Rick Moody - The Diviners

He said he intended to work with us too.

There’s a commotion taking place beneath the study of the Reverend Duffy, on the first floor. But he’s not ready yet to take a hand in this commotion. He applies himself instead in the matter of homiletics, as it was passed on to him by his teachers and as he has practiced it for thirty-five years, most of it in this parish, here in Newton, Massachusetts. Less through dogged persistence has he practiced his calling than through an inability to think of what else to do. It’s his portion and his cup. He has remained in this parish, and this parish is full of stories. Why, there was the time his choral director took up with one of the parishioners. The story would have barely risen to the level of gossip were it not for the fact that the choral director, Brian, and his inamorato, Archie, were both married to women at the time. Quite a story, and it required all his pastoral skills. The wives declared that their sex lives had been more than adequate.

Stories of parish life sustained him when he wasn’t sure if there was anything new to the job after the fifty or seventy-five marriages and just as many funerals, who knew how many baptisms and confirmations. The church calendar often looked to him like a child’s roller coaster, with gentle, predictable acclivities and declivities, and not much else. Here he is again at the end of the church year, coming up on Advent, that time of reflection, when the symbolism is so comforting: the all-powerful disguised as a defenseless baby in mean estate.

Well, not quite yet. First, the end of the church year. Time of eschatological imaginings, as in the week’s reading from Hebrews: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.” Not yet the advent of the baby with the fancy halo, not yet the time of the dove fluttering above the baby. Not yet. Instead, we are here where the metaphors are not comforting. So perhaps it’s appropriate that his wife is downstairs shouting at his biological son, which, it should be said, is an unusual thing in the household of the reverend. The shouting mostly came to its conclusion when the older, adopted son left. Still, some shouting does not mean that he must be immediately involved. When William Duffy, the eldest, was young there was much gnashing of teeth. There was never enough of anything to salve the open sore of William’s adoption, not to mention the unforgivable fact of William’s being of a different race. If only they had known of identity politics in the seventies what they know now at the fin de siècle.

At present, William is in difficult legal circumstance, and it is this circumstance that leads the reverend to the commencement of next Sunday’s homily, the notes on which he will embellish extempore, according to his usual style. Start on Sunday, work the whole week in a leisurely way, avoid the oppression of deadlines. He types the words on his old Smith-Corona, with its warm, percussive music:

You may be surprised to learn that it has been nearly two decades since I felt any certainty about the existence of the Almighty —

A relief when he types the line, and how many times he has thought of typing it before, never feeling that it was right, always feeling that it would shock the parish, perhaps even more than the liaison between Brian and Archie. The instructor in homiletics always advised getting down associations first, whatever they were. So he will get down all the thoughts and, likewise, all the uncertainties he has at the end of this jubilee year. He is uncertain about many things. His uncertainties are the “dreadful thing,” as advertised in the epistle to the Hebrews. Where are the saints who are supposed to be abroad in the land, in whom we might delight? The Reverend Duffy does not know where they are and he doesn’t know if they will come again in such a way that there is no doubt associated with them. The saints will not come on a particular day, wearing a particular robe, and with a particular program, and this is because the time of saints is past:

You may be surprised to know that when I pray I often do not know what to say and in reply I receive only silence —

He can hear his wife begging to know where his younger son, Maximillian, has been. Where has he been spending these last nights? With which of his friends did he allegedly stay, and will the parents of these friends vouch as to the facts? It is known that William, the elder, turned up briefly in the house, on Friday, speaking only of a need for a short vacation from his work, though in fact his entire life seems to have been a vacation. It is known that William is in an enormous amount of trouble, because almost immediately after his appearance the Reverend Duffy and his wife began to receive telephone calls about William’s trouble, which trouble came to pass in New York City. First among this sequence of dreadful revelations was the call from his daughter, Annabel, the middle child, whom the reverend loves most, though a father is not meant to love one child above the others. His daughter explained to them about the young Asian woman, and the reverend’s wife, Debby, wept there at the kitchen table, and she asked why they had all this going on now, alluding to other periods of trouble in their union and their family. The reverend held her briefly, though he was no good at holding people. He was better at a certain stiff resolve, and this is perhaps what made him effective at the weddings and funerals of the Congregationalists of Newton, Massachusetts, where stiffness has a long history.

His daughter called, and then his wife went upstairs to do the reconnaissance. In their younger son’s room she saw the curtains blowing in like sails on the sea vessel of calamity. Her two sons had gone out the window and shimmied down the tree, as though they were teenage hoodlums, and the window was open, and now they were gone. If this was not a story as full of metaphors as the powerless baby in mean estate, well, then the Reverend Duffy did not know his biblical stories.

The Gospel reading for the last Sunday of the church calendar is from Mark, and the homily had better deal with it. The only problem, seeing as how the reverend is cataloguing his uncertainties while his wife interrogates their son downstairs (she will not be trifled with, et cetera), is that the reverend doesn’t believe that Mark actually wrote the passage attributed to him here. The fiction of Mark is perhaps one of his uncertainties, as is the liberally embellished narrative of Jesus, especially in passages such as this one, wherein it feels that powerful bishops or church leaders are retroactively attempting to foreshadow kinds of martyrdom that had probably already taken place by the time of their subsequent redaction, in order that the wandering mendicant Jesus of Nazareth should come off as a fine prognosticator:

9 You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them. 10 And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. 11 Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit. 12 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 13 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.

This is just the kind of End Times nonsense that supports an entire industry of televangelist frauds, who learned their skills, the reverend thinks, not from theologians but from manufacturers of underarm deodorant. It nauseates the Reverend Duffy, this type of scriptural passage, it depresses him, but at the end of the church calendar, it is unavoidable. The people who incline toward this kind of bunk, or the Book of Revelation, are the ones with borderline personality disorder or a deluxe helping of delusional narcissism. They need clinical care. His son William, for example, always liked the Book of Revelation best because of all the special effects. And there are plenty of those in the reading today: