My husband Ben grew up Catholic; I grew up Southern Baptist. As love stories like ours go, it was probably inevitable that we would meet at an Episcopalian church. On our first date, he bought me my first beer; shortly thereafter, he fell asleep, drunk, on my bed, where partygoers put coats on top of him. Later, I dumped him over his lunch hour, both of us crying as we walked back to his office: him, because he thought I wouldn’t do it; me, because I was finally free of this boy who fell asleep in front of Sunday NASCAR but, at the same time, wondered so innocently that God could be real to men and children.
Our catechisms were very different: his required sacraments that touched tongues and foreheads, and dripped water rather than plunging him into it. Mine required altar calls and T-shirts and old oom-pah hymns.
Recently Ben told me that he had not known about the Rapture until age twenty-three, when someone gave him a copy of one of the Left Behind books. I was stunned at first, finding it hard to believe that his childhood was not hemmed in by the awe and fear of being caught up into heaven, that he had not possessed a reverence for Revelation’s mysterious timetable (would the twinkling of an eye happen first, or the trump resounding for the Lord’s descent?).
“No,” he said, “I never heard of it.”
But I barely heard him, because I was already laughing, telling him about the time I became convinced that my family’s Volkswagen was headed straight for a bright highway light that would prove to be the Rapture’s first portal.
It turned out to be the floodlight at Furniture World. My family sped by, unscathed, and the light came into view: a canned, mega-watt beam trained up at the night sky. The van’s laboring engine, topping out at fifty-five, gave a kind of dull, droned scolding.
Wasn’t I old enough to give up that crazy story? Did I really believe?
Ben asked me as much when I finally stopped laughing. We were driving down a highway in our own car—the only place, these days, where we seem to have time and space for an actual conversation. He was shaking his head, as he often does at my stories of childhood faith.
“That’s crazy,” he said. “What do you believe now?”
“The same thing,” I said without thinking. “Don’t you?”
He shook his head; he barely laughed, and I felt absurd for a moment. But then I thought about his childhood fear of the life-size St. Joseph statue at the foot of his bed: his worries that it would come to life, that it would turn to him, that the Christ Child’s father would walk to his bedside and speak to him plainly.
Ben showed me that statue once. He walked me down to St. Joe’s Catholic School, in his grandmother’s neighborhood, and we saw the diminutive wooden man praying under the staircase, just inside the school’s front doors.
“It was hard to go to sleep,” Ben said to me then, “because I really believed.” The way he stood before the statue, face rapt, eyes wide, I knew that he still did.