The Seventh Commandment

Mrs. Meyers’ class of young seraphim met in the basement of the Forest Avenue Baptist Church. The walls of my Sunday School classroom were cement blocks, painted creamy white. Jesus looked down on the eight-year-olds from over Mrs. Meyers’ tight grey curls. The children crowded around Jesus in the framed picture were plump cheeked representatives of all the major races: red and yellow, black and white.

“This month, we are going to talk about the Ten Commandments. We’re going to learn all ten. When you can recite all of the Ten Commandments, you will get this book mark with a gold tassel. Isn’t it lovely?”

The bookmark carried a picture of Jesus holding a lamb on one side, and the commandments one through ten, inclusive, on the other side. It occurred to me with the bookmark, we did not need to memorize the Ten Commandments. We could simply refer to the bookmark. Mrs. Meyers said, “You must write the words of the Lord on your heart.”

Mrs. Meyers began by explaining the commandments:

(1) No other God before God. That was an easy one. I had never heard about any other gods, before or after.

(2) No graven images. This one I thought referred to cemetery markers like my grandfather got when he died, with his name, date of birth and death and a carved lily. Mrs. Meyers said it meant something different, and that we as Baptists didn‘t have to worry about it. The idols it referred to were mostly found in Catholic churches.

(3) Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. This meant no cursing, regardless of what our parents or neighbors might say, since being adults they were subject to more stress than children, and God understood when they made the occasional slip.

(4) Keep the Sabbath holy. This meant going to church on Sunday morning instead of sleeping late or reading the funny papers.

(5) Honor your father and mother. This one was obvious. Parents controlled the supply of food and the car keys. Did Jesus really need to make this one a commandment?

(6) Don’t kill. No trouble following this one.

(7) Don’t commit adultery.

(8) Don’t steal. Apparently this included little things like hair barrettes or Barbie doll outfits if they belonged to your sister. You were expected to return them, even if you found them under the bed or behind the couch.

(9) Don’t lie. This mostly applied to not telling the truth to parents and teachers, including Sunday School teachers. Fibbing to younger siblings was allowed under a footnote, or so my older brother informed me.

(10) Don’t covet. This was an old-time word for being selfish. It meant don’t be selfish for toys your friends had that your parents could not afford. Also, don’t beg for every new toy you see on television on Saturday mornings.

I felt that I had a reasonable chance of following all these commandments. The one that concerned me most was number seven. Mrs. Meyers had completely skipped over that one. “What does adultery mean,“ I asked.

“You should ask your parents about this one, hon,” Mrs. Meyers said.

So I did.

“Mom, what is adultery? Dad, pass the potatoes, please.”

“This is not a topic for the dinner table,” my mother said. “Who taught you that word, anyway?”

“My Sunday School teacher.”

“They shouldn’t be talking about that in the Young Seraphim class,” Mother declared.

“It’s one of the commandments. We have to learn them all,” I said.

“That’s just fine,” said my father. “You can learn them without having to talk them to death.”

“I just want to know what it means,” I said.

“Don’t whine,” said my mother.

Later, I sat on our metal glider on the front porch. I was drawing on the backs of pages from an old 1958 calendar. My father sat at the other end of the glider, listening to a baseball game on a radio. The cord from the radio was plugged into a thick orange extension cord that ran around the back of the glider and into the house. I enjoyed sitting with my father. His legs were long enough to keep the glider constantly moving. While a new pitcher was warming up, I confided in my father, “I’m afraid I might commit adultery,” I whispered.

He extended his heels and brought the glider to an immediate stop. Then he coughed, but not in a choking way; he coughed in a trying not to laugh way.

“If I do, I’ll go to hell,” I continued. “It’s not fair I have to go to hell for doing something when I could have avoided it if I knew what it was.”

I knew plenty about hell by age eight. My older brother had painted a pretty graphic picture for me. All the houses and trees were on fire, there were little devils that jabbed forks into you day and night without warning, there was no water to drink, and snakes came up through the toilets to bite you on the butt. All in all, not a place I wanted to spend an eternity, however long that might be.

My father saw I was genuinely troubled. He pulled out the comics from the newspaper and handed them to me. “Draw Dagwood for me.“ He rose from his glider and rubbed the top of my head. “Don’t worry about that commandment,“ he said. “Only adults have to worry about that one. Kids get a pass on number seven. Want to split a popsicle with me?”

After he went into the house, I turned to a new page of the calendar and began drawing Dagwood. Pogo was easier to draw, having virtually no body, but I wanted to please my father. I felt that he had been straight with me, and what he said did give me some comfort. I just might escape hell should I be fortunate enough to come to a childhood demise. But he had done nothing to assuage my curiosity. What Dad did, probably without his knowing or intending it, was give me an important clue to deciphering the mystery of adultery.

I needed a quiet place to concentrate. We lived on a dead end street. At the end were a couple of empty lots, grown up in trees and brush. I was still slightly afraid to go there by myself. My brother had seen to that. But, I felt that I needed the quiet of nature to think through something of this magnitude. Besides, sitting alone in a tree seemed a safe place to ensure that I did not inadvertently commit adultery.

I started with the word: adultery. The word adult was right there. All I had to figure out was what activity adults engaged in that children did not. I went through my parents’ daily routines in my mind like a flip book. It seemed to me that we did a lot of things together: eating, watching television, attending church three times a week, brushing teeth, taking baths, feeding the dog, making beds, hanging up clothes. Fishing was my dad’s favorite pastime, and we often went along. The kids were not allowed to go into a boat with dad and his friends. We fished from the bank. Was adultery something that happened in boats, I wondered. My brother got to fish from the boat earlier that summer, so it couldn't be that. What did adults do that kids as old as my brother did not? I was completely stumped.

An early summer breeze blew through the leaves of the maple tree. I opened a library book I brought with me. My place was marked with a Bobby pin. I imagined how beautiful my library books would look with the gold tassel of the Ten Commandments bookmark flowing over the top of the spine. I felt the silky threads between my fingers. I might have lapsed into a daydream, but for the sudden sound that startled me nearly off my branch.

Sometimes people drove down our street, not realizing that it was a dead end. They would have to turn around between the two vacant lots, and go back out. Occasionally, someone would be frustrated or mad that they had made a mistake and screeched their brakes. As I sat in the lowest fork of a little sugar maple, I heard the squeal of brakes and the rubbing of tires on pavement. This was an example of what I later learned was called insight. At the time, I thought it was a revelation from God, my reward for all the thinking I had done to figure out adultery.

My answer had come, as clear as the song of a heavenly choir. I knew the one thing that adults did that children could not do. Adults drove cars. Still, driving was a useful activity. What could be sinful about it? Adultery was quite obviously the act of hitting someone with a car.

My child’s logic dictated that the driver did not even have to kill an operator or passenger in the other car, or a pedestrian. That would have been covered in commandment number six. Was hitting a parked car an act of adultery? No, I reasoned. There wasn’t a commandment that covered property damage, so that was obviously something God thought people could work out for themselves. I had figured it out on my own: adultery was hitting a person with one’s car, whether the victim was in a vehicle or walking, resulting in injury but not death.

Oh, the relief. Adultery, I understood, was well and truly an act I could not commit as a child. Until I reached my sixteenth birthday, breaking the seventh commandment was one thing I absolutely did not have to worry about. If I died before waking, as my nightly prayer suggested the possibility, and I managed to keep my hands off my sister’s things and told the truth, Heaven was mine.

I jumped down from the maple tree, and ran home. I longed to tell my parents that I had solved the mystery of the seventh commandment. My mother was visiting a neighbor, and my father was cleaning out the dog’s pen. I could be patient. I planned the perfect way to let Mom and Dad know that I understood the seventh commandment. That evening, I asked to say grace before the meal. “God is great, God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. And, please don’t let Daddy commit adultery when we go to Grandma’s house this weekend. Amen.”