The Monday after Low Sunday

 The Monday after Low Sunday 
being the first Sunday of Easter, only low because attendance
is low because the regular pastor is taking the Sunday off.

Evening. I am sitting with Axel on the porch of the cabin he has rented in Doubthat State Park. Supper over, the dishes done. I am his guest for cigars, drinks, quiet conversation, then to spend the night. But I don’t like cigars, not even the sweet-smelling wooden-tipped ones rolled for children, so I have brought a pack of cigarettes, Gauloises. The drink is akvavit, which I don’t much like either, though this that Axel has with fennel and/or anise scratching at its sides, is the more palatable the more we drink.
     Axel is talking about church the day before — because I asked him. Yes, though he was off, he went. And the sermon was . . . , and he stops. The light is blurry, day become night but with a little day left in it. Something is whirring and something else burping: insects and frogs, I imagine, who have no idea. Axel coughs as if a bit of cigar or spirit had gone down the wrong way. He coughs again.
     “There are people that you just don’t like, right? And people that don’t like you. There’s nothing either of you can do about it. They can’t help it. You can’t help it with them.”
     “Yes. Right.”

“The sermon yesterday,” Axel says. “It was good. The passage was John 20: Jesus appears to the ten, or so they say but Thomas doesn’t quite believe them. Then, he appears to the ten and Thomas, whom he challenges to put his finger into his hand and side and see”
     “Yes,” I said.
     “The scenes are the same in both appearances. He doesn’t chastise the disciples for running away. He doesn’t chastise Thomas. He is tender with all of them ‘Peace!’ he says. And all is peace. In the second, he breathes on them and gives them the Holy Spirit. In John’s hands, Pentecost isn’t Pentecostal at all. It’s very Lutheran.”
     “Yes.”
     “As was the sermon,” Axel went on. Then, he stopped again. Pulled at his cigar, sipped at his drink. “It was very much the sermon I would have preached myself, very much the sermon I have preached on that passage, only better. Good! A good solid . . . ,” he trailed off. I waited.
     “Only there are people . . . ” he trailed off again. And I picked it up,
     “Only there are people you don’t like, and there is nothing either of you can do about it.”
     He waved his cigar in a circle above his head, meaning yes.

“I don’t like thinking about that,” Axel said. “It doesn’t matter so much for some, for you for instance — at least not practically, not professionally since you no longer have a profession. But it matters for me because I am usually the one in the pulpit. And . . .” He slowed down, and
     I interrupted: “You hadn’t thought of this before?”
     “No. I should have. How difficult it is for people to separate the message from the messenger.”

The insects and the frogs were getting blurrier. “But there’s not just that,” Axel said out of the night. “Jesus,” he said, halfway between the name and a curse. “I am thinking, ‘It’s not just the cross that is a stumbling block; it could be Jesus himself.’
     “If he is truly human, as we say, there are going to be people that don’t like him. Not his fault but not their fault either. There is something about the way he walks or ducks his head before speaking, or the way he smells, the soap he uses, something about the shape of his mouth or his nose and his mouth together, about the way he uses his hands, or you just don’t know why. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Did God think of that?”

“Do we know what God is thinking?” I asked.
     “I wouldn’t have expected such pious bullshit from you,” Axel said.
     “The smoke,” I said, “and the ‘wine,’” I hesitated, “and the company.”

 04.21.22