Ropers
This Sunday after the meeting the pastors Phil and Gary walk up to me, hang around, hang around, finally if I want for them to visit me on the ranch.
Proselytism, I understand.
Except that we have a little problem here. I’m not that crazy about the pastors. The regular believers of this Bible club I do like. But something keeps me distant from the shepherds.
They hold too much authority. They draw respect from the faithful like a beekeeper filches honey from a hive, that’s fine. But then they pass on a share to Jesus, sure, but still keep at least a quarter for themselves. That’s way more than a tithe, sticking to the tried proportions. I’m a cradle Catholic, used to Rome’s fellas of the cloth. They don’t seize even 10% of that largess, even the bishops, these days. Two thousand years of positioning within a highly evolving Western civ has its effects.
Actually, the only time I felt someone was formatted for more among the Catholics, was with a Cardinal who a few years later would become a Pope, John Paul II. I was checking out philosophy at a Catholic university, the only free university in the Commie country I was born in, and he was a professor there. For seminars with him, a busy guy, we took train to another city, where he was the head of a Church district. When we first lined up to be introduced to him, he almost threw my elbow out of joint. I had my palm stretched out for a handshake of dudes, but he so abruptly pulled it down for a shepherd-like, his-on-top-of-mine clutch, that we struggled some. After the seminar and a supper I knew what to expect and the Cardinal had to jiggle with me for clutch.
So with the future Pope I didn’t go under, and here I'd procrastinate before these cookie-cutter saul-paul bros? I just knew we were in for a fender bender. If not a full head-on.
And I was right, when they came this afternoon to the ranch. The weather nice, the hills rolling, the prairie dogs dashing, we on a bench outside the cabin chatting away.
All roads lead to the Book, of course. I go inside and come out with mine. The only book I took along on leaving my womb country, save the one I wrote myself. I start reading from my Bible to the pastors. I start with the opening of John. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I’m reading in my native tongue. And I start feeling an interesting energy rising in me. The reason being – I’m reading and simultaneously analyzing on a second channel – that I am now the shepherd, and they are the sheep being sheared of authority, a little bit. Just like they have been filching this authority from me, drop after drop, for the last couple months. And now a trickle of it is returning home.
I finished reading. Phil reaches out for the book, flips through it, but his mind is on something else.
“Stash, wouldn’t you like to write hymns?”
In a second, I almost came to a boil. It was nothing in Phil’s wording, really. But the intention... It almost made me jump.
“Well, you know....” I start, pressing hard on a break. “I have a plan for writing, actually. It’s called literature. It has something to do with the spirit, too. So they say. Would you want me to dump it?”
“Well... We had a brother in Fort Collins in Colorado, he wrote music. The worldly music. But when he chose the truth, he lost interest in it. He wrote many hymns for us...”
He speaks as if he has had the argument forged since the morning. Since a week, perhaps. The second pastor, about half his age, bobs his head in unison.
“A Beethoven the brother from Fort Collins was rather not,” I state and feel good about it, even elated.
Phil and Gary smile in a motherly way.
“What? You think that Beethoven, if he joined you, would rather pen gospel tunes? Instead of the symphonies and the sonatas?” I ask straightly, because I can hardly believe my ears.
“He might’ve…” they kiss me with those motherly irises of theirs.
I just wanted to splash the rest of my tea over the dudes. Too bad it was lukewarm now. I laughed, instead, like at kids. And so it stayed until the end, tense. Until they got into their car and drove off.
I watched the brown Escort as it was rolling up and down the hills on the way to town. Up and down, up and down. Until it rolled up the last time, and was gone.
I went inside the cabin, put on the ropers, and walked into the sagebrush fields.
