Preachers

Sunday morning in rural southwestern West Virginia has pretty limited radio options: preachers. Based on the churches we drove past on tiny roads encroached by snow, either “free will” or “old regular” Baptists, or miscellaneous baseline protestant, with a possible predilection for snake handling.

A couple of them were pleasant: quiet, slow-speaking voices constructing a reasonable argument within a rigidly secluded universe of pre-assumptions. One of these concluded his careful monotone by singing all the verses of In the Sweet Bye and Bye acapella; at best, he was atonal. Another preacher—exhorting with the rapid fire delivery of a machine gun—spasmodically inserted “praise God” or “Hallelujah” between every second or third word. We could only bear his noise long enough for him to tell us he was going to read a couple verses of 1rst Corinthians; this took a couple minutes. Another preacher wound his congregants up with sing-song, four-beat phrases, the fourth beat always being a sharp intake of breath: 1, 2, 3, hiccup!; 1, 2, 3, hiccup!

The most remarkable thing about the preachers was how identical their messages were: God’s grace offers salvation; the Bible is the infallible and unquestioned word of God; if you elect to be saved, you will go to heaven. A Presbyterian by birth, I am allergic to the last message.

I was more allergic to the boredom of the dichotomy of heaven and hell: heaven is happiness and blue skies; hell is unhappiness and fire. One billboard we drove past depicted a blue smiley face in the clouds if you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and a red frowny face in flames if you don’t.

Why would we ever decide that heaven is a blue smiley face in the clouds? What if you don’t want to be happy all of the time? What if you prefer the variability of being human and alive? I like blue skies, but I also like fog, blueblack twilight, grey winter sun, and rain—as long as I don’t have to bike too far in it. And what sort of misguided human imagination would want to compress an omnipotent, all encompassing God into a being set on securing something as limpid as human happiness?

Whatever a person believes—or doesn’t—if you believe in a god, you have to believe the he—or she—is an inscrutable, uncontrollable riot. And that "heaven" must be a much more multifaceted experience than a blue smiley face.