"Some firms wouldn't hire me--they'd probably seen the name Bob Jones University on my resume and figured, "If the school can't even call itself Robert Jones University, how bright can its graduates be?" "
"Me and Mr. Jones," a reflection on living and leaving the Bob Jones lifestyle."By the time I joined my law firm, no one could have guessed at my past. I had stopped attending church and begun paying fifteen dollars for a single lipstick. I worked a "man's job" and decided to wait to have babies. I fiew to Vegas to play slots with my father. Any of these was enough to doom my soul, but life felt too good, as the preachers had warned, and I couldn't stop. This transformation still comes at a price. I haven't enjoyed a success or a pleasure or a new song without suspecting that the sin was being recorded somewhere to be used against me someday. Fun still unsettles me inside.
"Today, I'm on a partnership track in a top-tier law firm...Now I give advice to Fortune 500 corporations and green-light million-dollar deals. Savvy businessmen respect my opinion. They don't know that I still wake up screaming sometimes. The world is a scary place, and in my dreams I'm still protected. In my dreams, I'm still at Bob Jones, the place where everything turns out right. That's a feeling any person would want. When I see conservative Muslims or Orthodox Jews on the street, Branch Davidians on TV, baby cousins at my family reunion, I can see they've been promised that feeling, too. Under the right circumstances, that promise can be the most powerful thing in the world. Under the right circumstances, you'll do anything for that promise."
In the midst of smatterings of the normal trasnfers, traffic snafus, asthmatics and cuckoo binge drinkers, Barrett and I managed to have the incredible luck of having to do not one, but two "confirmations"--where we arrive far too late and can do nothing but confirm that the patient is already gone and we can't do anything. One 90-ish year old guy, one thirty-ish year old woman. You think it would make a difference, the one being full up with years like Abraham, the other young and mysteriously, unaccountably gone, but the family's faces and tears were the same.
So you look around the house, and they both had their inner-city apartment walls covered in copious amounts of Jesus Crap from the Christian bookstore. So what do you say to the bereaved? We're sorry for your loss. It looks like he was a good man. It looks like she was a good woman. They were on speaking terms with the Big Guy. They're with Jesus now.
But, I, as always, wonder: what if the sunny children and "God Watches Over This House" plaques and eerily matching "When God Closes a Door He Always Opens Another" posters with the little kitten on them were the wife's, and the old man hated it until the day he cursed his last? What if the religious young woman was the worst kind of tyrant? What if the young men were crying because they did not know how to think about the not-so-dearly beloved, what if they were remembering with disappointment that all they had to remember from father or mother or sister was abuse, tyrrany, and rampant egotism.
Something deep inside me is reminding me it's not very good to speak ill of the dead.
And what do I believe, anyway, about this going to be with Jesus when we die? About the chances of resurrection, about he qualifications for eternal life?
I'm certainly not on "good speaking terms" with the big guy. I think he's kind of an absentee jerk, in fact, but I'm not about to say it because, hey, my life is still pretty sweet, and there's this big, big payoff for swallowing your questions and toeing the line, so they say, and not much of one at all for saying, "Fuckit, this shit's ridiculous, I'm going to go blow my meaningless life at [pick your empty existentialist excuse for a dull, self-involved, neurotic pasttime]." (Note to self: thank Lewis and Chesterton for taking all the thrill and promise out of hedonism.)
And, hey, I don't even know who I'm talking about, anyway...he doesn't really pop up and endorse particular theologies every November like our good Republican presidential candidates.
Well, this is what that living in a moral vacuum feels like. Gee, it sucks. There must be an alternative...unless you're not sincerely convinced the world isn't a moral vacuum. So do you pretend? Especially if you're pretty sure that people who are convinced that the world is not a moral vacuum are essentially happier, and generally better, people--except when they find themselves incapable of convincing themselves anymore and fall apart into the cynical, the bitter, and the burnt out?
Thoughts and musings...
