The Viewing Room

BLOOD RULES

[blood rules] The sound of his hospital pager shaking his nightstand stirred him from sleep. He waited a few minutes before looking at the message. He had this uneasy feeling in his chest, as if the air was going in one direction, out of his lungs but not back in, no matter how many calm breaths he tried to take. He knew it was the anniversary reaction , disguised like a heart attack every year, but in those first few moments of waking up on September 11, it knocked the wind out of him every time. It had been twelve years to the day since Maurice ruined his career when he gave one wrong answer. He could still remember the question, word for word, and years later, he would have to answer it the same way, no matter what it cost. “Which commandment has given you the most trouble in your faith journey?” This was the question that the ordination committee had asked Maurice, and he had answered without hesitation. “Thou shalt not kill,” he had said. It was the truth, and the truth was supposed to set you free. As it happened, he was freed from receiving the title of Reverend. He would never be a licensed minister until he proved to this committee that he possessed a systematic personal theology that embraced him and all those members of his future flock who would look to him for inspiration and leadership in times of utmost suffering. That had been over a decade ago, and he would never stop paying for his honesty. He had been up for ordination at this exact time of year, the second week of September 2001, only days after the 9/11 disaster. The temples and the churches and the mosques had been [84] blood rules overflowing with people, many of them coming to their houses of worship for the first time in years, looking for God. They were also looking to God’s spokespeople, the priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams, for an explanation. His ordination committee looked exhausted , their faces gray with fatigue. Each of them had been overwhelmed with questions they could not answer. Where was God in the midst of all this suffering? How could the murderers say they worshipped the same God, a kind and loving and forgiving God, and kill all those people in the name of religion? But that had not been the reason Maurice had answered the question in that way. In fact, when the towers fell and he went to the Unitarian church where he was on the staff to open up the doors to those lost souls, he did not share their outrage. Yet he was also not in the same frame of mind as the senior and assistant ministers, who were lighting the chalice of peace and gathering various inspirational passages and poetry about forgiveness and peaceful hearts. He was thinking to himself, Welcome to my world. He did not dare express this out loud to anybody. And today, twelve years later, he was ashamed to realize that as the world acknowledged this anniversary, he felt terribly selfish that it was the sharp pang of personal loss that hit him before he remembered that the world had suffered. Wherever his faith journey led him, he knew that he would wrestle with this commandment for his entire life. It was the only commandment he was tempted, every day, to break. Just once. Maurice wanted to kill the man who had raped and tortured and killed his mother. He had hoped the state would do that for him, but the monster (how could he be human, since he did not have a soul?) was arrested for another gruesome murder in Arizona, and the death penalty had been abolished a year before his trial. At the time of his mother’s death, Maurice had been a figure skater touring with a national ice show. He was rehearsing when he got the news. His mother had had tickets to see him perform for blood rules [85] the first time in a major performance in Los Angeles that night. Instead , she was assaulted in her motel room. He never went back to the show, or to the ice, again. His mother had always wanted to be a minister and had never had the chance. So he had used his inheritance from her to pay for a graduate program at...