Chapter 15 The Tree #4
Hannah’s throat starts to swell, but she takes a deep breath and invites the calm of the chapel to wash over her. Ms. Carpenter waits patiently, and when Hannah turns in the pew to face her, she finds a compassionate expression on her teacher’s face.
“Can I tell you the story?” Hannah asks.
“Of course,” Ms. Carpenter says, more breath than voice.
She tells it haphazardly, parenthesizing her feelings and speaking quickly through the parts where Michele hit her and threw the beer.
The whole while, she feels her emotions building in her chest, staying with her until she reaches the part where Baker joined her at the edge of the yard.
Then her words start to feel insufficient and she wishes there was a way she could color the feelings inside of her, outlining them so they’re easier to see, highlighting details like Baker’s scared eyes and the texture of the dirt under her hands while she crawled down to her.
Ms. Carpenter’s expression does not change the whole time. She sits absolutely still, her eyebrows turned down and her hands folded in her lap. When Hannah finishes talking, Ms. Carpenter bows her head and closes her eyes for a long moment.
“Ms. Carpenter?”
Ms. Carpenter’s shoulders rise with a breath. Behind her, the sunlight grows stronger in the windows. “The unnecessary pain of this whole thing,” she says finally. “It kills me.”
Hannah waits for her to elaborate. She doesn’t.
“I’ve been wondering,” Hannah says, “if the pain—if the pain is necessary.”
Ms. Carpenter blinks as if coming out of a daydream. “Hmm?”
“I just—I just keep coming back to this same question—I just keep worrying—What if I am wrong? What if there is something wrong with me? I mean, look at everything that’s happened. Look at what happened to you. Look at—look at what happened to Baker.”
“Pain isn’t always a reflection of what’s right or wrong, Hannah.”
“But if things were different, if I was straight, then there wouldn’t be any of this pain.
You’d be okay, Baker would be okay, I would be okay.
Ms. Carpenter, I just feel—I feel so lost. I can’t tell what’s right or wrong anymore.
I can’t figure out the truth. I wish so badly that I could find Jesus, or God, or whatever—I just wish I could find Him in the park or something, and sit down with Him on the grass and ask Him what I’m supposed to do.
Or why any of this happened. I wish I could look into His face and say, ‘Why do I have these feelings in my heart? Are they bad? Why does everyone say they’re bad?
And if they are bad, why did You make me like this? ’”
Ms. Carpenter swallows. She clears her throat. “And what do you think He would say?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah says. She can feel the telltale signs that she is about to cry. “Everything Father Simon said at Mass—everything people say about Adam and Eve and what God intended for our relationships—how do I know what to believe?”
She takes a rattling breath, but it’s not enough to stop her from crying. Ms. Carpenter brings her a box of tissues from the back of the chapel, and Hannah dabs at her eyes and nose until she gets her breathing under control. “I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly.
“Don’t be,” Ms. Carpenter says, taking the box back from her, sniffling and using a tissue herself. “Someone needs to use these old tissues.”
Hannah laughs gratefully.
“Hannah,” Ms. Carpenter says, peering curiously at her, “why did you take the blame for that email?”
Hannah crumples a tissue between her fingers. “Because I wrote it.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
A beat of silence passes, and Hannah looks away.
“I was trying to—to protect—”
“Protect Baker?”
“I—well—”
“It’s okay,” Ms. Carpenter says kindly. “I know she wrote it. She came and talked to me about it, as I’m sure you no doubt heard from Michele.”
“What did you say to her?”
Ms. Carpenter’s face lifts with a small smile. “That’s between us. I’m sure Baker will tell you when she’s ready. But you wanted to protect her? Why?”
“Because—well, because I didn’t want her to get hurt. Because I could tell how scared she was.”
“And you weren’t scared?”
“No, I was, but I wasn’t really thinking about it. All I could think about was her.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Hannah says, her heart pounding with the answer, “I love her.”
Sunlight illuminates the smile on Ms. Carpenter’s face. “It’s amazing,” she says, folding her tissue over in her palm, “the things we’ll do when we love another person.”
Hannah swallows. “But I still don’t know whether that love is good or bad.”
Ms. Carpenter turns her head and squints at the altar.
Her sharp, dark eyebrows draw together the way they do when she’s unearthing the heart of a novel.
“You mentioned Adam and Eve,” she says, her eyes narrowing farther and farther.
“Which is pretty perfect for this conversation, since they represent both love and sin.”
Hannah follows Ms. Carpenter’s line of sight toward the altar, but she finds she can’t look steadily at it. “And how do I—how do I know which one I’m playing into?”
“Oh, I think we’re always playing into both,” Ms. Carpenter says easily.
“That’s what makes us human, right? Now look—I’m not a Creationist, Hannah.
I don’t believe the story of Genesis is supposed to be taken literally at all.
I think humanity, at the moment—I think we’re trapping ourselves in the story of Adam and Eve.
That we’re getting too caught up in the specifics and forgetting the larger meaning of the story. ”
“What’s the larger meaning?”
“Well, you tell me. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I think about that story in my head and—all I see is a man and a woman and no way to reconcile who I am with who they were.”
Ms. Carpenter crumples her face in sadness. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think the most essential thing is that God didn’t want Adam to be alone.
God wanted Adam to be able to love someone.
To have a relationship that reflected God’s own love.
And so He made Eve so that Adam could love her.
So that Adam could be fully human. And when He made Eve, He gave her the miraculous capacity to love Adam back.
Do you ever think about how crazy that is?
—Our miraculous capacity to love? We don’t know why, we don’t know how, but our hearts and souls are drawn to others.
We weren’t made to be alone. We were made to love.
And when we love, we automatically know God without even trying to, because God is love.
If we love as He made us to love—if we love with our hearts instead of our criteria—then we simply are love. ”
Hannah exhales. “So—you’re saying it’s okay for me to love Baker?”
“That has to be your call. I can’t sit here and pretend to know the mysteries of your heart. That’s between you and God. If you love her, and if you know God’s love by loving her, then it’s up to you to decide whether that love is worth seeking.”
“Okay.”
“But, Hannah,” Ms. Carpenter says tentatively, “I can tell you that I believe—that the human heart’s mysterious ability to love others is never wrong. Your heart will never ask your permission to love. It’s going to love whomever it was made to love, and the best thing you can do is follow it.”
“It’s just—it’s scary when other people don’t understand that.”
“Yeah,” Ms. Carpenter says, nodding with sad eyes.
“I’ve tried to pretend like I don’t care,” Hannah says. “Like I’m not afraid to break the rules. But deep down … I’m really scared.”
“You’ve been very brave so far.”
“No,” Hannah says.
“You have. Not just with other people, but with yourself. It takes overwhelming amounts of bravery to call yourself out on who you are.”
“It wasn’t bravery so much as an inevitability.”
“There’s nothing inevitable about it, Hannah. Some people go entire lifetimes without facing the truth about who they really are.”
“But I’m still working through it,” Hannah says. “I think Baker is, too. I think we’re both so ashamed of our feelings.” She swallows. “It’s hard to love someone when loving them makes you feel ashamed of yourself.”
Ms. Carpenter dips her head. Hannah releases a shaky breath and twists up the corners of her tissue. When she looks up, Ms. Carpenter is peering at the altar again.
“What are you thinking about?” Hannah asks.
Ms. Carpenter meets her eyes. “Shame,” she says.
Hannah nods. “It sucks.”
“Do you remember everything from the story of the Fall?” Ms. Carpenter asks. “Not just the part about picking the fruit from the tree, or about Adam and Eve sharing the fruit. Do you remember what happened afterward?”
“God was angry with them.”
“No, before that. Right after their eyes were opened.”
Their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked …
“They covered themselves up,” Hannah says.
“Exactly,” Ms. Carpenter says. “They were ashamed. It’s the second part of the sin.”
“Their shame? But—they should have felt ashamed. They disobeyed God.”
“Sure, but think about it in a bigger context. What does it mean about humanity?”
Hannah turns her hands in her lap, staring hard at the prints of her fingers. “That we shame ourselves? That we hide from God?”
“Right. Sometimes I think God reacted the way He did because He was so, so anguished that Adam and Eve hated something about themselves. They didn’t realize how beautiful they were in the garden.
They didn’t realize how perfect they were in their love.
When their eyes were opened—when they saw that they were naked—they felt as if they had to cover themselves.
They thought what God had made was shameful and embarrassing and wrong.
Can you imagine how that made God feel? How His heart must have ached to see them denying their beauty, their humanity, in front of Him like that?
It’s the most heartrending part of the story. ”
“I’m like them,” Hannah tells her. “I’m hiding from God because I’m ashamed of how He made me. I hate Him for the way He made me.”
“Hannah,” Ms. Carpenter says softly. “I think we all hide from God sometimes. We all have things we’re ashamed of. The essential thing is that you work through it.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Ms. Carpenter turns her head from side to side, her eyes glazed over in thought. “You refuse to be imprisoned by that shame. You realize that you are good—you are good because God made you—and you claim that goodness.”
Hannah shifts her body so that she faces the altar just the tiniest bit.
The rectangular table is draped in white cloth, with sunlight streaming across its surface.
Hannah lets her eyes linger on it until her vision glazes over, and now the white altar looks like a girl’s hospital bed, or like a man’s tomb.
“Hannah…,” Ms. Carpenter says softly. “You know what I love about the story of the Fall?”
“What?”
“I love how beautifully it matches up with the story of Christ. It makes a perfect palindrome. It’s what makes the Bible such a magnificent work of literature.”
Hannah keeps her eyes on the altar as she listens.
“In the end,” Ms. Carpenter says, “Adam and Eve’s shame can’t imprison us.
It doesn’t matter that they took the fruit from that tree and clothed themselves in garments of shame, sparking that long story of human suffering and filling the Bible with broken words—because after everything that happened, Christ, the new Word, sacrificed Himself on that same tree.
And after He died for us—after He showed us His love—He came back to life and shrugged off those garments of shame and death.
The story of Genesis cannot trap us anymore.
The tree of sin becomes the tree of salvation, those garments of shame become the garments of the Resurrection, and the garden that Eve was banished from becomes the garden Mary Magdalene walks through when she goes to Christ’s tomb on the Third Day.
That’s the garden you go looking for, Hannah—the one that leads to the risen Christ, who saves us with His radical, unconditional love.
The same love you have for Baker—the love that prompted you to carry the cross of her shame.
The same love she has for you—the love that prompted her to sacrifice herself to that fall and that tree.
Love ultimately wins, Hannah. Love ultimately saves. ”
Hannah is stunned. The air in the chapel is suddenly alight with magic. “Wow,” she breathes, her eyes filling with tears as she looks at the altar.
“Hannah,” Ms. Carpenter says.
“Yes?”
“You have to forgive yourself. You have to work past that harmful, murderous shame and start to love yourself. Love yourself the way God loves you. The way Baker loves you.”
“I will,” Hannah says.
She and Ms. Carpenter both turn to face the altar now, and the sunlight coats everything in the chapel—the altar, the crucifix, Hannah’s own body—in a beautiful, hopeful gold.