Your mother came up the road to tell us our supper was ready. It was a cold supper, she said, so there was no hurry. She agreed to sit with us for a few minutes. She always has to be coaxed to stay in company even a little while, and then it’s all I can do to get a word from her. I believe she worries about the way she talks. I love the way she talks, or the way she talked when I first knew her. “It don’t matter,” she would say, in that low, soft voice of hers. That was what she said when she meant she forgave someone, but it had a sound of deeper, sadder resignation, as if she were forgiving the whole of the created order, forgiving the Lord Himself. It grieves me that I may never hear just those words spoken by her again. I believe Boughton made her self-conscious with that little trick of his of correcting people. Not that he ever corrected her.
“It don’t matter.” It was as if she were renouncing the world itself just in order to make nothing of some offense to her. Such a prodigal renunciation, that empty-handed prodigality I remember from the old days. I have nothing to give you, take and eat. Ashy biscuit, summer rain, her hair falling wet around her face. If I were to multiply the splendors of the world by two — the splendors as I feel them — I would arrive at an idea of heaven very unlike anything you see in the old paintings.
So Jack Boughton is forty-three. I have no idea what sort of life he has had since he left here. There has never been any mention of marriage or children or of any particular kind of work. I always felt it was best not to inquire.
I was sitting there listening to old Boughton ramble along (he uses the expression himself) about a trip he and his wife made once to Minneapolis, when Jack broke in and said to me, “So, Reverend, I would like to hear your views on the doctrine of predestination.”
Now, that is probably my least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world. I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one’s understanding ever advanced one iota. I’ve seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he would bring up predestination! So I said, “That’s a complicated issue.”
“Let me simplify it,” he said. “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?”
“Well,” I said, “that may actually be the kind of simplification that raises more questions than it avoids.”
He laughed. “People must ask you about this all the time,” he said.
“They do.”
“Then I suppose you must have some way of responding.”
“I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”
He laughed. “You say it in those very words.”
“Yes, I do. More or less those very words. It’s a fraught question, and I’m careful with it.”
He nodded. “I take you to mean that you do believe in predestination.” “I dislike that word. It’s been put to crude uses.”
“Can you propose a better word?”
“Not offhand.” I felt he was deviling me, you see.
“I would like your help with this, Reverend,” he said, so seriously that I began to think he might be serious. “This is a grave issue, isn’t it? We’re not really dealing here with a mere word, a mere abstraction.”
“You’re right,” I said. “That’s true.”
“I assume predestination does not, in your understanding, mean that a good person will go to hell simply because he was consigned to hell from the beginning.”
Glory said, “Excuse me. I’ve heard this argument a thousand times and I hate it.”
Old Boughton said, “I hate this conversation a good deal myself and I’ve never seen it go anywhere. I wouldn’t really call this an argument, though, Glory.”
“Wait five minutes,” she said. She got up and walked into the house, but your mother sat still, listening.
Jack said, “I’m the amateur here. I suppose if I had your history with the question I’d be sick of it, too. Well, actually I believe I do have a history with it. I have had reason to wonder fairly often about it. I hoped you would instruct me a little.”
“I don’t believe a person can be good in any meaningful sense and also be consigned to perdition. Nor
