A Sin of Omission by Marguerite Poland

Author:Marguerite Poland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2019-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The ordination. That most solemn moment. Stephen’s destiny decided on the road from Southwell when Mzamo had slung his boots about his neck in anger and the mantle of preferment passed to his brother. Or perhaps that destiny had been decided far earlier, predetermined even before Basil Rutherford had found him as a child, his filthy scrap of sheepskin drawn around him like a shroud.

‘God’s doing, lad,’ Mfundisi Turvey had once said. ‘Believe it and accept it gladly.’

And he had accepted it, never doubting his vocation, bound irrevocably to his Missionary Vow. And yet, as Stephen knelt before the Bishop beside his fellow ordinand, the humbly moved and weeping Gideon Boom, he could not bring his mind to grasp the words the Bishop said.

His restless night, his sense of inadequacy, the disappointment of the unpretentious church – St Philip’s – in which the ceremony was held when he had hoped to be ordained beside his friend with the pomp of the Cathedral, left him wretched with a lurking sense of failure. He had not pleased God – or his superiors.

– Too many have missed the mark.

He must have missed the mark. And, despite his resolution to dwell on nothing but this most sacred moment, his eyes were drawn, again and again, to the place where she had stood and sung, translated from her silence to the surge of anthems.

Transcendently real. Unattainable.

And if the tears started to his eyes as the Bishop laid a hand upon him, calling him to the service of God, it was not in being awed by the great solemnity of his commitment. It was with an unremitting sense of loss.

He stood alone, unembraced. Even by God.

And when – his Stranger’s Pass expired – he took the road back to Nodyoba, he rode almost recklessly, impatient to escape the piety and self-congratulation of those who’d witnessed the moment of his ordination as if, in an instant, it had changed him into someone else.

Perhaps it had.

Perhaps there would always be a presence at his side, inescapable for life, like his Missionary Vow, waiting in perpetual judgement. The censor he could not delude. His manufactured self.

The Reverend Mr Stephen Mzamane, Deacon of the Church of the Province, incumbent of Holy Trinity Mission, Nodyoba, in the Diocese of Grahamstown.

He did not look about him – newborn into sanctity – or gaze in wonder at Creation, at the vast sky, the thrusting clouds, the sweeps of shadow in the hollows of the Ecca Pass, the distant curve of the Amathole, sun-capped by the late afternoon light. He swatted at flies and cursed the horse when it stumbled. He wished he could remove his clergyman’s collar, so often had he run his finger round the inner rim to wipe the sweat away.

How Mrs Rutherford and the other clergy wives in the congregation had gathered round and gazed at it, exclaiming at how splendid he looked. Mrs Rutherford had put on her spectacles and peered at him, called him ‘Reverend’, laughing fondly that he should no longer be ‘my little Stephen’.

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