His mind had grown clear again. He realized that he had succeeded in putting a safe distance between himself and whatever it was he was leaving behind. Cautiously, he began pulling the fragments of the last few days out from the shadows, as if they were old photographs strewn about the glove compartment. He reached in and took out the first that presented itself to him.
It was a picture of his empty church and of the stained glass windows telling the story of Jesus’ Passion. He found he was not able to stick with any one thought for long — sustained theological reflection was too much work right now. But he turned over in his mind this new notion of Jesus losing everything on the cross. Of course, it could not be otherwise. If Jesus had fully expected that somehow the Father was going to spare him this pain, and this tragic end, his dying would not have been a real death; after all, which of us dies with such assurance? No, in the moments of his dying, Jesus — like us — must have felt that all was lost.
How we linger at the portal, Father David thought, terrified of letting go — he had seen it so many times at the bedside — knowing that in death there is no retrieval of things lost. Everything really is lost to us the moment we lean back, close our eyes and let go. Whatever else there is, waiting for us beyond the grave, it is something brand new, something not available to us here, not until the old is utterly relinquished.
So it must have been for Jesus. It must truly have seemed to him that he was losing everything, not only life as he knew it, but also his great mission, which was scattering to the four winds even as he hung on the cross, the disciples disappearing into the crowd.
Father David let the thought linger. It was starting to grow fuzzy, starting to slip from his grasp. Okay, he thought, just let it go. It’s okay. Like death, there’s nothing you can do but let it go — let it all go. If it has any truth it will return.
He stopped again in Kenora. It felt strangely familiar to him, this northern town set amid rocks and lakes, like some of the towns he knew in the Muskokas, but rougher around the edges. Some native men sat together on a park bench overlooking the river, one playing a guitar. At first Father David assumed they were drunk, like so many he had seen in the city parks. But they were not drunk. They were just enjoying one another’s company over this sunny noon hour, making music and trading stories. It reminded him of bright fall days like this at college, when students would spread themselves out on the lawn in the quad under a cacophony of music blaring from stereo speakers propped in the open residence windows overhead. It represented a measure of freedom he had never allowed himself. He had always had something important to do.
As he carried on, the rocks and lakes soon gave way to lower deciduous groves — aspen mostly, the silver leaves trembling in the breeze — and to roadside scrub brush. The topography was changing, flattening out. The sky was opening up around him.
Soon after he passed the sign saying, “Welcome to Friendly Manitoba,” the roadside trees vanished altogether, and he pulled out onto a flat limitless expanse. The flatness was oddly exhilarating to him, though at some darker level also disconcerting. He had never been surrounded by so much … space!
He was suddenly reminded of a nightmare he had suffered as a young child, something he had not thought of for years. It was among his earliest memories. There were no characters in the dream, and there was certainly no plot. There was only the growing perception of a vast yawning emptiness opening up before him, like the screen of their old television set in its dying moments after it was turned off. Everything just went gray. Except, that is, for a tiny diminishing dot at the very centre of the screen.
David would watch that dot as it got smaller and smaller, as the surrounding grayness of the screen grew darker and darker, swallowing it up, until there was nothing, nothing at all but his own reflection staring back in the glass, nothing but the helpless sensation that he, little baby David, was drowning in the sea of his own expanding consciousness. His breathing would stop. Then he would suddenly gasp, sucking air into his tiny lungs, and wail with all his might into the dark night. Amazing, that he could recall all that now. And the sheer terror of it.
Without noticing it, Father David was speeding up, flowing along with the afternoon traffic bound for Winnipeg. He opened his window and stuck his elbow out into the breeze with an assumed nonchalance, as if he had driven this patch of road all his life, as if the world opening up before him was not, in some mysterious way, terrifying to him. But there was an autumn chill in the air, and after a few minutes he retrieved his arm and wound the window up again.
The road stretched on and on. He reached for another mental picture from the dark glove compartment of his mind. It was clericus. He smiled slightly, shaking his head with recognition. It was not so much that he didn’t like his brother and sister clergy. Well, okay, it was that he didn’t like them. But that seemed so — he didn’t know — petulant or something, something not worthy of him. Perhaps it was more that he just couldn’t trust them. That had been his father’s view.
Archdeacon Frederick Corcoran had not been a joiner. Otherwise, Father David was certain, his father would have been a bishop. He was hard-working and sincere, giving to his ministry whatever was required, which was just about everything. He had no life outside of the demands of his job and the obligations of his family. Father David had known his father only as the rector of large churches, with important people occupying specific pews, looking up at him as he preached.
His father worked for days on those sermons, locked up in his study, reading biblical passages from the original Greek and Hebrew, trying out sentences aloud before committing them to paper. Then, on Sunday mornings, those same sentences were lifted directly from the page and once again given voice, magnificent voice. His father was a good preacher.
But on more than one occasion Father David had heard his father complain to his mother about his colleagues. This one was lazy, that one was unscrupulous, the other one was ambitious. He had high standards, his father, and none of his ordained brethren seemed capable of measuring up.
Father David recognized those same feelings in himself about his own colleagues. Theirs was a high calling, after all. It was not good enough to approach one’s ministry as if it were a career, climbing the ladder, telling people what they wanted to hear, ingratiating oneself to the rich and influential. His father never pandered to anyone. Father David admired that in him.
Yet his mother had found life with his father to be difficult. This was a new thought altogether. He wondered how he could have missed it. They had never fought; at least, he was unaware of it, if they had. They had had their disagreements, it was true, and he could remember his mother on one occasion crying softly in their bedroom. But his father had gone to her, and they had spoken together in hushed tones. Eventually they re-emerged and everything carried on as usual.
But the price for holding to one’s principles is necessarily high. People may not like you. People may take advantage of you. People — even those closest to you — may tempt you to compromise. His father had not compromised. He had brought dignity and integrity to his ministry, and it spilled out into his family as well, into the orderliness of their day to day life, into their standards of honesty and hard work.
Sometimes, Father David now realized, he had felt sorry for his father. The man had had no friends but his mother. Father David couldn’t remember him laughing very much. And he died far too young, before either he or Paula were launched into their adult lives, leaving something undone, something unsaid. Father David wondered now what that might be. What would he want to hear his father say to him, if he could? He allowed the thought to trail off as he adjusted his position on the hard seat.
Late in the afternoon, Winnipeg suddenly appeared to the north. From the bypassing ring road, the city rose up in the distance as a small cluster of skyscrapers and high-rise apartment buildings. He was sure that it was peopled, that Canada’s Gateway to the West was all there, intact. But he wasn’t about to deviate from his course to find out. He stopped only long enough to eat a limp Caesar salad and a dry piece of garlic bread from a gas station restaurant, and then he drove on.
Again Father David found himself driving into the setting sun. He followed it as long as he could,