In the Beauty of the Lilies (11 page)

Clarence suppressed a smile; the mass of leaden guilt with which he woke in the morning and lay down at night almost seemed manageable, caught up and segmented in such strict language. “The word ‘demit’ is new to me,” he confessed. “And I doubt I would be presenting a letter to another church; I am not apt to join one when I lack sufficient belief to keep on in the only profession for which I am fitted.”

“Yes, well fitted. So your ruling elder, Harlan Dearholt, informs me.”

“Harlan is a model of faith. Had I but a tenth of his portion, I would continue in harness without complaint.”

With a soft slap Dreaver let the supple black book fall to his desktop and asked, “What has made you imagine in yourself a lack of faith?”

Having already rehearsed in several other conversations the desolating progress of his thought and reading, he summed it up economically, and concluded, “To put it in mathematical terms: it has been bearing in upon me for some time that God is a non-factor—all the equations work without Him. Science still confesses to mysteries, of course—the ultimate origins of matter, how life came to arise, and so on. But how the forms of life have shaped themselves, how men came to descend from apes, how the Bible came to be written, along with similar accretions of folklore—the Hindoo Gita, the Koran—which Christendom does not happen to recognize as sacred: all this became terribly clear to me. The universe is a pointless, self-running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare.”

Dreaver shrugged—the smallest possible stiffening of his shoulders, under his business suit. “It has appeared that way even at moments to our Lord,” he said mildly. “Unfaith is a cohort of faith, as Satan is a cohort of God. It is the shadow that shapes the truth into form, the No that must be said, so that Yea can ring out. I believe your seminary was Princeton, was it not?”

“Yes.”

“There could be the trouble. You imbibed conservatism there, and it limits your thinking now. The two Hodges, and Benjamin Warfield—fine men in the old muscular tradition, but quite helpless when the winds of history blow. They cannot
bend
, Mr. Wilmot, and those that cannot bend break. If you had gone to Union, as I did, you would not be afraid to let history into your understanding. Into your understanding of the Bible, into the workings of our lives, into the future of the church. Hugh Black and Charles A. Briggs, whom the old guard rode out of the ministry for his embrace of the Higher Criticism, William Brown and Henry Sloane Coffin, Arthur McGiffert and Henry Jackson Van Dyke—the staunch liberal tradition has nothing to fear from the future; no development can upset it. Remember the Epistle to the Hebrews, how Paul begins?—‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past.’
Divers manners
, and that includes Darwin and Marx, when the evidence bears out what they say. ‘For the law made nothing perfect,’ Paul told the Hebrews; they were the conservatives of their time, clinging to every shrivelled scrap of the Torah and the law as if their souls depended on it. ‘For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God.’ Whatever brings in a better hope, that draws us nigh to God—that’s what I gleaned at Union, Mr. Wilmot, where we were taught not to be afraid of science, not to fear admitting that the Holy Book is embedded in history—that it contains the best wisdom of its time, but that time is not our time. Relativity is the word we must live by now. Everything is relative, and what matters is how
we
, we human creatures, relate to one another. Think of how our two seminaries relate to their surroundings—Union in the middle of the nation’s biggest city, and far from the most savory part of Manhattan at that, but drawing vitality and the pulse of reality from it; Princeton sitting down there in fox-hunting country, surrounded by estates and lettuce farms, cut off from the real, urban, industrial world. Its theology
took shape in the eighteenth century, when the Deists were the wolves at the door, and hasn’t changed since.
Change
, Mr. Wilmot—from the nebulae to the microbes change is the way of Creation, and it must be our way, but for God’s sake don’t destroy your essential self. Don’t give up your calling. I promise you, there is nothing in your beliefs or unbeliefs that can’t serve as the basis for an effective and deeply satisfying Christian ministry. You have taken the charge upon you too egoistically: depend upon your parishioners, as well as bidding them depend on you. You are the captain and they are the crew, but the wind in your sails is none of your making.”

Mr. Dreaver, one of those fair-lashed men whose eyelids always look pink, spoke all this with a virtually hypnotic smoothness, as if memorized, or at least urged upon troubled pastors several times before. For the sake of the children and Stella, Clarence wanted to believe him. “What about personal immortality?” he asked.

The moderator shrugged, and began to speak confidentially, in a kind of shorthand. Clarence felt the pressure of the next appointment already bearing upon them. “Very little of it in classic Judaism. The New Testament references, ambiguous and various. The Roman Catholic emphasis definitely post-patristic. Purgatory, Limbo, the anatomy of Hell and Paradise—
entirely
invented post–first millennium. Consider this approach: Modern physics proves that nothing is newly created or destroyed, not the merest atom or particle of energy; in exactly what form our own energy persists nobody knows or pretends to know. Prying into the afterlife, with Spiritualism and the like, breeds goblins and absurdities. State the hope firmly, of endless continuance, and anxiety is eased. Life can go on.
This
life is the one to be lived now, that
much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say—‘One world at a time’?”

His pink lids opened wider, the intelligent blue eyes under their white lashes asking how much more Clarence demanded of him. Dreaver’s eyes’ blue was not milky but a steelier echo of the northern seas that, from Orkney to Jutland, had narrowed their seafaring ancestors’ gazes with briny winds and a low-angled sun. He spoke with a gliding, quick-tongued New York accent that was consistently light, fluid, easy, even nonchalant, dropping some “g”s, passing over some “r”s. Clarence asked, “The Resurrection?” He felt as a circus trainer must, tossing a ball to a seal who effortlessly, shimmeringly balances it on his nose.

The little shrug again, impatient and alert, with a gaze above Clarence’s shoulder as if someone might walk into the room from the outer office. “The Gospels give garbled accounts. The risen Christ was seen here, there, sometimes by crowds. He ate of the honeycomb, showed His wound to doubting Thomas, and wandered off out of history again. Mark’s and Luke’s accounts of the ascension seem pretty tacked-on; the description at the beginning of Acts’ account feels rather theatrical, with the cloud that takes Him out of sight and the two men in white who pop up. Paul testifies to an appearance, to ‘one born out of time,’ but gives no details, and in the next letter to the Corinthians has developed the formula ‘Whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.’ Talk about building a house on sand! What can’t be disputed, though, is that the Jesus movement resurrected itself in the months and years after the Crucifixion. Think of the devastation, the humiliation the disciples must have felt—and we all still celebrate the living Christ among us. Do we not? If there was no Resurrection,
something happened just as inspiring and transformative. Here’s a crux, actually, where history helps the believer, and puts the burden of explanation on the skeptics.” Seeing Clarence about to speak, he lifted a shapely small hand whose palm had a lily’s waxen pallor. “And if the Resurrection is only a manner of speaking, a metaphor for the Christian community’s revival and growth, why should we scorn words?—words which bring us the only reality the mind grasps.” He tapped his glossy, lightly furrowed brow. “Bishop Berkeley, et cetera. Try some William James, if you care. Not just
The Will to Believe
and
Varieties
but the recent books, like
The Meaning of Truth
. Pragmatism—it turns the tables. It’s the American contribution to the great debate; you might say it’s the healthy Calvinist answer to all those pedantic Lutherans who burnt the ship beneath them and then couldn’t walk on water. And actually there are some interesting new developments in German—a man called Husserl, picking up on some old hints of Hegel in
Phänomenologie des Geistes
, and using some of Kant’s terminology. I mean, ‘the real’ isn’t quite as self-defining as we intuitively think. Human consciousness is part of it—shapes it. The Resurrection can be thought of as something we have
made
happen, if you follow me, instead of something that happened once and for all, and debatably at that. Welcome to the twentieth century, Mr. Wilmot; we all have some catching up to do. Amazing things are coming out of European physics. Time is the fourth dimension, it turns out, and slows down when the observer speeds up. The other three dimensions don’t form a rigid grid; space is more like a net that sags when you put something in it, and that sagging is what we call gravity. Also, light isn’t an indivisible, static presence; it has a speed, and it comes in packets—irreducible amounts called quanta. Quanta aren’t merely the limit of our measurements; they appear
to be the fact. Energy is grainy! All these strainings of our common sense are facts. We don’t any more merely investigate reality—Lilliputians crawling over some huge dark Gulliver sleeping there. We
make
it, make it with our minds, our minds and wills. We make God, you could say.”

“A personal God?” Clarence asked, mesmerized and feeling betrayed, as Lazarus might have when brought back to life. “The Biblical God?”

“Again, ‘existence’? In what sense? ‘Personal’ is tautological, of course. Why bother to have an impersonal God?—you’re back then with Spinoza and calling ‘God’ everything and therefore nothing. The Unitarians tried that and within three generations they’re a spent force. The soul needs something
extra
, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible—think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.”

Clarence liked this light-tongued, pink-lidded, preoccupied man, and was considerately conscious of the inroads his troubled case was making upon Dreaver’s crowded schedule. He felt like a deficient schoolboy having a privileged hour with a busy tutor. Beyond the brick buildings of Jersey City, with their flat roofs and lettered advertisements for pills and tailors and dance halls, the green patch of cattailed marsh rippled and twinkled in the summer breeze like those vistas of freedom seen from a classroom window, rectangles of a world sublimely free of effortful thought and the problems that exist in books. From beneath the accumulated weight of two months of atheistic dreariness and dread he glimpsed this blithe creation bathing naked in the sun, and felt the eclipse in his heart as some kind of sin which the other man, with his rapid, stabbing equivocations, might lift from him. “You’re
saying,” Clarence said hesitantly, “that within the general indeterminacy—”

“There is room for belief,” Thomas Dreaver finished, sinking back in his wooden swivel chair so emphatically that the spring hinge beneath the seat squeaked in surprise.

“Enough space to go through the motions.”

“Going through the motions, not at all. Walking toward the light. None of us lives
in
the light; we can only walk toward it, with the eyes and legs God has given us.”

How easy it is, Clarence thought, to use the word “God” when the reality has been construed out of existence. The God Who confronted Moses was a terrible burning presence, unspeakable. “But my parishioners expect me to be halfway along the path at least.”

“Your parishioners know you are human—don’t underestimate them. Mr. Dearholt has supplied me with a sheaf of fond testimonials. You are loved, Mr. Wilmot.”

“I don’t underestimate them. That’s why I wish to quit. To demit,” he corrected, smiling. This man made him happy, even as he resisted his counsel. The church was not utterly dead, if bright young men like Dreaver continued to staff it.

“The people see,” Dreaver offered, gazing up at the ceiling fan that lackadaisically paddled the torpid air, “the difficulties. They know that out of our common unease and terrors the majestic apparitions of faith are born. What drives them to church, those that come? They need very little from you to complete their quest, but that little they do need, and will forgive you much if you provide it. We have spoken of the Bible as the point of departure; think of yourself—your standing there in vestments, the visible pillar of the institution—as the point of arrival. You have pledged yourself to walk with them toward the light.”

“But I can’t—”

“Never say can’t, Mr. Wilmot. The movements of our innermost selves are various, and unpredictable. They need but a tendency to be suddenly fulfilled, when we least expect it. To yourself you seem unworthy. To me you seem an eminently well-qualified pastor—dignified, conscientious, and admirably earnest that the things of faith not be taken lightly.”

“Lightly! Mr. Dreaver, you are putting a positive aspect on what in truth is quite negative. The things of faith for me have totally evaporated.”

Now the young man did look tired; the reputed graininess of energy had gone to his voice, which had hoarsened. His intent blue eyes seemed to itch, behind a chronic flutter of his pink lids and pale lashes. Clarence inconsiderately had dumped the full load of his own incapacity upon this upholder of that by which they both lived. Yet the moderator offered a smile, and a dismissive flicker of his hands above the papers that awaited his attention. “What evaporates can re-condense,” Dreaver said. He picked up the black-bound Book of Discipline but did not open it, since both remembered what he had read. “I cannot permit your demission on the evidence you present, of alterations in your understanding of doctrine. Doctrine is the living, changing expression of a living God, and is properly the subject of ongoing, at times radical, reconsideration. You heard it: at least a year’s probation. The General Assembly of 1889 made this rule in response to a situation in the Presbytery of Butler. In 1901 the Presbytery of Chicago and in 1906 that of Puget Sound, with similar cases in their venue, placed on record overtures assenting to the wisdom of the probationary period. In that period of a year this Presbytery of Jersey City asks that you carry on your duties as before, with good faith and a genuine
will, and that you submit to searching introspection the motives and reasons that would lead you to consider relinquishment of those duties.”