The saints I trust have all done time in some private hell. The ones in the windows never fooled me. Everyone up there looks finished, and a finished man has nothing to say to a man still drowning. The church knew this, I think, and preferred it that way. A saint with the blood still in him might tell you the truth, and the truth would have emptied the collection plates. God was never far. Everything they built depended on you believing otherwise.
The gurus came after the priests, smiling where the priests had thundered, and the fear underneath was the same fear. I sat under both. Every book promised the man I could become and despised the man I was, politely, in fresh vocabulary, and the last page always pointed to another book. None of it taught me how to live inside my own skin. It taught me to wait there, unhappily, for someone better to move in.
What I believe now is smaller and stranger. Grace keeps bad company. It always did. The man the whole faith hangs on ate with tax collectors and let a ruined woman weep into his hair while the credentialed men watched from the wall and kept score. He touched lepers. He died between two thieves and promised one of them paradise with his last breath, and the thief had done nothing to earn it except ask. I have read that story a hundred times and it has never once sounded like a man interested in improving anybody. It sounds like a man receiving people just as they came.
I have spent my share of hours on barstools. The man at the end of the rail is a liar, mostly. His fish grow. His war gathers witnesses it never had. He is also the first to notice when a stranger comes in trying to smother something. He notices, he says one true thing, quiet, and he buys the round. Nobody gets billed. I have watched men do for each other, over beer they could barely afford, what the retreats charge four grand to imitate.
The lying never bothered me. The good liars lie the way painters paint, reaching for something the facts keep missing. A man wants his life to have been bigger than it was. That longing is the most honest thing in the building. The fish story is the only prayer he knows how to say, and I believe it gets heard. Half of scripture is fish stories. The fish keep feeding people anyway.
I have nothing against the improved. I only noticed, in every real trouble I have seen, that the ones who came were flawed men with bad knees and worse histories, men who showed up with their trucks and their silence, and stayed.
The saints worth keeping were this kind of people. Augustine, begging God for chastity, just not yet. Peter, denying his dearest friend beside a fire while it warmed his lying skin, and going on to lead the whole thing anyway. Thomas, needing his fingers in the holes. Paul, minding coats at a killing. Cowards and doubters, deniers and accessories. The church raised them to the altars and then taught everyone after to be ashamed of the very flaws that got them there. I have never understood the shame. The flaw was where God got in.
What the rail gives that the sanctuary quit giving is simple. Nobody there is appraising you. The bartender asks what you're having and means only that. You can sit an hour inside your own silence and no one will try to fix it, and it turns out that being left unfixed, in company, is most of what a hurting man needs. I don't know why the institutions never learned this. Maybe there was no money in it.
Enough is a word I had to learn late. A man says it in a sanctuary and gets prayed over. He says it on a barstool and gets a nod, because everyone at the rail already knows. Nobody here is finished. The drinks come anyway. So does the mercy, and it checks no one's progress first.
The scarred pull up the next stool and say me too, and I think those are the two most sacred words we have. They cost something to say. They cost nothing to hear but relief.
The useful people I have known were never the polished ones. The sponsor with a record of his own who still answers his phone. The nurse who curses the whole drive home and comes back. The deacon who quit explaining God and started fixing porches for widows. The waitress who knows which regulars are drinking their grief and lets them, and slides the pretzels closer without a word. Nobody improved them. Life used them as they were, hard, and they let it, which is the closest thing to sainthood I expect to see.
I don't know what God is. I stopped pretending to know a long time ago, and I am easier company for it. But whatever it is, it has never once seemed interested in my improvement. It seems interested in my doors. I keep them unlocked now. And when the man at the end of the rail starts in on the fish again, bigger this telling than the last, I let him have it, the whole magnificent lie, because underneath it something true is asking to be loved, and I would rather sit with him than with any finished man alive.
