If God so loved the world.

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

 New Year's Day.
        Nils knocked. It felt early. The light in the room looked early. "What?" I said. "What?" he said. I said louder, "Open the door." "Yes, what?" he said after he'd opened the door and stuck his shaggy head in.
        "You knocked," I said. "What do you want?"
        "Do you want to get up now?"
        "I don't know. What about what's-her-name?"
        "Kristi," he said. "We're going to make pancakes, then she's going home. Do you want pancakes?"
        "Yes," I said. "But it takes a while, you know."
        "What?"
        "For me to get up, for me to get dressed, for me to get down the stairs."
        "I'll help you down the stairs, Ted explained that," he said. "But how long, do you think?"
        "Maybe half an hour."
        "I'll come back up in twenty-five minutes," he said.

The pancakes were good. (They were pancakes: Pancakes are good.) And after they scrambled all the dishes into the dishwasher, Kristi left. I was in the kitchen. She went to the front of the house. She came back in her coat, which was long and black with a hood (but not up). She said, "Nice to meet you, Albert." She reached out her right again. I took it. I said, "Yes."

Nils came back into the kitchen and sat down with me at the table. "What?" he said.
        I looked across the table. I looked down at my hands on the table, veins sticking out of the loose, freckled skin. I looked across the table. "What can I tell you?" he said.
        "What day is it?" I said.
        "Monday."
        "Did we go to church yesterday?"
        "I did," he said. "You did not - unless you drove yourself while I was gone."
        "I didn't know it was Sunday. I don't know that it's Sunday always if Ted doesn't tell me."
        "Sorry."
        I looked down at my hands again. They are a mess: the fingers are still straight, but there's too much skin, too spotted and the veins running through; they look like old washing, they look like witch's hands. "Where did you go?"
        "I went to Axel's."
        "Why?"
        He shrugged.

I said after a minute: "Do you believe that stuff?"
        "You go to church, do you?"
        I spread my gray hands out on the table, a way of shrugging.
        He said, "I don't know if believe is the right word. I rely on it. That stuff." He stopped. He went on:
        "I didn't go to a Lutheran but to a Presbyterian seminary, don't ask me why, I can't say exactly, but I'd already followed Axel at St. Olaf, I certainly didn't want to follow him at Luther. Anyway, it was the kind of seminary you couldn't leave not believing in the importance - even the supreme importance - of Reformed theology.  There was nothing in the world - in the underworld or the overworld or the ether the worlds floated in; nothing in the microscopic or the macroscopic, or the cosmoscopic world, nothing in the physical world or the spiritual world, ; nothing enacted by human beings, animals, thrones, dominions, or God God's self - that it couldn't examine and, at least theoretically, explain.

Saul

"The explanation might be lame sometimes, even laughable. But then, there was/is a good explanation for that. We, the explainers, are lame (like Jacob) and laughable (like Saul taking a piss and David taking a picture of it); we are lame and laughable, having fallen naked from great heights and bounced off the ground (like a trampoline) in ill-fitting clothes God had sewn for us.
        "I seem to be stuck with that. It doesn't matter that the world may have moved on, or bumbled on or away - though what does the world know? The world may have moved on, but this is still the way I make sense of it."

 "Why then did you leave the church?"
        "I don't know that I have left the church. Ask Axel: Sunday was no oddity. I'm there almost every Sunday. But I left the church I was serving when I found out - when I was told - I knew only one sermon. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, I preached the same thing, ending with the same question.
        "The body was simple: Jesus loves you. You know that, don't you? The conclusion: 'What are you going to do about it?' That was up to them; I didn't know. What I was going to about it, apparently, was this: The next Sunday I was going to preach the same sermon, tell the congregation that Jesus loved them, try to show them somehow that Jesus loved them. And ask the same question: 'What are you going to do about it?'
        "Nils One-Note."
                                         01/02/24