The miracles of the Bible are violations of the so-called laws of nature, but these laws are based on observation, are merely empirical, and deity is above them. When Jesus, after the resurrection, comes into the room without opening the door, it is a miracle—in the sense that one cannot ordinarily do it. To raise the dead is miraculous and, likewise, to make the sun stand still. We cannot do these things, but God can, just as he performed the greatest miracle of all: the creation. He is omnipotent, which is to say, he can do anything. No—he can do anything that can be done.
Me, Charles (holding me), Julian, Elaine
(Emporia)
For beyond these mere physical impossibilities—saying to this mountain, Be removed—there are the true impossibilities of logic. Even God cannot annul the law of identity, which says that whatever is, is. He can, of course, destroy what is, but cannot make it at the same time be and not be. He can create seven times seventy worlds, but cannot keep seven from being a prime number. Two plus two equals four in all possible worlds, created or uncreated.
Well, I had heard all this before, and while he was talking, and on the way home, I was faintly amused by anyone taking such things so seriously. But later that night I was unreasonably angry, to think that people professing belief in God should turn and subject him to Copi or Quine. If I were to invent a god, I would make sure he didn’t get stuck with the primeness of seven or have reason to feel threatened by Godel’s proof. He might produce a square circle, if he felt so inclined. And, yes, he could, at one and the same moment, exist and not exist.
Elaine, me, Charles, and Julian on a visit to Leeton.
Elaine, Charles, me, and Julian (Emporia)
Sharon College, sitting on a hill in South Carolina, at a point where the Blue Ridge has petered out, was founded by Wesleyans shortly before the First World War. It is recorded (by the Reverend Eber Teter, a founding father whose health failed before he could accept the office of treasurer) that when the first spadeful of clay was turned, those present fell on their knees with one accord, sang repeatedly “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow” and prayed many a fervent prayer. “How we felt our hearts,” his account says, “burn within us.” When my mother and Elaine and I got to Sharon, walking the last half-mile through the dusk, the fragrance of apples gradually replacing the soot in our lungs, Wednesday night prayer meeting was on in the chapel and they were singing “Jesus Paid It All.”
Sharon was a junior college, but boasted a four-year program in theology—leading to the degree Th.B.—and it had a high school as well. We moved into three rooms of a building called Teter Hall, which had been the original men’s dormitory but, converted now, housed married students and us. And the English teacher Miss Yodle who, to mutual regret, lived just below us. On each floor, at the end of the hallway, a john had been installed, though to shower one had to trudge to the basement. Miss Yodle would not use these inside facilities, I suppose because the rest of us did, and so she had a private outhouse—not the only one around but the only one still in use, which every Halloween of course got tipped over, leaving a two-hole stool on exhibit.
Julian was then stationed on the West Coast, having joined the navy on V-J Day. When his discharge was due, as I found out later, Charles had driven (from where, I have no idea) to California to get him (to take him where, Charles probably had no clear idea either). Julian, it turned out, was in the brig. He had bashed the mess cook with a serving spoon after the cook refused him seconds. I remember how once, when Julian was growing up, he ran to Mother crying and tried to get her to hide him.
“They’re going to put me in jail,” he kept screaming.
“What have you done?”
“I pulled Swint’s nose,” he said and Mother, relieved, tried to console him.
“You shouldn’t have done it, but they aren’t going to put you in jail for pulling someone’s nose.” He looked doubtful, and it came out that he had pulled his friend, by the nose, from Fifth and Neosho to Twelfth and Main, close to a mile.
The town Sharon is three miles from the college. Its Main (and only paved) Street is the highway; on one side of it the railroad runs parallel and on the other there is a rampart of buildings about the length of a city block—Sharon’s business district. The buildings towards Greenville are old, the end one a large frame structure housing a general store; those the other direction are newer—there is a movie house and, where the highway begins to curve, the quicker to reach Atlanta, a pink service station. (I say “is” because, although everything has doubtless changed since I left there, Sharon seemed to me at the time to present an aspect of eternity: it was so ugly.)
Charles, in front of the house at 614 Neosho Street.
There is one break in the rampart, one vacant lot between two edifices, where we held street services. J.W. would back his car over the sidewalk onto the packed clay. He had a loudspeaker on top of his car and after we had sung a few hymns he would preach into an elegant little microphone perched on a pole of aluminum. People just walking along Main Street would suddenly, when they were past Harvey’s package store, find themselves confronted by an invitation of enormous volume. And coated with static, since J.W. yelled directly into the little cup and sometimes shook the rod in his enthusiasm.
J.W. was himself enormous, balloon-like, and when he was in the spirit it often seemed to me that he might bounce too high and be carried away. He was from somewhere in the hills—the lower Blue Ridge—and he had ministered to hill people for fifteen years before coming to Sharon to study homiletics. His reputation had, in fact, ranged from village to village over a surprising territory, mainly because of an exorcism he had performed in the late thirties. An old farmer, who produced principally moonshine, was dying in his shack and J.W., after climbing a mountain to see him, was greeted by a crone carrying a shotgun and told that the case was absolutely hopeless. The man, eighty-odd years old, had been hexed. A lady on a neighboring slope—the shotgun-carrier suggested a broken engagement, but it could hardly have been recent—was by some means or other causing his chest to constrict, a little more each day, and the end was near. J.W. went in, despite the smell, and found the man lying on a pallet, eyes bulging out of a dry skull, his arms locked around his chest as if he were holding himself to the bed. J.W. prayed, read the Twenty-third Psalm, prayed some more, put his hand on the old head, and prayed some more. The man seemed already in another world. J.W. leapt to his feet, took a charred stick from the stove and on the rough wall of the shack scratched a stick figure of more than human size.
“Where does it hurt?” he shouted to the sick man, who in spite of himself had moved until he could see the drawing. “Where does it hurt?” J.W. shouted again and getting no reply shouted on, “Here! Here’s where the devil is!” and scratched an X in the middle of his stick figure’s chest. “The devil is there! He’s there!” he shouted, pointing at the X. Then he grabbed the shotgun from the crone, and shouting “In the blessed name of Jesus” pulled the trigger and blasted the X, the devil, and a good portion of the wall. In an instant the man was on his feet, hopping mad and cursing, chasing J.W. halfway across the mountain while the crone, on her knees, screamed hallelujahs.
I played the violin. I started in junior high and as in many of my more complicated projects, began with promise, a promise never fulfilled. But musicians were scarce at Sharon, so for street services a fragile girl named Stella played the accordion, and I fiddled away—practically inaudible under Stella’s vast and unarticulated sound. Often Evangeline stood next to me and held the hymnbook so that the pages would not flip in the wind. I tried hard to figure out Evangeline. Glancing at her (sideways, missing a few notes of “Work For the Night is Coming”) I could sometimes suppose that she was different