“Pastor, are you sure you’re okay?”
I grinned. “If you’re worried about my sobriety, Doris, it isn’t that. I promise.”
“I didn’t think it was. But something’s bothering you. Even your eyes look different.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t know how to explain the sudden change in eye color, but I could tell her what was bothering me. “Doris, how do you know when you’re doing God’s will?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I had to laugh. I’d always taught the people in our church that the answer to almost any Christian question is, “Why do you want to know?” Most people don’t ask questions because they are looking for the right dogma to satisfy their quest for religious knowledge. Almost always, there’s a question behind the question, some kind of hurt or pain they’re looking to assuage.
“When I got into the ministry, I had visions of making a real difference. I’m not saying that my work here, at Holy Cross, hasn’t been worthwhile. It is. But there’s so much more we could be doing if we weren’t restrained by…”
“The likes of the bishop?” Doris asked. She winced suddenly.
“Doris, are you okay?”
“Just a headache. With age, dear, comes aches and pains you’ve never imagined. Perhaps it’s thinking about that dreadful man that brought it on.”
I chuckled. “Well, your suspicion is correct. But it’s not just him. It's that there are so many opportunities in our community, in our city. So many people who are hurting, but there is so little I can do for fear of violating some denominational rule.”
“Then break the rules, dear.”
I cocked my head. “Even if it means they kick me out? I wouldn’t be your pastor anymore.”
“If that’s the plan God has for you, so be it.”
“I just wish I had some kind of sign, you know? Like when Jesus appeared to Paul on the Damascus road.”
“So you expect God Almighty to come down from heaven, zap you in the butt with lightning, and knock you off your horse, just to let you know he wants you to take a different path?”
I laughed. “Well, not exactly. But in a matter of speaking, yes.”
Doris pressed her lips together and gave me a strange look, smiling out of just one side of her mouth. “It’s a sick and perverse generation that asks for signs, Pastor.”
I winced. She was quoting Jesus at me. “I know that, but you’d think if God wanted me to do something, he’d make it more obvious.”
“Maybe he is.”
I shrugged. “How do you figure?”
“Wasn’t Jesus pretty clear when they asked him what the greatest commandment in the law was?”
“He said to love God and love your neighbor,” I said.
Doris nodded. “I don't know that I've always made the best choices in my life. But I generally try to ask when it's otherwise unclear which way I should go, 'Is this going to help me love God and love others?' Not that everything you do in life has to be about that. Sometimes, it's okay to just do things for fun. But if you have a chance to do something that's going to let God's love for the world show and you hesitate, or if you find yourself on a path that prevents you from fulfilling those two commands, you might have to consider the notion that what you're doing now isn't God's will.”
I smiled. “Are you trying to get your pastor to leave?”
Doris laughed. “Heavens, no! We’ve been spoiled to have you all these years, Pastor. No matter what the bishop might think. But if God has something bigger planned for you, if there’s an opportunity in front of you that will allow you to love more, to love the way He first loved us, then he’s already given you his answer.”
“No lightning bolts to the butt?”
“Not unless you’d like that,” Doris said, smirking
I almost gagged on my tongue. Not the first time she’d taken me off-guard. “No, not something I’d enjoy.”
“Good!” Doris said, wagging her finger. “Because if you did, the bishop would probably have a few words to say to you about that, too!”
Chapter Five
I splashed a little water on my face and did my best to tame the mane before heading out to preach. My hair was dark brown, about as dark as it could be without being black. Thick, but straight and fine. Without a good pomade, keeping it under control was a challenge, one that was exacerbated by my robe. My alb had giant sleeves that, when I extended my arms, gave me the appearance of having angels’ wings. Like M.C. Hammer pants, but for the arms. Completely ridiculous.
Trying to wet my hands in the sink, then do my hair without getting the sleeves wet wasn’t easy. And the small sink we had in the vestry was installed a bit lower than the average bathroom sink. I had to squat a little to use it. Then, every time I raised my moistened hands to fix my hair, my sleeves invariably flapped in my face.
Stupid robes.
I sighed.
Someone laughed. It was high-pitched, more like a cackle. I looked around.
No one was there.
There was a giggle.
What the…
I looked down. A small mouse was staring back at me. He was on his hind legs, staring at me and laughing.
You couldn’t make this shit up.
“Get out of here!” I shouted, kicking half-heartedly toward the rodent.
Instead, it ran underneath my robe.
I bit my tongue hard to prevent myself from shrieking like a twelve-year-old girl as I danced around, trying to shake the mouse out of my robes.
It kept laughing.
A glow in the mirror caught my eye. I glanced at it while I tried to shake the creature out of my robes.
My eyes had changed color before. They’d turned from a dark chocolatey brown to something like golden caramel. But now they were glowing, emitting bright yellow light.
I gasped. No sooner did I notice it than the glow started to fade.
And the damn mouse stopped giggling.
What the…
I must’ve been losing my mind.
I shook my robes again. Where’d that little asshole go?
I didn’t hear him. I didn’t feel him. I took a deep breath. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and I could only pray that my eyes wouldn’t start glowing or that prick of a mouse wouldn’t make a reappearance from somewhere inside my robes in the middle of the service. I glanced at the clock. I was already two minutes late. Much longer than that, and folks would start getting restless. I had to go out.
I flipped on my microphone and stepped out of the vestry into the chancel.
My robe flowed around me as I stepped in front of the congregation. We weren’t a huge congregation. During Holy Cross’s heyday, they used to fill the pews, even setting up folding chairs in the aisles. The old folks often reminisced over the good old days and weren’t at all shy about sharing their dreams of re-populating our spacious sanctuary again. At maximum capacity, we could seat more than a thousand. I’d never seen it. Even on Christmas or Easter, we’d never get to more than about half-capacity. On a regular Sunday like this, our small gathering of a hundred, generally more concentrated toward the back than the front of the church, gave the place a very empty feeling.
I liked to step down from the chancel and walk among people while I spoke. It wasn’t a practice the bishop would approve of. He believed that preaching should be confined to pulpits. We had one of those old-school ones that required going up a small set of steps so I could preach from a good fifteen feet over everyone’s heads. They used these back in the days before they had microphones; it had to do with the building’s acoustics and allowing a preacher’s voice to carry throughout the space. I rarely used the pulpit. No one dusted it anymore on account of the steps they’d have to climb to do it.
I strolled down the center aisle, smiling and shaking hands along the way. A cool breeze, one I wouldn’t have felt had I been wearing pants, billowed around my man parts. Quite a strange sensation when you’re standing in front of God
’s people.
“Welcome to Holy Cross,” I said, spotting the bishop in the back row, looking as sour-faced as ever. I smiled and nodded at him. A smile was about as much as those like the bishop found appropriate in worship. Worship was supposed to be a somber occasion. He hadn’t read in the Bible about the occasion when King David was worshipping God, dancing naked on his roof.
By comparison, preaching in a robe and my skivvies was relatively tame.
I extended my hands palms up and made the universal gesture to accompany the words, “Please rise.”
Everyone stood up.
If I’d turned my palms down and made the opposite motion, they’d all sit down, too. Of course, we followed a liturgy prescribed by the denomination that had defined moments for standing and sitting. I only made the gesture out of habit and for the sake of visitors. Some of the members swore we used to get visitors. Then again, at least one of our members claimed he’d seen Sasquatch.
The organist played the first few bars to introduce the hymn before everyone joined in the first stanza of Amazing Grace.
A good hymn. A classic. A basic, truthful message that gets to the heart of our faith. Of course, it was also a bit too melodic for our bishop’s preference. The less singable, it seemed, and the denser the hymn lyrics, the more he approved of it. But Amazing Grace was in the hymnal, which had gone through a rigorous process of doctrinal review and was deemed safe for the soul by a commission at our denomination’s headquarters.
Flacius didn’t have cause to complain. Not yet, anyway.
After the hymn, we went through a prescribed liturgy of responsive readings. I speak the plain text. The congregation speaks the bold words. Back and forth. No one pays much attention to the words they’re speaking, of course. They’d spoken these same words with only slight permitted variations every week for years.
The Scripture readings changed every week. Bishop Flacius would likely criticize my reading of the texts. I tried to inflect my voice to make the readings engaging. He was of the mind that the scriptures should always be read in a monotone. We don’t want to add anything of ourselves to the bare word, after all. He’d never considered, I’d always maintained, that a monotone does add something to the text: boredom. I suspected that was not the emotion God had intended these words to evoke.
Ironically, the Gospel reading for the day was from Luke chapter eleven, when Jesus chastises the Pharisees quite forcefully. I made a point to make eye contact with the bishop as I spoke. “Woe to you because you are like unmarked graves, which people walk over without knowing it.”
Dead. Irrelevant. Ignored.
If we followed the bishop’s vision of what the church should be like, that would be it.
It wasn’t going to take a lot of creativity to improvise a sermon based on the text, and if it ticked off the bishop, so be it.
I was done toeing the company line. I’d come to the point in my ministry when I had to make a choice. Was I serving the church, or was I serving my God? Did I love my church or the hundred or so folks who’d gathered to hear a message of hope that helped make sense of a senseless world?
What Doris had told me before the service made sense. Love God. Love my fellow human beings. But love my denomination? It was becoming more and more clear that I had to choose. I’d either obey my God or obey my bishop. The two options were becoming mutually exclusive.
We had one more hymn after the Scripture readings and before the sermon. I had about three minutes to come up with a quick outline. From that, I could mostly connect the dots and get through the sermon. When the bishop saw I wasn’t preaching from a manuscript, he wouldn’t be happy. The words we preach were so important, he believed, that we needed to spend hours pondering each syllable. After all, better not get tongue-tied and say something that came close to an unapproved doctrine. Do that, and people would go to hell for sure.
This was what I’d planned. On the one hand, it was the product of three minutes of work. On the other hand, it was the product of years of experience and exacerbation.
The Pharisees had become irrelevant to the people of Jesus’ day because they’d focused on pure teaching and obedience but ignored and even condemned people who were struggling with the trials and tribulations of life. They were eager to damn people and even condemned Jesus for being so bold as to share a meal with sinners but didn’t take a moment to try to understand people’s stories. They didn’t bother to consider why people had made the choices they’d made in life. The plan was to consider how we’d done the same. Jesus embraced the outsiders, people whose lifestyles didn’t fit the expectations of the religious. How willing were we to embrace people whose lifestyles weren’t like our own? People who looked different than we do, people who loved differently than we do. Would Jesus damn those people? It seemed to me he’d reserved his harshest words for the people who condemned them. It was the Pharisees, not the sinners, who were dead, whose lives were like unmarked graves, trampled over by passersby because their message had lost resonance.
That was what I’d hoped to preach, so I started. “Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord and Savior.”
No sooner did I start than I noticed that not a single eye in the place was on me. They were all turned to the back of the church, a small crowd huddling around someone.
I cocked my head for a moment, confused by what was happening before tossing my Bible onto one of the pews and running to the crowd.
It was Doris, and she had collapsed.
“Someone call nine-one-one!” I shouted. I probably didn’t need to tell anyone. Someone probably already had. I remembered our conversation. She’d had a headache. She’d smiled at me, just briefly, out of just one side of her mouth. I’d thought, at the time, she was just holding back her words. But now, I knew what was happening. “Tell the nine-one-one operator that she’s having a stroke!”
I knelt beside Doris and grabbed her hand with my left. I squeezed. She couldn’t squeeze back. That side of her body was paralyzed. Definitely a stroke.
“Doris,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “I’m here. Pastor Caspar is here. Help is on the way. Stay with me, okay?”
I placed my right palm on her forehead. Just to give her a sense of calm.
My hand started to glow. I almost yanked it away. Then Doris squeezed my left hand.
I held my right hand in place. My hand trembled even as it continued to emit the strange glow. Whatever was happening, it was working. I was healing her.
People don’t know how to react when they see things like that. At first, a few people gasped. But then, there was silence. The congregation, every member gathered around, was speechless.
The glow faded. I removed my hand from Doris’ forehead.
She squeezed my left hand again and tugged. She wanted me to help her up.
I stood, my legs quaking, and helped Doris to her feet.
“Pastor!” one of our elders remarked. “It’s a miracle!”
Doris smiled at me, and a tear fell from her eye. “Praise the Lord, Pastor!”
I hugged her. The whole place was abuzz. People were laughing, they were so full of joy.
All except one. My eyes met his. The bishop’s face turned even more sour than usual. He shook his head and cleared his throat before turning to the door. I didn’t try to stop him. I wasn’t about to let him rob this moment of its joy.
Was it a miracle?
If the bishop questioned if it had come from God, as I suspected he would, I wasn’t sure he’d be wrong. Not this time.
Sure, it could have been a God thing.
But I’d seen that glow before—when Layla had pressed her hand to my wound when she healed me.
It probably took a good thirty minutes before everyone settled down and returned to their pews. We were going to have to wrap this up with an abbreviated service.
After all, there was a football game at noon.
I recently saw a survey that said women outnumbered men when
it came to regular church attendance by a ratio of nearly two to one. Why? There were probably several reasons, but it would be ignorant to deny that Sunday conflicts with the NFL was one of them.
I stood up and returned to the pulpit. The congregation looked at me with eagerness. What was I going to preach after that? I didn’t know for sure.
Something scurried down my leg.
Shit, I thought as the mouse darted out from beneath my robe and straight toward the congregation.
Shrieks followed by giggles echoed throughout the sanctuary.
So much for an orderly service.
Chapter Six
I don’t even remember what I preached after that. I was half-inclined to call off the service, but Doris insisted. This was precisely the kind of occasion that should cause us to want to worship God.
What I did, what the congregation saw, had confirmed to them the veracity of their faith. But nothing had ever called my faith into question more than that. After seeking God all my life, trying to preach a specific message of hope, I never saw anything at all miraculous. Then, after an encounter with a crazy cultist who told tales of orcs, magic, and a whole other world, I’d not only witnessed but performed something like a miracle?
I didn’t know what to believe.
My mind was all over the place. The night before, Layla healed me. What would the bishop say? How I was going to justify walking home in my robe since my car was still at the bishop’s church where we’d had our meeting the night before. I still didn’t have pants.
I couldn’t get through the service fast enough.
Yes, everyone else was overcome with joy in the wake of what had the appearance of a miracle. The paramedics were dumbfounded. False alarm? By the time they arrived, Doris was fine. They suggested a physician follow-up, a recommendation I wasn’t about to contradict.
Don’t get me wrong. I was happy. I was glad that whatever I’d done had healed Doris, but it also scared the crap out of me. And after all the stuff Layla had said about elves, orcs, a prophecy, well, that was even less believable than the notion that I’d just performed a miracle.
Who Let the Dogma Out (The Elven Prophecy Book 1) Page 3