Prediction: when the Bishop closes his hands, as he invariably does, on the pulpit rail …
Truth: “I take my text from the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, from the seventeenth chapter, and from the first verse of that chapter. Hr-hm! ‘I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.’
“Now I have no doubt that some of you—(ouch! What in the name of…?)—will have been a trifle shocked (what can possibly have made my hands smart like this?) at the choice of text which I’ve made—quite deliberately, I assure you (perhaps it’ll wear off if I try and ignore it)—in order to dramatise in the most violent possible fashion a truth which some people, professedly Christians like ourselves, have closed their eyes to. (It burns like hellfire!)
“The point which I want to make, which I hope to convince you needs to be made, is this—and it’s quite a simple one. Because the Book from which I took my text is that among all others which is relevant to everyday human experience, it does not shun some of the less palatable aspects of our lives. It does not express approval of them, naturally, but it certainly does not censor, as it were, the home truths about us which we have to face squarely if we are to lead the kind of lives it’s our Christian duty to attempt. (Ah, that’s better, it’s coming down to a sort of warm glow like gloves.)
“And because Man has a spark of the divine in his nature, the founders of our Church did not shrink from using very human—one might almost say crudely human—analogies in their teaching.
“The analogy of the prostitute, who sells her body for gain, is one which a few generations ago might have been regarded as distasteful by a great number of people. But the fact that our society called such people into existence was itself a shame—a disgrace, one might call it, using the strict technical aspect of the term ‘grace’. Fortunately we have come to recognise some concomitant aspects of the responsibility with which we have been charged by being created in material bodies, and among these is a recognition of the fact that the fact that the choice of the symbol of marriage between our Lord and His bride the Church was no accident—that, in short, the union between man and wife is an expression of love, an expression of love, in other words—ah—an expression of love. (I hope they won’t notice if I lean back against the pillar behind me!)
“Of course, prostitutes are becoming harder and harder to find these days. When I was a young man, there were some among my fellows who—ah—resorted to such persons, and I thought they were to be pitied, because clearly they had not come to terms with the built-in, as it were, faculty for expressing affection which is implied in the act which has not only the perpetuation of our species as its goal but also the giving of delight by one person to another or others.
“(?)
“When I say ‘others’, of course, I have in mind the regrettable fact that we human beings are far short of perfect and in a sense the full achievement of this heaven-sent faculty for pleasing one’s life’s partner is, like other human activities, one requiring testing and practice before the ultimate skill is achieved, and thus and therefore we find people who marry and genuinely regret that they chose this particular partner to whom in the upshot they are not after all suited and from whom with regret we part them regretfully because …
“Well, anyway. (Never realised before how heavy and sweaty these idiotic robes can become!)
“Lots of people don’t get this point, as you very well know. I mean, ever since the great schism of the late twentieth century, we’ve been treated to the nauseating spectacle of some head-in-the-sand bigots over there in Madrid bombarding what are supposed to be their fellow Catholics with a succession of bulls and encyclicals and what-not just because the Church of Rome cottoned on to the basic truth that there’s more to making love than manufacturing a series of babies who can be splashed with a bit of holy water and sent off to heaven to keep the hallelujahs flying and recognised the need for the contraceptive pill. But here’s this Pope Eglantine going on about how you mustn’t interfere with divine ordinances and give your other kids a chance to grow up in comfort so they can become rounded adult human beings, oh no, you must never ever enjoy yourself with anybody else except to procreate as though there weren’t enough of us around treading on each other’s heels and getting in the way all the time and taking away the bread from our mouths practically because they’re so greedy and selfish and Christ it’s enough to make you want to turn Muslim, really it is, because they’re promised a string of perpetually virgin houris when they die and what else is the contraceptive pill except a here-and-now counterpart of that no mucking about when your wife gets her belly full and night after night lying alone and unable to sleep for the pressure and you know literally it gets to be an ache after a while and all those sheeting idiots like Augustine who had his fun when he was a kid with the women of the streets and then turned around and forbade it for everyone else I think he had the pox and it got into his spinal fluid and brought on GPI and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s probably impotent anyone would think the same thing had happened to Pope Eglantine and his gang of Right Catholics. Why don’t I shut up and stop stuffing your ears with nonsense when you ought to be stuffing some other organ entirely?”
Consequence: the congregation was extremely disturbed.
continuity (6)
AUCTION BLOCK FOR ME
“Mr. House.” The tone absolutely neutral. “We met earlier today. Sit down, won’t you? It’ll have to be on the bed, I’m afraid—or perhaps you’d rather we adjourned to one of the public lounges downstairs?”
“No, this is fine,” Norman said distractedly, lowering himself on the very edge of the narrow bed. His eyes roamed randomly from point to point in the small room.
“May I offer you some refreshment? I recall that you don’t take alcohol, but perhaps coffee, or—”
“No thanks. I’ll smoke, though, if you don’t mind.”
“Ah, Bay Golds! That’s the brand I used to favour—no, I won’t, thank you. I gave it up. I was using it as a refuge from clear-headedness, and once or twice I nearly visited disaster on myself in consequence.”
Skirmishing. Abruptly Norman found the words to speak his mind. With the reefer in his hand still unlit, he said, “Look, Mr. Masters, let me say what I’ve come to say and then get out and stop bothering you. Mainly, it’s that I know I didn’t make a very good impression on you at lunchtime.”
Elihu leaned back in his chair, crossed his right leg over his left, put the tips of his fingers together, and waited.
“I’m not talking about the kind of impression Old GT and the rest of the high muckamucks brought me in to make on you. That has nothing to do with me as a person—it’s all the corporation image bit, here’s an enlightened employer with coloured VPs, and it’s stale news. The big companies have been doing it for fifty or sixty years and all it’s done is assuage a part of their guilt. What I’m apologising for is the impression I set out to make.”
He looked at Elihu squarely for the first time. “Tell me honestly: what did you think of me?”
“Think of you?” Elihu echoed, and gave a sad chuckle. “I didn’t get the chance to form an opinion of you. I’ll tell you what I thought of the way you were coming on, if you like.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“You were demonstrating to the distinguished visitor that you could be an even bigger bleeder than GT’s chief executives.”