Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Really? That’s interesting. My mom was English and she met my dad when he was serving with the Air Force in the north of England, and she went home with him, to New Jersey. So, like—’

‘And it was there,’ Nicholas Ellis continued steadily, ‘that I first became exposed to what you might consider a more “dynamic” manifestation of Christianity.’

‘In the, uh, Bible Belt?’ Snakes and hot coals?

‘Where I became fully aware of the power of God.’ The priest looked up at the veiled church. ‘Where, if you like, the power of the Holy Spirit reached out and touched me.’

No, Robin did not like. ‘You notice how the mist winds itself around the tower? As a painter, that fascinates me.’

‘The sheer fervour, the electric momentum , you encountered in little...’ Ellis’s hands forming fists for emphasis, ‘little clapboard chapels. The living church – I knew what that meant for the first time. Over here, we have all these exquisite ancient buildings, steeped in centuries of worship... and we’re losing it, losing it , Robin.’

‘Right,’ Robin had said neutrally.

Ellis nodded toward the ruins. ‘Poets eulogizing the beauty of country churches... and they meant the buildings , the surroundings. Man, is that not beauty at its most superficial?’

‘Uh... I guess.’ Robin considered how Betty would want him to play this and so didn’t rise to it. But he knew in his soul that what those poets were evoking, whether they were aware of it or not, was an energy of place which long pre-dated Christianity. The energy Robin was experiencing right there, right this minute, with the tower uniting with the mist and the water surging below. Sure, the Christians picked up on that, mainly in medieval times, with all those soaring Gothic cathedrals, but basically it was out of their league.

Because, Robin thought, meeting the priest’s pale eyes, this is a pagan thing, man.

And this was when he had first become aware of an agenda. Sensing that whatever the future held for him and this casual-looking priest in his army cast-offs, it was not going to involve friendly rivalry and good-natured badinage.

‘Buildings are jewellery,’ Ellis had said, ‘baubles. When I came home, I felt like a missionary in my own land. I was working as a teacher at the time. But when I was subsequently ordained, ended up here, I knew this was where I was destined to be. These people have their priorities right.’

‘How’s that?’

Ellis let the question go by. He was now talking about how the States also had its bad side. How he had spent time in California, where people threw away their souls like candy wrappers, where the Devil squatted in shop windows like Santa Claus, handing out packs of tarot cards and runes and I Ching sets.

‘Can you believe those people?’ Robin turned away to control a grin. For, albeit he was East Coast raised, he was those people.

‘Over here, it’s less obvious.’ Ellis shuddered suddenly. ‘Far more deeply embedded. Like bindweed, the worst of it’s underground.’

Robin hadn’t reacted, though he was unsure of whether this was the best response or not. Maybe some normal person bombarded with this bullshit would, by now, be telling this guy he had things to do, someplace else to go, calls to make – nice talking with you, Reverend, maybe see you around.

Looking over at the rain-screened hills, Ellis was saying how, the very week he had arrived here, it was announced that archaeologists had stumbled on something in the Radnor Valley – evidence of one of the biggest prehistoric wooden temples ever discovered in Europe.

Robin’s response had been, ‘Yeah, wasn’t that terrific?’

When Ellis had turned to him, there was a light in his eyes which Robin perceived as like a gas jet.

‘He said it was a sign of something coming to the surface.’

‘Them finding the prehistoric site?’ Betty sat up, pushing her golden hair behind her ears.

‘It was coming out like a rash, was how he put it,’ Robin said. ‘Like the disease under the surface – the disease which you only identify when the rash starts coming out?’

‘What’s he talking about?’

‘Man with an agenda, Bets.’ Robin detected a half-inch of beer in one of the Michelob bottles and drained it, laid down the bottle with a thump. ‘If there’s anything I can recognize straight off, it’s another guy with an agenda.’

‘Robin, you don’t have an agenda, you just have woolly dreams.’

‘You wanna hear this, or not?’

‘Sorry,’ Betty said, frayed. ‘Go on.’

Robin told her that when Ellis had first come here, before the Church let him go his own way, he looked after four small parishes, on both sides of the border. New Radnor was the biggest. All the parishes possessed churches, except one of these was in ruins.

‘But don’t take this the wrong way. Remember this is a guy doesn’t go for churches. He’s into clapboard shacks. Now, Old Hindwell is a village with no church any more, not even a Baptist chapel. But one thing it does have is a clapboard fucking shack . Well, not exactly clapboard – more like concrete and steel. The parish hall in fact.’

‘Is there one?’

‘Up some steps, top of the village. Built, not too well, in the early sixties. Close to derelict, when Ellis arrived. He hacks through the brambles one day and a big light comes down on him, like that guy on the road to Damascus, and he’s like, “This is it. This is my church!” You recall that film Witness , where the Amish community build this huge barn in, like, one day?’

‘Everybody mucking in. Brilliant.’

‘Yeah, well, what happens here is Christians converge from miles around to help Nick Ellis realize his vision. Money comes pouring in. Carpenters, plumbers, sundry artisans giving their work for free. No time at all, the parish hall’s good as new... better than new. And there’s a nice big cross sticking out the roof, with a light inside the porch. And every Sunday the place is packed with more people than all the other local churches put together.’

Robin paused.

Betty opened out her hands. ‘What do you want me to say? Triumph of the spirit? You think I should knock that?’

‘Wait,’ Robin told her. ‘How come all this goes down in a place with so little religious feeling they abandoned the original goddamn church?’

‘Evangelism, Robin. It spreads like a grass fire when it gets going. He’s a new kind of priest with all that American... whatever. If it can happen there, it can happen here – and obviously has. Which shows how right we were to keep a low profile, because those born-again people, to put it mildly, are not tolerant towards paganism.’

Robin shook his head. ‘Ellis denies responsibility for the upsurge. Figures it was waiting to happen – to deal with something that went wrong. Something of which Old Hindwell church is symptomatic.’

Betty waited.

‘So we’re both moving in closer to the church, and I’m finding him a little irritating by now, so I start to point out these wonderful ancient yew trees – how the building itself might be medieval but I’m told that the yews in a circle and the general positioning of the church indicate that it occupies a pre-Christian site. I’m talking in a “this doesn’t mean much to me but it’s interesting, isn’t it?” kind of voice.’

‘Robin,’ Betty said, ‘you don’t possess that voice.’

Ellis was staring at him. ‘Who told you that, Robin?’

Robin floundered. ‘Oh... the real estate agent, I guess.’

Furious with himself that, instead of speaking up for the oldest religion of these islands, he was scuttling away like some shamed vampire at dawn, allowing this humourless bastard to go on assuming without question that his own 2,000-year-old cult had established a right to the moral high ground. So how did they achieve that, Nick? By waging countless so-called holy wars against other faiths? By fighting amongst themselves with bombs and midnight kneecappings, blowing guys away in front of their kids?