Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou

7 Glimpses

106 7 Glimpses One Sufi proverb says: “Faith is verification by the heart; profession by the tongue; action by the limbs.” I don’t know about numbers One and Two, but I finally got number Three down pretty good. After I made my first painting, I couldn’t stop; my hand wanted to hold a paintbrush as if it were the hand of God Himself. I was seeing visions, too: rabbis falling out of the sky, and people dancing, and eyes peering down from the sky as prayers flew up from the earth. The visions came to me fully formed, one after another, sometimes so furiously that I couldn’t sleep but instead kept popping up to sketch out each vision—to take notes on it, as it were— before it fled into the night. Was this God, talking to me in images? At the time, I didn’t think so. I thought that the paintings I was making were an expression of some part of the “real” me that had gotten lost along the way, that part of my soul that had gone underground during all my years of neurotic misery. Now I think otherwise. But the way it was with Joanna was this: for her, Jesus was real, period, a living, breathing presence. I know, because one day I asked her point blank. We were in St. Anthony’s small, over-air-conditioned kitchen, while in the living room a bunch of residents were nodding off to Sally Jessy Raphael , their T cells disappearing with each commercial break. “You want to know how I know Jesus is real ?” Joanna said. Actually, I wanted her to tell me how I myself might meet Jesus: what I had to do, what attitude I might take, to meet Him up close and personal, only hold the Christianity, starting with the Personal Savior stuff. I wanted Joanna to tell me how—exactly—I might know the inner peace and freedom that she seemed to claim as her birthright. Couldn’t she just give me the recipe? A little bit of prayer, some singing, perhaps a few good deeds, mix it all together, add some chocolate chips, and bake in the oven at 350— just substitute Adonai for Christ, and it’s kosher: Voilà! God. Because, let’s face it, at first glance, most people, if given a choice of whose life they’d rather inhabit, mine or Joanna’s, would choose mine. Most people—or at least most people in my world—would rather be well-off and white, with vacations in Maine and trips to the islands, than distinctly not-well-off and black, with a small apartment in Livingston Parish, a low-paid job, and car payments from now until doomsday. But Joanna, as she told me in no uncertain terms, was rich. Inside, where her real life was lived, her spirit was huge, free, untroubled. There was so much Jesus in her, she said, that there were times when she couldn’t keep Him inside anymore, when she had to sing His praises, when her apartment became a church, and she became the preacher, congregation, and choir. Joanna told me that she’d always been a Christian, but not necessarily a Christian Christian, not a Christian in her heart. She said that though she’d been raised Christian, she hadn’t always known Jesus. Not really. She hadn’t even been much interested in him. He came to her anyway, one night when she was laid up in the bed, her back sore from lifting too many old people (she’d had a job working at an old-age home then), her mind sore from the pain of living, at a time in her life when she was all twisted up and feeling sorry for herself. She said that one night when she was just lying there, her heart a stone, her blood bitter, a friend called her to ask her: would she speak to this man? This man could help her. And Joanna thought: yeah, okay, why not? The next day, the man called her, saying that the Lord had instructed him to call her—and then he went on and told Joanna all kinds of things about herself, secret things, hidden things that no one else in the entire world knew about, like the bad dreams that had plagued her as a child, and the worries she had for her daughters. “He looked straight into my...