Through most of the meal, almost everybody around me seems to find somebody else far more interesting to talk to. Lynda Wyatt, whose conceit is that she can charm anybody into anything, seems to have her hands full with Kwame Kennerly, and Dahlia Hadley, who has not said another word to me since I raised my voice to her, is arguing historic preservation with Lynda’s husband, Norm. (She’s pro-, he’s anti-.) Marc Hadley is instructing Shirley on the finer points of separation of church and state, about which she has written and he has not. Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, both slim and pert, finally arrived, their daughter’s recital having gone well; seated on opposite sides of the table, the two of them have eyes, as usual, mainly for each other. I have tried to say a word to Lem, usually a sparkling conversationalist, but he has responded with little more than grunts, as though he cannot bear talking to me; and I wonder anew whether his changed attitude is my imagination, or whether my stock around the law school has really fallen so far, so fast.
But Dr. Young, who earlier prayed over the food with no pretense of ecumenism, has decided to bend my ear about the murder of Freeman Bishop, which has not come up in our counseling sessions. He has been relating a rather long story about a lynching that his granddaddy told him about, back in Georgia around about nineteen- ought-six, in which a black preacher was burned with a hot coal all over his arms and legs and then shot in the back of the head when he refused to talk about his efforts to organize the mill workers.
“You see,” says Dr. Young, rolling into his theme, “Satan never changes. That is his great weakness. That is where the believer has the advantage over him, praise God. Satan is a creature of habit. He is clever but he is not intelligent. Satan is always the same, and his subjects, those souls who are lost to him, always behave the same. If Hitler marched the Jews off to the extermination camps, you can be sure that some other wicked leader, in times out of mind, slaughtered the innocents because they were different. You see leaders today, all over the world, doing it again! Black, white, yellow, brown, people of every color slaughtering people of every color! Because Satan is always the same. Always! Satan is stupid. Clever, you see, but not intelligent, praise God. This is God’s gift to us, requiring Satan to remain stupid. Why is Satan stupid? So that, if we are alert, we can recognize him. By his signs shall we know him! For Satan, stupid Satan, always attacks us in the same ways. If the old methods fail, he can think of nothing new, praise God. So he just goes on to attack somebody else. He attacks us with sexual desire and other temptations that distract the body. He attacks us with drink and drugs and other temptations that addle the brain. He attacks us with racial hatred and love of money and other temptations that distort the soul.”
Dr. Young’s sermon is louder now, and the whole table is paying attention, even Marc, who cannot stand to have the attention of a room focused on anybody but himself.
“You see, then, what Satan does. He attacks the body. He attacks the brain. He attacks the soul. Body, mind, and soul-those are the only parts of the human being that Satan understands how to attack, praise God. If you guard them from Satan, you are safe. If you guard your body, you are guarding the temple of the Lord, for you are made in God’s image. If you guard your mind, you are guarding the toolhouse of the Lord, for God works his will here on earth through mortal human beings. And if you guard your spirit, you are guarding the storehouse of the Lord, for God fills our souls with his power to help us to do his work on earth.”
Marc Hadley, author of the famous Chapter Three, can stand this no longer. He interrupts.
“Morris…” he begins.
“Dr. Young is fine,” says Dr. Young equably.
“Dr. Young”-it burns Marc to address him this way when his doctorate is surely in divinity, probably from some unknown seminary-“first, let me tell you that my wife and I are freethinkers. We are religious skeptics,” he translates unnecessarily. Most of the table is watching Marc, but I am watching Dahlia, whose small mouth curls in distaste just before she turns to gaze out the window toward the surf. I wonder whether she is mad at her husband for entering into the argument in the first place, or for his use of we, while neglecting to mention that she is a very serious Roman Catholic who takes her son to mass every Sunday. “We are not atheists,” Marc presses on, “because there is no proof that God does not exist, but we are skeptical of the truth claims of all religions, because there is no proof that God does. Or that Satan does. Second-”
“Well, let us deal with the first first.” The pastor smiles. “You know, a very great thinker named Martin Buber once wrote that there are no atheists, because the atheist has to struggle with God every day. Maybe that is why the Scripture tells us, ‘The fool has said in his heart there is no God.’”
“I don’t remember that in Buber,” says Marc Hadley, who hates to be told anything he does not already know.
“It was in Between Man and Man, ” Lemaster Carlyle, the onetime divinity student, intervenes quietly, taking the whole table by surprise. “A marvelous book. People who have read I and Thou and think they know Buber have not even scratched the surface.” A dig at poor Marc, something of an insider’s sport around the law school.
Dr. Young points a gray finger at Lem. “You are right, Professor Carlyle, but you are also wrong. The important question is not whether or not you have read Buber, nor is the important question which Buber you have read. The important question is whether you know what the stakes are. When I was at Harvard getting my doctorate, I had a philosophy professor, an atheist, who used to remind us what religion was all about: ‘It is not your mind that God wants,’ he used to say, ‘but your soul.’ Because God invented the human mind, but enters that mind through the human heart. My professor used to say, ‘God does not want you to read the Bible and say, What a beautiful book! He wants you to read the Bible and say, Hallelujah, I believe! ’”
I enjoy watching Marc’s jaw drop, which does not happen often, but his mouth has been hanging open since the Reverend strung together the words doctorate and Harvard. Morris Young has depths that Marc Hadley, in his genteel liberal racism, never imagined.
Meanwhile, the preacher’s pocked face arranges itself into a smile of reminiscence. “This was back in the fifties, of course, a time when philosophers, even atheist philosophers, were expected to know their Bible. After all, the Bible has been by far the most influential book in Western history, praise God, probably in the history of the whole world. Well, how can anybody pretend to understand or to explain that world without understanding the book that built it? But when you come to know the Bible, you come to know God. So the atheist who has truly tried to understand the world will already be closer to God than many Christians, because he will know God’s word. The Lord creates many paths to his house, and he will, in the fullness of time, gather in even many of those who believe that they do not believe; for, in struggling with God, they are halfway to belief already.”
“Amen, Reverend,” says Kwame Kennerly, Shirley beams at him.
Meanwhile, Dahlia Hadley is taking her turn. “But isn’t the atheist at risk? He might come to God, but, then again, he might not.” I glance up just in time to see her smile prettily at Marc, but the surging anger is there, just below the surface of her girlish face, for those who care to look.
Dr. Young notices her fury. He notices everything. He nods his heavy head. “That is true, my dear, that is true, that is true.” His rolling voice has developed a musical lilt. “The Lord opens the door to Heaven to the most miserable sinner, but the sinner still has to step through it. And the human mind, that glorious creation, has a way of throwing up obstacles. Oh, yes. The Lord holds the door open and the mind says, ‘That’s not the Lord!’ or ‘That’s not the door!’ or ‘I’d rather store up treasures on earth!’ Those are the counsels of Satan, who is always the same, remember, praise God, clever but not intelligent. Many a man would rather listen to Satan’s counsels, would rather win what the sinful world gives grudgingly than accept what God offers freely. And we all know what the Gospel says about such men: ‘They have their reward.’”
Marc Hadley wants to interrupt again, but Shirley Branch, sitting next to him at the head of the table, has the temerity to put a hand on his arm to make him shush.
Ben Montoya speaks up instead: “Some people don’t happen to share your religious beliefs, Reverend,” he declares, rudely but correctly. “Have you thought about their rights?”
Dr. Morris Young smiles down the table at him. “Oh, Professor Montoya, I have no concern for such matters. Rights are a thing of men. God is a God of love. You do not love your neighbor by giving your neighbor a right. You give the poor man or the black man a right and you feel you have done your duty to him. You may even feel that he now owes you a debt of gratitude. But if you had loved him to begin with, the question of right would never have arisen.”
Lem Carlyle again intervenes gently, seeking common ground, as a future dean must. “But Christianity teaches that human beings are fallen. That we are sinful by nature. So Christianity justifies the state itself as ordained by God to keep order among these fallen creatures. Isn’t that why we have rights, in Christian thought- because we know that we are too weak to live in love for each other, as God would prefer?”
