As independent as Cosmo had become since leaving home—as confident and unyielding as an unblemished bamboo cane—his father’s words struck him like a typhoon snapping every tree in the jungle. Cosmo teetered on weak knees.
The older man moved more intentionally than Cosmo remembered. The father sat his basket aside, brushed his hands on his pants, and steadily closed the space between father and son.
He continued the hymn at a hum, his hands held out as if attempting to soothe and corral a stray pig. Somehow the father knew the temptation to run coursed through the son’s trembling limbs. Before the son could react, the father wrapped his arms around him, as if Cosmo was a child.
The father placed his lips to the son’s ear and whispered softer than a mosquito. “I know of all the things you’ve done, my son. God has shown me the path you’ve trod.”
Cosmo’s weak knees folded. Blood pounded in his temples. His vision blurred.
The father gripped the boy to his chest. “The lust for violence, the greed, the pride. It’s been a windy road, but God has brought you home.”
Dangling in the father’s embrace, the son breathed a single word, “How?”
The father draped the son’s arm over his broad shoulders. Together the pair hobbled toward the weathered bench propped against the back of the hut. “Did you think for a second God was not with you?”
Cosmo shook his head, a distant vacancy in his eyes. “They tortured me.”
For the first time, the father quaked beneath the son’s weight. “Especially then. Did you not survive an ordeal that should have killed you a dozen times?”
As father and son dropped onto the creaking bench, a memory blossomed in Cosmo’s mind. He remembered praying to God while lying paralyzed on his back in the old woman’s hut. He remembered promising his service in exchange for his life.
“Every action has its consequence, son. God cannot save us from our own choices. But he promises to preserve the most important part, if we surrender it to him.”
“So I suffered violence because of the violence I’ve done to others.” Cosmo gritted his teeth. “It’s just karma in Christian clothing.” His eyes roved the familiar tree line at the edge of the village.
“No.” His father breathed deeply. “Perhaps I failed to tell you often enough when you were a child—you need to understand, son, I love you.”
Cosmo clenched his eyes shut, and the world began to spin.
“No matter what you’ve done, I love you with all the love God has enabled me. Yet my love is imperfect. I’m petty, selfish, quick to anger and slow to forgive. Not so with God. Nothing you do can erode his love, or earn it.”
“Then it’s hopeless.” Cosmo opened his eyes. He saw neither the jungle sloping gently uphill nor the trees composing it. He didn’t feel the light breeze waft beneath the thatch-covered porch where he and his father sat. He didn’t feel anything.
His father shook his head. “I’ve been so frightened of awakening violent spirits from our people’s past, I’ve neglected to teach you the whole of the Gospel story.”
Cosmo didn’t flinch. “Jesus died on a cross. He let the Jews and the Romans kill him. I know the story.”
“No, in the Old Testament there was a king by the name of David. He was a warrior with blood on his hands.”
Cosmo’s spine tingled. For the first time in months a sharpness of focus flooded his mind.
His father continued. “David grew up fighting from a young age. Men flocked to his leadership. He trained them into a small army. God had promised David the Kingdom of Israel, and yet Israel already had King Saul—a mighty man, impressive in the eyes of others.
“While small and unimposing physically, David’s heart impressed God. For years, David remained God’s chosen king while Saul lived in the palace and David lived in caves. Forced to cling to God, David fought against his enemies and his friends. He even joined his enemies to save those under his care.”
“Why?” Confusion and anger roiled beneath Cosmo’s surface. “Why not just give David the kingdom? Why does God enjoy tormenting his servants?”
“God loved Saul as well.” His father turned Cosmo’s head until their eyes met. “Don’t you understand? God is not just the god of those who serve him. All of this,” he gestured toward the village and the hills surrounding them, “the Naga, the Kuki, the Indian, the Burmese, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Animist—God is the creator and lover of them all.”
Cosmo stared a long silent moment into his father’s eyes. Could he know how Cosmo felt about the poverty God had permitted them to suffer all these years? Of all the horrible things Cosmo had done, how many of them had been for money and for the respect money brings? Now his father was telling him God permitted their poverty because he loved the Indians and Burmese too?
His father blinked first. “I suppose that is a matter for another day. As for Saul, he could not understand how sometimes pleasing God means disappointing the people who rely on us. Saul’s trust in the divine failed, so God’s anointing failed Saul. He and his son fell in battle, and finally David became king.
“David’s years of hardship had equipped him to succeed where Saul had failed. The wilderness had taught him the balance of being a humble warrior. For many years longer than his time in the wilderness, David ruled from the palace. But in time, his spirit grew weak as he grew proud.
“And this is the important part.” His father clutched Cosmo gently by the scruff of his neck. “It was said of David that no other man to walk the face of the earth approached closer to the very heart of God. And yet, David strayed.
“While lounging lazily on the roof of his palace, he eyed the bathing wife of another man—one of his loyal generals. He lusted for her. His insides burned like kindling until he devised a strategy to murder the woman’s husband and take her as his own.
“Sloth, envy, greed, lust and murder.” His father paused for dramatic tension. Even while speaking to his son, he could not disassociate from the practices of his preaching profession. “What would you expect God to do with such a man? A man who had once been closer to him than a son to a father?”
Cosmo could envision the outcome in his head, although he feared the moral of such a story. “The family of the man David murdered would rise up to overthrow his rule. The woman he stole would despise him. There would be a cycle of violence where there had once been peace.”
Cosmo’s father pursed his lips and nodded, as if processing a new revelation about his youngest son. “If that had been the case, indeed our lives would be hopeless. But that is not what happened.” He softened his expression. “God convicted David of his evil doing through the words of a prophet.
“Remembering the closeness he once had with God, David asked forgiveness, which God readily gave. As consequence of David’s actions, the ill-conceived child in the woman’s womb died. In an act of God’s grace, the younger brother of that child grew up to rule in David’s place.”
Cosmo didn’t understand. “David kept his kingdom? But what did he do to earn it back? Did he pay in the afterlife?”
“He did three simple things. He wept, he prayed, he surrendered his life again to God. There is no penance, no karma—not now or in the life to come. There is only our repentance and God’s loving grace.”
Cosmo held up his hands. Normally steady, they shook. “But what about the blood?”
His father stood and gripped Cosmo’s hands in his own. “Washed clean.”
Cosmo tightened his grip.
“But you must empty them, son. There is no grasping in God’s kingdom, and only empty hands can receive.” The father drilled his son with his eyes. “You’ve wept. You’ve prayed. But you still have to surrender.”
Cosmo’s father stood above him. He assumed a gentle air, as if not to send Cosmo fleeing into the jungle on a crippled leg. “Can you do that? Will you?”
Cosmo flirted with releasing his hopelessness, but over the last weeks, the guilt had dug in its claws. How could he not do something to make it right? How could he pretend the blood wasn’t there? His father had told him more than he longed to hear. That was exactly the problem. It exceeded the ridiculous.
How could such forgiveness exist in the world Cosmo knew? Surely if he accepted such forgiveness, it would change him. It would change everything. “I,” he stuttered, “I want to.”
His father nodded. Kneeling in the dirt, he placed his hands over the bullet wound to Cosmo’s thigh. “So you know God’s presence always comes in power, let this be an outward sign of the work done in your heart on this day.”
Cosmo had heard his father speak the same words dozens of times during revival meetings. Never before had they borne meaning. He thought his thigh burned hot beneath his father’s hands. Perhaps he imagined it. Then his entire body stiffened.
He closed his eyes and held his breath until he could hold it no longer. Behind closed lids he watched amorphous images and ghastly whiffs of smoke peel away from him and disappear with his exhale. As the breath left his body, so did all the pain, the anger, and the guilt.
He breathed in.
Pulsing with life, he leapt to his feet and pulled his father up with him. He hadn’t realized the weight of the burden pressing him toward the center of the earth until it had gone. “Thank you.” Cosmo embraced his father for the first time in all his living memory.
His father laughed a belly laugh like that of a man sharing the news of a healthy baby boy after a troubled delivery. “Thank God, for my son had died and now he is alive.”