Grif Stockley: Religious Conviction

Rainey, dainty as the first time I had lunch with her at Wendy’s (she had a salad that day as well), dabs at her mouth with a cloth napkin she insists is ecologically correct, despite the energy expended to clean it.

“We’re great all right,” she says sourly.

“All the wealth in this country, and millions of people don’t even have health insurance. With the cuts in Medicaid, I wonder how people live as long as they do.”

Content to be a white American middle-class male, I savor the taste on my tongue. God, wine tastes good with a meal. If the French weren’t such snobs, they could still civilize us.

“Genetics,” I say, undercutting my excuse to guzzle more booze.

“I’m beginning to think your body gets a certain number of years no matter what you do to it.”

“You don’t believe that!” Rainey practically snorts, shaking her head.

“That would sound too much like fate.”

The truth is, I don’t. Life will continue to be one random accident until, sooner or later, we peel a little too much off the ozone layer.

“Did you tell Sarah I’m working with Chet Bracken on the Wallace case?” I ask her, moving the subject along. She is spooning her soup the way my mother taught me forty years ago in eastern Arkansas: move the spoon through the soup away from you as if it were a Feris wheel and then bring it to your mouth. You don’t look so greedy that way. Manners. An overrated virtue to people who don’t have any.

“I would rather you breach your client’s confidentiality Rainey says dryly.

Sarah puts down her fork, and says in a high voice, “You told me once that Chet Bracken was a brilliant thug.”

I look at my daughter and remember that is exactly what I said. What goes around comes around.

“I meant some attorneys believe that about him,” I backtrack, “but there’s never been any proof he’s ever done one thing unethical.” Losing ground with Sarah, I turn to Rainey.

“Did you know he’s a member of your new church?”

Rainey sips her tea.

“There’re only five thousand members at Christian Life,” she says, giving me an un usual deadpan expression.

“I haven’t met them all in the last four months.”

I managed to keep Bracken’s secret that he has cancer a total of two hours before I told Rainey, which is probably a record for me. I deposit information with my girlfriend faster than a squirrel stores nuts for winter.

Rainey keeps her mouth shut, which is more than I can say for myself.

Sarah has consumed about an ounce of soup. She’d rather have red meat any day. She moves the spoon around in the bowl.

“What case?”

I explain briefly about the Wallace murder and my client’s connection with Christian Life.

“I figured Rainey could fill me in, since she’s started going to her church.”

No longer feigning even polite interest in her food, my daughter pushes back from the table.

“That’s my dad,” she says to Rainey.

“What’s a person for except for him to use to help win a case? And you’re even fixing dinner for him!”

I raise my eyebrows to warn Sarah she is going a little far. Still, we have had this discussion before. My argument is that defense attorneys aren’t given many weapons, and you have to make do with what is at hand. She says that lawyers like me hurt innocent people in the process and then act as if it couldn’t be helped. Worse, according to Sarah, I seem to be more alive right before a trial and during it than at any other time. I seem to enjoy it too much. She’s right. I do.

Rainey nods, apparently having made peace with her self long ago.

“This way I can exercise a little influence over him,” she says, as if I were not sitting across from her.

“If you’re not willing to help him, he won’t listen at all.”

I roll my eyes and pretend I don’t know what they’re talking about. In fact, not too many months ago I stashed in this very house a witness who needed to disappear for a few hours. She spent the night, and Rainey deposited her at the courthouse to testify the next mo ming

“So tell me about Christian Life,” I say to Rainey, who nods as if she expected me to play dumb.

“Only if you won’t make fun of it,” she demands, her lips pursed, daring me to make some smart remark.

“Why didn’t you ask Chet Bracken?”

Sarah, who has not missed Sunday Mass in months after not going for a couple of years after her mother died, nods in agreement. At least I have a clue as to why Rainey has gotten religion. With Sarah I have no idea. Church seems to be a woman thing, mostly, is all I can figure.

“I promise I won’t make fun,” I say, meaning it. Rainey can be a big help if she’s willing to poke around for me.

“Actually, I would have felt kind of weird asking Bracken,” I admit. If Chet had started telling me about how Jesus Christ had changed his life, I would have tried to crawl under my desk. I can handle that kind of talk better from a woman.

“It’s not like you think, Gideon,” Rainey lectures me.

“It’s not hellfire and damnation.” Rainey turns to Sarah, who is listening respectfully.

“Your father has this image of a Jimmy Swaggart praying for money and promising to heal people. That’s absurd! What Christian Life is about is helping people to accept the belief that God broke into human history two thousand years ago.

Christian Life starts with a person just as you are right now, faith or no faith, and invites you, invites me, to witness the changes in the lives of the members of its congregation. People who are just starting are assigned church families. They are not blood families just groups of about fifteen to twenty people who become your Christian Life family. It’s incredible how persons in your family have changed their lives. Most of them weren’t what anyone would call bad before. They lived ordinary, typical lives filled with the normal boredom, despair, and the sense of meaninglessness that accompany twentieth-century existence. Now their lives are truly God-centered, and they have a joy in their lives that is just thrilling to be around.”

While Rainey is speaking, I am tempted to slurp my soup. When she gets started on Christian Life, she positively glows. It is hard not to be jealous. I never have been able to generate this kind of excitement in her.

Trying to conceal my irritation, I ask, “I don’t get the connection between their lives and a literal belief in the Bible.” I look at my daughter, who is listening intently.

Mass, unless it has changed, is pretty much a cut-and dried affair in the Catholic church.

“What happens if you let it,” Rainey says, her voice soft and fragile, “is that God, working through your family, gives you the courage and will to believe that the Bible is His Word. It’s simply through His grace that you come to accept the Scriptures.”

I realize I have begun to resent the amount of time Rainey spends at Christian Life. In the last couple of months she has been up there at their huge complex for part of four or five days of every week. Christian Life is like a separate city within Blackwell County, but that’s the point. A way of life, she says. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Christian Life is a cult, but Rainey flatly maintains there is nothing unusual about its doctrine or its leadership. Because of its size, she says, they break themselves down into “families” which nurture people like herself.

My daughter, who has never been shy before around Rainey until tonight, clears her throat and asks, “And you believe the Bible now word for word?”

Rainey smiles.

“About ninety percent of the time I do. To help new members, they use the familiar metaphor of a trip. Joining Christian Life is like taking an unexpected journey. When you first begin it, you don’t have the right clothes; you’re anxious about what you’re leaving; you’re nervous about your destination.