What Would Jan Say? 3 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

I don’t know if preachers still ask the impassioned rhetorical question: If Jesus walked into church this morning, what would He say to you? The question was a staple of my childhood church-going, and it always provoked a collision of the two Jesuses I knew: the stoic, gentle, hippie-haired Jesus of Sunday School quarterlies, and the brusque, haunted Jesus of the Gospels, striding Galilee in dirty sandals and a well-worn robe.

The latter Jesus always won; when a preacher asked the question, I invariably saw Jesus bust through our sanctuary’s swinging doors, white-robed and scruffy, hair a bit greasy as if He had walked all the way here or just doffed an old baseball cap.

I turned around many times to anticipate the arrival of a God who was more gunslinger than Good Shepherd, and I had no idea what He would say to me. But when he had aired his parables, I believed He would take me in His arms as He had gathered the little children, His embrace kind and His robe warm at my face.

Another mysterious visitor whose arrivals always confounded me was my mother’s high school friend Jan, who was divorced, but as a pledge to God and her re-married ex-, still wore her diamond wedding ring.

For several years in my childhood, it was surprising but not completely unexpected to look up at the tail end of a sermon or an altar call and see that Jan had slipped into the sanctuary to sing the last hymn and try to catch my mom before she drove home after a weekend visiting family.

I imagined Jan easing quietly between the same swinging doors that Jesus busted through, her mane of tight, thick red curls golden in a cut of afternoon sun. But I never actually saw her face until she appeared in the fluorescent-tinged shadows at the back of the sanctuary: her eyes large and blue and calm, her features chiseled and compact, like a feminine form of which copies might be made. Her skin was very pale and the color of her lips was a rich, clean pink, the color found in blooming things.

In her predicament, Jan was almost as puzzling to me as Jesus: an apparition of another life that made strange sense, but due less to godhood and more to bad luck. She was the second divorced woman I ever knew, the first being my aunt, who was jilted by an adulterous, lantern-jawed pastor before staking her life on a wry, dry, ever-faithful postal worker.

In my memory, Jan’s random arrivals at our church began just about the time a no-divorce tract showed up at our house. The tract was the size of a picture book, with cartoon drawings in bland yellow, red, and black, a triptych that unfolded accordion-style, as if counsel regarding this matter could be reduced to a manual of just three handy pages.

The tract held up Hosea, the Old Testament prophet betrothed to a faithless prostitute, as a model of Christian marital love. Hosea was always faithful, always believing, always ready to receive his wife—who, in his case, finally returned, and God used their marriage to show Israel that His love was unfailing, too.

My parents confiscated the tract. Then they sat my sister Joni and me down on their bed, a regular family meeting place, to tell us that they did not agree with its viewpoint, and that there were times when divorce was necessary and remarriage no problem.

It was the opposite of what we were absorbing in Sunday School and Southern Baptist life-in-general—but that did not faze me very much, as my mother’s devotion to Margaret Sanger had already shot jittery holes in numerous Sunday potluck conversations.

I wonder now if Jan was the one who gave my parents the tract. Regardless, it did little to persuade them to her theological side. I loved my mother and father, and I saw the sense in their kind, thoughtful remarks on her beauty, on what a gentle, good mother she would make, and on how important marriage was in bringing stability and joy to a person’s life.

When my husband left a year ago this week, Jan was one of the friends in whom my mother confided, and she was one among the women from home whose love and counsel came to me through my mother’s voice. Jan’s husband also left their marriage in the final months of his medical school career, so she knew the same shame of pulling hard for two dreams, only to watch them collapse in one remarkable implosion. She assured my mother that she was praying fervently for me and for my marriage.

Especially at this strange anniversary, every time I consider slipping the ring off my finger before our divorce is final, I think of Jan. Every time I read or pray about what it means to be faithful to my husband even now, to turn the grief of rejection into self-examination and humility, I think of her.

What would Jan say if she walked into my bedroom tonight as I sit slumped in my twin bed, a pile of pillows and down blankets plumped around me, a barricade I build each night to try to stay as warm as I once was with my husband sleeping beside me? What would she say about the years ahead and the choices I will have to make?

I have no doubt she would comfort me, speak kindly to me, and tuck me in as a mother might. I would see her calm face and blue eyes close. She would take my hands to pray and the metal of our rings would clink together, lace cold between the warmth of our fingers.