IN THE NAME OF THE . . .
By George Hook
As if the cycles of schismatic violence in faith that had torn
Protestant from Roman Catholic and, more crucially to this night of nights, Roman
Catholic from Protestant centuries ago are being revealed to her as merely
preclusive skirmishes fought in the space of what came to only shards of
seconds and minutes when set against this solitary moment on this date of all
dates in this country town of Se Haute Indiana with its little more than 3,000
souls of all places that has somehow found itself drawn from across the span of
preordained immutable destiny to become a millennial proving ground in a
reemergent and evidently climacteric struggle between the Worded and the
Wordless, she here and now bears witness to the inexpugnable walk of the True
Father with each ready step—narrowly straight in its equable path like the
soldered-bound arms of the cruciform doornails she has been wearing on a
leather strap around her neck awake and even in her fitful sleep of late as if
this home-wrought crucifix (encouraged throughout its forging by the True
Father who fathered and guides the True Doors to Christ Choir in her church and
who foresaw each member of the True Doors to Christ Choir wearing the eternal
symbol of the ensanguined vehicle for the ancient sacrifice of the Son of Man
as a metallic stamp of a link between the singers) that she is now fingering
nervously had become the inspiriting key that might have opened the true doors
for the boy to the choir and to their Jesus Christ—dropping in her mind with a
thump of a shudder that astonishes the very earth itself into swelling and
buckling under the commanding weight of the measured tread of the True Father
though she in body experiences the lachrymose frowst around her where his
footfalls are hushed by a thickly sound-deadening wall-to-wall purple carpet
and his coming is heralded not with celestial battle trumpets and peals of
sky-rending thunder but only by the faint accompaniment of trilled murmurs from
prerecorded organ music as he who is also her father by earthly birth walks in
the name of the truly sapient fatherhood of the boy in solemn question toward
the False Father who has established himself across the room opposite her with
his sacerdotal conceit standing out in the uniform blackness (save for the
insidious touch of squared whiteness beneath the ridge of his Adam’s apple she
sees that nags at her, as if it were the white of a mesmeric third eye that has
been keeping everyone in this room under its sights the entire evening but now
turns its aim toward confronting the True Father) of his mien that is the black
of his cleanly dustless suit jacket, the black of the sharply pleated pants,
and the black of the dress shoes polished like mirrors reflecting deep space
that all together blackly form an ominous shape to be ceremoniously vestured
tomorrow morning in a costume of silken and linen finery in brazen colours with
sinister markings that will be more about dressing up an imperious showpiece of
a heretical ritual that features a profanely gesturing performance by the False
Father than about a solemn contemplation over what state the boy had finally
entered even though he had surely been there along with the choir at every one
of their scheduled rehearsals on those summer evenings in the assembly hall of
the little white-on-white church in Vyrgle Indiana and afterward had been there
among them sharing in the feast of pizza and JC Cola during their church
basement gatherings and had also been there riding in the
black-striped-canary-yellow school bus on the sun-swept highway of that July
morning going to the Chicago Convention Center with them that did not mean he
had been truly in their there as it
were because she is remembering how his great and open smile would be lounging
away in one of the pews like it was less a strong bench for worship and prayer
than his personal couch for lazy reflection while the True Father was bringing
them to harmony around the pulpit and how he was laying nonchalantly back when
they did not actually have to be singing in the bus for their voices together
in the soulful fellowship of merely talking or laughing to still sound like
they were in a kind of intuitive hymn that had its part for each one of the
choir to play to pass the long miles of time all the way to the city where he
had appeared lifted out of his seat at the evangelical spectacular through
their praying hands linked in a clasped togetherness of beseeching vibrancy and
following their zealous whisperings that told him to come on down now to the
main stage inside the galactic vastitude of an amphitheatre to exit stage right
out of view until he and several others made ready would rematerialize in
plastic beach sandals and transformatively cloaked in albescent garments that
looked like ethereal smocks (she had been a bit surprised at herself smiling
over the sight of him then, he who was usually all beat-rough bluejeans and
weathered denim jacket now humbled so silly that she was wondering if they had
at least left him his jockey shorts under there) and stand in line as one by
one they would go up a metal ramp of stairs with the top fastened to a
polished-wood deck on the brim of the mammoth outdoor swimming pool of a
baptismal font brought indoors until the boy had let an aide to the starring
evangelist of this day lower him from off the deck bare feet first into the
sky-blue quiescence of the consecrative water and into the steadying hands of
the evangelist himself who would bend the boy down to break the water and
totally and incontrovertibly immerse his head beneath it as should have been
done in the first place – what the True Father, pointing to the obvious right
there before them in the King James Bible itself on the kitchen table at one of
the late-night scriptural coffee study sessions of the True Father that the boy
had been joining during his visits to her home to see her as a friend but not
as a girlfriend (she would keep reminding him, and now she is left here to
wonder because of this night tonight if any hopes of seeing more between them
had been at the heart of his calling to the table and not the soul of the
matter) had insisted be done for absolute salvation, despite whatever was
inside the boy’s family Bible on the other side of the table, though judging
from the distorted portrayals of the mother of the saviour that made her out to
be some sort of a glittering demigoddess, ornate paperwork certifying the
needless ministrations of vain sacraments, picture cards of Christian men and
women of past ages who had become deceptive objects of reverence that sainted
them above all other Christians to grant them intercessional pretensions that
fooled people into praying through them to reach God instead of just praying
directly to God like they could have done right from the start that the boy
kept pulling out of (this English translation from the pig latin, she had
thought, when she heard the boy say the book was something called the Vulgar,
not from the original Greek that God had used to give the Word to man) the
scurrilous Bible, it had never been meant for studying scriptures and verses as
were the Bibles of her family, but was instead this glorified file folder
holding all these insidious markers to apocryphal pages that promoted the
worship of falsity – had it not been for that worldly church whose iniquitous
strain of fouled Christianity had been passed down to him from his family of
earthly birth who had cast vitriolic doubt on his transformation into a baby
Christian that past summer of sunlit promise that has now darkened into the
sepulchral murk of this late fall for she knew they had told the boy to go to
the False Father with what he had been hearing from the lessons of the table
and then accept the doctrinal lie about how pouring water on the brow of an
infant served as enough of a baptism when the child hardly knew the faces of
his parents let alone a lustrating rebirth in the face of Jesus Christ with all
of that now bringing her to the wonder of being here at this fatal juncture of
ending time where the foreordained Manichean showdown between the bad and the
good and the light and the dark and what is of this world and what is of heaven
has been apocalyptically charged into motion now that the True Father is
closing on the False Father over the mystery of a question about what state of
passing the soul of a common boy had entered at that instant of a second after
the decrepit junker without license plates that he and his friends had been
running wild like dirt-track racers swerving fast to kick up the grit-grey dust
of the rougher backroads of Se Haute Indiana during this last summer of his
paradoxical Christian rebirthood had lost control this fall when the threadbare
tires hit an early morning ice slick from a sharp first frost and threw the
junker wobbling and flipping like an infernal machine onto its roof and into
the stagnant water of a roadside ditch as the rust-cracked undercarriage of the
driver’s seat broke apart and sent the seat jolting and heaving backward to
slam the knees and the legs of the boy sitting behind the driver into his hips
and then crushing his chest as the cataclysmic force snapped his neck so that
his body would be found later in the wreckage of his death trap lying in a
mangled foetus position on the collapsed ceiling of the roof with his bruised
and cut face down in the slime-encrusted seepage which is why she heeds now in
this closed room of sombrous assemblage the magniloquent call of trumpeting
angels and braying demons arising from out of the lowing sonance of taped organ
music and feels the might of vast armies uniformed in black and white on the
march to the epochal reckoning of the battle to bring all battles to an end in
the resolute walk of the True Father that defiantly goes right past the parents
of the boy and stops before the False Father where the True Father presents his
hand and says for the whole world to hear “just wanted to introduce myself: I
was his spiritual father” as she suddenly rises from the folding chair and
cries “and he wasn’t having any of your Extreme Unction neither!”
END
George Hook: poet, writer, artist about town. Previously Arts and Letters editor of The Wall Street Journal/Europe.