A LAST BELIEF

A debate between a devout cleric and a lovely woman

“I dared say,” mumbled the Reverend Josiah Pyke to Jenny Beauregard, “I dared say that you’re going to come out with some smart-Alec reason why I should be in another job...”

“I don’t understand,” murmured Jenny, as pretty as a picture with lovely long and wavy blond hair and the tiniest white dress imaginable, demonstrating that legs are always worth looking at, even on a thirty-something and for a serious clerical gentleman.

“Well, you’re always telling me you’re an atheist. A non-believer, a soul lost to the torment of confusion, with no love for God in your pretty little heart...”

I’d better be careful … I nearly said pretty little dress and that would have led to pretty long legs … I really must keep control of my thoughts while I still can…

Jenny smiled at him, so sweetly his heart gave a little lurch. “You can believe what you like,” she said, “if you believe that it’s actually true.”

“But what does true mean?” he asked, falling back on one of the cheesy trick questions he always used when he didn’t actually have a coherent answer.

“You know what true means,” she sighed, “it means a thought that reflects in every instance and from every angle that what it encapsulates is actual and exists in our Universe. Like the world exists.”

“As God created it,” agreed the Reverend Pyke. “In all its fragrance and beauty,” he added, thinking that might help.

“You mean, with endless eruptions from endless volcanoes, with a poisonous atmosphere that no man (or woman, must I add) could possibly breathe, all sulphur and foulness, and like that for so long you wouldn’t begin to count the days even if you had a thousand years to do it in?”

“He created a garden,” rumbled Pyke, on firmer ground seeing as he’d read the facts in his bible so many times he could almost quote them by heart, “a beautiful garden with plants and trees, with fruits in abundance and lions lying down with lambs. I’d love to have known it!”

“But what about all the other stuff that must have happened before there was any such thing as a lion or a lamb? Dinosaurs, for instance?” said Jenny teasingly, her pretty eyes twinkling and the gentle summer breeze catching her hair in wisps so that Josiah was tempted to reach out and touch it.

But he didn’t. He’d been in that sort of trouble before and it wasn’t going to happen again.

“Who says there were dinosaurs?” he scoffed (or almost scoffed: he was quite a polite gentleman and thought scoffing to be frightfully infra dig.) “They’re all right in pretty children’s books, but have you ever seen one?”

Jenny’s laugh, when he said that, was such a musical tinkle that it made something in his nether regions twitch.

I must be careful, this lass always did have this effect on me even when she was no more than a teenager… and it would never do if I gave myself away, I mustn’t do it, I’m a man if God after all…

“Of course I haven’t seen one!” she laughed, “the last big one died out millions of years ago!”

“Now I know you’re talking out of the back of your head!” grinned Josiah, “it’s been proven, worked out in beautiful detail with everything relevant taken into consideration, that the world’s not more than a tad over six thousand years old. So how could there have been dinosaurs around longer ago than that!”

“That’s plain silly,” smiled Jenny, “everyone knows that! The world’s very much older than such a small period of time! Why, the coal you put on your fire was formed by underground pressures millions of years ago!”

“It was put in the ground by a loving God to keep us warm in winter!” protested the reverend gentleman. “And don’t forget, the first man, the one who kick-started the human race, was created by that same loving God in the wonderful garden.”

“So it says in the Old Testament,” nodded Jenny, “he was crafted out of clay, I believe that it says. But don’t you think that’s a fanciful story told by the ignorant to the ignorant a very long time ago, and now that we know more science we can easily prove that it’s wrong in every detail. Especially the bit about woman.”

“Moulded from a man’s rib at night while he slept,” sighed Josiah, “such a beautiful account of God’s brilliance.”

“You wouldn’t think so if you were a woman,” Jenny told him in a slightly more serious voice. “Then there was the talking snake.”

“Ah, the temptation of Eve, a woman too weak in her mind to see that the serpent was evil,” sighed Josiah. “It has always been thus.”

“But I’m a woman,” chided Jenny, “are you saying that I’m weak in the head?”

“All women are,” nodded the vicar, “they have small brains, you know, and small brains think a great deal less deeply than big ones.”

“It’s all nonsense, of course,” sighed Jenny, “the man made from clay, his woman formed from one of his ribs, his sons actually sleeping with his woman or wife, Eve, and having kids by her...”

“Now nowhere does it say that!” suddenly snapped Josiah, “that’s incest! You must never think that, Miss Beauregard! It’s taking the name and substance of the Lord and his creation in vain, and I won’t hear of it!”

“Haven’t you ever wondered what happened?” asked Jenny. “Back then? In the beginning as the story goes?”

He shook his head. “It’s been good discussing things with you, but I fear I’m weary and need to rest,” he said suddenly, “I was told, the doctor told me, I have a tumour, inoperable he said, and I won’t see another Easter… Come springtime I should be off to see my Maker, and when I do go and greet him I’ll tell him just how pretty you are, what a credit to his craft and so on, and beg him to reserve a place for you… but you do see, don’t you, that I must believe? I must know with an absolute certainty that what I have spent my life believing is absolutely and irrefutably true?”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she mumbled suddenly, “but doctors can be wrong, you know.”

“Not this one and not this time,” sighed the Reverend, “it’s been lovely talking to you, Jenny, we must do it again! But soon. Make it soon.”

“Then believe on, sir, believe on,” whispered Jenny Beauregard, “and don’t go just yet. Please. not yet. I need to ask you about floating arks and two of every kind and … and doves!”

“My Lord will take me in his good time,” sighed Josiah, “and then I will gladly go. Now excuse me. It’s been … lovely.”

© Peter Rogerson 03.12.17