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

On the Eve of Christmas Eve, 2014

 

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Don’t skim your eye down the words.  Go back and say the words.  Say them with measured solemnity, four syllables to each word.  Sixteen syllables all together. 

You are praising the Lord.  This is the Gloria in excelsis Deo that you are pronouncing. 

In late morning on the eve of Christmas Eve, I called my wife at the church.  She is our pastor’s secretary.  I was checking in, concerned about errands I needed to finish while I was out on the road.  We spoke briefly about the errands. 

Then I asked her when she planned to be home from the church.  Uncharacteristically, she did not know.  Usually, she knows.  Usually, she knows because she knows what tasks she must finish, and she responds with a time—an hour, two hours.  This time, she was vague.  It was odd of her—my wife is not a vague person, about time or about anything else.  “I don’t know,” is what she said, and she said it with a puzzled intonation, as though she wondered why she did not know but said it anyway.  I was puzzled, too, when I hung up. 

I thought that perhaps I should call her back, to ask if she were all right.  I thought that perhaps I should question her tone of puzzlement, which suggested she did not feel in charge of her time that afternoon.  But I did not call her back.  I had errands to do. 

Here’s what I learned later.  After I hung up, an hour or two passed at the church.  My wife was alone.  She finished tasks.  There is always a task to finish on a secretary’s desk.  But, puzzlingly, she did not formulate a plan for the finishing of her tasks and for her getting home.  Then the church’s door opened and a man entered whom my wife had never seen.  The man introduced himself and asked if the pastor were in.  The pastor was not in.  

The man seemed puzzled by the circumstance that the pastor was not in at the church.  “But God told me I must come to see him now.”  

“Well, would you like me to make an appointment for you, for later?”

“But God told me I must come to see him now.” 

After all—this is how my wife reported the conversation to me—after all, the man was puzzled himself.  He had done what God had told him to do.  Now, it was the pastor’s turn. 

The pastor had left the church not long before, with several plans in his mind.  He had not been certain which of the plans he would undertake.  He would let my wife know which plan he would undertake, he said, when he knew himself. 

My wife dialed the phone.  The pastor answered.   

“There’s a man here,” she said, and she gave his name.  “He says he needs to see you.”

“Oh.” 

“I wasn’t certain about your plan.” 

“Well, I haven’t selected the plan yet.  I don’t know why.  Right now, I’m eating lunch.”  The pastor thought for a moment.  “Can he wait ten minutes?”

My wife looked at the man.  “Can you wait ten minutes?”

“Yes.”

She turned back to the phone.  “He can wait.”

“See you in ten.”

Two hours after the man sat down with our pastor, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord, and his name was written in Glory. 

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Late that same night, on the eve of Christmas Eve, my wife and I relaxed on our couch.  The house was aromatic with baking gift breads.  The Christmas tree was lit with white bulbs, wax candles burned among our mantel display of spruce boughs and red balls, and twinkling candles were alight in our windows so that, as my mother told me when I was a child, if the Christ Child should be in need a place to lie down, He would see by our candles that He would be welcome here. 

My wife had explained to me the odd events of that afternoon—the man puzzled why the pastor should not be at his office when God had indicated that he would be, my wife puzzled about her inability to manage a time to return to our house so that she was available just at the right moment to make a telephone call , our pastor puzzled that he had not selected among his plans for the afternoon so that he was, at the necessary time, just eating lunch. 

My wife lay back on the couch and put her feet in my lap.  In silence, I stroked her feet.  The wine was red in my glass, and white in my wife’s.  We listened to Susan Boyle sing Hallelujah. The words of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen filled the room.   

We are busy people, she and I, with several jobs between us—retirees who still work hard, and I have a new book coming out, a memoir recounting my life as the son of a poet father—a father whose poetry molded my relationship with our Father. 

Relaxing on our couch, weary after days and days of heavy work for both of us, nearing the completion of our Advent anticipation of a miracle—humbly trying to experience our anticipation with patience—the beauty of the season and of the Christ lights overthrew me.  I wept. 

My wife looked her question, but gently: this was her emotional husband. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

I wept for Cohen’s spare, elegiac poetry.  I wept for Boyle’s easy voice.  I wept for the still, calm beauty of our decorated home.  I wept for giving gift bread to our friends, bread which my wife had created.  But mostly I wept that, on the eve of Christmas Eve, the Lord Himself had used my wife and our pastor for His own purpose, which was to bring another soul to salvation—the godly using, which had puzzled each of them, as their planning of their days was set aside.     

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah.

 

 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

 

The Trouble with God

I buckled myself into the police cruiser.  Our chief of police gunned us out of the driveway and onto the road, fast.  We were looking for one of the sons. 

“I hate a suicide,” the chief said.

“It’s my first.”   

“I’ve been at more than two hundred.  I counted them once.  They never get easier.  Accidents, even murders—those get easier.  Suicides—never.”

“Maybe it’s that…maybe it’s that they had a choice, and instead of trying some more, they chose….”

“Two weeks ago, it was a fifteen-year-old boy—over a girl.  Over a girl.”

Our chief—a father of teen daughters—slowed and then turned abruptly onto another road.  Five teenage boys were riding their four-wheelers toward us on the pavement. They and their vehicles were splashed with mud.  They were whooping it up. 

The chief flicked on his blue lights and stopped and buzzed his window down.  “Where you guys been?”

“Just around,” said one.

“You can’t be riding on the road.  You know that.”

“Yeah.” 

“Don’t make me stop you again.”

“Yeah.”

“Get home now.”

“Sure.”

The chief buzzed his window back up, and we sped on.

After a moment, he said, “His older brother was fine, never any trouble.  But that one?  If we weren’t on this kind of a call, I’d have given all of them trouble.  The other ones, they’re just following that one.”  He was quiet for a moment and then he said, “I’ll probably hear from his father tomorrow, roasting me for hassling his kid.”

“Used to be—if that had been me, and you had stopped me—my father would have roasted me.”

We turned onto a gravel road that wound back and down into the woods.  The cruiser’s headlights came on.  It was evening and dark, now, in the woods—it was a humid, still, Maine evening with swarms of bugs in the air.  After a few turns, we saw the trailer, slowed. 

The chief muttered, “His truck’s here.  Not the car.”

Inside the trailer, dogs—sounded like two of them—began to bark. 

The chief spoke into his radio, reporting our location, then—“Okay, let’s go see.  You going to make the announcement?”

“I scarcely know him.  Know a lot of his family, but not him.” 

“He’ll know you’re from the church?”

“Yeah, he should.”

“Okay.  I’ll make the announcement, then you step forward.”

I trailed the chief up onto a bit of deck, which sagged under the weight of the two of us.  Lots of lobstering stuff piled around.  Louder barking.  The chief peered in through a small window built into the door of the trailer and banged with his fist.  “Arnold?  You here?”

The dogs went berserk.

“Hey, Arnold?”

No answer. 

We backed away, stepping down to the ground.  The chief walked a few steps to peer around the corner of the trailer. “Car’s here,” he called to me. “Arnold’s gotta be here somewhere.”

He strode back to the cruiser, opened the driver’s door, and hit the siren for about ten seconds.  Crows rose from the trees, cawing.  We listened.  Nothing, except the dogs.  The chief hit the siren again.  

Sounds from the woods behind the trailer.  Someone crashing through trees. 

Arnold stepped around the trailer’s corner.  He was carrying a bucket.  “What the hell?”  Then he saw the cruiser and the chief.  He stopped.  “Oh, no….”

“Arnold.”  The chief walked toward him.  I was a step or two behind.  “There’s been a death.”

The chief said a few words in a low voice.

All the blood drained from Arnold’s face.  He staggered.  “What?”

He fell to his knees.  The bucket scattered sideways, spilling black water. 

Arnold collapsed further and now lay on his side on the gravel.  “Arnold?” said the chief. 

Arnold rolled onto his back and, reaching toward the sky with both hands, bellowed, “Why? Why?”

I knelt.  I didn’t know what to do, so I put my hands on his chest and bent closer to him.  He stared at me and grabbed my shoulders and bellowed again, this time at me—“Why?”

“I don’t know.  There’s no way to know.  There’s no logic.”

“I told them.  I told them.  I told them.”

The chief said, “You told them what?”

“It was all going to hell. But why?  Why this?” 

His hands fell away from my shoulders, and he lay boneless on the ground. 

I pressed closer.  “We can get through this.  We can get through this.  We’re a praying body.”  Arnold seemed not to hear.  Not knowing what to do, I repeated myself.  “We’re a praying body.”

The chief squatted down.  “We’ll take you to the house.  They need you there now.  Can you stand up?”

Curses flowed from Arnold’s mouth blacker than the water that had spilled from the bucket. 

My hands were still on Arnold’s chest.  “We can get through this together,” I said. 

His eyes came back to mine.  “Yeah?  How?”

“I was praying with your family, and then we came to find you.  Pastor’s at the house now.”

Arnold twisted and struggled up onto one elbow.  “Oh, God, it hurts.”

The chief said, “Let’s get you up,” and he and I assisted Arnold to stand. 

 

                                                                        ***

 

Arnold needed God.  Of course, a lot of people need God. 

A lot of people are in pain. Pain is everywhere. But a lot of people in pain hope they can handle the pain themselves so they don’t need to need God. 

The trouble with God is that He has this judgment-through-eternity thing going on, and there are a lot of people who prefer to bear a lot of pain, all by themselves, in order—in their minds—to avoid needing God, who will judge them through eternity.   

Way back when, I might probably have been one of them myself. 

But God has this other thing going on, too, by which He un-remembers our sins.

There’s a catch.  The catch about God un-remembering is that He only un-remembers when, first, we accept the love-gift which He gave to us by the sacrifice of His Son. 

Complicated.  That doesn’t track.  Not for a lot of people.

For me, it tracks, but then I’m a believer, so of course it tracks for me.  But it doesn’t track for Arnold. 

                                                                        ***

Arnold stumbled into the back seat of the cruiser, slumped. 

“Are you okay?” the chief asked.  He leaned in.  “Here, I’ll buckle you.” 

Arnold sat straighter for a moment but when the buckle clicked, he slumped again.

The chief started the engine, turned the cruiser around, paused.  “Anything you need to do here first?”

“Huh?”

“Anything you need to do here first?  The dogs?”

Arnold shook his head. 

The chief radioed our situation and then drove—slowly now—through the woods in the dim air and turned onto the road.

I craned back from my front seat.  “You told them what?”

“It was all going to hell.”

“We can get through this.”

Arnold looked at me uncomprehendingly. 

 

                                                                        ***

 

It’s that whole sin thing.  It’s that whole judgment-through-eternity thing.  Arnold hadn’t done anything to deserve this, but now this horrid thing has just happened in his family, and it was going to hurt him and his whole family for a long, long time. 

Sometimes in life you get tipped toward God, when some horrid thing happens like what had happened just now.

When you get tipped toward God it is confusing.  It was easier before horrid things happened and you got tipped toward God—wasn’t it?  It was easier, when life was simpler.  It was easier then, when life was simpler, like football, and you just played through the pain, and took it like a man, and sometimes you won and sometimes you didn’t.

It was easier before, when you didn’t need to trouble yourself about God’s bizarre economics of love and sacrifice and un-remembering, and when you could keep all that godly economics all tucked away in our human past—like it was just a myth from long, long ago. 

But God keeps on creeping back into our minds in that way that He has, and He keeps on tipping us toward Him. 

It would be so much easier if the Son-sacrifice thing was just a make believe story from a time when people weren’t as smart as we are now, and when they needed to have their hands held in order to get through their days.  Not like us, who get through our days just fine—or anyway we get through them okay enough.     

But Arnold needed God, which meant he needed Jesus first.

 

                                                                        ***

 

I was a deacon at my church, and this was my first suicide as a deacon, and I didn’t know what to do to help Arnold find Jesus except one last time to say “We can get through this together.”   

I did not say any of those other things about sacrifice and un-remembering to Arnold while we drove him through the bug-flickering night to a home racked with agony. 

I was a deacon at my church, and I didn’t know what to do. 

It would need to be God to do something for Arnold because He was the only one who did know what to do. 

 

Copyright -- Dikkon Eberhart, 2014