He inventoried the place after a passing gander at me. You could see
that he liked nice things--and the Astolat is well heeled. His eye
rested especially on some mirror-backed hanging shelves.
"I hate to intrude like this--"
"Any friend of pop's--" I said.
He gave the panama a scale--to show me he was an informal guy like
me--and dropped into one of my chairs. The thing squeaked hard and
braced itself. I figured to be charming for about ten minutes.
I'm a sucker for people who get to see me, anyway. I like most
people--as individuals, to begin with; and although I do what I
can--and the family does what it can--to keep the more extraverted
oddities from jimmying doors and peering through bedroom windows, I
spend a God-awful amount of time chitchatting with visiting strangers
of all sorts.
The chair he'd taken was in reach of my MS, so he reached for it. It is
possible that he was trying to adjust to the fact that I was wearing
only a pair of shorts.
"Sounds amusing," he said, after reading a few lines.
That was what Gwen had said the night before. I was glad to see the
Cloth in agreement with the professionally unclad. Competent magazine
fiction should appeal to all tastes.
"Pleased that you think so."
I told myself that I had no right to be irritated at the preacher's
patronizing tone, or at his unasking and uninvited reading of my
manuscript. After all, when artists paint in public places, people feel
free to look over their shoulders.
"I'm the rector of St. Shadows, over on Park," he said. "But don't hold
that against me."
I'd heard of the guy. The "Socker" came from intercollegiate boxing--at
which he had been champ of his class many long years ago. My old man
thought he was a "great personality, a liberal, a true intellectual of
the church, and a profound modern philosopher."
"I won't hold it against you if you say not."
He laughed--about four watts too heartily. "Mind if I take this coat
off?"
I did mind--because that meant he'd stick around longer. But I'd asked
him up. What the hell! I usually give myself a break around four or
five, anyhow--for coffee.
I told him that. "I was about to knock off--" and so on. "Would you
like something to drink?"
He said he'd have a sloe gin fizz. This was to get across his modernity
and liberality.
"Don't drink, myself." I took some trivial pleasure in his visible
surprise.
"I thought all authors--?"
"Used to be a lush. Quit." I told Room Service about this new guest and
his taste for wild plum juice.
He had said, "Oh," anent my confession. I hung up and he grinned at me.
He'd taken off his collar and dickey by that time and was sitting there
in a wet undershirt. "In town for long?"
"Nope."
"You're here a good deal, though, your father tells me."
"Sometimes. At the moment--we're building in Florida--and my kid
attends school there--so Florida is where we spend most of our time."
"Hot, in the fall and spring, isn't it?"
"Not this hot!"
He thought that was amusing, too. "Hurricanes," he said.
"Yep. Hurricanes."
"You've been in them?"
"Repeatedly." I passed up a grade-A chance to dramatize Wylie, since it
would give him equal privileges, when his turn came.
"I'll tell you, frankly, why I'm here," Socker said. "I want you to do
me a favor." He gave me that ministerial look--the beaming meekness of
a man who is never denied a favor.
"Like what?"
It dashed him a trifle. "Well, Phil--" (old friend of dad, I reminded
myself) "I don't suppose you've been in a church for a long time."
"Not to my knowledge."
That got him again. "And I don't suppose you've ever been in a
church like mine. Don't get the idea I'm about to ask you over to
hear me preach. A preacher like yourself--you see, I've read your
books--wouldn't be much interested in the rhetorical efforts of a chap
like me." He was a little nervous, now, and actually a shade humble.
"What I'm driving at is this. We've got a young people's society that
has thrown doctrine out the window--not caring how much stained glass
broke--and is trying to get some meaning out of religion by putting
some new meaning in it."
"Sounds trenchant."
"I want you to come over, Phil, and talk to my young people. They're
readers of yours. We've discussed your books at meetings--gone through
them chapter by chapter--had some real battles! It's our feeling that,
at bottom, you're as earnest a Believer as any of the rest of us. I've
sprung some surprises on my young folks--Phil--but springing you would
really rock them."
The Buick salesman touch.
I told him--as nicely as I could--about never making speeches, and why.
It's always embarrassing.
He covered up his very annoyed disappointment and decided all I needed
was a working-over. He began this by ignoring the invitation--after a
little more pressure got him nowhere. He talked about his church and
the young people and their outlook:
"You'd be interested in learning what's going on among religious
liberals, Phil. In fact, you owe it to yourself to find out! And your
writing shows you don't know! Dogma has simply gone overboard--and
I mean overboard. We're studying psychology as hard as you are. We
take up a book like the late Liebman's _Peace of Mind_--and learn to
understand it. Hell-fire and damnation--original sin--that sort of
rubbish--is out. We'll listen to a communist over there as attentively
as to a priest. We believe Christ would have made the fair distribution
of goods His business--if He were alive now. We sit around and air
sex problems as frankly as the professors. Use their lingo. We don't
believe religion ought to be a lifelong way of pain and hardship and
self-torment and sorrow--"
I'd been thinking about the Law of Opposites. What he was saying, I'd
said, myself, in some instances. But not all. Some of it made me a
little sick. I tried to interrupt but he barged ahead:
"To us, religion is a practical attitude and a source of _joie de
vivre_--or it's mistaken. We've got a gymnasium in my church and we
hold weekly dances and weekly bingo games there. When we talk about the
Master--we talk about a Man who is our Friend--not an Oriental mystic
who left His disciples puzzled by contradictory advice. If you can't
see your way clear to visiting with us--at this time--you certainly
ought to be able to see the value of catching up with the status of
modern Christianity--"
"There are a couple of points that worry me," I said.
"Come and thresh them out with us!"
"I don't imagine Jesus would have been interested in communism, for
example."
"Because it's antagonistic to orthodox religion? Wasn't He an
antagonist of orthodoxy, Himself?"
"The logic escapes me, there. If I'm not mistaken, Jesus was
exclusively concerned with the inner world. He was completely
antimaterialist. Social systems were superficial to Him. He was agin
the obsessive materialism of Near East capitalists two thousand years
ago--and I strongly suspect He would see dialectical materialism as a
mere spread of that unilateral pall over the conscious minds of the
masses."
"Superb! Come over and tell us that!"
"You're supposed to know it, already," I answered. "And to be teaching
it. Besides, I am a firm believer in Original Sin."
"_What!_"
The sloe gin and my iced coffee arrived.
He offered to pay--a unique point--clumsy, but pleasant.
George looked him over twice. George had never seen a clergyman in my
haunts, except my father, whom he knew.
"I believe in Original Sin," I said, when George went and when the
parson had taken a cool, deep pull, "since I believe every religion is
the attempt, the compulsive and unconscious attempt, to make a schemata
of instincts that will be palpable to the sense perceptions of human
personality--and since I also believe that religions have generally
failed in that function--causing the sin."
"Failed how?"
"Failed by being turned to the support of the ego."
"But we'd agree with you, there!"
"So I must conclude there is some basic error in the entire religious
phenomenon. Believing that religions express a genuine psychological
compulsion--a need to discover the inner pattern of behavior, the inner
design of consciousness--but observing that the orthodox patterns
offered so far have led only to a succession of material advances that
ended in social collapse--I must conclude that there is some _human_
error which repeats itself down the millenniums. Some terribly deep
perversion of Nature that at first lets man advance a little--then
throws him back nearly the whole distance--gets him going once
more with a newer, 'truer' religion--and so on, ad infinitum. This
perversion is what I call Original Sin."
"Pretty abstract," he said.
"Not at all. Here's the Sin. Religions have been used not so much
as formulations for guidance as to convince their various Believers
that man is, himself, godlike, wherefore God. Not an animal with a
fresh neurological awareness. Not a beast of the field, who knows
it and who therefore knows that what goes on inside beasts is
nothing to sneer at. But God Almighty, personified according to His
self-personifications of Zeus, Amon-Ra, the Prophets, Jehovah, or
Who-not. God Almighty--destined to live forever with all the numerous
Gods-Almighties--in the Elysian Fields, Nirvana, or Wherever. You
follow me?"
"I think so."
"You don't. Let's try it again. Imagine a band of apes that developed
self-awareness. Apes that suddenly saw themselves _as selves_. Imagine
those apes interpreting the new cortical phenomenon not as a fresh
and fascinating development amongst animals--but as evidence of their
metamorphosis from the flesh to something Higher. They don't know
what, exactly. They work out What in a series of mythologies and
religions. 'What' turns out, in our era, to be Sons of God, Brothers in
Christ, Redeemed Eternally by Grace. That's where they are today. Not
humble animals, carrying on the business of Evolution for species yet
unguessed. They feel sure (in Christ) that they are the perfect biology
right now. They sit at the end of an age-old endeavor to acquire that
seeming. An endeavor which has shucked off or hidden every aspect of
animal reality it can."