Jayber Crow (8 page)

 

And then one day I asked myself, “How is it going to suit you to be called Brother Crow?” I walked around a while, saying over and over to myself, “Brother Crow, Brother Crow, Brother Crow.” It did not seem to be referring to me. I imagined hospitable, nice people saying to me before Sunday dinner, “Brother Crow, would you express our thanks?” And then I couldn't imagine myself.

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known at The Good Shepherd. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But these preachers I'm talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Although I was shaken, maybe I could have clamped my mouth shut and gone ahead. But about then I began to get into different trouble and more serious. You might call it doctrinal trouble.

The trouble started because I began to doubt the main rock of the faith, which was that the Bible was true in every word. “I reckon there ain't a scratch of a pen in it but what is true,” Uncle Othy used to say, but he spoke as of a distant wonder, and was not much concerned. The pious men of The Good Shepherd and Pigeonville were concerned. They had
staked their immortal souls on the infallible truth of every pen scratch from “In the beginning” to “Amen.” But I had read all of it by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

For instance, there is a big difference between the old tribespeople's coldhearted ferocity against their enemies and Jesus' preaching of forgiveness and of love for your enemies. And there is a big difference again between Jesus' unqualified command, “Love your enemies,” and Paul the Apostle's “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men,” which amounts to permission not to live peaceably with all men. And what about the verse in the same chapter saying that we should do good to our enemy, “for in doing so thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” Where did Jesus ever see doing good as a form of revenge? I saw the Bible as pretty much slanting upward until it got to Jesus, who forgave even the ones who were killing Him while they were killing Him, and then slanting down again when it got to St. Paul. I was truly moved by the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. I could imagine them. The Nativity in the Gospel of Luke and the Resurrection in the Gospel of John I could just shut my eyes and see. I could imagine everything until I got to the letters of Paul.

Questions all of a sudden were clanging in my mind like Edgar Allan Poe's brazen alarum bells. I still believed in the divinity and the teachings of Jesus and was determined to follow my purpose of preaching the Gospel—when I preached, I thought, I would just not mention the parts that gave me trouble—but it got so I couldn't open a Bible without setting off a great jangling and wrangling of questions that almost deafened me.

If we are to understand the Bible as literally true, why are we permitted to hate our enemies? If Jesus meant what He said when He said we should love our enemies, how can Christians go to war? Why, since He told us to pray in secret, do we continue to pray in public? Is an insincere or vain public prayer not a violation of the third commandment? And what about our bodies that always seemed to come off so badly in every contest with our soul? Did Jesus put on our flesh so that we might despise it?

But the worst day of all was when it hit me that Jesus' own most fervent prayer was refused: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup
from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” I must have read that verse or heard it a hundred times before without seeing or hearing. Maybe I didn't want to see it. But then one day I saw it. It just knocked me in the head.
This
, I thought, is what is meant by “thy will be done” in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.

After Jesus' terrible prayer at Gethsemane, an angel came to Him and gave Him strength, but did not remove the cup.

Before that time I may have had my doubts about public prayers, but I had listened to them complacently enough, even when they were for the football team. I had prayed my own private prayers complacently enough, asking for things I wanted, even though I knew well already that a lot of things I wanted I was not going to get, no matter how much I prayed for them. (Though I hadn't got around to thinking about it, I already knew that I had been glad to have some things I had got that I had never thought to want, let alone pray for.)

But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray “thy will be done” after you see what it means?

And what did these questions do to my understanding of all the prayers I had ever heard and prayed? And what did they do to the possibility that I could stand before a congregation—
my
congregation, who would believe that I knew what I was doing—and pray for favorable weather, a good harvest, the recovery of the sick and the strayed, victory in war? Does prayer change God's mind? If God's mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all? And what are we to think when two good people pray for opposite things—as when two devout mothers of soldiers on opposite sides pray for the safety of their sons, or for victory?

Does God want us to cross the abyss between Him and us? If we can‘t—and it looked to me like we can't—will He help us? Or does He
want us to fall into the abyss? Are there some things He wants us to learn that we can't learn except by falling into the abyss? Is that why the Jonah of old, who could not say “thy will be done,” had to lie three days and three nights in the dark in the belly of the great fish?

“Father, remove this cup from me,” I prayed. And there I stopped. For how would I know what God's will was, even provided I could have the strength to submit to it? I knew a lot of hearsay about God speaking to people in plain English, but He never had (He never has) spoken so to me.

By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty—in my own mind, or in the human lot—of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed—into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call. I wasn't just a student or a going-to-be preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where.

 

I went to my professors with my questions, starting with the easiest questions and the talkiest professors. I don't think about them much anymore. I don't hold anything against them. They were decent enough men, according to their lights. The problem was that they'd had no doubts. They had not asked the questions that I was asking and so of course they could not answer them. They told me I needed to have more faith; I needed to believe; I needed to pray; I needed to give up my questioning, which was a sign of weakness of faith.

Those men could go on all day about the sins of the flesh or the amount of water needed for baptism or whether you could go to Heaven without being baptized or who could or couldn't go to Heaven, but they couldn't say why, if we're to take some of the Bible literally, we don't take all of it literally, or why we kill our enemies, or why we pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets that we may be seen of men.

That I should give up my questioning was good enough advice, which I would have been glad enough to take, except that my questioning would not give me up. It kept at me. Sometimes it seemed to me that
people I walked by in the street must be able to hear the dingdonging in my head.

And so finally, late one afternoon, I went to the professor I was afraid to go to, old Dr. Ardmire. I was afraid to go to him because I knew he was going to tell me the truth. Dr. Ardmire was a feared man. He was a master of the Greek New Testament, a hard student and a hard teacher. We believed that he had never given but one A in his life. The number of students in his class in New Testament Greek, which he taught every fall, varied from maybe twenty to maybe three or four, as the horror died away and was renewed. He was known, behind his back, as Old Grit.

I knocked at his open door and waited until he read to a stopping place and looked up from his book.

“Come in, Mr.
J
. Crow.” He didn't like it that I went by my initial.

I went in.

He said, “Have a seat, please.”

I sat down.

Customarily, when I came to see him I would be bringing work that he had required me to talk with him about. That day I was empty-handed.

Seeing that I was, he said, “What have you got in mind?”

“Well,” I said, “I've got a lot of questions.”

He said, “Perhaps you would like to say what they are?”

“Well, for instance,” I said, “if Jesus said for us to love our enemies—and He did say that, didn't He?—how can it ever be right to
kill
our enemies? And if He said not to pray in public, how come we're all the time praying in public? And if Jesus' own prayer in the garden wasn't granted, what is there for us to pray, except ‘thy will be done,' which there's no use in praying because it will be done anyhow?”

I sort of ran down. He didn't say anything. He was looking straight at me. And then I realized that he wasn't looking at me the way he usually did. I seemed to see way back in his eyes a little gleam of light. It was a light of kindness and (as I now think) of amusement.

He said, “Have you any more?”

“Well, for instance,” I said, for it had just occurred to me, “suppose you prayed for something and you got it, how do you know
how
you got it? How do you know you didn't get it because you were going to get it
whether you prayed for it or not? So how do you know it does any good to pray? You would need proof, wouldn't you?”

He nodded.

“But there's no way to get any proof.”

He shook his head. We looked at each other.

He said, “Do you have any answers?”

“No,” I said. I was concentrating so hard, looking at him, you could have nailed my foot to the floor and I wouldn't have felt it.

“So,” I said, “I reckon what it all comes down to is, how can I preach if I don't have any answers?”

“Yes, Mr. Crow,” he said. “How can you?” He was not one of your frying-size chickens.

“I don't believe I can,” I said, and I felt my skin turn cold, for I had not even thought that until then.

He said, “No, I don't believe you can.” And we sat there and looked at each other again while he waited for me to see the next thing, so he wouldn't have to tell me: I oughtn't to waste any time resigning my scholarship and leaving Pigeonville. I saw it soon enough.

I said, “Well,” for now I was ashamed, “I had this feeling maybe I had been called.”

“And you may have been right. But not to what you thought. Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time.”

“And how long is that going to take?”

“I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.”

“That could be a long time.”

“I will tell you a further mystery,” he said. “It may take longer.”

He held out his hand to me and I shook it. As I started to leave, it came to me that of all the teachers I'd had in school he was the kindest, and I turned around. I was going to thank him, but he had gone back to his book.

It was enough to make your head swim. There I went, walking away from Dr. Ardmire's office down the empty corridor late in the afternoon, and once again all my life so far was behind me. I had a feeling of strangeness and a feeling of being free; I had no more obligations, no more fear of failure, for failure had already come and, in a way, had gone. My questions were still with me, but for the time being anyhow they weren't crying out to be answered. I wasn't yet as free as I was going to become, but I knew that I was freer than I had ever been before. More than anything, I was glad to be free of being a preacher. It has always taken me a long time to think of something to say, and then more often than not I say it to myself. I would have had no business trying to preach a sermon three times a week.

And then, even before I got out of the building, and without any intention on my part, the thought of Nan O'Callahan returned to me. But she didn't come to mind this time as “Sister Crow,” the entirely supposed preacher's wife of my hopeless daydreams. She came as herself, comely, weighty, fragrant, and warm.