Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  “We must also try to distinguish—and this is particularly true for us in holy orders—a secular call from a spiritual call. Both may be valid but they are not the same. The Bible has taught us that the spiritual has precedence; a secular need, however great, must yield to it. This indeed is a prominent article of Jesus’ teaching, though not always of His practice. We see Him, as you know, in the company of the underdog, the underprivileged. But does His sympathy for these lowly ones reach out only to their spiritual part? No. Do not let yourself be deceived. The transcendent Jesus is also a warm human being. He is present at the Marriage of Cana, where there is not enough wine to go around, and, instead of accepting this unfairness of distribution as inevitable and foreordained, He makes wine. When He preaches to a hungry multitude, He makes loaves and fishes. Even more interesting, he does not offer any spiritual comfort, any pie in the sky, to the leper who comes to Him saying ‘Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.’ He cures the man and sends him on his way. Which shows that a fleshly need did not always have a low priority with Jesus; far from it. I dare to think that a secular need equally in our day may take on a sacred character, may cry out to Heaven for remedy. Our Lord is no longer on earth today, and the day of miracles in the old sense is past. Instead, we have our own latter-day miracles of science and technology, capable of feeding and healing the multitude if we will only use them rightly.”

  So far, pretty telling, although the point ought to be made that poverty had been inevitable in Jesus’ day, owing to primitive methods of production; this explained His doctrine of Christian resignation—appropriate in its time-frame but now in need of updating. The whole passage could be expanded when he sat down with pencil and paper. And he would have to look up the words from St. Matthew in the revised version; when drafting a sermon in his head, he fell back, perforce, on King James, which memory—like Helen and her three young allies—was always eager to supply. But he never let details get between him and a powerful idea, such as the one his inspiration had been working toward. Experience had shown him that he might lose it if he did not swiftly clothe it in words.

  “And what of civil rights, you may ask, dear friends. And the right to a fair trial and to speak our minds openly? Don’t they belong to the political rather than the religious sphere? Yes and no, depending. If the craving for justice and equality was put in our hearts by God (you will not tell me they came from the devil), and in all our hearts to the same measure, then it is God’s business that this yearning of the spirit be recognized as belonging to all alike and be loved in all alike….”

  That was the real meat of the sermon, and he had been keen to hear Gus’s reaction to it. It was a ground-breaking argument for the pastorate’s joining in activities (exemplified by today’s mission) still looked on by many, in the Church and outside, as extra-curricular. An overwhelming argument, he had thought. But somewhere along the way he had lost sight of Jonah. This morning, while shaving, he had been wondering how he could work Jonah back in. “We in the ministry, like the prophet Jonah, have accepted a special function of attending to the Lord’s business, wherever and whenever it calls us. But the world is a bigger, more complex place today than it was in Jonah’s time, while we, poor mortals, are still man-sized, like the prophet. We evidently cannot answer, with holy alacrity, all the calls that come in to our spiritual switchboard. Not long ago, for instance, on the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of our Christian year, a young Iranian came up to your rector, after divine service…. What was I to tell him, dear friends? That because he was a stranger and we had our own vineyard to tend, his call, though seemingly urgent, must be placed on ‘Wait’?”

  Jerked awake, like Saul struck down by the questioning Saviour on the road to Damascus, Frank now had the awful suspicion that “Wait” might indeed have been the right answer. He watched the airport Hilton go by and was assailed by a crowd of tardy second thoughts. He was no longer proud of his sermon draft, which to his mind, more uncertain with every passing second, appeared as self-serving. The unfortunate switchboard metaphor pointed to what looked like a basic unwillingness to think through the question of their mission: “Those figures of speech are cop-outs, Father,” John had told him. “You bring in astronauts and space modules when you don’t want to say what you mean.” Frank now admitted the charge. To somebody of his democratic temperament, he guessed, the idea of greater and lesser as applied to other people’s emergencies was troubling. Yet a man doing the Lord’s business had to budget his outlay of himself.

  He asked himself whether a warning—or a sorrowful reproach—could really have come to him from on high as he dozed. Or was the sinking feeling in his stomach due to unseasonably early rising and an undigested breakfast? If God had spoken in his ear, it would be something completely outside his experience. Gus was on close terms with his Maker and seemed to converse with Him intimately as a friend, but Frank, while envying this, attributed it to Rachel’s loss. He himself, though he had been granted perfect faith, had never had a direct intimation of the divine presence, not even during the religious crisis that had shaken him up when he was sixteen and led him from the high-school debating squad into sacred studies. On the other side of the coin, inner division, soul struggle, likewise was outside his ken, except as he observed it in parishioners who came to him for guidance. And his only real acquaintance with the pangs of remorse was when he had hurt one of the children’s feelings and sought to repair the damage—easier, he often found, in a united family than mending a broken toy. He tried to be a good man and a good pastor and was content to know God, and love Him, through the liturgy and through His commandments.

  Yet now it was as if God had deserted him; this too was a new sensation for Frank. The divine guidance on which he relied, confident that it was there, though invisible, steering him on the right road, was suddenly noticeable by its absence. He no longer felt directed but, instead, irresolute as a pinball hesitating on the board. There remained natural reason, which God, who had furnished it, would expect him to use. If it was too late, as he guessed it was, to draw back from this enterprise, he could still be clear with himself on it and gain, maybe, a new perspective.

  In short, to come swiftly to the point (Frank, Jr., was braking as he approached the turn-off for the airport), could it be rightly said that he and the Bishop were answering a call of the kind that had come to Jonah or were they merely acting as world citizens carrying out a secular task? In his own mind, Frank noticed, he had been referring to it as a “mission,” which implied, he guessed, an apostolate. But possibly that was bad doctrine. An old-time prophet sent by God on this errand would have aimed at the Shah’s reclamation. Yet he and the Bishop (if he could speak for Gus) had no intention of appearing before the monarch, as early Christians, to say nothing of the old-time prophets, would have done. They were going as mere “observers” and practically by stealth. It was probably far-fetched, under modern conditions—screening, security, protocol—to think of securing an audience with the sovereign. But if they failed to make an effort to convey God’s displeasure to him, would they not be guilty of Jonah’s sin?

  There was a big hole—Frank now forced himself to recognize—right in the middle of that confounded sermon. Jonah’s sin. It was not just disobedience. His wilfulness had a strange motive. The fact was, Jonah did not want Nineveh to repent. The reason he ignored the Lord’s command, indeed did his best to escape from it, was that he was afraid that Nineveh would and so avoid God’s punishment.

  To tell the truth, Frank had never been able to understand Jonah’s personality structure. But it was as clear as could be in the Bible that his governing passion was to see Nineveh destroyed, rather than saved. He was a stubborn cuss, with a one-track mind. Being in the whale did not teach him anything. When he finally did preach in that iniquitous city (since the Lord by then had him in His grip), he effected a conversion that any hellfire preacher would envy. The king “arose from his throne and laid his robe from him and covered him w
ith sackcloth and ashes” and ordered his people to turn from their evil ways and “the violence that was in their hands.” So the city was saved. But Jonah was angry with God for sparing it. He sat under his gourd-vine and reviled. Why? Narrow, sectarian Judaism maybe: clannish jealousy of the Ninevehites, who were Gentiles. It almost looked as if Jonah did not want his God to be a true Christian.

  There was a lesson there for Frank and Gus. “The violence that was in their hands.” Change Nineveh to Teheran, and the meaning was clear: for His business, God had no need of “observers”—He knew about the torture and the illegality. What He held out to sinful men was redemption, and for that He needed bearers of His Word.

  The car had drawn up at the curb in front of Air France: Frank, Jr., was opening the trunk. In the back seat, Frank sat with his head in his hands, alleging a touch of migraine. He was still thinking. No minister today, he reasoned, would aspire to make converts of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and Nassiri, his secret-police chief. But a man of God, possessed of the living faith, would hope to bring them to serve God in their own way, as good Moslems, and obey His commandments. Naturally, he and the Bishop, unlike Jonah, did not desire their destruction, whatever Sadegh and his friends might feel on that score. Yet for Christians the mere absence of evil wishes toward a wrongdoer was not enough. As unafraid Christians, they ought not to be satisfied with conducting an investigation and when they were safely out of the country announcing the results at an airport press conference—Asad’s idea—in Athens or Paris.

  That still might be very much worth doing (Frank was not prepared to gainsay it), but where did the Church come in? If he and Gus did not want to open themselves to the charge of abusing their sacerdotal function, they should go as private citizens, with no handles to their names. Yet without the mantle of their calling, they were no different from Joe Zilch, in short useless to the Iranians. It was a dilemma, all right.

  Taxis behind them were honking. Making signs of apology and conciliation, Frank hastily descended from the car. Gus was standing by their baggage, waving his umbrella to attract the attention of a disappearing porter. He looked fresh as a morning rose, all primed to go, without a backward thought, apparently. Still, it was one thing for Gus—who was retired—to be flying off to far lands, and another for Frank, rector of St. Matthew’s, charged with the administration of the sacraments and the maintenance of Christian values in the broad community of New York. Of course he had his curates; he had considered them when making his decision. They could run the show, as they did anyway when he was taking his vacation. If he was not back by Ash Wednesday, they would get some useful practice in preaching Lenten sermons.

  Yet an uneasiness still gripped him as he stood on the walk eyeing the jet-liners taking off into the overcast sky. It came home to him that, like Jonah, he might be taking evasive action and setting sail for Tarshish when Nineveh, behind him, was where the Lord meant him to be. Would he be cast, he wondered, into the belly of the whale? He thought of the children’s tearfulness about air travel—so manifest to him this morning—of Frank, Jr., who had gone to park the car. How would he react when he learned that his mother was pregnant, with his father on the other side of the world and having no fixed date of return? Frank’s long-standing doubts about Sadegh’s competence returned, combining suddenly with his other doubts and anxieties to make him wish from the bottom of his heart (he refrained from praying) that something would yet happen so that they would not have to go.

  Unworthy man, he chided himself, could it be that he was plain afraid? Having bitten off more than he could chew, he might finally be recognizing it at the airport, of all places, where retreat was cut off. But if it was unmanly fear, not the voice of conscience, that was assailing him, he was all the more obliged to quell it and abide by his commitment. There was no time left in any case to peer into his motivations or decide what, if anything, he was nervous of. He must take the plunge briskly, as he used to urge the young ones gathered shivering on the lake shore for the first dip of the season: the water always felt chillier to those who hung back, wetting a toe and getting cold feet. He could not let Sadegh down.

  Gus’s freckled old hand was testing the weight of Rachel’s book bag, which had been placed on top of the others for fear it would get dirty or crushed. No skycap was in sight. If Gus were to have a little heart attack…? The dear soul had been warned by his specialist against lifting anything heavier than a shopping bag of groceries. If he were to try to carry that bag himself, which would be like him, it could not do him any serious damage. But a few palpitations, enough to rule out the trip for both of them—no question but that Frank would have to take the patient home…?

  The crazy thoughts that came to you in stress situations, as if planted in your mind by the devil! It made a modern man wonder whether it was not a mistake to doubt Satan’s real existence. But of course, thanks to good habits, the “Get thee behind me” followed in a flash; he had hardly felt the brush of temptation before he took the bag firmly from the old man’s grasp and set it back on the pile. They had a few minutes, he admonished, before check-in. A porter would surely come. Or he would find one of those carts, like the ones they had in the supermarket. But now a new dastardly thought came to tantalize him. If the flight were to be canceled? They did that quite often these days, on account of the fuel crisis, if the plane was not full. He was certain somebody had told him that. Frank shook his head. It would be only a reprieve. His apple-cheeked old friend had his timepiece out again. “The others ought to be here, Frankie. Should I go in and have a look?”

  Frank was slow to reply. If the rabbi was not there, or the Senator, if nobody on this blamed committee was there, then they would be free to go home. It would be God’s will. The prayer he had not let himself pray would be answered. But if he sent Gus inside to reconnoiter and any one of the promised four was there, there could be no turning back. This was something, Frank decided, that he did not yet want to know. As long as he did not know, he could still hope.

  “Never mind, Gus. I see a porter.” In fact a skycap was wheeling a cart down the walk toward them. Preceded by their baggage, Frank and Gus went through the door. At the Air France counter for Economy class, Sadegh was waiting, alone.

  To his astonishment and moral relief, Frank’s instantaneous reaction was anger: faced with the fact that the committee to all appearances consisted of Gus and himself, he could not contain the oath of disappointment that sprang to his lips. “God damn it, Sadegh, you promised!” How little the human heart knew itself! He had sinned in mistrusting his own willingness, nay, eagerness, to fight this good fight. Now that their fine, broad-based crusade was dissolving into thin air before his disbelieving eyes, he could have wept for the pity of it. There was a lesson there of some kind: to use a homely comparison, it was like tossing a coin to decide whether to go hiking or take out the canoe; often you only learned that it was heads you really wanted when the other side, tails, showed its face.

  Two

  “BON VOL,” AILEEN SIMMONS wrote on one of the green-printed cards distributed by the hostess; upon reflection, she added “Service aimable.” On the line Effectuez-vous ce voyage pour Affaires □ Tourisme □ Autres motifs____? she had placed a check after Autres motifs, without becoming more specific. Her occupation she had given simply as “Educatrice.” “Recteur d’université” sounded a bit pompous for the president of a women’s college, and the presence of the other kind of rector, across the aisle, made her hesitate to assume the title. She would have liked to see how those men of God described themselves and what they would put next to “Other” as their reason for taking the flight—like good monolingual Americans, they would use the verso, obviously, provided for English-speakers. Aileen’s bump of curiosity was well developed, and it interested her, as a one-time social historian, to note how other people responded to polls and questionnaires, which for her were always a puzzle, like a multiple-choice test.

  The problems of identity posed by forms to be comp
leted were one of the perplexities of travel for a thinking reed. The majority seemed to know who and what they were and expressed it swiftly, in block letters, but a worry bird like herself could pore for half a minute over “Domicile.” She never knew whether to give her tax residence, which was Fayetteville, Arkansas, her home town, or Sunnydale, Massachusetts, which was the home of Lucy Skinner College and her semi-real residence. Then, on leaving a country, she often forgot which she had decided to put down on entering, thus making herself a mystery, she supposed, to compilers of statistics if those entry and exit forms were kept and ever actually compared.

  A person named Aileen, more commonly spelled Eileen, must have started out in life with an identity crisis, she reckoned, and Simmons was frequently written as Simons—she had learned that when looking herself up in Who’s Who: “SIMMONS, see also SIMONS.” In her passport her eyes were “blue,” but in her old passport they had been “gray,” and her height in the current one had been officially corrected from 6’ 3” (a comical erratum of the U.S. Passport Office) to 5’ 3”. Her hair, which had had a gray or graying interval, unrecorded in a travel document, had returned to a shade she called for brevity’s sake “light brown.” She answered to “Dr. Simmons,” “President Simmons,” and, by preference, “Miss Simmons” or “Simmie.” She did not care for “Ms.”

  She was a chameleon, she imagined. The minute she stepped into a French airplane, she was talking French with the crew, not because she was a Francophile but because she knew how, having done two years of graduate work in French universities and lived with French families. She exercised her French, as she kept up her tennis, whenever the occasion presented itself—in restaurants, chiefly, but also in meetings with her French department staff and at dinners she gave for visiting conférenciers. When teased, she always said she was amortizing Senator Fulbright’s investment; she had been an early Fulbright scholar, at Montpellier and Strasbourg. In Strasbourg, she had also learned German, which she kept up by listening to records of lieder and Mozart and Strauss operas (she loved music) but she no longer tried to speak it with Germans. In Mexico, one summer, she had picked up some Spanish.