Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

So where is the truth to be found? Who are the elect blessedly walking the true path to Salvation … and who are the misguided others? Can we tell? Do we know? We think we know — of course we think we know. We have our belief. But how do we distinguish our truth from another’s falsity, we of the true faith, except by the story we cherish? Our story of God. But, my friends, I ask you: Is God a story? Can we, each of us examining our faith — I mean its pure center, not its comforts, not its habits, not its ritual sacraments — can we believe anymore in the heart of our faith that God is our story of Him? What, for instance, has the industrialized carnage, the continentally engineered terrorist slaughter of the Holocaust done to our story? Do we dare ask? What mortification, what ritual, what practice would have been a commensurate Christian response to the Holocaust? Something to assure us of the truth of our story? Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau — a mass exile, perhaps? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, over the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp? I don’t know what it would be — but I know I’d recognize it if I saw it. If we go on with our story, blindly, after something like that, is it not merely innocent but also foolish, and possibly a defamation, a profound impiety? To presume to contain God in this unknowing story of ours, to hold Him, circumscribe Him, the author of everything we can conceive and everything we cannot conceive … in our story of Him? Of Her? Of whom? What in the name of our faith — what in God’s name! — do we think we are talking about!

WEDNESDAY LUNCH.

Well, Father, I hear you delivered yourself of another doozy.

How do you get your information, Charley. My little deacon, maybe, or my Kapellmeister?

Be serious.

No, really, unless you’ve got the altar bugged. Because, God knows, there’s nobody but us chickens. Give me an uptown parish, why don’t you, where the subway doesn’t shake the rafters. Give me one of God’s midtown showplaces of the pious rich and famous, and I’ll show you what doozy means.

Now, listen, Pem, he says. This is unseemly. You are doing and saying things that are … ecclesiastically worrying.

He frowns at his grilled fish as if wondering what it’s doing there. His well-chosen Pinot Grigio shamelessly neglected as he sips ice water.

Tell me what I should be talking about, Charley. My five parishioners are serious people. I mean, is this only a problem for Jewish theology? Mormon? Swedenborgian?

There’s a place for doubt. And it’s not the altar of St. Timothy’s.

Funny you should say that. Doubt is my next week’s sermon: the idea is that in our time it is no more likely that a religious person will live a moral life than that an irreligious person will. What do you think?

A tone has crept in, a pride of intellect, something is not right—

And it may be that we guardians of the sacred texts are in spirit less God-fearing than the average secular individual in a modern industrial democracy who has quietly accepted the ethical teachings and installed them in himself and/or herself.

Lays the knife and fork down, composes his thoughts: You’ve always been your own man, Pem, and in the past I’ve had a sneaking admiration for the freedom you’ve found within church discipline. We all have. And in a sense you’ve paid for it, we both know that. In terms of talent and brains, the way you burned up Yale, you probably should have been my bishop. But in another sense it is harder to do what I do, be the authority that your kind is always testing.

My kind?

Please think about this. The file is getting awfully thick. You are headed for an examination, a Presentment. Is that what you want?

His blue eyes look disarmingly into mine. Boyish shock of hair, now gray, falling over the forehead. Then his famous smile flashes over his face and instantly fades, having been the grimace of distraction of an administrative mind.

What I know of such things, Pem, I know well. Self-destruction is not one act, or even one kind of act. It is the whole man coming apart in every direction, all three hundred and sixty degrees.

Amen to that, Charley. You don’t suppose there’s time for a double espresso?

ALL RIGHT, THAT WISE old dog Tillich — Paulus Tillichus — how does he construe the sermon? Picks a text and worries the hell out of it. Sniffs at the words, paws them: What, when you get right down to it, is a demon ? You say you want to be saved ? But what does that mean? When you pray for eternal life , what do you think you’re asking for? Paulus, God’s philologist, this Merriam-Webster of the DDs, this German … shepherd. I loved him. The suspense he held us in — teetering on the edge of secularism, arms waving wildly. Of course, he saved us every time, pulled back from the abyss, and we were okay after all, back with Jesus. Until the next sermon, the next lesson. Because if God is to live, the words of faith must be renewed. The words must be reborn.

Oh, did we flock to him. Enrollments soared.

But that was then and this is now.

We’re back in Christendom, Paulus. People are born again, not words. You can see it on television.

FRIDAY MORNING. Following his intuition, Divinity Detective wandered over to the restaurant-supply district on the Bowery, below Houston, where the trade is brisk in used steam tables, walk-in freezers, grills, sinks, pots, woks, and bins of cutlery. Back behind the Taipei Trading Company was the antique gas-operated fridge too recently acquired to have a sales tag, with the mark of my shoe sole still on the door where I kicked it when it wouldn’t stay closed. And in one of the bins of the used-dish department the tea things from our pantry, white with a green trim, gift from the dear departed Ladies’ Auxiliary. Practically named my own price, Lord. With free delivery. A steal.

Evening. I walk over to Tompkins Square, find my friend on his bench.

This has got to stop, I say to him.

My, you riled up.

Wouldn’t you be?

Not like the Pops I know.

I thought we had an understanding. I thought there was mutual respect.

They is. Have a seat.

Sparrows working the benches in the dusk.

Told you wastin’ your time, but I ast aroun like I said I would. No one here hittin’ on Tim’s.

Not from here?

Thasit.

How can you be sure?

This regulated territory.

Regulated! That’s funny.

Now who’s not showin’ respeck. This my parish we talkin’ bout. Church of the Sweet Vision. They lean on me, see what I’m sayin’? I am known for my compassion. You dealin’ with foreigners or some such, thas my word to you.

Ah, hell. I suppose you’re right.

No problem. Unsnaps attaché case: Here, my very own personal blend. No charge. Relax yoursel.

Thanks.

Toke of my affection.

MONDAY NIGHT, a new tack. I waited in the balcony with my BearScare six-volt Superbeam. If something stirred, I’d just press the button and my Superbeam would hit the altar at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second — same cruising speed as the finger of God.

The amber crime-preventing lights on the block make a perfect indoor crime site of my church. Intimations of a kind of tarnished air in the vaulted spaces. The stained-glass figures yellowed into lurid obsolescence. How many years has this church been home to me? But all I had to do was sit up in the back for a few hours to understand the truth of its stolid indifference. How an oak pew creaks. How a passing police siren in its two Doppler pitches is like a crisis being filed away in the stone walls.