Transcendent Kingdom(53)

“That’s all right,” I said, inching away. “Do you want the door open or closed?”

I took the long way home from Fred’s office, wondering if it was too late to change my mind and become a doctor. At least then I could look at the body and see a body, look at a brain and see a brain, not a mystery that can never be solved, not an “us” that can never be explained. All of my years of Christianity, of considering the heart, the soul, and the mind with which Scripture tells us to love the Lord, had primed me to believe in the great mystery of our existence, but the closer I tried to get to uncovering it, the further away the objects moved. The fact that I can locate the part of the brain where memory is stored only answers questions of where and perhaps even how. It does little to answer the why. I was always, I am ever, unnerved.



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    This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.

“You’re not serious,” Anne said that day in Integrated Science when I revealed my former Jesus freak. She’d spent our entire friendship performing a kind of evangelism of her own, trying to disabuse me of my faith. I didn’t need her help; I’d been doing that work on my own for years.

“Do you believe in evolution?” she asked one sunny spring day. We had dragged a couple of picnic blankets out onto the lawn so that we could study in the sunshine. It was among the happiest times of my life. And though we argued all the time and though we wouldn’t stay friends for much longer, she knew me better than anyone had ever known me. Even my mother, flesh of my flesh, had never really seen me the way Anne saw me. Only Nana had known me better.

    “Of course I believe in evolution,” I said.

“Okay, but how can you believe in evolution and also believe in God? Creationism and evolution are diametrically opposed.”

I plucked a weed from the grass at the edge of the blanket and started to crush its petals in my hand, smearing my fingers with yellow pigment, then presenting that color to Anne as though it were a gift. “I think we’re made out of stardust and God made the stars,” I said. I blew and yellow dust flew into the air, into Anne’s hair, and she looked at me like I was crazy, and she saw me.



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I don’t know why Jesus would raise Lazarus from the dead, but I also don’t know why some mice stop pressing the lever and other mice don’t. This may be a false equivalence, but they are two questions that have emerged from my one, unique mind at one point in my life or another, and so they are two questions that have value to me.

I wasn’t thinking about Lazarus much in the days after Nana died. I had already stopped believing in the possibility of extravagant miracles. But small miracles, everyday miracles, like my mother rising from her bed, those still seemed worth hoping for.

“Please get up,” I said to her each day before I left for school, vigorously shaking her arm, her torso, her legs, until she made some kind of noncommittal noise at me, some gesture that eased my mind, allowed me to believe that maybe, maybe, that day would be the day.

She’d already lost her job, but I didn’t know that. The home health company called a hundred times or more, but I had long since stopped answering the phone. I kept to my routine like my routine would save me, and then on a Thursday, a week and a half in, I went into my mother’s room and she wasn’t in her bed.

    My heart soared. I had done it. Like Jesus, I had willed a woman to come forth. I went to look for her in the living room, the kitchen. Her car was still parked in the garage, and it wasn’t until I saw that little tan Camry there, its headlights like eyes peering into my soul, that I knew what a grave mistake I had made. I ran back to my mother’s bedroom, opened the door to the bathroom, and found her there, submerged in the bathtub with an empty bottle of Ambien resting on the counter.

I never wanted to see a policeman again, and so I called Pastor John.

“Slow down, honey,” he said, and then panicked. “My God, my God. Just wait there.”

The ambulance arrived before Pastor John did. The EMTs lifted my mother onto the stretcher. She couldn’t look at me; she just kept saying “I’m sorry,” and “I should have let him take him.”

“What?” I asked. “Who?”

“He wanted to take Nana to Ghana and I said no. Oh, Awurade, why, why didn’t I let him take him?”

Pastor John came in as they took my mother. We followed the stretcher out of the house, and I barely listened as Pastor John received instructions from the EMTs. I shut my eyes tightly, so tightly that I started to feel the tension in my forehead. I cried and I prayed.