In This Mountain

by Jan Karon

  Perhaps, she thought, it was because she’d given up being a noun, and was being transformed into a verb.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen,” he said, crossing himself.

  “I wrestled with this morning’s message as Jacob wrestled with the angel, until at last I said to God, ‘I will not let You go until You bless me.’

  “I had prayed and labored over a sermon, the title of which is listed in your bulletin and which no longer has anything to do with what I have to say to you this morning, nor does it delve the meaning of today’s Propers.

  “What I’d hoped to say was something we all need to know and ponder in our lives, but the message would not come together, it would not profess the deeper truth I felt God wanted me to convey.

  “And the reason it would not is simple:

  “I was writing the wrong sermon.

  “Then…at the final hour, when hope was dim and my heart bruised with the sense of failure, God blessed me with a completely different message—a sermon expressly for this service, this day, this people.”

  Father Tim smiled. “The trouble is, he gave me only four words.

  “I was reminded, then, of Winston Churchill, how he was called to deliver the convocation address at his old school—where, by the way, he had not done well, his headmaster had predicted nothing but failure for Churchill. He was called to give the address and he stood to the podium and there was an enormous swell of excitement among the pupils and faculty that here was a great man of history, a great man of letters and discourse, about to tell them how to go forward in their lives.

  “Mr. Churchill leaned over the podium, looked his audience in the eye, and here, according to legend, is what he said; this is the entire text of his address that day:

  “‘Young men, nevah, nevah, nevah give up.’

  “Then he sat down. That was his message. Seven words. In truth, if he had said more, those seven words might not have had the power to penetrate so deeply, nor counsel so wisely.

  “Last night, alone in my study, God gave me four words that Saint Paul wrote in his second letter to the church at Thessalonica. Four words that can help us enter into obedience, trust, and closer communion with God Himself, made known through Jesus Christ.

  “Here are the four words. I pray you will inscribe them on your heart.”

  Hope Winchester sat forward in the pew.

  “In everything…give thanks.”

  Father Tim paused and looked at those gathered before him. At Emma Newland…Gene Bolick…Dooley Barlowe…Pauline Leeper…Hope Winchester…Hélène Pringle. Around the nave his eyes gazed, drawing them close.

  “In everything, give thanks. That’s all. That’s this morning’s message.

  “If you believe as I do that Scripture is the inspired Word of God, then we see this not as a random thought or an oddly clever idea of His servant, Paul, but as a loving command issued through the great apostle.

  “Generally, Christians understand that giving thanks is good and right.

  “Though we don’t do it often enough, it’s easy to have a grateful heart for food and shelter, love and hope, health and peace. But what about the hard stuff, the stuff that darkens your world and wounds you to the quick? Just what is this everything business?

  “It’s the hook. It’s the key. Everything is the word on which this whole powerful command stands and has its being.

  “Please don’t misunderstand; the word thanks is crucial. But a deeper spiritual truth, I believe, lies in giving thanks in…everything.

  “In loss of all kinds. In illness. In depression. In grief. In failure. And, of course, in health and peace, success and happiness. In everything.

  “There’ll be times when you wonder how you can possibly thank Him for something that turns your life upside down; certainly there will be such times for me. Let us, then, at times like these, give thanks on faith alone… obedient, trusting, hoping, believing.

  “Perhaps you remember the young boy who was kidnapped and beaten and thrown into prison, yet rose up as Joseph the King, ruler of nations, able to say to his brothers, with a spirit of forgiveness, ‘You thought evil against me, but God meant it for good, that many lives might be spared.’ Better still, remember our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who suffered agonies we can’t begin to imagine, fulfilling God’s will that you and I might have everlasting life.

  “Some of us have been in trying circumstances these last months. Unsettling. Unremitting. Even, we sometimes think, unbearable. Dear God, we pray, stop this! Fix that! Bless us—and step on it!

  “I admit to you that although I often thank God for my blessings, even the smallest, I haven’t thanked Him for my afflictions.

  “I know the fifth chapter of First Thessalonians pretty well, yet it just hadn’t occurred to me to actually take Him up on this notion. I’ve been too busy begging Him to lead me out of the valley and onto the mountaintop. After all, I have work to do, I have things to accomplish…alas, I am the White Rabbit everlastingly running down the hole like the rest of the common horde.

  “I want to tell you that I started thanking Him last night—this morning at two o’clock, to be precise—for something that grieves me deeply. And I’m committed to continue thanking Him in this hard thing, no matter how desperate it might become, and I’m going to begin looking for the good in it. Whether God caused it or permitted it, we can rest assured—there is great good in it.

  “Why have I decided to take these four words as a personal commission? Here’s the entire eighteenth verse:

  “‘In everything, give thanks…for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.’

  “His will concerning you. His will concerning me.

  “This thing which I’ve taken as a commission intrigues me. I want to see where it goes, where it leads. I pray you’ll be called to do the same. And please, tell me where it leads you. Let me hear what happens when you respond to what I believe is a powerful and challenging, though deceptively simple, command of God.

  “Let’s look once more at the four words God is saying to us…by looking at what our obedience to them will say to God.

  “Our obedience will say, ‘Father, I don’t know why You’re causing, or allowing, this hard thing to happen, but I’m going to give thanks in it because You ask me to. I’m going to trust You to have a purpose for it that I can’t know and may never know. Bottom line, You’re God—and that’s good enough for me.’

  “What if you had to allow one of your teenagers to experience a hard thing, and she said, ‘Mom, I don’t really understand why you’re letting this happen, but you’re my mom and I trust you and that’s good enough for me’?”

  He looked around the congregation. “Ah, well,” he said, “probably not the best example.”

  Laughter.

  “But you get the idea.

  “There are, of course, many more words in the first letter to the Thessalonians. Here are just a few:

  “‘Pray without ceasing.’

  “‘Abstain from all appearance of evil.’

  “‘Quench not the Spirit.’

  “These words, too, contain holy counsel and absolute truth.

  “But the words which God chose for this day, this service, this pastor, and this people, were just four. Yes, do the other things I command you to do, He says, but mark these.”

  He gazed upon his former flock with great tenderness.

  “Mark these.”

  Hélène Pringle realized she had been holding her breath for what seemed a very long time.

  “When we go out into this golden morning and meet in our beautiful churchyard, let those who will, follow yet another loving command from Paul’s letter. ‘Greet the brethren with an holy kiss!’

  “Amen.”

  Miss Pringle exhaled; and then, with the congregation, gave the response.

  “Amen!”

  Hélène Pringle went quickly out the side door of the church and along the st
reet to the corner of Main and Wisteria, where she stopped for a moment and looked back.

  She hadn’t wanted anyone to kiss her, not at all, that was the trouble with Americans, they required a lot of touching. Yes, of course, the French greeted each other with a kiss—a kiss on both cheeks, for that matter—but it meant nothing in particular. It seemed to her that the holy kiss the father spoke about might actually mean something, though she wasn’t sure what.

  She trembled slightly, and wondered what on earth was grieving the father so deeply. Then she turned and hastened up Wisteria Lane toward the old rectory, where Barbizon would be wanting his liver snacks.

  Hope Winchester had gotten over feeling naked and now felt fully clothed, able to stand in the sunshine and talk with several of her customers, as young people passed trays of cookies and lemonade in paper cups.

  “Why, bless your heart!” said Esther Bolick. “Look who’s here!”

  “Will wonders never cease?” A choir member who collected Penguin Classics gave her a hug.

  Though Hope didn’t see George, Harley Welch bobbed his head in her direction and offered a shy grin.

  She was turning to go down the walk when the chaplain from Hope House, standing with a group on the church walk, suddenly swung around and jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow.

  “Ouch!” she said.

  “Miss Winchester! I’m so sorry.”

  He looked sincerely distressed.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Really.”

  Scott Murphy turned and picked a small, cream-colored hydrangea blossom from the bush next to the church walk. He smiled congenially, ducked his head in a modest bow, and handed the bloom to her. “Forgive me!”

  Having no idea what to do with it, she tucked it into the small chignon she’d been wearing these days.

  “There you go!” he said, looking pleased.

  She thought the chaplain, whom she’d seen only twice, and both times in blue jeans, looked very grown-up in a tie.

  For someone whose life consisted of little more than going to the bookshop and home again, she found church a dizzying whirl of laughter, music, cookies, pealing bells, new ideas, children playing on the lawn, and people who were generally swarming like bees in a hive.

  Father Tim walked over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  She touched her cheek and smiled. “A holy kiss!”

  “Yes. We’re happy to see you, Hope.”

  Hope! Once again, her name sounded brand-new.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In Everything

  After a quick lunch, he rang the number in Kinloch. No answer.

  “Barnabas!”

  Barnabas crawled from under the hall table and stretched. Then he trotted to the study and sat down, looking steadily at Father Tim.

  “How would you like to get out of Dodge?”

  The Great Wagging of the Tail began.

  “Meet new squirrels! See new sights! Broaden your horizons!”

  The wagging accelerated.

  The crowd in Kinloch would surely have a corner where he could tether his dog to a table leg, or perhaps some intrepid youth would dog-sit him in a rear pew.

  He went to the study and thumped onto the sofa for a thirty-minute nap. Then he got up and changed clothes, foraged in his desk drawer for his handwritten directions, rounded up a dog bowl and bottles of water for the car, and set a dish of tinned liver on the floor by the refrigerator.

  “Violet,” he said, “you’re on your own.”

  He felt wonderful, he felt eager.

  He felt ready for anything.

  They were well out of Mitford and heading north, north where the rain had obviously come with greater regularity and the hills were still green with summer.

  “How about a little Wordsworth?” he asked his dog, who, in the passenger seat, rode belted in and looking straight ahead.

  No response. He supposed Barnabas had heard enough of Wordsworth over the years.

  “Longfellow, then!”

  Barnabas flicked his left ear.

  “Let’s see.” He’d have to dig deep for Longfellow, it had been a while….

  “I’m noodling my noggin,” he explained to his companion.

  Ah, but it was good to be off and away, with no one to mind what a country priest might say to his best friend.

  He pulled the steep grade to Kinloch, listening to a country music station. “What’s made Milwaukee famous has made a fool out of me….”

  Feeling expansive, he considered a few things he’d like to do now that the weight seemed to have lifted off his chest, off his heart.

  First, he’d like to visit Homeless Hobbes in his new digs. Also, he wanted to build a latticework fence around their garbage cans, take the twins to a movie in Wesley, and…definitely!…make Mississippi barbecue for George and Harley.

  What else? He was going to finish the book of essays if it killed him.

  Driving up the side of a mountain on a dazzling afternoon made life’s possibilities seem bright and endless.

  A car was waiting for him in the parking lot, the sort of car that suggested Kinloch was a comfortable parish. Settled by Scots in the late eighteenth century, Kinloch was now known as a venerable stronghold of ample cottages built in the twenties by Florida money and passed down through succeeding generations. Given its lush and manicured banks, even the lake appeared well-heeled.

  “Father Kavanagh! Welcome!”

  Stout, gray-haired, and lively, Mary Fisher gave him a bone-crushing handshake, then snatched the hanging vestments from his hand and hung them in the car. As Barnabas relieved himself at the water’s edge, she opened the passenger door and all but lifted him onto the seat. “I was told to take good care of you!” she shouted, obviously a dash hard-of-hearing.

  “Wait! My dog…”

  “Dog? What dog?” Mary Fisher turned to look as Barnabas galloped up to the astonished woman and thumped down at her feet, panting.

  “Good Lord!” she gasped, crashing backward against the car.

  “It’s a bit out of the ordinary, I admit, but I hoped that someone might—”

  “Nobody said anything about a dog!”

  “True, true. I failed to mention it. But he’ll be no trouble. And look! I washed him! He’s clean as a pin!” He maneuvered his dog onto the backseat as Mary Fisher grumbled her way to the driver’s side, where she leaped behind the wheel, put the car in reverse, and backed up at dizzying speed.

  “The lake…,” he muttered.

  “What about it?” she bawled.

  She had nearly backed into it, that’s what about it. He figured this experience would make riding with Hélène Pringle look like a Lord’s Chapel coffee hour.

  He turned and peered at his dog, clinging to the leather for dear life as Mary Fisher floored the accelerator and they lurched ahead.

  “So what are you preachin’ on today?”

  “Ah…” He gripped the handle above the passenger door as his driver made a sudden right-hand turn and hauled up a narrow lane carved into the side of a steep hill. His sermon topic fled all conscious memory.

  “How many are we expecting?” he asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “How many are we expecting?” he boomed in his pulpit voice.

  “God only knows!”

  Flying around a curve, it appeared likely they would meet the panel truck head-on, but Mary Fisher deftly whipped around it. He would have considered leaping out, but it was a considerable drop into the gorge, with no guardrails in sight. Weren’t there laws about guardrails? Perhaps he’d walk back to the parking lot after the service.

  He looked at his watch. Seven minutes after five. His visit to Kinloch felt protracted before it had hardly begun.

  “See over there?” His driver slung her arm in front of his face and pointed toward a large house topping a mountain ridge. “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “Good to know,” he said, as she rounded a curve.

  S
eeing a straight stretch before them, Mary Fisher hammered down on the accelerator. Clearly she had driven professionally. The Grand Prix, perhaps, or maybe only Talladega.

  “Here you go!” she said, wheeling at last into a gravel drive and jumping out.

  “Is the chapel nearby?” he asked as she opened his door.

  “What’s that?”

  “The chapel. Is it nearby?”

  “Right, this is goodbye! You won’t see me ’til I haul you down after the service.” She opened the rear door and Barnabas spilled out like so much molasses. “Nobody said anything about a dog!” she reminded him.

  “Right. Sorry. Really.” He snatched his vestments himself.

  Mary Fisher had ushered him into a bedroom where he might change before going on to the chapel. Though it was clearly a home, and an unusually handsome one at that, no one was around. Everyone was at the chapel, he supposed, setting things up.

  Barnabas sprawled in a corner, definitely out of sorts from the winding drive up the mountain. In truth, the priest wasn’t feeling so well, either. Robed and wearing his stole, he walked up the hall, looking for a kitchen. He’d left the dog bowl and water in his car, and they could both use a good, long drink. Why wasn’t someone around to see to things? It was a little…he searched for a word…eerie, somehow.

  He found a bowl, and hoping nobody would mind—it was only stoneware, not porcelain, he reassured himself—filled it at the kitchen sink. As he did so, he noticed a familiar but indefinable smell in the room. He stood motionless for a moment, trying to name it, but found he couldn’t.

  After drinking a glass of water, he hurried to the bedroom with the water bowl.

  He supposed he should set the bowl on a towel, Barnabas’s water-lapping style had a way of distributing heavy precip over a large area; better still, he’d set it on the tiled floor of a small sitting room adjoining the bedroom, and mop up afterward with his handkerchief.