Western Civ To Go

Posted By admin on March 16, 2010

My blog post this week is a short fiction story that I wrote for a creative writing class that I am teaching this semester. If I am going to read, critique, and evaluate all sorts of student papers, I want to have the fun of experimenting with the assigned genres myself!

Here goes!

Scar Tissue

by Teri Ong

The voice was the thing.

Her parents, fine singers themselves, had named her Chantal. And her life had indeed been filled with music and singing.

Chantal trained and disciplined her wild gift until it was a ruly and useful companion. In her youth she attained above average status as a singer, even touring with several vocal ensembles and choirs. There were the occasional solos, and, of course, service in her church.

As with most musicians, keeping body and soul together meant becoming a teacher. Before she left college, she was already teaching other youngsters how to control and use their voices in praise of their Maker. Her first date with Mr. Russell had been to a choral festival. He first took notice of her at a concert at their college. She had been conducting the ladies’ chorale.

Chantal enjoyed teaching, but was not sad to set that part of her life aside to marry Mr. Russell. For a few years, life became a happy blur of babies, child-rearing, domestic life, and, of course, service in her church. In the blink of an eye, it was time for her to take up baton and sheet music again and pour her life into students. A great many students. In choirs. In classrooms. In her studio. There was always singing.

One winter, the flow of lessons, classes, and rehearsals was stymied by a case of laryngitis– a deep and persistent case. Chantal had no voice whatsoever. She had always found colds and sore throats to be particularly bothersome because they interfered with her normal duties more than they would have disrupted other people’s lives. But this was a new experience.

No voice! No voice at all! For days and days. When it did come back, it was thin and uncertain. She began teaching again as soon as she could be heard at all. But her voice tired and weakened quickly and easily.

“It’s just the after-effects of the laryngitis,” she thought. “It will heal in time.”

But it did not heal.

Her voice remained weak and thin; her range contracted. She kept teaching students, she could explain and coach, though she could no longer demonstrate.

At first Mr. Russell encouraged her to get help. But vocal coaches and therapists found no solutions. Then came the doctors. She had a rare disease affecting the muscles that control the vocal cords. Diagnosis: a slow deterioration of the ability for the muscles to coordinate. Eventually she would lose all ability to speak, let alone sing.

Life went on. Other musicians suffered loss too. Pianists with arthritis lost their art. Musicians have paralyzing strokes just like other people. Even young artists experience loss through accidental injury. Chantal was not in despair. She had the hope of heaven through the Savior she loved. Someday she would be made new and glorious. She dreamed of a new and glorious voice– and big! A voice like Leontyne or Joan or Jessye. Meanwhile, she poured out the last bit of her voice, like water in a sandy place.

The wind of God soon passed over the flower of her life, and she was gone. Gone to heaven! How glorious it was! She had always imagined heaven as being pure and crystaline, but her image was a little cold. The New Jerusalem was warm and vibrant, the streets teaming with playing children, watched over by delighted old men and women, just as the prophet had said.

Chantal felt as if she had waked up from the best night of sleep she had ever had. Refreshed. Yes, that was the very word– made fresh again. Joy and serenity mingled with vigor in a way she never knew in the days before her mortality put on immortality. Before, when there was intensity of vitality, there had also been a restlessness. Later, when she had known the reality of godly contentment, the youthful vigor was gone. What happiness! To be home in the kingdom of the King of Love!

There was only one perplexing matter; her face was always a little wet. At first, she was hardly aware of the perpetual dampness. Then she came to understand that tears were often trickling down. Tears of joy, she thought. But as she enjoyed the wonders of the city she noticed that almost no one else had tears in their eyes.

She saw an old man sitting near the gate. She had seen him there often. She would ask him.

“Sir, I have noticed that I seem to be one of only a few who still have tears in my eyes. Do you know why that would be?”

“Welcome! You must be one of the newer arrivals. Soon you will be called to the tear room, and all will be made plain.”

“Where is the tear room? How will I know when it is my time to go? Will someone show me the way, or send me word?”

“Don’t worry! When the time comes, you will know what to do.”

Chantal smiled at the man. She was still puzzled, but was not troubled.

She spent days and hours talking to everyone she encountered. They all had such intriguing stories of how they came to be redeemed. Chantal had always thought about the possibility of hearing the life stories of the patriarchs or the apostles, even people who had witnessed the miracles recorded in the Bible first hand. There would be plenty of time for that– forever is a long time! But she was finding that everyone there had a glorious story of God’s grace. There would be so much to tell Mr. Russell when he arrived!

After awhile– she couldn’t really determine if it had seemed like hours, or days, or years since there is no night there– she felt drawn to the small door in the wall at the top of the main street. It was a plain door that somehow didn’t seem to fit.

Chantal walked purposefully up the road and knocked on the little door.

“Please do come in, Chantal,” she heard a warm voice call from inside.

She pushed gently on the door which gave way easily to her touch. “Oh! My Lord!” she cried. She was standing face to face with Jesus inside a room of cosmic proportions. She felt she never wanted to take her eyes off her Savior, but the scope of where she was was evident around the periphery. In truth, the room, if you could call it that, extended into the vast forever of the universe. If not for the welcoming closeness of her Master, she might have been terrified in her smallness.

“Come, sit here with Me, Little One.”

“Where am I exactly, Lord?”

“This is the tear room. I bring everyone here to wipe away their tears.”

“Yes, the man at the gate told me I would come here eventually. It’s funny, I always thought the tears would automatically be gone when one came in Your city.”

Jesus laughed a laugh that was at once comforting and reassuring. “Nothing in the city is auto-matic; We take care of everything personally. Father thinks it all and speaks it all, I hold everything together, and our Spirit energizes it. That’s the way it has always been– everywhere in the universe.”

“Of course; I think I have known that, but never understood it until just now.”

“Now, tell me what your tears are about.”

“I’m not sure; I think they are just tears of joy. It seemed like such a long wait to get to Your city, but now I know that it really wasn’t. And I am so happy.”

“ Are you sure that is all they are?”

“I think so.”

“Do you still want me to wipe them away?”

“If you wipe them away, does that mean that the joy will go away too?”

Jesus laughed the same deep laugh. “No. My joy will always remain. But I think there is something more you need to tell me.”

Chantal took the eyes of her awareness from the face of her Savior and turned them inward. She knew what Jesus meant.

“Well, I did think that I would be able to sing again when I got here. I thought that heaven was all about singing. I thought when I got my celestial body that I would get a new voice. I had hoped for so long that it would be a glorious voice– much better even than the first one You gave me.”

“Has it been a very great disappointment that your expectation in that regard was not fulfilled in the way you hoped?”

“I don’t think I would say I am disappointed. I am happy in every way and in ways I could not have understood before coming here. But now that I look deeply, I do think that is why my face is always dampish. I did think the scars of the old life would go away.”

Jesus held out His hand to stroke her cheek. A jagged, thick red scar filled the palm of His hand. She understood clearly; that was how her name had been written on His hand.

“Oh, dear Lord!” she sobbed. “How could I have misunderstood?! Your scars have never gone away. Am I, Your servant, above my Master?” Her eyes now gushed out great streams of tears.

The scarred hands of her Savior were cupped under her chin. The hands for whom all the oceans of the world were but a drop in a bucket pooled with her tears.

It was as if Christ had opened a sluicegate on her soul. Once the reservoir of her expectations had drained, the streams of tears stopped as quickly as they had begun. Chantal looked full in Jesus’ eyes.

“You will sing for Me always.” He lifted a shining vial made of pure crystal and poured the tears from His hand into it. When it was nearly full, Chantal had a sensation of hearing her voice, small and thin but pure, rising up in doxology. Her heart leaped. She put her hand to her throat.

“No, not that way. You will always bear in your body My own marks, but that is what produces the praise.” He handed her the vial. As she took it from His hand, she perceived that the voice she heard was coming from the vial of her tears.

Her dry face smiled.

Jesus held out his hand again. In it was a small white stone.

“Take it, “ He said. “I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.Go now and sing for Me, Chantal.”

Her smile broadened; she lifted the vial high over her head. The song grew bigger as it rose.

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