(continued from yesterday) 

It's time, she tells herself, to go theological herself, and press the pedal to the metal. "Okay," she says to her husband's stubbornness, "if all of Abe's sins were forgiven on Calvary, then that forgiveness includes all his iniquities--including his last one." If she's not arguing the truth about forgiveness, she thinks, then, well, her Calvinist husband is buying into the whole "works righteousness" argument, the heretical idea that we are ourselves responsible for our own salvation. She knows her husband can't buy "free will." It's like totally un-Calvinistic. "Nobody gets saved because of asking/or not asking," she says, "but because God is merciful."

Then she stumbles. "Though I admit," she says, "that people usually ask." That line "cost her," Sietze says, and allows her father to swing back: "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie."

To Mom, Abe in hell is still unthinkable. She adjusts her footwork by trying to argue redundancy, although Sietze senses she's on thin ice. If, by grace, our sins are forever forgiven, then we honestly don't need to ask forgiveness anyway, she says--or something to that effect. It simply can't be true that his final act with that shotgun nullifies his salvation simply because he didn't ask for forgiveness? "If asking forgiveness/ for sins already forgiven is proper, then praying/ for Abe is also proper. We shouldn't take any/ of God's mercies for granted."

The logic is strained. All three of them understand she's losing.

That's when Mom gives up the theology and goes after her husband's own struggles, his own sadness. He hasn't taken a bite of his pork chop. He's forgotten to eat. His supper is getting cold, she says, because all of this is horribly painful. "Look at you," she says, "you haven't eaten your pork chop." You're just as consumed by Abe's suicide as I am. Don't hide behind scripture.

She knows why he's just been stripped naked. Finally, the whole business of salvation is completely and undeniably unknowable. She plays the ace or the Rook card, goes to the book of Psalms, 145:2: "God greatness is unsearchable." That, she says, is the bottom line. It's not wrong to pray for Abe because, you know, we can't know everything. We aren't God, and He is. 

Here's how Sietze tells it. "Yet the unsearchableness/of God raised the debate above whether any Protestant/had ever done this before or what would the preacher say if we told him." 

His mother took the argument into the rarified air of the divine nature of God. We can't know because "God's greatness is unsearchable."  "Abe will go wherever God/ has planned," his mother says, "but is it impossible that God/has also planned that Abe will join/the other saints again in answer/to our prayer? Then how can we refuse to pray?"

End of story. 

It's Sietze who asks, in reflection, whether his father remembers the one night he prayed for the dead: "Be as gracious/to our friend Abe as your decrees/and righteousness will allow, and help/us all to enter in at the strait gate, Amen."

"Was it, you, or God who worked that miracle?" he asks his mother, before all three began to pick on their cold porkchops.

The elaborate theology of the poem brought them no comfort. The two pugilists, and their son the non-combatant, finally break bread together only when they gather beneath their mutual belief in God's unsearchable greatness, which is to say, blessedly, that their only comfort is that they all--even Abe the suicide--belong to a God who's greatness is unsearchable.

My kids didn't really get it all that much, didn't love the show, didn't really follow all that silly theology. They didn't grow up in a similar world, even though just about all their friends had monstrous Dutch names. 

The characters in Purpaleanie are drawn from a time and a place that's can't and won't be replicated. The only real constant is change. 

But me?--I hear the arguments that night in Sietze's dining room, and I can't help enjoying it. I know the territory, the expressive theology. But I also know the humanness, and, like Sietze's mother, I can't help believing that God's greatness is unsearchable.