Demons vs. rashes

 Demons vs. rashes 

Sunday morning was rain, hard and cold. Uncle Albert didn’t want to get out in it. He wasn’t going to church; he wasn’t even coming over to watch Premier League football (though he would come Monday afternoon to see Arsenal lose its sad, sad game to Sheffield United).

     It was just as well. Roz wanted me to go to church with her: The narrow man* was preaching at the little Presbyterian Church near Red Spring, where our State Senator is a member. The Senator wasn’t there. There weren’t many there at all. I counted 17 including the two of us and the preacher.

     The rain was loud on the roof, sounding both angry and resigned.

with apologies to Martin Schongauer

The narrow man has grown a beard; it is sparse but neatly shaped. It gives him the resigned look of a prophet that knows no one is listening, however attentive any may appear. The true prophets have wild, thick, scratchy beards and are sure all must be listening as it is God’s word they are speaking. The Word cannot return empty, even when it - almost invariably - does. Did Amos topple even one idol?

     He apologizes, the narrow man, for departing from the assigned reading for the Sunday. He has no excuse, only one story has been picking at his sleeve, pulling at his ears, pestering him, so he can’t get it out of his mind, “The Gerasene Demoniac,” as he called it.

     “Picking? Pulling? Pestering?” he asked. It had been plaguing him, infesting him like the demons infested the poor man living naked in the cemetery on the other side of the lake. He tried to smile. He shrugged. The little beard was white. It made him look, I thought, paler than I remembered, more worn. I didn’t believe the story had been plaguing him, however. I took the smile and the shrug as an admission of hyperbole.

     But Roz said afterwards that she was worried about him.

He said something like this:

     The church came to believe - and his text for this morning was its proof - that demons could only be moved on, from a madman into a herd of defenseless pigs, for example. They could not be killed, and they could not be rehabilitated; they could not be taught a trade and settle into a quiet, productive life.

     Leprosy, on the other hand, could be cleansed. Whatever happened to them after, when the scales were lifted from one man’s skin, they didn’t go on to descend on another’s. A broken body could be mended. A troubled spirit could not be calmed.

     It’s one explanation, he believed, tentatively, for why we try to shift blame: why the problems of women are the fault of men, and the problems of men are the fault of their mothers; it's why conservatives must blame liberals, and liberals must blame conservatives; it's why the problems of the UK are the fault of the EU, and the problems of the EU are the fault of Greece; it's why “the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Muslims and everybody hates the Jews.”** He didn’t want to gore anyone’s ox, it wasn't any one's failing; indeed, the examples could be multiplied infinitely. If we can no longer, in the twenty-first century, find someone to cast out our demons, we ourselves can - we think we must - lay them on others’ doorsteps. Then, let the other be angry. No, the other is angry already at being blamed: It’s not her expletive deleted fault, God knows!

     So, is this what we have become, he wondered, a society of sects, shifting the blame, throwing it off on another herd because how else do we get rid of the demons that infest us?

And he stopped as if winded. “I’ll leave you with that,” he said. And he tried again to smile; he shrugged his shoulders.

     The rain continued until late afternoon.

10.23.19

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 * We hear the narrow man only occasionally. You may find the occasions here.
** Because it's National Brotherhood Week!