But Jesus said, "Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." Matthew 19:14
When I was six or seven years old, I was sitting at the dinner table with my family one night when my sister said something that made me laugh. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember the laughter bubbling up like an underground spring deep inside me and pouring out into that long ago kitchen where it mingled playfully with the clatter of forks and the smell of cigarette smoke and onions.
My dad reached across the table and hit the top of my head so hard that my chin hit my dinner plate. In the absolute silence that followed I noticed that my lip had split. There was a pool of blood in my mashed potatoes.
Someone was crying, but it wasn’t me, it was my mother.
“Oh Bill,” she whispered, “she’s bleeding.”
“Well she laughs like a fucking horse!” my dad bellowed.
In retrospect, I think my dad was more horrified by his actions than my mom was. He was a good man fighting a constant battle with a mood disorder that would haunt him all of his life. He never hit me again, not even a smack as punishment and he never physically abused my mother or my sisters. Despite his frequent battles with depression, anxiety and rage, he valiantly loved us all to the very best of his ability to the very end of his days.
And because I loved him back, I never laughed like a horse again. After that night, I developed a habit of covering my mouth with my hands when I felt laughter welling up. If that didn’t work, I would bite my lip or pinch myself to stop it. I was bound and determined not to let that fucking horse escape.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of physical violence. The split lip made little impression on me. Any bodily pain I may have felt from that incident was totally eclipsed by the stain of guilt and shame that spread over me when I realized that my laughter had somehow offended my dad so badly that it caused him to lash out and hurt me.
I learned a life-changing lesson at that dinner table. I learned that the most honest, spontaneous and joyful parts of me could be deeply offensive to people I loved. Over the course of my childhood, that dinner table lesson was reinforced again and again, in classrooms and on playgrounds and other places where people gathered. It was reinforced most powerfully of all in church where I learned that the altar was a sacred dinner table and that the God who presided over it was far more easily offended than the most fastidious of humans in the pews. According to the stories around that table, God was an all powerful being who demanded that I both fear him and trust him. He loved me, but was also offended by me.
Different table, same old story.
As a result of my dinner table lessons in life I have spent several decades reigning in and hiding any part of myself that other people or their God might find offensive. I have avoided conflict as if it were a used face mask on the floor of a COVID-19 unit. I have very rarely expressed the slightest hint of disagreement with another person in public no matter how strong my personal thoughts, beliefs or feelings on any given subject. I have gone so far out of my way to please others that I have occasionally lost my way back to my own life and wandered around in the lives of other people for days – or decades. I have, in fact, managed to get through half a century without offending hardly anyone at all. It was quite an accomplishment. If I could have kept it up for just a few more years, I probably would have a died a very popular old lady and had a funeral in a church overflowing with mourners extolling my virtues.
But alas, here lately I have been getting the strangest feeling that while I have been successfully covering myself up all these years, I have somehow been letting God down. I have been overtaken by a wild notion that maybe it was God who created that fucking horse in the first place. What if He has been wandering around all these years looking for her?
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In the very beginning of the Bible, right after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit there is a scene where God is walking in the garden in the breeze of the day looking for them, but they hide themselves from Him. And then God calls out, “Where are you?” and Adam replies “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.” And then God asks the most profound question in the book of Genesis, and perhaps, in the entire Bible. God asks,
“Who told you that you were naked?”
Apparently, you see, Adam and Eve had been running around naked in the garden their entire lives up to that point and never felt a smidgeon of guilt or shame until they ate some poison fruit at dinner.
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In church I was taught that the kingdom of heaven has a fence around it and that if I have been good enough, God will let me in when I die. But over the course of my life, I have been present at several death vigils. I call these vigils my “near- death” experiences and regard them as a sacred privilege. I have experienced some of my most profound spiritual insights during these moments. It is nearly impossible for me to describe these experiences in words, so when trying to explain them, I have to use images.
When I am with someone who is dying, I always have the strangest feeling that time is going backwards and that the aging process has somehow reversed itself. No matter how old the person is, I begin to perceive them as young and the closer to death they get, the younger they seem to me. It's as if a deeply hidden child inside of them is rising to the surface.
As the moment of death approaches, I feel a subtle flow around me - like the purest, most joyful laughter you could ever imagine. And for a few perfect moments after someone has died, that energy frolics in the room like a wild creature freed from a cage or naked lovers in a garden. In those moments, I know with absolute certainty that there is no fence around heaven.
The fences are around us.
I think the Garden of Eden and the Kingdom of Heaven are just different names for the same place, and it has always been right here. The question has never been whether we are good enough to get in.
The question is, do we trust God enough to come out?
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Jackie D
August 04, 2021
I can picture this whole event, down to the marbly purply/pink tea glass with little squares on it your Mom probably had – that or a Double Cola bottle! Who would think such supper table conversation could have such an affect……but words can be so hurtful. A lesson to us all.