The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  John walked into the Metro station and swiped his fare card across the magnetic reader. As the gate opened he laughed at himself. All at once he realized that he was actually accepting Rome’s claims even while he disputed them. He was allowing their claims about doctrine to keep him out.

  In a moment he knew what he had to do. He had to break the spell Fr. Miller and the rest of the conservative Catholic world had cast over his conscience. Fr. Miller had told him that he couldn’t take communion until he joined the Roman Catholic Church and accepted all her de fide teachings. But John knew that the church was about Jesus, not about the pope’s rules.

  He felt a kind of liberation as he formulated his plan. He had to escape this internal contradiction, and the way to do that was perfectly clear. He’d attend mass at lunch today and take Holy Communion. Jillian would be proud: it would be a sacramental act in more ways than one.

  * * *

  Mass at the St. Matthew’s cathedral started in fifteen minutes, which gave him just enough time to print and deliver the memo he’d been writing all morning and walk a couple city blocks to M St. and Rhode Island Avenue.

  The phone rang.

  I’ll have to keep this short, he thought as he picked it up.

  “John,” Jillian said, but her voice said far more. She was upset about something important, and he knew this would require all his attention. He glanced at the clock.

  “There’s a problem with the adoption.”

  John cringed and sunk back into his chair. This was going to be a long conversation.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She hesitated a moment, and the hesitation made John nervous. He had always considered Jillian the most open and trustworthy person in the world, but the revelation that she had a son, and that she had kept it from him, had thrown his world upside down.

  “The father has filed a petition to keep us from moving Karl out of Ohio,” Jillian said.

  The father. Those words brought a sick feeling to John’s stomach and awakened thoughts he didn’t want to entertain. And “the father” was the last man in the world either of them wanted to have to deal with now.

  “Can he do that?” he asked.

  “He can file,” Jillian said, sounding glad the conversation had taken that turn. “Our lawyer doesn’t think he’s got much of a case, but it still makes one more thing we have to go through, and it means I’m going to have to go out to Ohio and stand in front of the judge again.”

  The cash register rang in John’s mind. Another trip. Another hotel bill. More lawyer’s fees. Maybe “the father” knew exactly what he was doing. If they had to spend any more money on the adoption, there’d be no way it would go through.

  But why did the father want Karl in Ohio? Had he been keeping up on him too?

  John felt a sudden flash of jealousy. Here was another way this man, whoever he was, had invaded his life. If John’s suspicion was true and he’d been keeping up on the boy, he had another point of contact with Jillian. And Jillian was going to have to go out and meet him. Was that also part of his plan? Or was that the whole plan?

  “When?” he asked.

  “Next Friday.”

  “Can we delay it?” John asked, looking at his calendar. “I have to be here that day.”

  “John, I appreciate that you want to go out with me, but I had to push to get them to schedule it so soon. I want all this to get finished and out of the way.”

  John didn’t like her choice of words. On top of everything else, now Jillian was going to Ohio to meet “the father” – without him. He grabbed a pencil and a notepad, not because he had anything to write, but because it helped him to think carefully.

  There was no reason to suspect anything, but the emotions burned in his mind. Unbidden, his mind replayed a scene from school. He could see his girlfriend as she insisted that the football player was just being polite when he offered her a ride home, and he could see the insincerity in her eyes. At that moment he knew the relationship was over, but he didn’t have the courage or strength of will to make the call. Four agonizing months went by as he tried to keep her. Now, he looked back on his actions with disgust.

  Next her, you idiot, he wished he could tell his former self, and a song lyric sprung to mind.

  There’s a line, I can’t cross over.

  It’s no good for me, and it’s no good for you.

  He hoped there was none of that here.

  “Okay,” he said, not really meaning it. It wasn’t okay. Not at all. “Can we talk about it more tonight? I’ve got to run.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry to put you through all this.”

  “It’s okay. Let’s talk about it tonight.”

  John hung up the phone and looked at his clock. He’d be late, but so would most of the Catholics.

  * * *

  Superstitious fears and images from bad movies filled John’s mind. Someone – one of the faithful Catholics – would stand up and point him out. “He’s one of them.” Or again, John would come forward to receive the sacrament, the priest would look in his eyes, and somehow he would know. “You’re not one of us.” The formerly smiling face would change, becoming a demon, full of wrath and vengeance. He’d be caught, red-handed in the midst of an angry mob of brain-washed murderers.

  Or Fr. Miller would step out from some dark corner of the impressive cathedral and see him, a loathsome Protestant, about to take the Body and Blood of Christ. “No,” he would shout across the room, and John would be exposed to the entire congregation. Every one would hate him as the man who had tried to desecrate the Blessed Sacrament.

  John wasn’t nearly as insane as all that. If such thoughts had come to the surface, he would have laughed at them. But in the back of his mind, beneath his conscious awareness, stories like that trickled around and gave him a general feeling of unease. Beneath thoughts, beneath words or recognition, his fears nagged at him.

  Against that fear he had marshaled an army of arguments. From the time the idea occurred to him that morning until the moment he stepped into the church, dipped his finger in the basin of holy water, crossed himself and quietly took a seat, he had been telling himself that it was the right thing to do, and by a quarter after noon he had at least twenty reasons why.

  Who gave Rome the right to restrict Jesus’ promise to those who would take their yoke of submission? It was unconscionable. That was the sacrilege, not that he, a non-Roman Catholic, might take Jesus at His words and eat the living bread He offered in the sacrament.

  He had been thinking along those lines all day, but seated among the daily communicants in the cathedral a new voice joined the argument. Why, after all, did he feel the need to take this sacrament? Wasn’t the sacrament in the Episcopal Church Jesus’ Body and Blood? Why did he have to come over here and break Rome’s rules?

  Suddenly John was confused. He hadn’t thought of it that way before, and slowly a new thought took shape. Out of the back recesses of his mind he recognized a suspicion that indeed here, and only here, in a Roman Catholic parish, was the True sacrament of the altar.

  As soon as the thought took shape in clear words his mind was repulsed. Sure, he knew the stories – that people in the occult only used consecrated elements from Roman Catholic masses in their silly “black masses.” But that was all superstition. And since when are occultists considered authorities on Christian theology? He’d also read of the “Eucharistic miracles,” but he didn’t want to believe them. They seemed so crass. So cheap. So pedestrian.

  And yet, here he was, at a Roman Catholic mass, and the voice in his mind was sober and clear. He couldn’t deny that he regarded the sacrament in this church differently than the sacrament at his home parish. There was always the hint of suspicion in his mind that the Episcopal Eucharist was a sham – that it had the right form and appearance, but the wrong substance. That somewhere along the way, the chain had been broken, the charism lost, the magic dissipated.

  Magic, he laughed, with the grim laugh
of a man who thinks he’s seen the mistake and can be excused. And that’s why I have to do this. To rid myself of these silly notions.

  The time had come. The Eucharistic ministers were taking the host to stations at the ends of the two aisles. Somehow that seemed less threatening. He wouldn’t have to face the priest, after all.

  More superstition, he thought. He’s just a man in funny clothes.

  But is he? Then why was he sure that the Body and Blood of Christ were present when he said the words of institution, but he could never conjure up that same confidence in the bread he took from Fr. Devlin?

  The crowd was small, even for a mid-day mass, and there were only five people ahead of him. He looked up at the female altar server, and something Jessica had said, a few weeks before, came back to him.

  “Women serve in the church already, John, and the people accept it. The faithful are ready for women priests. It’s just the pope who’s holding things back. Arrogant man. Does he think the church belongs to him? It’s Christ’s church, John, not the pope’s.”

  Why did those words occur to him just now? He knew there was some reason, and it didn’t take long to find it. He realized the similarity between what Jessica had said and his own words, and it was like a slap in the face. With those words his whole argument, collapsed like a house of cards.

  There were only two people in front of him now, and he had to make a decision. His gut told him it was wrong. His mind still screamed at him that he was being ridiculous. That he had to take the sacrament. This is Christ’s Body, given from Him to you. Forget what the pope says.

  The last person stepped forward. John was next. And in that instant, as if something had been irrevocably settled, the entire debate in his mind changed. There was no question about the validity of this or that sacrament, or the prerogatives and powers of the pope. As he looked at the simple bread before him, outwardly no different than the wafers used at St. Anne’s, he felt an overwhelming longing to take this sacrament.

  “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.”

  And here it was. As he stood, five feet away from the Host, all his pretensions about the Episcopal Eucharist were swept away. He wasn’t really sure that he was receiving Christ’s Body and Blood at the rail before St. Anne’s altar. It was an exercise in wishful thinking. He tried to believe, but he was plagued with doubts.

  The exclusivist claims of Rome that so bothered his intellect now compelled his emotions. The imitator always says that his product is just as good as the original, but the original still stands on its own. In a way, it was like the Lord, Liar, Lunatic argument that he had found so compelling about Christ. This church claims to be the one and only real church. Either it is, or it’s not. If it’s not, then Rome is a wicked impostor that must be fought. If it is, then he had to bow the knee.

  Now he had the chance. If Christ’s Body and Blood were anywhere to be had in this life, here it was, and nobody could stop him from taking it onto his tongue. All he had to do was step forward and open his mouth. But if they were right – if Rome was the true church and had the authority from God to establish the rules of His kingdom – then to take this sacrament would be to choose the path of an outlaw.

  The competing thoughts warred in his mind for an instant, and then he turned and walked out of the cathedral.

  Chapter 19 – Testing Convictions

  “What if you twist it this way?” Jillian called up to John in the attic as she gestured from below with her hands. The head board from Jillian’s old double bed just didn’t seem to want to fit back down the hole they had pushed it up only a year before.

  John took a break and shook his head. “Are you sure we put this thing through this hole? There isn’t another way up here?”

  Jillian sighed, put her hands on her sides and wondered what other options they had. The head board didn’t bend, and they didn’t want to make the hole any bigger, but .... That was it.

  “Wait a minute,” John said at the same moment. “The feet screw off.”

  A minute later he was handing the head board down to Jillian, bringing a surprising amount of fiberglass insulation with it, along with dust and cobwebs. Jillian grabbed a particularly large web and stretched it out to show John.

  “They grow faster around witches, I hear,” he said with a wry grin.

  “So what else do we need from up there?” Jillian asked, wiping the wooden headboard clean with a damp kitchen rag.

  John shone his flashlight around the nooks and crannies of the attic one last time. “I think that’s about it.”

  He climbed down the folding attic staircase and looked at the assortment of junk from Jillian’s sewing room that had to go up. They both paused and seemed to recognize the significance of what they were doing – rearranging their life to accommodate Karl. Nothing would be the same any longer. No more care-free, late nights out. No more frolicking on the living room carpet. No more quiet, Saturday morning breakfasts.

  Karl would require maintenance. Each of them would have to keep track of the emotional needs of two people, not just one. John would have to learn to carve out time to play ball, like his father had done with him. Jillian would have to gain the confidence of a boy who was still very confused about her – why she gave him away, and whether sharing some genes was really all that significant.

  But mostly, it wouldn’t be “John and Jillian” anymore, and the addition to the household wasn’t that joyous result of their one-flesh union, part John and part Jillian, made from their own love. He was an intruder. A sign and symbol that their union wasn’t as perfect as John had imagined. Sure, he would grow to love the boy, and he respected Jillian’s decision in a hard situation, but there was no getting around the sense of loss. Something had died, only to be replaced by a snotty-nosed, bad-mannered kid who was using up their money and changing their lives forever.

  “John,” Jillian began, sensing what was going on between them as they looked at the transformation of their house, “I’m sorry that I’ve ...”

  “To have and to hold from this day forward,” John interrupted, taking her hand and looking into her eyes, “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, ‘til death do us part, according to God’s holy ordinance. I meant it.”

  Jillian put her head on his shoulder. “It doesn’t say ‘for dumb and dumber.’”

  John put his arms around her and pulled her close.

  “What’s done is done. We just have to do the best we can with what we’ve got. There’s no sense trying to re-live the past, or re-visit things we can’t change. Karl is part of our lives now,” he said, pushing her away far enough to look into her eyes, “and I intend to make that a positive experience – for us and for him.”

  Jillian smiled and squeezed him tight.

  * * *

  “So what do you want to do tonight?” John asked over his paper at breakfast the next day.

  “We don’t have much choice. Amy and Wayne are supposed to come over. Remember?”

  “Arrgh,” John growled, pushing his paper away and reaching for his coffee cup.

  “I thought you liked them.” Jillian set down her muffin and looked concerned.

  John shook his head. “I like them just fine, but we haven’t been out for a while. I’m in the mood to do something different.”

  She shrugged. “Get used to it. Once we have Karl, we’re not going to be free to up and run off on a whim.”

  John remembered the Friday, two years ago, when Jillian called in the morning and they decided to go to the beach. There was nothing to stop them, so they went. They were about to lose that kind of freedom for the next decade or so. Even longer, if they had kids of their own.

  “And aren’t you concerned about money, anyway?” Jillian continued.

  John scowled. That was too close to nagging.

  “I’m not talking about spending a lot of money. I just want t
o go out. Eat some crabs. Drink a few beers. Throw some darts. Come home smelling like cigarettes.”

  Jillian laughed. “Well maybe we can arrange to meet somewhere. Do you think it’s too late?”

  “Probably, but we can try. But you’d better invite Wayne’s wife.”

  “I’d better invite? Why me?”

  “You’re the social chairman,” John grinned. “But I’ll call if you’d rather. You’re just better at it.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Jillian laughed. “But okay, I’ll call Amy and you call Wayne. Where do we want to go?”

  “How about that seafood place down 301?”

  Jillian shook her head. “I don’t like that place. They use picnic tables and those red and white checkered table cloths ... and plastic tumblers, and the waitress always calls you ‘hun.’”

  John laughed. “That’s what I like about it. It’s a homey place.”

  “Homey? If you grew up in a barn. I think it’s time for me to call your mother.”

  “Go ahead. She’d want to meet us there. She loves crabs. But ... oh, yeah, I forgot. You didn’t grow up around here. You don’t know about crabs, do you?”

  “You grew up in Pennsylvania,” she protested.

  “Yes, but both my parents are from Maryland, and we used to eat crabs on the back patio all the time. It’s a social thing. You can talk and drink beer and nibble on crabs all night.”

  “And starve,” Jillian protested.

  “Bring two pieces of bread and make a sandwich,” John said, looking at his watch. “But I’ve got to run. So you call Amy, right? And call me at work before noon to make sure everything’s set, okay?”

  “Don’t you think Amy’s gonna feel odd going out with two couples?”

  That stopped John in his tracks. He looked worried for a moment, and then shrugged.

  “There’s only one way to find out. Ask her and let me know, then I’ll call Wayne. Bye,” he said, giving her a kiss and grabbing his brief case.

  * * *

  “So do we go for a couple dozen, or all you can eat?” Wayne asked as they sat themselves at a round wooden table in a newer section of the restaurant. John had pointed it out to Jillian in triumph.