Future Perfect
I
mean the tense as in, “After we shall have sung the hymn, “O God, Our Help in
Ages Past,” number 107, we shall hear from our guest preacher, NM.”
This
was last Thursday. Roz had discovered that her “friend,” the Narrow Man, was preaching at St. Jude’s, so she thought she would go to church
with Uncle Albert and me if we were going – if there were a service, then if we
could make our way through the streets and sidewalks flooded with snow and
coronavirus.
“Well, if we can’t,” I said, “we can
watch him on television.” “If,” Roz said, he can make his way through the
flooded streets or St. Jude’s has a helicopter.”
“Yes,” I said; then, when she turned
and went toward the kitchen, began to think about “if.”
If
I think about it, I find I am only vaguely interested in the future. Partly, it
is a philosophical stance though an existential (brooding) thing, not a
well-thought-out position. But it, the future, is, as far as I can see, completely
unpredictable.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t make
plans that we can’t carry out – plans for ten minutes from now or tomorrow, for
next week or next year. We write appointments in our calendars. We plan trips
and begin to make arrangements for them. We act as if nothing will intervene.
It is a convincing act (even when we buy travel insurance), and we are largely
convinced. But we’re also aware that we are acting.
All the world is not a stage we are
playing on – we do know that too – that there are things happening backstage,
in the audience, in the box office, and on the street in front of the theater*
that may prevent Act IV from proceeding to Act V. Someone in the audience – or in
the cast! – could have a heart attack. Someone in the box office could get it
in his mind to throw the master switch in the breaker box. Two friends of a
paralytic could unroof a section of the roof and let their friend’s limp-legged
body down center stage front.
None of these things would immediately
change our plans because for a lengthy moment we would be without plans
altogether. For another while, we would be uncertain that the way we had seen
forward was still closed to us. At the same time, we would be wondering if it
were still open to us. Was it ever actually a way?
There might well be in the meantime
people running around shouting directions at us, even directions based on a
contingency plan. Officious jackanapeses reveling in their officiousness.
Still, would they have any confidence that their instructions would be carried
out? How many under their officious yelling would believe and follow? (What
makes the paralytic stand up and walk? Does he know where he is going?)
We
do plan. But at our core, we’re in a constant panic about our plans because we
know we are pretending to know something we don’t. (What we know
is that we are pretending.) We know the plans are an uncertain hedge against
runaway inflation. (What plans did the paralytic make for his stroke?)
So,
someone whirled the gazillions of ice-bats stratospherically circling the
Valley and the gelid waste that they had dropped onto our sidewalks and streets
was pushed aside and deodorized sufficiently that we could go outside without
choking, we could walk without falling, we could drive to St. Jude’s for
Morning Prayer. And the Narrow Man preached.
But did anyone listen? Uncle Albert
slept; not only were his eyes closed, he was also snoring, if so lightly to
disturb any of the other eight widely-spaced people there for the early
service. I tried to follow, but I lost the thread with the first break in it
between the passage from Nehemiah and the passage from First Corinthians, for
that is what he was doing, leading us from passage to passage – Nehemiah 8 to
First Corinthians 12 to Luke 4 – or so he said. I did hear that much. And I
heard more, but I was finding it hard to follow, trying to remember why Ezra
held from on high that the Jews in the land, the ones that didn’t go into exile
and come back but remained in the land, had to put away their wives and their
children. For didn’t make them, the wives and the children, “widows and orphans
and aliens in the land” to be afforded special care; yet, once put away, we don’t
hear of them again, do we? So, I was leafing through the Bible in my mind
because there aren’t any in the pews at St. Jude’s. And it was full of holes in
the whole Chronicles saga.
And Uncle Albert was asleep, not
that I could consult his prodigious memory anyway.
Roz
said on the way home, “Wasn’t that a good sermon?” And we both agreed. But I
wondered how he, the Narrow Man, felt about it. Could he tell that no one but faithful
Roz was paying attention? Did he feel like Whitman’s noiseless, patient spider,
launching “filament, filament, filament” but not at all sure that a single “gossamer
thread” would catch anywhere?
Maybe that’s what preachers always
feel like. If they’re at all aware.
01.25.22
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* and in the next street over, etc.
