As I mentioned in my last post, in my formative years we attended a church that did not offer hope for the dead. It was a liturgical church. We were into ritual, not hope. Duty to the sacraments was paramount, along with regular church attendance.
But we somehow missed 2 Corinthians 5:1 “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not made by human hands.” But then, we didn’t read or know scripture back then.
If I write another short story in the Danny Tompkins series, it might be on this idea of hope for the dead. It’s something I didn’t even think about until I was maybe 22 years old. I was recently born again, was just about to move to Kansas City to take my first job after college. I had a talk with the new priest at our parish, a man I barely knew but with whom I felt some friendship. I don’t really remember what we spoke of, but I came away from that conversation suddenly thinking, “Oh, no, I never prayed for Mom during her long illness!”
We listened weekly as the priest intoned the prays for the sick, but the congregation didn’t join in. Dad never gathered us together as a family to pray for her healing, or for relief from her pain. He didn’t know any of that, because our parish priest didn’t know any of that and so couldn’t teach it to us. There was no hope for the dead, and so no real hope for healing. What good were prayers, then?
What would be the childhood memory, and the link to the adult memory? Maybe I’ll give too much away here, but I’m not sure I’ll write the short story, so I might as well go ahead. In 1961 we drove one Saturday from Cranston RI to Northfield Massachusetts to attend Mom’s 25th reunion at Northfield School for Girls. This was a boarding school that Mom attended, in proper British tradition. The trip was memorable for several things. It rained that day, putting a damper on everything. Mom was the only one from her class who showed up. And on the trip home, after dark, when we were passing through Worcester MA, the brakes failed on our old clunker (maybe a Studebaker?). Dad had to get us home using the emergency brake.
The adult memory tieing back to that is the biography I read of Dwight L. Moody. In that biography it said that Moody founded Northfield School for Girls, along with the nearby Mount Hermon School for Boys. They were Christian schools! The gospel was preached and taught. Sure, they were schools for the uppity, the ones who thought a boarding school education was superior to a public education.
The result of learning that was a smidgen of hope. What if Mom, fading away on that Thursday night, remembered the chapels she sat through, and the words preached? What if she read that biography of D.L. Moody—it had been her book. Might she have had enough wits about her sometime during that last week to remember why God lets people into heaven, and to have said the prayer, to have meant it, to repent of her sins?
It’s thin hope, I know, but it’s hope none the less. I’m going to think about this one a while. I see some potential, but am not sure I have enough for the story here. One thing, though: I already have the poem written to insert into this one.