The Shark God (30 page)

The white man wore glasses and had an unruly shock of light brown hair. He was smoking. That wasn't remarkable. This was: he wore a black shirt, black shorts, and a black-and-white sash around his waist. I had never thought of asking the
tasiu
if there were any white men in their order. I couldn't imagine someone from my world falling so completely into the realm of miracles. I pushed my way onto the street and chased him down.

“Awright?” he said when I caught him. His accent, to my untrained ear, suggested south London, salt-of-the-earth, but he had the bearing of an Old Etonian.

I knew of the brotherhood's vow of poverty, and I had seen their diet of root vegetables and mush, so I suspected the white
tasiu
would accept an invitation to dinner at the Hong Kong Palace, where the spring rolls were served with ketchup but the beer was cold.

“Brother,” I said, after we had polished off a couple of SolBrew, “what the hell are you doing in that uniform?”

He laughed. “Sometimes I wake up and think I must be bonkers,” he said, wolfing down the last of our chop suey. “I'm forty-two years old, and I have no estate, no house, no money, no car, no material symbols to mark my existence…”

“You are an ascetic,” I said.

“Actually, yes.”

Richard Carter was born in Guildford, a cathedral town just south of London. His father was an Anglican priest. He had studied English and drama. He had always been a Christian, at least in a postmodern sense. He had thought that God was a good idea, that Jesus was a very good teacher. Christianity had seemed a useful religion.

The young man's view of the cosmos changed after he moved to Indonesia, and then to the Solomons in 1987. He came to teach at the Church of Melanesia's Selwyn College. He saw things he had never seen in England, things that convinced him, just as they had convinced the Victorian missionaries, that the struggle between good and evil was something that could be seen and touched. Carter was ordained a minister in 1992. From the beginning, he was drawn to the
tasiu
, and they to him. He was captivated by their lives, by their meekness, by the tenderness and nobility of their community, by the holiness he saw in their poverty. The brothers must have seen a similar holiness in Carter; they invited him to join their order, and he became Brother Richard. Soon he was rewriting Christian parables as Melanesian dramas, which the brothers performed on tour throughout the islands.

“But what about the miracles?” I asked. Did he believe in the fantastical
mana
-ization of the brotherhood or in all that funneling of divine power through walking sticks and holy water? Had the islanders wiped the rational skepticism from his English soul? I wanted him to shout
yes
.

But instead he smiled cryptically. “I have become more receptive to the mysteries of faith, to things that can't be explained simply…”

“Bending bullets?”

“No, I don't believe in bending bullets. But believe me, somehow this community of young men is able to do things that other Melanesians can't. And it's all through the grace of God. The brothers don't spend three or four hours a day in prayer for nothing, you know. Here, let me tell you a story.

“In my early days, I was on the
Southern Cross
, heading for the Reef Islands with the brothers. We heard on the ship's radio that a man back at Taroaniara, the ship's base, was possessed by some kind of evil. The poor guy had been foaming at the mouth, that kind of thing, and finally he had died. Well, by some miraculous coincidence, our first landfall in the Reefs happened to be this man's home village. We went ashore. The old folks gathered around and told us that the dead man had recently been selected as their next chief. But not only that: they said that anyone they had ever chosen to be their chief had been afflicted by a death curse—there had been possessions, sickness, freak accidents, all kinds of stuff. It had been going on for decades. You could feel the darkness in the village. We were faced with an ancestral curse so strong it had cast a pall of darkness over the place. So the brothers sat down and decided to perform a clearance.

“The next morning we conducted a rousing service about the power of light over darkness. We reminded people that in the presence of God, evil is a nonreality: it cannot exist. We made a procession around the village with big pots of holy water. We went from house to house, driving out evil and praying while the brothers marked crosses in the sand. A lot of this ‘driving out' involves using primeval symbols, you know: water, fire, or marks in the sand to express spiritual truth. Anyway, this exercise was incredibly powerful. More and more people joined the procession. They followed the brothers around. They started singing hymns to the rhythm of
kastom
songs. Then, after the ceremony, all the people who had been pie-faced, dark and gray, they were suddenly light and cheery and laughing. You could feel the oppression lifting like a great weight from their shoulders! There was a physical sense of release from darkness. I felt it, too, the darkness dissolving away. And, you know, the village has never been bothered by that curse again.”

“And this is your miracle?”

“Yes, it is. I would probably explain those events differently than the Melanesians would. But their fears were real. The darkness that held them was not something you could simply dismiss. It was killing people, and the brothers helped put an end to it. I have no difficulty coming to terms with the miraculous aspect of what happened there.”

No thunder. No blinding clouds. No ghosts. Carter's tale didn't match up to my own miracle stories at all. It did not seem like proof of anything more than the power of psychology. I wanted to ask him how miracles worked, what demons looked like, how he thought evil and goodness might interact with atoms and molecules in order to change events in the material world. What about the guns that melted into snakes, the helpful crocodiles, the walking sticks that hung in midair? Did he believe these things really had happened or not?

“Why can't you just let the stories be?” he asked.

“Because I would like to know they are true.”

“Ah,” he said. “You want proof.”

“I made it rain by blowing on a
kastom
stone,” I offered, hoping he would see that I was a believer, too. What he saw was my hunger, my childish urgency.

He sighed. “Look, our knowledge of truth, the truth about that which is life-giving and eternal, it exists beyond the bounds of rationalism. Faith carries us closer, but in the end we can't describe it. We just don't have words for it. At the end of the day, we are reduced to telling stories about that mystery. That's what I know.”

“But guns turning into snakes…”

“Did Jesus actually walk on water? My answer would be, yes, he did, in his disciples' memory of him. He did in their faith experience. The walk on water could not be captured on video or analyzed by a scientist, and yet it was profoundly true for those who witnessed it.”

The white
tasiu
refused to be pinned in the magic debate. He drifted between metaphor and an amorphous mysticism. It took many hours of conversation, months of reflection, and the death of our friends to understand his message. What I now think the brother was saying was that stories are containers for spiritual truths. What I think he was saying is that it was the apostles' faith in such miracles that enabled them to surmount fear and chaos in order to lay the foundations for their church. The miracle was made true because it was believed. But did the miraculous moment lay in history, in imagination, or somewhere in between?

The Canadian scholar Northrop Frye argued that it was a mistake for biblical scholars to attempt to divine the boundary between historical and mythical truth. Frye, who was a United Church minister, insisted that the key to understanding the Bible was to see it entirely as a work of metaphorical literature. Some parts of the New Testament may be historically accurate, but they are accurate only by accident. The Bible's writers—none of whom actually met Jesus—were not at all interested in historical reporting because they were tackling the much more important task of imparting a grand metaphor. And that metaphor was the life of their Messiah, who was, as they say, the
word
made flesh.

“Jesus is not presented as a historical figure,” wrote Frye, “but as a figure who drops into history from another dimension of reality, and thereby shows what the limitations of the historical perspective are.” The Bible, he concluded, was
more
true because of its counterhistorical nature.

Frye could just as easily have applied his theory to Melanesia. If
people used myth to express spiritual truths, then it made sense for miracles to be attributed to the
tasiu
, who embodied everything that Melanesians had come to see as holy. People felt their goodness, their glow. Stories about the
tasiu
began with observed events, but, as Frye would have it, these were not always enough to convey the force of the holiness that people felt. So the storytellers dramatized the observed moment with symbolism. A lightning strike. A helpful crocodile. Whatever. They did what storytellers have done since the beginning of time: they embellished in order to elevate their formless truths and place their stories in the mythical realm.

The key to finding God, Frye said, was imagination.

My great-grandfather would have been appalled by Frye. He insisted that a man had no business serving as a religious teacher if he denied “the plain facts of the Gospel record.” Biblical miracles were rock solid. The incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus were nonnegotiable. But how did Henry Montgomery know these things? Where did his certainty begin? I searched through his writings for answers, and what I found was an infuriating smugness: “Our faith rests on a revelation from above. God has spoken to us, and we have heard His voice and have been assured that it is the voice of God Himself,” he wrote in
Life's Journey
, a series of essays published in 1916. In other words, God was true for Henry
because
he believed, because he had faith. In one essay he personified Faith as a feminine spirit. He gave her a voice. Faith pitied and chided skeptics, reminding them that she was above proof, “but I am more certain to your heart and life because I am seen by better eyes than your bodily eyes. Your soul and spirit have eyes too. That is how you see me and accept my message from God.”

All this was infuriating, and seemed unfair, too. Henry Montgomery got his proof. He got his miracle, in the form of a personal visitation from the Holy Spirit that Easter morning in his Irish garden. All I wanted was more of the same. I wanted the
tasiu
to make their walking sticks hang in midair for me. I wanted them to be
guile crocodiles. I had not yet considered that my great-grandfather was a teller of mythical stories. I had not yet considered that his miraculous visions, and my own, could be expressions of the soul's other way of seeing. I was not yet ready to consider the idea on which Frye and the white
tasiu
likely agreed: the measure of a miracle's truth was not the accuracy of the event so much as the quality of the faith it inspired.

Brother Richard said that magic did not count as a miracle unless it led to God. That is why he was so worried about the Melanesian Brotherhood. Faith in the power of the
tasiu
and their walking sticks was verging on idol worship. People were forgetting that those walking sticks were merely symbolic. Some members of the order had even begun to believe they could direct supernatural power. All this talk of guns turning into snakes was causing them to develop a sense of invulnerability and spiritual pride. It was a trap, and it could only lead to more fear and superstition. What the islanders needed, said the white
tasiu
, was a new kind of story, one that would lead them closer to the transcendent vision of the New Testament.

I did not see the
tasiu
bend bullets or cast out demons. I did not see them turn machine guns into snakes. But I did see something of their power, which was not as I imagined. And I did see the beginning of a story that would carry them through a great darkness and back into the light, a story in which the brotherhood would give up their
mana
but be utterly reborn. And like the New Testament, like the myth of Bishop Patteson, that story would be about suffering as much as it would be about rebirth.

 

I was sitting on the veranda at the Chester Rest House one morning when the MV
Temotu
appeared like a great white lie in the port. I saw her tie up to one of the cement piers. Then came the
Eastern Trader
, following like a mongrel after its master. I ran
down to swear at their crews. Where the hell had they been? West, they said. When would we be leaving for Santa Cruz?

“Tomorrow,” said one sailor with a chuckle.

“Tomorrow, someday—or tomorrow, the day after today?”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, of course.”

I was about to leave when I spotted a burly
tasiu
climbing over the ship's rails; it was Clement, the gun brother who had promised to be my source. He was lumbering toward a Toyota Hilux with a white flag mounted on the roof of the cab. The flag had a black cross stitched to it. There were more
tasiu
inside the truck. It was the disarmament gang.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“CDC-1,” said Brother Clement. “Criminal activity. We're on a mission.”

CDC-1 was part of a giant swath of plantations east of Honiara once run by the foreign-owned Commonwealth Development Corporation. During the tension, the company had evaporated and its Malaitan workers had been run off the island. Now the people who considered themselves to be the traditional owners of the plantation lands were fighting over the spoils.