Third Sunday in Easter

On certain days, when the sun lifts into the sky, the first rays travel across to the copse of trees across the road from our house, where they light on the center of the trees and ignite them in morning splendor. Yesterday, I happened to look outside just as this happened and was able to get a picture of it. The picture of course does not capture the deep beauty of the true moment, but it does communicate a certain surface element of the beauty.

Sometimes when I scuff along the graveled lanes that twist around our farm, I feel blind to what is around me, so intent am I upon the dialogue within me, the exchange of whispered words and questions and ideas and speculations, all falling upon the ear of God, an ear I imagine to be as pink as a curled conch shell and as benign as a great-grandfather’s afternoon smile. I am aware as I walk and converse with Him that I have selected the road on which I stroll, but did I choose the roads that led me to this particular one? Did my choices ever disappoint Him, or is He mellow and unperturbed like Buddha is said to be? Good parents, it seems to me, do grow annoyed or angry or frustrated or impatient with their children, if for no other reason than that the lessons have already been dispensed, time and time again. I think I can bear the impatience of God if the patience comes with it. His ire, if followed by His paradise, is tolerable to me, and I tell my beads in whispers this very thing.

Since it was her birthday a few days ago, I have been thinking of my grandmother, that old adder who was so fearsome and irritable in my young life, but who mellowed into a soft-cheeked and approachable sage in the last half-dozen years of her earthly stay. She of the belted housedress and the blocky black shoes and the black purse with its severe snap closure containing its handkerchiefs and Wrigley’s Doublemint gum and a hairbrush and a butter-soft change purse and what she called her billfold. She of the rocking chair and the Reader’s Digest bible, the thumbed pages encased in a pillowed cover as green as Prince Philip’s funereal Land Rover. She of the wildly exaggerated threats and the boundless energy for weeding and cleaning and painting and sweeping. She of the immaculate gardens and well-behaved chickens (except for that one rooster, gone on these many years to poultry Valhalla at mine own hand) and the silver-dollar pancakes and poke salet and a dollop of jelly in her oatmeal and sipping coffee from the saucer to see if it was satisfactory after it was poured from the battered percolator with the glass bulb on top.

I have been thinking of her and of other loved ones who have passed through the veil from this life to the next. Thinking of her soul and her sins, and thinking of the Church teaching that I never expected to like, much less embrace, a teaching that I have come to find remarkable and attractive, a teaching I ponder every day on this lonely earth, the doctrine of Purgatory.

Years ago, I read an interview with the odious Gene Simmons (Chaim Witz) of the rock band Kiss, an interview in which he said something to the effect, “I don’t like Jesus because someone can live a really evil, bad life but then just before he dies or just before his plane crashes, he can ask Jesus to forgive him and come into his heart, and he gets a free pass and goes to heaven.” When I read this remark, I thought, “You know, he has a point.”

There always was something about the Say The Sinner’s Prayer strategy that bothered me. It seemed forced and formulaic, like too many things in the churches I was a part of in the days before I walked away from Protestantism. The scenario described by Simmons is consistent with the “gospel presentations” I’ve heard all my life, and I can say in retrospect that I never believed nor trusted these presentations. But I outwardly assented to them because I am intellectually lazy and spiritually mediocre. I didn’t know what else to believe, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to turn to Catholicism or Buddhism or New Ageism or Anything Elseism.

But now, as my life slows down but my hours speed up, as the shadows grow longer and darker and I find myself listening more closely and reading more intently than at any point in my life, I am again confronted with the questions about what happens when we die. What happened to that woman or that man whom I knew and loved when he or she died?

These questions pull on my sleeve and point me to other questions. If God is completely holy and pure and if He cannot allow sin in his presence, is an entire lifetime of falling short of His standard — and more times than not, the “falling short” being absolutely willful and intentional — wiped out completely, consequences and all, because someone sincerely said some words asking Christ to forgive him of his sins?

I don’t know. This doesn’t seem to make sense. It doesn’t seem to be fair, and that’s the real bugaboo with me. The idea of spending time after death in a place where one is purified from every vestige of life’s sins does make sense and does seem fair. This is a doctrine believed and taught by the early Church, and by the Fathers of the Church, but dismissed and ridiculed after Martin Luther became a celebrity and married a nun who forsook her vows and set up house with him.

I no longer believe so much that I once believed. And yet what I do believe, I believe with a sweetness and a calm that I never possessed in my younger years. And unlike in my younger years, I am open to receiving old truths that are newly discovered by me, and to believing the ancient faith of those who lost their lives in defense of it.

And so on the mornings and the evenings when I trail along behind barking Jinx, laughing at his Gomerishness, I think of my own sins, of my desire to be a saint, of my diminishing number of grains in the hourglass, and I begin to use my hours of prayer to intercede for those in Purgatory, those who awaiting a final release into the presence of the Living God, and I wonder if anyone will pray for me after I am dead. The likelihood of me becoming a saint before my death is almost nonexistent, and yet the desire is deeply-rooted and sincere and growing. When I draw my last breath here, will anyone pray on my behalf as I wait to be freed from the purgation of impurity? And how many forgotten souls are there? All through the South, one sees tiny family cemeteries bounded by chain link fences, sometimes old iron fences, and the graves are mostly neglected and weedy and unkempt. The graves themselves are forgotten…how much more so the souls of those who once inhabited the bones reposed beneath those scrubby patches of grass?

There is nothing abstract about my faith, and precious little that is intellectual. I no longer argue, no longer debate, no longer try to convince anyone of anything. At my age and in my station, this would be akin to trying to convince someone that I was Nanny’s grandson. Arguing about something obvious and self-evident is beyond foolish. And it disrupts and distracts from the peace and beauty displayed around me.

I am walking through all this beauty. I want to enjoy it, to drink it in, to feel it brush past me like wind or leaves or a dog’s flank against my leg. It is real and it is within and without.

~ S.K. Orr