The Heretics of St. Possenti

by Rolf Nelson

  It took all of Cranberry’s training and self-discipline to conceal his rising anger, fear, or pity, as man after man hectored him. Finally, after several hours, he was left alone to pray quietly in a corner.

  New Mission

  It is well known that there are four kinds of monks…. But the fourth class of monks is that called Landlopers, who keep going their whole life long from one province to another…. Passing these over, let us go on with the help of God to lay down a rule for that most valiant kind of monks, the Cenobites [who live under a rule and an Abbot].

  —The Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, Ch. I (The Kinds of Monks)

  It was a chastened, browbeaten, and silent man who was led from the holding cell so much later that night that it was technically early morning. His release followed a number of phone calls, the upshot of which was that while it was clear he’d broken the letter of the law and a conviction would be assured, it was clear he hadn’t intended to break the law, so the archdiocese lawyer used the “Hillary Defense”. On top of that, the District Attorney didn’t want to risk bad press during his current push for stricter gun laws, so Thomas was released with little more than a stern warning.

  For the first time, Bishop Thomas Cranberry reconsidered his reflexive support for such laws.

  * * *

  Cranberry sat in the pews of his church, silently praying and contemplating his recent experiences. It had been a rough week. For once he wasn’t sure what his next homily would be about. The weekly “recommendation” sent from on high felt wholly inadequate, as helping more non-Christians settle into the area when they continued to show no inclination to convert (let alone donate) seemed to be fueling many of the other problems he had heard so much about while in the holding cell. The men haranguing him the night before, either young and street smart or older and well worn, had a litany of anecdotes and statistics that he had been unable to refute or answer, and hours of research that morning had only confirmed what his cellmates had told him in the crudest of terms: young men were more likely than women to be incarcerated, get locked out of education and jobs, suffer mental illness or addiction or crippling injuries, commit suicide, get separated from their own children, be victims of violence, be falsely accused of crimes, and die young. Yet all he ever heard from anyone in “polite” society was asking how these men could do more for women to help them in the name of… equality, or fairness, or feminism… or something. He was no longer sure what anyone really wanted beyond the shallow tropes proffered.

  It made his head hurt. It was the confusion of uncertainty which he had run from to join the priesthood, where he saw certainty, clarity.

  Of course he could dust off any of the many homilies he had given before, but for once none of them seemed appropriate.

  Pleading to give more sounded crass and hollow. Asking for prayer seemed both mundane and inadequate, though never a bad idea. Discussing any of the various sins didn’t feel appropriate at this moment. After thinking for several hours, he was no closer to any clear vision of what to talk about. Sighing wearily, he decided that perhaps a walk would do him good… though he would be rather more careful about keeping his eyes and ears open. He rose and paced slowly up the aisle.

  His phone rang.

  It was a particular ringtone he knew he couldn’t ignore. His walk would have to wait.

  * * *

  The conversation with Archbishop Malone was long and unsatisfactory. Not unsurprisingly, he was unhappy about being called by the police to bail out his protégé, and an hour rehashing problems that every church in the region had without any solution on the horizon didn’t help his disposition any. Cranberry’s passing on his cellmate’s comments about the perceived weakness of the Christian faith—with something other than absolute condemnation; he merely recognized the honesty of their feelings—went over like a pregnant pole-vaulter.

  In the end, the archbishop dumped the problem squarely and explicitly into Cranberry’s lap.

  “You appear to be passionate about this problem of the missing men in the flock and their difficulties, Thomas. And it is a problem we all face. So: since you have such a great desire to better understand the other side of it, I think you should spend time away from your daily duties and research it. Treat this as one of your projects… but full time.”

  “Away from the pulpit? Full time? But–”

  “I expect you can make a great deal more progress if you are not distracted by the mundane duties of tending daily paperwork, confirmations, and all the rest.

  “Pray. Fast. Talk to others beyond those whom you have so pointedly told me offer no solutions. Attend Mass in churches you have not visited for a while, and at unusual times. See if you can succeed where so many others have failed. Get out of your office and back to the flock. Perhaps in meditation and silence you will find the truth of our current path, or perhaps you will be inspired and find a solution that fills the pews and saves lost souls.

  “It has been a long time since you took any time off. Take two or three months. Maybe more. Let me know what you have discovered by, oh, say, Assumption.”

  Archbishop Malone hung up.

  Cranberry sat for a long time, then stood up, and set out on the walk he had promised himself.

  Problems

  Whenever weighty matters are to be transacted in the monastery, let the Abbot call together the whole community, and make known the matter which is to be considered.

  —The Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, Ch. III (The Counsel of the Brothers)

  The difficulty with an impossible problem possessing no acceptable solution is sorting through all the terrible solutions, non-solutions, and false hopes without getting too discouraged. Worse, this wasn’t even a properly defined problem. It was more of a vague “things are not working well; make them better” situation. After four laps around his neighborhood, waving hello to each person he passed and sometimes even vaguely recognized, Catholic or not, he wasn’t any closer to an answer. He hadn’t even made any progress toward generating ideas that he could not immediately cross off as illegal, impractical, often tried, often failed, or impossible.

  This was not, of course, the first time he’d thought about this subject.

  Indeed, there were few weeks he hadn’t spent time pondering it.

  On his fifth lap, a pleasant Indian Sikh couple who lived two doors down joined him. “If it is a nice afternoon for a walk, it must be a very good one for five walks,” Vritra said with a smile. “May we join you?”

  “By all means, please do,” said Thomas. Though of very different backgrounds than himself—Vritra was an engineer, and his wife, Manditha, worked for a marketing firm—they were good people and appeared to be adapting to their new home well; they had moved in from California two years earlier. After some small chit-chat, Vritra asked why he’d been walking so many laps and looked so weary.

  “I have been given a Herculean task.”

  “Are you not mixing your mythological metaphors as a Christian?”

  “Simply using one I thought you might be familiar with.”

  Vritra shrugged and nodded acknowledgment. “Indeed I am. Greek mythology is a common enough set of stories for American grade schools. So you have a difficult problem. Of what sort?”

  “Reversing a century-long trend in falling rates of church attendance. I’ve been directed to find a marketing method to bring back strays and to recruit new faces.” He briefly outlined the events that led him to this long walk, as well as the task he’d been handed.

  “Difficult,” agreed Manditha. “No offense intended, Thomas, but… is it a marketing problem or a product problem?”

  Bishop Cranberry smiled. “None taken. We have the best product in all the universe: salvation of the eternal soul. The ‘customers’ just need to know about it.”

  “Not necessarily.” Manditha’s bald, if polite and quiet, assertion brought Thomas up short. “You are confusing related, but very different, things.”

  “I am quite certa
in I know something about the soul and salvation.”

  “No doubt you do. But you are making three classic mistakes: you are confusing want with demand. How you use the product, and how the potential customer sees it. And conflating now with eventually.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean. But no, I do not think I’m confusing them, though it may seem like it.”

  “But you are. Want is an abstract thing, Thomas. Meaningless in the marketing community. We want nice houses, world peace, respectful children, and two calorie-free desserts after dinner. Demand is what people will pay for, right now, and put down the cash—or fill out the financing paperwork—to drive away with it when they leave the store.”

  Her husband, seeing the bishop’s expression, picked up where she left off. “You are absolutely convinced that your church, your faith, is the best, something everyone needs. And it is. For you. And most people will want it… eventually. But you want them to buy into it now. What they see, though, is that it gives them nothing now. It only takes today, with a promise of payment… eventually. For them to demand it now, it must have something to offer that they value now. It is every bit as much a product problem as a marketing problem.

  “As an engineer, the first thing I must do is make sure I have defined the problem correctly. If I cannot define the problem, I cannot solve it or even know if I’m close. So define your problem more exactly.”

  “And when marketing,” Manditha added, “you have to know what the customers want before you can educate them on how what you have fills that demand.”

  “The problem is simple enough. Regular attendance numbers are falling,” replied Thomas matter-of-factly. “We need more people in the pews, lending a hand, helping out, donating. The needs of the needy are endless, but our reliable parishioners are not a bottomless pit of time and money.”

  “So then you are not selling salvation as you said before. You are begging for money and volunteers and measuring success by headcount. That requires a rather different sales pitch, yes? A different lure?”

  “No, we are not just begging for money and counting bodies–”

  “I was under the impression you said your product was salvation, but now you say you measure success by measuring prints of posteriors in pews, yes?”

  “That’s a rather simplistic way of looking at it, of course, but I suppose that, yes, that is the most basic numerical measure,” Cranberry agreed grudgingly.

  “And do your potential customers, your future flock, care about the long-term benefits enough to incur the current cost? What do you offer that they will actually demand, and be willing to pay for, now, in time or money?”

  Bishop Cranberry had never thought about it from that angle before. He didn’t have a glib answer. He was absolutely certain that salvation was worth any cost, but the slender woman made an excellent point in her quiet, understated way. The three walked in near silence through the crisp spring air.

  After another lap, Cranberry asked the diminutive Manditha, “When you are starting a new ad campaign for something, what is the first thing you do?

  “That depends. Yours is already a very well-established brand, as it were. So we would do market research to see what demands the potential customers have that it might meet. If there are not any, then it will be a very difficult sale, and I’d recommend further product development and modification.”

  “That would be problematic. That is why people go to the Lutheran or Episcopalian or Mormon churches.”

  “Yes. Of course. So…?”

  “As I said, it is a marketing problem. Educating them, getting them to really understand what salvation is, and how we can help their peace of mind now.”

  “I still think you are confusing want with demand. What does your church offer that they need? That they will demand now? Marketing, like marriage and faith, is transactional: give something to get something. If all you offer is prayer and occasional soup…”

  “But I KNOW they need salvation and the peace of knowing God!” Cranberry exclaimed.

  “Of course,” the bearded engineer replied with an amused smile. “But I know many too proud to accept charity. If they are concerned about paying the rent, such concerns are beyond them.” He paused. “If I need to repair a bridge today for tomorrow’s commute, I would prep a mending-plate, fire up the welding rig, and start laying down beads. But if I need to double the carrying capacity for the next decade, ten tons of reinforcing steel will not do that job. We need a whole new bridge. Your faith is an old one. Think long term. Perhaps you need to give them something now to get them in the door today, believing tomorrow, and worry about how to make it pay next year?”

  Thomas frowned. That wasn’t the way he thought about God.

  They walked on in silence for another few blocks before Manditha broke the silence. “Target demographic?”

  “Young men.”

  “Ah, the same one everyone else wants,” noted Vritra.

  Manditha nodded. “On the one hand, they are well studied. On the other hand, already heavily targeted with advertising and piled deep with conflicting demands and expectations.”

  “And very unlikely to think about the long term, or even past the weekend,” said Cranberry glumly.

  “Right up until reality kicks them in the teeth. Yes. I’ve seen it, too.” Vritra’s voice was quiet and knowing. “My youngest cousin strongly resembled that last year.”

  Manditha nodded without a smile.

  “So… how to get them to think long term, to consider their eternal souls?” Cranberry pondered aloud.

  “Age and experience of failure are the traditional ways,” Vritra replied wryly.

  “If they can’t think past the weekend, what can you offer them to get them to the weekend? Your faith has a long history. What has it done—good, bad, indifferent—that perhaps a modern version is something they will demand? Demand not in the abstract, long-term sense but in the concrete-deliverables-in-this-world sense?”

  Cranberry rubbed his chin thoughtfully, but did not answer. He didn’t have one to give.

  * * *

  The conversation moved to lighter subjects, and eventually they reached Vritra’s front porch again, shaking hands as they parted ways, each still keeping their own thoughts and considerations on the deeper problems. Thomas walked on.

  His meandering course finally led him to the steps of a building he knew well.

  He knocked on the door to the home office of Kainan Lukas, Esquire, a former Orthodox lay minister and part-time lawyer. Thomas let himself in when the buzzer unlocked the door, and was greeted warmly in the book-lined office. “Ah, Thomas! Come to convert at last, I see!”

  “No, not today, Kainan. Perhaps tomorrow you will stop by for the same?”

  “Afraid not. Sarah would be a tad miffed.”

  “Hmmph. I suppose she would. How is she?”

  “Oh, fine, fine. Kids, too. Caleb is playing baseball, now. Can you believe it?”

  “They do grow fast, I hear.”

  “Your mother? Recovered from hip surgery okay?”

  Bishop Cranberry nodded, relaxing into the comfortable, wandering small talk of old friends who, despite some obvious differences, had much in common. Just when Thomas was about the broach the reason for his arrival, Kainan glanced at the clock and exclaimed, “Oh, time flies! I have to get David; his dojo is having a special practice. I said I’d watch and bring him home after. Very sorry to run like this, but… Hey, you wouldn’t perchance want to come, would you? Might find a new convert.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, thank you for the offer, of course, but I–”

  “No, I insist. Unless you have someplace else more pressing to be?” The lawyer looked at the bishop acutely, a glint in his eye. “No? Well, then it’s settled. There is plenty of room in the car, and it would do you good to see new territory; if one of us cannot convert the heathens, then mayhap the other might do so.”

  “Ah, I suppose it might. No, no place pressing. Quite the o
pposite, in fact. I can tell you about it on the way over.”

  Dojo

  Proclaim ye this among the nations: prepare war, rouse up the strong: let them come, let all the men of war come up.

  —Joel 3:9

  The drive to the dojo was uneventful. The lawyer listened in a silence broken only by occasional grunts of sympathy and understanding as Bishop Cranberry laid out events and the mission he’d been given.

  When Thomas was done, Kainan said nothing immediately. Finally, carefully, he spoke. “It’s easy to give advice on a path one has walked. It is even easier to offer it on a path one knows little of.”

  The bishop, though accustomed to giving deep, subtle, and somewhat cryptic aphorisms himself, had to think a moment on this one before he smiled and agreed. “Yes. That was one of the notes frequently struck by the men in my holding cell. For example, how can I possibly offer marital guidance when I’ve never been married? That is one place where I envy you and your wife, sin though envy may be.”

  “Yes. But the learning process isn’t always enjoyable—you may have noticed—and in some things knowing the ideal is better than a misleading firsthand experience. But, yes. It helps more than it hurts.”

  “And so I come full circle,” said the bishop with dark amusement. “Trying to solve the unsolvable, by learning the unknowable, looking for the invisible without a light.”