4 THE FALLING PRIEST

Two contrasting attitudes ...

The furore following his decision, suddenly and out of the blue, not to conduct a religious service for the funeral of Mildred O’Donnelly both threatened the physical well-being of the Priest, Father Samuel Tinder, and caused so much confusion amongst the distraught mourners that nobody was sure what would happen next. Indeed, at the height of the melee the Priest felt threatened probably as much as it the protesters felt upset and humiliated. Jonathan O’Donnelly went to great pains who went to great lengths to point out that he’d had plenty of opportunities to make that decision before the coffin had been trundled into his church and he ought to be ashamed of himself. And it would serve him right if he got hurt.

Father Samuel Tinder felt more than a few physical digs as he tried to explain, outside the church, why he had behaved in such an unusual way, but he had principles and who were they to gainsay them? Who were they to decide who would and who wouldn’t be prayed into Heaven?

“I’m on the side of the Lord,” he almost wept.

“So was my friend Mildred,” grated a woman’s voice in his ear.

Many another man would have sought solace in the company of a friend, but this priest couldn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t have friends, he had plenty of them, he consulted them most evenings before bed, via the gift of silent prayer. But his friends, positive as they always were, couldn’t be found at just about any time. Their conversations with him needed no impediment to the purity of communication, nothing to interfere with the strictly silent method he chose to transmit his thoughts to them. In short, he required the darkness of night and the silence of his bedroom, where he knelt by his bed like he’d been taught to kneel as a boy. His parents had been most firm about that. Penitence was best observed from the kneeling position. It had always been thus, and always would be.

In the end Samuel, his nerves still rattled and on edge, opted for a quiet stroll through town. It was midweek, the shops were closed and there were few people about to interfere with his solemn introspection. And those people he did pass, knowing nothing of recent funereal evens and noticing his collar, would nod briefly and wish him a really good night.

This comforted him. In his mind they were all off to their little houses wherein they’d find their little women and little families. Then they’d turn to face their Lord and whisper lengthy prayers of gratitude for all the things that had pleased them that day, and many of the things that hadn’t but which had been both informative and morally educational.

Much as he loved his fellow creatures on the street, he failed to notice how their trail often ended at the doorway of the Crab and Lobster, a somewhat noisy public house with karaoke every night and live performers on Fridays.

He needed to work out what he might have done better, because it was his opinion that during the outpouring of unnecessary grief and anger after his announcement and cancellation of the funeral there had been the chance he might have ended up dangling from a street light on the end of a rope, his heart stilled permanently and on his way to Heaven’s verdant pastures. The mourner’s anger had been that manifest. But he was a single-minded man or the church of Rome and would not, could not, recommend to his God that a wrongdoer who had spent a great deal of her life contentedly enjoying sins of the flesh should be greeted in the afterlife with open arms.

He quite plainly couldn’t do it. He had been right, though hindsight indicated that he ought to have explained his objections days earlier and referred the deceased to, maybe, the local crematorium and a secular minister.

He, personally, didn’t hold with crematoria. He didn’t like the idea of his own flesh being frizzled to dust and ashes and a few puffs of rather unpleasant smoke and couldn’t for the life of him fathom how such a mess would reform into a saved body come the Afterlife and rebirth. But creatures like the O’Donnelly woman wouldn’t have minded, and a whole unpleasant scene would have been avoided.

The town was quiet and the air warm enough for him to start enjoying it. He paused now and again by shop windows and admired the goods on display. He particularly enjoyed the displays of those electrical goods that were beyond his comprehension, goods that claimed the impossible but that people actually bought.

For a few moments he forgot the recent threats to his well-being and contemplated a television with a huge screen that could cope with what was called streaming. He had no idea what streaming was, but couldn’t disassociate the word from mental images of trickling rivers through verdant pastures. And there were other things he couldn’t fully understand as well, things usually containing the word digital in their description.

And how could an object like a telephone take photographs? And what, exactly, was the Internet? And what in the name of goodness were windows that you couldn’t see through?

The trouble with this particular Priest was that he was trapped in a past age and rather liked it that way. It wasn’t something common to members of the Priesthood, but to this particular individual. Over the years he had formed his own, very personal, ideas of what things might be, and to him, surrounded as he was by constant reminders of evil and the human debris of a celestial war in Heaven, most of the incomprehensible electronic devices were most likely evil.

He had, after all, heard of internet pornography in which sinners did all manner of satanic things to each other whilst their images were being captured on film for posterity. He had no idea what those satanic things might be and didn’t want to know: he merely wanted to condemn them.

In short, he wanted nothing to do with it.

Across the road was the small local theatre displaying a notice advertising the local dramatic offering. It was The Importance of being Ernest by Oscar Wilde, and he knew what he thought of that. After all, Oscar Wilde had been a sinner, hadn’t he?

The evening had drawn towards night, and the theatre-goers were spilling out into the street.

Suddenly his heart gave an unexpected lurch when he noticed a particular woman on her own, scurrying past others in a personal race to the car park from which the first to arrive and claim their car would be the first to leave. Was that the good Samaritan? And could she possibly have disgraced herself by being entertained by the immorality that must be Ernest?

But why ever she was there, his heart had lurched.

Oo0oo

Sophie Stone had also been upset by the funeral that wasn’t.

That stupid Priest, she thought, making ignorant accusations about the morality of her best friend. He didn’t know her, did he? He can’t have or he would have admired her and not scorned her, called her a sinner and embarrassed her entire and extensive family. Mildred had, if anything, been a saint and never a sinner. That was Sophie’s opinion, and according to her own definition of saints she was right.

And to think she’d helped the silly man with his bank card! It had been him, hadn’t it? She was almost sure, though his Priest’s regalia went some way to disguising him. But no, she’d recognise that face anywhere. It was confused. Lost. That of a stranger in a strange land.

The play had been an excellent amateur production. She was familiar with it having seen several versions of it, but there was something about Wilde that stood the test of time even though babies were never put into handbags these days.

She’d had the ticket for weeks, a gift, as it was, from Mildred, who hadn’t expected to be mowed down by a drunken driver but had planned to accompany her to the theatre, just the two of them resurrecting the joys of a really old friendship.

It had been quite a decision for her to make. Should she go? It would mean going on her own, when it was meant to be a girls’ night out, the girls concerned being just the two of them. In the end she’d asked Mildred’s other half, Jonathan, what he thought, and he had assured her that his deceased wife’s spirit would be heart broken if she didn’t go, in memory of their friendship if for no other reason.

Jonathan was an all-round good egg.

So she went, and she went alone. She’d thought of asking Constance of the library if she’d like the other ticket, but decided against it. Her friendship with Mildred had been too special to be diluted with a new friendship while her body was unburied. There would be another ceremony tomorrow, fitted in at the crematorium at the last moment.

She raced across the road towards the car park, and then she saw the Priest. She stopped dead on the pavement, and then decided that something ought to be said. Bad things should not be allowed to pass unnoticed.

So she went up to him, swiftly and purposefully, and when he saw her, his face, in the street lights of a darkening night, turned suddenly pale.

“You are a prize and very cruel prat, and I regret ever helping you with your bank card!” she said, loud and clear, and stormed off.

While behind her, he crumpled into a pathetic heap on the ground and lay still while a crowd gathered round him.

Someone phoned for an ambulance.

© Peter Rogerson 10.01.19