Palestinian Shepherds and Iranian Kings

Section 135 has exchanged hot coals for Pentecostal fire

How did the song go? I dont care how you get here get here if you can.

They pulled up at the nondescript brick-built warehouse on the outskirts of Cambridge, squeezing the car into a slice of air between an upbeat Chevy and a downtrodden Beatle. The menagerie of vehicles in the car park promised a veritable zoological jamboree if their owners were as diverse. Vernon wondered if he would need a shoehorn to ease them both out of the cabriolet and, to his shame, swore uneasily under his breath. Humans he felt were overrated and there were just too many of them. As they approached the entrance the vibrant music he could feel in his chest contradicted the functionalism of the retail-park foyer.

“Hi there; good morning.”

Just inside the entrance the welcoming committee stood poised to dispense practised empathy and anointing. The pleasant American voice was owned by an attractive woman of Japanese descent and Vernon was handed a printed welcome pack by her vivacious Hispanic colleague. Their greeting seemed genuine and for a moment Vernon and Nsansa were bathed in heaven’s beam of love.

Shepherds too; get here if you can.

On realising that it was directed toward the weary pensioner grappling with the door behind him, Vernon stifled his response to the other woman’s “Lovely to see you thees morning” Their moment had passed.

They found their seats in the auditorium, and as Nsansa stood swaying and soaking up the rhythms and melodies of the worship band, Vernon looked around him curiously. Jesus had always managed to draw an international following he thought, hadn’t Palestinian shepherds and Iranian kings rubbed shoulders at his birth in a building as nondescript as this. It all seemed to make sense somehow and so he too stood, soaking up the music with more than a little interest directed towards the band’s very competent drummer.

As the final strains of ‘Lord I lift your name on high’ hung in the air like the vapour trail of a passing jet, a black pastor jumped to his feet and prayed that his words would be God’s words. Vernon hunkered down for the inevitable sanctified stream of consciousness, resolute the way he had been in school assemblies, to see it through to the end whilst enduring the foot persistently kicking the back of his chair. There was of course no seat kicking now and though the address was undoubtedly fast-paced it was not what he’d expected.

Surely this was true religion… the gift of Gods acceptance.

A fiery apostle’s ancient letter to the Christians in Rome bore a disarming message… it was not presented as a call for Holy War but an invitation to inner peace. ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ Entranced, Vernon lowered his world-weary defences and absorbed the spirit-lifting antidote to the poison of self-reproach. ^‘He who gave up his own Son for us all… will he not also graciously give us all things?’ Vernon held his breath, dreading the hollow promise of a prosperity gospel… and released it with a sigh of contentment. Here was the heart of religion surely; ‘It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns?’ The dubious testimony of answered prayer that followed, the several unsolicited offers of prayerful counselling, even the church–grade coffee-with-chicory failed to rob him of his glimpse of heaven. How to hold on to the gift of faith without becoming a debtor to religion that was the problem; how to occupy every room in the house with a God who liked to Spring clean?

Check out the path to this moment on The Novel page

My ever changing moods

Section 134 is playing the glad game

Vernon woke up feeling pleased with himself. On reflection that in itself was remarkable, not just because he was by nature melancholic and pessimistic, but because his philosophical reading, tinged as it was with a curiosity about neuroscience, had alerted him to the observation made by Proust that awakening generally entails the gradual reassembly of self from the oblivion of sleep. Nevertheless, and despite his recent setbacks, Vernon awoke this morning knowing who he was and knowing that he was lucky.

The sun was out, the sky was blue, not a cloud in sight to spoil the view…

He turned and looked at Nsansa lying next to him, breathing in as he did so the rich scent of the oils with which she conditioned her coffee-toned skin. He stroked her back in appreciation and from somewhere beneath the pillow heard a murmur of approval. Further reasons to be cheerful in three parts were that his mother and sister approved his trip to Thailand, his research proposal had been accepted by Dr van der Floot and he had survived the walk across hot coals that his India visa required. Things were looking up.

Most of all, Vernon reflected drowsily, his feeling of self-satisfaction was derived from the news story of the previous day, the one that had unnerved him profoundly, and the subsequent text on his phone that had woken him up this morning. The text was from Jean Luc. Five words gave him hope. ‘Tarkey has handed himself in’.

Tarkey, by doing so had confirmed the link between Mudrock’s losses and his own actions. It was a short step from there to suppose it was a guilty link. Snug in his thinking-nest, though somewhat distracted by the lazy hand that was exploring his left thigh, Vernon doubted that this turn of events was merely because of the newspaper reporting which was in the public domain. He didn’t know yet, but he considered it likely, Tarkey had been ‘lent on’.

Vernon realised that he did not have an address on the sunny side of the street.

Later that morning, as the sun took control of the day and they cleared away the breakfasting debris, Nsansa and Vernon considered going to church. Both admitted their sense of hypocrisy. They were, as Nsansa put it guiltily, ‘living in sin’. Their response to that burden was not the same however. Nsansa declared that she was preparing for marriage, and Vernon already knew how seriously her culture held that obligation. He was pretty certain she believed it and did not therefore see it as insincerity on her part. Vernon on the other hand was still undecided about their compatibility and was striving for integrity of a different sort, though he doubted his mother would see it that way; the analogy he used to convince himself, in those more critical moments of self-doubt, was that he was endeavouring to ‘occupy every room in his house’. Too long he had felt his childhood beliefs had curtailed this or that form of self-development. Now as an imminently divorced adult who had long ago left innocence behind, he wanted to find what it was really that ‘the landlord’ allowed. Let him turn up on Vernon’s existential threshold and make it clear. This was not so much an act of defiance, but rather an ‘an experiment of living’. Of course, Vernon’s upbringing had furnished him with plenty of scriptural awareness; the human heart, he knew only too well, was deceitfully wicked. And so, although his sunny mood had not entirely been forgotten, it was through a broiling sea of conflicting emotions that Vernon eased the cabriolet out of the alley and set off mid-morning with Nsansa for her Liberated Church of the Pentecost.