“And do what with all this land?” asked David.
“Do you really want my opinion?”
“No, but I’m dying to hear it.”
Whitbrend smiled. “Listen. You tear out the car stalls. You tear down the outbuildings. Leave the playground. Convert the main chapel to a utility building, day school, study center, and business office.”
Whitbrend lifted an arm and pointed to the north. “There, in what is now just asphalt and speakers, you build the Grove of God Chapel. It is magnificent without being showy. It is a true monument to God. You build it of mirrored glass that will magnify its dimensions when it appears on-screen, and will dazzle the viewer. Its look is neither modern nor old, but a…contemporary-Gothic synthesis that is both ancient and ageless. There is no asphalt around it, but a simple grove of orange trees-ten idyllic acres. The green leaves and bright fruit of the trees are caught in the reflective glass of the chapel. The chapel is the heart of the Grove of God. The center of Eden. The beginning of life. Through the beautiful trees winds a wide boulevard to and from the chapel. Not an asphalt boulevard. Brick. I think brick painted sky blue, like your asphalt, would be perfect. Inside, this is a chapel that God Himself would be honored to visit. Not just honored. He’d wipe His shoes before entering. And smile with pride. It is resplendent but controlled. It is internally wired for video and sound, of course. And from a pulpit of tasteful splendor you deliver the finest sermons of any televangelist in the country. That inspires me with awe.”
A ripple of fear and revelation shivered down David Becker’s back. “Are you an evangelist or a television marketer?”
Whitbrend blushed and looked away. “I’m a minister by calling. But I’ve never delivered a sermon that can compare with one of yours. I’m not even in the same league. You have strength and authority. Your strength is wide and inclusive rather than focused and specific, which is what it takes to minister. I attend your church occasionally. When I can’t, my wife attends on my behalf. In a white sixty-two Impala. She tape-records your sermons for me so I can learn from them. I’m probably the only minister on earth who hustles home from his Sunday duties so he can listen to another minister perform his. Incidentally, there’s a nice aftermarket out there for tapes of your messages. I’m surprised you haven’t tapped it yet.”
“Why flatter me? You’ve got twice the imagination and ambition that I do.”
“But you’ve got all the talent.”
David considered this twenty-two-year-old minister. “What do you want?”
“To be a vehicle for God’s power.”
“Does He speak to you?” asked David. More eagerness in the question than he had planned.
Whitbrend looked at David. His blush was gone and his expression was grave. “I feel that He guides me.”
“Have you ever actually heard His voice?”
“No,” said Whitbrend.
“Does that bother you?”
“It’s the soil for my faith.”
“God’s silence is the soil for your faith,” said David. “That’s good.”
Whitbrend shrugged. “Have you? I mean, have you actually heard the Voice?”
“No. So I listen all the harder.”
“What more can anybody do?” asked Whitbrend.
An uncomfortable silence.
Then David looked out at The Raising of Lazarus. Saw the colors clear and rich in the morning sun. Tried to picture the Chapel of the Grove of God peaking toward the heavens. Imagined the glass flanks dotted with oranges. His own father could plant and tend the grove. David imagined his congregation inside. Imagined the sky bristling as the Word rode the airwaves to the corners of the universe. The Word the rider. His voice the horse.
“I’d like you to deliver the Sunday message,” said David. “All three services. After that, we’ll talk again.”
Whitbrend studied him with a tensile calm but a brightness in his eyes. Trying to keep his enthusiasm under control, thought David.
“Okay,” he said, breaking into a nervous smile.
David wondered how he’d broken the front tooth. Why he didn’t take the whiteness down a notch to match the others.
AT TEN that morning David counseled a young couple about their upcoming marriage. Ron and Diane. This was one of his favorite pastoral roles, because he got to experience the power and energy of love between human beings. The younger they were, the more pure and simple this love would be. David often believed he faltered in this capacity, because he failed to warn some young people strongly enough about all that can go wrong. The list was awfully damned long. Perils upon perils. So why not let them find out on their own? Maybe they’d be just fine. The divorce rate was soaring and this “free love” thing seemed to have everyone under thirty heading for the sheets and everyone over thirty heading for the motel or the divorce court. But people were still getting married like there was no tomorrow. David tried to emphasize forgiveness, and giving your partner respect and liberty as well as love. Basically, with the young ones, he just sat across the desk from them while they held hands and nodded. Ron and Diane were very young and very much in love. Ron had gotten a medical exemption for flat feet from the draft board. Diane was going to put him through college. Ron was headed for IBM. Scrubbed, pink-faced, straight-toothed. They actually had pimples. Not severe acne, just the vestigial marks of youth. David noted that Ron hid an erection, which amused Diane. The young lovers made him smile.
Just before noon he ministered to a believer dying in a hospital. It wasn’t easy to watch a person die. It challenged his belief in an afterlife when the present life so conspicuously and finally departed a body. And after such a long and tenacious fight. Life was the strongest thing he’d ever seen, but it was really kind of brief. It was there, then not. Really, totally, absolutely not. The dying person was a mother of three. Metastasized lung cancer, though she’d never smoked a cigarette in her life. Her children were too young to endure the scene, and the overwrought father was a blur of tears. He looked at David as if David’s God-the one to whom he and his family had reported for duty every Sunday of their lives-had specifically chosen his wife for this unfair and painful end. Which David fully believed and was exactly what he’d said about Janelle Vonn in his sermon on her death. That God chose some people to endure so that others wouldn’t have to. That we should love and respect these people.
The father looked at David like he wanted to kill someone.
When the children were ushered out David asked the young father if he would like to pray.
I hate your fucking God, he hissed, tears hitting the linoleum floor around him.
Let’s pray, anyway.
That afternoon David sat in with the Grove Drive-In Church youth league. It was Barbara’s group, Tuesday and Thursdays. Social, spiritual, and philanthropic. They’d recently delivered another two thousand dollars’ worth of new clothes to children in Tijuana. David sat at a table in the back of the meeting room, his presence simply to encourage them. Watched Barbara handle the details of a car-wash fund-raiser. Thought back to an earlier voyage to Tijuana and the way Miss Tustin Janelle Vonn had been so beautiful and unself-conscious as she handed a new red sweater to a skinny wisp of a girl with dusty black hair and a smile bright as a lightbulb. The rain was pounding on a leaky sheet-metal roof and David clearly remembered what Janelle had said to the girl.
Quiere a Dios con tu corazón, preciosa hermana. Pero lava tu pelo con tus manos.
Love God with your heart, pretty sister. But wash your hair with your hands.
David looked down at the little stack of worship pamphlets on the table. Yellow this week. Leftovers from the Tuesday youth league meeting. Picked one up and read the title of his scheduled sermon, “Integrity in a Relative World.” Had some nice moments in it, but not his best. A moot point, he thought, now that the Reverend Darren Whitbrend was set to take the stage. An acid test for the young minister. If Darren couldn’t move the congregation, then there was no point in further discussion.