Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  After Mass, Mrs. Cohen stuffed their backpacks with food.

  “You’ve got a visitor eh? Here, you’ll be needing more than usual. No arguments! Put that money back in your pocket! You don’t want to get me cranky. Then I’d have to go to confession to you for getting mad at you. A fine pickle you’d put me in then, eh? Here, take this marzipan. It’s Sunday. Enjoy it. Now what about the dried beans?”

  And so forth.

  At the end of her lecture, she removed two letters from her bosom and stuck them into the knapsack.

  “My brother-in-law in Smyrna was here yesterday. Two letters for you.”

  Elijah did not open them until he and Brother Ass stopped for a rest at the halfway point on their return journey. He sat in the shade of a rock and read the envelope. The return address was a prison in Illinois. The stamp was postmarked Chicago.

  Dear Buddy,

  Don’t worry, they can’t trace this letter to wherever you are. I still have some friends. The touristy couple who are my couriers like to make pilgrimages to the mysterious East, and they promised to drop my immortal words into a mailbox in Istanbul, addressed to a certain Mr. Cohen of Smyrna. Wow! You do get around.

  I recognized the handwriting, but I doubt if anyone else did on this side of the Atlantic. The alias gave me a chuckle. Since when did you start calling yourself Davy? Oh well, I penetrated your disguise instantly. I read about your various crimes in the papers and recognized the scenario. Same as mine, right? Right! Nice people these new-world democrats. Home of the brave and land of the free. Looks like I’ll be out in the year 2020, maybe sooner for good behavior.

  I can’t tell you how much your words meant to me. I’ve made my peace with being unjustly condemned. It does relieve a lot of tension. No more fundraising, no more torturous bingo nights, no more haggling with writers and committees—I never could stand all that ego-involvement. No more pride, no more rage. I work in the machine shop. I read the Scriptures. I spend a lot of time on the last book of the Bible, and I’ve got to say it looks more and more like a lens coming into focus. Maybe I got squashed under the big Apocalypse steamroller. So what! I finally get a cell of my own and plenty of time to pray. You’d be amazed at how many honest criminals there are in here. They’re as guilty as sin and admit it, which is a better way of life than the folks outside who are guilty and think they’re innocent. We’re all criminals at heart, even those of us who are innocent, technically speaking. Cain and Abel—you know the story.

  Some of the folks in here want ministering. I love it. Good old-fashioned priesthood. It’s hard but at least it’s honest. I worry a lot. It’s still my biggest sin. I worry about the Church and I worry about you and I worry about my brothers’ kids who have all jettisoned the Faith. Gertie died of a stroke. Thank God my parents died before all this happened.

  They say the Holy Father is very ill. I guess there are a lot of people glad about it. What’s going to happen to the Church with so many zombies walking around in her, spouting off in her? What comes next, Davy? Is there any hope for us? The Pope always talked about hope, and maybe that was his big grace. He taught us to hope when everything seems lost. I thought a lot about that last December during my trial. I always had a secret dislike of Advent, because it’s such a crazy busy time of year for priests. But I really enjoyed it this year, if you can imagine anyone enjoying a liturgical season while he’s being sent to jail for something he didn’t do. Advent, placed so strategically at the dying of the year, is good, good training. We’re not supposed to be like the ancient pagans who watched the coming of winter with a kind of terror-stricken obsession, mesmerized by the specter of death, enslaved to death, sacrificing their children to the insatiable appetite of death. Not supposed to be, but funny how the deathly vapors seep into your heart without you knowing it. During Advent, I learned to kick it out. I learned to gaze into the growing dark with spring in my eyes. Impossible? Yep! But Christians should always keep an icon of the impossible in their hearts. Right?

  Well, it’s Ordinary Time now, and back to the usual. Writing this has been good therapy—even better than baying under the moon. Thanks for listening. It’s not often I get to rhapsodize. How many ferverinos do you hear out there in the desert? You did say desert. Where? Africa? Asia? Some European city? It’s all desert now, isn’t it?

  I hope that somewhere, somehow, you’ve got a cell of your own.

  Love,

  Ed Smith

  The second letter contained no salutation and no signature. It was typed, and like the first was addressed to “D. Pastore”, care of Mr. Cohen of Smyrna. It had been mailed from Athens.

  I received your message six weeks after posting. I am relieved to have news of you, and so is H. F., who sends you his blessing. Pray for him, for he is much maligned in every direction. Do not believe what you read about him, or about anything regarding our affairs. I hope to come to you by late spring or early summer if the political situation improves. Our contact in Constantinople has been of great help. He will take me to Smyrna and from thence to persons who will connect me to your current location. I do not know where you are, but I feel assured that you are well. Feed the flock that has been given into your hands. I entrust you totally to the care of the Mother of God.

  —Fide, C.D.F.

  Elijah deciphered it easily. Constantinople was the office of the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Fide was Latin for Faith. C.D.F. meant the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The letter was from the prefect—Dottrina, Billy had called him.

  The prior welcomed them back to the hut and set a meal of boiled lentils and onions on the table. For dessert they feasted on a patty of oat bread with sesame seeds and slices of sweet marzipan. Elijah told his companions about Dottrina’s letter, and they were greatly encouraged by it.

  “Think of it! A cardinal coming here!” said Brother Ass. “I’ve never met a cardinal before.”

  Elijah and the prior chuckled.

  “Cardinals are just like you and me”, said the prior.

  “Oh, I don’t believe that”, said the small one. He jumped up and began to bustle about the hut straightening everything. He grabbed a broom and began to sweep the dirt floor.

  “Sit down and enjoy your coffee. His Eminence may not arrive for months.”

  “I hope he comes soon, Father Elijah, then we’ll have a regular monastery again. Four of us make a choir.”

  “We will elect you prior, brother.”

  “Never!” said the small one, shocked. “Never!”

  “I think I shall be the chief theologian”, said the prior, “and the cook!”

  “We won’t be the first to make a monastery here”, said Elijah.

  “These stones have fallen and risen more than once since the Incarnation. Behind the hut are the foundations of an ancient oratory.”

  “Who put this hut back together?”

  “I did. It’s only a beginning.”

  “You don’t intend to reconstruct a whole monastery by hand!”

  “Yes. One stone at a time.”

  After vespers, Elijah went outside and watched the stars as they appeared one by one above the ridge in the east. He was surprised to see the silhouette of a man standing against the deep blue of the dusk, looking down into the ravine, watching.

  Elijah shouted a greeting, but it was doubtful that his voice carried that far. He waved, and the figure waved back.

  He beckoned it down, but the figure remained without moving. Then it signaled that Elijah should climb to him.

  Puzzled, he got up, dusted off his trousers, and ascended along the goat path.

  As he neared the ridge, he recognized the figure. It was the boy who had showed him the cave several months before. He was an adolescent of about sixteen years, tall, sturdy, his bare feet planted firmly, dressed in white pants and shirt, his face flaming in the last light reflected off the western sea. Then Elijah realized that the sun had already set, and the burnished bronze of the boy’s face was lit by an
unknown source.

  “Now you are to be shown a new thing”, he said.

  The boy turned and climbed higher, not looking back, confident in Elijah’s obedience. Elijah followed him, going more by sense than by vision, for the dark fell swiftly and the pale dust of the track soon became invisible. He proceeded slowly, wondering, overcome with awe, guided only by the tower of the boy’s back receding ahead of him.

  XXII

  Apokalypsis

  As the darkness on the mountains increased, Elijah became anxious. The receding form grew dim, then invisible. He called to him, but there was no answer. He staggered along blindly for several meters until he tripped against a stone and fell. He sat and waited. The boy would soon notice and come back to find him.

  The boy did not return. Elijah called again and again, but only insects and night birds answered. A fox barked in the distance. A ship out on the Aegean sounded its foghorn. Clouds rolled in from the west and blotted out the stars. He held his hand in front of his eyes but could not see it.

  Eventually he began to wonder if the boy were a deceiving spirit. If he were an angel of the Most High, he would have returned by now. There was nothing he could do but wait for the dawn. If he tried to go forward into unknown terrain, he could stumble over the edge of any one of a thousand ravines and never be found. If he tried to retrace his steps, he would surely lose his way. He had spent many nights of his life listening in the dark. Always he had prayed, and always he had remembered to increase his prayer when the protests of his emotions struck their noisy chorus, their arguments, their vertigo, dragging him down into nightmare. During his life, he had hidden in sewers and attics, in barns and holes in the earth, in the bilges of ships and, deepest of all, in the spiritual night of Carmel. He was, therefore, accustomed to the assault upon the senses, the temptation to run somewhere, anywhere, in order to escape the eternal, relentless oppression; alternately, to attack the faceless dark with threats, sobs, and imprecations. He had learned the art of quieting his mind, then his emotions, and finally his spirit. Now he prayed, as he always did in such situations, the prayers of the will. He recited the Psalms aloud, slowly, employing each word deliberately, pushing back the shroud covering him in layers that grew heavier with each passing breath.

  Recollection evaded him. Formal prayers fell from his tongue like lead. Eventually, he cried out, “O Lord, I need help. What did You lead me out here for? Was it You? Was it the enemy?”

  The night did not respond; if anything, it thickened, pressing down upon his consciousness. Where had the voices gone? Why were they silent? The self-awareness that had come to him the night before now repeated itself: Stripped before his eyes was the fundamental problem of his soul—he had been given everything and it did not suffice. In the past the Lord had spoken to him through dreams, visions, interior locutions. He began to doubt them now. Was all of it the product of a tropical mythology planted within his subconscious? Was the dialogue merely an exchange between the hemispheres of the brain, the traffic between the bicameral mind? Was it intuition informing intellect, or the converse? Or was it pure imagination invested with a kind of magisterial authority by his beliefs? Was it no more than a set of ethics, a system of religious thought, a beautiful culture, blown away now by the winds of absolute reality? Was Smokrev right about castles and fairies? Maybe the only relief from a universe such as this was a choice between a deliberate leap into the abyss and a drive for power over what had not yet been sucked into it, sustaining for a time the illusion of freedom from the inexorable pull of gravity.

  He no longer knew. And the unknowing increased his anxiety to the point that it began to rip through his chest, growing steadily worse until he wondered if the terror would reach pathological proportions. If it did not soon stop, psychotic fear would drive him to throw himself over the edge of a cliff long before his companions could search for him by daylight. He hoped that he was suffering a heart attack, and the possibility that he was dying cheered him for an instant, before the negations pressed in with renewed vigor.

  He forced himself to think about everything he knew of the spiritual life, everything in his memory that gave evidence against the dark—but it was useless. Mysticism? Even to pretend to call this the dark night of the soul was an absurdity. To identify this abysmal nothingness, unrelieved by a flicker of consolation or certainty, or by the merest whiff of spiritual nobility, was so false a notion that to call it a parody of genuine spirituality was to be too kind. What was his name? Who was he: an Elijah without a raven; a David without a kingdom; a Professore Pastore scratching in the dirt of a thousand dead civilizations; a Dovidl spinning his dreydels on the parlor rug as the madman spins his fantasy with horrible logic; a bishop preaching his homilies to an empty cathedral—a hut constructed of stones that had fallen and risen, fallen and risen how many times, destroyed and recreated by the hands of man. Man? What was man? He was man, but what was this man-thing he pretended to call himself? A beggar, a hero-king, a sisyphus; a bird stuck on a thorn, its pierced heart palpitating in the cage of its ribs; a father potent with seed and self-inflicted sterility; a scribbler of plays with no beginning and no end, no hero and no villain—scribbling, scribbling as the train hauled him to the furnace; a painter, a poet, a huckster, a fool in the pigs’ wallow of self-pity, a prodigal son spending the inheritance of his thousand kisses, running home to a father who did not exist? An angel, a satyr, a golem? None of these and all of them. He was man. Meaningless man. Meaningless, meaningless. Even the word meaningless was meaningless. He was nothing but a collation of mental and physical aches, a bag of foul memories that had managed to drag itself out of the fire of holocaust, surviving only by accident, leaving a smear of its egoism and its spiritual pride behind it like a snail’s trail of putrefaction.

  Ruth? Little one, my daughter? Anna? Severa? Pawel?

  Empty words. Paper constructions, roaring up into the sky mixed with the oily smoke of burning human fat.

  The ascent of Mount Carmel? This? He felt like vomiting at the thought of it. How could there be any life beyond the limitless expanse of corruption? To hope for life was to deepen the absurdity. Death, the permanent addiction. He longed to die, to escape the break-up of his mind. The heart attack was not happening quickly enough. But he lacked the courage to kill himself. If only he could get closer to a cliff, he might tip himself over into a freefall from which there was no return. Yes, he was capable of that at least—a sort of half-accident, half-suicide. A coward’s self-obliteration. He tried to stand but his legs crumpled, and he fell back to the ground. He could no longer walk, but he could still crawl. Yes, he would drag his living corpse to the precipice and roll it over the edge as the final exercise of the logical illogic that had consumed his life.

  He was a consciousness squashed beneath the flattened cosmos. But one dimension was left to him. He pulled his body along it. Through the compressed circles of a Hell that no longer existed, ring within ring, gyroscope within gyroscope, eternally trapped in the meaninglessness of the word damned.

  He sought annihilation only. When he met it, he would gulp it down—no, he would throw himself into its mouth, and it would gulp him down.

  Then he bumped his head against a rock and lost consciousness.

  * * *

  His broken head awoke him. There was gray light. There was smoke. There was dirt in his mouth and ash in his soul. At first he thought he was in Hell, for Hell might still exist if Heaven and Purgatory did not.

  Beside his face there was a stone, and there was blood on it. He rolled over on his back and stared up at the ceiling of the universe, but it did not fall down to crush him.

  He wondered why it did not.

  He pulled his body upright and leaned against the stone. On the other side of it was a cliff falling a thousand feet toward the rocks by the sea.

  The sea was still there, sighing.

  A bird sang.

  There were birds in the flattened universe. Elijah spoke into the wind, for th
ere was also wind in the flattened universe:

  I have had enough.

  God does not hear. He is silent.

  The smoke of burning bodies goes up forever.

  They stripped me naked and shaved the hair from my body and filmed me with cameras.

  I fled from fear, and You led me into greater fear. But You were not there.

  They were not content to kill the poetry, they threw the poet into the fire, and he too went up.

  You were not there.

  They were not content with killing men but tore a woman’s body apart and cut out the living child. And they went up, mother and daughter, they went up into the place that does not exist.

  Why were You not there?

  Eli, Eli!

  The fists rained down on old men who said their prayers and raised their hands to heaven.

  And they too went up.

  I could see them no more.

  You were not there!

  They tore the prayers of children from their little mouths.

  They ripped their limbs like dolls, and the last thing their screaming eyes saw as they were hurled into the pit were the laughing faces of strong men.

  From the pit I cried to You, but You did not answer.