I roamed the spacious corridors of my church, alone, while my mind pressed against the teachings I learned there. My parents and grandparents served in countless volunteer roles, so there was work to be done at my church nearly every day. My grandparents had joined the Gilead Baptist Church in the late 1940s, and my father was a member when he married my mother in 1958. She joined the church then, too. My mother’s provincial desires rejected her large, Irish, non-practicing Catholic family. My father’s choosing a Catholic woman from a rouge family of drinkers and gamblers furthered the Baptist mission of saving the lost.
Before I started first grade, I was often at church with my mother on Fridays as she printed and folded bulletins in the church office, a small room that doubled as the library. I would hear the wet slap of the mimeograph machine as I climbed the narrow stairs behind the choir loft up to the baptismal pool, a concrete trough below an open window that overlooked the full sanctuary. Burgundy, velvet fabric draped the window, giving it the proper backdrop for what the preacher talked about during a baptism: sins washed clean by the blood of the Lamb. I would lie on the concrete floor of the empty baptistry and visualize being dunked under water by the preacher someday. When I closed my eyes, I’d see the water turn blood-red from the slaughter of little lambs. My grandma often lamented that agony was the expected lot of the people of God, but I hated that the lambs suffered, too.
My family expected me to participate in everything church offered, and I did: Sunday school; Vacation Bible school; revival week; Wednesday night suppers; and Girls in Action, a Baptist-only version of Girl Scouts where, for performing good deeds, I earned badges, a scepter, a gold-toned cape, and a crown. My piano teacher, who doubled as our church organist, held our recitals on the same stage where the preacher entreated sinners to be saved.
God was the guiding light of our vacations, too. Late summer in 1970, the six of us—my grandparents and my family of four—loaded in our family Oldsmobile. With my father behind the wheel, we sped to the mountains of Kentucky. The Olds rushed around switchback turns as it climbed to Pineville; the engine chugging in rhythm. My father felt he had to speed. We packed vacation activities into a few days, because we could not leave the farm for long; there was too much work to be done. My grandpa chuckled at my grandma when she complained from the back seat about my dad driving too fast. As we met the headlights of oncoming cars on the darkened curves, Grandma prayed for our safe arrival. She said she knew God was with us because we were doing his work.
We came to the mountains to see the Book of Job. It was an outdoor performance chronicling Job’s suffering at the hands of Satan. (My grandma took travel recommendations from the Billy Graham broadcasts she listened to daily.) The stage looked like the nave of a church. The actors’ makeup and costumes simulated the color and design of a church’s stained-glass windows, like they were covered face to foot with bits of jewels, glass, and colored stones. Discordant organ music resounded through the open air. Through one eye, I watched the re-enactment of Job’s suffering, while I blocked the other eye with my mother’s shoulder. On the stage from the center of a storm, the voice of God belted and silenced everything under the night sky. Lights made the actors’ faces glow in mosaic colors. Job was illuminated from beneath, casting tall shadows to the rear of the stage. All the characters raised their gloved hands and covered their faces, then lowered their hands and yelled as a chorus, “Job! Job! Job! Dead! Dead! Dead!” The floor below Job slowly turned gold and as the rest of the stage darkened, the chorus of women sustained an eerie chant in the background.
Back in our car, my grandma said she liked how the play showed evil befalls even the innocent and undeserving. It seemed as if the drama soothed her, perhaps because she identified with Job. I reached over and took her hand as we drove away in the night toward a roadside motel.
The next morning, we jumped back into the Olds and traveled south to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. My mother wanted to take my brother and me to the top of the Space Needle. My grandma wanted to see Jesus.
Standing on the observation level of the Space Needle, 400-feet-high, my eyes scanned the whole Smoky Mountains. My mother pointed to the mountain range and read from a pamphlet about Mount LeConte, the tallest peak we could see. I gazed out into the smoke-like fog rising from the deep-green trees. From the top of the needle, my mother pointed again and again at our Oldsmobile parked on the street, making sure that we could see my grandparents and my father sitting inside it, the size of ants. My grandpa had refused to be that high up in such a narrow building, just in case the land shifted. I thought my grandma would have liked being up so high, where she could reach out and touch God.
Our next stop was at Christus Gardens, where we walked through life-sized, wax-dummy dioramas depicting scenes from Jesus’ life: the baby in the manger, the boy in the temple, and the man at the last supper. In the background, a scratchy but angelic voice spoke over a high-pitched, heavenly choir, intoning Jesus as "The Master." The last diorama showed the empty tomb where Jesus had been but was no more. We kept following where the arrows pointed, through the automatic doors that whooshed open to reveal the largest face of Jesus you could imagine. Sculpted from a six-ton slab of Carrera marble, big Jesus was taller than everyone who stood in front of it. My grandma stared in astonishment, as no matter where you stood in its presence, the big eyes of Jesus were always looking right at her.
“That’s how it is,” she said. “Jesus is always watching.”
Grandma was in awe. But I never came face-to-face with him, that big Jesus. I stood slightly behind my mother, shielded from the eyes that followed me everywhere.
I knew that day that I didn’t feel like my family did about Jesus and church and worship and belief. But, I kept it to myself. Some part of me had learned that in order to gain your love, I must be like you. And I wasn’t like them. I could not look at the big eyes of Jesus. I could not worship that which brought my grandma to her knees, He who could relieve her suffering but did not.
But years later on a school day in 1974, I went public to the people I trusted most: my best girlfriends—Melissa, Sheri, Laura, and Dayna. I was ten years old and during recess, we walked around the playground, a large, open field across the street from our elementary school, and talked about Jesus. In the front corner of the field, kids’ feet had worn the grass, leaving patches for home plate and pitcher’s mound and narrow paths connected invisible bases.
I blurted out words that I never took back: “I don’t believe it.”
I told them that I don’t believe that we come here to Earth for a short time (in the grand scale of all time!) and, based on what we do or don’t do before we die, we get sent (by the Almighty of everything) to heaven or H-E-DOUBLE-L when we die. Forever. “It just doesn’t make sense,” I said with certainty, like fact. Yet, I spelled hell instead of saying it, because saying hell was swearing and swearing would send you straight to hell. My grandmother warned me about swearing, which I mainly did on a dare from my big brother.
That day, we girls wore matching t-shirts that we bought together from a booth at the last county fair, each airbrushed with a colorful scene, like a dolphin jumping over an oasis or a heart with angel’s wings. In their houses, I knew which kitchen cabinets held the drinking glasses and helped myself when I visited. On sticky, summer nights, we arranged our sleeping bags in the middle of Sheri’s back porch and rocked out to Grand Funk Railroad’s The Locomotion, dancing in a girl-train and as we chugged along, we belted this brand-new dance song. Our friendship bond was strong and everlasting.
Though none of the girls joined me in questioning heaven or hell. Dayna said that she’d already been saved, last year at her church’s revival, so she had already gained a guarantee of heaven. The Dead Sea Scrolls had been found in a cave, Laura’s preacher had said, so the Bible was true, she assured. Sheri, always the one to say something funny, thought that God’s days had to be longer than ours in order the create the whole universe in just seven. And Melissa looked at me with a hint of sadness, like she worried about me.
Our conversation slid away from hell when our teacher motioned us in, but my mind lingered in dissatisfaction. Big Jesus heard my doubting sinfulness. My friends heard, too, and none of them understood me.