A Plea for Eros

was time for the official bathroom break, and she was leading the class down the steps in two lines. She looked me in the eye and said,
“Was it an emergency?”
I said, “Yes.” Immediately after I had spoken and for years to come, I asked myself whether I had lied. It wasn’t really an emergency in the true sense of the word, was it? Could I have held my pee? Probably. Would it have been hard? Maybe. Did just having to go pretty badly constitute an emergency?
    As an adult, I can tell myself that treating schoolchildren like prison inmates is bad pedagogy, that the half-lie may have saved me from a scolding or worse, but the story’s interest lies in my struggle over semantics and the moral resonance of interpreting the meaning of a word. Had Mrs. G. not used the word
emergency,
I never would have remembered the incident. Some words, sentences, and phrases sit forever in the mind like brain tattoos. On the playground, children used to sing the chorus “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Few things then or now have ever struck me as more false than that ludicrous chant. Words can devastate, and they can heal.
    I don’t have a picture in my mind of our Sunday school teacher reading the story of Abraham and Isaac to the class. I can’t remember what she looked like and I don’t recall her name, so I’ll call her Mrs. Y. I retain a vague memory of light coming through a window and floating specks of dust in the air, but that might be from another class and another year at St. John’s Lutheran Church. I do know we heard the story and that it alarmed me even before the teacher uttered these words:
“You have to love God more than anyone or anything.”
“More than your parents?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
    That “yes” tortured me for days. What kind of a God asked a man to kill his own son? What if God asked me to kill
my
parents? I could never do it. I knew I loved them far more than I loved God. Although I can’t remember the class, I do have a vivid memory of lying on my bed at night thinking about
the sentence.
I can still hear my sister’s steady breathing across the room. I wished so hard that she would wake up. The fear was in my lungs and made it difficult to breathe. I hated the thought that God was there, an all-seeing, all-knowing, jealous God was there, in the room with me and Liv and this God, the one I was supposed to love more than anyone or anything, was the same God who asked Abraham to murder his son. God was capable of anything.
    After a week of lying awake with
the sentence,
I finally confessed to my mother: “Mrs. Y. said we have to love God more than our parents.” My mother looked at me and spoke a single word:
“Nonsense.”
She was sitting at the kitchen table when she said it, and I was standing very close to her. I can still feel the relief in my chest and a lightness coursing through my body. I turned around, and suddenly weightless, I felt as if I were floating down the stairs to my room.
    When my daughter was three years old, she looked up at me and said, “Mom, when I grow up, will I still be Sophie?” I said yes because it’s true that a name follows a body over time, but the three-year-old who asked the question bears little resemblance to the grown-up young woman I know today. We need to think of the self as a continuum, a steady story over time. The mind is always searching for similarities, associations, repetitions, because they create meaning. When recognizable repetitions are disrupted, people say, “He wasn’t himself,” or, “I don’t know what came over me. I’m not myself today.” A few years ago, I listened to a woman who was both a doctor and a manic-depressive speak in public about a memoir she had written. She described the end of her manic episodes by saying, “I returned to myself.” But strictly speaking, that logic is false. Whether people are besieged by a chemical imbalance or thrown into a panic or depression by a wrenching loss, their inconsistencies also belong to the self. It’s the feeling or impression of foreignness that makes us want to cast off the interruptions, explosions, lapses, and inconsistencies—all the material in ourselves that we refuse to integrate into a narrative.
    I didn’t know what to do with what I saw in my mind those nights I lay thinking over the sentence—Abraham’s hand clutching the knife and raising it in the air as he prepares to murder his son, to cut open his