Many months later, Robin came to the meeting shaking with rage. Thered been a manifestation of Hell near her house, and shed seen her husband among the lost souls. Shed confronted the nurse, who admitted to lying in the hopes that Robin would learn to love God, so that at least she would be saved even if her husband hadnt been. Robin wasnt at the next meeting, and at the meeting after that the group learned she had committed suicide to rejoin her husband.
None of them knew the status of Robins and her husbands relationship in the afterlife, but successes were known to happen; some couples had indeed been happily reunited through suicide. The support group had attendees whose spouses had descended to Hell, and they talked about being torn between wanting to remain alive and wanting to rejoin their spouses. Neil wasnt in their situation, but his first response when listening to them had been envy: if Sarah had gone to Hell, suicide would be the solution to all his problems.
This led to a shameful self-knowledge for Neil. He realized that if he had to choose between going to Hell while Sarah went to Heaven, or having both of them go to Hell together, he would choose the latter: he would rather she be exiled from God than separated from him. He knew it was selfish, but he couldnt change how he felt: he believed Sarah could be happy in either place, but he could only be happy with her.
Neils previous experiences with women had never been good. All too often hed begin flirting with a woman while sitting at a bar, only to have her remember an appointment elsewhere the moment he stood up and his shortened leg came into view. Once, a woman hed been dating for several weeks broke off their relationship, explaining that while she herself didnt consider his leg a defect, whenever they were seen in public together other people assumed there must be something wrong with her for being with him, and surely he could understand how unfair that was to her?
Sarah had been the first woman Neil met whose demeanor hadnt changed one bit, whose expression hadnt flickered toward pity or horror or even surprise when she first saw his leg. For that reason alone it was predictable that Neil would become infatuated with her; by the time he saw all the sides of her personality, hed completely fallen in love with her. And because his best qualities came out when he was with her, she fell in love with him too.
Neil had been surprised when Sarah told him she was devout. There werent many signs of her devotionshe didnt go to church, sharing Neils dislike for the attitudes of most people who attendedbut in her own, quiet way she was grateful to God for her life. She never tried to convert Neil, saying that devotion would come from within or not at all. They rarely had any cause to mention God, and most of the time it wouldve been easy for Neil to imagine that Sarahs views on God matched his own.
This is not to say that Sarahs devotion had no effect on Neil. On the contrary, Sarah was far and away the best argument for loving God that he had ever encountered. If love of God had contributed to making her the person she was, then perhaps it did make sense. During the years that the two of them were married, his outlook on life improved, and it probably would have reached the point where he was thankful to God, if he and Sarah had grown old together.
Sarahs death removed that particular possibility, but it neednt have closed the door on Neils loving God. Neil could have taken it as a reminder that no one can count on having decades left. He could have been moved by the realization that, had he died with her, his soul wouldve been lost and the two of them separated for eternity. He could have seen Sarahs death as a wake-up call, telling him to love God while he still had the chance.
Instead Neil became actively resentful of God. Sarah had been the greatest blessing of his life, and God had taken her away. Now he was expected to love Him for it? For Neil, it was like having a kidnapper demand love as ransom for his wifes return. Obedience he might have managed, but sincere, heartfelt love? That was a ransom he couldnt pay.
This paradox confronted several people in the support group. One of the attendees, a man named Phil Soames, correctly pointed out that thinking of it as a condition to be met would guarantee failure. You couldnt love God as a means to an end, you had to love Him for Himself. If your ultimate goal in loving God was a reunion with your spouse, you werent demonstrating true devotion at all.
A woman in the support group named Valerie Tommasino said they shouldnt even try. Shed been reading a book published by the humanist movement; its members considered it wrong to love a God who inflicted such pain, and advocated that people act according to their own moral sense instead of being guided by the carrot and the stick. These were people who, when they died, descended to Hell in proud defiance of God.
Neil himself had read a pamphlet of the humanist movement; what he most remembered was that it had quoted the fallen angels. Visitations of fallen angels were infrequent, and caused neither good fortune nor bad; they werent acting under Gods direction, but just passing through the mortal plane as they went about their unimaginable business. On the occasions they appeared, people would ask them questions: Did they know Gods intentions? Why had they rebelled? The fallen angels reply was always the same: Decide for yourselves. That is what we did. We advise you to do the same.
Those in the humanist movement had decided, and if it werent for Sarah, Neil wouldve made the identical choice. But he wanted her back, and the only way was to find a reason to love God.
Looking for any footing on which to build their devotion, some attendees of the support group took comfort in the fact that their loved ones hadnt suffered when God took them, but instead died instantly. Neil didnt even have that; Sarah had received horrific lacerations when the glass hit her. Of course, it could have been worse. One couples teenage son been trapped in a fire ignited by an angels visitation, and received full-thickness burns over eighty percent of his body before rescue workers could free him; his eventual death was a mercy. Sarah had been fortunate by comparison, but not enough to make Neil love God.
Neil could think of only one thing that would make him give thanks to God, and that was if He allowed Sarah to appear before him. It would give him immeasurable comfort just to see her smile again; hed never been visited by a saved soul before, and a vision now would have meant more to him than at any other point in his life.
But visions dont appear just because a person needs one, and none ever came to Neil. He had to find his own way toward God.
The next time he attended the support group meeting for witnesses of Nathanaels visitation, Neil sought out Benny Vasquez, the man whose eyes had been erased by Heavens light. Benny didnt always attend because he was now being invited to speak at other meetings; few visitations resulted in an eyeless person, since Heavens light entered the mortal plane only in the brief moments that an angel emerged from or reentered Heaven, so the eyeless were minor celebrities, and in demand as speakers to church groups.
Benny was now as sightless as any burrowing worm: not only were his eyes and sockets missing, his skull lacked even the space for such features, the cheekbones now abutting the forehead. The light that had brought his soul as close to perfection as was possible in the mortal plane had also deformed his body; it was commonly held that this illustrated the superfluity of physical bodies in Heaven. With the limited expressive capacity his face retained, Benny always wore a blissful, rapturous smile.
Neil hoped Benny could say something to help him love God. Benny described Heavens light as infinitely beautiful, a sight of such compelling majesty that it vanquished all doubts. It constituted incontrovertible proof that God should be loved, an explanation that made it as obvious as 1+1=2. Unfortunately, while Benny could offer many analogies for the effect of Heavens light, he couldnt duplicate that effect with his own words. Those who were already devout found Bennys descriptions thrilling, but to Neil, they seemed frustratingly vague. So he looked elsewhere for counsel.