by Gary Amdahl
“Mmm,” nodded Andrew. “In our way, I suppose we do. That might be one end of the spectrum, and Charles’s work here might be the other.”
“I do have a thought or two I’d like to share with you all,” said Pastor Tom, “seeing that I have you here like a congregation before me and have never been able to resist such an environment.”
“Hear! Hear!” said Gus.
“We are all ears!” said Tony.
“Incorrigible little rakes,” said Amelia, not unkindly.
“Rah-ther,” said Gus.
“If anyone sees a waiter,” said Tony, “I’d like a glass of wine.”
“You may not have wine,” said Amelia.
“Pray, why ever not?” asked Tony, agog.
“It is an extraordinary thing to say, Amelia,” said Gus, gently.
“I believe,” said Tony, “that I will have a glass of wine.”
“I second that. Motion carries,” said Gus, beaming.
“I’m laughing,” said Amelia. But she was not.
“I too am amused,” said Pastor Tom, and he appeared genuinely to be so.
“That doesn’t mean I approve,” continued Amelia.
“What does it mean, Amelia?” asked Tony.
“Laughing, he means,” said Gus helpfully. “Not just yours, but laughing, anybody’s laughing, at you or with you. What’s it all about, Amelia?”
There was a significantly long and table-wide pause both of speech and of movement. After this pause, it seemed everyone was looking at Amelia, whose head was still slightly bowed.
“I don’t know,” she said simply.
“Now,” said Andrew somewhat wanly, “if we could just get Chick to admit he doesn’t know something, we’d really be in business.”
Pastor Tom cleared his throat. It was hard to say if he was trying for comedy or truly needed, in the wake of rising and falling emotion, to clear his throat.
“In re Thomas Hardy, ‘God’s Funeral,’ godless anarchism . . . .”
“Do go on,” said Tony.
“Shut the fuck up, Tony,” said Charles.
Another significant silence ensued.
“Well!” exclaimed Amelia. “Charles is at least at a loss for words!”
“‘Shut the fuck up, Tony.’”
“Gus is only repeating what he thinks he heard because he honestly can’t believe what he thinks he heard,” said Tony.
“‘Shut the fuck up, Tony,’” Gus repeated.
Pastor Tom sighed with pointedly rueful recognition of the ungovernable nature of the boys’ hilarity.
“You know what?” asked Charles. “I still don’t have a sense of humor so your routines are lost on me.”
This reproof seemed to actually dampen their spirits. There was, however, a subtle but unmistakable suggestion of two vaudevillians failing to impress an agent. It was most visible in the looks Gus and Tony shot everybody, craning their necks left and right, up and down the table, including the neutrally masked Charles. No one looked the least willing to play along, but only Andrew’s disapproval—apparent disapproval, they encouraged themselves—truly troubled them: he had after all been their master in these intrafamilial coups de theatre.
“Vera,” said Pastor Tom, “perhaps you will help me understand this.”
“Of course, I’m more than willing,” said Vera. “Able is another question.”
“It seems to me that it is only an image of God that has died. A conception of a practical God, if you will.”
“I will.”
“A sort of everyday, working God.”
“I understand you, but I’m not sure I agree with you.”
“Very few of the people who are mourning God believe we are bereft in an absolutely materialist universe. Do they?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. My guess, however, is that very few do not.”
“I see.”
“Perhaps we are overreacting.”
“Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”
“Tom!” laughed Amelia, incredulous but amused.
Gus, Tony, and Andrew laughed. Vera let a snicker escape.
“The God that is being mourned in the poem,” Pastor Tom continued, smiling, “is an image we have thrown up, as with a magic lantern—”
“Or movie projector,” said Gus.
“Zoopraxiscope,” offered Tony.
“—lantern, yes, thank you, gentlemen, like a movie projector on a big white screen of our human fears and desires. It is purely human. It is not God at all.”
“What then is God?”
“The manlike shape that is dead is as Mr. Hardy so beautifully says, ‘the junk and treasure of an ancient creed.’”
“Beautifully said indeed. But what then is God if not the junk and treasure of an ancient creed, and, moreover, the cause of endless hatred and war?”
“The spirit of loving-kindness that both constitutes and animates the universe, that makes the music of the spheres so achingly beautiful.”
“Perhaps. But religion, its time is up. I’m quoting an anarchist. Misquoting.”
“Religion? Or politics wearing religious robes.”
“Hard to tell the difference between a politician wearing priestly robes and a priest wearing a suit and tie.”
“Only if you are looking at their clothes and not listening to what they say, watching what they do.”
“No god, no dogma. That is my ancient creed.”
“You anticipate me: your ancient creed denying the existence of God and abjuring the consequently baseless dogma of belief in that God sounds . . . religiously dogmatic. Surely you see that . . .?”
“Hmmm, yes. But it’s a slogan, rather, a rallying cry, not dogma. And my belief, if that’s what it is, and I’m not admitting it is, is not religious in nature. It’s practical.”
“Ah, but there’s nothing more essentially practical than the religious urge!”
“Hmmm, yes, I’m afraid I don’t see it. It seems essentially impractical, rather?”
“What could be more practical than finding a path, a method, an idea, that takes you away from existential misery and toward peace that passes all understanding?”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? That’s what ‘we’ both want. And yet I see your way as essentially impractical and you see mine as . . . essentially superficial?”
“Not at all.”
“How do you see my way?”
“If your way is toward social justice, I see it, for starters, as wholly admirable.”
“Thank you, I appreciate your open-mindedness.”
“My way is toward social justice as well.”
“Perhaps you can describe that way . . .?”
“It is a Christian way. It is the Christian way. I most emphatically do not say that the Christian way is the only way toward social justice, or that only the Christian possesses the desire and tools for work along that way, but I do say it is essentially Christian to work for social justice. I profess a social gospel. You may have heard of our movement.”
“Yes, I believe I have.”
“Have you spent any time exploring it?”
“Frankly, no. I don’t trust it. I trust you, Pastor Ruggles!”
“Please call me Tom.”
“I trust you, Tom! But I’m not sure I—”
“Let me put it to you this way, if I may?”
“Tom! Are you asking an anarchist for permission?”
Vera and Tom laughed. Amelia frowned.
“It’s not so much a question, Miss . . . I don’t know your last name, pardon me—”
“Vera. Call me Vera, please.”
“First-name basis with an anarchist! What a world!”
“Think nothing of it.”
“Oh, but I can’t help it!”
“In a world where no one rules, first names are—”
“One can only imagine: one big happy family! The observation I’d like to make—if I may?”
Everybody but Charles laughed. Because she ver
y often failed in her attempts to make people laugh—failed so often and so completely that most people never suspected attempts had been made—Amelia was more than pleased that everybody around the table was laughing. She noted Charles’s abstention, which troubled but did not tumble her, and smiled and chuckled as she finished what she had set out to say.
“However we may wish to define anarchism—”
“We’re going to stop laughing now, Amelia,” said Gus.
“Good show, old girl,” said Tony.
Amelia continued to smile and faintly snicker.
“However we may wish to define anarchism, it has already been rather thoroughly defined in at least the popular mind—and effectively so in the governmental mind: murderous criminals. A friend of our father’s was shot but by the grace of God not killed: the former president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Schrank was insane, not an anarchist.”
“And because attempts have been made on the life of our father, as well, by lawless criminals who were not nominally anarchists either, we, who may know better, often decline to make the proper distinction. It strikes us that murder is wrong no matter what the circumstances, no matter how strongly and persuasively they may seem to mitigate against outright and final condemnation.”
“You are opposed to the death penalty and to war, then, as I am, as we anarchists are.”
“I shouldn’t speak for Tom, but I am both opposed to the death penalty and to war, and reconciled to their existence in this life of nearly ceaseless suffering.”
“For what it’s worth, I am opposed to murder. There is nothing at all in anarchism that calls for it—precisely the opposite. Anyone who claims murder is a necessary means to an end is a very sad, mad, bad person, in my estimation. As for reconciliation with various forms of sanctioned murder, to the suffering you rightly characterize as ceaseless, I am less able, or perhaps less willing, than you are, to do so. That goes, interestingly, for Charles, as well: his theory of theater called out for what I saw as a truly bizarre kind of reconciliation with what he saw as a profound illusion.”
“Fascinating,” said Charles, “and repellant, yes. I don’t see the reconciliation as bizarre—the illusion, rather—but that’s . . . well, that’s quibbling.”
“Quibble on, old chap!” cried Gus.
“By all means. Don’t let us stop you!” cheered Tony.
“Speaking of fascinating and repellant!” said Andrew. “I’ve got new nicknames for you village idiots!”
“Oh dear,” said Gus. “Which one of us is repellant?”
“We are a one-two punch, old brother of mine, and you are usually the lead, which means you repel, while I finish them off in dazed confusion.”
“Charles is going to tell us to shut the fuck up again.”
“Well, he had better not.”
Charles said nothing and refused to smile.
“The naughty words are really not funny,” said Pastor Tom.
“Tom sits on the president’s Ecumenical Council,” said Amelia.
“I’m not sure,” said Pastor Tom, “that that means anything to anybody, much less to Vera.”
“It means a great deal,” said Vera.
“Thank you,” said Amelia.
“Not at all,” said Gus.
“I’m glad Uncle Tom doesn’t have to squat.”
“Please forgive me if I say this as plainly as I can.”
“Nothing would please me more than plain speech.”
“It is astonishing to think that my husband can advise the president on spiritual matters one day and speak to you the next.”
“Ah now, Amelia,” said Pastor Tom.
“Don’t you agree, Vera?”
“I do agree. It is astonishing.”
“It’s because he sees—because we see, and that is a very inclusive we—that there is in fact a good deal of common ground between some of what is talked about in radical political circles and some of what is preached from pulpits.”
“I have no trouble believing that is so.”
Pastor Tom leaned in and spoke over folded hands.
“Vera, I’m going to continue speaking plainly, in the great tradition my wife has laid down here today. We don’t think people like you should be tarred and feathered.”
“What do you say to that, Miss Vera?” asked Gus.
“Can’t say fairer than that, can you, Miss Vera,” said Tony.
“Boys, I am bowled over, I tell you. Bowled over.”
“Not run out of town on a rail, not hunted down and arrested and deported because of your political affiliations. This is a free country. You can peaceably assemble every which way. You don’t have to come down the aisle and be born again in Christ. But those beliefs that are essential to Christian practice—or rather ought to be—can make this country better, stronger, and more beautiful in exactly the same ways that those beliefs that are essential to anarchist practice do. I dare say—”
“That Jesus Christ was an anarchist, yes, I do see that.”
“You’re going to imply that we are being naïve and unsophisticated,” said Amelia, “in our idealism. Aren’t you, my dear?”
“Yes, my dear,” said Vera, “I am.”
“But you are forgetting that my husband has the ear of the president.”
“My dear ear,” said Gus.
“Your ear, dear?” asked Tony.
“I’m not forgetting that. Whether he does or does not is not the point. Whether he does or does not makes no difference.”
“I am sorry to hear you say so.”
“I’m sorry to say so, but really!”
“I think you are caught in some kind of current or tide that is sweeping you toward apathy and nihilism.”
Charles laughed. Everyone stopped and looked at him.
“I’ll let Gus and Tony speak for me,” he said.
But neither Gus nor Tony were up to it, falling abruptly back into the stupid little rich boys they were afraid they truly were.
“I believe in acting,” said Vera.
“Propaganda of the deed?” asked Andrew.
“I don’t see how propaganda is necessarily related to deeds. I have no control over how my deeds are heard and seen. Any intention I have is very likely to be the first to be destroyed in the maelstrom of consequence.”
“My husband does not act? My father does not act? The president does not act?”
“I have no faith in their action.”
“Oh, I see! Only in your own?”
“Not even in my own. I have no expectation whatsoever that acts will be anything but show and tell. That was what drew me to your brother and what kept me near him when his babble threatened to drive me away.”
“Show. And tell,” repeated Amelia. “Have I got that right? Life is show and tell?”
“Yes. If you want to live, you show and you tell. That is what living is all about.”
“I never put it that way,” said Charles, “because I never saw it that way, but that is exactly right.”
“Your Jesus Christ was fully alive, as I define life: he showed and told what it occurred to him to show and tell, freely and with commitment. In that way he was indeed an anarchist, but I can’t see the comparison going much further. He suffered to the extent that he had expectations, and that, too, now that I mention it, is something he shares with anarchists and nearly everybody on the planet. The social gospel you espouse and that you say he espoused—”
“Are you capitalizing that ‘H’ in your mind, Vera?” asked Gus.
“Do you see letters in your mind, Vera, when you talk?” asked Tony.
“—has no relation whatsoever to . . . how shall I say, Gus, Tony? To the timeless exigencies of the finding and the keeping of political power.”
“Took the—” said Gus.
“—words right out of my mouth,” said Tony.
“Our words.”
“Our mouths.”
“Po
litical power is also on my mind,” said Andrew.
The table once more fell silent.
“If you have no expectations of change, and we must assume ‘change for the better,’ why act? And if you do act, how do you handle the consequences?” asked Andrew.
“The charge of apathy, again,” said Vera. “Soon to be followed as if perforce by charges of nihilism.”
“I see,” said Andrew, “that you have an alternative, and that would be a kind of serenity that we are learning to associate with oriental . . . wisdom.”
“Don’t stick out your front teeth, boys, please,” said Pastor Tom.
“And please don’t try out your comic Chinese accents,” said Amelia.
“Father does all the time,” said Gus.
“He really does enter into the spirit of it,” said Tony.
“Niggers and Jews too,” said Gus.
“All in good fun,” said Tony.
The table once again observed a moment of silence. In it, genuine uncertainty could be seen in the eyes of Gus and Tony. It was as if Tony had asked a question instead of making a declaration. For everyone but Vera, it was an unparalleled, perhaps precedent-setting moment in their growth.
“Is there solace in your serenity?” asked Andrew. “I wonder if you have replaced the solace of the warm, flawed, human God with a cold inhuman serenity?”
“There’s nothing inhuman about it,” said Charles.
“I couldn’t replace a solace I never knew, could I?” asked Vera.
“I need a replacement!” said Andrew, abruptly and loudly. “I need a replacement for God and I need a replacement for the religion of progressive politics! My life is neither godless nor anarchic but I am in very deep despair.”
Charles was caught off guard: “Despair?”
“Everything I worked for—everything we’ve worked for, Al, Father, me, Teddy, Hi, even you, here, I suppose, if I understood the setup—it’s all a lie. Big, fat lie. I’m an idiot for having played along. And quite an asshole as I did. You have to be an asshole if you’re in politics, but you don’t have to be an idiot. I chose to be an idiot. An idiot and an asshole in the service of a Big, Fat Lie.”
“Andrew,” said Pastor Tom. “No, now, come on.”
“I don’t know what made me say that.”
“We never know what makes us say things,” said Charles, “if you stop and think about it.”
