Hearthstone Entertainment
23 True Confessions
OUR EVENING GATHERING went late. I tossed another log on the fire at ten and most people were still hanging around. Jennifer brought out her secret stash of Girl Scout Thin Mints and marshmallows and we made s’mores. After it got dark and had cooled down some, Larry and Theresa came out to join us. Cassie, Josh, and Mary moved on and others of the clan came to perch on my lap and even on the edge of John’s and Bea’s loungers. It was really beautiful as they met some of the IU folks and even a few of the high school seniors for the first time. I stayed in my Adirondack lounger for the most part and welcomed everyone who came to visit. It seemed like it was a ‘pay respects to Patrón’ night, though no one called me that, thank goodness.
That wasn’t the reason I stayed in my Adirondack. John had asked me to stand by him and I somehow thought he wasn’t finished. I had no idea what else might be on his mind, though. By eleven-thirty, people started heading to bed. Bea got up and said she was going to see if the bed was as comfortable as it looked. John didn’t make a move to get up. There were still a few couples and a group of girls hanging out, but we had relative privacy so I took a breath to steady myself and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I had a feeling there was more to the story. I know I’m just a kid, but if you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”
“Brian, you are just a kid like my Aunt Fanny,” he chuckled.
“I was unaware of your aunt,” I said, trying to maintain a straight face. We both laughed.
“Last year, I started teaching the junior high Sunday school class. I missed Cassandra’s childhood, I guess. Bertha Landrau had taught that class since the church was founded, but she had enough and quit. You remember her. She taught it when you came to our church. I was expecting something different. I expected kids like you and Cassandra. I should have known better. You still hold the record for Bible verses memorized over the summer. Cassandra was inspired to do better at it herself. She convinced Josh to start learning verses after poor Denise. I knew that you didn’t really want to be there. I considered myself to be doing a good deed by using your desire to see my daughter to get you to go to church. But you made the best of it. You used the opportunity to learn, even if you didn’t agree with what you were learning.”
“I have to say, I kept it up so Cassie would like me. She always seemed proud of me when we got together.”
“When was that?” he asked. “You and Cassandra saw each other more that summer than I knew, didn’t you?”
“We sort of ran into each other playing in the woods sometimes,” I confessed. He shook his head.
“I found the map.” This time I just shook my head.
“Well, that is in the past. Remember, nothing is hidden that won’t be revealed.” I shuddered. “What I found in the junior high class were children who didn’t know the rudiments of what the church taught and had no respect for their teachers, their preacher, or their parents. Their idea of church was that it was a place you went to be told what not to do. Bertha had established the rule of boys on one side of the room and girls on the other. I remembered how Cass had told me why that was and decided that I’d challenge them.”
“You let them sit together?”
“Not immediately. Brian, I have never studied and contemplated a subject so thoroughly in my life. Oh, I read the Bible every day. But I’d pretty much let my beliefs be dictated by the way our minister interpreted it for me. This time, I had to find a way to communicate it to kids who simply didn’t want to hear and who were waiting to be yelled at for something—anything—because it was sinful. So, one Sunday I went out on a limb. I asked them why they sat with girls on one side of the room and boys on the other side. The answers started with the obvious. Mrs. Landrau made us sit this way. I kept probing. Do you know what they finally said that tipped me off? A boy said, ‘If we sit next to girls, we’ll get them pregnant and go to hell.’ The girls blushed and giggled a little. The boys rolled their eyes with comments like, ‘As if.’” John was really sad about this. I remembered that time, pretty well, and I remember Cassie telling me that if we kissed again she’d get pregnant and go to hell.
“We were pretty ignorant when we were that age.”
“We taught you to be ignorant. It bothered me. I asked if anyone in the class actually knew how a girl got pregnant. There was a lot of shifting around and one boy said, ‘by holding hands and stuff.’ The thing that shocked me was that we—the church, our Sunday school—had sexualized male-female relationships for children who were only eleven and twelve years old! We’d given them no understanding of love and respect. We’d given them a bunch of rules—separated them across the room from each other—with a threat of eternal damnation.”
“Eternity looks like a long time to a twelve-year-old,” I sighed.
“It looks even longer when you are my age. At twelve, you don’t even know how long twelve years is. You don’t remember anything before six. Or very little. At my age, I at least know how long fifty is and Eternity seems a lot bigger,” he said. He sat with his shoulders slumped forward. I had no idea where this was going, so I just waited. “I started with I Corinthians 13. The chapter of love.”
“It’s always been one of my favorites,” I said.
“They had no concept of what love was. I prayed. I wanted to show them there was a way to honor and respect each other, to love each other so that they never made a life-changing mistake, like getting pregnant. Of course, some will. I’ll be blamed.”
“Why?”
“I taught your agreement.”
“You what? I thought you hated our agreement!”
“I thought I did, too. But each time I looked for an example of love and respect, I came back to it. I rewrote it. Only in terms that I could support scripturally. First off, jealousy. That was an easy one. Kids—remarkably young kids—understand jealousy. It is nothing more than wanting what someone else has. I could back it up with a ‘thou shalt not’ from the Ten Commandments. I started it the other way around. I told them that instead of not being jealous they should try to not make others jealous. You know, none of them had ever thought of that. I think I even surprised myself. How do we take an active role in not making others jealous? We share. We treat them with respect. We protect them from others. And when we reach that point, we can deal with each other in terms of respect. We will ask permission, not of our parents, but of each other. We find out if something might be hurtful to the other person. In short, when school let out and we started the summer program, they all signed an agreement. At that point, I told them it was all right to mix sides of the room, if they followed what they had agreed to and asked permission.”
“Wow! I really never thought anyone would use that agreement to teach a Sunday school class. Were they okay? Did they really agree and follow the rules?”
“They were fine. When Pastor Clark found out, he was not. He preached a scathing sermon regarding how children were led astray and the foundations of our faith were being eroded. He held up the agreement and told the congregation and the children that it was a loathsome work of the devil and banished me in the middle of Sunday worship,” John sighed.
“Holy shit!” I said. “Um… Sorry. John, that’s terrible.”
“I didn’t let it go. I should have just left. But by that point I was so upset—not that he was attacking me, but that he was tearing down what I’d built with those kids. It had taken us a year to build respect in that classroom. I told him he was wrong. I stood in the middle of the congregation and told him he was wrong and that he was distorting the Word of God by turning it into a doctrine of hate and fear. I called for an immediate vote from the congregation to have him removed from the pulpit. It was an ugly day, Brian. I was so thankful that Josh and Cassandra had moved here. The chairman of our church council took the vote and then asked me to leave. My good old friend, Martin Sanders, one-time member of the School Board, took my arm and led me to the door of the church. Bea followed me with her head held high and tears running down her cheeks.” Mr. Clinton was crying now, too. What a horrid thing to go through!
“I stopped at the door, and took off my shoes, and knocked the dust off of them before I left.” The image was clear. ‘And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.’
I looked at John. Cassie’s father. My sometimes nemesis, but always a thoughtful and considerate man. A man who had only this evening called me his son and asked me to stand beside him. I knelt by his side and hugged him while he cried.
I wasn’t getting to bed anytime soon, so I tossed another log on the fire. Rose stopped me and pressed her lips to mine. A kiss of assurance.
“Is everything okay?”
“We just need to talk a while. When you go in, please reassure Josh and Cassie and Mary. I’m sure they are worried about her dad and maybe even about themselves.”
“You’re just listening?”
“Like Hannah does in the morning. You know. Confession is good for the soul,” I said.
“I love you, Brian,” Rose said. She kissed me again and made sure I knew she loved me. “And remember, we all love you.” That last kiss was just a brush across my lips and meant as much as every other kiss I’d ever received. I watched her as she went back to the barn and then sat down next to John again.
“You need to get back to your family?” he asked. “I shouldn’t keep you.”
“My family supports each other. I just put another log on the fire. I don’t want to douse it.”
“I was so foolish, Brian. Avoid my mistakes.”
“You’re a good man, John. Your mistakes are minor.”
“All I wanted was for my daughter to love God and be saved. I believed there was nothing I could do that could be better than delivering my child to the Lord. And then I saw what I had subjected her to. All she needed from me was my love, and I gave her my fear. When she met Josh, I was torn. He was broken. Devastated. He deserved the love of God every bit as much as I did or as Cassie did. But then it became obvious that the price of that… redemption, would be my daughter. I watched them fall in love and said, ‘At least she is over Brian.’” He laughed. “Oh what a fool am I. I didn’t want those children, those junior high children, to think that God was all about punishment for what was wrong. And then everything I believed in went up in smoke. In an instant, that bastard turned my love into a loathsome abomination and cast them back into their pit of despair. I have no faith, Brian. I concede. You were right. I was wrong.”
“John,” I said softly as I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t give up your faith. It wasn’t the problem. Still isn’t. That there were evil people that influenced things beyond your control—that isn’t your fault. You were always willing to listen. When I brought Cassie home as an impudent neighbor brat, you listened to what we had to say. You discerned the good and the bad and adjusted. When Josh was broken—I won’t say you fixed him—you loved him. You brought him back from the brink of suicide when he despaired over Denise’s death. Those children in that Sunday school class have seen a glimpse of love and respect. Once having seen it, they won’t settle for anything less. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a new class enters high school with their own dating agreement.”
“Would you make them part of your clan if they did?”
“Maybe. If they wanted. But they won’t know about our clan. They’ll know about what a good man taught them. Maybe they will create their own clan.” I paused and considered carefully what I was about to reveal. I wasn’t supposed to know, but… “John, when we put together the agreements to expand the renovation of the barn into the rest of the loft, help Lionel and Lamar build another duplex out here on the ranch, get the property subdivided, and build us a new house, Anna asked me to help her run the numbers and make sure everything was solid. I had the opportunity to see things that I shouldn’t have under any other circumstances. I want you to know that I have never disclosed this to anyone else in the clan, and I never will. But thank you for funding the renovation of the barn. You can’t even imagine what I felt that day. How I despaired for my clan. I can only imagine some great and benevolent God turning to you and saying, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ Don’t lose your faith, John. Your faith has never been an issue.”
“What have I done? How have I come to the point where as a fifty-one-year-old Christian, I am comforted by a nineteen-year-old atheist who tells me not to lose my faith?” He started laughing.
“Really? I don’t think I’m an atheist,” I laughed.
“An agnostic?”
“No.” He looked at me as if I was insane. “I think that to be an atheist or an agnostic, you have to care. I don’t. I don’t care if there is a God or not, or if there are twenty of them or hundreds. It’s irrelevant. There are good people and there are people who are not as good. I won’t even call them bad, though I do believe that the pain we inflict upon each other is evil. People shouldn’t treat people the way your preacher treated you. Think about it. There was no purpose other than the preservation of his power. You had purpose in the way you set rules for Cassie and disciplined her. He didn’t try to bring you closer to God. He didn’t attempt to deliver his child to the Lord. He only thought to destroy. Isn’t that one of the names you give the devil? The great destroyer?”
“I may have to visit here periodically just to have theological arguments with you, Brian. You are good for my soul.”
“I hope you will visit us often, John. Though you might want to give the girls a little more warning before you fly over. And I’ll talk with you all you want. But there is really nothing about my religion, or even my politics, that requires me to convince you that I’m right and you are wrong,” I said.
“Well, that’s a relief,” he laughed.
“Nor does it require me to listen to you try to convince me.”
He looked at me and nodded.
What is the world coming to?
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
