woods.

  John hoped to build an office in the attic of one of the new additions so that he could work at home a couple days a week. But there was little chance of that any time soon. The adoption was eating away at their finances at a pace they could hardly believe. It was as if the government only wanted rich people to adopt. And the worst of it was that after all the money was spent, there was no guarantee. They would have Karl for the summer, but the court could take him away in the fall. And it was all up to some social-worker bureaucrat who would run them through a hare-brained analysis crafted by a committee of lawyers and nincompoops.

  Jillian kept wondering if it was fair to put John through all this, and was it fair to raise Karl’s hopes – that he might be reunited with his real mother and have a stable home again – only to see them dashed by an unfeeling legal system that sometimes seemed to be more concerned with procedure than with justice?

  Things weren’t looking good. They were in debt for two cars, a house, an addition and legal bills. They could only barely make the payments, provided nothing else went wrong. But if Karl needed braces the bank would laugh at them.

  And then there was school. Jillian hated to mention it, but she had a growing conviction that she didn’t want to send Karl to public school. Initially, her reasons were entirely selfish. Every trip to Ed and Anne’s house was a reminder that kids learn bad attitudes and bad language from the other kids, and she didn’t want Karl bringing that home.

  How many times had Anne complained to her? “I teach my kids as well as I can, and then I come home from a hard day at the office, and what do I get? Attitude. Smirks. Sighs. Foul language, even. Disrespect. They wade it in all day at school and it clings to them when they get home. It’s all I can do to try to civilize them again before they head off for another baptism in filth.”

  Jillian longed for an alternative. But after the conference she had a completely new perspective. Something had clicked in her mind as she listened to a day and a half of solid Christian teaching. The words had painted pictures from the past – of tonsured monks with nothing but the wool on their backs and the cross around their necks bringing a message of peace to a land of savage barbarians – and prevailing. Idols were destroyed, superstitions exorcised, and the seeds of civility were planted. Sometimes those seeds took hundreds of years to sprout, germinating through the ages while savage men killed one another under the sign those monks had brought with them, but the seed eventually took root and grew into a great tree. The leaven of the kingdom worked its way into hearts, changing attitudes, cultures, and laws.

  Every institution of society had been transformed by that message. It was Christianity that freed the slaves. It was Christianity, alone among world religions, that taught monogamy. Women were no longer the property of their husbands, but were “fellow heirs of the grace of life,” as the apostle said. They were protected against predatory males by marriage laws and strict customs regulating family life. Life was no party for anybody, but Christianity created an atmosphere for decency and order, and that provided the foundation of a better world.

  Jillian wondered what would have become of her in a pagan land, pregnant by a man who didn’t want her? She probably would have been forced into begging, or worse. Making men responsibl
e for their paternity at least saved a woman from that.

  But now it seemed that paganism was on the rise in the west. In medieval times, the church had won the culture through education. In Europe, the nobles had sent their children to the monks to be educated, and the new religion spread through the culture. The academy was just one arm of the church. But now, Christians send their children to the heathen to learn unbelief. And attitude.

  Not Karl, Jillian resolved. Somehow they had to find a way to get Karl into a Christian school.

  She looked over at John, asleep on his chair with a paperback mystery open on his chest.

  Later.

  Chapter 17 – Speaking of Spirits

  “So what thin pretense are we going to use to fight about something tonight?” Ed asked the literary group as he popped open his first beer – a dopplebock, in celebration of the spring.

  Amy looked at him warily, and then glanced at Jillian to see if he was serious. It was her first night in this crowd, and she didn’t like to argue, even with people she knew well.

  Jillian gently shook her head as if to say, “Don’t mind him,” and then she looked sharply at Ed.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Ed said, catching Jillian’s glare and noticing Amy for the first time. “We have a guest tonight, and here I am acting like a Neanderthal. Excuse me. I’m Ed.” He got up from his chair and extended a large hand. “And I’m not nearly so rude as I let on.”

  “Amy,” she said. “Pleased to meet you. And what do you usually discuss at these meetings?”

  Anne laughed. “There are so many factions here, Amy, it’s hard to keep track of them all. We have the Episcopalians against the Baptists, and the believers against the non-believer – at least when Harold is here – and the skeptics against the ... well, the gullible ones.” Anne’s eyes twinkled, and Amy wondered who the gullible ones might be. “It’s a strange crowd.”

  “And that’s got to be Jillian’s influence,” Ed said with a curious look in his eye. “You know she’s a witch don’t you? And that she snared her husband by casting spells on him and making him drink her witch’s brew?”

  “Which you’re drinking right now,” John added, pointing to Amy’s mug. “When we meet at our house, we drink Jillian’s special coffee. And I have to admit that it has an effect on the conversation. At Ed’s house, for example, the talk is usually more subdued, more genteel. It’s something about that fancy house he lives in, I guess. And at Frank’s house we usually get into a good argument.” He turned and gave Frank an inquisitive look, with a touch of a smile. “What is it about your house that makes us want to fight, Frank?”

  Frank wasn’t paying attention. He was trying to take an inventory of John’s bookshelf, and it took a few seconds for the question to sink in.

  “Oh, my house?” he said at last. “I don’t think it’s the house. It’s probably because I serve lousy coffee.”

  “And this house, of course,” Anne said in a mysterious voice, “is where all the mystical, magical things happen. You wouldn’t believe what’s been done right here, on this very carpet. Spells and conjuring and magic of all sorts.”

  “Oooh,” Amy said with mock wonder. “Deep magic from the dawn of time?”

  “Or crass silliness from somebody’s latest acid trip,” Frank muttered. John laughed, and Jillian gave Frank one of those I’m-looking-down-on-you-over-my-eyeglasses looks, which only lost some of the effect from a lack of eyeglasses.

  “But doesn’t that bring up a good topic?” Amy asked. “How does decor affect the way people think and feel in a place?”

  “Oh, we’ve been over that a million times,” Ed said with feigned superiority. “In fact, I know it so well ... here, you describe a room to me and I’ll tell you exactly what the people in it are thinking. More than that,” he continued, but started to laugh at himself and couldn’t continue right away, so John took the chance and jumped in.

  “That’s just your first, isn’t it, Ed? Do we have to cut you off?”

  “No, I’m serious,” Amy protested. “I took John and Jillian to a conference at a church in Annapolis, and they acted like we were having a wedding in a circus tent. I want to know what you all think about this, because I’d never really considered it before.”

  “Of course you have,” Anne said, “you just haven’t noticed that you have. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come up with that analogy. What’s wrong with a wedding in a circus tent? You see, you’ve already made some kind of value judgment about appropriate decor. Maybe you just haven’t thought of it in terms of churches.”

  “Maybe,” Amy agreed. “Maybe that’s my Baptist upbringing.”

  “Uh, oh,” Ed said, getting out of his chair. “I’d better run and get another beer before Frank gets going.”

  Frank grinned at Ed and held up his empty bottle in a friendly plea for another. Ed took the empty and headed into the kitchen.

  “You’re right, Amy,” Frank said. “Baptists traditionally don’t think much of decorating their churches all fancy. It’s will-worship.”

  “Huh?” Anne said. “Who’s Will?”

  Frank grimaced at her. “Not Will, a person. I mean your will. We’re only supposed to offer God the worship that He prescribes, so we’re not supposed to make up all these silly rites and ceremonies and things to generate phony religious feelings. Jesus said we’re to worship in spirit and truth.”

  John laughed. “And since when does ‘spirit and truth’ mean ‘keep the walls bare’? But what you really mean to say,” he continued before Frank could reply, “is that you believe in a sterile, intellectual religion that likes to forget that humans are spirits in bodies, and that what we do with our bodies affects what we are in our spirit.”

  “Speaking of spirits,” Ed said, handing Frank another beer and returning to his seat.

  “I don’t think Baptists forget that our bodies have souls and spirits. We just don’t think all that kneeling and standing and crossing and everything else is sincere – or necessary, or even helpful – so we don’t do it.”

  “But you take off your hat for the pledge of allegiance,” John shot back. “The idea, Frank, is that it’s a two-way street between doing and feeling. If you believe, you do, and if you do, it can help train you to believe.”

  “So can we get back to architecture?” Anne asked, seeing that Amy had been cut off from the discussion of her question. “What was it that John and Jillian said about that church in Annapolis?”

  Amy leaned back in her chair, sighed and looked up at the dark wooden beams that ran across the white ceiling.

  “Oh, it was something about how they didn’t feel like they were visiting God when they came into that church.”

  “That’s a bunch of poppycock,” Frank said. “So you don’t get some weird feeling in your gut. What does that have to do with being in the presence of God? It’s probably better that your mind isn’t clouded with all those goofy associations. That way you can concentrate on the word that’s being preached.”

  Ed shook his head slowly. “That seems pretty naive to me, Frank. You’ve got to set a mood. You can’t just throw a switch and be in worship mode any more than you can get romantic at the drop of a hat. It takes soft music, flowers ... you know. That’s just the way we are.”

  “Hey, keep talking like that,” Anne said, reaching over and rubbing Ed’s arm. Ed smiled at her with his eyes.

  “Hymns do just fine for me,” Frank said. “Uh ... I mean for worship, not romance.” Everyone laughed and Jillian reached over to get another carrot from the vegetable tray on the coffee table.

  “Okay,” Jillian said, “so hymns set the mood with sound. What about sight, and touch, and smell?”

  “Oh, no,” Frank groaned. “Now you’re gonna start getting into incense and bells and holy water.”

  “Flowers, cards and chocolates are okay on February 14th,” John said, “but incense, bells and stained glass are bad on Sunday. Is that it?”

  “No, John,” Frank said, ta
king a more conciliatory tone, “I guess it’s not bad, necessarily. It just makes me uncomfortable. My attitude towards ritual is that it helps people slide through their religious life without ever experiencing real faith in their hearts. They get a feeling that they’re being religious, but that’s all it is. A feeling.”

  “I understand that’s how you feel,” John said a little more sympathetically, “but I think you’ve bought into a very narrow, overly intellectual view of faith.”

  “So John, it sounds to me like you’d be more comfortable in a Roman Catholic Church,” Amy said.

  Jillian’s back went a little straighter and she lost a shade of color in her face. She looked at John and noticed that he was discreetly watching her out of the corner of his eye.

  Chapter 18 – Breaking the Spell

  Why is it that everybody thinks I’m becoming a Roman Catholic? John wondered the next morning as he walked from his car to the Greenbelt Metro stop. He intended to buy a few new shirts after work, and the Metro was more convenient to stores than his commuter rail station.

  Is it like spinach in your teeth? Obvious to everyone but you ... until you look in a mirror?

  Even as he wondered, he had to admit a certain logic to it. American Episcopalianism is often called “Catholic lite.” It was a way to be Catholic without the pope – or without whichever other Roman dogma didn’t seem right. But the truth was that John agreed with Rome on most of the controversial issues.

  Despite that, it didn’t make much difference. He might agree with Rome on a lot of points, but Rome wouldn’t accept him! He didn’t believe the church was infallible, he didn’t believe in Transubstantiation, and he had some problems with several other things that the faithful were obliged to accept. To join the Roman Catholic Church you had to state that you agreed with everything they taught, which seemed horribly unfair, since that standard would disqualify most of the people in the pews. Still, that was the rule, and to join while disagreeing with their doctrine would be dishonest.