Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

“But you are contrite!. That is a blesséd thing, it means you are at last on the right path. You make me very happy,” said Henry, warmly shaking his hand.

At the next Sunday morning service Starky announced the text for his sermon, stood chewing his lower lip for a while then said unhappily, “I confess to all here that I, Samuel Starky, am a sinner like yourselves, of the Earth, earthly. In this church you should hear nothing speak but God’s Holy Spirit. Alas, alas, Sam Starky’s words are not fit for your ears so I will now pray silently that the Holy Spirit descend and use my voice as its instrument. I know at least nine souls who will also pray for that, and I humbly beg the rest of you to pray for that also.” He clasped hands and closed eyes. Those in the rectory pew and six others in the church did the same. A majority looked at each other in perplexity and as minutes passed started whispering in voices that grew to a conversational hum. At last Starky opened his eyes and said brokenly, “The Holy Ghost has not accepted my petition. I will petition Him again at the evening service.”

After removing their robes in the vestry Starky and Prince joined Mrs Starky and Julia and then went outside through a loudly gossiping throng, some puzzled, some amused. Most fell silent as the rector and his company emerged leaving the voice of an old man with his back to them declaiming, “Boy and man I have happily slept through a parcel of sermons so I don’t like this dumb parson who why is you nudgin’ me?. . Ah.”

On entering the rectory Starky said, “O please, Brother Henry, please conduct the evening service! I am not able, indeed I am not.”

“Dear Brother Starky, I will not conduct the evening service because your inability to preach is more effective than anything I could say.”

“Impossible!”

“Not impossible — certain. Before you returned here my sermons were heard without unease and without murmuring. I spoke to them honestly, but The Spirit did not dictate my words as it does when I speak to willing ears. I should have publicly awaited The Spirit’s coming as you are doing, but now your silence in the pulpit is more effective than mine will ever be.” “And tonight, Sam, you may have better luck,” said Mrs Starky. “O no dear! Luck is a pagan deity!” said Julia, “We must continue to invoke God’s help through prayer.”

She looked to Henry who rewarded her with a smile and nod.

The evening service passed like the morning one, except that Starky’s distress was greater. But attendance at Prince’s Bible study group rose from nine (counting the Starkys) to seventeen, and nineteen attended the Friday prayer meeting. At the next Sunday service Starky, having announced the sermon’s text, sobbed aloud then begged concerned Christians to follow him across to the rectory and help him pray that he receive the power of the Holy Spirit. Over thirty of the congregation followed him there while Henry conducted the traditional service, minus sermon, to just before the final blessing, then paused and waited. Soon after Starky and his followers rejoined the congregation and Starky, in a stoical, monotonous voice, brought the service to the traditional end. “How brave you were dear,” said Mrs Starky as they returned to the rectory.

“Heroic! That is the word,” said Julia.

“The Lord chastens who He loveth,” said Henry calmly, “He is chastening you, Sam! Be assured, dear Brother Samuel, that The Spirit cannot desert one as humbled as you have become. It is biding its time, which must now be very, very near.”

A miserable smile was Starky’s only reply.

Next Sunday the congregation was swelled by an influx of curious visitors from neighbouring parishes. Some were dissenters who had heard that a Church of England rector was about to turn Methodist, Baptist or Quaker, others wanted to enjoy the antics of a mad parson. In the morning service Starky’s plea for the Holy Spirit to descend on him was a despairing yell answered from the back of the church by jeers, laughter and clapping, along with many indignant shushing sounds from elsewhere.

“I cannot conduct another service, Brother Prince! You must do it for me at Evensong,” groaned Starky as they returned to the rectory, arm-in-arm with Henry on one side and his wife on the other.

“You can. You will. I know you will.”

“Hear hear, well said Brother Henry! We all know you will,” said his sister stoutly.

“You’ll feel better after lunch, dear,” said his wife.

The Evensong congregation was like the morning’s at first, apart from Starky’s conduct of the service being more lost and halting than ever. At sermon time he ascended the pulpit and stared out for almost half a minute, open-mouthed, wide-eyed and visibly sweating, then said with difficulty, “Belovéd. . dearly belovéd brothers. . and sisters. . I will read the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. If the Lord is pleased to speak by me. . then He will. If He will not I must hold my tongue because I will not, I cannot speak for myself.”

He then read out quietly but clearly, “ Awake, thou that sleepest; and arize from the dead; and Christ shall give thee light ,” and with no change of voice said, “Wise men tell us that this world of ours is a great globe hurtling round the Sun, spinning like a huge cannonball as it goes yet holding on its surface oceans, mountains, cities, you, me, all of us. What a terrible thought!”

After a brief pause he added urgently, “Why are we all not sick with dizziness? What stops the bodies of you, me, everybody on this planet being flung out by this whirling wheel of a world into boundless space? Scientific men say our bodies are held here by a force called gravity, a force pulling everything down toward the Earth’s centre, a centre where many imagine Hell to be. But Hell cannot be inside the Earth because the Earth is a mortal body that will die and pass away! When it does only Hell will remain here and it will be eternal. These bodies of ours also must and will die — as we all know — but they contain immortal souls that will not and cannot die, as most of you forget. O you poor, poor souls, think how frantically you will beg for death when death is no longer possible! When the last trump sounds, the sky rolls up like a scroll, the stars fall like ripe figs, the world vanishes yet ye are resurrected! Where will you stand when there is no ground to stand upon? I tell you, you will not stand, it will be impossible! Some of us, thank God, will be drawn up easily and gladly into the eternally happy companionship of Jesus Christ our Lord, in the Kingdom of Heaven for which he created you all, and into which he invites you all, and where all who gladly accept His loving invitation will certainly go. But the vast majority of you who are refusing that loving invitation will exist with no ground beneath your feet — exist in eternal torturing darkness, without light, without hope of light. . without hope of anything, ever!

“Not many of you have been in one of Her Majesty’s new improved prisons where the inmates break stones with heavy hammers, trudge for hours on end over treadmills, stagger with big iron cannonballs round a yard from one heap to another whenever a warder blows a whistle. In return they are allowed just enough food and sleep to keep them alive for the duration of their sentence. How like most people’s life on Earth that is! Has anyone here never been sickened by toil? And come to the end of the day’s drudgery feeling exactly where they were at the start? And wakened next morning to a life they must lift and go on carrying like an almost unbearable burden? Such are the lives in Queen Victoria’s new improved prisons, but he who protests against this punishing labour must endure worse. That man is taken down a dark tunnel through several thicknesses of wall and locked in a tiny cell without windows or light. Bread and water is passed to him through a tiny opening by someone he never sees. The silence here is so complete that only by muttering or yelling or scraping his heels on the floor may a man know he is not struck deaf, and he has no way of knowing he has not been struck blind. Five days of this punishment turns the strongest criminal into a gibbering lunatic, yet he has merely disobeyed a human, prison governor. How much more dreadful must be the imprisonment of we who disobey the governor of the universe! Awake, thou that sleepest; and arise from the dead; and Christ will give thee light! Do you not fear to disobey that call? Why will you not leave this earthly prison house by taking steps toward joining Christ in his Holy Kingdom? The punishment I described never lasts as long as a week! God’s spell of solitary confinement will never end. The punishment I described is mental, but on the last day to your souls all-horrible alone-ness will be added a resurrected, undying body of flesh whose every inch, inside and out, will be gripped and crushed by a scorching mass of unendurable — but eternally to be endured — agony .”