Reformed

Illustrations by Oliver Barrett

My earliest memory of a religious conversation has to do with the devil. Daddy and I are in the car, heading up North Haledon Avenue toward the T intersection and the big hill that will take us down into Hawthorne, New Jersey, where we lived until I turned three. This could not have been my first religious conversation, because we had already moved from Hawthorne, and because God is so much more important than the devil, as I surely would have been told in church and during other car rides I have since forgotten. But this is the first I can recall, and I remember it occurring at the same intersection where I was taught to distinguish left from right. I still form a mental picture of that place whenever some fugue of self-doubt puts me in danger of confusing the two. Right goes toward the sunny straight pavement of Linda Vista Avenue—back toward North Haledon, where our new house is and my new little brother—and left goes into the shade of overarching trees and eventually descends sharply into Hawthorne, where I used to be a baby just like him. Approaching this intersection of sun and shade, present and past, my father tells me about the devil.

You might suppose that the setting has been contrived, that my memory has collated good and evil with right and left, but in fact I have no recollection of assigning the devil any direction other than down. Perhaps even then I knew these matters were complicated. For if left was the dark and descending direction, it was also the direction that led us to the Rea Avenue Reformed Church and to the Eden of Goffle Brook Park, where I broke bread for the ducks and helped my mother gather dandelion leaves for our bittersweet salads, whereas the sunnier right led to a part of town that was unknown to me until years later when I began riding a bike. So the devil might be met as easily on one side as on the other.

He would try to get you to obey him instead of God, my father explained. He would ask you to do bad things. It seems that I was metaphysically ambitious in my preschool years, for I asked my father what would happen if I simply pretended to follow the devil, waiting until he was gone and I could continue following God as before. My father said, very wisely I think, that pretending to follow the devil was just the same as following him, which meant you would go “where the devil is.” He had just told me about that place. I wasn’t especially frightened of it, only disappointed that what I had fancied to be quite clever was of no avail. I am more prone to shudder now, which is to say that I have often looked back on this exchange and wondered if it doesn’t reveal an early flaw in my character: a tendency to want to placate power rather than oppose it, a tendency that may well have originated in my relationship to my father himself. So, the man who first taught me to resist the devil may also have been the man who trained me to sue for peace—and that is complicated, too, as the devil well knows.

Like other children, I was fascinated by old Lucifer, by his horns and tail, which simultaneously made him sinister and gave him an animal’s grace, by his fire-engine hide, his flame that no fire engine can put out, and above all by his barbed fork, which strikes a boy as so much more interesting than a shepherd’s crook or a prophet’s staff. Certainly more interesting than a palm branch, even with the license to shout a hosanna or two. If ever the devil wanted to tempt me, I was sure, he would start out by offering me a turn with that handy fork. Similarly, what I liked most about the New Testament—that is, when...