First, leave it in your garage for thirty years because, in addition to the words of Jesus in red, the names of you and your spouse are embossed in gold on the Bible’s white pleather cover—it is personalized, the way your relationship with God is supposed to be. You cannot merely pass it on.
Take stock of what has happened—or not happened—in the thirty years since your mates in the singles Sunday school class at your Baptist church pitched in to purchase this oversized Bible for your wedding gift.
Though the names on the cover are “Alice and Daniel Jones,” you—Alice—never took your husband’s name.
Your husband did not begin to accompany you to church as he had promised.
You insisted that your daughter attend from nursery to high school graduation even in the face of her teenage hostility. The church consistently misspelled her name in the bulletin for eighteen years, from the time she received her first rose as an infant to Baccalaureate Sunday when they honored the high school graduates. You should have chosen a more conventional spelling.
You have asked your husband for his input on what to do with the Bible. He has made clear that the solution is up to you.
Plot the disposal.
In your garage, which you have vowed to clean out, the Bible is one of many books to be disposed of. There are three tiers. You can sell the first tier or trade them for credit at the used bookstore. You can donate the less appealing ones, handing them off to the non-judgmental workers who man the Goodwill truck in the Sav Mor parking lot on Saturdays. What’s left are those not even Goodwill will take: thirty-year-old guidebooks to places that don’t exist anymore; moldy, rippled paperbacks that got wet when a pipe burst and are probably dangerous to inhale. And this Bible. These are destined for the Hard to Recycle event at your local elementary school. Mark the date on your calendar.
The Bible is the King James version. It contains full color illustrations of a very European Jesus.
You have other Bibles, you tell yourself. Well worn with study. Dog-eared even. The New English version that you received as a third grader at the radical Baptist church that raised you. The NRSV that you preferred in the years when you taught adult Sunday school. A small King James New Testament that a client gifted you when your daughter was born. A New Testament published in 1890 in Welsh that you purchased in a small bookstore in Caernarfon at age fourteen, thinking it would help you learn the language. The cover flakes black to the touch.
In the first-tier box of “try to sell” books, you have placed your twelve-volume set of concordances with their gold and red covers and sequential numbers on the spines. Remember how much you learned reading the volume on John. All that talk of living water. Start to reach for that volume, but stop yourself. Stay strong.
Think of your former church, your last “church home.”
As a young professional in a new town in the early Nineties, you joined this Baptist church because, although it was not as progressive as your church of origin, it was “moderate.” It ordained women and had eventually, after a few embarrassing “no” votes, admitted African-Americans to membership in the 1960s. You wanted to remain Baptist, having been taught as a child the priesthood of the believer and the evils of centralized authority. The value of religious freedom and the importance of separation of church and state. Until you were eighteen, you thought all Baptist churches were like the one that raised you. (They aren’t).
In the twenty-five years you belonged to this church, you succumbed to the busy-ness of it. You taught Bible study, you chaired important committees, you were ordained as a deacon, you organized the hosting of a traveling women’s homeless shelter, you served on the homeless shelter food line with your Sunday school friends. On Christmas Eve, you kept the nursery so other parents could partake of communion.
You left this church when, two years after same-sex marriage was legalized, the church still had not discussed what it would do if a gay couple presented for membership or a youth who had grown up in the church asked to use the sanctuary to marry their same-sex partner. Heads buried in sand.
At the time you left, a new pastor had just been hired. You felt bad that your first meeting with him was to tell him you were leaving and why. He told you he thought the church would eventually address the marriage equality question but that he wouldn’t raise it for at least another year. You told him you couldn’t wait that long. That you needed to belong to a church that you could recommend to friends who moved to town. That the church should address the issue before real people whose feelings could be hurt presented for marriage. The new pastor was a nice young man. He looked to be about twelve. Some years after you left, he did in fact lead the church through a discernment process and now the church hands out water bottles to people at the annual Pride parade.
When you left, you had planned to find a new church, an open and affirming church where no one had voted for Donald Trump. You did visit some, the impediments being introversion, and your judgy intolerance for the more woo-woo aspects of religion that correlate with progressive views. Liturgical dance by dancers too old for leotards. Passings of the peace that went on too long. Congregational oversharing of cares and concerns that had you shouting “TMI!” In the end, you did not join because you discovered the peace of an unplanned Sunday, an actual day of rest, something you had never experienced and now enjoyed very much.
You did worry sometimes about your funeral. A secular funeral home wouldn’t supply a large loud choir singing the hymns you loved and missed. But that seemed a selfish reason for continued membership.
Back to the Bible.
Muse that there should be instructions for disposing of a Bible the way there are for decommissioning a tattered American flag or worn out paper currency. A respectful burning. But admit that that seems wrong. Someone, somewhere, could benefit from these words of the Lord in large print.
Google a local nonprofit that provides books to prisoners. Discover they only take paperbacks. Understandable. The sharp corners of this hardback Bible could shank someone.
6.
On the day of the Hard to Recycle event, hide the Bible under other orphan books in the box so that by the time volunteers uncover it, “Alice and Daniel Jones” will be long gone. Join the line of cars and pop your trunk, no need to exit the vehicle. Watch the young, smiley volunteers take your box to the bed of a truck without going through it. When one of them asks if you’d like to make a donation, drop a ten dollar bill in their plastic bucket the way you used to drop money in the collection plate. Don’t expect the gift to assuage your guilt.
On your drive home, let your mind wander to churchy memories. Learning the words to “Fairest Lord Jesus” as a five-year-old in the vestibule where light filtered pink through a stained glass window. Kneading brown modeling clay to fashion Jonah’s whale. Youth group camping trips where it was hard to distinguish the exhilaration of being close to God from the exhilaration of being close to cute boys. The generous baby shower your Sunday school class threw you when they had only known you a few weeks. Your pastor praying over you in your hospital bed when a case of pneumonia nearly took you home early to Beulah Land. Your daughter’s Sunday school teacher telling you that when she asked the class of preschoolers what Easter was, your daughter piped up and said, “It’s when those men killed Jesus and he popped right back up again!”
Part of you wishes Jesus would pop right back up again, demanding prominence in your life the way He once did. Intervening and advising you hour by hour in the most personal way. But those days of mountain top experiences and magical thinking are gone, God’s whispers drowned out by the snarls of nationalist right-wingers who have co-opted the Christian brand. Jesus has become an occasional flicker seen out of the corner of your eye.
Take one last look in your rear view mirror. The Hard to Recycle truck is not following you, its driver waving out the window, calling, “Ma’am! You forgot something!” No punitive lightning bolt streaks from the sky. Park in your driveway and let yourself into the garage. Where books once teetered you can now admire clean concrete floor. Start to hum a few bars of “Fairest Lord Jesus” to test the new acoustics, but realize it has been too long since you sang and your voice is rusty.
A few more Saturdays of sorting and divesting and you will be able to fit your car in here. Spread your arms and turn in a circle, not sure how you feel about the emptiness.
