single exception was a young woman in candy cane coloured tights and a black leather jacket that was at least three sizes too big for her. Her head was bare, and her squidink hair had been given a brush cut much like many a floor monitor’s in a Bible School boy’s dorm. She wore no gloves, and though I could see her breath and her hands looked chapped, she didn’t even warm them inside a jacket pocket — even the one that was without a cigarette. She wasn’t smirking like some, and she didn’t have her back to me like the others. No — she was smiling right at me.
Though on my bad days, these days, I believe that in the end we’re all just carbon deposits, to be mined like the dinosaurs by creatures which we can’t imagine, on that day a stranger’s smile was enough to transport me to the bosom of Abraham. Suddenly I didn’t worry if I was dull. I wouldn’t have minded if everyone dismissed me as just a gangly Bible-thumper who couldn’t whistle even a single song of experience. Everyone but this one young woman. Perhaps most remarkably, I no longer cared about the Christian service points. Suddenly it was so much bigger than that.
As when the Lord flashed his backside to Moses on Sinai, so when I beheld that smile I caught a glimpse of a hallowed and uncommon knowledge: This is where I’m supposed to he. I regretted none of the doors I had closed or ignored in my 18 years to bring me to that speck and blink of space and time: the chair on which I stood was the fulcrum about which the Wheel of Heaven spun out God’s and peculiar will in an instant, one kind smile from this stranger(a rather attractive young woman, I couldn’t help but notice) had become blessed assurance that I was performing my Father’s pleasure. She might smoke, dress like a tramp and even have been with a man, but all I knew and cared for was that Jesus loved her and wanted me to tell her so. I was as humble a mouthpiece for the Holy Ghost as my stereo had been for Beelzebub, but the woman’s smile was a smidgen of rainbow to me — a promise of a covenant she didn’t even know. It’s okay, she might mean by it, don’t let those punks get to you; or, Sure it was funny, but I’m listening; or even, Amuse me til my streetcar comes. But God was whispering through her scarcely parted lips, This is the reason I’ve led you here.
“I used to be a communist. Actually, a Maoist — not that that matters. I was disrespectful to my parents; full of wicked thoughts. Like many of you, I’m sure, I was desperate for something to give meaning to my life …. Desperate, that is, until I found the answer in the one who’s birth we’ll be celebrating tomorrow.” Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Cicero wince. Oh oh: Christmas.
“1 didn’t come to that answer easily. I had a rebellious heart and lots of distractions. I was doing lousy in school — geometry, especially.” I notice a few smiles and nods of empathy. “But when I gave my life to Jesus, he changed me. I don’t mean my problems suddenly vanished — I failed geometry — but at least I knew my problems happened for a purpose.”
“So, how come you failed geometry?” It was a boy in the back, maybe 15. Maybe struggling himself with the curriculum.
“Ah! Well you see, I would have been able to get into university if I’d passed. But the Lord arranged things so I’d only be able to get into Bible College.” I flush, with something like pride, at the tittering.
“Couldn’t you have made it up at summer school?”
“Well yes. Technically.” I imagine Cicero hanging his head, and I glance over and he’s done precisely that. “I didn’t really want to do that. And Cod doesn’t allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist.” A rumbling of muffled snickers, and I press on. “All problems are sent to test us; to draw us closer to the Lord. Even geometry problems. So today I might not know how to calculate the circumference of a circle, but I’ve learned that Heaven has glories that cannot be measured.” Cicero raised his head and turned sharply towards me. He looked confused. The smile broadened on the face of the woman in tights and leather.
Perhaps if I’d been saved a little later in life — say, with six more months of puberty under my belt — my testimony would’ve been as savoury as Cicero’s. But this was great; no exaggeration, no apology. My heart was racing. I thought of Polycarp, the third century bishop of Smyrna, and recalled Amphora Faulker’s impassioned sketch in Church History 101 of his glorious, sticky end. I heard her syrupy, southern drawl recount his hymns of praise as the flames licked his body, the streams of blood from the stabs of impatient centurions, and their astonishment as the blood doused the fire. I thought of Dylan, ass-deep in Pat Boone’s shallow end, squeezing his hands tight across his narrow chest and falling backwards into new life. All of us were fools for God. Be not afraid of them that kill the body …. Fear him who hath power to cast into hell.
As the son of a Trotskyite, I’d had many opportunities to contend with public humiliation. Now, while I played this dinky part in premillennial history, this was my first time to use that experience in the service of the Lord. I felt the Holy Ghost tickle the base of my spine and I practically swooned, steadying myself only upon the weight of my burden for a single immortal soul. Here I was, then: a tiny link in the ancient chain; the great chain of being a Bible-thumping pain in the ass.
“I’m not talking about a religion; it’s a relationship. The most intimate you can imagine.” The several sniggers from the curbside crowd emboldened me. “I thank God he saved me before I fell too deep into the ways of the world, because I know that all it offers can’t be compared to one mo-”
“So, you’re like a virgin?”
If the question had been asked by anyone but the woman in tights and leather, I would have ignored it. But this was my stake; my centurion’s spear.
“Yes, I am a virgin. A virgin and unashamed.”
“You haven’t missed much.”
It was as though the hour had struck: a long dash following five seconds of silence. After a startled hush, the shoulders of those who’d seemed to have been hiding from my math teacher began heaving with laughter. A couple of chunky guys in bomber jackets started hooting. Soon, Augusta and Sally and almost everyone else were either chuckling or grinning shyly. Even me. The only two who weren’t smiling were Cicero and the woman.
“I know: I haven’t missed a thing,” I said as the laughter tapered down to titters. “The Bible says that ‘God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ What I want to ask is, what have you missed?”
“And Jesus wants an answer!” Cicero jumped on my line like a cat upon a pigeon’s neck. I hadn’t finished, but the spark in his eyes made me feel like a bundle of dry kindling, and the throbbing vein at his temple was a telegraph that told me to step the hell down fast. He was up on the chair and preaching before I’d touched ground. “That’s why we’re here this evening: to tell you about the bridge that God built with the flesh of his only begotten to bring us all back into his holy fellowship.”
“Praise em, eh? Fine job, boy,” whispered a middle-aged Asian woman with a bad cold as I backed out of the semi-circle. “There’s no shame in saving yourself.” Then she blew her nose, examined the tissue and walked on.
Now, I didn’t know what to make of it. I enjoyed the rush of being a fool for God, but I didn’t expect that afterwards I’d feel nearly so foolish.
“We’re all born in sin, cut off from God,” Cicero boomed, and he motioned for Sally to raise the felt board. It showed a familiar enough scene, straight out of my Principals of Soul Winning textbook: two fudge-coloured cliffs separated by a deep valley and orange licks of hellfire. Above one cliff hovered a pale yellow crown, and upon the other stood a black stick figure that looked like an airport sign indicating the nearest men’s room.
“Jesus said ? am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” continued, slapping a swollen scarlet cruciform right in the chasm’s middle, it’s crossbeam bridging the gulf. ‘“No man cometh to the Father but by me.’” So no one would miss the point he walked the stick figure