“Not me. Him.” Thomas was smiling again. And looking at me like he could read everything in my soul.
I said, “You know what I mean. It’s a miracle, anyway. The biggest miracle since, I don’t know, since, the Resurrection. The next day we need help, guidance, right? My husband and I, we go to church. The church is closed. Locked tight. We go around back and try to find the fathers. Nobody there but a housekeeper and she’s scared. Won’t open up. Why is the church shut? They’re afraid of rioters, she says. Where’s Father McDermott? He’s gone to the Archdiocese for a conference. So have all the other fathers. Go away, she says. Nobody’s here. You follow me, Thomas? Biggest miracle since the Resurrection, and they close the church the next day.”
Thomas said, “They got nervous, I guess.”
“Nervous? Sure they were nervous. That’s my whole point. Where were the fathers when we needed them? Conferring at the Archdiocese. The Cardinal was holding a special meeting about the crisis. The crisis, Thomas! God Himself works a miracle, and to the church it’s a crisis! What am I supposed to do? Where does it leave me? I need the church, the church has always been telling me that, and all of a sudden the church locks its doors and says to me, Go figure it out by yourself, lady, we won’t have a bulletin for a couple of days. The church was scared! I think they were afraid the Lord was going to come in and say we don’t need priests any more, we don’t need churches, all this organized-religion stuff hasn’t worked out so well anyway, so let’s forget it and move right into the Millennium.”
“Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power,” Thomas said, shrugging. “But the church opened again, didn’t it?”
“Sure, four days later. Business as usual, except we aren’t supposed to ask any questions about June 6 yet. Because they don’t have The Word from Rome yet, the interpretation, the official policy.” I had to laugh. “‘Three weeks, almost, since it happened, and the College of Cardinals is still in special consistory, trying to decide what position the church ought to take. Isn’t that crazy, Thomas? If the Pope can’t recognize a miracle when he sees one, what good is the whole church?”
“All right,” Thomas said, “but why blame me?”
“Because you took my church away from me. I can’t trust those people any more. I don’t know what to believe. We’ve got God right here beside us, and the church isn’t giving any leadership. What do we do now? How do we handle this thing?”
“Have faith, my child,” he said, “and pray for salvation, and remain steadfast in your righteousness.” He said a lot of other stuff like that too, rattling it off like he was a computer programmed to deliver blessings. I could tell he wasn’t sincere. He wasn’t trying to answer me, just to calm me down and get rid of me.
“No,” I said, breaking in on him. “That stuff isn’t good enough. Have faith. Pray a lot. I’ve been doing that all my life. Okay, we prayed and we got God to show Himself. What now? What’s your program, Thomas? Tell me that. What do you want us to do? You took our church away—what will you give us to replace it?”
I could tell he didn’t have any answers.
His face turned red and he tugged on the ends of his hair and looked at Saul Kraft in a sour way, almost like he was saying I-told-you-so with his eyes. Then he looked back at me and I saw either sorrow or fear in his face, I don’t know which, and I realized right then that this Thomas is just a human being like you and me, a human being, who doesn’t really understand what’s happening and doesn’t know how to go on from this point. He tried to fake it. He told me again to pray, never underestimate the power of prayer, et cetera, et cetera, but his heart wasn’t in his words. He was stuck. What’s your program, Thomas? He doesn’t have any. He hasn’t thought things through past the point of getting the Sign from God. He can’t help us now. There’s your Thomas for you, the Proclaimer, the prophet. He’s scared. We’re all scared, and he’s just one of us, no different, no wiser. And last night the Apocalyptists burned the shopping center. You know, if you had asked me six months ago how I’d feel if God gave us a Sign that He was really watching over us, I’d have told you that I thought it would be the most wonderful thing that had ever happened since Jesus in the manger. But now it’s happened. And I’m not so sure how wonderful it is. I walk around feeling that the ground might open up under my feet any time. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us all. God has come, and it ought to be beautiful, and instead it’s just scary. I never imagined it would be this way. Oh, God. God I feel so lost. God I I feel so empty.
Seven
An Insight of Discerners
Speaking before an audience was nothing new for me, of course. Not after all the years I’ve spent in classrooms, patiently instructing each season’s hairy new crop of young in the mysteries of tachyon theory, anterior-charge particles, and time-reversal equations. Nor was this audience a particularly alien or frightening one: it was made up mainly of faculty people from Harvard and M.I.T., some graduate students, and a sprinkling of lawyers, psychologists, and other professional folk from Cambridge and the outskirts. All of us part of the community of scholarship, so to speak. The sort of audience that might come together to protest the latest incident of ecological rape or of preventive national liberation. But one aspect of my role this evening was unsettling to me. This was in the truest sense a religious gathering; that is, we were meeting to discuss the nature of God and to arrive at some comprehension of our proper relationship to Him. And I was the main speaker, me, old Bill Gifford, who for nearly four decades had regarded the Deity as an antiquated irrelevance. I was this flock’s pastor. How strange that felt.
“But I believe that many of you are in the same predicament,” I told them. “Men and women to whom the religious impulse has been something essentially foreign. Whose lives were complete and fulfilled although prayer and ritual were wholly absent from them. Who regarded the concept of a supreme being as meaningless and who looked upon the churchgoing habits of those around them as nothing more than lower-class superstitiousness on the one hand and middle-class pietism on the other. And then came the great surprise of June 6—forcing us to reconsider doctrines we had scorned, forcing us to reexamine our basic philosophical constructs, forcing us to seek an acceptable explanation of a phenomenon that we had always deemed impossible and implausible. All of you, like myself, suddenly found yourselves treading very deep metaphysical waters.”
The nucleus of this group had come together on an ad hoc basis the week after It happened, and since then had been meeting two or three times a week. At first there was no formal organizational structure, no organizational name, no policy; it was merely a gathering of intelligent and sophisticated New Englanders who felt unable to cope individually with the altered nature of reality and who needed mutual reassurance and reinforcement. That was why I started going, anyway. But within ten days we were groping toward a more positive purpose: no longer simply to learn how to accept what had befallen humanity, but to find some way of turning it to a useful purpose. I had begun articulating some ideas along those lines in private conversation, and abruptly I was asked by several of the leaders of the group to make my thoughts public at the next meeting.