Story - The Preacher

When I wrote this I was deliberately trying to emulate that wonderfully bleak 19th century Prussian tone I so admired.

THE PREACHER

I

‘In America everyone is born twice over’. The Preacher was giving a sermon following his return from his trip there. His wife, who was ill and tired, had gone to the wall of the Church to sit sideways and listen to him, her head stooped down.

The Preacher looked at his hearers and continued, ‘Let me ask you this. Is it naïve to insert into your constitution the pursuit of happiness? Let me answer you like this. The perfectability of man is a myth and has led to a damaging cult of re-invention and the false notion that happiness is an achievable state of being’.

The Preacher stopped to consider where he was and moved lightly with his hand the typed sheets in front of him that the hearers could not see. With his free hand he picked up his bible and held it aloft, ‘Self help books sell by the millions, therapists prosper, plastic surgeons believe that they can add to our lives, and lawyers grow fat through payments for divorce. The pursuit of inner illumination and knowledge grows thinner and threadbare.’

He looked down towards the pulpit and shook his head as if he were disagreeing with a question that had only been posed to him. Raising it again he raised his voice.

‘In America there is a fundamental problem with Jesus. Those who find Him there are not interested in turning back the tide of secular belief and in creating the Kingdom of God on Earth. They are not interested in finding truth. Instead they use Jesus to make themselves feel good about themselves. They think as individuals. They are seeking to make truth. And they have equated faith with happiness.’

The Preacher paused, and he held up a forefinger of warning. ‘If Christ came back today and heard what was being said in His name He would condemn this mortal sin. He would tell them that they have turned away, that they have cut themselves off from Grace. Yes, like the woman’, he said as he stretched his arm and hand out and up, ‘who vomits the sinful fox from her mouth in the oak rood screen’.

In the silence that followed he brought back his hand like the downward swoop of a hawk.

The Preacher looked, for a while, at his wife.

‘Let me tell you where I think happiness is. It is living with the unknown. Christ was a clever shadow. Yet we could not live without knowing His actual face and so we abandoned His rejection of images and we invented Him again. And still the doubt remains. It is living within the open air. And yet we have crept inside, and when we are inside, we doubt the outside and we fear the stranger who may come in through the door. And so still the doubt remains. It is receiving the love of another being. For me this is, most preciously, my Christ. But for many it is the love of a wife or a family member too. Yet we do not trust them, and still the doubt remains. It is living without desperation, free of personal ambition, but also in hope’.

The Preacher paused and looked at those listening and he said with emphasis, ‘We must live with doubt’.

Grace Stonechat was the Preacher’s wife and she got up and left the Church. Behind her the Preacher was continuing and did not hear the rasp of the door as it closed.

He continued. ‘I went out to the forest recently and I had to wait two days for the weather to break. It had been raining for all of that time, creating impassable pools, and it had softly opened the earth so that a man could not walk upon it. I had had to wait but now I was there, in the early morning. And as I walked a fog descended so that I could not see, and the fog silenced everything, even all of the small animals and the birds. And as it became denser I could hear and see nothing. It was not dark. It was a changeless, milky, light. I was not afraid. So I stopped. I just stopped, and I closed my eyes and I leaned upon my stick and I felt in those moments before the sun’s heat cleared it away, I felt a calmness and a stillness and happiness. It was borne of the knowledge that it would not last, of the understanding that it was not a state of being, and that it was built upon a previous and necessary melancholy’.

The Preacher stopped, then waited, and then led those hearing him in prayer.

II

Grace finished all other possible tasks and washed and wrung her hands bone-dry and then finally went to her husband’s study and begged him again to talk to Ruth.

‘Why will she talk to me when she has her psychiatrist?’ she heard him answer her over his book, without looking. She said his name once, gently but he was continuing,

‘I cannot stand it’, Grace interrupted him, and ‘I cannot cope with it any more. She rises before us in the morning and goes God knows where…’. The Preacher said gently her name to chide her but she continued, ‘and she will eat nothing, she rattles around with just pills inside her, and she isn’t getting better, and she says that she is lost to God’.

He came to her and held her, and then he stroked with both hands slowly and gently her hair and he whispered to reassure her now, as best he could. Finally, when she had calmed a little, she heard him relent and say, ‘Come on then, lets try together’.

In her room Ruth was sat at her table with her head resting forwards on her arms and turned sideways, towards the wall. She was lightly, fitfully, asleep. In front of her on the table was the list that she had been working on for some weeks. The Preacher picked it up to see if any additions had been made. She had added two new headings, Firstly ‘Understand from Mani why what has happened has happened’ and then ‘What I will need for the trip?’ Under the first heading were seven neat question marks. Under the second she had begun a list which consisted of ‘Rucksack, matches, gas, plates – two? -, torch, maps’.

They waited whilst she slept. When Ruth woke she snapped at them, ‘What are you doing here?’

Grace was speechless and put her hand to her mouth and her other hand on her husband’s shoulder. The Preacher said, ‘Ruth, we’ve come to talk’ but Ruth snapped again, ‘Why don’t you bloody leave me alone, I am OK. And anyway it is none of your concern. Please. Just go’.

His voice began to break as the Preacher continued, ‘Ruth, please tell me what we can do to help you, how we can help you through this. Whatever you need us to do we will arrange for you’.

Ruth shouted at him, ‘Leave me alone!’

‘Can’t you see that this is difficult for us, that we do not understand what we should do, that we are torn?’, the Preacher paused and began to add, ‘ if only you would let God…’

Ruth screamed and rose immediately and spun round and picked up a book and threw it at him. It hit him hard, fully in the face, which he then covered with his hands. Grace cried loudly and Ruth was crying too. ‘Come on Grace’, the Preacher was saying, ‘Come on, let’s leave her, and we will come back when she is quieter’.

III

Ruth woke at four as usual and she lay stiffen-still and listened to her heart. Then, as she lay there still more, she gently placed each hand at her sides and with spiders’ fingers she scrunched up the bed sheet and set it free. And by this repeated action she lessened and then removed the tingling in her hands.

And then she rose.

She walked through the streets of the town in darkness and hugged the rucksack, which had been packed the night before. At the station she was alone and through the three-pronged metal automated barrier she went and she crouched back against the damp mossy wall and waited. Rolling a cigarette she then smoked and closed her eyes and rested her head on her outstretched arms and eased her breathing.

The fizz from the cable overhead awoke her again to the outside world and flicking the butt of her cigarette on to the track, she caught the first train. This rattled her east and east until it had carried her to Hainault and no further because it was early and the first peak train to take her further along this dotted line was not yet running.

By dawdling back away from the small group of other-travellers which the train had gathered together, and then by fake bag searching she was left alone in the empty station. The driver of the train locked his cab and walked quietly to the other end of the platform where he entered the first car and closed the door with a slam. She waited and smoked again and then with a hum and a guided clatter the train eased forward out of the station and across the track to pursue its way back.

She turned and walked herself along the mile of dead track to Ongar. She walked through the lifeless station at Ongar and then into to the fields of farmed huckleberries which resemble Solanium Nigrum, the deadly nightshade.

She arrived there with a feeling of relief. She hooked her rucksack in the usual place at the corner post of the field and walked towards the middle. At the middle she wept and panicked and walked until the day broke. The sun was up and the temperature began a slow rise. It would be warm, clear. She would go to Central London and browse in a bookshop, buy a coffee, read a magazine and then go see Doctor Basaf.

She went back the way she came, walking the crack-and-crunch neatly stone strewn track, placing each of her steps between the sleepers. She was hit by the first train, which slammed into her, tossing her aside, ripping off one arm, dead.

The Preacher’s wife collapsed. She was not at the Church for the funeral service. She had suffered a stroke at the news of her daughter’s death. She was struck dumb. And so she lay, that day (and every one since), in silence, with a calm face, unmoving and without even the skill to cry.

The Preacher planned and wrote the service but he did not read it well. He kept his arms by his side, his back straight and his voice was quiet as he unevenly wove events from his daughter’s experience into the shape of her life. He outlined the mathematics of how long she had lived, the length of her marriage, her education, and her illness. He put into a wider pattern his daughter’s experience of faith, of relationships, of philosophy and of the fears that she had and which she could not quell. He comforted, he met some of his hearer’s doubts halfway and he gently encouraged them to trust but also to question. He lowered his daughter from the world and for the only time that day he held out his hand to let her slip through his fingers.

And then he let them go.

The Preacher cared for his wife. He washed her carefully and quietly and he spoke to her softly every day, and he asked her how she was and told her how she seemed. When he was quietly preaching he made sure that she was comfortable and that someone was always with her. And he told her of the condition of Ruth’s grave and what was in flower and what was going to be. Then, when he had learned to move her, he took her there, and into the forest where they could sit and watch and listen to the movement of the trees.

The Preacher, through tending the grave, learned what would grow and then slowly, quietly, he filled the house with flowers and with plants.

James A Bullion – Revised November 2007.