This appeared in 81–a regional publication that I love. Like most of what I write, it’s about issues that are relevant to sobriety.

lastwords

June 2008

Crossing the Jordan River
So What About God?

by Martha Woodroof

I began school in the Southern Bible Belt before the Supreme Court removed prayer from the classroom in 1962 with Engel v. Vitale. I was the daughter of an agnostic and an atheist. Jesus was every child’s friend but mine.

On some Monday mornings, my teacher—Southern sweet and impenetrably groomed— would purse her lips and ask any student who hadn’t been in Sunday school to stand up. When I stood up, she led the class in prayer for me.

The first time this happened, I went home and asked my father if it would be all right to lie by staying seated. My father was tough when it came to personal ethics. He told me to stand up for what I believe. And so I did—first on one leg and then on the other—as the rest of the class prayed for either my soul’s redemption or that my heathen family would take me to church. After a while, it wasn’t so awful. It wasn’t as bad as stepping barefoot on a slug, for example, or going to formal teas at my great aunt’s. Looking back, it’s probably one reason I’m comfortable around strange people. By the second grade I had met a weirdo, and it was I.

My parents lived and died without being Born Again. The Bible Belt— thank the Lord!—failed to encircle us. I did have company along some other less-traveled roads— demonstrating for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.

I had lots of company when I dropped out of college to rejoice in the 60s and flouted as many social conventions, sexual conventions, and career conventions as I possibly could. I grew up fairly tough, independent, and willing, like my parents, to question everything— including my parents’ skepticism about the existence of God.

…

So what about God? By the late 1980s — divorced twice, restless, but still a firm believer in peace and love—I’d figured out how to support myself with freelance radio journalism. I specialized in what I thought of as Americana pieces and so spent a lot of time driving southern back roads in my pickup looking for material. Emmylou Harris was my traveling companion. She sang melody, I sang harmony; together, we were born to run. At night I slept in under my truck’s camper top, snug as a Hobbit.

The Jordan River runs through Rappahannock County, Va. I crossed it often while picking up tape for stories. Mid-bridge — perhaps because of the lingering effects from the Bible Belt — I would sometimes think about Moses and the Promised Land, wondering whether this Jordan River bounded any such place as that, and, if so, which side of the river I was on. I’d try to imagine how my life would work if I believed the way Moses had, what change for the better a faith in God might work in me. I had no desire to have it do for me what it had done for my second grade teacher, but I was never so dumb or so numb that I didn’t feel a tug inside to believe I wasn’t all there was.

…

Once while driving that road through a blinding, mid- December snowstorm, I almost hit a hitchhiker. This, as every child of the ‘60s knows, made him my responsibility. Besides, he wore nothing but a thin sport coat. The man could freeze.

I pulled over. The guy ran toward me in an off-balance gallop, his arms flapping like a wild turkey’s awkward wings. I held the passenger door open while he climbed in. “Howdy, ma’am,” he said and smiled. His teeth were bad. He stank like a camp latrine.

We took off together into the snow. The man began talking politics, wandering freely among parties and philosophies, smacking a knee rhythmically with a fist. He got increasingly agitated as though someone were arguing with him, although I hadn’t said a word

“Did you run your car off the road?” I finally asked.

“No, ma’am. I’m not out here ’cause I’m in trouble. I’m just out here.”

“Oh.” The snow, if anything, was falling harder. How had the Hollies put it, from the safety of their recording studio? He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother? Fat lot the Hollies knew, I thought.

My passenger went back to politics, I went back to silence. For the first and only time in my years on the road, I was scared. We passed a road sign: Jordan River, three miles. There’s a store there, I remembered. One of those country stores that never closes because it’s the only place its customers have to go

“I can take you as far as the river store,” I said.

“The river store’s fine,” he said.

His hand crept across the seat until his fingers touched my right thigh. My fear must have showed. “You think I’m going to hurt you, don’t you, pretty lady?” he said.

We were the only two creatures in our small, white world. If he makes a move, I thought, I can backhand him across the throat with one hand and keep the truck on the road with the other.

The man shifted slightly in his seat. I imagined a kind of gathering going on in him and tried to match it with a gathering of my own. Then— whoosh—_____the tension dissipated. He took his hand away from my thigh, and just like that, he was OK, I was OK, the world was OK.

“There was a time I might have hurt you,” he said happily, “but now, you don’t need to worry about a thing. When you ride with me, you ride with Jesus.”

I let him out at the country store by the Jordan River. “Thanks for the ride, pretty lady,” he said. “God will bless you for it.”

I’m not sure why, but I believe what he said about God. Years later, having swum through addiction with all its self-imposed disasters, and having landed on the other side, I now believe that there is a greater power that helps out any of us humans if we let it. This God is not the prissy, judgmental monitor that stalked my second-grade classroom. This God is whatever made my parents instill good values in their children, whatever partners with me in my recovery, whatever rode with that hitchhiker on the day he didn’t hurt me. This God is whatever it is that rides with any of us when we’re able to do better than we could on our own.