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This will be a little different from my usual articles. Here is a rough draft of a short story that Ive been mulling over for a couple days now. It’s in an incomplete state at the moment, but I may update it later.
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“I no longer believe.” said the man to the friar.
“Well,” the friar replied, with a slight hint of an Umbrian accent, “then you are not alone. Few these days still do.”
The man reacted with a look of slight annoyance. Not the response he wanted.
“I have searched the world for some shard of holiness. I’ve spent three years looking for but a trace of Gods fingerprints. I have scaled the heights of Mount Athos to kiss the hand of Mary Magdalene, yet the flesh was cool to my lips. I flew to Fatima to see where the Virgin moved the sun, but I found only an overcast sky. I knelt in front of the bones of St Peter, under Berninis bronze baldachin, but saw only glimmers of dust in fissured rock. I went to view the head of John the Baptist, all four of them. But his voice did not cry out from a single one of the skulls.”
The friar looked at him quizzically. “Only the four of them? I thought there was a fifth? Theres your problem my son.”
The stranger clenched his jaw in frustration. “I have visited a dozen monasteries, and never once did I sense an angel among us. I have volunteered in orphanages, but never once saw the face of God in a child’s smile. Only desperation.”
“Ive never been a big fan of orphans either, such depressing creatures.”
The man sat up and exclaimed, “Where is He?”
The friars expression remained unchanged.
“My child, what is it that you want from me. Why have you come here? Would you like me to summon God down and bind him in a square, like a petty magus or conjurer? Would you like me to have him perform miracles for you?”
The man, frustrated responded “I was told by a capuchin friar in a convent many miles away, that a certain friar in this church had the answers which I seek. He told me that you could tell me where I can find some semblance of holiness.”
The friars deep amber eyes pierced into the strangers pupils, analyzing them.
“My son. Listen to me, and listen well. I believe I know the friar who sent you. But he did not send you here to find answers, he sent you here for a warning. Holiness…” he paused upon the word, searching for the best way to complete the statement, “Holiness can be dangerous.”
The man was taken aback. He had half expected some tepid words of reassurance, a flaccid antidote of “God works in mysterious ways, Christ is all around you, say a few hail marys and an our father.” But there was a bitterness to the priest's ominous phrase, and underneath, he could detect a hint of fear.
“God is not a teddy bear for you to hold at night. God is an all consuming fire. And if you approach him in an unfitting manner, your flesh will burn to ash.”
The priest’s eyes were no longer focused on the man, they were staring skyward, wide open, trembling.
“Do you know why the primordial couple was cast from the garden? It was not because they broke some banal rule instituted by a rigid school master, the children did not merely take a cookie from their mothers jar. After the consumption of the fruit, Adam and eve were altered. They were changed. They could no longer be in the presence of God. Their expulsion from the garden, their severance from immortality, it was not just a punishment, it was also a mercy.”
The Capuchins wrinkled knuckles whitened around the ruby rosary, trembling, adorned in beads of perspiration.
“To live forever in a state of sin, in the presence of the power of God, such would have been an unspeakable hell.”
He erupted into a fit of wheezing coughs as he spit out the last syllable. The man half reached out to comfort the friar, but the priest shot him a look of warning, and he recoiled. His amber eyes burning, surrounded by the white of his sclera, he stared straight into the stranger's soul.
“I will tell you a story today. A story that I have not repeated out loud in many years, but a memory that replays itself every night when I close my eyes. The story you were sent here to hear. A story that will expel the childish sentiments you have expressed to me from your mind. The selfish and foolish desire to see the face of God. For no man can see the Fathers face and live.”
The friar relaxed back into his chair, and pulled the cloth hood over his head. He closed his eyes and began to speak.
“I was a young man when I left my village in Umbria, younger than you, with maybe even less faith. I had entered an apprenticeship to be a maker of stained glass in a village near Assisi. As a child, my favorite place in the whole world was inside a church. But my ears were never open, and my gaze never at the altar. It was the glass that won my heart, when the midday sun would grace the windows, inflaming the atrium with color. Opulent emerald rays and fluorescent ruby, light touches of sapphire and saffron, streaming in from those portals to infinity. I can still see them now, when I close my eyes, unchanged after half a century. The angel Gabriel, cast in the window to the right of the altar, with an azure cloak and deep cerulean wings. A head adorned in honey gold rays, with eyes of burning jasper. I would stare and bask in those celestial hues, as if I was in the presence of the angel himself. How that stained glass would shine! Far more touching, far more ethereal, then the disheveled priest. As he would raise the host above his head, I would glimpse at the whey faced cracker, and think, “this is the face of God?” I much preferred my angel Gabriel. How could you eat divinity? The divine should be the purest light, not the blandest of dinners. And I would look up above the host, at the statue of our tortured savior, and recoil at the site of the crucifix. My childhood church’s Christ was so realistic, its face so tortured, so fleshy, so flawed! Macerated and desperate, feeble and anemic. The only color being the dreadful red of his flagellated skin. A being fit only for childhood nightmares, and the crucifixes figure certainly manifested in my boyhood dreams. He would come for me, bloody and gored, trying to affix me to the cross of golgotha, to make me suffer as he did. But in the dream, my radiant angel, my Gabriel, would smite him, and save me. We would fly off together, incandescent, two beings of light.”
The stranger looked at the friar with a mix of horror and awe. To hear a man of God admit such things!
The friar continued. “And so as a young man I had decided to devote my life to crafting such sublime marvels, to wield glass and transform it into something greater. To bend light blue, to change the sun rays green, through the shining faces of a hundred Gabriels. In my mind there was a power in that, a control. I only wanted to make something beautiful. Far removed from the carnality of mass. How could one take pleasure in the eating of flesh? God should be met with the eyes, not the tongue.
My father found me an apprenticeship with a stain glass maker of some renown, in a neighboring village. He taught me the trade, and I was happier then I had ever been in my entire life. Happier then I would ever be again. But it was there, in that village, that my life would be transformed, like the rays of dawn through a rose window…”
He paused for a moment, drifting into thought. Finally he continued.
“The community there was nothing out of the ordinary. Pious, I thought, the typical salt of the earth central Italian of the time. An uneventful village, with the only outbreaks of excitement being the occasional rumor of adultery, or gossip of a perversion, the standard fare. But one sunday, one sunday I came into the local church, and sat down in one of the few open spots of the pews. Sitting amongst the veiled faces, the men and women in their Sunday best. Heads bowed in prayer, or perhaps contemplating lunch.
The beginning of the mass was uneventful. That is until it wasn't. I’d wager I was one of the first to notice it, because of my life long fascination with light. One of the candles which stood erect over the altar, began to flicker, ever so slightly. Nothing extraordinary, just a subtle pulsation only perceptible to the few who noticed such things. Then another began to flicker, on the opposite end, but there was no breeze on that day, the air was as still as a cadavers lungs. Both the flickering candles then extinguished. “Odd,” I thought. And as I stared at the candelabra for a few moments, the flames ignited once more. I gasped, thinking my eyes were playing a trick on me, and yet, how could they be? Then it began to happen. The other flames would flicker, extinguish, and reignite. On and off. At that moment, I thought I was losing my mind, however, the other attendants began to notice it too.”
The man sat looking at the friar, flabbergasted, unsure where any of this was going.
The friar continued. “After a minute of this bizarre display, the whole congregation was alert, marveling at what was occurring. Everyone but the priest, who was in the midst of the eucharistic formula, oblivious to what was happening around him. Finally, all the lights of the candles blew out, as he raised the host above his head. My gaze then met the eucharist, at the apex of its ascent, and everything went still. And I shall never forget it…..
The eucharist erupted in rays of lights, blinding, with the ferocity of the sun, splintering into unimaginable color, vortexes of unnatural hues, beautiful, terrible hues! Colors inconceivable, colors unbelievable, blinding, awful, sublime! Never in my wildest dreams could I conceive of such splendor! Dancing flames of jasper! Terrible tongues of violet! Torrents of turquoise tearing apart the natural spectrum of color, inconceivable, terrible, beautiful! Perfect!”
The friar was standing, screaming, throwing his hands to the sky as the stranger marveled in terror at his description.
“And through that blaze of incandescent splendor, through the wrath of that luminous onslaught, I saw two figures standing besides the source for a brief moment, howling at me!”
The friar turned and threw a pointed finger at the stranger and screamed “ROARING AT ME!”
And the friar fell back into his chair, tears streaming down his face, pupils dilated and frantic, gasping for air.
He finally caught his breath, and turned back to the stranger.
“And then it was gone. The priest still holding the host above his head, as it returned to white. And from the smallest pin point of the middle of the unleavened bread, a single speck of sanguine blood appeared upon its face, and down fell a single drop which crystalized into ruby on the floor. And the priest, paralyzed with the rest of the flock, stood there frozen, arms raised, until he finally took the host into the palms of his hands, marveling at it in fear, and then threw the wafer into his mouth. And as he swallowed he shrieked a bloodcurdling scream, and collapsed. Simultaneous to his body hitting the floor, a child near the back shot up from the seat and screamed as well, before collapsing to the floor.”
The friar was standing again, staring off at the tabernacle, trying to find his words.
“When the congregation finally came to their senses, the few who could move ran to help the priest and the boy. The priest had died on the spot, blood running from his nose, his eyes blown out of their sockets, his tongue lying ten feet away. His body knotted and coiled unnaturally, like a dead python in rigor mortis, stiff and already cold to the touch. But the boy… the boy was merely unconscious, unconscious but marked… for the palms of his hands were bloody, and to the amazement of the congregation, bearing holes.”
The man, finally finding his voice, asked, “And then what happened?”
“And then the whole world collapsed.
Some men scrambled out of the church, finding their families, going to hide. Hide from what, i'm not sure even they knew. Others fell to their knees and prayed for hours, others lay on the floor speaking in tongues and babbling nonsensical phrases. Movement poured forth. Several men immediately ran for the altar, pushing each other over, scrambling over the body of the priest to find the jewel that had dropped from the host. Desperately trying to grasp onto something of that event. Others grasped onto the child, lifting his unconscious body up, parading him through the streets, announcing that the day of the Lord had come. I was the only one who remained seated, watching some of the men rip each other to shreds over the bloody jewel.
It took three days for some semblance of normalcy to return to the village, when enough people realized the world was not ending. The bishop had been summoned to investigate the “miracle.” By this time the child with the stigmata was conscious. That poor child. In the interim one of the villagers who was born with a congenital birth deformity, thought it a good idea to try and approach the child, thinking him a saint. Thinking that he was touched by the light in some way. And unfortunately for the boy, when he placed his hand on the deformed man, he was healed. That was all the village needed to know they were in the presence of a savior.
The boy was born half retarded, and was known for unintelligible outbursts. But after the miracle, the village was convinced he was Christ incarnate. Every weird phrase he would say, every strange gesture, was written down and interpreted by the villagers. A low babble could signify God was unhappy with a certain womens appearance, a high moan meant the crowd needed to pray to the west, a twiddle of the thumbs signified a man was a thief. To hear about this in retrospect, it must sound so absurd, how could they be taken with such madness you may wonder? But that is because you were not there, you were not in the presence of that original miracle. You could never understand.
When the bishop finally arrived with the authorities, he arrived to no miracles.
A third of the village was dead. A veritable massacre occurred when someone had recovered the Eucharistic gem, a bloodbath over who got to possess it. I heard that one of the nuns managed to steal it and sneak it out of the town. She was later found robbed and raped by a group of bandits.
As for the child, a certain woman with consumption had approached the boy, full of joyful tears, finally, her affliction would be healed! But when the boy placed his hands on her, she continued to cough up blood. She was so distraught that the boy wouldn’t or couldn’t heal her that she claimed he was the antichrist, the devil incarnate, and stabbed him in the throat with a pair of scissors. The villagers in their fury, lynched the woman with their bare hands, in between streams of tears and screams of terror.
The funeral was almost immediate, as the town was convinced that after his burial he would rise from the dead. After a few hours of waiting at his grave, segments of the town got impatient and dug him up, to the protesting screams of his mother. When they found only a lifeless child, the eschatological hopes morphed into something darker, and they began ripping his corpse to pieces, to have some relic from this saint's body. The sight of this was too much for the boys mother, and she hung herself hours later. Even today, in certain towns around Assisi, you can find families with little unidentified bones above their fireplace. Their origin forgotten, willfully or subconsciously, all that is remembered is that it was the remains of a saint.
The affair was covered up by the church and the secular authorities. The town now completely abandoned. The survivors either fled to stay with relatives in neighboring towns, or committed to sanitariums.
It was then, in the rubble of that act of God, that I decided to devote my life to him. To the bloody, macerated God of the cross.
It was then I decided to became a Capuchin.”
The man and the friar sat in silence for a few minutes. Staring into each other's eyes, two mirrors reflecting into infinity.
“If I were to believe this story, how can you be so sure this was even an act of God, and not an act of the devil?”
“There was nothing satanic in the miracles that occurred, only in the actions of those who witnessed it. You did not witness the colors that I did, the terrible perfection. Words cannot even come close to describing it. Such visions can only come from the Almighty. Satan can reflect and bend light, but only God can create it. Holiness… holiness can be dangerous. Holiness can destroy.”
And the old friar began to cry once more, completely despondent, tears of sorrow intermingled with tears of joy.
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Amazing read, didn’t know what to expect but I was pulled in within the first few sentences
Had never considered the idea that expulsion from Eden was an act of mercy
Wonder if you think that Hell itself is by extension similarly merciful, as torment for impure souls is still less painful than an eternity in God’s presence.
Incredible read. Sad, but profound. I want to know what were the figures howling/roaring at him and why?