The foremost thing that puzzled me about my grandmother’s religious attitude was her callous disregard for the personal feelings of others and her inability to understand—and her refusal to even try—anything of the nature of the social relationships obtaining in the world about her. Yet this callousness toward others, this disdain of things relating to the life of society as a whole, was united with an abstract, all-embracing love for humanity. Many times, when the Saturday evening sun was sinking—for Saturday was our Sabbath—she would call us children together and make us kneel; then she would pray for the Africans, the Japanese, the Chinese, and so forth. During weekdays she could be found standing upon street corners or going from door to door selling religious tracts dealing with the plight of the remote “heathen.” I remember times when I spent the entire night at church, sitting up and listening to the singing and the preaching and the praying, fighting sleep, drunk with fatigue; and the next thing I’d know I would be rubbing my eyes and blinking at the bright sunshine pouring through stained-glass windows; my bones would be aching for having slept all night on the hard church benches.

“While you were sleeping, the Holy Ghost was here,” my grandmother would chide me gently, smiling knowingly.

And I would feel abashed.

Often she prevailed insistently upon me to join church, but I would always tell her no. When she would ask me what real objections I had, I would tell her that I had to see something before I would join. She had to accept my explanations, because she had told me that she had not joined until she had seen something. . . .

One Saturday the elder—the Seventh-Day Adventist call their pastors elders instead of reverends, for they feel that only God should be called reverend—preached a sermon about some prophet of the Old Testament who had seen an angel in a vision. I nudged my grandmother and she leaned closer.

“You see, Granny,” I whispered, “if I ever saw an angel like that man did, I’d join church.”

My grandmother beamed and I wondered vaguely what made her seem so glad. When the service was over my grandmother hurried to the pulpit and spoke with the elder, who, as he listened to my grandmother, looked in my direction. Then I was called to talk with the elder.

“Your grandmother tells me you saw an angel,” he said, leveling steady eyes at me.

My mouth gaped open in surprise.

“No, sir,” I mumbled.

“You did tell me you saw an angel,” my grandmother said. “You told me during service . . .”

“No’m,” I said hastily, burning with embarrassment, ashamed that so many people were listening. “I told you that if I saw one I’d join church . . .”

The elder smiled. My grandmother was angry.

“You did tell me!” she said stoutly.

Church members began to laugh.

“Granny, you didn’t understand,” I said.

My grandmother walked away, hurt. For a week there was coolness between us. Such was the atmosphere in which I spent my most sensitive and formative years. Without hesitation my grandmother would have sacrificed my life if, in doing so, she would have thought that she could have saved me for eternity. She would have done this because she loved me; eternity was so real to her that human life had an air of unreality. Yet, despite this dichotomy, she lived out her daily actions with a throbbing sincerity that brooked no doubt on anybody’s part. My grandmother would not have dared feed a tramp who came to her door, but had she dared, after the tramp had swallowed the last mouthful, she would ask him what religion he professed and if the tramp’s religion differed from her own, she would have informed him quietly and seriously that he was doomed straight for hell.