Isaías Castillo had fifty-four cents in his bank account when he died.
The number appeared at the bottom of the burial assistance form, beneath the date of birth, date of death, and cause of death. Born in 1995. Twenty years old. Heroin overdose. Maritza Castillo had filled out the form neatly in block letters until reaching the ASSETS section, where the blue pen had exhausted itself.
CHECKING ACCOUNT: $0.54
SAVINGS: $0.00
OTHER: __________
Daniel reviewed the application that morning and sent it to the New Hope missions council. He attached the funeral home's estimate and clarified that Maritza was a member of The Way, even though her son was not. He ended the email with the only sentence that mattered: I have given his mother my word that the church will take care of the burial.
The answer arrived four hours later.
Brother Daniel, while we sympathize with Mrs. Castillo's loss, benevolence funds for funeral expenses may be disbursed only when the deceased was a member in good standing. The council cannot approve this request.
Cannot, as if Derek Gregory had consulted the laws of nature. His name appeared at the bottom of the email, above his title: Chairman, Missions Council, New Hope Southern Baptist Church.
Isaías wasn't a member when he died. It didn't matter that his mother was. The council's decision was final. It didn't matter that Daniel had already promised her that the church would take care of things.
He clicked Reply and typed, “This is a bad witness.” He deleted it. He tried, “This is not what Christ called us to be,” and deleted that too. Soon he was left with Brother Derek and a blinking cursor after the comma.
Behind the email waited the monthly church-plant report, whose categories had remained unchanged for five years: people contacted, gospel presentations, conversions, baptisms, and memberships. Each month, Daniel recorded the numbers so men hundreds of miles away could determine the mission's viability.
No category for people fed or rents paid. No category for the dead. Figures.
New Hope covered his salary, his apartment, and the lease for the old youth club where The Way was based. They sent him to New York to save souls, but the agreement didn't specify what to do with their bodies.
Daniel pushed back from the desk, almost hitting the wall with his chair. His office was a converted janitorial closet, but it was adequate. He moved past the desk and shut the laptop, closing Derek's email.
Across the hall, the larger pastor's office was filled with cardboard boxes that reached halfway up one wall. At first, leaving it empty had seemed practical. Patrick might still come once his health allowed, or New Hope might finally send the replacement it had promised. After five years of waiting, Daniel no longer saw the point in clearing the boxes.
A folding chair scraped across the gymnasium floor beyond the sanctuary door. Then a woman coughed and quickly smothered it.
Maritza had arrived.
Maritza stood just inside the sanctuary, one hand gripping her purse strap and the other wrapped around a white handkerchief. She wore a black wool coat, buttoned to her throat. Melted snow darkened her shoulders.
The sanctuary had been a gymnasium when the building belonged to a youth club. Faded boundary lines still marked the floor beneath the folding chairs, and a basketball hoop hung folded against the far wall. Daniel had once promised himself he would have it removed. After five years, it still hung above the pulpit like some obscure denominational symbol.
“Ms. Maritza,” he said. “Thank you for coming. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Pastor Dan.” She let go of her purse long enough to take his hand. Her fingers were cold. “I should thank you. I know my son did not come to church. I understand if you cannot preach for him.”
The word cannot followed him out of Derek’s email. “I’m going to preach.”
“Are you sure?”
“I gave you my word.”
She squeezed his hand with both of hers. “God bless you.”
Daniel looked toward his office. The closed laptop waited on the other side of the wall.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s sit down and talk about Isaías.”
He pulled two folding chairs from the nearest row and placed them across from each other. Maritza sat carefully, keeping her purse in her lap. Daniel took the opposite chair and reached for the box of tissues beneath the pulpit.
“Ms. Maritza—”
“Please, Pastor. I have asked you before. Just Maritza.” She smiled. “I am only a few years older than you. Don’t make me feel ancient.”
“Maritza,” he said. “I want the service to sound like your son. I don’t want to stand up there and give a sermon that could be about anybody.”
She nodded.
“Tell me what Isaías was like before the addiction.”
Her fingers stopped working the handkerchief. Daniel heard the mistake after it had already crossed the space between them.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That came out wrong.”
“The drugs came later,” she said. “But they did not make him someone else. He was still Isaías.”
“Of course.”
“No.” Her voice remained gentle. “Not of course. People forgot. I sometimes forgot too.”
She unfolded the handkerchief, studied the damp center, and folded it along a new crease.
“He stole from me,” she said. “Did you know that?”
Daniel shook his head.
“My wedding ring. My mother’s earrings. Money when I was foolish enough to leave my purse where he could find it.” She rubbed her thumb along the fold. “Then he would come home crying. He would promise me he was finished. Sometimes he meant it for an hour. Sometimes a week.”
Daniel lowered the unopened box of tissues to the floor.
“But that is not where you begin,” she said.
“All right.”
“My baby loved to draw.” The strain around her mouth loosened. “He had so many art books. Animals, comic books, anatomy. He had books about how the muscles sit under the skin. He would copy the pictures until he understood them, then make something of his own. I bought him his first sketchbook when he was four. He filled every page in two days, then drew on the inside covers because he could not stand to leave any space empty.”
“What did he draw?”
“Dragons, mostly. Monsters. Superheroes with arms bigger than their heads.” She smiled. “When he was fifteen, he was arrested for painting a dragon on the security gate of a shop on the Grand Concourse.”
“Arrested?”
“For tagging. The police had him sitting on the sidewalk when the owner arrived. The man looked at the gate, looked at Isaías, and asked if he had painted it.”
“What did Isaías say?”
“He said, ‘Depends. Do you like it?’”
Daniel laughed before he could stop himself.
“The owner laughed too,” Maritza said. “He told the police he didn’t want to press charges. He made Isaías come back the next day and finish it.”
She opened her purse and took out her phone. A crack ran from one corner to the center. She entered the passcode, then slowly scrolled through her photographs.
“Here.”
Daniel moved the chair beside hers.
The mural covered a steel security gate from the sidewalk to the awning. A red dragon coiled across a field of blue. Its claws and eyes were white, and a thick gold chain hung around its neck, bearing the Dominican coat of arms. The scales had been painted one at a time, hundreds of them, each catching light that did not exist on the flat metal.
“That’s incredible,” Daniel said.
“He painted the chain after the owner said it needed something.” She enlarged the photograph with two fingers. “Look at the face. It looks like it knows a secret.”
Daniel studied the dragon’s narrowed eyes. “He had real talent.”
“He did.”
Maritza swiped another photograph. This one showed Isaías standing several feet from the mural, his hands buried in the pockets of a gray sweatshirt. His head was lowered, but he was looking toward the camera, caught between annoyance and pride.
“That was the only picture he let me take that day,” she said. “He hated cameras.”
“He looks happy.”
“He was trying not to.”
She swiped again. Isaías vanished, replaced by a photograph of Maritza’s kitchen table. A sheet of paper lay beside a coffee cup. On it, the same dragon had been drawn in pencil. One wing was finished with dense, careful lines. The other dissolved into circles and faint marks where the bones would go.
“I found this in his room two weeks ago,” she said. “He had stopped drawing after he started using. Or I thought he had. This was beneath the mattress.” She enlarged the unfinished wing. “It was not as good as before. His hand shook. You can see it in the lines. But he was trying.”
“That matters.”
“Yes,” she said. “It does.”
For several seconds, neither spoke. The radiator knocked somewhere along the far wall. Maritza minimized the photograph and returned to the image of Isaías beside the mural.
“He was protective of me,” she said. “Even when he was little. Once, when he was eight, some men whistled at me while we were walking home. They were teasing. I ignored them. But Isaías charged at them.”
“At eight?”
“He dropped his backpack and put up his fists. Four grown men, and my baby believed he could take every one of them. They laughed so hard at my boy. I had to drag Isaías away while he shouted that they needed to respect his mother.”
Daniel pictured the boy with his fists raised, furious at a world too large for him.
“He sounds fearless.”
“Eh, he was also terrified of pigeons.”
“Pigeons?”
“One flew into our apartment when he was six. After that, he crossed the street whenever he saw more than three together.”
Daniel laughed again. This time Maritza joined him.
“And he cooked,” she continued. “Usually at three or four in the morning. I would wake up to pots banging and think he was high. Once the oil caught fire while he was making tostones. I ran into the kitchen screaming that he would burn the building down.”
“What did he do?”
“He looked at me and said, ‘Mama, relax. I’m not high. My cooking is just that fuego.’”
Daniel closed his eyes and laughed.
“He thought he was so funny,” Maritza said. “But he was. He knew he was. I was yelling, the fire alarm was screaming, the kitchen was full of smoke, and he stood there smiling until I started laughing. I didn’t want to. But his smile—oh, that goofy smile.”
Her laughter lingered for a moment, then broke. She turned her face away. The handkerchief rose to her mouth. Daniel waited. He did not reach for her, did not tell her she was all right, did not offer the tissues again. The gymnasium hummed around them.
When she looked back, she wiped the phone screen with the edge of her handkerchief.
“He called me every Sunday,” she said. “Even after he stopped coming home. Sometimes he asked for money. Sometimes he lied about where he was. But he called.”
She scrolled through the photographs again. The mural. The unfinished drawing. Isaías looking away from the camera. Then birthday cakes, food, distant relatives, and screenshots Maritza had probably saved without remembering why.
“There should be more,” she said.
Daniel said nothing.
“A mother should have more pictures of her only child.”
She reached the end and started again, moving more slowly now, as if another photograph might appear if she gave the phone enough time. Finally, she locked the screen.
“Pastor,” she said, “may I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She placed the phone down on her knee. Her thumb traveled along the crack in its screen.
“He did not come to church,” she said.
Daniel waited.
“Not for a long time. And when he died, there were drugs in him.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him.
“Will I see my baby again?”
The old categories assembled themselves before Daniel could stop them: profession of faith, believer’s baptism, church membership. Empty boxes, every one. Beneath them, as if typed on another form:
CAUSE OF DEATH: HEROIN OVERDOSE.
He knew the approved answer. He had offered versions of it in hospital rooms and beneath funeral-home lights. No one could know what passed between a soul and God in its final moments. The sentence sounded merciful because it left the smallest door of hope ajar.
Maritza waited.
“I believe God is merciful,” Daniel said.
“That is not what I asked, Pastor Dan.”
“No.”
“Is my baby with God? Will I see him again?”
Daniel looked down at his hands. “I don’t know.”
The handkerchief tightened inside her fist.
“You do not know,” she said, “or you cannot say?”
He almost reached for the safer answer. “Both.”
She turned her face toward the floor markings. Blue for basketball. Yellow for volleyball. A red boundary line ending beneath her shoe.
“When he was little,” she said, “he thought God lived above the church ceiling. He would look up during the songs.” Daniel followed her gaze to the basketball hoop above the pulpit. “Later,” she said, “he thought God was angry with him. Everyone was angry with him, so why should God be any different?”
“God wasn’t angry with him.”
“Then where is my son?”
Daniel closed his mouth. Maritza nodded once.
“At the funeral,” Daniel said, “I will talk about Isaías.” She looked at him again. “I won’t make him into a warning,” he said. “I won’t stand there and use his death to frighten other people.”
“People already used his life for that.”
“I won’t.”
Her hand relaxed around the handkerchief. She smoothed it over her knee, folded it once, then returned it to her purse.
“The funeral home called me this morning,” she said. “They want to know about the cemetery.”
“I’ll call them today.”
“The church said yes?”
The council’s answer waited beneath the closed lid of his laptop.
“The funeral will be handled.”
“Pastor Dan, that’s not what I asked.”
“No, it’s not.”
Maritza’s mouth hardened. Anger, Daniel understood. Anger required no doctrine.
“Did they say yes?”
Daniel held her gaze. “You will have a place to bury your son, Maritza. I promise.”
She studied him long enough that he wondered whether she could read the council’s answer on his face. “You already promised.”
“I know.”
Maritza stood. Daniel rose with her.
“Isaías Manuel Castillo Peña,” she said. “That is his whole name.”
“I’ll put all of it in the program.”
“And the picture by the dragon?”
“If you send it to me.”
She picked up her purse. At the sanctuary door, she stopped with one hand on the bar.
“He was trying, Pastor.”
Daniel thought of the unfinished wing, its bones still visible beneath the lines. “I know.”
When the door closed behind her, he stayed beside the two chairs. He took the funeral-home estimate from his pocket, found the number printed at the top, and pressed Call before he could calculate what his promise would cost.
* * *
At nine the next morning, Daniel had three hours left to secure the burial. He called Patrick.
“You have seven seconds to make me glad you woke me,” Patrick said.
“Woke you? It’s nine in the morning!”
“I’m retired. You think time means something to me?”
“Pat, retired or not, you—”
“Don’t you sass me, boy. My body might be broken, but my mind is still sharper than yours ever could be. Besides, I need my beauty rest.”
“Didn’t work,” Melissa called somewhere behind him.
“Ignore that woman.” Patrick lowered his voice. “Melissa says hello.”
“Tell her I said hi and that I miss her.”
“I will later.”
Daniel leaned back in his desk chair. The wall met his shoulder before the chair completed the movement.
“How are you feeling, Pat?”
“Ah, there it is.”
“What?”
“The question you pretend you aren’t calling to ask.”
Daniel waited.
“Remission still means remission,” Patrick said. “The rest of me is taking its sweet time, but it’s getting there.”
“So you’re still getting better?”
“That’s what I keep getting told.”
Patrick coughed away from the receiver. It lasted only a few seconds. Daniel counted them anyway.
“You still there?” Patrick asked.
“Unfortunately.”
“Good. What do you need?”
“I need you to call Derek.”
Patrick groaned. “I liked it better when we were talking about my health.”
“The missions council rejected a burial request.”
“Whose burial?”
“A twenty-year-old named Isaías Manuel Castillo Peña. His mother belongs to The Way. He didn’t.”
“And you promised her before asking the council.”
“Yes.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Takes one to know one.”
Patrick laughed. “Ass.”
“The funeral home needs an answer by noon,” Daniel said. “Derek says benevolence money can only be used when the deceased was a member in good standing.”
“And he wasn’t even a member.”
“He was twenty years old, Pat.”
“And not a member.”
“No. He wasn’t.”
Patrick breathed into the phone. Daniel could hear a television somewhere in the room with him, its volume turned low.
“How much?” Patrick asked.
“More than his mother has.”
“That also wasn’t my question.”
“I sent Derek the estimate.”
“And you want me to convince him?”
Daniel sighed. “I want you to remind him that Jesus wasn’t a member in good standing either.”
Patrick laughed, coughed, and recovered. “That argument may feel clever right up until that son of a bitch hangs up on me.”
“So lead with something else.”
“I’ll call him,” Patrick said. “But I’m old enough to know better than to promise anything.”
“Thank you.”
“Boy, I just told you that I’m not promising anything.”
Daniel picked at the loose corner of the estimate. “There’s something else.” Patrick waited. “His mother asked if she would see him again.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her I didn’t know.”
Patrick sighed. “Well… at least you were honest.”
“It felt like cowardice,” Daniel said.
“Why?”
“Because I knew what I was supposed to say.”
“And what’s that?”
“That we can’t know what passed between him and God in his final moments.”
“There are worse answers.”
“It’s a loophole, Pat. We imagine he whispered a prayer while the needle was still in his arm so we can comfort her without admitting our theology might be wrong.”
“Or we admit that God knows things we don’t.”
“She wasn’t asking what God knows. She was asking whether God still loved her son.”
“Well, now, Dan, that’s not the same question.”
“Why not?” Daniel asked.
Patrick hesitated, then cleared his throat. “Love doesn’t mean pretending evil doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“You’re close to it, bud.”
Daniel stood. He could take two steps toward the door before running out of space.
“He stole her wedding ring and his grandmother’s earrings,” he said. “He lied for money. Promised to stop and went back.”
“And?” Patrick asked.
“She loved him.”
“She was his mother.”
“Pat, that’s the point.”
Patrick said nothing.
“She knew what he had done,” Daniel continued. “She didn’t call it good or pretend it hadn’t hurt. She kept loving him. Why must God choose between justice and love when she didn’t?”
“We don’t.”
“We say God is love until someone dies believing the wrong thing. Then justice gets the last word.”
“The cross is where justice and love meet.”
Daniel closed his eyes.
“What?” Patrick asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, go ahead. Your eyes rolled hard enough for me to hear them.”
“What you said belongs on a coffee mug or a T-shirt.”
“You’re an ass.”
Patrick coughed again, deeper this time. Melissa came closer and asked if he needed water. When he returned, his breathing was slower.
“The cross isn’t God choosing justice over love. It’s God absorbing the cost of evil. When you forgive a debt, you absorb the loss.”
“Then why is belief the one debt God refuses to absorb?”
“Faith is not a debt.”
“Then why do we make it one?” Daniel asked.
Patrick said nothing.
“Isaías thought God was angry with him because everyone else was.”
Daniel folded the loose corner of the estimate flat.
“Is that rejection? A wounded kid failing to recognize something he was never taught to see?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer stopped Daniel. Patrick exhaled. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “You aren’t the only person allowed to say it.”
Daniel returned to the desk. “I’ve been reading the Gospels side by side,” he said. “Mark calls Jesus’s death a ransom. Luke follows Mark and leaves that sentence out. Luke still has repentance. He still has forgiveness. He still has grace—”
“Ehrman,” Patrick said.
“Luke.”
“Ehrman reading Luke.”
“Is he wrong?”
Patrick laughed. “Often!”
“But about that?”
Patrick waited. “Luke still has the cross.”
“Yes. But maybe not the transaction.”
“Then why did Jesus die?”
“Because Rome killed him.”
“You spent three years and a criminal amount of tuition learning better than that.”
“I spent three years learning answers. I’m asking if they were Jesus’s.”
Patrick’s breathing changed. Not much. Daniel heard it anyway. “Did Jesus think he needed to die, or did his followers need the death to mean something afterward? Maybe he expected God’s kingdom in his lifetime. Maybe the cross was not the plan—only what this world does to people who live as he told us to.”
“And the Resurrection?”
Daniel looked across the hall. The door to Patrick’s office stood open. Boxes filled the room where Patrick was supposed to have worked.
“Dan?”
Remission, the doctors called it, as if cancer had signed a treaty.
“I believe that I believe,” Daniel said.
Patrick groaned.
“What?” Daniel asked.
“Whose sentence are you hiding behind now?”
Daniel said nothing.
“I don’t care if Kermit the Frog said it. Tell me what it means.”
Daniel ran his thumb along the edge of the estimate. “It means I hope Jesus rose. I live as if he did. Some days, that feels like belief.”
“And today?”
“Today it feels like hope,” Daniel said.
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“I know.”
The television continued murmuring behind Patrick. Neither man spoke.
“That scares me,” Patrick finally said.
“Me too.”
Daniel suspected they meant the same thing.
“I think you’re wrong about the cross,” Patrick said. “I believe the tomb was empty and faith matters. I also think your anger is turning questions into conclusions.”
“I am angry.”
“Damn right. You have every reason to be. That still doesn’t make you right.”
“No.”
“But I know less about what God does with a wounded twenty-year-old than I thought I knew at your age.”
Daniel stared at the boxes across the hall. “What do I preach?”
“You preach what you know.”
“I don’t know much.”
“Well, that’s always been the case. But you know his name.”
“Isaías Manuel Castillo Peña,” Daniel said.
“You know he loved his mother and hurt her. You know she loved him anyway. Start there.”
“And when I get to where he is now?”
“Don’t borrow my certainty because you’re frightened by your doubt. And don’t use Isaías to punish Derek.”
“Then what do I say, Pat?”
“The truth you can stand behind when his mother looks at you.”
Daniel let out a breath.
“I’ll call Derek,” Patrick said.
“Pat—”
“I’m going to tell him you’re impulsive, insubordinate, and becoming dangerous to respectable Christians.”
“You just described Jesus, dumbass!” Melissa shouted in the background.
“That damn woman,” Patrick said.
“Pat, thank you, I—”
“You never listen; you know that? That’s your problem.”
“And I never eat, and I never call, and I never write, and I—”
“Never show respect,” Patrick said. “I love you, kid. I hope you know that.”
“I love you too, old man.”
“I’m not your old man, you bastard.” Patrick paused. “Daniel.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t turn Isaías into an argument.”
The line went quiet.
* * *
Forty-three minutes after Patrick hung up, Derek Gregory called. Daniel watched the name vibrate on his desk before answering.
“Brother Derek.”
“Daniel, I just had an interesting conversation with Patrick.”
“I’m not sure he knows how to have an uninteresting conversation.”
“He called me a Pharisee.”
“Yeah, I’ve told him that’s a pretty problematic term, but—”
“The council’s decision stands.”
Daniel closed his eyes. “Then why are you calling?”
“Because I may have found another way to help.”
Derek paused. Daniel gave him silence.
“The benevolence policy is clear,” Derek continued. “We cannot use those funds for the burial of a nonmember. If we make an exception for one family, we have no principled reason to refuse the next.”
“You could help the next family too—”
“Daniel—”
“I’m listening.”
Derek cleared his throat.
“We cannot approve the expense as benevolence,” Derek said. “But the missions budget gives us more discretion over evangelistic outreach.”
Daniel turned toward his laptop. The monthly report remained beneath Derek’s original email.
“What does evangelistic outreach have to do with burying Isaías?”
“His funeral will bring people into The Way who might never otherwise enter a church.”
“So the funeral counts as outreach?”
“It can.”
“And the burial?” Daniel asked.
“The burial expense would be necessary to facilitate the service.”
“The body is an event cost.”
Derek sighed into the phone. “That’s not at all how I would phrase it, Daniel.”
“How would you phrase it, then, Derek?”
“I would say the church is helping a grieving family while using the opportunity to share the hope of the gospel.”
Daniel opened the monthly report.
PEOPLE CONTACTED.
GOSPEL PRESENTATIONS.
CONVERSIONS.
BAPTISMS.
MEMBERSHIPS.
“What would I have to do?” Daniel asked.
“Hold the service at The Way. Give a clear presentation of the gospel. Explain the necessity of salvation through Christ and offer those present an opportunity to respond.”
Daniel pictured Maritza’s hand tightening around the white handkerchief. People had already used his life for that.
“We would also need the usual outreach report,” Derek said.
“Of course.”
“Approximate attendance, number of gospel presentations, professions of faith. Any contact information you can obtain for follow-up.”
“How many gospel presentations does one funeral count as?” Daniel asked.
Derek sighed. “I am trying to help you.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question held no anger. That made it harder.
Daniel pictured Derek calling the other council members, spending most of the morning defending a pastor who had promised money he didn’t have. In Raleigh, this looked like compassion.
“I know,” Daniel repeated.
“I’m not asking you to turn the young man into a spectacle. You can honor his life. You can comfort his mother. But we have an obligation to tell people the truth about eternity.”
“And what truth is that?”
“That salvation is found in Christ alone.”
Daniel looked across the hall at Patrick’s office.
Don’t borrow my certainty because you’re frightened by your doubt.
“I agree,” Daniel said.
“Then you will present the gospel?”
“I will preach the gospel,” Daniel said.
“And give people an opportunity to respond?”
Daniel ran his finger down the empty columns of the monthly report. “Yes.”
Derek released a breath. “All right. I’ll authorize the expense from the outreach fund. You should have confirmation within the hour.”
“Derek, thank you.”
“You’ll send the report after the service?”
“Yes.”
“And Daniel?”
“I’m here.”
“I know you’re angry with the council. But rules are not the enemy of compassion. Sometimes they’re what make compassion possible.”
Daniel looked at the burial estimate. “I’ll remember that.”
Derek hung up.
The approval arrived twelve minutes later. Daniel forwarded it to the funeral home, then called to make sure they had received it. The director confirmed the burial date and thanked him for choosing their services.
Only after the call ended did Daniel open the attachment from New Hope.
EVANGELISTIC OUTREACH EXPENSE AUTHORIZATION appeared in bold letters at the top.
The form included fields for the date, location, anticipated attendance, method of gospel presentation, and follow-up plans.
Isaías’s name appeared nowhere.
* * *
Four days later, Daniel counted fifty-three people in the sanctuary and hated himself for doing so.
The Way had forty folding chairs. The funeral director found seven more somewhere and arranged them along the back wall, where the radiator knocked and hissed beneath the January coats. Those who still could not find a seat stood in the aisle or leaned against the cinder-block walls. Some wore black. Others had come in work boots and hooded sweatshirts, dressed for the lives they led rather than the occasion that had interrupted them.
Isaías lay in front of the pulpit.
The funeral home had dressed him in a dark suit Maritza had brought them. His hands rested one over the other. Daniel had seen dead men made presentable before, but Isaías looked less peaceful than absent, as if everyone had gathered in a room he had just left.
A photograph and a framed drawing stood beside the casket.
In the photograph, Isaías stood several feet from the mural, both hands buried in the pockets of his gray sweatshirt. His head was lowered, but the lens caught half a smile. The finished dragon coiled across the steel gate behind him. Maritza had framed the unfinished drawing from beneath his mattress. One wing was dark with scales; the other still revealed the bones beneath.
On the program beneath the photograph, Daniel had printed every letter of his name.
ISAÍAS MANUEL CASTILLO PEÑA
He had checked the accents three times.
The songs had been sung. A cousin described the time Isaías tried to fix her car and left two bolts on the pavement afterward. Someone near the back called out that the car had run better without them, and the room erupted in startled laughter, the kind people sometimes allowed themselves around the dead.
One of Isaías’s friends spoke next. He could not have been more than twenty-two. He wore a white shirt with the collar buttoned wrong and kept both hands wrapped around the microphone.
“He didn’t like people messing with anybody smaller than them,” the young man said. “Even when he was the smallest dude there.”
More laughter, quieter this time. The friend looked toward the casket. “He was trying.”
Daniel spotted Maritza in the first row. The white handkerchief lay clenched in her hands. When no one else came forward, Daniel rose.
His sermon waited inside his Bible. He had revised it every night and returned each morning to what he had been taught to say.
DEATH CONFRONTS EVERYONE
SALVATION IS FOUND IN CHRIST ALONE
WE CANNOT KNOW WHAT PASSED BETWEEN THE DECEASED AND GOD
THOSE PRESENT CAN KNOW WHERE THEY WILL SPEND ETERNITY
INVITATION
It was orderly. Defensible. Each point led neatly to the next.
Isaías appeared nowhere in it.
Daniel placed the pages on the pulpit and looked at the people New Hope would count as an evangelistic opportunity.
“We are here to remember Isaías Manuel Castillo Peña,” he began.
Maritza lowered her face into the handkerchief.
“I did not know Isaías well enough to stand here and pretend I did. I know him through the people who loved him. I know he painted a dragon on the Grand Concourse. I know he once tried to fight four grown men for whistling at his mother. I know he tried to make tostones at three in the morning and nearly set the kitchen on fire.”
Maritza laughed through her tears.
“And I know he hurt people. He hurt those who loved him, and he knew it. He made promises he couldn’t keep. He tried to free himself from something stronger than he understood, and he ran out of time.”
The room had gone still. Daniel looked down at his Bible.
“In the Gospel of John, Jesus comes to the grave of his friend Lazarus. Lazarus’s sister Martha goes out to meet him. She is grieving and angry, and she tells Jesus that if he had been there, her brother would not have died.”
Daniel found the passage, even though he no longer needed the page.
“Jesus tells her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though he dies.’”
There it was. The one who believes. Daniel looked at Maritza. She was already watching him.
The loophole was right there. No one knew what had passed between Isaías and God in his final moments. Perhaps, as the heroin slowed his heart, he had remembered a childhood prayer. Perhaps God had accepted a word Isaías no longer had the strength to speak.
It would sound merciful. It would require nothing of Daniel.
He touched the top page of his sermon. Beyond the pulpit, the unfinished dragon spread its paper wings beside the casket.
Don’t borrow my certainty because you’re frightened by your doubt.
Daniel lifted the pages and put them inside his Bible.
“I’ve preached this passage before as though Jesus came to Martha with an answer.”
A woman in the second row raised her head.
“And he did give her one. But then Jesus goes with her to the grave. He sees Martha grieving. He sees her sister grieving. He sees everyone who loved Lazarus standing in a place where their love can no longer reach him.”
Daniel stepped away from the pulpit.
“And Jesus wept.”
The radiator struck once beneath the coats.
“He knows what he is about to do, and still he weeps. He does not stand above their grief and explain it. He enters it. Before the grave opens, before anyone understands what God is doing, Jesus weeps.”
Maritza pressed the handkerchief against her mouth.
“That is not something Jesus does on the way to the gospel. That is the gospel. God does not remain at a safe distance from what destroys us. God comes near enough to grieve.”
Daniel could hear his own breathing through the microphone.
“I was taught that a funeral sermon must warn the living. Remind everyone that death is coming. Tell them to decide before it’s too late.” He glanced at the casket. “But Isaías is not a warning. He is not an illustration. And I will not reduce his life to the way it ended.”
Daniel rested one hand on the closed Bible.
“I do not understand everything the death of Jesus accomplished. I cannot explain the cross today without borrowing someone else’s certainty. But I do not believe Jesus died to persuade an unwilling God to love us. Whatever else the cross means, it means God entered the worst this world could do and did not stop loving us there.”
No one moved.
“We say God is love. Then someone dies without believing as we do, and suddenly we speak as though love and justice were enemies—as though God must stop loving to be just.” Daniel looked at Maritza. “Isaías hurt his mother. She has never pretended otherwise. She did not call the harm good. She loved him, knowing exactly what it cost to love him.”
Maritza’s hands became still.
“And I cannot believe she is better at loving her son than God is.”
Someone behind her whispered, “Amen.” Daniel had heard that word thousands of times, yet it had never frightened him before.
“Four days ago, Maritza asked me whether she would see her son again. I told her I did not know.” He swallowed. “That was honest, but it wasn’t everything I believe.”
He waited until Maritza met his eyes.
“I cannot prove what waits beyond death,” he said. “Some days I believe the Resurrection with certainty. Today, hope is the most honest form my belief can take.”
Patrick had told him that hope and belief were not the same. Perhaps they were not.
“Maritza, I believe you will see your son again.”
Her face crumpled. Her sister caught her as she bent forward, but Maritza never looked away from him.
“I cannot believe a needle was stronger than grace. I cannot believe Isaías’s worst moment was the truest thing about him or the final word God spoke over his life. I believe God knows him by his full name. I believe he is known completely and loved without illusion.”
Daniel looked from the mother to the son.
“I believe Isaías is with God.”
The sentence remained standing after his certainty gave way. He turned toward the rest of the room.
“I promised I would give everyone here an opportunity to respond to the gospel,” Daniel said. “So I will.”
He stepped closer to the first row.
“If you are using, come talk to me. If you fear this could be you someday, come talk to me. If you love someone who is disappearing and do not know how to reach them, come talk to me.”
He looked at the unfinished wing.
“Stay afterward, call tomorrow, or leave your number on my desk. We will help you find treatment. You will not have to perform your pain or say a prayer before we decide you are worth helping.”
A chair creaked near the back.
“Love someone before you understand them. Love them without calling the damage good—while they try and when they fail. If God came near to us in Jesus, then come near to one another.”
Daniel returned to the pulpit. “Remember the artist. Remember the protector. Remember the terrible cook. Remember the young man whose work remained unfinished.”
He bowed his head. “God of the living and the dead, remember Isaías Manuel Castillo Peña. Hold him in the love from which nothing can separate us. Hold his mother. Hold everyone in this room who is trying. And teach us to come near. Amen.”
For several seconds, the sanctuary remained silent. Then Maritza said, “Amen.” The others followed.
As the funeral director approached the casket, a young man in a misbuttoned white shirt waited beside the pulpit. Daniel recognized him as the friend who’d spoken earlier.
“You meant that?” the young man asked.
“What part?”
“The help.”
“Yes.”
The young man looked toward Isaías, then back toward Daniel. “Can I call you?”
Daniel removed one of the church’s cards from his wallet and wrote his cell number below the office line.
“Any time.”
The young man folded it once and put it in his pocket.
At the cemetery, the wind came hard across the bare ground. Maritza stood beside the grave until everyone else had started returning to their cars. She held the program against her coat, the dragon facing outward.
“You believe what you said?” she asked.
Daniel looked down at the casket. “I do.”
The doubt answered immediately. The program snapped once against Maritza’s coat. She waited. Daniel did not take the words back.
* * *
That night, Daniel returned to The Way and opened the outreach report.
The sanctuary was dark beyond his office. Forty-seven empty chairs remained in rows, including the seven the funeral director had added. Someone had left a program on the seat nearest where the casket had stood. From the cover, Isaías watched him with the dragon behind him.
Daniel completed the report.
PEOPLE CONTACTED: 53
GOSPEL PRESENTATIONS: 1
PROFESSIONS OF FAITH: 0
FOLLOW-UP CONTACTS: 1
In the field marked FOLLOW-UP PLANS, he entered the young man’s telephone number and wrote: REQUESTED ASSISTANCE FINDING SUBSTANCE-ABUSE TREATMENT.
He tabbed to the field marked EVENT OR ACTIVITY.
Daniel typed:
FUNERAL OF ISAÍAS MANUEL CASTILLO PEÑA
The final field asked for the method of gospel presentation. Daniel entered two words.
JESUS WEPT.
He pressed Send before he could calculate what it would cost.
(Title Photo by Drew Dempsey on Unsplash)