Salvation and Old Women

I’m (re)reading Galatians, with a commentary by my friend Sam Williams alongside the text, wondering whether discussions about salvation have any merit, and what my ideas about it are. They’re sort of fluid, centering one minute on biblical descriptions of people seated around a throne singing “Alleluia,” and the next on being absorbed into some sort of cosmic bundle of love. My wife, much more spiritual than I, votes for a connection between salvation and belonging to a loving, like-minded community, and she’s probably correct.

I frequently link salvation to past life experiences that have left deep impressions on me, some taking place as early as grade school. One involves attending an overnight children’s church camp where dinner was followed by a worship service. At the end of it several counselors gathered in a circle with a candle, and with all the other lights out they asked whether we would rather stay out in the darkness forever, or  join them and come into the light Jesus offered. I fairly sprinted to the candle. No dark eternity for me; at seven years old I wasn’t that dumb.

I also remember, in second grade, being bullied by two classmates who delighted in making fun of the way I walked (slightly pigeon-toed) and then tripping me. Salvation came when they finally quit. 

But I sometimes played the opposite role by kneeling down behind Tom Thatcher. He was oversized as a fifth- and  sixth-grader, especially clumsy, and renowned for the time he put a Scheaffer pen ink cartridge in his mouth and bit down on it, drooling blue ink to the delight of everyone else in the class. 

So in this other role I would kneel, someone else would push, and Tom would go down backward. I felt no remorse for this until I was in college and Tom, who had joined the Marines, was killed in Viet Nam. A few years ago I saw his name on the wall in Washington D.C. I’ve often thought that if salvation were achieved because someone earned it, and it was between the two of us, Tom would be the more deserving, and I would be consigned finally to the outer darkness.

But my understanding of salvation as an escape from trouble or illness or death has often been reinforced. When my five year-old daughter and I took the train one night to downtown Chicago to pick up a friend at Union Station and returned with him on another train to Berwyn, we waited in the rain to cross the tracks. I could see the commuter train coming into view and even though the gates were down I said to my daughter and my friend, “Come on, we can make it.” But an angel dressed as an old woman grabbed my arm and said “Stop!” just as the express train roared by on the inside track. When I caught my breath and turned to thank her she was quite gone. So now, unlike my wife, I think of salvation in terms of Jesus, light, rain and old women. It is really quite comforting.