DAY 7

By the time my son was beginning grammar school, nearly all the original parishioners in my elderly congregation had died. It was an honor to have known them, to have held their hands as they passed, and to have presided over their burials. They were called the greatest generation for just cause. Their nobility was poured into everything they did; you could even taste it in their baked goods and garden fresh vegetables, all grown and crafted with their own hands. Yet, these offerings would soon be replaced on the fellowship table with the likes of pizza boxes and buckets of fast food chicken. It was the dying, not only of individuals, but of an age. The Great Ignorance had descended and this was never more clearly revealed to me than the diminishing effort I saw appearing on the tables of our Wednesday church buffets.

I remember every piece of meatloaf, every whip of mashed potato like it was yesterday. The memories sent my body into a crazed frenzy, and it is here on the seventh day of this last fast, that I can find no Sabbath rest. In an attempt to relieve the pain, I wandered through the old church of my youth. It was smaller than I remembered, hollow now from years of neglect and abandonment. No one came here, not even the local gangs or the bored teens. It was empty brick, warmed by the sun and cooled by the brisk night air. The glow from people singing and sharing hugs had long passed.

I looked over to the platform where I had delivered so many messages, where I had exchanged my vows with my wife, where my son would tug my trousers after services as I chatted with members and guests. I looked down the aisle and remembered the countless processions of Christmas candles, ushers, and offertory plates. I stared intently as the memory of my wife walking down the aisle toward me illuminated the room. Her beauty almost lost and forgotten to me suddenly reappeared, wrapped in a white wedding dress like a friendly ghost; her mouth curled up in the dearest of smiles as she moved toward my nervous fidgeting. And so it was here that I finally dropped to my knees and wept.

Such it is with all things gone by. Time and memory swirl like water in tub’s drain, dissipating our lives in a great circle. At the center, there is nothing but the porous hole of death; at the edges are the things that spin too quickly, and we cannot slow them down or examine them too closely. Everything we are and everything we have been orbits around this center, caught in the tug of its wake as the level of each liquid memory lowers to our final gurgles and gasps for air. Only then does the drain go silent. It has nothing more to take from us.

Gantry had much to take from me, but as the great drain sucked him down, he would be forced to leave his work to other men. Within a year of our conversation, he would pass. He had embarked on his crusade almost immediately, buttering up board members and writing letters to my superiors. Although he would die without seeing the fruit of his labor come to pass, they would not bury his crusade against me alongside him. Gantry was the ‘me’ I could never become: an adversary who understood that all great battles are won inside the hearts and minds of others, while all great warriors simply pull puppet strings from affluent places of safety. Lackey was his chief puppet and upon Gantry’s death would assume control of the show.

All first attempts to remove my credentials failed, in that many who knew me could see clearly what was going on. Both Gantry and Lackey worked the board behind the scenes and appealed to my superiors to remove me. Even though their attempts were repeatedly thwarted, they kept moving. It only took sixteen short months from the time Tooley was elected to the Senate to the time the IRS started knocking on our church doors. They began pouring over every deduction we had ever claimed. That was followed by a personal inquiry into my tax status. The witch hunt proved to be a dead end, but not before it cost the church thousands in legal fees.

Still determined, they moved to more sinister tactics. One summer morning, a substantial group of them led by Lackey himself showed up for a Sunday service. At the end of the message, they all came forward as a group to transfer their membership letters and join the congregation. Their numbers didn’t quite rival our membership at the time, but they would certainly have had the power to sway votes if accepted to the fold. Thankfully, I still had a group of ardent supporters among my elder body who denied them membership at my behest. Word of this spread quickly and placed the entire congregation on the hot seat with my superiors as being “an unwelcoming body of believers.” It didn’t matter that the whole lot of them were wolves in sheep’s clothing. All that mattered was the bad taste it left in Lackey’s mouth, so he complained most ferociously to the denominational leadership. Accusations of heresy soon followed, and I confess that from that moment on, I never knew if a church visitor was a denominational plant sent to evaluate my messages or if they truly wanted to check us out.

While most of the original group of infiltrators gave up after realizing we would not accept them for church membership, Lackey and his wife stayed around. Each week, they would enter the service late and sit in the back. He never said a word to me, just sat there occasionally leaning forward during my homilies as if to feign interest. I seriously considered taking out a restraining order on him, but knew drawing that kind of attention to our spat would ultimately lead our fellowship being kicked from the Diocese. Lackey knew it too. That is what he was hoping for and why he kept showing up week after week.

Lackey had a foster child that he cared for, which was perhaps his only redeeming quality. I never asked, but being his only child I could only assume that he and his wife had trouble conceiving on their own. Ashley was her name; an extremely bright child given the home they took her from. She was only one year older than my own son and in a small church that meant the two of them would come to know each other well. I had no desire to draw my son into our conflict, but I was extremely disturbed to find out how close they had become in the children’s classes – “inseparable friends” I would hear. He even approached me one Sunday about having her come to the house to play, and I was instantly mortified by the thought. I refused; however, thinking back I wonder if it would not have been best to accept the girl into my home and prove every lie she ever heard about me to be untrue. Malice is never a friend to truth and in this regard I believe I erred on the wrong side of my son’s request.

In time, despite having never obtained formal membership with us, Lackey managed to pry a few parishioners out from under my care. I soon found myself having private conversations with a handful of people as to why he had been denied membership. He was creeping into the fold slowly enough to remain undetected by most anyone but a close circle of us, and I was forced to assume a defensive posture with an increasing number of our membership.

The stress was growing and the whole family felt it. I felt the kind of lingering anger that simmers, but never boils; a slow rise in temperature that can catch you at the most unusual times and only after a night of tossing and turning do you realize where it came from. The world seemed darker and the sweet smells and tastes of things I once enjoyed started to fade. I was sinking into depression and I knew it. They say that depression is repressed anger and that was certainly true in my case. I no longer enjoyed preparing for my sermons and I dreaded my time in the office, knowing that at some point during the day something would trigger a thought of a snake slithering among us.

Of my many flaws as a pastor, I believe the one that hurt the most during this time was the erroneous belief I could protect the flock from this man. That sort of thing is best left to God alone. By the time I had determined to take out a restraining order on him, it was too late. His poison had run its course through too much of the church body and the thought of dragging these sweet people through a massive ordeal was more than I could stand. With my wife’s permission, I formally announced that I would resign my position. There was some outcry, but not nearly as much as I suspected. I believe that the congregation was just as ready to move beyond this as I was.

Lackey’s jeering gaze from the back of the church during my final sermon was the thing that was etched the deepest into my memory. His jaw protruded as if in noble accomplishment while his eyes darted over me. He licked his lips and swallowed and I could feel the anticipation of a hunter looming over its prey.

My text was fairly simple – it came from the Gospel of Matthew and served as my parting shot to a kind of Christianity that no longer had room for the likes of me:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'"

Although the text itself was rough and edged, my delivery was gracious. I was able to genuinely and sincerely relate all the congregants that I had witnessed over the years -- a great many souls -- who really did practice an authentic faith. I told as many of their stories as I could during those last thirty minutes. I honestly presented the congregation examples of people they knew who, at least in my estimation, really lived out what it meant to be a follower of Jesus Christ. And that was enough, for me and for them. I shook many hands that day, but quickly excused myself when I saw Lackey and his wife enter the line. He would have no moment to glory, no opportunity to gloat. This ordeal between us, while ending on this battlefield, was far from over. I was closing one door, but preparing my soul to open another.

We packed our things and walked out of the parish house like a family of itinerant craftsmen in search of work in a broken economy. We were refugees, both literally and spiritually, and I cannot say that we ever found a true home again. I remained a wanderer along the curbside of church politics the rest of my life, dodging cars, avoiding cheap and easy Jesus buffets, and lamenting the end of an era.

DAY 6

My attempts to block the cemetery board from appointing Lackey were noticed by a great many people. I was their youngest board member, elected primarily because my dissertation had been widely disseminated around the country, even prior to publication. On paper, I was the most qualified candidate even if an out-of-the-box thinker. I was appointed on a 10-2 vote, with Lewis Gantry being my most vocal critic at the time. Gantry was extremely wealthy and aging quickly. Rumors were circulating that he was planning on leaving the school a nice endowment after his death. Over the course of my stay on the board, it was interesting to watch certain members cave to his requests.

I was successful in blocking Lackey’s first attempt to join the board. The vote split evenly down the middle, so it fell to the President who decided to appoint less controversial figure. His choice was less than ideal, but I supported him in it. Within a matter of months, the new appointee became Gantry’s whipping boy and ironically, between the two of them they managed to sway enough votes to oust the sitting President on some silly Calvinist debate, the details of which escape me after forty plus years.

The culture of the board was changing rapidly then – pressure from donors to “tighten the theological belt” were the topics of repeated conversation in our meetings. Tempers would sometimes flare and the old, freer thinking guard was growing weary of the battle. In time, they would all leave and I too would be muscled out.

Despite being fifteen years my senior and being my former professor, Lackey knew there were still a few people who listened to me around campus. I remember he cordially called me up during the new member orientation process (he was elected on his second attempt with a 9-3 vote despite my efforts to prevent this); according to his self-report, he was “seeking my advice” on board issues. I have often reminisced about our conversation, wondering if he wanted to bury the hatchet between us and was just too stupid to know how, or if he really was out to spring his trap. Perhaps, he was after some kind of validation after having succeeded in getting elected, perhaps he wanted to gloat, or perhaps it was something altogether different. I can’t be sure. One thing I feel confident about however: it must have pained him greatly to acquiesce to me as a former student who he once graded harshly.

My wife was five months pregnant when Lackey extended the white flag and we agreed to share a meal together as husbands and wives. It was no secret among the board that we were expecting and I suspect that Lackey certainly knew this. My wife was good at hiding the weight gain under loose fitting clothing and at this point anyone who didn’t know us, probably would have no idea she was pregnant. But Lackey surely knew.

After hasty introductions, we settled in and ordered. The ladies discussed the pregnancy, while Lackey and I listened politely, occasionally eying one another. Sensing a pause in their conversation, he chimed in toward me, “Are you aware the board will be voting next month on whether to endorse Tooley for the Senate?”

Of course I was aware and I did not like the idea at all. The cemetery had never endorsed a political figure before and I saw no good reason to begin. “I think the whole city is aware by now. I know my parishioners have been talking about it during the fellowship meals. Regardless of the outcome, I think it was wrongheaded to even consider voting on it.”

“I suspected that’s where you would be on it.” Lackey turned his fork over and over in his hand before continuing. “I know you haven’t looked favorably on my appointment. But I also know that how I vote on this issue will determine for the rest of them which side of the fence I’m on. It’s my first vote on the board. There could be repercussions.” He stopped and looked intently at me.

I buried my first instinct to respond. Of course there would be repercussions, I thought to myself. The board climate was growing foul; endorsing a political candidate was evidence enough of this fact alone. Gantry was pushing the right buttons internally on the board, while particular high profile pastors were pressing them in the media. And as in most things political, the trail of money led straight to a group whose only interest was obtaining more power and social capital.

It didn’t occur to me at this moment, but some time later I realized that Lackey had also revealed something of his intentions in commenting about his vote. He was nothing like me, in that I never thought about repercussions as being a negative thing, nor did I look to my appointment on the board as any sort of means to an end. Lackey revealed by his own admission that he wasn’t on the board to simply serve it. He had ambitions. I only wish I had recognized it right then.

“I will be abstaining from the vote as a sign of protest,” I shot back at him. “I am sure there will be many who do not approve, but I am not concerned.”

“That’s what I have always admired about you,” he said. “You vote your conscience the same way you write your papers.”

I detected the insincerity buried in the rub, and so did my wife. She reached over and patted my thigh as a sign of reassurance. Was it my conscience that kept me constantly blocking Lackey from the board? Did he like that about me too? As I recall, I muttered as much back to him in a witty response, to which we all laughed. He was definitely playing the role of the gracious martyr, which made me more convinced that he wanted something particular from me.

The only other thing I recall from our time together in that first meeting was his insistence on discussing the issue of abortion despite my wife’s obvious discomfort. It’s why I said he surely knew we were pregnant. Everything he said about it seemed rehearsed, like he was probing my own womb with a pair of obstetrician’s forceps to drag something out of me. At one point, he started to get into the procedure of it all and we were, thankfully, interrupted by our head waiter. I never saw the life growing in my wife’s womb as anything other than a human person who was half mine and thereby I drew half the stakes as to any outcome that might befall him. Outside of the two of us though, it was no one else’s business – least of all, the Lackey’s of this world.

We talked all the way home that night and my saintly wife endured a great many profanities as I fumed over my former professor’s gall at openly discussing abortion during dinner with a pregnant woman. I was so intense that I’d nearly forgotten the rest of our conversation, and so I was naturally defenseless the next morning when Lewis Gantry phoned me to request a meeting on the upcoming vote. I had a light morning scheduled for sermon preparation and accommodating his request over coffee was agreeable to us both.

This would prove to be a fencepost kind of meeting, meaning my choices on this day would be strung along the line of my life leading me to this current hunger strike. My faith would be spread out on a cracker like welcoming pâté, metabolized by the first of a thousand villi, and passed as waste to the generation behind me. Others like me would be consumed until the whole of what we once were would be starved out of the nation’s psyche.

Gantry just sat and spun his coffee spoon around the fluid blackness. I’ve never trusted a man who sugared up his coffee. A touch of cream I could understand, but three scoops of sugar spoke to me of the insincerity of having taken a cup of it to begin with; I saw it as an open rejection of what the coffee truly was. Though he was reluctant to converse, I had no trouble ribbing him by suggesting he might have ordered a soda instead.

He smiled only briefly. “Always the humorist,” he said. “The world could be perched headlong on the edge of destruction and you’d find a clever way to critique its posture for a last chuckle.”

“And you, Mr. Gantry, could take a good chuckle and find a clever way drive it to such an edge.” I retorted. “Why don’t you tell me why you called this meeting?”

“Lackey told me you will be abstaining from the vote to endorse Pete Tooley for the Senate. I think this reflects poorly on the board and the seminary. I’ve come to ask you to reconsider.” He stared intently at me and drew a long, sweetened sip.

My coffee was black, bold, and bitter; the way I liked it. Like the coffee, my resolve too was made of stronger stuff. “I have reviewed the charter and see no cause to reconsider. In fact, I would like you to reconsider your position. This entire affair is out of line with our founding documents.”

“The only thing out of line is a country that no longer holds to the faith of its own founding documents. It will be our undoing if we fail to act.” Gantry did everything but pound the table as he spoke and I was reminded of the time I visited my grandpa’s church to hear a fiery, moral message.

“I have always been of the mind that God is still God no matter whose man is in office. These are petty affairs run by petty souls. As the great Apostle himself said, our day is one that ‘clings to a form of godliness, while denying its power.’ Mr. Gantry, I mean no offense, but this move to endorse Tooley is meant to compensate for the weak-kneed, self-serving Christianity we’ve been pumping into the heads of young seminarians.” I could tell this response was not well-received. Gantry’s old wrinkled skin bristled in a way that I think surprised even him.

He pointed his finger squarely at me. “You’re treading on dangerous ground son. You’ve got a pregnant wife at home and small congregation where you bury at least one member per month. I know people who would work to pull your credentials and kick you to the curb. Try raising that kid as an itinerant preacher with no health care, retirement, or steady salary. You’re lucky to be associated with this denomination and you better be counting your blessings.”

I was taken back for two reasons. One, because Gantry meant every word he said and most likely wasn’t bluffing at all. He did have that kind of authority in the system, being its biggest donor. Two, I was surprised by how much pity and compassion I had for him in those moments. I would have thought his threatening rant would have produced fear or anger in me, but it did not. Instead, I saw a small, terrified child behind his eyes, a child who was used to playing it tough in the neighborhood because at home he was subjected to a great many beatings. This was the only way Gantry could give his defeated soul a breath of fresh air. It was a crowning flower on his malicious stone erected above his box of beaten bones. I felt a Christ-like pity rise up in me for him.

Perhaps, I would have been served better to respond to his aggression with aggression of my own. But I could not. I simply reached over to him with an open hand, my knuckles on the table, my palms up. I said, “Let me pray with you,” and with such a display of brotherly affection, there could be but one response from a man of such hatred. The crucifixion of my career was set in motion.

DAY 5

In my wife’s second to last week, I shamefully agreed to a feeding tube at the behest of my son who could no longer bear to see her painfully thin body taking shallow breaths between all the unconscious groaning. The profound weakness I demonstrated during those final days did little more than extend her suffering; doubly ironic given all the hands I held for other spouses who had demonstrated a far greater courage than me in the final moments of their loved ones. Over this, I have wept many bitter tears.

The feeding tube was inserted and thankfully she never regained consciousness after that. My son was equally distraught by this, and the visible discomfort of the tube itself left him increasingly anxious about what was being done to her. But he also recognized that the procedure was largely taken because he’d bullied me into doing it, so whatever misgivings he carried remained locked inside him. My wife, on the other hand, was still every bit as beautiful to me, even though I noticed my son could barely stand to look at her. My boy and I would stay up long hours there, taking turns holding her hand. I would recite the stories of how we met in a cemetery beneath an inscription that would define us, how I was just sitting there with a book of poems in my hand that would take me a lifetime to comprehend despite their utter simplicity and how she was then, and stayed throughout our marriage, in a state of perpetual rhythmic grace.

In the days before we wed, the two of us were inseparable. I would occasionally hear stories about my seminary friends who’d gone on to pastor big churches – and how their parishioners demanded excessive amounts of the time which they had promised to their families. These old friends were often refused the chance of a normal life by a demanding church council. This was never my experience and in fact, mine was quite the opposite. I found that the entire congregation, which had taken to my fiancé so well, was all but begging us to spend time together. I even felt guilty at the number of days I was out of the office with her, hiking and camping and taking trips. But these dear, sweet people never once complained. Of course I will never be objective enough to know for sure, but I believe my sermons actually improved with time away from my regular duties. By the time we reached the week of the wedding, I was officially working in the office only once or twice per week. None of that mattered though, because the congregation was with me in those stressful moments outside the office – moments of preparation, cooking and cleaning, arranging details, and managing the more trivial church day to day operations.

The congregation even secretly voted to give me a raise, telling me to “apply the bonus salary toward a new baby fund.” It was as if they were all getting married right alongside me and I swear to this day nothing I’ve ever done in my pastoral career felt more like “church” than laughing together with them over my cummerbund selection, or playfully bantering with them on which Bach tune we should play during the seating of the parents. We were truly a family.

When my parents and in-laws arrived two days early to assist, they were aghast by the amount of work that had already been completed by my parishioners, leaving them nothing to do. After the initial shock of it wore off, my parents settled into a relaxed groove. “They remind me of the church I grew up in,” remarked my mother. “I hope you are able to stay here forever.”

“Me too,” I responded. At that time I wasn’t much thinking about their average age, which was well over 65. They all seemed so young and so happy then. I suppose we all did; this was before the riots started, before we all sat on the brink of a civil war, before I’d gathered up an army of bones from the Great Dark and marched them upon the cemetery flowers.

Speaking of the seminary, I managed to my get old friend Joe to perform the service for us. He’d moved through the graduate program there and taken a faculty slot teaching social justice before they axed the program. His homily was delivered wonderfully although it skipped a few beats when he tried to speak intimately about me. I realized how distant I had been in those years and how little of me Joe actually knew. No one but me noticed the snafus, and his delivery was well received by both our families as well as my congregation.

With a wink and nod, we were wed, she and I. And although I mean not to draw too many similarities (I know I keep repeating this), I have since wondered how it is that two minds can find such a nameless entity as love and bask in the glow of it without acknowledging that all light, when in the presence of anything substantial, does in fact leave a deepening shadow. And really, only the chitinous and oily things of this world actually reside in the shadow, but you would need the fortitude to go there I think to even understand. Most of us are not good enough to seek the dark, nor vile enough to make our nests there. We sit lukewarm in the mouth of that which has been written, quietly disbelieving, yet patiently expecting an old familiar blasphemy: the shadow of what we know we could become. And so again, I think I will stop there in case I have drawn too many similarities.

“You should have another drink,” she said. “It’s your wedding.”

I took in every inch of her for about the millionth time. Her eyes beckoned me to shatter the chains that often kept me wrapped tightly to my peculiar, introverted demons whenever I found myself surrounded by an overly exuberant crowd. I obliged, as I had learned to faithfully do at her requests during our time together. She was almost always right to ask more of me. I held my cards too tightly, not because of any personal fears or insecurities, but more out of a nature to protect what was mine. I was a territorial thinker, a trait I believe our son inherited for which I respect, despite our differences. A man need never cast his pearls to the swine until he’s inspected the quality of their hooves.

My problem, and my wife understood it, was that I was a perpetual investigator of men’s souls and if every tear in the human spirit were to exist in this physical realm, there would be no way to keep my fingers from probing them all. I existed to stealthily penetrate, like a midnight roach in a tidy home. Sadly, I was good at it too; I could, from mere crumbs in oddly corners, ascertain the constitution of the meal consumed by my unsuspecting, narcoleptic hosts. I could, from the sole of a man’s boot, determine if he read Whitman or lived him out; and after a few short moments with a man, could write his headstone inscription as well as his own mother. Perhaps it was this six-legged skill, slithered up along my own flypaper backbone which caused me to keep my own cards very close in my dealings with others.

About the time I would have begun staggering, Joe stepped up to bid me farewell. My memories are particularly fuzzy on this issue, but I recall him recanting to me the beginnings of the coming battles. He said, “You know the new board appointments are this week,” and I nodded my affirmation. He added, “Lackey is giving it another go.”

This, I didn’t know. James L. Lackey (who died last winter) was my life’s great tormentor. I have often wondered what kind of adversary I would make should I chose enemies. I never have, so I suppose I will never know. My opinion is that I would be the most brutal of foes – that I could with great deception plant any seed, replicate myself in the soil of weaker men and burst them from within, and that I would reserve the sticky afterbirth of each torn orifice to metabolize new maneuvers against the front line of whatever the next one propped up against me. I believe that I could, were I so inclined, unleash great horror upon any that opposed me, and that I could do this with a mechanized efficiency were it not for conscience’s sake.

Lackey was probably the single-worst professor I ever had in school – a graduate assistant professor to be more accurate. He gave me the first letter grade “C” I had ever received while working on my Master’s degree. It all really boiled down to one paper. He hated it. In huge red ink he said, “I don’t think you realize that this thinker totally undermines the dominant Christian perspective of the 20th century.” To this day I can’t remember what the paper was about, but the idea that I didn’t understand the subversive intent of the author? I can only imagine it was why I selected the writer in the first place.

What I do recall was my response to the grade, which came in the following poem, which I also believe offended him though that was far from my intent.

Jaundice

Through infected worlds
lean infectious words,
The Great Iamb:
“I am.”
[that I am]

I would not know it at the time, but Lackey would immediately count me among his ideological enemies, the first of many who would do so. Despite the aggression I have received over the years, I have never counted an intellectual opponent as an enemy. Not even my son who has worked feverishly against me all these years.

I quickly broke from my chain of thought and responded to Joe’s statement about Lackey. “I had no idea he was on the move again. You know my vote isn’t worth anything at the board, besides I’m headed to the Keys for a honeymoon. Have you met my first wife?” Perhaps it was the alcohol, but I couldn’t help but rib him during the seriousness of the moment.

“I know,” he said. “I just thought you would want to be aware.” He turned to me and for a moment I was ready to take back every thought I had of him during the homily. He knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t let this business sit.

I contemplated my choices on the matter, thinking that perhaps Joe had dropped a seed of war in me; that he had once again sent me to fetch my father’s gravel shovel to remove the expired remains which are always left beneath the untrained tires of a theological lackey. But my troubles now had a ratified, marital outlet, so I instead let him walk away and returned to dance with my wife. That night I made love to her six times. I told only two people this fact and they both mocked the assertion with such an authenticity that I decided I had not inspected their hooves closely enough. I’m not sure why they found this hard to believe. Being twenty-seven years old, it was hardly demanding. In fact, we made love twenty-four times in six days while honeymooning. I emerged covered in a thick spiritual afterbirth; I was ready for anything except a movement of consumerist, patriotic Christianity, sent to vibrate the tiniest bones in this nation’s ear with ecstatic, masturbatory gasps.

DAY 4

Having undertaken a spiritual fast before, I know that the stomach cramps begin to get easier after the fourth day. I never fasted beyond seven days however, and that was late in my ministry career. I was seasoned then, or perhaps cured like leather. The process of spiritual ripening can take a lifetime, but unlike my son, I was fortunate to have great people around me when I first started the clergy profession.

I took my first parish at the age of twenty-four. Probably not a wise move, but I had an elderly Latin professor who knew of an opening in a local congregation and he strongly urged me to apply while finishing up my advanced degrees. “Real ministry would do you some good,” he used to say to me, remarking often on my sullen gazes and intentionally offensive translations of Virgil’s poems. I remember he had a kind face, the sort that would furrow up at the first sign of discomfort or offense; and I suspect the old fellow never said a dishonest word -- his face would have revealed too much. I said as much of him at his funeral many months later.

The church my professor sent me to was very much in need of a pastor – and not just because their pulpit was empty and no one was capable of delivering the homilies. They were an elderly lot and overwhelmed with the grief of having lost nine parishioners in thirteen short months. I was honestly taken back by the way they received me, being so young and inexperienced. I stumbled through the opening months of this first placement, but these dear souls were always gracious; better still, they were amazing cooks and often visited me, arms loaded with freshly baked pies and casseroles. I gained fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks and although the conversations never reached any real intellectual fulfillment as they had with my seminary companions, I found that I never grew tired of my parishioners company either. My professor was right, “real ministry” was doing me some good.

I kept up my trips to the cemetery during my tenure at this church and found myself writing some of my best sermons there in the quiet of the tombstones. I had planned to one day publish them as they reflected some of the happiest moments of my life. There was a particular sculpture there under which I did my best work. Carved above the entrance to small mausoleum was a pair of children holding hands and looking upward to the east. Their faces were smoothed and polished and time had not worn on them in anyway. The inscription said, “In hands and in hearts, in life and in death, all things are bound together.”

I sat there on many cool mornings reading Walt Whitman, trying to piece together the unitary ideas of life and death. My regularity was noticed and after several weeks, a young suburban jogger stopped beside me to catch her breath.

“I see you here nearly every morning at this hour,” she expressed. “Same place, same time.”

I looked up from my book and took in her face and form carefully, so as not to be seen staring. She was stunningly beautiful, with a long slender body suited for running. Her hair was very short, cut with almost masculine features, but upon closer examination I realized that it helped to reveal her gorgeous blue eyes and slender, supple neck. Her complexion was clear and her cheek bones glistened with beads of sweat from the run.

I stood up and brushed myself off slightly. “I regret never having noticed you noticing me,” I said wryly and she smiled. We exchanged pleasantries for a moment and she returned to her run, neither of us ever asking for the other’s name.

Over the coming weeks, I continued my routine and took note of hers. She was a Monday, Wednesday, Friday runner – perhaps Sunday too, but I was never there on Sunday mornings. She had two running outfits, both very modest by the day’s standards. She kept a great pace, a modern rhythm in her step which neatly matched the way she swung her arms as she moved. That led me to believe she was perhaps a musician or a poet because such kinesthetic rhythms are not exerted by most people without great mental concentration and training. She stopped again sometime later and through our chatting I came to realize that I’d been wrong on both counts. She was hairdresser, which I supposed was a type of artist, and more relevant to the point of my observation of her natural rhythm, she dabbled in martial arts.

She too had discovered my profession and to my great surprised was seated among my many blue-haired friends the Sunday morning following. She was stunningly beautiful and although I had never been the nervous sort, something about her presence led me to stumble my way through the text as if I were being graded by one whose opinion I found extremely precious. She was cordial afterward and said nice things about the homily. It was good to finally get a younger person’s perspective, as the older congregants would always compliment me while coupling the compliment with phrases like, “You’re going to be a great preacher one day.” I never quite knew how to take that kind of praise back then and sometimes even found it offensive. I know now that my parishioners recognized all too well my need to mature and find my own rhythm as both an artist and a shepherd. Perhaps they sensed that I had not yet come to fully grasp my profession or adopt the cultural expectations that accompanied it.

After the sermon that first morning, I invited her to lunch and she agreed. We talked about the things we loved about life and she was amazingly open about her lack of a spiritual upbringing. Still, as I have found repeatedly throughout life, some of the people nearest to Jesus have lived lives far away from the formality of the Church. Perhaps it was this unfiltered and honest approach to life that most attracted me – her positions on truly spiritual topics that had not passed through the antiseptic rinse of religion. It was the beginning of something wonderful.

That very night I had a terrible dream. I was standing in the sanctuary of my church enjoying the beauty of the stillness, when suddenly there came a deep rumbling from beneath the platform where I preached week in and week out. The rumbling grew stronger and its location increasingly specific, thereby ruling out any thoughts I had of it being an earthquake. In my dream, a small trap door appeared near the pulpit leading into a dark, musty basement. Fearfully, but with great curiosity, I descended into the darkness.

When I was fully inside the small, hidden area there beneath my church I was greeted (as we often are in dreams) with an odd conglomeration of objects. Some were ancient candlesticks and holy relics mixed right alongside modern items like laptop computers and microwaves. In the center of the room, the source of the rumbling was covered by a large painter’s tarp. Streaks of dried white paint covered the bluish cloth, which was shaking with intense vibrations and emitting mechanical noises that sounded like a wound-up child’s toy under the Christmas tree.

Timidly, I removed the cloth and beneath it stood what I could only guess to be a life-size, fully robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex. It makes me chuckle to think of today, but in my dream the machine sprung to life and what began as an eerie dream quickly became a nightmare that I would only recently come to understand.

Still dreaming, I sprang from the hole beneath the pulpit and found myself staring blankly into the faces of all my elderly friends who’d gathered as they would normally for a Sunday morning service. The ground gave way beneath my feet and the mechanical T-Rex emerged to the horror of my parishioners. Knocked to the ground, I could only watch in terror as it gripped them in its jaws, sometimes one entire row of them at a time. Shaking its head violently back and forth, their bodies crashed into lifeless humps beneath the cracked and broken stained glass windows.

My dream ended with me standing among the wreckage of the sanctuary, looking intently back into the darkness of the room where a solitary figure stood with a device in his hand. I could not make out his features, not even in the slightest, but I did see him wave the device and heard him laugh as he pressed a button on it. The button controlled the robotic destructor and he would turn it on and off again in glee as I was powerless to reach him.

I woke up and immediately wrote the dream down, if for no other reason than to try and make sense of it. After pondering on it all day, I could only surmise that I had some latent fear of unleashing something very old, something even extinct, upon my parish. This creature wasn’t merely something ancient, but something ancient and recreated through modern, man-made means.

I grew extra careful in my preparation for most of that entire year with the dream never too far my thoughts. But even that careful eye and guarded demeanor would soon be drawn away and I would cast all my thoughts wistfully toward my wedding day where in hands and in hearts all things are bound together, whether in the granite, mechanical wastelands of T.S. Eliot or in Whitman’s softer folds of leaves and grass.

DAY 3

Before I took my first parish, far from my home in the North Carolina hills, I attended seminary. Of course since I’m in a confessional of sorts, administering my own last rites, it seems only fitting to relay the joke we all shared by referring to the facility and the education’s collective effect on our souls as not a seminary, but a cemetery.

Cemeteries are amazing places and paradoxically heap great beauty above decay, not too unlike the cosmos itself whose giant dying stars collide, explode, and birth new places in the deepest, most inaccessible erogenous zones of Mother Nature. We had an old one there, a real cemetery that is, that was something of tourist attraction because of the sculptures that had been created by a famous Italian artist whose name I now forget. Although never quite reaching the fame of the Stagileno in Genoa where great thinkers such as Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche would sometimes frequent to contemplate life’s deeper questions, the views none the less did my soul well. I found that I spent many afternoons there among the granite gods gathering what goodly messages could be found and recording them for dryer souls who would grade my performance and measure my fitness for the ministry. In such a righteous gloss, my professors could only weigh the inscriptions I inked for them above the deeper truths which sunk into the bosom of the soil, nearer still to the now decrepit bones of finer men whose human lubricant keeps the shaft and crank of Nature’s engine secretly turning.

So inviting was this particular seminary (I meant cemetery) that the locals would often come to walk their pets exuberantly along the dry, decorated chests of those who had passed. I remember some of their faces even after twenty years, the pensive looks beneath the relaxing strolls and the oblivious frolicking of the canines and even recall the occasional cocked leg of mutts showering down what they had used up atop thirsty graveside pollen. And so too did my cemetery essay papers frolic and raise a leg above the deeper truths for which so many of my teachers were unprepared.

One such particularly offensive paper lends itself neatly to this blood and soil confession and took the murder of one brother by another to a series of logical questions and abundantly graceful answers. When Cain slew his brother, he received of all things a mark of protection from the Divine, a mark that the lowly and innocent Abel would have found quite useful just moments earlier. I was not pointing this odd little fact out to be cute or make them gasp; instead I was as I had often done then, lamenting my squashed kitten among the carved stone faces in the seminary. Most everyone will at some point storm angrily into God’s presence with raised fists and burning questions, but as the good teacher said, only the “pure in heart” ever really see Him. The rest are simply shadow boxers.

My education was in great need of entombment and I found no deeper ditches in which to throw my wasted nobility than those ruts carved out by fermentation. Alcohol was once the heavenly project of enlightened monks and for good reason. I’ve always said there are two reasons a man drinks too much – the first reason is that he doesn’t know God at all; while the second reason is that he knows God too well.

We had a watering hole we liked to frequent back then. It sat across from a dog food factory that filled the air with a thick rank of slaughter and ground feed each night, although admittedly it would be hard to notice upon exiting the place. Inebriation’s greatest gift is a dulling of the senses. My personal poison was the “Boiler Maker,” a shot of thick bourbon dropped in fresh beer that fizzled and foamed through each gulp, popping like seltzer, but as numbing as any dental cream. Every time I would drop in the shot of liquor and watch the effect, I thought about the Big Bang and how the universe was probably quite similar in both its appearance and paralyzing effect on consciousness.

We would talk, my fellow wanderers and I, about a great many things and I must confess I seldom grew tired of their company. One particular evening Joe, my friend across the hall, asked the most penetrating question about narcolepsy and while totally unrelated to the confession at hand, I could not help but grow weary thinking through its complexity. “If narcolepsy is a real disease, then couldn’t anything be?” he asked. Although I’m certain he never knew it (because I am certain I have always kept my best thoughts to myself), the question affected me deeply, and as with all the deeper questions of my life, I was left with either folding his inquiry neatly between the legs of our barmaid who’d taken a particular affinity for me in those days, or fetching my father’s old flathead gravel shovel and scraping up the mess of the question off the road so that I might see the stain of it and draw clear conclusions.

Joe probably never thought anything more about it, but I would spend the remainder of my days in the seminary pondering the statistics of classification and the way in which the ruler we take to the pavement’s slop of fur often determines what exactly gets measured. In the case of narcolepsy it would seem one is measuring for fatigue and overall daytime sleepiness, genetic markers could be found and an overall “predisposition” for this thing uncovered while the whole world pours another unmeasured cup of hot coffee upon the sticky flypaper of being. And if this is true (and I think maybe it is so) then we could for any other reason chose to take another stick to prod the whole damn cosmic soup and thereby classify in any direction, be it breath or gasp. And it occurred to me then that this procedure is one we’ve followed for generations and in essence carved out our own beautiful statues of meaning that we heap atop the old boxes of bones. These statues sprout angelic wings while boxes of bone see without ever opening their long missing eyes.

And so, while in the cemetery, I sat and pondered with myself, thinking indeed it might be best to see without eyes, to get beneath the circus of wreaths and granite and flowers, and deeper still below the thin roots of trees to reach the pulsating womb of darkness and decomposition – to force her out and eat her placenta if necessary.

Now when I mention moving down into rhythm of death and becoming a box of old bones, I didn’t mean this literally, at least not then. As a corpse I would have been of little use to these matters besides serving up a fresh meal to our very large and transcendent ecosystem. I mean this figuratively of course, and perhaps (dare I confess it here?) spiritually. I would descend into the box of a great silence as if to escape the way in which my world was crafted. To get to this place would perhaps even require the risk of damnation, unless of course such a grand disorder was indeed determined by the strangest of narcoleptic men who came before me with their own dark rulers until everything I thought I knew about God was in fact summed up in that dark red stain on the pavement that I recall so often: a stain created not by some mindless driver en route to his destination, but instead by the tire treads of ancient prophets who wrote their fearful destinies into my own blood.

Over time, even my cemetery (I meant seminary) friends began to view me with pity and yet never a single one of them offered me a shot of epinephrine. The smoke of my education would fade and I would breathe again, even go on to serve as the youngest board member for the institution. But at this time of my life, there were no nurses, no intellectual midwives.

Today, I would only rarely lean back against the window sill and count my cows before returning to bed in a deep and altogether constructed sleep, where I sputter and cough beneath the cancer of knowing too many things. I would resist the temptation to turn all my cemetery stones to bread and contemplate whether I too had been marked for protection, given my cocked and often irreligious legs.

DAY 2

By the time I reached twenty years I had grown so accustomed to God’s presence that the mystery of it was like breathing and while many find breathing to be quite commonplace, as an asthmatic, I never did. There is a majestic fullness to breath that we only recognize in its absence and so it is with all things Transcendent. The absence of breath is gripping and terrifying – it is not particularly painful in the sense of being stung by a bee or thumping your little toe. The pain is of another category that only comes through the awareness that we are not taking in air; and in this way, I have come to find better definitions for damnation as I mentioned yesterday.

I am in fact hungry today, but it is beautiful here. I slip outside to catch glimpses of sun while I still can. The sky is a rich, deep blue and every cloud an angel. There is no one here, no gathering of spectators, no press. Hunger strikes are meant to call attention to things, but I find no more need of earthly eyes. I am alone with myself enjoying the crisp, clean air. When Gerald Manley Hopkins speaks of the “dearest freshness deep down things” perhaps the most basic of these is the smell of clean air.

I remember when was eleven I had the worst asthma attack of my life. My grandparents were ‘grand’ farmers, people of the earth who loved God and soil and fresh crops. Of my many regrets in this life, one that stands out and often bubbles over is the fact that I spent too few hours watching them work. I suspect I could have learned a great deal from them.

It was difficult to exist in close proximity to my grandparents for two reasons. First, my grandfather was a heavy smoker through my childhood years. He would willfully exchange clean air for the gray wisp of what the hellfire consumed. The cloud of it would billow around him, around the house and skate toward me like some living entity, some devil of malicious intent working its way up through my nostrils and past the cilia; ushering my dark, fleshy places to coil up defensively and restrict my breathing. I’ve come to recognize in my years of asthma what it means to truly gasp, and as a clergyman of some sixty years, I’ve come to recognize in my many hours of asthmatic gasping what it means to truly breathe; and now as related to this confession, how it is that these two methods of retrieving air are quite dissimilar in the body, as in all things spiritual.

Second, despite my love for the many animals that filled every waking day with clucking and deep bellowing sounds (Nature’s collective tongue moving from skeleton to skeleton), the truth was that I was allergic every one of them. My grandfather had a large barn and there are few experiences that children today can enjoy as profound as swinging from barn rafters to hay bales under the constant, methodic grinding of bovine teeth as they patiently work sprinkled oats in a trough. It is one of life’s rhythms hardly available to them anymore, replaced instead by flashes of color beamed down from metal antennas onto thin plasma, which serves to compound the Great Ignorance. Television fills our minds like grandpa’s smoke and our entire species while oddly unaware of its own breath, remains perplexed as to why we gasp.

At eleven years old on a Christmas Eve, my lungs decided they’d had enough foreign contaminant, as each sticky Alveoli underwent the flypaper-wandering, from a mouth that followed its eyes and from eyes that followed its soul to these people I loved so much. Christmas Eve, while I was constricted and gasping, we piled in together as a family and drove to the hospital, a house of concrete and epinephrine, so my gasping could be relieved and my breathing restored. From manger to manger we traveled, not as wise men, but as shepherds.

Even at eleven, I felt terrible for that sweet nurse who at the expense of her own family Christmas would treat my gasp and give respiratory birth to me in the form of my own bronchial Jesus. These nurses are dear souls and through my years of ministering to the dying I have come to see them as angels in their own regard, like the puffy clouds above me today.

She never once complained about working the holiday, as I would often do in as a pastor; and in that sense I suppose she was a better minister than me. Her presence was calm and sure, the prick of the needle and draining syringe brought quick relief to my lungs, like mammalian labor – like our old grey puss which after having pressed out the nine could once again breathe easy and lick the sticky nutrients of creation off the entire artistic production.

The nurse smiled gently toward me, like a great composer of orchestral oxygen and I took in a glorious, immaculate breath.

That year, Christmas was particularly sweet. I could breathe again, but more than that, my grandfather was still alive. Although he’d forgo his smoking habit almost immediately after my respiratory emergency, it would be the accumulated cigarettes that ultimately took him to the ground he loved. I remember still the last time we ever spoke. Laid up from radiation treatments, he seldom emerged from the bed. A week before he died, he managed to get up and walk over to the window and gazed silently outward toward the pasture. We were alone in the house as I had elected to stay with him while the rest of the family enjoyed the catfish ponds. He placed one hand on the window sill to support his weight and pointed out silently for a few moments, occasionally pecking the glass. He finally turned to me and said in a struggled voice, “Do you see those cows? Those are my cows.” I nodded a strange acknowledgement and he returned to bed.

I suppose that had I known these would be his last words to me I would have thought of something gracious to say, but I did not. In the remainder of our time, he slept in his bed, and I, through an open door, laid on a sofa listening to sullen gasps for air and uncontrollable coughs expelling the cancer in clumps.

That was late July or early August, I forget. The space and time has been far removed from the Christmas that defined my notions of breathing. In the time between, my mind and spirit had grown enough to know there could be no other profession for me than that of a clergyman. The great web of dead kittens and asthma would lead me to a Universe of sputtering light with a bag of candles and a deep recognition of a secluded, cosmic Nativity.

It would be the response to that Nativity, not the foretelling of it, that produced a Great Star; it would be the utility not the essence that I would lay as a neatly wrapped package of myrrh in the manager.

But I mean not to draw too many similarities and I must return inside now, lest someone notices me.

DAY 1

This is no age for old priests. There is nothing left to eat here and the sustenance of all the great things has been consumed by the teeth of much younger men. Everything that was has been gnawed to the bone and all that will be lies like a stone in a desert temptation awaiting some great miracle that will not come. So it is with all things: in living and dying, in past and future, there rises a discernable line from the yeast of our memory and with it the acknowledgement that one cannot point to a singular ingredient or immaculate event. Our lives are strung along, like telephone wire or fencing, attached to certain, firmly planted posts that bubble and pop in the rising temperature of age. Each fence post assembles a founding link to the chain of who we have become, degree by degree, until the whole loaf itself has been consumed.

My decision to starve myself to death in the abandoned sanctuary of my first parish is one such long chain of events with grounded posts, and being that this is my first day without food, I felt it appropriate to start at the beginning, during my initial understandings of these things. And lest one should believe that this starvation is unholy, we must remember that man does not live by bread alone.

I’ve told this first marking along my life’s trail scarcely enough it seems that no one outside of my immediate family is aware of it. I recall once repeating it to my own mother in all its macabre detail who simply replied that she had only a small recollection of the event. This admission hardly surprised me in that my being, as a child, was highly elusive and intentionally so. It never was so much the privacy or the lunacy of humanity that kept me silent so much as my inability to fully communicate myself. And of course it wasn’t that there was all that much to communicate, but what there was of me was mine, and I have always been inherently selfish.

It was the fall season; and I remember this only because of the slight chill in the air and the color of the leaves. Along the Appalachia, the leaves turn with vibrant enthusiasm – a welcoming of death that to this day I have only gained glimmers of understanding. I suspect that in some short weeks, I will have more understanding of this unless my colors are not allowed to turn should they intervene. I fear that if my son has any say, he will against my wishes, authorize the deep mechanical tubes of man and they will poor back into me the very substance of my protest, like a clarinet of medical serendipity – a benign and altogether cancerous invasion of my own dying, and all in the name of some undefined good.

The smell of leaves while crisp and beautiful has always left a stench of death in my nostrils. I’d like to blame the asthma, but I’ve always known that something much darker has been at work in me and this great work began at the age of seven staring down at the matted fur of my dead kitten.

We had an old grey farm cat on our four acres and I loved her as much as I suppose any boy is capable of loving the source of his sneezing. Impregnated, she gave birth to a litter of nine and I was fortunate enough at such a young age to witness the entire spectacle. Never particularly squeamish, I can still recall with great curiosity the form and grace by which this sleek and covetous mammal ate her own placenta; a metaphor perhaps for what would come in numerous births and rebirths, be they spiritual or otherwise. The production of something new always carries with it the blood of something old, and in this conglomeration of discard and flesh one might always find, if not appetizing, at least the things for which a soul needs. It matters not the hour, nor the resolve to do without. The spirit consumes what the spirit births.

Of the nine, there was the usual runt: the poor nipple-less wanderer in search of milk. And while totally unaware at age nine, in some short years I would come to understand this lot in life in much more personal detail as the majority of my own fumbling to breast would be repelled with great anxiety from lovers of a less open disposition.

The cat’s motherly eyes were never far, nor her sharp pinch of mouth on fur, which she would place along the back scruff of her eyeless babes and carry them back to warmth when they tumbled out of the basket. It was with great encouragement that I noted an instinctual commitment to keep the nine bags of fur and claw near enough and warm enough to have their fill. The weak one grew, albeit slowly, and within a few short days had sprouted bristle-like hair, resembling a seminal grass along its oil slick back and my heart was stilled knowing it would survive the malnourishment.

Many weeks later, the litter’s runt finally began to wander. She wobbled at first, eyes barely open, not unlike us all I suppose. Wandering in any capacity is quite akin to its amoebic origins: like a spore of jelly, we each tumble outward to collect whatever might stick to us; and today, as an old man, I now see that most mammals progress beneath the weight of such a great symphony. Our wandering is a flag unfurled, the great cosmic flypaper – and as much as my ideological opponents would have me believe that this process is born inside the meat, I am forced to wonder as they themselves cling to me with their countless theories. How is it I managed to move forward and gather newer, fresher mammalian ideas from outside this envelope of being, while maintaining the choice to deny my physical being?

Nevertheless, when things wander they do perchance get wandered upon and as such leave permanent indentations. These are more than psychological imprintings from a myriad of doting mothers; they are more often the harbingers of great and permanent marks carved out from the basement of time. So it was with the runt of this litter who in some short weeks was forever engraved with the imprint of a harder rubber tire whose tread existed to glide upon the stains of Nature’s tears.

The perpetrator of this death, like so many, kept moving and never stopped. There were only two tiny thumps and rush of wind. For years, I had imaginations about who the driver was and where they were going. I thought about the subtle differences between destinies and destinations, all of which applies to where I sit today.

When I approached the street, I found her there near the road, body completely smashed and paper thin; two tiny eyes spread randomly as an ink blot test sent by a stranger therapeutic mind to probe and measure the abyss behind my own, as if such a spread of kitty gelatin and paint could glean anything more of the event than the despair of coddled brains on cooling cement. I don’t wish to link us too desperately at this moment, and yet from mother’s teat to simple travel staples we all seem to find something of ourselves along the curbsides of our wandering. The meat itself isn’t what calls us backward from the streets in shock so much as the attachments we are severing, but death does have a way of driving the pulverized moment back into a frozen time when we first saw a picture of what will surely come.

Again, I mean not to draw too many similarities.

The strangest thing about looking up at suffering is what you suddenly glean, or perhaps convince yourself you have gleaned, about the Divine. This is no less true at nine than it is at ninety-nine, or at least I imagine it to be so. The irony of damnation is that like decomposition its entry lacks the savage intensity of its contents which is likely why I detest hearing the word “damn” roll off the lips of those who fail to understand such things. Something wholly other is at work in the world and only in the accumulated mass of dying can one fully glimpse its terrible beauty and call it damned.

My shrieks were thin and high pitched, like some grandmother reciting lines of Giovanni in a broken opera; the world itself the stage and those crumbling leaves the vibrating seat on which each sound wave sat and churned and bounced; and even wandered. I’ve been told and believe it is true that all sound is interpreted by the broken connection of nerve to bone; and in our case as human beings this severing is not between one singular bone and its nerves, but rather three tiny bones in particular. It would seem that even our most tender interpretations are rooted in a skeletal reality, like a child’s nightmare the greatest of Nature’s conductors usher forth movements to us of the Divine Spirit; and these are received unintentionally into our an empirical, Trinitarian disposition.

They came running, these entities from which I sprang. My father first followed closely by my mother. Firm hands pulled me away from the curbside and directed me into the house. But I watched from the window as my father scooped each feline bit of her up to the sun with a flathead gravel shovel. In his defense, there would have been no other way to retrieve the dead kitten and this too gives me pause to consider how quickly our warm substance entwines with the inanimate only to dry and cool and stick there upon the asphalts of cosmic paths; all that we are even in our most rudimentary forms is cuddled and hunkered down as if to resist the most prying instruments of man.

When I returned to the scene there was only a deep red stain settled between the rough black nodules of pavement; and one more thing: a white chip of skull, flaked off and reflecting a fading light which would serve for me as a lasting dim image of the pain and the sullen realization that autumn was never bound by a turning earth or the wobble of rock in deep space. Autumn comes from someplace wholly other: Hallowed Be Thy name.