The Second Jump

“It’s a religion that couldn’t be thought of, Christianity,” said the salesman.  To the waitress, he said, “Massaman curry with chicken; brown rice.”  The clink of silver wear on plates and the buzz of lunch conversation filled the background.  “That’s a line from C.S. Lewis, but it’s apropos.” 
 

            The salesman and the lawyer lunched together now and then.  Usually the salesman kept the conversational ball on the other side of the table.  He asked leading questions to draw out his customer, to keep up with the details of the lawyer's practice.  

 

            But today was a different day.  He had not asked for this lunch in order to sell; today, he had something to tell.  The lawyer was a Jew.  The salesman had been one too, until recently.  At one time, he had been so serious about Judaism, he had converted to it.   

            “Well, it doesn’t apply to me,” said the lawyer. 

            “The Prophets are riddled with anticipation.  That’s the whole point.  Think of Isaiah.  Everything’s leading somewhere, in one particular direction. That’s what the Messiah is all about.”

            The lawyer grinned.  “But not yet.”

            The waitress brought drinks and small, complimentary spring rolls. 

            “Not everything is the natural.  That’s what I’ve come to believe.  We humans so very much want all the answers to be within the natural.  But they aren’t.” The salesman took one of the rolls and passed the plate across.  “There’s a war on, and the real solution, the real victory, comes through the supernatural.” 

“A war?”

“Yeah, a war.  A war between God and Satan.”

“You have gone round the bend, haven’t you?”

            The restaurant was located at the edge of a river which enjoyed a two hundred year history of vigorous ship building.  Almost within view of the men was a ship yard where Aegis missile cruisers were crafted for the navy.  Two of these lethal greyhounds were visible from where they sat, secured against a pier, just downstream. 

 

            The salesman—being a salesman—was fond of a battle.  His battles were in service of his product.  He had a hunter’s instinct: Go out and find a pain, then offer a solution which eases that pain. 

            Two new diners came and settled at the next table, men, in their forties, trim, upright.  Probably navy.    

            The salesman glanced at them and looked back at the lawyer.  “A war.”  He thought for second, and then he said, “I feel like I’m taking the second jump.”

             “What do you mean?”

             The salesman watched his customer across the table.  The man was a litigator, a battler in his own right.  One of the characteristics of the lawyer that interested the salesman, though, applied to the lawyer’s private world: he had good art in his office, idiosyncratic stuff, showing an educated and an eclectic taste.  Two of his three children were in the arts.  The other was a lawyer, like her father. 

            “A close friend of mine is a former Master Sergeant in the 82^nd Airborne Division.   Fourteen years in.  We see a lot of one another.  Once, he told me something startling about jumping out of airplanes.  He said people who aren’t paratroopers think stepping out of the airplane at 3,000 feet must be very hard.  They think it must be hard to make yourself jump.  Especially the first time.  But they’re wrong, he says.  That first jump, you’re so pumped after all the training, you just bail right out without even a thought.  Boom!  And you’re out there in the wind, counting to four.   

            “But it’s the second jump, he said.  That’s the hard one.”

            The lunches arrived; pad Thai for the lawyer. 

            The salesman held the lawyer’s gaze, so the other would not eat yet.  “It’s taking that step out the airplane door when you’re actually thinking about it.  That’s the hard thing.  That’s the second jump.  That’s what I’m doing.  When I became a Jew—really became one—that was the first jump.  I was so ready to convert, I just jumped right into it.  I was pumped.  This is my second jump, and it’s harder.”

            “Why harder?”

             “Well, human things for one: what to tell friends, what to tell the children.  They’re grownups, but will they be horrified?”

             “So you’re trying this out on me?”

             The salesman grinned.  “Yeah.  You horrified?”

             “No.  Mystified.  Maybe it’s like you’ve caught a disease, and it’s changed your thinking, and I wonder when you’ll come out of it.”

             Both men ate.  The sailors at the next table had their spring rolls now.  “Good curry,” said the salesman to break the silence. 

             The lawyer put down his cutlery.  “You mean this?”

             “Yes.  I’m probably going to maybe be baptized.  It’s not a disease.” 

             “Well.”  The lawyer gave the salesman a friendly smile.  “Good, I guess.  I don’t quite know what to say.  Now you’re going to tell me that I can’t get into heaven because I haven’t been baptized.”

             “What difference could that possibly make to you, since you don’t believe in heaven in the first place?”

             The lawyer laughed.  “But you know what I mean.  You’ll try to covert me.”

             The salesman shook his head. “No, I won’t.  If you’re going to be converted, you’ll convert yourself.”

           “Yeah, right.”

            “It’s a still, small voice.  An invitation, that’s all.  Maybe you’ll hear an invitation.”

            The two men returned to their meals.  After a bit, the lawyer asked, “What did you mean about the supernatural?”

            “This was a turning point for me.”  The salesman finished a bite and then spooned more curry onto his plate.  He didn’t eat it yet.   He prodded at it, mixing it with rice.  “There have been a number of turning points really.  But this was one of the recent ones.”  He looked up and held the lawyer’s eye.  “I watched a Billy Graham thing on TV." He saw the lawyer flinch.  "I know; I know.   I used to shudder at those things too—all those people like robots coming down into the center place, like mind-numbed robots.  It was creepy.” 

             “Yeah.”

             “Well, that was before my wife and I spent the last year attending the Baptist church across the road.”  Suddenly, he laughed.  “And we’re not robots.”

             The lawyer smiled.  “Certain of that?”      

             “Ninety-five percent.  Anyway, you know how the camera pans across the faces of the people in the stands?  All these faces.  I was watching them and thinking about what was going on in their heads.  Probably some were attending simply to support a friend, and nothing very much was going on inside.  But as Graham was speaking about how everything else has been tried, and nothing else has worked—and, here, he’s holding up a Bible—I had this sense—as I watched their faces—that every single one of them, way down deep inside, every single one of them knew that what Graham was saying is absolutely true.” 

             The salesman watched the lawyer, who was listening, but with a deponent’s caution.  The salesman said, “Not everyone in the stands was convinced enough to do something about it—that is, to come down to the central floor—but every single one of them knew what Graham said is true.”

             Before the lawyer could respond, the salesman continued.  “You know me.  I’ve read history for forty years.  And you—you know statutes, cases, regulations from all fifty states…and the fed.  We’re the same generation, you and me.  We did all those sixties things—sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, baby.   And not just us…narcissistic us.  Everyone else did it all too—all of it—in the 19^th century, and the 18^th century, and the 17^th  …all the way back.   Everything natural that can be tried, has been tried.  That’s what I saw on those people’s faces. 

            “There’s a war going on, and we have tried as hard as we possibly can, we skeptics.  We have tried as hard as we can to get the answer right and to make human life right.  I take my hat off to us—we have tried so hard and with such a good will.  Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights…everything!  We’ve tried every possible natural thing that we can think of, and even over and over again when one didn’t work before.  And in the faces of that crowd listening to Billy Graham there was—palpably!—the knowledge that the natural solution, the skeptic’s solution, the agnostic’s solution, the atheist’s solution, every single one of those solutions has failed to do the job.”

            The salesman put down his fork.  “And why?  Because it can’t.  We think it’s the job of the natural, of what we can control, but it’s not.  It’s God’s job, not ours.  Oh, how we do wish it weren’t so!  But deep down, deep down were all of us face the very core of ourselves, we know that the natural doesn’t work. 

             “The answer comes from the supernatural.” 

             The salesman drank and then said, “You know how you tell me that your clients come to you wanting justice?  And you tell them the legal system isn’t about justice?  It’s about apportioning blame and dividing money?  Well…same thing.  Only God can provide justice because only God knows all the facts.  We humans try, oh, we do try.  But even you admit our system is not designed to provide what the clients need, deep down.”

             There was a pause, then: “I believe in God.”  This was an odd statement from the lawyer, defensive, and the salesman took it as a crack in his lawyerly armor.    

             “Sure you do.  You’re a Jew.  You’re one of God’s tribe; his covenant people.  But, you know, it turned out the Sinai covenant wasn’t enough.  The Jews disobeyed…they were skeptics, just like we are today.  They knew better.  They argued with God.  That used to be one of the great attractions for me in Judaism, years ago, when I converted.  Direct experience with God—fighting it out in the well of the cosmic court.  Wrestling with His angels in the desert; sweat to sweat.  And we waited for the Messiah, and we whined, and we argued, and we complained.”  The salesman took one more bite of curry.  He laughed.  “I hate this manna!  Yuck!  That’s what we said.”  He shook his fork at the lawyer, who laughed.  “I want something else.  That’s what we yelled: you’re not pleasing us, Yahweh.  Come on, please me!” 

             The salesman put down his fork and said quietly, “So God gave us something else.  He gave us Christ.  And Christ made us free.”

             There was silence at the table.  The sailors paid for their lunch and went away, perhaps back to their ship.  The noise of the restaurant was less loud than before. 

             After a time, the lawyer said, “I’ll give you this much.  I believe in Pentecost.  I think Christ doesn’t apply to me.  But how could anyone have made up Pentecost?”

             “So we’re back at the beginning.  Christianity itself couldn’t have been made up.  It happened.  That’s what I believe.  And the fact that it happened compels action on our part.  It compels action; there is no other choice.  Judaism is a waiting game, though I think most modern, liberal Jews don’t really think the Messiah is still on His way.  They’ve—we’ve—become complacent in our posture as observers from the outside, dependent on the 613 mitvot.  We’re a covenant people, yes, symbols of God’s direct action in the world, to be honored and supported therefore.  But we’re standers-off; we’re disdainers of a new covenant.  Intellectual.” 

             The waitress brought the check.  It was the lawyer’s turn.  “See?” said the lawyer, “You’re becoming a Christian, and now I have to pay for your sermons.”

 They laughed. 

 “But there’s nothing wrong with intellectualism,” said the lawyer, scrawling his name on a charge card slip. 

 “There is when it doesn’t allow for the experience of holy dread.”

 The lawyer looked up, startled.  “Oh, man, you do sound like one of them.”

 “Dread in the sense of reverence.  Like dreadful beauty.”

 The lawyer grimaced.  “Nobody talks that way nowadays.  Supposing I said that to a jury?”

 The men collected their things and stood up.  The salesman said, “Keep this in mind.  Everything else has been tried.  That’s the thing.  If the supernatural actually and truly did intrude into the natural—and there’s 2,000 years of evidence that it did (and I’ll lecture you about the righteousness of that evidence next time—on my dime), then we humans do have the answer.  Sure, we wish we didn’t need to pay attention to it.  We wish we could do this on our own.  But we can’t.”

 The men looked into the distance, out the window of the restaurant at the river and the warships.  “We’ve struggled for so long a time now,” the salesman prodded, “and we feel burdened down with it all. We’re so heavy we have a hard time lifting our heads sometimes.”

“I know lots of people who have been crushed by life.”

“Yes, I agree.  It’s in your profession to gather those anecdotes.  But Paul said, though we will all be tested, we won’t be tested beyond our endurance.”

“I’ve seen too many who are crushed by life to believe what you say.”

“Those ones, they didn’t know Christ.”

“Lots of people don’t know Christ.”

“But Christ is there.”

             Outside, before parting, the two men shook hands. 

             It was the lawyer who had the last word, ironically using the final hurrah from the Passover Seder: “Next year in Jerusalem!”  The laughter of the two men was meant differently, but for each of them the metaphor was strong.   

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015