His appreciative smile pleased her, but when he nodded, it was with a jerking motion. He said, “You are indomitable.”
“But what will you do?”
“Do? The man spews his filth. My enemies will suck on it. My friends will know what it is.”
“No. He twists the mind of the King against you. The prelates are one thing, but the King can hurt you,” she said.
Indeed, the King was already moving against Abelard’s patron, Count Theobald, and he was tilting toward Bernard’s Cistercian monks against the black robes of Cluny. Because of Italian intrigues, the Pope stood sorely in need of the French King, and so Louis could hurt Abelard in Rome, too.
Héloïse added, “And Bernard’s preaching rises to a pitch before the rabble. The executioner of heretics is the mob, Peter. The man is a danger, I say. You must challenge Bernard.”
“In my youth, I challenged the fox that dared to cross my path in the forest. I challenged the sun not to rise. I challenged the bells of Notre-Dame to be silent.”
“When you challenged philosophers, you won,” she insisted. “It made your reputation. More to the point, it vindicated your thinking.”
“My reputation stands, Héloïse. I think what I think. I say so, and I let my words defend themselves. So far, they have.”
“Are you a heretic?”
Her question surprised both of them.
“No. Absolutely not,” he said forcefully. “The measure of my thought is nothing but the Gospel, elevated by reason, which is the true mind of the Church.”
“Then show it. Bernard must be stopped. His manipulation of the boy King must be stopped. His assault on Cluny must be stopped. His War of the Cross must be stopped. You can stop him. He has made himself vulnerable to you.”
Abelard laughed. “How so, Mother?”
“Do not ‘Mother’ me, Peter Abelard.”
“How so, then?”
“He has defamed you with the charge of heresy. Make him prove it. Demand a hearing. It is your right. He has involved the King and the Pope. Therefore, demand a Church Council, the bishops gathered with universal authority. The King presiding, with papal license. Dispute the White Monk in that setting and, when you demolish his charges, the anathema will come down on him—not you. The serpent will be defanged.”
“I went through a heresy trial once before.”
“That was a long time ago, and it was because of me. You were being tried, no matter the pretext, because they hated your proven capacity for love. Now I am an aged Abbess, forever cloaked in gray, the color of death. The comely Héloïse lives on only in the songs of troubadours, which no one takes seriously. At issue against Bernard will be nothing but ideas and doctrines, finally. The disputation will shape the future of the faith. It will avenge Prince Isaac.”
“I seek vengeance no more,” Abelard said, his voice muted. “As for the slaughter of Prince Isaac, I doubt that Bernard, for all his venom, is one of those preaching death to Jews.”
“Perhaps not. But his theology makes such preaching inevitable.”
“Is this why you summoned me? To stiffen my spine for the mêlée? To make me young again—but without the comely Héloïse?”
“Ah, sir…but you do have her.” She covered his hand once more. “Our secret.” She still knew how to read him, and knew that he had accepted what she’d proposed. He welcomed it. He would be her champion, and she would be his unknown lady. He would vanquish his enemy and live! That, in combination with their physical touch, however bare, should have made her pleasure exquisite. But in his hand, she felt his tremor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Good Shepherd Church at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was crowded. Along the side aisles, car-sized radiators hissed plumes of steam, and up the length of the center aisle a river of undulating linoleum floor tile shone with festal polish. The stained-glass windows, usually so vivid in the daylight, were opaque now; the darkness outside blanked out the colorful saints and martyrs, whose peaked hands, tilted heads, and halos were evident only in outlines of lead. The organ was playing a singsong “Silent Night,” and the congregation was quietly trilling along, even as latecomers shook out their heavy coats and timidly sought places in the packed pews, or in the rearmost corners, to stand. The large church seemed small with this turnout. Though the willful gestures of its architecture—embedded half-pillars instead of true columns; groined arches made of plaster; chandeliers blazing with flame-pointed lightbulbs—fell short of the great Gothic spaces of the Catholic past, the sweeping power of the place came from the overflowing devotion of the Mass-goers. They were here because, on this night above all others, more than longing for Good News, they had it.
Michael Kavanagh faced the congregation from the altar, and his heart brimmed with love for each of them, and for all of them together. If human life is made for more than itself, that more was present—not in the sacrament, or in the Church, but in the good people themselves.
And what else, he wondered as he stood with hands steepled at his chin, does Christmas celebrate than that? Hic Incarnatus Est. God is here. Now. Not in a newborn babe, but in us.
He was wearing the jubilant gold vestments that the sacristan broke out only once a year—tonight. Behind him stood altar boys, candle bearers, acolytes, a crucifer, and a thurifer, whose brass incense pot spewed forth a billowing cloud that had everyone in the sanctuary squinting. Beside him were Frank Russell and Billy Mitchell, decked out in the vestments of Deacon and Subdeacon. Kavanagh was glad they were with him. Old fuddy-duddies both, yet he was in touch with how fond he’d become of them, especially Billy, whose glass eye always seemed to be weeping but never was. Billy and Frank had no idea that this was to be his last Mass as a priest. Without knowing it, they were stand-ins for the entire fraternity from which he would walk away tonight. When they exchanged the ritual kiss of peace, he would bid adieu, through them, to all the brothers of the common life. In this one instance, perhaps, he would let the war-wounded Billy’s tears be a sign of actual feeling.
What most surprised Kavanagh was the equanimity with which he’d come to this moment. Over the last month, two or three nights a week, he’d taken to shivering in his beach chair on the rectory roof, smoking and nursing the one bourbon he allowed himself. But mostly he had spent his time on a last turn through the parish rounds, earnestly connecting with all those who’d depended on him—the nuns in the school, the hospital staff, certain long-term patients, lads on the basketball court, the penitents who’d so trusted him. Without their knowing, he was saying goodbye. It was out of the question that he reveal his plan simply to disappear from Inwood on the day after Christmas. “Thou art a priest forever” was the rubric, and, to the “good people of Good Shepherd,” the violation of his ordination vow would be a sacrilege, a scandal. Even those who loved him would feel betrayed. That was why he’d chosen not to burden the parish Christmas by leaving weeks ago. Not even the Monsignor knew.
Apart from his sisters and brother, the only person he’d sought to tell was Runner. At that Swiss-themed bar in New Jersey, Kavanagh had described to him the Madison Avenue moment of Non credo! and so John Malloy would not be surprised. Malloy had said that a shattered faith in the Church equated to the loss of God, but that had not been Kavanagh’s experience. On the contrary, God’s love for him was simply no longer contingent on his being a priest—there was the liberation. Kavanagh had said as much in the letter he wrote to Malloy, but Malloy had not answered. That lack of response was the negative echo of what else was missing.
Only a week ago, he’d finally yielded to a feeling not so much of longing as of incompleteness, and he’d allowed himself to return to The Cloisters. He’d rehearsed what he would say to her—that he’d come to the museum only to close the “loop” for which he’d been thrown. But he learned from the desk lady at the museum entrance that Rachel Vedette had abruptly quit her job at the beginning of December. She’d left no forwarding contact information—which Kavanagh, in his narcissis
m, took as a message sent to him. Fair enough, he told himself, and put whatever else he might have felt second to his hope for that grave woman’s happiness.
Her disappearance, together with his old friend’s lack of response, had simply cauterized the precipice-anguish of an unknown future. In an odd way, this pointed solitude seemed fitting, which perhaps explained his unexpected moral poise. For the first time in his life, he was acting on an impulse that belonged to him alone. The surprise was in finding that, apparently, he was up to it.
After the sung Kyrie, and the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, Kavanagh sat, flanked by altar boys, to hear the Epistle read by Billy Mitchell, a passage from the Letter to the Hebrews. Because of his glass eye, Billy always read the text with his head at an angle. Kavanagh listened in particular for the Letter’s definition of Christ: “He is the brightness of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s substance, and he upholds all things by the word of his power.” After the Epistle, and the rustle of the congregation’s rising to its feet, came the Gospel. Frank Russell swung the thurible with panache, then read the text from John, which famously concluded, as Kavanagh had been relieved to find when he worked on his sermon, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The congregation, acting in sync, sat down again. When Father Michael Kavanagh mounted the pulpit, it was less for a finale than for an initiation; the time had come to declare himself. “My dear friends,” he said softly. “Merry Christmas.” There was a stir as the decorum-minded people, all but one child, stifled the urge to reply. Yet the child spoke for the church, calling out, “Merry Christmas, Father.” Kavanagh smiled broadly, encouraging a buzz of laughter. He felt the wave of their affection cresting toward him, and his eyes burned suddenly. He said, “ ‘Full of grace and truth’: that’s not me, God knows. But I want to speak—if not gracefully—at least truthfully about why God comes to us in Jesus tonight. I hope you’ll bear with me.”
Kavanagh’s earnest feeling drew them in. He was quiet for a moment, and the congregation, too, became unusually hushed. Already, they sensed something out of the ordinary.
“When I was growing up,” he said, “they told me that I was in trouble from the minute I was born. Original Sin…you know. They told me that I was on the wrong side of a huge gulf between me on this side and God in heaven on the other. An abyss. I had no idea how I’d come to be on its wrong side, but there I was—with all of you, ‘poor banished children of Eve.’ And they told us—didn’t they?—that by ourselves there was nothing we could do to get across that gulf. To God. We were damned if we did, and damned if we didn’t. You know the feeling. Damned. Damned.”
He paused, letting the nods of the people speak, not only to him, but to one another. “Here’s how they explained it to us: Because Adam’s sin offended God’s honor, and threw the whole moral structure of Creation out of kilter, we humans became ugly, and Creation became ‘fallen.’ God had no choice but to turn against what He had made until, somehow, that Original Sin could be atoned for—counterbalanced with some infinite act of virtue. We humans could not do it, because the status of the One offended was divine, while our status was menial. God the Father, by Himself, could not repair the breach, because, far away in heaven, He was too remote—too unlike us. Only a Being who had something of both—human and divine—could bridge the gap between man and God. And the only way such a human-divine Being could accomplish this atonement was by offering Himself as a sacrifice—offering infinite suffering to outweigh the infinite offense on the scales of cosmic justice. So, they explained, God sent His only beloved Son to be this God-Man, bridging the divine-human abyss by fulfilling the Father’s will and dying on the cross, so that the Creator’s mind could be changed back from damning His Creation to loving it. This is what, on Christmas, the Church calls the ‘Good News.’
“Come again? My friends, what is ‘good’ in this news? Do we really believe that God, as a loving Father, could possibly require the brutal death of His beloved Son for any reason? On the night of his death, Jesus prayed, ‘Not my will but Thine be done.’ God’s will was Calvary? For what? To restore offended honor? What kind of father does that? Would you do it to your child—require his brutal death to satisfy some need of yours? Who here would do such a thing?”
He waited. Not a muscle moved, anywhere.
“No one,” Kavanagh said. “No parent here would do what we are sometimes told our heavenly Father did.”
Again, he let the silence build.
When he resumed, his tone had changed. He was a neighbor now, a friend—parsing through a mystery. “We are sometimes told that, because Jesus has taken our place and died for our sins, restoring the balance that had been thrown out of whack by Adam’s sin, anyone who is baptized in His name is ‘saved.’ That is, anyone who is baptized will be spared from being damned by God to an eternity in the lake of fire. Not just the wrong side of the abyss, but engulfed in flames! Forever! That is why we are so intent on baptizing our little babies, because if they die without the sacrament they die without being beloved of God. We can’t bring ourselves to picture the little ones in hell, so we imagine a place called limbo, which may be free of fire but amounts, in fact, to an eternity of unhappy exile. Come again? Our innocent babies? Who have done nothing wrong? God does not love them? Because no priest happened to be there in time, to baptize them? Come again?
“My friends, what kind of God is this? Do we really believe it took the brutal crucifixion of Jesus to change God’s mind from damnation to love? Do we believe the Creator of the vast cosmos turned against His own Creation because of one measly sin committed eons ago by one naked guy living in a garden? Do we believe, for that matter, that God only loves baptized Catholics? No salvation outside the Church? Yes, Popes and Church Councils seem to have taught that, but do we really believe it?
“Think of your Inwood neighbors, living on Seaman Avenue, or Park Terrace—neighbors named, let’s say, Cohen and Ginsberg, good people to whom you would entrust your own children in an emergency, or with whose daughters and sons your own kids play, or to whom you might simply be devoted as a friendly neighbor. How many of you men here tonight shared foxholes or cockpits or tin cans with fellas named Cohen and Ginsberg? Did you damn them, or did you thank God for them? Do we believe that the Cohens and Ginsbergs are, by definition and through no fault of their own, condemned to an eternity in hell for being Jews? Come again? Do we believe in a God who is that unjust?
“My friends, I do not believe it. Non credo! And, to tell you the truth, I don’t think you believe it, either. Si non credimus!” Father Kavanagh grinned suddenly. “If I put this in Latin, maybe it will seem less outlandish. What do you think?” He waited. Sensing the priest’s permission, the people laughed. Perplexity was palpable in the air, but so was relief. They were leaning forward, listening hard.
He went on: “So, if it is literally unbelievable that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came down on Christmas night to change the mind of our heavenly Father from damnation to salvation—if we can’t believe that—what can we believe? Simply this: Jesus did not come—and He certainly did not die—to change the mind of God. The mind of God, Jesus told us and told us and told us again, does not need to be changed. God is love, Jesus said. Always was and always will be. Constant. Faithful. Universal. The Creator never turned against the Creation—no matter what Adam did. The Father never ordered the death of His Son—no matter what unfolded in Jerusalem all those years ago. And our God never wills the suffering—now, or in the life to come—of any of His children.
“No. What happened as a result of the sin of Adam was that we, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, imagined that we were damned. We ‘poor banished children of Eve’ banished ourselves. God did not do that. God does not damn. We invented that monster-God ourselves, because, for reasons we do not understand, we are born inclined to feel that we deserve a monstrous fate.
But that is our mistake: our original mistake. Leave sin out of it.
“And, seeing our mistake, what God did in response was to send us word that we were wrong about Him. The Word that became flesh—tonight!—and lived among us. There is no gulf! There is no abyss! Now, that is Good News!”
Kavanagh fell silent for a moment, and he let his gaze move slowly and deliberately across the congregation, making eye contact with one parishioner after another.
Then, more quietly, he said: “Please remember what I am telling you tonight, and please remember it about me. I used to think that God loved me because I was good; because I was a priest. If I were otherwise, I would be damned. But I know now that that is not so. God loves me because God made me, and I exist. Period. And I invite you to take seriously your own experience of that same reality. You came into the world, in the words of the Epistle tonight, as ‘the exact imprint of God’s substance.’ That’s you! Therefore, trust yourselves. Trust your experience. Hey, if you think well of the Ginsbergs, God must think well of them. Anything that contradicts the knowledge that we have from our own lives cannot be true, and it cannot be the true faith of the Church.
“How do we know all this? Like the old spiritual says, Jesus told us so. That’s how. Remember His story of the Prodigal Son? How the father never stopped loving the wayward lad who squandered his inheritance and broke his father’s heart; and how the father, even then, when he glimpsed the runaway boy off in the distance, rushed out to greet him; and how the father had the huge banquet in his son’s honor, with the fatted calf and all? Jesus said—that is what God is like. The prodigal father—prodigal in love. So stop thinking God is the monster up there who is out to get you. Out to punish you. Out to send you to hell if you so much as have a bad thought, or disobey a rule, or eat a hot dog on a Friday, or fail to believe every little thing some preacher tells you to believe—including this one.
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