7 THE BISHOP

A well-intentioned senior cleric upsets the Priest

Father Samuel Tinder sighed with a kind of contentment he wasn’t used to feeling. It felt good to be home, and on the plus side his heart was still beating.

There would, of course, be things to overcome. That funeral, to start with. He knew he’d been right, but the reaction to his decision, in the press and it had even reached the Nationals with eminent people both praising or condemning him in public, had come as as surprise.

What, he asked himself, was wrong with him interpreting the will of God and taking note of what he was totally convinced God intended for the Afterlife. He’d read books on the subject, even a few translations of really old manuscripts in which it was perfectly clear that God was in his Heaven, Satan in his Hell, and the two were constantly at war with each other, a war of bitter hatred with the souls of men as the prize. And if the harlot had gone, waved on by the forgiveness he was offering at the funeral, to Heaven, then she would have been as good as a devilish spy in the Heavenly paradise.

No, he knew he had been right. Of course he had, even though it had precipitated the sort of fuss that troubled him because that fuss was more about the rights of a harlot than his own honest working out of God’s will.

Anyway, the wretched woman had been consigned to the flames and eventually everything would be forgotten in the way that even the worst sins of Eve in the Garden of Eden had been largely forgotten.

I mean, the wretched woman even plucked the forbidden fruit, he muttered to himself.

And he was preparing his first post heart-attack sermon when the Bishop arrived, unannounced.

“I was expecting a small tot to warm the heart in my coffee,” boomed the Bishop in the kind of voice that had been honed to perfection in huge churches where it had been made to carry to every corner before its echoes obliterated any sense it contained.

“Then I must disappoint you, Bishop,” he said, a little weakly on account of his still enfeebled physical state, “I have been warned that the demon drink, even taken modestly, and that’s all I ever did but take it in modest quantities, might precipitate another problem with my heart. So I poured what remained, and it was an almost full half-bottle, down the sink and am now on cocoa instead.”

“Giving, I suppose, no regard to the health complications brought on by chocolate fats I presume,” grunted the Bishop, and the way he grunted it sent a message to the weakened Father, that the Bishop was in one of his moods. Maybe he should have hung on to that whiskey just in case visitors called, but he knew his own fondness for a tiny tot of the stuff and might have weakened one solitary night when he was reading a particularly obscure treatise on something vital.

“I’m replacing you in the diocese,” said the Bishop, abruptly. “You clearly need time to recover, to re-invigorate yourself, and I’ve a younger man keen to take the reins. Instead, you are to go to sanctuary at Saint Bogus’s. You’ll fit in well there.”

“But I’m needed here,” protested the Father, knowing that he was, though nobody had exactly made such a thing clear to him.

The Bishop shook his head. “That’s not possible,” he boomed, “we have your health to consider, and the opinions of the press.”

So that’s it, thought Father Tinder sadly, he’s bowing down to the opinion of the Satanic press! As if the writers of filth, like they can be, have more right to his judgement than me, an honest and hard working Priest!

“Saint Bogus’s?” he asked.

“A small monastery near the coast. Fresh air and prayer will bring you back to full strength.”

“Then I can return to my own church?” asked the Father, guessing the answer, and guessing rightly for once.

“We’ll see about that when the time comes,” replied the Bishop obliquely, “what is important is you regaining your health. You nearly died, you know.”

“And it I had I’d, right now, at this moment, be sitting at the holy feet of our Lord instead of drinking cocoa in a lonely presbytery every night,” muttered the saddened Samuel.

“If you believe such a thing,” nodded the Bishop.

“If I didn’t believe such a thing I’d be in the wrong job!” snapped the aggrieved Father, not liking the tone of the Bishop’s voice.

“Oh come off it, Sammy. I may call you that, may I? You can’t believe all the old nonsense. You’ve got a good living, you’re well cared for, you have independence and you are a force of good in the world. You put smiles on the faces of mothers when they bring their new born infants to see you, you gladden the hearts of those getting wed and you comfort those who are mourning lost loved ones. That’s all good, but it doesn’t mean you have to believe every word that you say!”

Father Samuel Tinder opened his eyes wide, aghast. “What are you saying Bishop?” he asked.

“I think you must know what I’m saying. Mankind has moved on apace since the early days when the book of Genesis was written, and science, real science with no invisible spirits in the skies, has proved that the Earth is many millions of years old and that long before the first men walked the green fields of summer there were many generations of other creatures. There was no garden of Eden. There was no Adam and there can’t possibly have been an Eve. There was no forbidden fruit and ergo there was no serpent. In truth, there was no original sin...”

“That’s … that’s terrible,” stammered Father Tinder, his mind working at break-neck speed and failing to make any sense of what this respected Bishop was saying.

“Instead, there was a band of primitive, almost ape-like creatures, venturing out of their homeland that one day would be called Africa, taking their babies, their children and, yes, their diseases with them. And they moved, step by step and generation after generation, until they spread across the entire world. That’s proven fact. And in that proven fact there’s no need for a magical tree with forbidden fruit because life was too hard, too violent and often too short for such things to be necessary.”

“But my faith...” babbled Samuel, and with an unexpected and unwelcome suddenness the pains gathered in his chest like they had in the street when he’d collapsed, and he stared with disbelief at the other man of God.

Oo0oo

“He’s back in hospital,” said Constance to Sophia Stone, looking at her friend through shocked eyes, “I heard about it this morning on my way in. The caretaker told me, and he lives near the Presbytery.”

“You mean, the Priest?” asked Sophia.

“The same,” nodded the librarian. She was behind her station in the library and Sophia had popped in on her way home from shopping. “He said, that’s our caretaker said, that the Bishop was there last night, visiting, and then an ambulance came… he’s not dead, apparently, but he’s had another scare.”

“I thought they’d let him out of hospital a bit quickly,” murmured Sophia.

“What do you think happened?” asked Constance, “I mean, you being a popular author and all that, you probably know a bit more about such things than a librarian like me might be expected to.”

“I haven’t the least idea,” replied Sophia, “but we could look at it like this: last time when he collapsed they said it happened in response to someone saying something to him, and I’ve still every reason to believe that someone was me.”

“And you didn’t really say very much?”

Sophia shook her head. “What I said was angry, but I didn’t shout, it was only the one sentence as far as I can remember. But think of this. You say the Bishop was there, no doubt in his fancy car...”

“I doubt he catches a bus!”

“Exactly. Well, what if he said something too. Something that hit home. Something that the silly Priest didn’t want to hear?”

“Like what?”

“Well, Father Tinder is reported to have said that he based his decision when he refused the funeral on his most sincere beliefs about right and wrong, and I think those beliefs must go deep. What if, in their conversation, the Bishop also questioned his beliefs, maybe suggested that he was a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to God…?”

Constance looked thoughtfully at her friend. “I do think that Father Tinder’s faith was a bit rooted in the past,” she said, “when I think of the books he borrowed when he was here. They were a bit specialist, you know. We’ve had them for years on the shelves, and he was the first to take them out!”

“What were they about?”

“Crikey, that’s asking! But he did start off by asking for books about the good Samaritan.”

“He might have wondered whether it’s possible for enemies to be good…?

“Or women. He might have asked himself about women being anything but wicked. After all, he wouldn’t bury your friend because he said she was a sinner.”

“Serve him right getting a heart attack if that’s the way he looks at us, Constance!” grinned Sophia.

© Peter Rogerson 13.02.19