In God we trust

James Pollock, the once-famous governor of Pennsylvania who was credited with putting “In God we trust” on American currency, is buried behind my husband’s childhood home in Milton, Pa. This week, Jonathan and I visited the rusty, small town of Milton, which the bridge-decked Susquehanna divides into an East and a West. Barefoot, I walked through Mr. Pollock’s cemetery.

But it wasn’t Mr. Pollock’s grave that caught my eye. Instead, I took notice of four stones belonging to a family called Middleton. The grave of the parents came first. To the right of them lay the graves of their children: Stella, Mary, and Joseph. Perversely, the graves of the young interest cemetery-walkers most. The Middleton parents outlived their children by decades. Stella, the first lost child, died in 1911. Her sister died the following year. Joseph lived longest, into his teens, and then died in 1916. I began calculating the years. What awful epidemic had struck in that decade? Or had a genetic disease taken the children? How had the parents survived the losses?

You, of course, get a strange feeling in cemeteries when you consider that death reposes so close under your bare feet. But as I stood over this tragedy, its pains long past, I remembered what I had read in the Bible the day before. In Luke 20, the resurrection-denying Sadducees try to trick Jesus with the old “whose wife will she be in heaven” number. Jesus’ response does so much more than answer the clever riddle. It tells us who we are: “Those who are considered worthy … cannot die anymore … being sons of the resurrection.” He added, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.”

When I read that, sitting at the kitchen table in my in-law’s bright, airy house, I felt the title had been emblazoned on me for good: “daughter of the resurrection. Not dead. Living.” The faith-words intensified in the Milton cemetery. I felt suddenly aware of the sweet imaginative tasks assigned to the Christian. If you are going to stand in a graveyard as a follower of Christ, you have the privilege of stretching your immortal mind and heart toward the heights of reality. The ground will break open. The dead will rise, Ezekiel-style, bone upon bone, sinew upon sinew, and the breath of God will be in them. If God’s Spirit lives in you, you know that as you grow more like Christ the entropy introduced by the Fall is already reversing in your own personality. The church advances, and from horrible disorder life comes again. You are a son or a daughter of the resurrection. You will never die. When you receive your new body, you will be able to turn to your fellow saints and say, “Look! It’s really me!”

“In God we trust” is much more than a crusty conservative adage of old America. It is a resolute statement that applies to the saints of God. And this trust in God calls to more than your convictions. It calls to the deepest imagination of your heart.