The Decision

continued

Like Mea Ivimey... Of all Mea's disappointments in me - my conventional suburban life, Little League, and the PTA in place of poetic isolation - nothing had distressed her so much as my growing interest in Christianity. When I'd first started attending St. Mark's, she'd put it down to our active household. "With the demands of the children," she'd say, "I can see why you'd enjoy a quiet hour."

But to begin to believe the same thing all the others did! Her chief objection to Christianity seemed to be its popularity. How could her soul mate share a set of beliefs with millions of ordinary people? Each time I raised the subject, it was met with such a despairing shake of the head that I eventually stopped trying.

Despite objections without and qualms within, however, three years after the experience in the chapel, I made the forty-five-mile trip to New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine for the formal sacrament of confirmation. In the echoing vastness of the world's largest Gothic church, I spoke the Creed aloud for the first time. I believe in God... and in Jesus Christ... born of the Virgin Mary... crucified, dead, and buried... rose from the dead... ascended into heaven... For me it had been a faltering journey over my own prejudice, fears, and intellectual pride.

As I repeated the ancient formula, I understood John's comment on making his own decision that morning in the car three years earlier. It felt like dying.

And with that "death" came the birth of something new. In the years since that trip to the cathedral, a blessing pronounced each week by the minister has held special meaning for me:

"Almighty God ... by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in eternal life."

The prayer is not that God will give us eternal life. It's that he will keep us in a life already begun, already being lived here on earth. And this life begins with the death of some little piece of self-will.

In these love stories, no two of which are alike, the holdout against the divine Suitor takes many forms. For me, reciting the Creed, for John, confessing that Jesus is God, for someone else, kneeling or praying aloud or something else. But when this clamoring, protesting little egotist is allowed to die, there's room where it was for the birth of something new. The Light that John saw in the hospital has never returned, he says, in visible form. But the relationship begun there has persisted. John told me several years later that, while he was happy to be granted more years of earthly life, he'd been aware ever since that night in the lCU of another life unfolding alongside this one. One independent of daily ups and downs. When his mind doubted and his spirit sagged, the new life pursued its unshakable course.

I knew what he meant. I too catch glimpses of this parallel existence. The life that isn't dependent on me at all, the life I'm already living in heaven.