Musings

The Keys to the Kingdom ... and the Roller Skates

We lived in northern New Jersey, an area that would soon be peppered with homes, but when my family moved there it felt like wilderness. We were third to be settled on a development of new houses, split-levels with just the essentials, but it was my mother’s dream to have a family room, with a fireplace, and bookshelves installed on either side. I remember when the room was under construction. Below it stood the foundation, so large it might have housed a swimming pool, and the concrete floor became my rink for roller skating with my good friend Lisa.  

Our old metal skates were fashioned like cars, with two sets of wheels; they could be shortened and lengthened by means of a key.  A soothing sound, that of two girls careening on a cement floor next to a three-foot-high cinderblock wall painted a thick white.  We could grab the top of the wall, if we wished to or needed to, slide our fingers on the edge without tearing any flesh.   My friend and I solved many world problems while skating in eights and circles, forward and back. We engaged in serious discourse. We often did, us girls—there was a bunch of us all around the same age. I was one of the few Jews in the neighborhood, and I had questions that could not be resolved by my parents. I did not understand Jesus, how he could be God and human at the same time. I asked my friend about Jesus, and she dutifully answered me, as we skated.

“We believe in Jesus, that he was the savior.”

“What’s ‘savior’?”

“Means he saves us.”

“What’s saving?”

“From Hell.”

“Hell?”

“Damnation?”

“What’s that?”

“Fire and the devil?”

“You’re kidding? Where is that?”

“After you die.”

“But where is it?”

“Down there,” she said, my friend. She was a good reader, and is now a librarian.

So this terrible Hell was situated under the ground, then, which is where they buried the bodies of the dead. Even I understood that, although the only person I knew who died was the mother of a friend in our neighborhood, and I believed she was still around somewhere, just unseen. However, I also knew very well the story of Pompeii, which would solidify itself on the shelf and torment me when I became a solid reader. Still, I’d heard all about lava and the word petrify and its relationship to the word volcano, and so it meant that I had to renew my attempts to question my mother about Hell and salvation and Jesus, which I did, endlessly, but to no avail.

The skating conversation continued. “So how does he save you?”

“When you get baptized.”

“What’s baptized.”

“They sprinkle water over you. People do it differently. Some people actually swim in the water, and some people get sprinkled, even before they have an opportunity to agree to it.”

“Agree to what?”

“Becoming Christian.”

“What did you do?”

“I got sprinkled. As a baby. I don’t exactly remember it.”

“Jesus. He’s a Christian, then?” As stated, I knew about Jesus, even sang about him because I loved the tune of “Jesus Loves Me.” I found it so catchy that I sang it on the toilet until my father hollered for me to stop. I’d mixed it up with the Mickey Mouse Club Song. So by the end it went something like this: We are weak/ and He is strong/ That’s how Mouseketeers are born.

Santa Claus, Christmas ornaments, blinking lights around doorways, the Tree, Easter dresses and hats, Easter candy—I learned to accept that those treasures would never be mine, much the way I understood that I wouldn’t have long blonde hair or pale blue eyes or speak with the accents of Midwesterners or Southerners, or grow large tomatoes the way my next door neighbor from Iowa did. But the notion of suffering in the afterlife haunted me, vying as it did with my fervent belief in everlasting life.  

However, somehow it all congealed, and things became painfully clear to my seven-year old mind that unless you were Christian and baptized, you were going to Hell someday, and even though it didn’t penetrate my inner world enough to absolutely terrify me the way Frankenstein did—certainly not the way it got all my friends pasty white and respectful—still I knew Hell wasn’t something I wanted to experience first hand.

Nor did it have much to do with my own religious training.  I loved my Hebrew School teachers, the sweet-smelling, smiling women who hugged us and joked as they tried to pass on the goods, and they fed us and sang and danced with us. Anything that mixed eating with singing was as close to God as I required. The aftermath of the Friday night service, drinking heavily sugared weak tea in the basement of the synagogue with platters of cut cakes was my idea of heaven. I loved the songs and had known all the words before I even knew how to read. I attended services with my father. Religious gatherings were tied up with familial gatherings, the wild games and hushed conversations with cousins, and meshing of delicious food with the beloved apartments of my grandmother, or the beautiful homes of aunts. My mother, an agnostic until the end, thought praying was voodoo, but I loved praying. I loved my Judaism, would not forsake it, even for the Christmas tree. There was no way I was going to become Christian for fear of Hell.

Jesus is God’s son. Why was this such a fascinating idea, though? Why did they make so much of it? Of course he was God’s child. Who wasn’t. This tidbit was a thing I chewed on for a long time, the way children do—really mulled it over, until one day it just popped out. I said to my friend again, when we were roller skating on the foundation, “So what if Jesus is God’s son!  I’m God’s daughter.”

“You can’t be God’s daughter.”

“Why not?”

“Jesus is special.”

“I know, but you can be God’s daughter, too,” I said.

“Really?”

It was hard to read her face.

“We all believe the same thing, then,” I said.

“I guess,” she said.

“So this way I don’t have to go to Hell anymore, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“Well, it’s the same thing, then.” I was ready to be baptized now, so I didn’t have to go to Hell.

We kept skating and repeating the thing, because I needed to know she agreed with me. It was something that had to be made clear, and the way children make things clear is by repeating it. Adults do it, too. With a little less grace.

“What’s the same thing?”

“Jews,” I said. “And Christians. We are all God’s children—so the way I look at it, Jesus was God’s son, and I’m God’s daughter. And so are you.”

Later that day, I sprinkled myself with water—a poignant and misguided gesture, in retrospect—but for a few minutes anyway, it was as if a wave of peace, or unity, had come down from the sky and settled itself upon the land.

The tenets of Christianity are among those things I still find puzzling. Grace is something that I wouldn’t begin to approach until I read Flannery O’Connor—and I wouldn’t really get to the bottom of it until I taught the story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and the truth is I’m not sure I’ll ever truly get it until I have it, if you know what I mean.