Like a Thief

The following quote is drawn from The Book of Bebb, comprising four novels having as their central character Leo Bebb, who presided over a religious diploma mill in Florida as well as the Church of Holy Love, Inc. 

HE SAYS, "ANTONIO, he comes like a thief in the night, like a bridegroom to the bride he's got waiting for him with flowers in her hair. You should see how they turn pale when he comes, some of them. The cheaters of widows and orphans, for one, and the lawyers they pay to make it legal. The flag-waving politicians with their hand in the till. The folks that run the sex movies and the smut stores that poison the air of the world like a open sewer. The whole miserable pack of them. He doesn't do a thing in the world to hurt them because just standing there seeing him go by is hurtful enough, all that glory galloping by they missed by being spiteful and mean. Their hearts just break against the sight of him the way waves break against a rock." 

Bebb said, "But it's the others that's the real sight to see, the ones that aren't any better than they ought to be but not all that much worse either. That means all of us pretty near. He comes riding up so fast on them there's no time to put on their Sunday suit and go wait for him in the front parlor with the Scriptures laying open on the table. The midwest farmgirl that run away from home and don't have any other way to make ends meet, she's sitting all painted up on a bar stool trying to look like she knows the difference between a martini cocktail and a root beer float. The middle-age drummer that hasn't made a sale all day is stretched out on his bed in a cheap motel staring at the ceiling with the TV on. The big-time executive is bawling out his secretary for coming back from her dinner ten minutes late, and the old waitress with varicose veins is taking the weight off her feet a few minutes in the help's toilet. Of that day and hour knoweth no man, Antonio. Therefore be ye also ready, for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh."  

Bebb said, "You ever looked at somebody's face sitting in the window watching for his folks to come home? Say it's gotten dark and the roads are slippery and there's been some bad accidents come over the radio. One by one he watches the headlights of cars come winding up the hill. He's got his heart in his mouth hoping this time for sure it's going to be the one to slow down and pull into the yard, but one after the other they all just keep on driving past till his face goes grey waiting for what looks like it's never going to come. Antonio, that's the face we all of us got when we're not doing anything special with our face. You look at somebody the next time he's just sitting around staring into space when he doesn't know anybody's watching.  

"Then finally when he's about given up hope and maybe dozed off a minute or two, he hears the back door open. He hears footsteps in the kitchen. He hears the voice out of all the voices of the world he's waiting for call out his name. Then you watch his face. Antonio, all over the world there'll be faces like that when the rider comes." 

-Originally published in The Book of Bebb

Isaiah

THERE WERE BANKS OF CANDLES flickering in the distance and clouds of incense thickening the air with holiness and stinging his eyes, and high above him, as if it had always been there but was only now seen for what it was (like a face in the leaves of a tree or a bear among the stars), there was the Mystery Itself, whose gown was the incense and the candles a dusting of gold at the hem. There were winged creatures shouting back and forth the way excited children shout to each other when dusk calls them home, and the whole vast, reeking place started to shake beneath his feet like a wagon going over cobbles, and he cried out, "O God, I am done for! I am foul of mouth and the member of a foul-mouthed race. With my own two eyes I have seen him. I'm a goner and sunk." Then one of the winged things touched his mouth with fire and said, "There, it will be all right now," and the Mystery Itself said, "Who will it be?" and with charred lips he said, "Me," and Mystery said "Go."

Mystery said, "Go give the deaf hell till you're blue in the face and go show the blind heaven till you drop in your tracks, because they'd sooner eat ground glass than swallow the bitter pill that puts roses in the cheeks and a gleam in the eye. Go do it."

Isaiah said, "Do it till when?"

Mystery said, "Till hell freezes over."
Mystery said, "Do it till the cows come home."

And that is what a prophet does for a living and, starting from the year that King Uzziah died, when he saw and heard all these things, Isaiah went and did it.

Isaiah 6

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Isaac

WITH ONE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION, there has perhaps never been a birth more longed for and rejoiced in than Isaac's. Sarah was in her nineties when an angel told her that after years of barrenness she and her centenarian husband, Abraham, were finally going to have the child God had promised them, and their wild and incredulous mirth at this news prompted them to name him Isaac, which in Hebrew means "laughter." He is a shadowy figure compared to his father, Abraham, and his son Jacob, but at certain moments in his life the shadows recede, and he stands on the stage in a flood of light.

He was just a boy when, to see what Abraham was made of, God said that he was to take Isaac up into the hills and make a burnt offering of him. Abraham didn't have the heart to tell him what was going to happen, and if Isaac guessed, he didn't have the heart to admit that he did as they trudged side by side up the steep track. A mule was loaded down with the things they needed for making the fire, but the sacrificial animal was conspicuously absent, and when Isaac asked about it, Abraham choked out an evasive answer as best he could. By the time the wood was all laid out and ready to be lit, Isaac no longer had any doubts as to what lay in store for him, and maybe the reason he didn't fight for his life was that suddenly it didn't seem to him all that much worth fighting for. He let himself be tied up and laid out on top of the wood like an unblemished lamb, and, shaking like a leaf, the old man got as far as raising the knife over his head when God spoke up at last and said he'd seen all he needed to see and Abraham could use it on a ram instead. The lights switch off there, and the stage is returned mercifully to darkness.

Isaac was getting pretty long in the tooth himself when Abraham finally died, and he and his half brother, Ishmael, buried him in the same cave that years before Abraham had bought to bury Sarah in. If either of them said anything while they were at it, their words were not recorded, and maybe the scene was played out in silence—the two old men leaning on their shovels, out of breath, with the old man who had nearly been the end of both of them in his day lying six feet deep beneath their aching feet.

Isaac was on the verge of second childhood and almost blind when his son Jacob conned him into thinking he was his other son, Esau, so he could get the old man's blessing and the lion's share of the estate when that time came. Isaac had a hunch there was something fishy going on and called the young man over to be sure. The young man said he was Esau, but it was in Jacob's voice that he said it. Isaac couldn't trust his hearing all that much better than his eyesight, however, so he told him to let him touch him with his hands. Esau's hands were hairy, and he knew he'd know them anywhere. But Jacob had seen that coming, and Isaac wasn't sure whether what he felt were Esau's hairy hands or a pair of bearskin gloves. In fact, there was so little he could be sure of anymore, he thought, and he felt so old and hopeless and dumb, that he almost didn't care by then which son it was if he'd only stop badgering him. He sent out for a drink and a sandwich, which revived him a little, and then with a sudden rush of emotion, his all but useless eyes welling with tears, he reached out, pulled the young man to him, and kissed him. Clover and timothy, black earth, horse manure, rain—his ears and his eyes were all shot, he thought, and he couldn't even tell what he was touching half the time, what with his bad circulation, but at least he still had a nose that worked, and by now the lump in his throat was so big he could hardly get the words out of his mouth.

"See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed," he said (Genesis 27:27), and then, not caring whether it was Esau or Jacob or Napoleon Bonaparte who was there on his knees before him, he gave out with a blessing that made all the other blessings he'd ever given sound like two cents.

Jacob had to get out of town in a hurry when Esau found out, and he was gone off and on for twenty years, but he came back again finally just in time to see Isaac once more before he died, although it's doubtful that Isaac was in any condition by then to know much about it. Then Jacob and Esau together, the guller and the gulled, buried him as by then they had also buried the hatchet, and thus the shadowy old man disappeared permanently into the shadows at last.

Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-22:19; 25:7-11; 35:27-29

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Insects

THE FLY IN THE SOUP. The ant at the picnic. The silverfish in the shirt drawer. The mosquito at three o'clock in the morning. Pests is what we have come to call them, as if that were their proper name, and it is not hard to see why. Even the most tenderhearted among us exterminates them without a qualm, and my guess is that St. Francis himself would understand and forgive.

It takes a microscope to see them in all their indescribable intricacy, but even the naked eye can see enough to know that no less than ourselves, they are part of the great web of life and that even the tiniest and most tiresome among them, as also among us, is precious beyond telling.

-Originally published in Beyond Words

Innocence

"BE WISE AS SERPENTS and innocent as doves," Jesus told the disciples when he sent them off to spread the good news (Matthew 10:16). In other words, you can be both. Innocence doesn't mean being Little Red Riding Hood. You can know which side is up. You can have been around. Certainly the disciples had—fishermen, husbands and fathers, a tax collector—and Jesus thought them capable of being innocent even so. But they were to be sharp-eyed, not wide-eyed. He was sending them out "as sheep in the midst of wolves," he said, and they would need their wits about them. They were to be smart sheep.

Innocent people may be up to their necks in muck with the rest of us, but the mark of their innocence is that it never seems to stick to them. Things may be rotten all around them, but they preserve a curious freshness. Even when, like the disciple Peter, they are guilty of tragic flaws and failures, you feel that some inner purity remains untouched. Everybody knew, for instance, that the woman who washed Jesus' feet in Simon the Pharisee's house was no better than she ought to be, but as she dried them with her hair and kissed them, apart from Simon there was no one there, least of all Jesus, who would have dreamed of holding it against her (Luke 7:36-49).

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words