When we read the parables of the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospels, they are always feasting and partying, rather than standing in solemn choirs. In one parable when some of the invited guests do not show up, the master broadens the invitation:

…22 ‘Sir,’ the servant replied, ‘what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.’ 23 So the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the highways and the hedges and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full. 24For I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will taste my banquet.’”…(Luke 14:23)

These guests are probably not the Main Street Christians, but probably the rowdies of the community. You wonder if Emily Dickinson could be one of those romping outside the doors who get the second invitation.

Emily Dickinson apparently hung outside the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven, considering, but never ready to go in. Kristin LeMay quotes these obscure verses from the Dickinson manuscripts.

The Bobolink is gone–the Rowdy of the Meadow–

And no one swaggers now but me–

The Presbyterian Birds can now resume the Meeting

He gaily interrupts that overflowing Day

When opening the Sabbath in their afflictive Way

He bowed to Heaven instead of Earth

And shouted Let us pray–

In the chapter featuring this poem LeMay portrays Emily as critical of the austerity of the sermon, the pulpit, the overdressed congregants and swiping at their solemnity with her ironic commentary.

The pulpit was so high the minister was obliged to infer the effect of his sermon from the tops of the heads and bonnets before him (237).

But others, Dickinson’s niece for example, suggested it was more a sense of the absurd rather than deliberate sacrilege that motivated Emily.

“although Emily took liberties with the Puritan vernacular and dogma . . . these impish flashes were no more to the underlying God-consciousness of the real Emily than the gargoyle on the roof is to the heart of the cathedral within” ( 229).

Interesting analogy: Emily as gargoyle hanging off the side of the cathedral. The gargoyle is a functional appendage to a church, unlike the ornamental lines that glorify God:

In architecture, a gargoyle (/ˈɡɑːrɡɔɪl/) is a carved or formed grotesque^[1] with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building, thereby preventing rainwater from running down masonry walls and eroding the mortar between.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargoyle

In the same sense that the church is protected from the effects of moisture by the gargoyle, so its sacraments are protected by the grotesque, fearful and even comic representations of these water ducts. We might say the gargoyle not only protects the building from internal damage, but also protects it from taking itself too seriously, mocking the Presbyterian birds for their grave conduct of church business.  Hence the bobloinks’s “shouted”  “let us pray,” instead of intoning “in their afflictive Way.” Of interest are the alternative verbs to “shouted” Emily scribbled in the margins of her manuscript: “bubbled” and “gurgled” (LeMay 231).  A range of emotions for prayer runs between “gurgled” and “shouted.”  They suggest the emotions she might have felt in private prayer as distinguished from the “afflictive Way” she found within the church’s walls.

Presumably Emily abandoned the church, because her swaggering self was unwelcome. She could not play the bobolink among the Presbyterians, so she retired to the sanctuary of her second story bedroom.  Should rogues like her be allowed in the kingdom of heaven? Does Emily fit the pattern of those roaming the highways and hedges? How often have we conducted such rogues out the door, as the gargoyle conducts rainwater into the streets?

“Unless we become as Rogues, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” Emily was quoted to say.  Could rogues like her be the ones in the highways and byways compelled to fill the seats of God’s banquet?