Second Child

continued

But a halo above my head? A holiness of my own? Wholly good, pure, loving? Would this be a self I could recognize?

When John had his first cancer surgery, I stayed at a friend's apartment near the hospital. There were two other out-of-town guests there that week, young women about my age. I've long since forgotten their names, but never the impression they made.

Or... did not make. How can I describe two people who scarcely seemed to occupy the space through which they moved? They belonged to a movement based, they earnestly explained to me, on the "Four Absolutes." Absolute Honesty. Absolute Purity. Absolute Love. Absolute Trust. They had erased - at least, apparently, from their conscious minds - all negatives. No selfishness. No fear. No anger. No sorrow.

The world they described over the breakfast table was a million miles, not a few blocks, from the pain-haunted corridors of Memorial Hospital.

And far more terrifying.

There was one moment so uncanny I can feel the fright of it still. My third morning at the apartment, there was a soft knock at my bedroom door. I opened it to see one of the young women kindly holding out a cup of coffee. I could smell the brew, feel the cup's warmth as I took it from her. But though I could see her gently smiling face perfectly clearly, I was suddenly certain that she was not there.

I could walk straight forward, I thought, and encounter only air.

A person without personality So yielding, so self-effacing, there was no identity to respond to. Eliminating negatives, she had eliminated some core of selfhood.

This can't be what our redeemed selves will be like! Their efforts at perfection had made them less than full human beings, is what I felt about my apartment mates. The modern-day saints it's been my delight to know - people like David Wilkerson, Dick Riley, Catherine Marshall, Corrie ten Boom, Molly Shelley - are complex, gutsy, many-faceted folks, full of contrasts and contradictions. They get angry, they get tired, they get discouraged and confused and out of sorts. They're not absolutely anything, except absolutely sure of God's strength and their own weakness.

Denying our humanity cannot build a life substantial enough to stand up to eternity. The larger life promised in Jesus must somehow incorporate the failures and pain of each of our stories. The dark threads of Corrie’s embroidery.

When I look at Andrew Foster's portrait of St. Paul in the church on Nantucket, I think back to that experience in the apartment. Not only the gold of heaven, in the painting, but the saint's black beard, his swarthy skin, his dark clothing, all seem to shimmer with light. And I recall what Andrew said about the way icons are painted. Western artists, he said, lay down the lighter tones first, then add dark ones for contour. With an icon, it's the reverse:

'The blacks and browns and purples go on first. Then the surface is built up, layer by layer, each succeeding color lighter and brighter, until the whole picture seems to glow."

The whole picture... "Then shall I know," wrote St. Paul on one of the pages of the book that heaven has clothed in jewels, "even as also I am known" (l Cor. 13: 12 KJV).

And what will he see as he looks at himself with that total comprehension? A flawless person? Or a person whose somber shades too glow with the "lighter tones" added by the brush of perfect understanding? Perhaps in heaven we will see ourselves, virtues and faults, joys and sorrows, in the radiance of the picture completed.