Читать книгу From the Dark Domain - Keith Potter - Страница 14

There is no pride in saying that I began to flourish at church. While youth ministry fit badly, I accepted a new role at the Village Church in Eugene. It felt good to return to Eugene, a place where I’d once found a niche. Even Mommy liked that city and took pride in the standing of being the wife of a smart, favored Associate Pastor at a prestigious church. And this was my church, the place of my youthful curiosity. It was true sanctuary and I walked in a line of noble pastors like Dr. Everson.

Those were fine days at Village Eugene. The church’s reputation as a thinker’s church in a university town meant that an erudite man of words could offset his lack of zeal for the gospel with theological complexity. I’d only encountered Christ vaguely, so teaching theology and dabbling in philosophy were easier in a climate where people loved intellectual calisthenics with a dash of mysticism. As a student of many intellectual voices, my lectures informed without inspiring, since I had no honest testimony of successful lab work in the science of living faith. I found it far too easy to teach religion without experiencing deep spirituality.

Soon I adopted the social gospel like many of my peers. It seemed the path to respectability and advancement and it required little prayer or God-consciousness. Of course, the poor are always on God’s heart and being an advocate for the disadvantaged puts us akin to God. But, I confess, I ran a parallel track in proximity to God without actually intersecting him.

From all evidence, my fellows in that movement covered a spectrum of thought regarding classic Christianity. I quietly embraced the ethics of collective morality because I’d suffered so many defeats in the realm of personal spirituality. For example, I wore marital crisis and every self-inflicted wound like a badge because they put me in touch with those who suffer. I gave little thought to how my failures in critical relationships and mismanagement of human covenants affected the shepherding of the local church. There is something in First Timothy about fitness for ministry, and again in Titus; but I was majoring in Old Testament prophetic literature. Not the predictive kind that pointed to the coming Savior, but to the appeal for justice. God knows I was quietly hungry for justice and empathetic toward the oppressed.

The Bible was for me a handy book of cut and paste quotes to be superimposed whenever they granted authority to my presuppositions. And those quotes didn’t support my biases, or even accused them, I was quick to abase the authority of whole swaths of scripture and to apply modern criticisms that put apostolic authorship in doubt, or that placed notions of timeless truth under a cloud of suspicion. I discounted entire portions of the Bible because they were inconvenient to my cause or indicting to my character. At the time, in my own feeble way, I was on an intellectual crusade to stamp out shallow, adolescent versions of the faith. In so doing, I was commandeering God for my purposes. With God in my pocket, however small that God became, I did some good for the disenfranchised, but even more harm to the church, their greater friend.

In other words, we discounted entire portions of the Bible because they were inconvenient to our cause or indicting to our character. But at the time, we were on a crusade to stamp out shallow, intrusive evangelicalism and to commandeer God for our purposes. With God in our pockets, however small that God became, we did some good for the disenfranchised and even more harm to the church, their greatest friend.

All the while, you were a wonderful boy. Every gadget came apart in your hands as the Holy Writ came apart in mine, though you somehow fit yours together again with improvements while mine was a Humpty Dumpty religion. What you did to bikes and model airplanes, radios and finally computers astounded me then as your genius does today. Yes, Donnie, I do know where and who you are.

You were imperturbable; not involved with us, of course, for the best of reasons. Nor were you exuberant or exultant like other children. Any traces of overt revelry had been squeezed from you. But you were curious.

Once, when you were barely more that a toddler, I replaced the battery in a toy car and still couldn’t get it to work. After giving up and handing you a dead car, I returned later to find you unscrewing the battery compartment and reversing the batteries. You never looked at me in triumph or disgust; you simply played with the car and logged the discovery.

Oh, I would love to see that log. Especially the feelings recorded there, so that I could understand you more and reconcile with you more completely. But even then, you locked away all of that emotion in a strong box and hid the key.

Perhaps you wish that I’d searched harder for the key? Maybe you left it in plain sight and I had no eyes to see? Donnie, I was blind, but now I see. I was lost, but now I’m found.

Will you let me know you?

The first time Mommy slapped you, I wanted to call the police. Just as I’d wanted to call a lawyer when she first hit me. But I didn’t and, again, I didn’t.

Few understood spousal abuse in those days, and even fewer acknowledged the abuse of wives upon husbands. While you and I found our escapes in our realms of accomplishment, we were hostages in that home.

Once, I held Mommy down to make her stop hitting me, and she bit me and spit in my face and swore that she’d call the police, the church board and the newspapers if I didn’t let her up. I let her up and she hit me mercilessly until I had to spend two days in isolation and actually practiced wearing makeup for the first of many times.

More often, I left the house, dreading the likelihood that she’d visit her rage upon you; dreading even more that she’d take you away or abandon us both in her rage.

Most often, I cowered and caved and placated—damn it, did I placate.

Now I know what a better man would have done. A better man would have stood up to her from the very first day after that awful honeymoon and said, “This is unacceptable. We either get help together or this marriage is annulled.” And when the violence began, a stronger husband and father would have brought in every help, exercised every kind of intervention, and answered that woman’s misguided cry for mercy so that she, and we, could have been rescued from her rage.

But I lacked the courage. I watched my father master in the art of placation without confrontation. It was the only form of marriage that he knew and the only kind I learned. While my mother abused me with words and utter neglect, she implanted the subtle assumption that for a woman to be miserable and to behave abominably is the norm.

Sorry to displace blame. Forgive me, Donnie, for being what you would justifiably call a wimp. Forgive me, Mommy, for being too weak to be your knight in shining armor; too feeble to vanquish the dragon that held you captive in a dark place.

Donnie, I believe that Mommy was sexually abused, and perhaps by her own father. And her mother refused to address the problem. Grandma was a strange woman; hard and cold and afraid of scandal; a small-town socialite among people with even smaller minds. Mommy never told me why she hated men, though she told me often why she despised me. She talked around the truth by calling me ugly and stupid and smelly and skinny and an awful provider and a terrible pastor and a horrid father. What she meant to say was simply this: “Please, help me. Do something! I’m wounded and afraid and afflicted by monumental anguish. I’m dying. You help others! Why can’t you help me?”

And that was the irony, Donnie. I did help others. Somehow, I could perceive and improve the state of every other living soul except your Mommy’s; and yours, of course. And even my own. But I helped others.

Did I already ask you to forgive me?