JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 25

25. INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

God was not the only presence in Eve’s church. That soft, flaky, feathery vanilla flour had a companion: the ether that lay outside. Outside, in the non-churched world, there was a great breathing, and unlike the single breath of God inside, this was the breath of the Multitude. Humanity in all its petty, everyday smells.

Here were men, with eyes that looked away from your eyes to your chest, eyes that followed your behind as you walked away, eyes that probed and demanded and claimed. Those eyes were an affront, but they also beckoned. They were like an oily substance, sticky, not like the soft powder of God’s presence. Viscous and slightly tangy, sharp, multifarious, possessed of individual tongues, each with its own little need and its own little beggary.

The Church gave her a calm serenity, a being-at-one with more than herself.

The world outside scraped against what was in her, only that, nothing more. She herself was one of the many breaths and tongues; she had her own needs, too. The presence of the Lord did not speak to that need. That need was hers, even though He had planted it in her. He had created the paradox: shaping her so she could obey Him in a betrayal of Him, by turning away from Him to the smaller him that was His humbler replication in human men.

He waited for her inside the church, and when she was there, He pointed her outside, and so she swung, from the presence of the Lord to the pressures of the world, back and forth, between Him and what He had planted in her.

A week later Eve couldn’t stand it any longer.

She did a bit of sewing and went to Rachel’s apartment, where she knocked on Rachel’s door. She knew that she was breaking the law. She was a Beloved, and Rachel was now a Scarlet, and never the twain shall meet. But she did not care. She wanted to tell Rachel not to despair -- that she, Eve, was going to dedicate her life to saving Rachel from the disgrace of being a Scarlet, and work to have her reclassified back to Beloved.

Rachel opened the door. She was wearing a big A on her chest to denote her new classification. Her shoulders were bent. Her eyes opened wide.
“Let’s go for a walk,” said Eve.