Six
The Woman Who Is Sore at Heart Reproaches Thomas
I knew he was in our county and I had to get to see him because he was the one who made all this trouble for me. So I went to his headquarters, the place where the broadcasts were being made that week, and I saw him standing in the middle of a group of his followers. A very handsome man, really, somewhat too dirty and wild-looking for my tastes, but you give him a shave and a haircut and he’d be quite attractive in my estimation. Big and strong he is, and when you see him you want to throw yourself into his arms, though of course I was in no frame of mind to do any such thing just then and in any case I’m not that sort of woman. I went right toward him. There was a tremendous crowd in the street, but I’m not discouraged easily, my husband likes to call me his “little bulldog” sometimes, and I just bulled my way through that mob, a little kicking and some elbowing and I think I bit someone’s arm once and I got through. There was Thomas and next to him that skinny little man who’s always with him, that Saul Kraft, who I guess is his press agent or something. As l I got close, three of his bodyguards looked at me and then at each other, probably saying oh-oh, here comes another crank dame, and they started to surround me and move me away, and Thomas wasn’t even looking at me, and I began to yell, saying I had to talk to Thomas, I had something important to say. And then this Saul Kraft told them to let go of me and bring me forward. They checked me out for concealed weapons and then Thomas asked me what I wanted.
I felt nervous before him. Such a famous man. But I planted my feet flat on the ground and stuck my jaw up the way Dad taught me, and I said, “You did all this. You’ve wrecked me, Thomas. You’ve got me so I don’t know if I’m standing on my head or right side up.”
He gave me a funny sideways smile. “I did?”
“Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you how it was. I went to Mass every week, my whole family, Church of the Redeemer on Wilson Avenue. We put money in the plate, we did everything the fathers told us to do, we tried to live good Christian lives, right? Not that we really thought much about God. Whether He was actually up there listening to me saying my paternoster. I figured He was too busy to worry much about me, and I couldn’t be too concerned about Him, because He surpasses my understanding, you follow? Instead I prayed to the fathers. To me Father McDermott was like God Himself, in a way, not meaning any disrespect. What I’m trying to say is that the average ordinary person, they don’t have a very close relationship with God, you follow? With the church, yes, with the fathers, but not with God. Okay. Now you come along and say the world is in a mess, so let’s pray to God to show Himself like in the olden times. I ask Father McDermott about it and he says it’s all right, it’s permitted even though it isn’t an idea that came from Rome, on such-and-such day we’ll have this world moment of prayer. So I pray, and the sun stands still. June 6, you made the sun stand still.”
“Not me. Him.” Thomas was smiling again. And looking at me like he could read everything in my soul.
I said, “You know what I mean. It’s a miracle, anyway. The biggest miracle since, I don’t know, since, the Resurrection. The next day we need help, guidance, right? My husband and I, we go to church. The church is closed. Locked tight. We go around back and try to find the fathers. Nobody there but a housekeeper and she’s scared. Won’t open up. Why is the church shut? They’re afraid of rioters, she says. Where’s Father McDermott? He’s gone to the Archdiocese for a conference. So have all the other fathers. Go away, she says. Nobody’s here. You follow me, Thomas? Biggest miracle since the Resurrection, and they close the church the next day.”
Thomas said, “They got nervous, I guess.”
“Nervous? Sure they were nervous. That’s my whole point. Where were the fathers when we needed them? Conferring at the Archdiocese. The Cardinal was holding a special meeting about the crisis. The crisis, Thomas! God Himself works a miracle, and to the church it’s a crisis! What am I supposed to do? Where does it leave me? I need the church, the church has always been telling me that, and all of a sudden the church locks its doors and says to me, Go figure it out by yourself, lady, we won’t have a bulletin for a couple of days. The church was scared! I think they were afraid the Lord was going to come in and say we don’t need priests any more, we don’t need churches, all this organized- religion stuff hasn’t worked out so well anyway, so let’s forget it and move right into the Millennium.”
“Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power,” Thomas said, shrugging. “But the church opened again, didn’t it?”
“Sure, four days later. Business as usual, except we aren’t supposed to ask any questions about June 6 yet. Because they don’t have The Word from Rome yet, the interpretation, the official policy.” I had to laugh. “‘Three weeks, almost, since it happened, and the College of Cardinals is still in special consistory, trying to decide what position the church ought to take. Isn’t that crazy, Thomas? If the Pope can’t recognize a miracle when he sees one, what good is the whole church?”
“All right,” Thomas said, “but why blame me?”
“Because you took my church away from me. I can’t trust those people any more. I don’t know what to believe. We’ve got God right here beside us, and the church isn’t giving any leadership. What do we do now? How do we handle this thing?”
“Have faith, my child,” he said, “and pray for salvation, and remain steadfast in your righteousness.” He said a lot of other stuff like that too, rattling it off like he was a computer programmed to deliver blessings. I could tell he wasn’t sincere. He wasn’t trying to answer me, just to calm me down and get rid of me.
“No,” I said, breaking in on him. “That stuff isn’t good enough. Have faith. Pray a lot. I’ve been doing that all my life. Okay, we prayed and we got God to show Himself. What now? What’s your program, Thomas? Tell me that. What do you want us to do? You took our church away—what will you give us to replace it?”
I could tell he didn’t have any answers.
His face turned red and he tugged on the ends of his hair and looked at Saul Kraft in a sour way, almost like he was saying I-told-you-so with his eyes. Then he looked back at me and I saw either sorrow or fear in his face, I don’t know which, and I realized right then that this Thomas is just a human being like you and me, a human being, who doesn’t really understand what’s happening and doesn’t know how to go on from this point. He tried to fake it. He told me again to pray, never underestimate the power of prayer, et cetera, et cetera, but his heart wasn’t in his words. He was stuck. What’s your program, Thomas? He doesn’t have any. He hasn’t thought things through past the point of getting the Sign from God. He can’t help us now. There’s your Thomas for you, the Proclaimer, the prophet. He’s scared. We’re all scared, and he’s just one of us, no different, no wiser. And last night the Apocalyptists burned the shopping center. You know, if you had asked me six months ago how I’d feel if God gave us a Sign that He was really watching over us, I’d have told you that I thought it would be the most wonderful thing that had ever happened since Jesus in the manger. But now it’s happened. And I’m not so sure how wonderful it is. I walk around feeling that the ground might open up under my feet any time. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us all. God has come, and it ought to be beautiful, and instead it’s just scary. I never imagined it would be this way. Oh, God. God I feel so lost. God I I feel so empty.
Seven
An Insight of Discerners
Speaking before an audience was nothing new for me, of course. Not after all the years I’ve spent in classrooms, patiently instructing each season’s hairy new crop of young in the mysteries of tachyon theory, anterior-charge particles, and time-reversal equations. Nor was this audience a particularly alien or frightening one: it was made up mainly of faculty people from Harvard and M.I.T., some graduate students, and a sprinkling of lawyers, psychologists, and other professional folk from Cambridge and the outskirts. All of us part of the community of sc
holarship, so to speak. The sort of audience that might come together to protest the latest incident of ecological rape or of preventive national liberation. But one aspect of my role this evening was unsettling to me. This was in the truest sense a religious gathering; that is, we were meeting to discuss the nature of God and to arrive at some comprehension of our proper relationship to Him. And I was the main speaker, me, old Bill Gifford, who for nearly four decades had regarded the Deity as an antiquated irrelevance. I was this flock’s pastor. How strange that felt.
“But I believe that many of you are in the same predicament,” I told them. “Men and women to whom the religious impulse has been something essentially foreign. Whose lives were complete and fulfilled although prayer and ritual were wholly absent from them. Who regarded the concept of a supreme being as meaningless and who looked upon the churchgoing habits of those around them as nothing more than lower-class superstitiousness on the one hand and middle-class pietism on the other. And then came the great surprise of June 6—forcing us to reconsider doctrines we had scorned, forcing us to reexamine our basic philosophical constructs, forcing us to seek an acceptable explanation of a phenomenon that we had always deemed impossible and implausible. All of you, like myself, suddenly found yourselves treading very deep metaphysical waters.”
The nucleus of this group had come together on an ad hoc basis the week after It happened, and since then had been meeting two or three times a week. At first there was no formal organizational structure, no organizational name, no policy; it was merely a gathering of intelligent and sophisticated New Englanders who felt unable to cope individually with the altered nature of reality and who needed mutual reassurance and reinforcement. That was why I started going, anyway. But within ten days we were groping toward a more positive purpose: no longer simply to learn how to accept what had befallen humanity, but to find some way of turning it to a useful purpose. I had begun articulating some ideas along those lines in private conversation, and abruptly I was asked by several of the leaders of the group to make my thoughts public at the next meeting.
“An astonishing event has occurred,” I went on. “A good many ingenious theories have been proposed to account for it—as, for example, that the Earth was brought to a halt through the workings of an extrasensory telekinetic force generated by the simultaneous concentration of the entire world population. We have also heard the astrological explanations—that the planets or the stars were lined up in a certain once-in-a-universe’s-lifetime way to bring about such a result. And there have been the arguments, some of them coming from quite surprising places, in favor of the notion that the June 6 event was the doing of malevolent creatures from outer space. The telekinesis hypothesis has a certain superficial plausibility, marred only by the fact that experimenters in the past have never been able to detect even an iota of telekinetic ability in any human being or combination of human beings. Perhaps a simultaneous world-wide effort might generate forces not to be found in any unit smaller than the total human population, but such reasoning requires an undesirable multiplication of hypotheses. I believe that most of you here agree with me that the other explanations of the June 6 event beg one critical question: Why did the slowing of the Earth occur so promptly, in seemingly direct response to Thomas the Proclaimer’s campaign of global prayer? Can we believe that a unique alignment of astrological forces just happened to occur the day after that hour of prayer? Can we believe that the extragalactic fiends just happened to meddle with the Earth’s rotation on that particular day? The element of coincidence necessary to sustain these and other arguments is fatal to them, I think.
“What are we left with, then? Only with the explanation that the Lord Almighty, heeding mankind’s entreaties, performed a miracle so that we should be confirmed in our faith in Him.
“So I conclude. So do many of you. But does it necessarily follow that mankind’s sorry religious history, with all its holy wars, its absurd dogmas, its childish rituals, its fastings and flagellations, is thereby justified? Because you and you and you and I were bowled over on June 6, blasted out of our skepticism by an event that has no rational explanation, should we therefore rush to the churches and synagogues and mosques and enroll immediately in the orthodoxy of our choice? I think not. I submit that our attitudes of skepticism and rationalism were properly held, although our aim was misplaced. In scorning the showy, trivial trappings of organized faith, in walking past the churches where our neighbors devoutly knelt, we erred by turning away also from the matter that underlay, their faith: the existence of a supreme being whose divine plan guides the universe. The spinning of prayer wheels and the mumbling of credos seemed so inane to us that, in our revulsion for such things, we were led to deny all notions of a higher order, of a teleological universe, and we embraced the concept of a wholly random cosmos. And then the Earth stood still for a day and a night.
“How did it happen? We admit it was God’s doing, you and I, amazed though we are to find ourselves saying so. We have been hammered into a posture of belief by that inexplicable event. But what do we mean by ‘God’? Who is He? An old man with long white whiskers? Where is He to be found? Somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter? Is He a supernatural being, or merely an extraterrestrial one? Does He too acknowledge a superior authority? And so on, an infinity of new questions. We have no valid knowledge of His nature, though now we have certain knowledge of His existence.
“Very well. A tremendous opportunity now exists for us the discerning few, for us who are in the habit of intellectual activity. All about us we see a world in frenzy. The Apocalyptists swoon with joy over the approaching catastrophe, the glossolaliacs chatter in maniac glee, the heads of entrenched churchly hierarchies are aghast at the possibility that the Millennium may really be at hand; everything is in flux, everything is new and strange. New cults spring up. Old creeds dissolve. And this is our moment. Let us step in and replace credulity and superstition with reason. An end to cults; an end to theology; an end to blind faith. Let it be our goal to relate the events of that awesome day to some principle of reason, and develop a useful, dynamic, rational movement of rebirth and revival—not a religion per se but rather a cluster of belief, based on the concept that a divine plan exists, that we live under the authority of a supreme or at least superior being, and that we must strive to come to some kind of rational relationship with this being.
“We’ve already had the moral strength to admit that our old intuitive skepticism was an error. Now let us provide an attractive alternate for those of us who still find ritualistic orthodoxy unpalatable, but who fear a total collapse into apocalyptic disarray if no steps are taken to strengthen mankind’s spiritual insight. Let us create, if we can, a purely secular movement, a nonreligious religion, which offers the hope of establishing a meaningful dialogue between Us and Him. Let us make plans. Let us find powerful symbols with which we may sway the undecided and the confused. Let us march forth as crusaders in a dramatic effort to rescue humanity from unreason and desperation.”
And so forth. I think it was a pretty eloquent speech, especially coming from someone who isn’t in the habit of delivering orations. A transcript of it got into the local paper the next day and was reprinted all over. My “us the discerning few” line drew a lot of attention, and spawned an instant label for our previously unnamed movement. We became known as the Discerners. Once we had a name, our status was different. We weren’t simply a group of concerned citizens any longer. Now we constituted a cult—a skeptical, rational, anti-superstitious cult, true, but nevertheless a cult, a sect, the newest facet of the world’s furiously proliferating latter-day craziness.
Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Three Page 24
