a vignette;
How Do Spacemen Believe in God?
I am a small child growing up when children are still permitted to sit in the front seat. I tuck my legs under me, adjust the seatbelt across the fleshy part of my belly, and turn my head.
“Mommy”
“Yes dear.” She is focusing on the road, the radio, the never-ending list of things to do in her head.
I take a deep breath.
“How do spacemen believe in God when they go all the way up there and they don’t see him?”
I am being clever, difficult. Her brows crease. Already, I am proud of my question. I know it isn’t like the multiplication problems I rapidly complete in class or the short series of reading comprehension questions I have to do every weekend. The hesitant look on my mother’s face confirms my expectations. Her lips part, but I’m too excited to listen.
We went to church on Sundays, whenever my mother remembered. I loved the long weeks when she’d be too worn out for the early children’s mass, when I’d watch the minutes of my clock drip away, breathing a sigh of relief when it passed nine-thirty, rationalizing that it was impossible for me to be woken from faked sleep, dressed, and driven to mass on time. When I turned twelve I became the first female alter server at my parish. I arrived fifteen minutes early and dressed myself in the white cloak that had previously only been worn by alter boys. As I stepped up to hand the host to the priest I walked at a deliberate angle, always keeping my mother’s beaming face in my peripheral vision.
At fourteen I volunteered to be a leader of the children’s choir. The kids would argue over who got to sit in my lap as we sang songs about Jesus’ love. The words fell emptily from my mouth, their volume never much louder than a whisper. I forgave myself for this, claiming I was self-conscious of my singing voice. I rationalized that even a near whisper was louder than silence.
Only now do I acknowledge the possibility the even then the words felt treacherous on my tongue, foreign despite their persistent presence while I was growing up.
I am almost twenty and at my grandmother’s funeral. A fellow parishioner stands before us and shares a memory. She is radiant as she speaks of Joan’s compassion, of the way just a few months ago my grandmother began to cry in church because a young boy had died in a car accident and Joan just wasn’t sure that he had found Jesus yet.
A wave of panic washes over my body. I squeeze my young cousin who is sitting in my lap, dismissing my needy gesture as supportive, affectionate.
At the beginning of the service I stood at that same pulpit. The memories I shared were all fastened to the idea of generosity. I told my grandmother’s favorite story of us, one I was too young to remember, one I knew only because she’d tell it to me over and over. I used wonderful adjectives to express earnest sentiments and until that moment I had been entirely satisfied by the glow on my father’s face as I attempted to capture his mother in five meager minutes.
But his look of pride is no longer enough. I know I have failed. My failure is reinforced later when my mother, in an attempt at sharing her pride, tells me that my dead grandmother is happy in heaven knowing that everyone she loves is promised eternal salvation. I smile vaguely, a familiar expression on someone still emerging from adolescence, and begin to despise the contemplative, inquisitive person I’ve been my entire life.
I am too excited to listen, but she answers anyway.
I expect her explain that heaven isn’t exactly up in the sky, that God doesn’t sit on top of the clouds. These are things I have already figured out; things I have decided for myself after learning that “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” and that Neil Armstrong’s footprints are on the moon.
“I guess spacemen rely on faith like all of us. Except maybe, having gone all the way up there, they just have to have a little more.”
I’m disappointed with her answer. It’s simplistic, ignorant of things I have been taught, facts I have eternalized as truth. I know what a universe is. I think that heaven has to be a place; I know that all matter takes up space.
I’m frowning as we pull into the driveway; failing to salvage the satisfaction I felt when I posed the question. I cling to the panic that played itself out on my mother’s brow. Her eyes now show no doubt.
Still I decide that “faith” is an empty word, one I begin to define as something my mother made up because she didn’t know the real answer. I give her partial credit; the points she lost hang in the balance throughout my entire adolescence.