Bear No Malice by Clarissa Harwood

Author:Clarissa Harwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

15

No one is useless in this world . . .

who lightens the burden of it for any one else.

—Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Tom sighed and rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. The Sunday service that morning hadn’t gone well. He was standing in the narthex of the cathedral, greeting parishioners as they left and struggling to appear interested in what they had to say. Usually he enjoyed talking with parishioners, but he had been irritated by a number of small mishaps before and during the service, as well as by the sermon, which Paul Harris had preached. A new acolyte had spilled some Communion wine just before the service began; an aged choir member had tripped and fallen on his way up the stairs to the choir loft; and Canon Martin, who had been scheduled to read the Gospel, had taken ill only minutes before he was to read. In each case, Tom had smoothed over the difficulties, taking care of the spill and giving the acolyte a firm lecture on handling the sacred vessels more carefully; determining that the choir member was more frightened than injured and helping him to his seat; and finally, reading the Gospel himself.

Paul Harris’s sermon was a bigger problem that even Tom couldn’t solve. Harris’s sermons were more like university lectures. This one was worse than usual, filled with bizarre mystical fluff and a painstaking (and painful, at least to Tom) exposition of an obscure passage in the book of Ezekiel. Tom had no use for these scholarly flights of fancy, especially in sermons. What the people needed to hear was sound, practical theology, ways they could apply the doctrines of Christianity to their lives. How exactly could visions of cherubim and dry bones and whirlwinds do that?

It was true that some people liked Harris’s sermons. Unaccountably, Miranda was one of them. Tom was loath to admit it, but it bothered him that she seemed to prefer Harris’s sermons to his own. She hadn’t said so, of course, but she had praised one of Harris’s sermons so highly that Tom hadn’t been able to help hinting at his displeasure. She hadn’t said a word about anyone’s sermons after that.

In his most charitable moments, Tom admitted that Harris was a good speaker. He had the charisma to infuse his words with drama and passion. Although Tom preached well enough, he hadn’t the ability to enthrall his listeners. He told himself he didn’t care, that his strengths more than made up for that weakness, if weakness it was. What he did well was solve problems; he knew what to do with things that were broken or spilled or out of place. Even more important, he knew what to do with people who were broken. When someone needed help, it was Tom he or she turned to, not Harris, who usually disappeared as soon as a service was over in order to be alone with his elevated thoughts.

Harris was standing at the other side of the entrance to the cathedral, about ten feet away.

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