Norman Rush - Mortals

“Now soon I will be finished … Rra … Rra, these tales are with us already, here. They are in the minds of the people and they are as stones, hard things, and you are facing a battle to unearth them. You can see it when the people flood in rivers to the stadium to pray to God and Christ Jesus for rain. You may wish to look aside from this. You may say they are wasting their time, to do so. But I say you will be wasting your time if you oppose it, and wasting more, it may be. Because rra, even as I tell you the tales about Jesus, I feel in my heart that if such a man could join us, we could carry the day.

“Because. Because if we are to clear this hell that we have made with the help of the makhoa, all the people must come with us. We must have every man! We must have men of every kind, from those who are wise, very wise, like yourself, because you do oppose this hell, down to the fools if need be. Every man! We must have the women, too. And we must have these people as they are, believing these tales or not.

“Rra, I say these tales of Jesus can help us. Think of Germany, the Peasant Wars, and the destruction of the princes. And you can go to Aiyetoro, in Nigeria, and see many people living and working as one, with no one rich, and they are all Christian, there, at Aiyetoro.

“Rra, this is what I must say … I have said it …

“What I say is, let everyone come who will, to join hands to cast hell from us. I will take every Christian, I will take all good people. But I will take bad people, devils, too, if I can find them and I can tell them a story to make them stay alongside me. My friend, you are casting down a sword before you go to battle.

“And am I sorry to be saying these things to you. I have learned many things here, coming to these teas and evenings of yours, and I have got from you reading I shall keep by me always, and I shall think of you. I have books enough and lists of books enough to keep my eyes open until I die. E. P. Sanders, Mr. Vermes. Robert Ingersoll, great thinker. I like him. And this fine book The Ghost Dance that shows the foolishness of man so truly you must choose whether to weep or laugh. I am reading it now.

“Rra, for a long time I have wished to say this to you, that I thank you. You have fed me. So I am saying all this now because I will be going away at some time, I think soon. Yes. But I want to say something to clear my heart. It is a small thing.

“I know what you say about the Roman church very well and it is true. But I held myself from saying what I think, at times. So, rra … I think it is very good to have saints. I like it. Perhaps not those saints they recommend. But to raise up some one or two people or more, singled out to be praised for a good life, for honor, is a thing I like. I think we should have saints of our own kind, when the world is more what it should be. I cannot bring my heart against this church, as you would say I must. And as well I think we must see this church as very clever, not only for saints but for saying they can take so many homosexualists and have them work to build the church and since they have no heirs their work will benefit the church alone. And this is a point, that the church is not saying see how in the Bible it says you are evil, get away from this place, oh my no. No, it says abide here, and do not express yourself toward boys, and all will be well. And they have benefited greatly from homosexualism, a thing their scriptures tell them to hate and abjure.

“So this is what I wish to say to you. I know your heart, my brother.

“Your heart is for a world far better than this one, of course. We are brothers. Your heart is for a world where every mind is set free. And your heart is for what minds set free at last might do together, with all these … these chains and curbs and dodges struck away. You see in your heart a world made by minds standing straight up at all times, where in past times most were stooping or trammeled down. You see a beautiful place, differing in all ways to this place.

“Ehe, yes, perhaps such can be … when we have done away with all this that you see , begging of children, this suffering whilst the rich are opening their hands the wider to clutch more and more of this country. Soon they will have all the cattle, and the villages will be roofless places, and then sand and dust. And there will be even more of the poor than at present pushing in from those villages to fill up Old Naledi until it is a solid ring of suffering around us. And … sha! Yes, it is a shame, what you see about you here, but in Sehitwa, in Shorobe, you can see worse. Come with me once to Shorobe. Well, I have said everything.”

The silence that followed was difficult, Ray could tell. It would have to be.

When Morel spoke, his voice was cold and loud, but there was a fine tremor in it at first.

“You are wrong, Kerekang.”

There was another silence, until Morel began again. “Kerekang, listen to me please.

“You remember when we began to discuss these things for the first time and I told you that faith was a terrible poison and you laughed because you thought I was making too much of it because in your experience it was a weak thing. You had been living in the U.K. where the established church is indeed in a rather etiolated condition. You found it hard to see the church as a live part of anything that people were deciding to do or not to do. This is what you compared it to. You told me that when you first ate in a good restaurant in England, the first couple of times, I believe, you said that when the proprietor came to the table to ask how you’d liked the meal, you’d been truthful, praised a couple of things but criticized others. And you’d seen a certain reaction among your friends and in the proprietor, of shock. And from that you had realized that obviously the custom was quickly to praise everything that had been served, whether you had liked it or not. And you proposed to me that religion was like that. Religion was like the protocol of saying everything was delicious, with the proprietor knowing it was unlikely or untrue and your companions knowing it was untrue … because they had complained during the meal … and you yourself knowing it was untrue. Nobody really believes, you said. Most people say they are Church of England, if you press them, you said, but nobody believes. The priests, many of them, certainly don’t, you said, and the priests know that nobody sitting in front of them believes. But people keep going at Easter and Christmas and saying they are C of E the rest of the time. Oh, and I think you also compared it to makeup on women, am I right? They all do it, you look at them, women, wearing makeup, and you incorporate it into your assessment of them without being aware you’re doing it, even though the woman knows and you know that you aren’t seeing the truth and she isn’t showing you the truth. So you proceed anyway. It’s minor, you said, and doesn’t hurt.

“And then what else did you say? I’m trying to recall. Oh yes, that the church was a useful thing if only for the fact that, just by stopping in irregularly, you would have a chance at getting a few people to turn up for your funeral who otherwise wouldn’t have, which was, you said, a comforting prospect.

“So, okay. England misled you. I showed you that in the world at large faith was expanding, credulism was expanding, and that the particular types of religious belief that were expanding the fastest were the purest, most primitive, the dumbest ones. And this is true in England now too, though it’s early days yet for the Muslims and others.

“And then we went country by country over a map of the world, my brother Kerekang. And I demonstrated to you that where the older sects and denominations that had in one way or another made certain accommodations to scientific reality were declining, these fiercer, simpler strains of faith were coming back. And we counted the actual theocracies existing in the world and you were surprised, weren’t you? And I gave you the statistics on beliefs in the United States of America, and you found them hard to believe.