naturally. From time to time I thought about asking one girl or another to go out, but I never did. To tell the truth, at The Good Shepherd I had fallen into the habit of keeping myself to myself. I was shy and always full of thoughts and had no great craving for company. Whenever a teacher or anybody took up my old name and started using it, I would say, “Call me J.”
But finally the questions I had not thought of caught up with me, and had to be thought of, and had to be asked. Pigeonville was scrupulous about being religious. You couldn’t have got hired to teach there if you weren’t a member of the denomination, and most of the students were there because it was a church school. Several of the teachers—the ones I was most likely to have—were ordained preachers. You could say that the place had a pious atmosphere. It was an atmosphere that I finally had to think about, and when I thought about it I had to admit that I could not get comfortable in it; I could not breathe a full breath in it. Though I didn’t get out into the country as often as I used to—because I was busier and because Pigeonville was a bigger town than Canefield and harder to get out of—the atmosphere at the college always made me long for the open countryside and flowing streams. My on-the-side life as an odd-jobs man took me out into better air, and I was more and more consciously grateful for that.
I wish I could give you the right description of that atmosphere. It was soapy and paperish and shut-in and a little stale. It didn’t smell of anything bodily or earthly. A little whiff of tobacco smoke would have done wonders for it. The main thing was that it made me feel excluded from it, even while I was in it.
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?
