Prose

Book of Essays Forthcoming

Jeanne's essays have been published in many journals and anthologies.  A collection of essays, Letters To My Fundamentalist People, will be published in 2010.  Here's an excerpt from one of those essays entitled "Saving Images".   

Saving Images

 I come from two cultures that despise each other.  I am an artist and a Christian, the child of parents who were Fundamentalists.  In Fundamentalist churches, as in arts magazines and organizations, the unquestioned assumption is that these two groups are mutually exclusive, that Fundamentalists don’t make images and that artists are never Fundamentalists.  For years I have felt that my existence creates an embarrassment for both.  Though I feel it may be scandalous to do so, I want to admit here that they are both my kin.  I love both equally.  This is the only way I can think of to ask both sides look up from their long and bloody war and to realize that they may have something in common. 
                When I was a child, I was a devout Baptist, like the rest of my family.  I went around believing that Jesus might return any minute.  I had a very clear image of what that second coming would be like.  I would be outside playing or maybe riding in a car.  I would hear a great trumpet.  I would look up.  There would be a few scattered clouds in the sky and Jesus' actual tanned feet would be slicing through the clouds like the prow of a ship through water.  The light of the whole sky would gather like arrows and rivet on Jesus' dazzling white robe.  
               I remember quite vividly the first time it dawned on me that Jesus might not be coming back in exactly those terms.  I was sixteen, lying in bed at night, listening to the radio.  I lunged out of bed, flung the door open, and ran into the Nebraska night.  I padded around our dark neighborhood for several hours.   I thought I had lost my faith. The disintegration of that image was more shocking than the first time I understood what was going on behind my parents’ closed bedroom door.  Subsequently, I worked very hard to get the image back, and it did return, but there was something around and under it that hadn't been there before--namely, the catastrophe of losing it.  
                Until a couple of years ago, I had forgotten this.  No wonder.  I used to be afraid to talk about it.  If I did  I would seem puerile to my friends who are artists and University Professors.   To my family and other Fundamentalist Christians, I would reek of unbelief. But lately it has occurred to me that I have always lived my life betwixt and between.  How does anyone get into this impossible position—torn between the arts and Christian Fundamentalism? 
                In memory I climb the steps to Temple Baptist Church on a quiet corner in Lincoln, Nebraska, and walk past the planter of English ivy, through the modern glass doors.  I stand at the back, where I sat for my father’s funeral when I was thirteen, and look toward the altar.  But there is no altar--not of the kind I expect after years of worshiping in an Episcopal church.  There is a plain square blond communion table.  Above the table, on the platform, stands a severe blond pulpit with a practical looking pulpit light.  The doors to the Baptistry, behind the pulpit, are closed.
                There is nowhere in this church to put my eyes.  I have been told why.  Our eyes are supposed to stay fixed on Jesus, and Jesus is God.  He cannot be trapped in an image.  This truism is frustratingly obvious, like a knot I can’t pick apart.  I am fifteen and I want to ask questions, but every question I formulate sounds dumb or smart alecky.  How can my eyes be fixed on something that isn’t there?   My Sunday School teacher tells me that our inner eyes are supposed to be fixed on the idea of Jesus.   Why not a picture or a statue, I ask.   Easy, he answers, and I imagine him whipping his Superman Cape around him.  We are commanded not to worship images.  And, of course, I know that.  I have memorized the ten commandments, including the one against graven images.
Now it is a Sunday noon, just after communion.  Water is rushing into the baptistery.  My mother is a new Deaconess and while she washes communion cups we kids discover this secret, that the water in the baptistery is not magic.  The baptistery has to be filled from a common tap that looks like an outdoor faucet and then the water has to stand all afternoon so it isn’t bone-chilling cold for the evening baptism.  This discovery of how earth-bound the baptismal water is sets me wondering about other things.
                As I gather communion cups for washing, I ask a Deaconess, “Why do we have that picture in the baptistery?”   She is tall and big-boned and she is wearing a flowery dress with a wide patent leather belt and a big bow under her chin.  She pauses, her big arms hugging three racks of cups to her ample chest, and stares at the baptistery as if to locate the answer.   “I don’t know, Honey,” she says.  “That’s the Jordan River.  I think we have that there so the candidate can be dunked in the river where Jesus was baptized.”  Oh, I say stupidly.  What I mean:  So it’s about history.  It’s about actually getting back there?  She walks off to wash the little cups.
              I am exploding with questions.  The trouble is, I know I don’t have the language to ask them.   They are gathered into a knot in my throat.  If I could think of the words, I would ask whether the painter ever saw the Jordan River, whether our painting is photographically correct.  How accurate does the painting have to be to work?  What happens if you get baptized without a picture of the Jordan River?  Why doesn’t this picture, apparently, count as an image?   Or if it does, why is this image permitted?  If the Jordan River is so important, why don’t we have to go there and stand in the actual river?  I am desperate to know what’s going on.  But I am also worried about seeming too earnest.   That Sunday night, during the evening service, I sit in the back of the church feeling my boyfriend’s arm around me, relieved not to be thinking.  But I have started down this path and soon I see images everywhere.  .  .  .  .