Gospel (2 page)

12.
Ah, but young Tesmegan tires, and I will begin the tales of my travels tomorrow. How in fits and starts, over the last ten years, I began my wanderings to search for the true relation of Our Church's origins according to Our Master's first disciples, followers, and acquaintances.

BRITAIN

 

I never saw, heard, nor read that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular but some degree of persecution.

—“Thoughts on Religion,”
Works,
vol. xv, R17 (post. 1765)
J
ONATHAN
S
WIFT

Let him who is fond of indulging in a dreamlike existence go to Oxford, and stay there; let him study this magnificent spectacle, the same under all aspects, with its mental twilight tempering the glare of noon, or mellowing the silver moonlight; let him wander in her sylvan suburbs, or linger in her cloistered halls; but let him not catch the din of scholars or teachers, or dine or sup with them, or speak a word to any of the privileged inhabitants; for if he does, the spell will be broken, the poetry and the religion gone, and the palace of the enchantment will melt from his embrace into thin air!

—
Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries
(1824)
W
ILLIAM
H
AZLITT

[The Arian Heresy,] this poisonous error, after corrupting whole world at length crossed the sea and infected even this remote island; and, once the doorway had been opened, every sort of pestilential heresy at once poured into this island, whose people are ready to listen to anything novel, and never hold firmly to anything.

—
A History of the English Church and People
(721)
B
EDE

So the Maker of Mankind laid waste this dwelling-place until the old works of Giants stood idle.… Therefore the Man wise in his heart considers carefully this wall-place and this dark life, remembers the multitude of deadly combats long ago, and speaks these words: “Where has the Horse gone? Where the young Warrior?… Where are the joys of the Hall? Alas, the bright Cup! Alas, the mailed Warrior! Alas, the Prince's glory! How that time has gone, vanished beneath night's cover, just as if it had never been!

—“The Wanderer,”
The Exeter Book
(975)

 

 

Shortly after the captain mentioned they were passing over Stornaway, that it was 45 degrees below zero outside, that they were at a height of 36,000 feet, that the weather in London was cloudy and drizzly and a good morning to all, he warned that due to a high-pressure cell over Great Britain it might be a little turbulent for the next hour or so, and after signing off—Buck, Chip, Dirk, Biff, whatever his name was, to Lucy he sounded drunk or at best half-awake—the little seatbelt sign lit up with a
ding.

Lucy Dantan automatically put her hand to her seatbelt, which had never been unfastened, and steeled herself.

First flight.

With the excitement of a first trip to Europe, the unusual mission ahead of her and her terror of being airborne, Lucy reckoned she had acceded to just twenty minutes of tortured plane-sleep, awakening with every bump and wobble. It was 6:30
A.M.
by her watch, 12:30 to the British people down below—technically Scottish, Lucy decided—and it wasn't too long now to London and Heathrow Airport.

As promised, here came the turbulence.

Lucy looked at the sleepy stewardess making her way down the aisle. The stewardess did this
all the time.
Several days a week, for months,
years
people did this. No problem, this turbulence. Absolutely common. Then there was a big
kalumph
as the plane dropped a hundred feet, a lurch Lucy found reminiscent of when the down elevator in the Sears Tower back home in Chicago puts on the brakes. A few people groaned, most shifted and readjusted themselves, still sleeping.

Time for more prayer, she vowed.

“Our Father, Who art in heaven,…”

(This again.)

“… hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come…” Lucy trailed off, this being too pro forma. “Please don't let this plane crash, Lord. Jesus, if it does go down, forgive me of my sins. And Holy Spirit…”

(Yes?)

Lucy dried up on the Holy Spirit. “If we're all gonna die, please sustain me and allow me the peace to meet my end with dignity.” What if the plane hurtled into the cold North Atlantic? Lucy imagined a crash-landing on the water. The plane would initially float and then panic would break out and there'd be a riot getting to the life rafts. “Give me the strength, Holy Spirit, to be of service through this coming ordeal. And if death is my lot…”

(The plane is not going to crash, My child.)

Then the plane hit a treacherous series of drops. A stewardess lost control of the orange juice she was pouring and a baby began to cry.

“Thy will be done,” Lucy muttered, eyes pinched closed, hands clasped tight. “If You want me to drop out of the sky, twenty-eight years old in the prime of life, all right, I can't stop You. But I'll be happy to dedicate my life to something or make some kind of promise…”

(Over Newfoundland, you promised Us two years with Mother Teresa. What do We get now?)

“And please, Holy Spirit, be with the pilot and copilot and guide them and be with them so that we may all land safely.”

(But I am with you always.)

There was a respite from the turbulence and Lucy was determined to distract herself. There were two allowable diversions: the in-flight magazine with every piece read three times except the mutual bonds article, and Lucy's own notepad with the details of her mission.

She reviewed: Dr. O'Hanrahan and his assistant, Gabriel O'Donoghue, her childhood friend and fellow grad student at the University of Chicago, had left the university on some kind of hush-hush expedition back in February. Gabriel and the professor were supposed to return in March. They didn't. Attempts to contact them by the Theology Department proved fruitless. Soon Gabriel stopped sending messages home. Soon the department had lost the trail of Dr. O'Hanrahan, but since he had the department credit card they had his receipts and some clue as to where he had been. Soon, a bill of $2,000 arrived and the department canceled the credit card.

While assuring Gabriel's parents that he was all right, and assuring Dr. O'Hanrahan's sister that the old man was all right, the Theology Department began to suspect that things were not all right: that this bitter, alcoholic, eccentric genius had taken the department credit card along with many other funds and trusts, and was blowing it in a last-ditch effort at revenge on the department he had built and, he felt, had betrayed him.

“You see, Miss Dantan,” Dr. Shaughnesy had told her a week ago, as she sat in his oaken office, somber and muted as one expected a theological study to be, “O'Hanrahan is a great man with a great mind, but alas, with a great grudge against us as well. Poor Patrick suspects his ouster as chairman was the result of a Masonic plot.”

Lucy asked, “If he doesn't listen to you, why would he listen to a stranger like me?”

“He may not, but at least the Theology Department will have done what it can to retrieve him. It is with the most abundant possible tact and diplomacy that we want you to approach him, and suggest…” Dr. Shaughnesy attempted a look of concern, human compassion never being his strength and always having to be slightly play-acted. “… suggest that he come back home to his loved ones and fellow colleagues. Don't let it end like this, in this … this childish display.”

“Might,” Lucy speculated, “he really be on to something? I mean, this was the man who worked on the Nag Hammadi digs, the Nimrut Dag stele, who helped catalogue the Huntington Library fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe he'll walk in the door with another Dead Sea Scroll or something.”

Dr. Shaughnesy looked somewhat pained and twisted the large onyx ring on his left hand; Lucy observed his pale, long fingers. “I don't think so, my dear. I have a file drawer full of hate mail from the man and I'm not sure he has any purpose but running up a tremendous bar and restaurant tab.” The head of the Theology Department twisted his ring again uncomfortably. “And yet, I don't want to report him to the police for defrauding the department. I want to give him this warning—Patrick was responsible for hiring me, after all. We, his former colleagues and admirers, owe him this courtesy.”

Lucy asked Dr. Shaughnesy why he was sure O'Hanrahan would be attending an upcoming dinner in All Souls College at Oxford University, Thursday night, June 21st, 1990. The Acolytes were a dining society for ecclesiasts from a number of faiths—Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, Judaism—who met once a year for a feast of fine food, rare wines, precious liqueurs, and an agreed-upon topic for learned, rousing debate.

“He's never missed one of these Acolyte Suppers yet,” said Shaughnesy. “And I have contacted a colleague at Cambridge who is in the Acolyte Society and, being indisposed, has ceded his place to me, and I in turn have put forward your name to attend.”

“Wow.”

“You are free, of course, to decline this trip for the department,” offered Shaughnesy, examining his bloodless hands.

“Oh no, sir,” she had insisted. “What an opportunity. I mean, I've never really been anywhere at all. Is there … is there some reason you're picking me to do this?”

Shaughnesy smiled briefly. “We were going to send one of the faculty, but it occurred there was no one available whom Patrick might not take great exception to—so few of us are on speaking terms with him. And you are among the most mature grad students remaining in the department.”

Lucy returned a wan smile. Her thesis: four years and counting.

So, of course, she had to go on this trip. When she said she'd been nowhere, she'd meant it. Indiana, Wisconsin as far as the Dells, all over Illinois, once down to St. Louis when the big arch was dedicated when she was a kid. Also, Lucy couldn't refuse the
one
thing ever asked of her in years of academic obscurity in this department. Especially with her thesis-extension hearing looming in September. And the fact that she'd been through three different senior advisers. No, there was no choice, politically. She had to go, and she had to succeed.

Lucy also had to go because it would be exciting—a whole other country. And there had been so little excitement in her life that if Lucy had turned this down she would be lying awake for months cursing this missed opportunity for an expenses-paid trip to Great Britain. Besides, she wondered sometimes if her life had the capacity to be exciting, if the years were fated to continue just like the previous ones, safe and dull.

A jolt from the turbulence brought Lucy back to the present.

Between the plane crashing and dealing with Dr. O'Hanrahan, whose ferocious presence Lucy had witnessed in lecture halls a time or two, her body pumped an adrenaline of incessant worry. What if Dr. O'Hanrahan isn't at Oxford as planned? What if he refuses to talk to her? What if he's insane? What if Gabriel's had a bad accident and O'Hanrahan is covering up.… Soon enough she would have her chance to learn the answers, Lucy thought as she looked out to see London in a soup of low-lying rain clouds. Oh thank you, Father, Jesus, and Holy Ghost, for delivering me safe and sound!

(No problem.)

Although, then again, most planes crash on takeoff or landing.

(This is not the fighting spirit We might have hoped for, Lucy.)

Touch down. Deceleration. Everyone alive.

Lucy was herded through Her Majesty's Customs and emerged with a minimum of hassle and customs folderol. Her luggage rode the luggage carousel and she grabbed her overpacked suitcase quickly, relieved to see it had come with her, afraid someone would run off with it, still suspicious of this Europe place.

Slowly she apprehended the foreignness of things. The sign:
INFORMATION CENTRE.
That's right, she remembered from somewhere, they turn around the
er'
s, over here. Amid the Urdu and French and German snatches of conversation she recognized her own language, more clipped, sometimes more gracious and formal, sometimes incomprehensible but musical and bouncing. Yeah, she confirmed to herself, they even
look
English. Not all too different from the Irish she grew up with really, here and there. No bowler hats, though. No dreamy indolent boys from Eton, no chimney sweeps out of
Mary Poppins,
no royalty anywhere to be seen.

The signs led her to a plaza, where she discovered it was damp and cold; she congratulated herself on the warm clothes she had brought. And look, there rounding the corner was her first red double-decker bus, its sign announcing Victoria Station. There was a line, which Lucy didn't take notice of as she went to read the small posted schedule—

“Excuse me,” said the protectress of the line, “there's a
queue.
”

After a dumb second, Lucy joined the silent regiment of waiting travelers at the very back, glared at the whole way.

The bus wheezed into the dock and Lucy bought a ticket with a crisp blue five-pound note and sat by a window so she could look out; an elderly lady sat beside her. When the bus commenced the ninety-minute trip, the windows fogged up and Lucy persistently used her sweater shirtsleeve to wipe away a small peephole.

“It'll do that, it will,” said the older woman in a whispered voice.

“I'm from America,” Lucy explained herself, “I just want to see out.”

“Yes, it's rather nice to see out.”

That was it. First conversation in Britain.

Well, at least she can tell Judy when she gets back home she made conversation, made
friends,
talked to people. Lived. It was important to prove this to Judy, her housemate back on Kimbark Street. Judy was adamant that Lucy never asserted herself or did anything fun. It had just about
killed
her that Lucy was chosen to take this trip for the department.