The lines of desire and purity collided in a heap of shame. I was fairly certain that Jesus would return to rapture the Christians to heaven before I could marry and go the distance. She was probably not my special someone, nor I hers.
The problem was that the more I learned about my contemptuous flesh, the more I wanted to feel the shape and heat of my girlfriend’s lap, where she would let my hand rest sometimes at the movies. Here was Jesus, turn-the-other-cheek, blessed-are-the-merciful Jesus, showing us the dark hole in his big love. Oh, Lord have mercy, the unpardonable sin! From my first reading of the Gospel of Matthew-“Wherefore I say unto you, ‘All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men’”-I was consumed by the need to understand what this might be. Those girls had committed the unpardonable sin, was my takeaway. They’ve lost a precious something they can never get back. “All the girls I know who’ve lost their purity have emotional scars. My mother explained to me that premarital sex leads to psychic ruin. “You need Jesus Christ to give you strength in (1) purity, (2) dedication, (3) courage,” my parents had written in a letter on my birthday. I had only to wait to receive my just deserts. My family, friends, and church prayed that I would run and finish the race and they prayed for my future mate as well, for the woman who had been chosen as my helpmate before the creation of the world, an idea no less grand in God’s perfect providence than the firmament of the heavens and the light upon the earth.
The goal was to remain sexually pure-presenting the temple undefiled-until I met my soul mate, who had made the same arduous journey. I knew my body was the temple of the Holy Spirit. In any case, I was pretty sure Jesus would find me somehow compromised on the day when the trumpets blasted and the sun went dark. I had not plucked out my roving eye, which I should have done, because, you know, as the Good Lord himself said, it would be better to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than go to hell with two. I’d found nude photos torn from a magazine in the woods one afternoon and had not disposed of them properly by which I mean I had not set them on fire as I had The Chipmunks Sing the Beatles album, my Easy Rider poster, and a Ouija board. And despite my cleaving to the straight and narrow, I believed in my heart of hearts I wouldn’t make the cut on Judgment Day. Holiness came to mean power civilized came to mean violent.Īt the time, however, I was aware mostly of principalities and powers colliding and clashing in my body-along with the sobering fact that, according to the people I trusted to interpret this world, Jesus was set to return soon. When in my early thirties I revisited these years as a scholar, I was struck by how a siege mentality had become pervasive among white southerners it was a complete way of seeing the world, with both an inner coherence and a breakdown of ordinary meaning. Not for nothing did the respected journalist Curtis Wilkie title his new book When Evil Lived in Laurel. In nearby Meridian, federal prosecutors tried 18 white Mississippians for their role in murdering civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. Board of Education had been the law of the land longer than I’d been alive, and yes, LBJ had signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, but in 1967 deepest Mississippi, the explicit agonies of the civil rights struggle were still unfolding. We had recently moved to the epicenter of southern white terrorism, according to the FBI’s reckoning. In time, I would find it helpful after temptation and fall to rub a rough dish towel against my genitalia until I bled. Not even my improvised chastity belt could help: tighty-whities secured by a jock strap so tight it squeezed my junk like some kind of BDSM zentai.
How hard it is to bring erections under the Lordship of Christ-a mystery I often ponder.
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