The Last Christian in San Francisco
Reading time: 6 minutes.
My mother taught me that ending your own life wasn't the Christian way of doing things. Look around you, she would say, you seen any animals thinking about dying? No, all animals think about survivin', livin', and bringin' babies to life. Certainly the Bible doesn't condone it. But I do appreciate when it cries out: "...How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?"
I was called up from El Paso, Texas about a man named James Morell, the only living Christian in San Francisco according to our records. He never had no wife or kids. We only knew about him because he attended our weekly online services, and there aren't that many of them tuning in online anymore. Anywho, I learned that Morell had an "End-of-Life" operation coming up. Now people called it "EOL" but it's really just euthanasia. They make you put down all kinds of information when you sign up for it. Who's your counselor, therapist, or religious affiliation if you got one. They want to make sure you have thought it through, but also cover any liabilities. Most people nowadays sign up for EOL five to ten years ahead of time. And no one really follows up on it until the week of the operation. So, naturally we got a call to service Morell.
I suppose that the idea of death has become a rational endpoint, planned years in advance, especially on the East and West coasts. I've wondered if it had something to do with the new brain implantations they got out there. I heard they made you smarter. The implantations probably made conclusions like getting an EOL inevitable, or so people said. Now, I have no doubt they gave you an advantage. Hell, I'm pretty sure that Pastor Willie heading up our main church in Dallas has it. The man's memory grew uncanny. Willie could quote reams of scripture now, though I still remember him stumbling over the Psalms or learning Hebrew in seminary. Most folks in Texas don't support this technology, but I suppose that won't last long. Lots of young professionals got them in Dallas, Austin, or Houston — all of them big hubs. It's just too damn hard to get a job without one.
So, there I was, climbing the hills of that street called Gough to get to Morell's apartment. He told me he had been living there since the late 20's, and he grew up all his life in the Bay Area. He had always wanted to make his way down to Texas and the South to see his "people" as he called Christians. I thought I was going to meet an old dying man. Someone frail. Someone agonizing over an illness. Maybe someone who needed to confess something. But no, Morell looked young, at least for someone who was nearly 70 years old. His mind was all there too. Morell said he had never met many Christians in California, especially in the Bay Area.
Most of them lived down in Los Angeles. I told him that I thought they were more like cults, but he reminded me that the Roman Empire considered the beginnings of our faith to be a cult too. I didn't argue much.
Morell told me that everyone in the Bay Area had an almost perfect knowledge of the Bible. And the Quran, Bhagavad Gita, or the text of any major religion for that matter. But faith, he said, was about free will in the face of perfect information.
I asked him how that fit into God's revelation of Christ and how God chose who truly believed. Our aim with technology was less about solving the problems now, he told me. The goal became to rationalize the world and organize it into some kind of framework. I could tell he had the brain chip too. I wanted to ask how it changed things for him as a believer, but I didn't know how. The faith of the old pretty much disappeared when the implantations became widely available. Both Christianity and Islam became unheard of in Europe since their governments started subsidizing the technology. Some people said the chip cured "the religious impulse" in whatever form it manifested.
Our day just went on talking about scripture, the differences between San Francis- co and El Paso, God's plan for mankind in this century, and whatnot. I thought this was it. We would finish up our visit and maybe sign some waivers for his EOL. I wasn't going to convince him otherwise. It wasn't my place. I barely knew the man. But before I left, I got over the awkwardness and asked Morell why he was a Christian, or rather, why he remained a Christian.
He explained that he experienced God when he was a kid. A kind of experience that no amount of thinking could think away. He started having dreams when he was twelve. He dreamt of Jesus. It wasn't the white Jesus in paintings. In fact, he couldn't even see Jesus' face. He just knew that it was him. He said Jesus started showing him his life. He revealed the college he was going to. The heart attack that would kill his dad. How he would fall in love but never get married or have kids. He showed him the jobs he would get and the businesses he would start. And everything that Jesus showed him came to be.
Now, I have been a pastor for 30 years. Stories like these aren't all that strange. I worked with a guy once that quit his job out of nowhere because he felt that God was telling him to move to a podunk town in Oklahoma. I thought he was crazy. But two years later, he found his lost brother who was separated from him in the foster care system. So, Morell's story almost seemed ordinary. It was the way God operated and I had come to accept that.
I asked Morell if this was it, if this was everything that God had revealed to him. He said he wasn't sure. He said that his life was coming to an end and the final thing from his dreams was that he would meet the last Christian in San Francisco. After that, his dreams stopped altogether.
He was scheduled for his surgery later that week so he wasn’t sure what the last dream meant. I told him that he didn't have to go through with it. Sometimes life has its own schedule, sometimes you've committed to something years ago and you have to carry out that promise. That was all he said.
I arranged a small funeral service for Morell and thought it appropriate to fly pastor Willie up from Dallas who oversaw our church network. Willie was more than happy to visit the city and reminisce about our seminary days. He remarked how interesting life was, a man like Morell that held strong to the faith, and instead of abandoning a city like this, he remained a beacon of light, and God bless his soul because he was probably the last man to do so there.
I stayed in San Francisco a couple of more weeks after the funeral. Willie only stayed for a few days. I thought I would do more sightseeing but I just ended up wandering by the water. I reflected about Morell everyday, thinking how he, Willie, and I were all about the same age but ended up at such different places. I wondered about the people in the city — how many of them rejected the faith and how much choice they had in doing so. I wondered how much choice I had.
It was time to mosey my way back to El Paso. On the plane I thought about it all again — that God's way just ain't our way. Then my wife texted me: "What you and Willie got up to there in the city? Did you hear that Willie is going through with that EOL thing? Did you two talk about this?"
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." — Isaiah 55:8-9