Cannibals and Missionaries (3 page)

Luckily, the good Lord had given him a sense of humor. But something else bothered him that could develop into more than a joke at his and the Bishop’s expense. The fact was, he had no notion of how they were going to gain access to the Shah’s prisons and his law courts. He supposed someone had a plan; in Paris, where they were to stay overnight, they would be met by lawyers, Sadegh promised—a Belgian and a don from Oxford who had a chair of jurisprudence. But had it occurred to anyone that the group might be thrown out of the Shah’s territory or clapped into jail or, worst of all, denied entry when they descended in a body from the plane? When he had put the question to the young Iranians, he had been assured that this could not happen, but he wondered how they knew. He wondered too whether their mystifying vagueness about details was due to a failure in communication: had they understood
any
of his questions?

“Hey, Father,” called Frank, Jr., from the front seat. “Is there going to be some guy with you that speaks the language?” This too had been on Frank’s mind, but he dratted his son’s lack of diplomacy. The last thing he wanted was to share these mundane worries with the Bishop: old people were prone to become fearful at the slightest suggestion of uncertainty. Thus he had seen no reason to tell Gus that Sadegh and his friends had borrowed his name without his permission; the main thing was that Gus, when finally approached, had accepted, so where was the sense of exciting him about an understandable peccadillo when they were halfway to Kennedy with Teheran as their agreed destination?

The Bishop had turned his head, which was round as a pumpkin and partly bald, in order to catch the answer. Frank considered. At one point, Sadegh had talked of a Cambridge don who spoke several of the native dialects, but then no more was said of him, and he seemed to have been replaced by the jurisprudence don from Oxford. “I’m not totally clear on that, young Frank. We can pick up an interpreter there if we need to. No problem.” But there certainly was a problem, as the Bishop was capable of guessing. In a police state any interpreter was almost sure to be a spy, and Iran seemed to qualify as a police state, though any substantial evidence to the contrary would be welcome, at least to Frank. He had an inspiration. “Through the Embassy,” he shouted. The old man nodded. “Or through the Church, Frankie.”

Frank felt moved again. The Bishop’s serene faith was a rock. And how could he himself have forgotten the Church in his reckonings? Maybe the Anglicans no longer had a mission to the Nestorians of Azerbaijan, but the Church would be there in one or more likely a dozen of its myriad forms—in these oecumenical days it made no great matter which. Of course he had known it, in his soul, if not in his mind. He had brought along his clerical gear to be able to take divine service should the need arise. That was an old habit with him, virtually automatic whenever he packed a bag. But though he never thought about it consciously, it presupposed on his part a profound conviction that wherever a man of God went, there would be Christians and an altar. Unlike Gus, however, who was a seasoned traveler, he had failed to picture the Church as a source of material help.

A pastor in that largely Moslem community, if he did not speak the language himself, would be bound to have native speakers in his flock, along, Frank supposed, with Exxon and Shell representatives, who were in need of God too. And if the pastor was a true shepherd, he would greet with joy his brothers in Christ come to look into torture, summary executions, and trials that were a mockery of justice, which he could
not
but know about granted that even a quarter of the tales in Sadegh’s folders were facts. No minister of the gospel, even the most lukewarm, one of Paul’s famous Laodiceans, could be unaware of the abominations suffered in those prisons not just by political hotheads but by dissident Moslems protesting the repression of their faith. In fact, there was no excuse
not
to know; prison-visiting was a duty laid on the clergy.

Frank gave an inward start. How strange that he had overlooked that point, when he imposed the duty on himself (Helen was supportive) twice a month throughout the year. Including summers: he was grimly familiar with the inside of every correctional institution in their own and neighboring counties right up to the Canadian border and he had been taking Frank, Jr., along, to instill the habit, ever since the boy had discovered his vocation. Cast your bread upon the waters: he saw himself and the Bishop in their dog-collars being introduced into the Shah’s prisons by a clerical accomplice and experienced a sense of deep and sweet relief, as though a balm had been applied to all the vexations of the journey—those foreseen and those as yet unforeseeable.

He cautioned himself not to let his natural hopefulness run away with him. SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, would scarcely have the same sociable attitude as the New York State wardens and guards, who knew him and young Frank and joshed them about searching the hampers of books and magazines they carried: “Any knives or other weapons, Reverend?” But the cloth was the cloth pretty much the world over, and even brutal men, men with something to conceal (who were not entirely lacking in New York State houses of correction), were more inclined to try to deceive it, pull the wool over its eyes, if he could use the figure, than to refuse it entry to the premises. And once you were inside, it was surprising how the prisoners would talk to you, sometimes with the aid of winks and hand gestures if a guard was present. In this age supposed to be irreligious, there was more healthy fear of God and also trust in Him than the laity reckoned.

A happy torpor came over Frank. His chin sank to his chest; he dozed. A doubt shook him awake. They were nearing Kennedy; Gus and the boy were silent. Misgiving as to his own purposes had gained entry to his mind as he cat-napped and was now demanding his full attention. John’s questions at the breakfast table might have been a time-bomb, he guessed. The point John had been getting at, stripped of youthful trimmings, went to the heart of the matter: did the Church,
qua
Church, have a role to play in an affair of this kind?

Frank had pretty well resolved that—he had thought—with himself, in the time available to him, what with the pressures of departure added to normal parish work, the children out of school over the holidays, extra morning and evening services, choir rehearsals, the Girls Friendly pageant, extra sermons to prepare for the Nativity and the Circumcision (Epiphany, blessedly, had fallen on a Sunday), distribution of presents to the needy, and the darned crèche and parish-house tree to set up. But two minds were better than one, and he had been counting on picking Gus’s brains in the plane today over a sherry or a bourbon (Gus’s preferred tipple) on the theology of what they were up to. The subject, as he roughly saw it (he found outlining helpful in his thinking), was really a sub-head under the larger topic of the Church’s task in modern society. Gus, he hoped, would play the devil’s advocate, bringing up arguments
against
this jaunt they were on and all the other good causes they had crusaded for; then they could change sides, with Gus assuming the defense. Frank had been looking forward to a far-reaching, hard-hitting discussion, like the old midnight bull sessions in Divinity School, that would probably not settle everything but be wonderful mental exercise and maybe useful for a sermon.

In fact he already had a pertinent sermon in the works—based on a contemporary reading of the Book of Jonah—which he had started composing in his head, from force of habit, during his spare moments. In the barber’s chair yesterday and last Saturday while watching a game of touch football played by the St. Matthew’s men’s club against St. George’s. Actually, he would not be needing it until his return (“
OPEN
”), but it was always well to have a sermon ripening, in prudent reserve. None of it yet was on paper; some bits, though, he knew by heart, and he might try them out on the Bishop if the plane was not too crowded….

“How many of us here this morning are Jonahs, who, having heard the divine call to betake ourselves to a place far from our homes—or perhaps merely to a less favored part of our city—to prophesy or, as we might say today, to bear witness, disobey the voice of God, which to us is the voice of conscience, and take ship for a different destination?” “No, the parallels are not perfect. The city Jonah was commanded to preach against was a wicked and flourishing city, whereas the call we hear may order us to go, if only in spirit, to very poor and wretched parts of the world, which some of us may feel are less sinful, on the whole, than the part of the world we would leave. Today the voice of God may speak to us from the columns of a newspaper, from an advertisement in a magazine, from an image on our television set….”

There was no need to belabor that. The congregation would understand that he was talking about Vietnam and Cambodia and South Africa and, closer to home, East Harlem. But now a section was coming that might give them new food for thought. “We may not know, today, how to recognize the call that came to Jonah. It is not always that clear and easy. There are false calls, just as in scripture there were false prophets, and perhaps poor Jonah—let’s give him the benefit of the doubt—took the voice he heard for a false voice.

“We must also try to distinguish—and this is particularly true for us in holy orders—a secular call from a spiritual call. Both may be valid but they are not the same. The Bible has taught us that the spiritual has precedence; a secular need, however great, must yield to it. This indeed is a prominent article of Jesus’ teaching, though not always of His practice. We see Him, as you know, in the company of the underdog, the underprivileged. But does His sympathy for these lowly ones reach out only to their spiritual part? No. Do not let yourself be deceived. The transcendent Jesus is also a warm human being. He is present at the Marriage of Cana, where there is not enough wine to go around, and, instead of accepting this unfairness of distribution as inevitable and foreordained, He
makes
wine. When He preaches to a hungry multitude, He
makes
loaves and fishes. Even more interesting, he does not offer any
spiritual
comfort, any pie in the sky, to the leper who comes to Him saying ‘Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.’ He cures the man and sends him on his way. Which shows that a fleshly need did not always have a low priority with Jesus; far from it. I dare to think that a secular need equally in our day may take on a sacred character, may cry out to Heaven for remedy. Our Lord is no longer on earth today, and the day of miracles in the old sense is past. Instead, we have our own latter-day miracles of science and technology, capable of feeding and healing the multitude if we will only use them rightly.”

So far, pretty telling, although the point ought to be made that poverty had been inevitable in Jesus’ day, owing to primitive methods of production; this explained His doctrine of Christian resignation—appropriate in its time-frame but now in need of updating. The whole passage could be expanded when he sat down with pencil and paper. And he would have to look up the words from St. Matthew in the revised version; when drafting a sermon in his head, he fell back, perforce, on King James, which memory—like Helen and her three young allies—was always eager to supply. But he never let details get between him and a powerful idea, such as the one his inspiration had been working toward. Experience had shown him that he might lose it if he did not swiftly clothe it in words.

“And what of civil rights, you may ask, dear friends. And the right to a fair trial and to speak our minds openly? Don’t they belong to the political rather than the religious sphere? Yes and no, depending. If the craving for justice and equality was put in our hearts by God (you will not tell me they came from the devil), and in all our hearts to the same measure, then it is God’s business that this yearning of the spirit be recognized as belonging to all alike and be loved in all alike….”

That was the real meat of the sermon, and he had been keen to hear Gus’s reaction to it. It was a ground-breaking argument for the pastorate’s joining in activities (exemplified by today’s mission) still looked on by many, in the Church and outside, as extra-curricular. An overwhelming argument, he had thought. But somewhere along the way he had lost sight of Jonah. This morning, while shaving, he had been wondering how he could work Jonah back in. “We in the ministry, like the prophet Jonah, have accepted a special function of attending to the Lord’s business, wherever and whenever it calls us. But the world is a bigger, more complex place today than it was in Jonah’s time, while we, poor mortals, are still man-sized, like the prophet. We evidently cannot answer, with holy alacrity,
all
the calls that come in to our spiritual switchboard. Not long ago, for instance, on the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of our Christian year, a young Iranian came up to your rector, after divine service…. What was I to tell him, dear friends? That because he was a stranger and we had our own vineyard to tend, his call, though seemingly urgent, must be placed on ‘Wait’?”

Jerked awake, like Saul struck down by the questioning Saviour on the road to Damascus, Frank now had the awful suspicion that “Wait” might indeed have been the right answer. He watched the airport Hilton go by and was assailed by a crowd of tardy second thoughts. He was no longer proud of his sermon draft, which to his mind, more uncertain with every passing second, appeared as self-serving. The unfortunate switchboard metaphor pointed to what looked like a basic unwillingness to think through the question of their mission: “Those figures of speech are cop-outs, Father,” John had told him. “You bring in astronauts and space modules when you don’t want to say what you mean.” Frank now admitted the charge. To somebody of his democratic temperament, he guessed, the idea of greater and lesser as applied to other people’s emergencies was troubling. Yet a man doing the Lord’s business had to budget his outlay of himself.

He asked himself whether a warning—or a sorrowful reproach—could really have come to him from on high as he dozed. Or was the sinking feeling in his stomach due to unseasonably early rising and an undigested breakfast? If God had spoken in his ear, it would be something completely outside his experience. Gus was on close terms with his Maker and seemed to converse with Him intimately as a friend, but Frank, while envying this, attributed it to Rachel’s loss. He himself, though he had been granted perfect faith, had never had a direct intimation of the divine presence, not even during the religious crisis that had shaken him up when he was sixteen and led him from the high-school debating squad into sacred studies. On the other side of the coin, inner division, soul struggle, likewise was outside his ken, except as he observed it in parishioners who came to him for guidance. And his only real acquaintance with the pangs of remorse was when he had hurt one of the children’s feelings and sought to repair the damage—easier, he often found, in a united family than mending a broken toy. He tried to be a good man and a good pastor and was content to know God, and love Him, through the liturgy and through His commandments.