A Pie Plate Pilgrimage

by William Loewen

  Chapter 11 - Stylish

  For a few days Lydia didn’t do any more work on the book project. She was still confused by what happened at the board meeting on Monday and Luke was keeping her pretty busy with her regular tasks. She probably would have left it alone for the whole week except that Thursday after supper she ate the last piece of pie for dessert. She washed the pie plate with the other dishes from supper and thought about finding a place for it in her cupboards. When she pulled it out of the rinse water, she realized there was a message on the inside of it, hidden until now by the pie it had been holding.

  Lydia would normally ignore or just not notice a message like “God Bless This Home,” but when she read it, she imagined Gerald’s mother speaking that short prayer as she prepared the pie. She wondered if the old woman contemplated these words each time she baked with it for her family and if she contemplated these words when she baked Lydia’s pie. Looking down at the phrase in the pie plate, Lydia got out her notes again to have another look at the potential candidates. As she looked at Reverend Ballard’s profile, she remembered that Gerald had said the priest was a family friend. That probably meant that he was a friend of Gerald’s mother as well. If she liked him, was there something redeemable about this man after all? If she too were advocating for him, why didn’t she speak up at the meeting?

  While Lydia mulled over the implications of that relationship, she decided to give Oscar another call. He wasn’t home, but she left him a message saying that the project had hit a snag and would he be interested in getting together to talk about it over coffee. He called her back at the office the next day and they set up a time to meet after work.

  “So what’s your fiancée doing today?” Lydia asked after the barista put their drinks on the counter for them to take.

  “She and her mom are going shopping tonight.”

  “Wedding stuff?” Lydia asked as she put her coffee down and threw her jacket over the back of a chair.

  “Probably,” he said, choosing a seat with his back to the window, “but I don’t ask questions about shopping trips.”

  “Maybe it’s better that way,” added Lydia. “Does that mean you’re free to talk with me for a while then?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said reassuringly, “I’ve told her all about it, and she thinks it’s important that I’m meeting you.”

  “Really?” Lydia asked, “Why is it important to her?”

  Oscar realized he should have chosen his words differently. “It’s nothing,” he said, taking a sip from his coffee and hoping there wouldn’t be any follow-up questions.

  “No really,” she insisted, “tell me!”

  “Well,” he began reluctantly, “she thinks you’re sort of like a project I’m working on.”

  Lydia had gotten the sense from guys she had drinks with before that they were working toward a particular destination, but she was pretty sure that this wasn’t the kind of goal the fiancée had in mind.

  “What sort of project?” she asked.

  “She thinks I’m trying to win you over, you know, to bring you to Christ.”

  “… and you’re not?” Lydia asked, already mostly trusting that he wasn’t.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Like I said before, I think your project is really interesting, and I feel lucky to be part of this journey with you, but I have no agenda beyond that.”

  “Well, I’m lucky she’s so trusting,” Lydia responded. “What else did she say about me?”

  “She said you’re very stylish,” Oscar responded.

  “Oh wow, that’s a compliment!” Lydia could easily recall the skirt and blouse combination she had been wearing when Evangeline last saw her. She doubted however that the matching earrings she had selected would have been visible from the parking lot.

  Oscar shook his head. “She wasn’t commenting on your style,” he said.

  Lydia looked confused.

  “That’s her way of saying she thinks you’re pretty.”

  “Oh?” Lydia said carefully.

  “Yeah, it’s complicated,” Oscar said, putting down his coffee. “If I say that I agree, then she thinks I agree with what she meant and not with what she said, which is trouble. If I say I didn’t notice, then she asks what I did notice, which is also trouble. If I say that I disagree with her, then she knows that since I don’t know anything about fashion that I’m just trying to patronize her.”

  “I see,” Lydia answered.

  “Now don’t get me wrong,” he added, “it’s entirely possible that through off-hand or slightly insensitive comments I’ve made in the past, I’ve given her cause to be suspicious. She’s probably right to be critical of me, I just wish she’d come out and say exactly what she was thinking.”

  Lydia was now thoroughly amused both by his analysis of the situation and his own admittance of guilt. In her own “girlfriend days” long ago, she didn’t view herself as the jealous type, but a few of her female friends had been guilty of playing this kind of mind game with their boyfriends too. Lydia had just never heard a guy decipher it so well.

  “So what did you say?” she asked.

  “I said that you probably just liked dressing up for the office, and then I told her that I really like the outfits she wears to her job too. I think that was good enough.”

  “Well done,” she said. She resisted the urge to ask what he really thought, but she didn’t want to give his fiancée any more to worry about.

  “Also,” Oscar added, “when she found out that you hadn’t settled on the author yet, she told me I should advocate for her father because she thinks he would be a good candidate.”

  “Would he?”

  “No,” Oscar answered and then retracted. “Maybe I shouldn’t answer so quickly. He is the lead pastor of a big church that seems to be keeping its members, so he must be doing a number of things right. He could probably sell five hundred copies in one Sunday at the church too. He just doesn’t really have anything new and dynamic to say that you can’t already get in the Christianity section of the bookstore. I also think the fame would get to his head.”

  “And this is the guy who’s giving you his daughter’s hand in marriage?”

  Oscar figured it would be easier to treat her question like it was rhetorical, and not answer.

  “So how did your Board Meeting go?” he asked.

  “Not good. The Board rejected the candidate I like and I can’t bring myself to work with the one they endorsed.”

  “But you were already suspecting that might happen, weren’t you?” he asked. “So who did they want you to go with?”

  “I suspected they’d go with the Anglican priest, but I didn’t think they would ignore the others as easily as they did. Had you heard of Reverend Ballard before this project?”

  “I know I’ve read his name in the newspapers, but I don’t know much about him.”

  “What do you think of him as an author?”

  “Well, I think all of your candidates are really interesting. I’d love to be able to pick their brains with you some more,” Oscar said, “but I wouldn’t say that I had any clear personal favourite. I’m not terribly surprised that they went with Reverend Ballard. He seems to fit the writer profile the best from what I read in the policy manual, but I can’t see how his writing style or his intended content would have any kind of mass appeal.”

  “Thank you!” Lydia exclaimed. “You’re the first person that’s agreed with me on this. Maybe it’s just the office he holds that everyone likes, but so far I thought I was the only one that wasn’t under his spell.”

  “Well Lydia, there’s something you need to know about priests and pastors.”

  “What’s that?” she asked eager to gain a sense of understanding that had been missing thus far in the process.

  “They are entirely unnecessary,” he said.

  “Come on,” she protested. It wasn’t that she disagreed; she just didn’t want him to get too comfortable making inflammatory arguments. />
  “Not only do we not need them, but they know we don’t need them. There are tons of stories in the Bible where Jesus tells someone off. Pastors love telling these stories, but the vast majority of the people he told off were the first century Palestine equivalent of pastors. They were perpetuating a religious system where they were the intermediaries between God and the people. But that wasn’t what God wanted, that wasn’t what the people needed, and it was exactly what Jesus came to replace.”

  “Should I be writing some of this down?” Lydia asked, more than a little confused.

  “No,” Oscar replied, realizing again who he was talking to. “Sorry if I’m over doing it with the Biblical arguments. Here’s another way of looking at it. If you go to a music concert, you might be impacted emotionally by what you experienced there. Afterward you might want to thank the performers, and that would make sense because they created that awe-inspiring event. But if you have a spiritual moment listening to a pastor’s sermon, even though the pastor orchestrated the whole morning program, he will likely say that it wasn’t him, but the Spirit working through him, that allowed you to be moved. He or she might also rightly say that if you discipline yourself with regular prayer, Bible reading and fellowship with other believers, etc., you can maintain the spiritual high that you have experienced. So that’s what I’m talking about when I say that they are unnecessary.”

  “You should probably know this better than me,” Lydia said, “but pastors do a lot more than just preach sermons, don’t they? They still get to make rules for people and rant about how evil society is, right?”

  “It might not sound like it, but I actually feel sorry for today’s pastors,” Oscar answered. “Churches expect their pastors to do much more than preach sermons. In fact, congregations ask for so many things that there is no way the pastor can possibly have received adequate training to perform their complete job description at a professional level. Even in a small town church, pastors are essentially the CEO of a non-profit organization with somewhere around a hundred members, half a million dollars in assets, and over a hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue. From their first day on the job they instantly become part of the church’s brand image and its main public relations representative. In theory, they are the first person their church members turn to for personal, family, and marriage counselling. They are asked to organize and perform any number of marriage, baptism and funeral ceremonies. They lobby on behalf of the church members to government, business and social institutions. And then, while they are doing all those other things, they still need to preach roughly 40 sermons a year that draw on almost two thousand years of Judeo-Christian literature and have some combination of inspiration, education, and entertainment. Maybe a potential pastor can be qualified to do a few of these things and have studied most of the rest, but all of them? No way!”

  “It sounds like you’re really blaming the people of the church,” Lydia said, surprising herself by identifying with the pastor. “Why is it his fault if too much is asked of him?”

  “Whose fault is it,” Oscar asked, “the people that write up the job description, or the person that says with a straight face that they can do it all?”

  “I guess I see your point. But why wouldn’t they just be honest that the job is impossible?”

  “When any of us are faced with a job that seems too big, we are forced to either play down the task or play up our ability to overcome it. With all that’s involved in the role of pastor, it’s really tough to play down the task. Depending on a person’s ego, it can be really tough not to play up their abilities.”

  His opposition seemed more rational than hers, but Lydia still wondered if there was an emotional component of his argument. This wouldn’t be the first time he seemed to be speaking against his future father-in-law.

  “You don’t need to sell me on pastors being frauds,” Lydia said comfortably. “I’d love to sell this kind of thinking to the Board of Directors, but to market this book all of our main ideas need to have clear Biblical justification. Does the Bible say anything like this?”

  “I could give you two answers,” he began. “The short answer is yes. The old system was that people could only connect with God through the priests, but when Jesus died, the curtain separating God and humanity was torn in half. After that, we didn’t need intermediaries anymore.”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Lydia said, “but I think I need to hear the long answer.”

  “I know you didn’t grow up in the church, so that explanation won’t make any sense, but just trust me that the short, technical answer is ‘yes.’ The long answer is that we’re not supposed to read the Bible that way. Too many people, especially Christians, read the Bible with a particular question in mind, and so they turn to a particular passage hoping to find a particular answer. If the Bible was an encyclopaedia, that would be fine, but it isn’t. The Bible is a collection of national history, family narratives, poetry, prophetic writing, letters between friends, and a whole bunch of story-telling. The Bible is a story of the relationship between God and his people, and sure there are overarching principles, underlying themes and core values, but the structure just doesn’t lend itself to finding short answers to complex questions.”

  Lydia had been hoping for a more concise and direct answer, but it was still a refreshing opinion, and one that she as a literature student could appreciate.

  “They gave me a month,” she explained to him. “In that time I have to either sell them on one of the other three candidates or come to terms with using Reverend Ballard. I’d love to be able to find a better candidate, or at least something more interesting about the ones that I already have, but I think I’ve exhausted my resources. If nothing changes, I’ll go back to the board and they’ll tell me to get the priest to write the book, which I don’t want to do, plus they’ll know I’ve wasted a month of the company’s time.”

  “I don’t want to impose,” Oscar said carefully, “but I’ve been reading over the documents you gave me, and I think I know a guy that would fit your company’s expectations. I mean, he’s a smart guy, knows his Bible, makes a good first impression, he has a lot to say, and I’ve been told he’s a pretty good-looking guy. His name is Zack. If you’d be willing to meet him, I could try to set up a time with him.”

  “Who said he’s good-looking?” Lydia asked, “Evangeline?”

  “Well she said he always looks stylish, so I put two and two together,” Oscar said with a grin.

  “Sure, why don’t we set up a meeting with him?” she agreed. “You’ve got better connections in the local Christian community than I do.”

  She didn’t have terribly high hopes for this friend, but even if he wasn’t as good as advertised, it couldn’t hurt to have one more option available to her.

  As they picked through the last of their fries and finished their drinks, Lydia went on to describe the rest of her week. She mentioned meeting Gerald’s mother and receiving the pie as a gift and that she had no idea what she would do with the plate.

  “You could try baking pies with it,” Oscar suggested sarcastically.

  Right around the time they were ready to leave, Evangeline called Oscar’s cell phone to see if he was ready and asked him to come over right away. Lydia offered to give him a ride, but he insisted on taking the bus, so they went their separate ways, promising to meet again on Saturday.

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