A Dark and Stormy Night by Tom Stacey

Author:Tom Stacey [Stacey, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911487258
Google: eO42swEACAAJ
Amazon: 1911487256
Publisher: Medina Publishing
Published: 2018-05-05T23:00:00+00:00

VII

How was it that after my ordination the aptness of celibacy, cathartic denial of the self, clouded? – the body now irrelevant or aloof.

I would not be monk, yet I would be chaste and meanwhile work the world, the demands of ministry and also of the dying, the lost, those bereft of love, strangers to love, unknown by joy, beauty-blind, uncomprehending of my truth, Truth itself. Thus there gathered around me all the clutter of the this and that as Bishop’s chaplain and curate of Holy Trinity, the pettifogging functions. Petty, fogging …

You got wind of my engagement. That surprised me. You wrote me a card, referring to Marigold as ‘your musician’. How did you know of her profession? At Oxford you’d speak of your flowers as virgin births while I spoke of melodies.

Almost immediately Marigold followed me to Africa to be married in the mudbrick cathedral of St Paul’s, Kasese, on the Uganda side of that wild Congo frontier. It was across the frontier with the Congo in the vast Ituri forest that my prospective charges inhabited and delved. Relentlessly they were being encroached upon by Bantu, for ever creeping across the continent river by river from two thousand years ago, planting yams and claiming any land they could break the soil of. With their metal and their cloth they bartered for pygmy-trapped bushmeat and pygmy-gathered medicine. The Church’s Bantu priesthood and converts could not but look upon pygmies as an inferior species of creation beyond the redemption of gospel and the Faith. I knew well enough their exclusion meant their withering and dying from the necrosis of game reserves and tourists. The CMS had been casting around for an outsider prepared to reach them. That meant a white man. That was the challenge that caught me, a challenge to overlay primal innocence with Christian innocence. ‘That alone,’ I have told Marigold, ‘might save them from extinction. Don’t you see? It is a complex test of the faith I claim.’

We are again in Holy Trinity. You say nothing and on the instant I wonder if what I am saying makes any sense.

‘I’ll be going out to Uganda’s border with eastern Congo in the spring attached to the regional Anglican diocese.’

My church on Prince Consort Road is growing dark. The stained glass prophets softly glow high in the west windows. The place has remained held by a strange silence, poised for an intensity of worship. You and I have been speaking in a whisper. The nursery school beyond the north wall has packed up for the day. In an hour I will be conducting the eucharist, spoken in formal intimacy: a mere handful will attend.

I get up to light four huge candles, two at each end of the altar on either side of two exquisite sprays of flowers of which I would once have required of myself to name each bloom.

When I return to the row of chairs, you are sat very upright, gazing at the candles with that penetrating concentration that is your hallmark.

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