Fundamentalist Poetics, or "Grandma, Where Did Dead People Go Before Jesus Came?"

To paraphrase Viktor Frankl quoting Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning - we humans can live with any how as long as we have sufficient why.

For my grandparents, the King James Bible was all the why they ever needed.

In After Theory, Terry Eagleton calls this "a neurotic hunt for solid foundations" (204) - I always called it Chasing the Devil. According to my Assembly-of-God-minister grandfather and my born-to-be-Preacher's-Wife grandmother, anyone who couldn't see that every word in the Bible was minutely, excruciatingly, and, at times, horrifically true and must needs be read in exactly the way Grandpa preached it on Sunday, was obviously and irrefutably being influenced by, if not completely filled with, The Devil.

Eagleton believes this stance is a denial of the "roughness" (204) of life, that Fundamentalists expect to feel life as "a matter ...of treading on thin air" (204) - I must, respectfully, disagree. My grandparents grew up in rural areas of Texas and Louisiana in the early part of the last century with over ten children in each family - lots of chances for children to get sick, get hurt, and die. My great-grandmother was a midwife, which meant that my grandmother, as a young girl, witnessed both birth and death - sometimes simultaneously.

My grandparents married and began a family while traveling many dusty roads of the South around 1930, leading tent revivals, just as the Depression was getting into full swing. Unlike today's t.v. personalities-cum-ministers, my grandfather made only what he received in tithes - they often lived on toast and coffee for weeks at a time. They knew life was "rough;" I argue, they expected nothing else but, instead, waited patiently for reward.

When my grandmother passed away, it was not the thought of "treading [the] thin air" of this world her soul flew toward, but the purified air of a Heaven she felt sure the Bible had promised.

Though I have never been able to share in their "pure ice of absolute certainty" (205), I came to respect very early that they were not trying to hide from reality - they lived long, full lives filled to the top with good and bad, and they embraced every moment. Maybe it's because they didn't have a lot of time for theorizing.