Sailing to Byzantium (15 page)

“Have faith, my child,” he said, “and pray for salvation, and remain steadfast in your righteousness.” He said a lot of other stuff like that too, rattling it off like he was a computer programmed to deliver blessings. I could tell he wasn’t sincere. He wasn’t trying to answer me, just to calm me down and get rid of me.

“No,” I said, breaking in on him. “That stuff isn’t good enough.
Have faith. Pray a lot.
I’ve been doing that all my life. Okay, we prayed and we got God to show Himself. What now? What’s your program, Thomas? Tell me that. What do you want us to do? You took our church away—what will you give us to replace it?”

I could tell he didn’t have any answers.

His face turned red and he tugged on the ends of his hair and looked at Saul Kraft in a sour way, almost like he was saying I-told-you-so with his eyes. Then he looked back at me and I saw either sorrow or fear in his face, I don’t know which, and I realized right then that this Thomas is just a human being like you and me, a human being, who doesn’t really understand what’s happening and doesn’t know how to go on from this point. He tried to fake it. He told me again to pray, never underestimate the power of prayer, et cetera, et cetera, but his heart wasn’t in his words. He was stuck.
What’s your program, Thomas?
He doesn’t have any. He hasn’t thought things through past the point of getting the Sign from God. He can’t help us now. There’s your Thomas for you, the Proclaimer, the prophet. He’s scared. We’re all scared, and he’s just one of us, no different, no wiser. And last night the Apocalyptists burned the shopping center. You know, if you had asked me six months ago how I’d feel if God gave us a Sign that He was really watching over us, I’d have told you that I thought it would be the most wonderful thing that had ever happened since Jesus in the manger. But now it’s happened. And I’m not so sure how wonderful it is. I walk around feeling that the ground might open up under my feet any time. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us all. God has come, and it ought to be beautiful, and instead it’s just scary. I never imagined it would be this way. Oh, God. God I feel so lost. God I feel so empty.

S
PEAKING BEFORE AN AUDIENCE
was nothing new for me, of course. Not after all the years I’ve spent in classrooms, patiently instructing each season’s hairy new crop of young in the mysteries of tachyon theory, anterior-charge particles, and time-reversal equations. Nor was this audience a particularly alien or frightening one: it was made up mainly of faculty people from Harvard and M.I.T., some graduate students, and a sprinkling of lawyers, psychologists, and other professional folk from Cambridge and the outskirts. All of us part of the community of scholarship, so to speak. The sort of audience that might come together to protest the latest incident of ecological rape or of preventive national liberation. But one aspect of my role this evening was unsettling to me. This was in the truest sense a religious gathering; that is, we were meeting to discuss the nature of God and to arrive at some comprehension of our proper relationship to Him. And I was the main speaker, me, old Bill Gifford, who for nearly four decades had regarded the Deity as an antiquated irrelevance. I was this flock’s pastor. How strange that felt.

“But I believe that many of you are in the same predicament,” I told them. “Men and women to whom the religious impulse has been something essentially foreign. Whose lives were complete and fulfilled although prayer and ritual were wholly absent from them. Who regarded the concept of a supreme being as meaningless and who looked upon the churchgoing habits of those around them as nothing more than lower-class superstitiousness on the one hand and middle-class pietism on the other. And then came the great surprise of June 6—forcing us to reconsider doctrines we had scorned, forcing us to reexamine our basic philosophical constructs, forcing us to seek an acceptable explanation of a phenomenon that we had always deemed impossible and implausible. All of you, like myself, suddenly found yourselves treading very deep metaphysical waters.”

The nucleus of this group had come together on an ad hoc basis the week after It happened, and since then had been meeting two or three times a week. At first there was no formal organizational structure, no organizational name, no policy; it was merely a gathering of intelligent and sophisticated New Englanders who felt unable to cope individually with the altered nature of reality and who needed mutual reassurance and reinforcement. That was why I started going, anyway. But within ten days we were groping toward a more positive purpose: no longer simply to learn how to
accept
what had befallen humanity, but to find some way of turning it to a useful purpose. I had begun articulating some ideas along those lines in private conversation, and abruptly I was asked by several of the leaders of the group to make my thoughts public at the next meeting.

“An astonishing event has occurred,” I went on. “A good many ingenious theories have been proposed to account for it—as, for example, that the Earth was brought to a halt through the workings of an extrasensory telekinetic force generated by the simultaneous concentration of the entire world population. We have also heard the astrological explanations—that the planets or the stars were lined up in a certain once-in-a-universe’s-lifetime way to bring about such a result. And there have been the arguments, some of them coming from quite surprising places, in favor of the notion that the June 6 event was the doing of malevolent creatures from outer space. The telekinesis hypothesis has a certain superficial plausibility, marred only by the fact that experimenters in the past have never been able to detect even an iota of telekinetic ability in any human being or combination of human beings. Perhaps a simultaneous world-wide effort might generate forces not to be found in any unit smaller than the total human population, but such reasoning requires an undesirable multiplication of hypotheses. I believe that most of you here agree with me that the other explanations of the June 6 event beg one critical question: Why did the slowing of the Earth occur so promptly, in seemingly direct response to Thomas the Proclaimer’s campaign of global prayer? Can we believe that a unique alignment of astrological forces just happened to occur the day after that hour of prayer? Can we believe that the extragalactic fiends just happened to meddle with the Earth’s rotation on that particular day? The element of coincidence necessary to sustain these and other arguments is fatal to them, I think.

“What are we left with, then? Only with the explanation that the Lord Almighty, heeding mankind’s entreaties, performed a miracle so that we should be confirmed in our faith in Him.

“So I conclude. So do many of you. But does it necessarily follow that mankind’s sorry religious history, with all its holy wars, its absurd dogmas, its childish rituals, its fastings and flagellations, is thereby justified? Because you and you and you and I were bowled over on June 6, blasted out of our skepticism by an event that has no rational explanation, should we therefore rush to the churches and synagogues and mosques and enroll immediately in the orthodoxy of our choice? I think not. I submit that our attitudes of skepticism and rationalism were properly held, although our aim was misplaced. In scorning the showy, trivial trappings of organized faith, in walking past the churches where our neighbors devoutly knelt, we erred by turning away also from the matter that underlay, their faith: the existence of a supreme being whose divine plan guides the universe. The spinning of prayer wheels and the mumbling of credos seemed so inane to us that, in our revulsion for such things, we were led to deny all notions of a higher order, of a teleological universe, and we embraced the concept of a wholly random cosmos. And then the Earth stood still for a day and a night.

“How did it happen? We admit it was God’s doing, you and I, amazed though we are to find ourselves saying so. We have been hammered into a posture of belief by that inexplicable event. But what do we mean by ‘God’? Who is He? An old man with long white whiskers? Where is He to be found? Somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter? Is He a supernatural being, or merely an extraterrestrial one? Does He too acknowledge a superior authority? And so on, an infinity of new questions. We have no valid knowledge of His nature, though now we have certain knowledge of His existence.

“Very well. A tremendous opportunity now exists for us the discerning few, for us who are in the habit of intellectual activity. All about us we see a world in frenzy. The Apocalyptists swoon with joy over the approaching catastrophe, the glossolaliacs chatter in maniac glee, the heads of entrenched churchly hierarchies are aghast at the possibility that the Millennium may really be at hand; everything is in flux, everything is new and strange. New cults spring up. Old creeds dissolve. And this is our moment. Let us step in and replace credulity and superstition with reason. An end to cults; an end to theology; an end to blind faith. Let it be our goal to relate the events of that awesome day to some principle of reason, and develop a useful, dynamic,
rational
movement of rebirth and revival—not a religion per se but rather a cluster of belief, based on the concept that a divine plan exists, that we live under the authority of a supreme or at least superior being, and that we must strive to come to some kind of rational relationship with this being.

“We’ve already had the moral strength to admit that our old intuitive skepticism was an error. Now let us provide an attractive alternate for those of us who still find ritualistic orthodoxy unpalatable, but who fear a total collapse into apocalyptic disarray if no steps are taken to strengthen mankind’s spiritual insight. Let us create, if we can, a purely secular movement, a nonreligious religion, which offers the hope of establishing a meaningful dialogue between Us and Him. Let us make plans. Let us find powerful symbols with which we may sway the undecided and the confused. Let us march forth as crusaders in a dramatic effort to rescue humanity from unreason and desperation.”

And so forth. I think it was a pretty eloquent speech, especially coming from someone who isn’t in the habit of delivering orations. A transcript of it got into the local paper the next day and was reprinted all over. My “us the discerning few” line drew a lot of attention, and spawned an instant label for our previously unnamed movement. We became known as the Discerners. Once we had a name, our status was different. We weren’t simply a group of concerned citizens any longer. Now we constituted a cult—a skeptical, rational, anti-superstitious cult, true, but nevertheless a cult, a sect, the newest facet of the world’s furiously proliferating latter-day craziness.

I
KNOW IT HASN’T BEEN
fashionable to believe in God these last twenty thirty forty years people haven’t been keeping His path much but I always did even when I was a little boy I believed truly and I loved Him and I wanted to go to church all the time even in the middle of the week I’d say to Mother let’s go to church I genuinely enjoyed kneeling and praying and feeling Him near me but she’d say no Davey you’ve got to wait till Sunday for that it’s only Wednesday now. So as they say I’m no stranger to His ways and of course when they called for that day of prayer I prayed with all my heart that he might give us a Sign but even so I’m no fool I mean I don’t accept everything on a silver platter I ask questions I have doubts I test things and probe a little I’m not one of your ordinary country bumpkins that takes everything on faith. In a way I suppose I could be said to belong to the discerning few although I don’t want any of you to get the idea I’m a Discerner oh no I have no sympathy whatever with that atheistic bunch. Anyway we all prayed and the Sign came and my first reaction was joy I don’t mind telling you I wept for joy when the sun stood still feeling that all the faith of a lifetime had been confirmed and the godless had better shiver in their boots but then a day or so later I began to think about it and I asked myself how do we know that the Sign really came from God? How can we be sure that the being we have invoked is really on our side I asked myself and of course I had no good answer to that. For all I knew we had conjured up Satan the Accursed and what we imagined was a miracle was really a trick out of the depths of hell designed to lead us all to perdition. Here are these Discerners telling us that they repent their atheism because they know now that God is real and God is with us but how naive they are they aren’t even allowing for the possibility that the Sign is a snare and a delusion I tell you we can’t be sure the thing is we absolutely
can’t be sure.
The Sign might have been from God or from the Devil and we don’t know we won’t know until we receive a second Sign which I await which I believe will be coming quite soon. And what will that second Sign tell us? I maintain that that has not yet been decided on high it may be a Sign announcing our utter damnation or it may be a Sign welcoming us to the Earthly Paradise and we must await it humbly and prayerfully my friends we must pray and purify ourselves and prepare for the worst as well as for the best. I like to think that in a short while God Himself will present Himself to us not in any indirect way like stopping the sun but rather in a direct manifestation either as God the Father or as God the Son and we will all be saved but this will come about
only if we remain righteous.
If we succumb to error and evil we will bring it to pass that the Devil’s advent will descend on us for as Thomas has said himself our destiny is in our hands as well as in His and I believe the first Sign was only the start of a process that will be decided for good or for evil in the days just ahead. Therefore I Davey Strafford call upon you my friends to keep the way of the faith for we must not waver in our hope that He Who Comes will be lovingly inclined toward us and I say that this is our time of supreme test and if we fail it we may discover that it is Satan who shows up to claim our souls. I say once more we cannot interpret the first Sign we can only have faith that it is truly from God and we must pray that this is so while we await the ultimate verdict of heaven therefore we have obtained the rental of a vacant grocery store on Coshocton Avenue which we have renamed the First Church of the Awaiters of Redemption and we will pray round the clock there are seventeen of us now and we will pray in three-hour shifts five of us at a time in rotation the numbers increasing as our expected rapid growth takes place I trust you will come to us and swell our voices for we must pray we’ve got to there’s no other hope now just pray a lot in order that He Who Comes may be benevolent and I ask you to keep praying and have a trusting heart in this our time of waiting.