Sailing to Byzantium (14 page)

Friends, I listened to the Lord, and. I discovered myself shaking and quivering and bursting into sweat, and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, I wasn’t the old filthy Thomas any more, I was somebody new and clean, I was a man with a high purpose, a man with a belief in something bigger and better than his own greedy desires. And I went down among you, changed as I was, and I told my tale, and all of you know the rest of the story, how we came freely together and offered up our hearts to Him, and how He vouchsafed us a miracle these two and a half weeks past, and gave us a Sign that He still watches over us.

But what do I see now, in these latter days after the giving of the Sign? What do I see?

Where is that new world of faith? Where is that new dream of hope? Where is mankind shoulder to shoulder, praising Him and working together to reach the light?

What do I see? I see this rotting planet turning black inside and splitting open at the core. I see the cancer of doubt. I see the virus of confusion. I see His Sign misinterpreted on every hand, and its beauty trampled on and destroyed.

I still see painted fools dancing and beating on drums and screaming that the world is going to be destroyed at the end of this year of nineteen hundred and ninety-nine. What madness is this? Has God not spoken? Has He not told us joyful news? God is with us! God is good! Why do these Apocalyptists not yet accept the truth of His Sign?

Even worse! Each day new madnesses take form! What are these cults sprouting up among us? Who are these people who demand of God that He return and spell out His intentions, as though the Sign wasn’t enough for them? And who are these cowardly blasphemers who say we must lie down in fear and weep piteous tears, because we have invoked not God but Satan, and destruction is our lot? Who are these men of empty souls who bleat and mumble and snivel in our midst? And look at your lofty churchmen, in their priestly robes and glittering tiaras, trying to explain away the Sign as some accident of nature! What talk is this from God’s own ministers? And behold the formerly godless ones, screeching like frightened monkeys now that their godlessness has been ripped from them! What do I see? I see madness and terror on all sides, where I should see only joy abounding!

I beg you, friends, have care, take counsel with your souls. I beg you, think clearly now if you ever have thought at all. Choose a wise path, friends, or you will throw away all the glory of the Day of the Sign and lay waste to our great achievement. Give no comfort to the forces of darkness. Keep away from these peddlers of lunatic creeds. Strive to recapture the wonder of that moment when all mankind spoke with a single voice. I beg you—how can you have doubt of Him now?—I beg you—faith—the triumph of faith—let us not allow—let us—not allow—not—allow—

(Jesus, my throat! All this shouting, it’s like swallowing fire. Give me that bottle, will you? Come on, give it here! The wine. The wine. Now. Ah. Oh, that’s better! Much better, oh, yes. No, wait, give it back—good, good—stop looking at me like that, Saul. Ah.
Ah.
)

And so I beseech you today, brothers and sisters in the Lord—brothers and sisters (what was I saying, Saul? what did I start to say?)—I call upon you to rededicate yourselves—to pledge yourselves to—to (is that it? I can’t remember)—to a new Crusade of Faith, that’s what we need, a purging of all our doubts and all our hesitations and all our (oh, Jesus, Saul, I’m lost, I don’t remember where the hell I’m supposed to be. Let the music start playing. Quick. That’s it. Good and louder. Louder.) Folks, let’s all sing! Raise your voices joyously unto Him!

I
shall praise the Lord my God,

Fountain of all power…

That’s the way! Sing! Everybody sing!

T
HROUGHOUT THE WORLD THE
quest for an appropriate response to the event of June 6 continues. No satisfactory interpretation of that day’s happenings has yet been established, though many have been proposed. Meanwhile passions run high; tempers easily give way; a surprising degree of violence has entered the situation. Clearly the temporary slowing of the earth’s axial rotation must have imposed exceptional emotional stress on the entire global population, creating severe strains that have persisted and even intensified in the succeeding weeks. Instances of seemingly motiveless crimes, particularly arson and vandalism, have greatly increased. Government authorities in Brazil, India, the United Arab Republic, and Italy have suggested that clandestine revolutionary or counterrevolutionary groups are behind much of this activity, taking advantage of the widespread mood of uncertainty to stir discontent. No evidence of this has thus far been made public. Much hostility has been directed toward the organized religions, a phenomenon for which there is as yet no generally accepted explanation, although several sociologists have asserted that this pattern of violent anticlerical behavior is a reaction to the failure of most established religious bodies as of this time to provide official interpretations of the so-called miracle of June 6. Reports of the destruction by mob action of houses of worship of various faiths, with accompanying injuries or fatalities suffered by ecclesiastical personnel, have come from Mexico, Denmark, Burma, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Hungary, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and, in the United States, Alabama, Colorado, and New York. Statements are promised shortly by leaders of most major faiths. Meanwhile a tendency has developed in certain ecclesiastical quarters toward supporting a mechanistic or rationalistic causation for the June 6 event; thus on Tuesday the Archbishop of York, stressing that he was speaking as a private citizen and not as a prelate of the Church of England, declared that we should not rule out entirely the possibility of a manipulation of the Earth’s movements by superior beings native to another planet, intent on spreading confusion preparatory to conquest. Modern theologians, the Archbishop said, see no inherent impossibility in the doctrine of a separate act of creation that brought forth an intelligent species on some extraterrestrial or extragalactic planet, nor is it inconceivable, he went on, that it might be the Lord’s ultimate purpose to cause a purging of sinful mankind at the hands of that other species. Thus the slowing of the Earth’s rotation may have been an attempt by these enemies from space to capitalize on the emotions generated by the recent campaign of the so-called prophet Thomas the Proclaimer. A spokesman for the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, commenting favorably two days later on the Archbishop’s theory, added that in the private view of the Patriarch it seems less implausible that such an alien species should exist than that a divine miracle of the June 6 sort could be invoked by popular demand. A number of other religious leaders, similarly speaking unofficially, have cautioned against too rapid acceptance of the divine origin of the June 6 event, without as yet going so far as to embrace the Archbishop of York’s suggestion. On Friday Dr. Nathan F. Scharf, President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, urgently appealed to American and Israeli scientists to produce a computer-generated mathematical schema capable of demonstrating how a unique but natural conjunction of astronomical forces might have resulted in the June 6 event. The only reply to this appeal thus far has come from Ssu-ma Hsiang, Minister of Science of the People’s Republic of China, who has revealed that a task force of several hundred Chinese astronomers is already at work on such a project. But his Soviet counterpart, Academician N. V. Posilippov, has on the contrary called for a revision of Marxist-Leninist astronomical theory to take into account what he terms “the possibility of intervention by as yet undefined forces, perhaps of supernatural aspect, in the motions of the heavenly bodies.” We may conclude, therefore, that the situation remains in flux. Observers agree that the chief beneficiaries of the June 6 event at this point have been the various recently founded apocalyptic sects, who now regard the so-called Day of the Sign as an indication of the imminent destruction of life on Earth. Undoubtedly much of the current violence and the other irrational behavior can be traced to the increased activity of such groups. A related manifestation is the dramatic expansion in recent weeks of older millenarian sects, notably the Pentecostal churches. The Protestant world in general has experienced a rebirth of the Pentecostal-inspired phenomenon known as glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues,” a technique for penetrating to revelatory or prophetic levels by means of unreined ecstatic outbursts
illalum gha ghollim ve illalum ghollim ghaznim kroo! Aiha! Kroo illalum nildaz sitamon ghaznim
of seemingly random syllables in no language known to the speaker; the value of this practice has
mehigioo camaleelee honistar zam
been a matter of controversy in religious circles for many centuries.

I
KNEW HE WAS IN
our county and I had to get to see him because he was the one who made all this trouble for me. So I went to his headquarters, the place where the broadcasts were being made that week, and I saw him standing in the middle of a group of his followers. A very handsome man, really, somewhat too dirty and wild-looking for my tastes, but you give him a shave and a haircut and he’d be quite attractive in my estimation. Big and strong he is, and when you see him you want to throw yourself into his arms, though of course I was in no frame of mind to do any such thing just then and in any case I’m not that sort of woman. I went right toward him. There was a tremendous crowd in the street, but I’m not discouraged easily, my husband likes to call me his “little bulldog” sometimes, and I just bulled my way through that mob, a little kicking and some elbowing and I think I bit someone’s arm once and I got through. There was Thomas and next to him that skinny little man who’s always with him, that Saul Kraft, who I guess is his press agent or something. As I got close, three of his bodyguards looked at me and then at each other, probably saying oh-oh, here comes another crank dame, and they started to surround me and move me away, and Thomas wasn’t even looking at me, and I began to yell, saying I had to talk to Thomas, I had something important to say. And then this Saul Kraft told them to let go of me and bring me forward. They checked me out for concealed weapons and then Thomas asked me what I wanted.

I felt nervous before him. Such a famous man. But I planted my feet flat on the ground and stuck my jaw up the way Dad taught me, and I said, “You did all this. You’ve wrecked me, Thomas. You’ve got me so I don’t know if I’m standing on my head or right side up.”

He gave me a funny sideways smile. “I did?”

“Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you how it was. I went to Mass every week, my whole family, Church of the Redeemer on Wilson Avenue. We put money in the plate, we did everything the fathers told us to do, we tried to live good Christian lives, right? Not that we really thought much about God. Whether He was actually up there listening to me saying my paternoster. I figured He was too busy to worry much about me, and I couldn’t be too concerned about Him, because He surpasses my understanding, you follow? Instead I prayed to the fathers. To me Father McDermott was like God Himself, in a way, not meaning any disrespect. What I’m trying to say is that the average ordinary person, they don’t have a very close relationship with God, you follow? With the church, yes, with the fathers, but not with God. Okay. Now you come along and say the world is in a mess, so let’s pray to God to show Himself like in the olden times. I ask Father McDermott about it and he says it’s all right, it’s permitted even though it isn’t an idea that came from Rome, on such-and-such day we’ll have this world moment of prayer. So I pray, and the sun stands still. June 6, you made the sun stand still.”

“Not me.
Him
.” Thomas was smiling again. And looking at me like he could read everything in my soul.

I said, “You know what I mean. It’s a miracle, anyway. The biggest miracle since, I don’t know, since, the Resurrection. The next day we need help, guidance, right? My husband and I, we go to church.
The church is closed.
Locked tight. We go around back and try to find the fathers. Nobody there but a housekeeper and she’s scared. Won’t open up. Why is the church shut? They’re afraid of rioters, she says. Where’s Father McDermott? He’s gone to the Archdiocese for a conference. So have all the other fathers. Go away, she says. Nobody’s here. You follow me, Thomas? Biggest miracle since the Resurrection,
and they close the church the next day.
”

Thomas said, “They got nervous, I guess.”

“Nervous? Sure they were nervous. That’s my whole point. Where were the fathers when we needed them? Conferring at the Archdiocese. The Cardinal was holding a special meeting about the crisis.
The crisis,
Thomas! God Himself works a miracle, and to the church it’s a crisis! What am I supposed to do? Where does it leave me? I need the church, the church has always been telling me that, and all of a sudden the church locks its doors and says to me, Go figure it out by yourself, lady, we won’t have a bulletin for a couple of days. The church was scared! I think they were afraid the Lord was going to come in and say we don’t need priests any more, we don’t need churches, all this organized-religion stuff hasn’t worked out so well anyway, so let’s forget it and move right into the Millennium.”

“Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power,” Thomas said, shrugging. “But the church opened again, didn’t it?”

“Sure, four days later. Business as usual, except we aren’t supposed to ask any questions about June 6 yet. Because they don’t have The Word from Rome yet, the interpretation, the official policy.” I had to laugh. “Three weeks, almost, since it happened, and the College of Cardinals is still in special consistory, trying to decide what position the church ought to take. Isn’t that crazy, Thomas? If the Pope can’t recognize a miracle when he sees one, what good is the whole church?”

“All right,” Thomas said, “but why blame me?”

“Because you took my church away from me. I can’t trust those people any more. I don’t know what to believe. We’ve got God right here beside us, and the church isn’t giving any leadership. What do we do now? How do we handle this thing?”