Uncross My Heart (7 page)

She invited me to join her for breakfast on campus but I declined, saying my plane would be leaving midmorning.

A pause ensued that seemed longer than the entire meal. “We have a mutual friend. Jude Baker.” Her tone was one of admittance.

My mind flashed on the odd coincidence that I’d just seen Jude Baker in the café in Chicago after saying good-bye to my father, having not seen, or thought of, her in years. I was struck by the oddity of someone talking about her.

“I stayed with her on my way to New York and she told me about you. In fact, she tried to get you to go out with us.”

I sank back in my chair, now understanding why this woman was so comfortable in my presence. She undoubtedly knew a great deal about me through Jude.

“So yes, I do have an advantage over you, Reverend Westbrooke.”

“So it appears.” I wasn’t too happy about this turn of events. I didn’t want people talking about me or my past or using the two to draw conclusions.

“She said you were a brilliant strategist when it came to winning religious battles and suggested that I see if I could get you to join C3—Change the Catholic Church.” She explained how she planned to effect change as it related to women’s rights and found it abhorrent that the church taught poverty-stricken families that it was a sin to use birth control. Without blinking she blamed the church for the spread of HIV because they told families they couldn’t use condoms. “It’s just so ridiculous that guys in dresses, living in a marble palace, on the backs of the very people they purport to care for, make those people’s lives more difficult and dangerous in the name of God.”

“Your name is being scratched off the pope’s Christmas card list with a chisel as we speak,” I said.
A great deal is wrong with organized
religion, but if the church does nothing more than give people hope and
a place to turn, that’
s
more than they had to start with
. Immediately after that fleeting thought, a conflicting one crossed my mind. Did I really believe the church helped or was I conditioned to believe it? Had even my private thoughts been brainwashed—my inner voice silenced?

“A connection to a Higher Power, I think the world needs it,” I blurted, putting an end to my internal dialogue.

“Does the world need it or is the world taught that it
must
need it or go down in flames?” She echoed my doubts.

“We all need a connection to love.”

“On that I would agree.” She gave me a provocative smile and I felt the conversation becoming personal. “Jude said after the incident with Jeannette you gave up
everything
.”

“I’m surprised my rather mundane private life has kept Jude interested all these years but—”

“Truce. I’m like that. I’m behaving as if I’ve known you for twenty years and that today we need to get to the bottom of what’s bothering you. When in fact, I’m what’s bothering you.” She gave a raucous laugh.

“So you teach women’s religious studies.” I tried to break up the energy and shift her focus.

She explained that her academic interest focused on women in the early Christian era but that their beliefs and writings were hard to unearth, buried in paternalistic chronicling. As a result, women were marginalized to near extinction. Outside the classroom, she engaged in C3 to change modern-day women’s views.

“So you’re after the Catholics, the Mormons, and then the Baptists. I hope you save us Episcopalians for last.”

“You do yourselves in by chanting ‘for I am but a lowly worm—’ How demeaning is that?”

“Don’t throw out the entire Psalter when the poetry is so beautiful.

‘For the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting, and his faithfulness endures from age to age.’” I defended the faith.

“You’re a romantic.”

“When we celebrate mass, we imitate all our European ancestors who for centuries stood in drafty, cold stone church buildings and chanted the very same words we say today. I find comfort in that continuity,” I said.

She smiled as one might at a naïve child. “Because there was no PA system in those old European cathedrals and the only way the priests could keep their attention was to get them to memorize phrases and regurgitate them.”

Our sparring was wearing on me, and I didn’t find the conversation nearly as exciting as my debates with Vivienne. I made a lame excuse about needing to get to bed early for my upcoming flight. She let me pick up the check. We drove back across the bridge to our hotel and parked some distance from the entrance.

As we strolled across the parking lot she said, “I’ll tell Jude I finally met Westie. Here’s my number. Call me when you’re in San Francisco.”

“I enjoyed meeting you,” I said, thinking she was smart and interesting but not nearly as attractive as Vivienne Wilde, and when that thought crossed my mind it startled even me.

The breeze was balmy and caressed my skin, lulling me into sensual thoughts. Lyra must have sensed my energy shifting away from her because she suddenly stopped and looked me in the eye.

“Okay, you’re not going to call me, I can see that. You’re all wound up in your shorts trying to figure out who you are, so how about this?

Give me your cell-phone number.” I rattled it off and she jotted it on the back of one of her own cards. “I’m going to call
you
the next time I’m in Chicago and take you to dinner.”

Her directness made me laugh. “Great.”

“Great,” she echoed, and gave me a quick hug. “By the way, did you read Benny Shanon’s study stating Moses was high on drugs when he got the Ten Commandments and saw the burning bush?” I rolled my eyes in response and she grinned. “Hey, better said by a Jewish theologian than a lesbian scholar—burning bush for me takes on a whole different meaning.” She winked before turning and heading for the lobby.

I glanced up at the sky to make sure lightning wasn’t about to strike us both.

Midweek, I was teaching The Relevance of Ancient Religious Concepts in Modern Times
,
a course required for seminary students, and I vied with BlackBerrys hidden beneath desktops for their attention. In fact, I was quite certain that hell for this millennial generation was an eternity without text messaging and Internet access.

“An Episcopal priest was followed to chapel by a cat,” I said, and the students smiled, accustomed to my irreverent style. “Every Sunday for twenty years the cat walked down the aisle, hopped onto the front pew, and curled up and awaited the sermon. When the priest died, his fellow clergy allowed the cat to continue to attend mass. They’d process down the aisle each Sunday, the cat walking behind them.

“The cat grew arthritic so the priests let him walk more slowly down the aisle and then placed him on a pillow in the pew. Then the cat became so elderly that the priests had to carry the feline down the aisle on the pillow and place him in the pew. One day the cat died. The clergy continued to carry the pillow down the aisle each Sunday in his honor. One hundred years later, a curious newcomer to the church, seeing the pillow being carried down the aisle, asked about its religious significance. The priest snorted in disdain. ‘It’s for the cat.’”

The students laughed.

“Over time, we forget the context, and perhaps even worse, we attack those who question. The best sign I’ve ever seen in a church read, ‘God asks that you give up your soul, not your brain.’

“Remember Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write as individuals. Communities selected a prominent person’s name as author of their collective works, created to guide their own people.

Their writings are important and sociologically relevant, but are they the Word of God, or are they the words of a people who believed in their God and wanted to improve the lives of their community? And either way, does it matter?”

I saw a few students flinch at the idea that anything in the Bible might not matter.

“If we could magically write down every word our parents ever said to us, we would find amazing truths, conflicting information, and downright lies. ‘Santa Claus comes down the chimney and leaves you gifts if you’re good. Santa Claus is actually your father. You need to get a college education so you can support yourself. Marry rich. It’s important to love everyone. We have to kill people when we’re at war. Life is hard. Life is good.’ Regardless of the conglomeration of information, we have a sense that our parents did their best to communicate what they believed to be true in order to help us. The Bible parents us. We will continue to analyze passages in the Bible for context.”

Class had run long and Gladys Irons was standing in the back of the room. I wondered why. Students nervously rustled their papers and books, not wanting to be in class a minute longer than they’d signed up for.

Roger Thurgood III stood and nearly shouted to be heard. “Do you believe anything that Christ said?” His voice quivered in demonstration of his frustration with my thoughts.

“I believe, Roger, along with many other scholars, that only a handful of statements in the New Testament can be authenticated as the words of Christ. And of those, almost all are about love, none about hate or fear or warnings of dire things to come. We’re out of time. See you next week.” The class rose as a group and exited the room, Roger mercifully among them.

Gladys walked to the front of the room as I erased the whiteboard.

“Are you available this afternoon to meet with
Christ Victorious
, a publication trying to make sure the right person gets in the White House?”

“Right person as in right wing?”

“This is your chance. They need fresh blood—”

I turned too suddenly and faced her, wanting this uptight woman to simply leave me alone. “Gladys, I’m not like you.”

“Oh, Alexandra, we’re past that now. It’s my fault. I didn’t appreciate what you bring to the Christian movement because of your odd presentation style, but that’s exactly why you’re able—”

“Gladys, I’m a liberal theologian. Ninety percent of the things you condemn, I don’t.”

“I think we’re rather in line with one anoth—”

“For starters, I don’t believe God punishes unbaptized babies, adulterers, or gay people.”

“Well, they don’t go to heaven.”

“I think we make our own heaven and hell for the most part, Gladys.”

“Oh, there’s a hell as surely as you are standing here before me.

And I believe that murderers and rapists and hideous people who do not follow God’s law most certainly go into the eternal fire.”

“Or perhaps those people are already in an eternal fire, and when they die, the agony and pain felt by the person they raped or killed, and the agony and pain of every single human who suffered due to that person’s torture and death, are made a part of the soul of that murderer like a suit sewn to the skin that cannot be removed. And that oppressive hopelessness and pain is their ongoing hell until they can find their way out through forgiveness.”

“What kind of talk is that? You’re saying people can find their way out of hell?”

“Maybe.” I thrust my hands into the air as if I’d just scored a field goal. “They might have to reincarnate over time to find their way out.”

“Reincarnate?”

“Think about life and the afterlife in a less linear fashion, Gladys.

Just go with me, for a moment. Free your mind. Do you think God selected thousands of people to be cavemen, die trying to discover fire, and that was their one shot at life?”

“Well, I don’t know about cavemen. I don’t spend time thinking about cave—”

“One guy got to be Russell Crowe and one got to be Cro-Magnon, and he froze to death, and that was his only shot at being a human.

Luck of the draw. Too bad, cave guy. Makes no sense, does it? Neither does the idea that if you love someone of the same gender, you go to hell.”“Alexandra, the way you think.”

“You believe that if a woman loves—let’s say kisses, or sleeps with—another woman, she goes to hell?”

“I believe it is a very strong possibility, if she does it repeatedly and does not repent.”

“Oh, Gladys, Gladys, Gladys—”

“The Lord said it is an abomination and those who—”

Unable to contain myself, I grabbed Gladys’s thick head in my hands and said, “I’m going to share the secret my neighbor shared with me.” I kissed her squarely on the mouth. “See you in hell.” I said it cheerily.

Gladys yanked herself free of my grasp. Her eyeballs jumped out at me as if on miniature Slinkys, and she huffed loudly several times.

With the back of her hand, she wiped her lips as if I’d pressed dog manure on them. “You are not fit to wear the robes of Christ.” She ran from my classroom, and I flung back my head and stared up at the ceiling.
Probably right,
I thought.

* * *

That night I sat cross-legged on the floor by the small fireplace in my farmhouse, talking morosely on the phone with Dennis, Ketch resting at my side.

“I wish I could have been there when you kissed her. I’ll bet you she hasn’t been kissed in decades. Of course, you shouldn’t have done it.” He paused. “What did kissing her feel like? She looks like she has rough lips.”

“It wasn’t that kind of kiss. It was a let-me-punch-your-ticket-to-hell kind of kiss.”

“You know she’ll go to Hightower.”

“No, she could never confess to anyone that she was kissed, which makes me feel like a sexual terrorist. I jumped her and she has no way to tell anyone about it. I need to apologize to her.” I took another sip from an old brandy snifter my grandmother only took down off the shelf for special occasions and wondered if she would have felt this particular evening qualified.

“Probably a good idea. How do you intend to phrase it?”

“Gladys, I’m sorry I…I don’t know. It will just have to come to me.”

“Dr. Westbrooke, you need to think about one of two things.” His tone was teasing, but somehow I knew the mellow lilt was merely to cover the fact that he really meant what he was about to say. “Either button up your behavior, or get yourself to a seminary that is more liberal and will appreciate and embrace you. There are some, you know.”

“I love Claridge.”

“But priests can’t be mashers.”