Bodies and Souls by Nancy Thayer

Author:Nancy Thayer [Thayer, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-553-39108-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Peter Taylor

The service was almost over, and Peter Taylor was not satisfied. He did not feel it had been a successful morning. Something was in the air.

There were Sundays when, during a sermon, he could feel the individual attention of each and every person focused so intently on his words that their combined concentration became almost a tangible thing. He often felt this—that he could stretch out his hand with a swift sure move and capture it, then hold it out as a gift to God: the fluttering and wary intelligence of these believers.

Once, when he had been speaking on the Trinity, he had announced that for him Jesus Christ was as real and actively present in his everyday life as his car or house or family. The congregation as one had been shocked at these words, and their usual colorful quietness had gone white, tense, and electric. He had had one awesome moment of feeling at the center of their fierce and hopeful regard before someone sneezed, someone else shuffled, and the tone of the room dropped back to normal. And of course almost immediately some of the more conservative members of the group began to shift uncomfortably on their pews, obviously anxious lest Peter lapse into some sort of unseemly evangelical spiel.

Those moments of unified consciousness were rare. Still, most Sundays were better than this one. Today everyone seemed to be so twittery. They sat with their heads cocked dutifully in his direction, but their eyes were glazed. Clearly they were occupied with their own thoughts. Some people stared out the windows or up at the carved moldings. Even Wilbur Wilson, who could always be counted on for almost fierce attentiveness, kept fidgeting about in his pew like a bored child. During the end of the sermon, which was supposed to have been uplifting and even cheering, Suzanna Blair’s face had slowly grown more and more woebegone, as if she had been hearing him preach about some sort of hell—and in the back of the church his own son Michael stared at him with a stony and unremittingly black stare.

The congregation rose to the opening chords of the organ music and raised their hymnals before them; they seemed to sigh and rustle with relief as they stood. They began to sing “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” and as they did, Peter let his eyes and his thoughts rest for a moment on Michael. His greatest fear was that there really was a God who would chastise him for not ministering well enough to his congregation, or for interpreting Him and His words incorrectly. But in this fear was a kind of hope—that if he prayed, thought, read, worked hard enough, he could perhaps do some part of it right. So in a strange way his fear made him optimistic, energetic, eager. So much yet remained to be done and seen.

But his greatest sorrow was of a different quality, for his greatest sorrow was that he had somehow failed his elder son.

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