A Wild Surmise

Redeemed

206 Redeemed And we shall all be in our good bodies, washed in the blood of the Lamb. And Christ shall come from a golden cloud and sit at the right hand of the Father. And the Father shall call out our names and in an instant all our sins shall be known to the multitudes. And we shall all be known to each other in our wickedness. It was in the fourth grade at St. Mary’s School when Sister Perpetua told us what our fate was to be at The Last Judgment. We would stand in the largest crowd we had ever known, in the healthiest body we had ever worn, and God the Father would tell everyone our sins. I’ve always wondered what would happen then when everyone who’d ever lived learned I had stolen matches from the church and taken home a marble from school which I did not return. Not that any facts got in the way of my fear of that reckoning. For example, where would everybody stand and how could anybody hear over the tumult such a crowd would generate, even if nobody but God the Father was talking? 207 And some of us would be two years old and some would be in our teens, and how would anybody actually be in a body older than 40 years of age? I should add it had always concerned me that the mental age of each person was not factored in—thus, some sins would be more embarrassing to those who heard about them than to those who committed them, and where would the justice be in that? But since I have been redeemed, I don’t worry about the Last Judgment any more than I do about the last payment on my house. Forgiveness, it turns out, is capacious when all we had been taught was that it was capricious. I was redeemed when I turned and went back to Sodom, to the friends and neighbors I had lived among all my life. Nothing untoward happened except I didn’t count myself among the fearful anymore. I don’t remember if my redemption took place on a Sunday or not. Stores were open, the markets were full of shoppers buying food. We greeted each other as we passed in the aisles. 208 It was as if nothing had ever set us apart in our lives. We didn’t even fear death because it was just another experience we would share at some time, either near or far in the future, but certainly beyond our current sense of things. ...