Read Online The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel - Free Book Online

their teachers.
    Amos remembered, sitting at his desk after talking to Beulah about the fate of the children, the first time he looked up and saw Alice in the congregation, beside her mother. The sermon that day had been on sacrifice. He’d begun literally, with the animal sacrifice of the First Testament. “It is difficult to truly consider, with our late sensibilities,” he’d said, “the blood steaming on the altar; doves, goats, lambs, calves.” Then there was a whole section he’d had to remove, if he remembered correctly, that began: “Trust me: this is a
book
we’re reading.” He would have held up the Bible, a dramatic gesture of the sort he ordinarily despised. “It has a message for you, but there has to be foreshadowing, tension, resolution. We have to be exhausted, sickened by all those corpses, the slaughter of innocent animals, in order to truly recognize the new witness of Jesus in Nazareth. There must be continuity.” The typological lamb. The Hebrew people made animal sacrifices; Jesus put an end to animal sacrifice with his own innocent death. Amos quoted from the Letter to the Hebrews 9:11 , and 10:1 – 18 . He was leading up to his favorite Christological position, which is that everything recognizable is inverted in the Christ-event: the strong are made weak, the prostitute is invited to the table, the Law is replaced with the Spirit, the sacrificial animals are set free. Christ’s task is
immediacy,
he doesn’t have time for anything but
metaphor,
he doesn’t have time for actual
cows,
to literally sacrifice is demonic (or as Tillich would say, to literalize any event in the myth of Jesus is idolatry). That’s what Amos wanted to say, and then he wanted to go on saying it for a few days or a few hundred pages, at least until he or someone in the audience had some idea what he was talking about. He ended the sermon with yet another banal plea for responsible stewardship of the earth, the same sort of plea that could be heard in any vaguely liberal church on any given Sunday. As he joined the congregation in silent prayer, a small voice repeated in his head,
Are you going to write bumper stickers next? “Love The Little Animals: Jesus Did”?
And when he opened his eyes, he saw Alice staring directly at him as if he were profoundly interesting, or of another species. The stare was almost rude, and Amos had looked away long before she did.
    But he had seen her long enough to form an impression he would remember, undoubtedly, for the rest of his life: her straight, blond hair hanging to her shoulders. Brown eyes, widely spaced; her face, broad and square, with high, pronounced cheekbones. A slight overbite, the sort that seems so sexy and heartbreaking in an actress in a black-and-white film. And dimples—visible even when she wasn’t smiling. Alice wasn’t beautiful, not really, but she was conscious. She took in the whole world at a glance, and in doing so, drew the world to her. How could he have known what he knew in that moment: that Alice was kind and competent, and possessed of an enviable stillness, that she was lovely all the way down to the source of her nature? He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began. She could have been a lingerie model sitting half-naked in that pew and he wouldn’t have noticed. She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him—that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.
    She didn’t speak to him that Sunday, or the next, or the Sunday after that. She just stood up when the service was over, kissed her mother on the cheek, and left. Amos didn’t ask anyone about her and mostly didn’t think about her during the week (but his nights were worse, and this was something he admitted to himself when he was able to admit anything at all). He wasn’t in love with