At the End, Light

Dear Kate,

I am going to embarrass myself, as if I haven't done enough of that already, by speaking about my embarrassment.

Yesterday, Mother's Day, my mom preached at our church and I translated for her.  She told stories, as I expected she would, trite and crude and didactic, with no other purpose than the moral betterment of simple minds, credulous choir.

She told a story I've heard before, how a man who used to go to church when he was young, having subsequently neglected his holy duty for five decades, now in his 80s came back to the flock, only to find it impossible that God would forgive a spineless opportunist that he has been and was even now: surely any dying man would say Yes to any half-decent rumor about any chance to cop-out for the last time.

My mom, being the undereducated and overzealous pastor she was, would glean from Testaments Old and New promises big and small to convince the man that his salvation, his ticket to heaven, was vouchsafed.  But for whatever reason he refused any reasoning whatsoever.

Long story short: it was not until the weekend when he went into a coma that he would wake up, in more than one sense, to declare, Yes, Jesus has forgiven him.  He said he had gone through a dark tunnel and at the end of it, light, and, there, Jesus Himself, telling the man He has forgiven him.

Then the embarrassing thing happened: I started to cry.  The translator was crying, like, how stupid can that be?  It wasn't even his story to tell, and, people didn't even know, it's been told to him before, in by and large the same ham-fisted way.  Such a fine young man, on stage, translating baloney and having his bologna too!  What was he thinking?  What did he see?  Why did he feel...sad - or what?

I wasn't thinking, and certainly not having even a chance to think about how I should feel: when I saw the picture, most evocative, of a man seeing light at the end of his tunnel, something that we all claim to long for especially during the pandemic but would ridicule the same vision in a dying man, how in it the longing of God was satisfied, that Jesus has accomplished, as He cried out last on the cross, what the Father has set out to do: to reconcile the world to Himself, His Father's will on earth be done as it is in heaven, on display the whole point of the entire and entirely embarrassing drama, the heart of God's heart to restore in us a heart for Him, tell me, what am I, what is a man to do, but to weep, a little, tears of joy?

Yet I haven't begun to tell you what I actually saw.  Maybe another day.

Yours, Alex