Can I Believe?

I never know from year to year whether Easter's grand story will lodge in my heart or stay trapped in the cool channels of my mind. My faith is as fickle as a cat. It comes and goes as it pleases. And sometimes, it seems to sit across the room and watch me, tail flicking.

I grew up Southern Baptist and was "saved" at 9. Easter was a big event. But it didn't seem like much of a miracle to me. I was too young to know what "dead and gone" meant. I didn't yet know grief's terrible yearning.

I was also too new in the world to separate one wonder from another. Jesus died and rose from the dead. It was a fact. Everybody knew that. TV pictures travel through the air. Wood floats. Airplanes fly.

I don't know exactly when that easy faith left me, but it did.

Last year, I attended Easter services at a Presbyterian church in Denton, Texas. I wore a silk dress and didn't need a coat because North Texas had been beautiful--lush and warm for a month. A friend I'll call "David" was with me. David is in his 80s, and he suffers from a mysterious spasm that causes him to jerk abruptly, as though he has just been startled awake from a bad dream. In crowds, the jerks are likely to come more often.

We were packed into the pews like pencils in a box. It was stuffy, and the jerks had a bad hold on David.

"We are gathered on this joyous day," the preacher said. Jerk. Jerk. Jerk.

"To celebrate the salvation of the world." Jerk, jerk.

David's knees would bang into the pew before us, and his backbone would jar the pew under us. The force of those jolts set the two pews to shaking until both rows of heads were rocking back and forth pretty much in time with David's.

A few kids turned around, but their mothers frowned and slapped their shoulders until they stopped looking.

Even if David could have walked--which didn't seem likely, given his condition at that moment--we couldn't have gotten out of that packed church. So we sat there, all dressed up, jerking back and forth, feeling miserable and trying to act as though nothing was happening.

Meanwhile, the preacher was going on about Jesus and the miracle. I looked around at everybody with their faces raised toward the pulpit and thought, "Is it possible that these people really believe this hooey? I know I sure don't." Jerk. Jerk.

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