And finally, they step into the river and save the drowning child. That's the scene I imagined. A long time afterward, I told Guide about this and he told me that he imagined it this way: When you open a drowned child's hand you find he was clutching straw. He said he felt as if he'd actually seen this occur when he was a child.
"Ladies and gentlemen, that's the kind of person Guide was. It anything, it made me feel that I was the drowned child he saw, that he saw my cold wet hand clutching the straw and took pity on me. I have decided to restart my movement and build a new church. But if Guide is now like the drowning child, then through our new church I intend to discover the straw his fingers were clutching.
"By unraveling the words of the visions I had in my trances, Guide cre- ated our theology. At the time of the Somersault when I said it was all non- sense, this is what I meant. The basic idea is that God is the totality of nature that created this world. Living a life of faith for us means being accurately and fully aware of this fact. When we achieve this, we realize that our aware- ness itself is, from the very start, made possible by God. What flows from God into us makes this awareness possible, making us able to verbalize it.
"At the time of the Somersault, what was at work inside me when I said that our theology was nonsense was another theology just starting to sprout, a miserable theology that toyed with the first. Nature, which makes up the totality of this planet-the environment we humans live in, in other words-is steadily falling apart. We've gone beyond the point of no return. God as the totality of nature-including human beings-is decaying bit by bit. God is terminally ill.
"Moreover, our awareness of God as being destroyed, of God with an incurable illness, is itself a part of God. Our crumbling God, our God who's sick, is the one who makes us aware-just like a mother teaching her baby to speak: a mother who is falling apart, who's dying from an incurable disease and is talking to her baby, who is fading away along with her, telling the baby what she knew from the start would happen.
"What I'd like to say right now, based on my new theology at the time of the Somersault, is this: From our viewpoint, as infants whose fate is to die around the same time as our mother, we have the right to stand up to God and say that this wasn't part of his plan! The dying mother hears the nonsen- sical words of the feverish baby, puts them in the proper context, and returns them to the baby's mouth. It is in that mother-child dialogue that we should find mankind's true repentance, because the ones who made this happen, who destroyed the natural world, who destroyed God and gave him an incurable disease, are none other than mankind itself. Isn't this how the church of the one who will lead them to repentance, the church of the antichrist, should be constructed: through protesting to God?
"Having lost Guide I've lost the way to interpret my visions, and now- dragging the Somersault along with me-here I stand. And I have decided to restart my movement focusing on leading people to this kind of repentance.
"Just as there is no doubt that Christ's humiliating death had meaning, there must be meaning in the desperate struggle of the antichrist who has stepped into hell. Otherwise, in that first consciousness of God as He created the world, why did He structure it so that there would appear so many antichrists at the end? God is the very one who, among all the things of cre- ation, cannot be dismissed by a joke, the one existence that has absolutely no reason ever to turn a Somersault."
After finishing, Patron propped his hands on the podium, and let his shoulders relax and his head hang down as he looked absently around the audience. Dancer approached and spoke to him, but Patron shook his head and pointed listlessly with his left hand at Ogi. Ogi responded to this, and looked at Dancer, who nodded back at him. Ogi went over to stand between Dancer and Patron. Calling forth all his strength, Patron leaned forward and, looking straight ahead toward the assembled multitude, cried out, "Ladies and gentlemen, please pray for Guide. Hallelujah!"
4
Patron hung his large head down and began silently praying, and Dancer and Ogi closed their eyes and followed suit. The people in the audi- ence shifted in their seats and began to pray silently; the sound of this mass movement of bodies was surprisingly peaceful. Kizu closed his eyes, too, and prayed. Filtered through an image of Guide in his mind, he prayed for Pa- tron. Lord, please help this person. And give me strength.
Just as at the farm along the Odakyu Line, Kizu found the lengthy prayer a little too much to take, and he opened his eyes to find Ikuo standing by the door Patron had used. Ikuo stood with legs apart as if he were about to start a fight, facing the quiet, praying crowd, all them with their eyes closed.
If intruders had wanted to throw the service into chaos, it would have been easy and now would have been the time. So Ikuo had a very good reason for not joining them in prayer. Kizu could sense in Ikuo, standing there like a rock that could at any moment swing into action, something menacing that outweighed the usual affinity he felt for him.
Please help this young man too, Kizu thought; I don't really know much about who he is, but he's in the grip of something that took hold of him when he was a child, that propels him forward--toward something. Kizu bowed his head and resumed his fervent prayers. I don't know what Ikuo is so fired up about, he prayed, but if this is, as Patron said, a small part of Your con- sciousness of the world, isn't that something to smile about? I pray that You help this young man so busily moving in that direction.
Here I am calling out to You, Kizu prayed, yet truthfully I'm not sure about You. But through this young man I am leaving my whole life up to You.
I know that I have, inside me, an incurable illness that's fairly common for someone my age. But as long as this doesn't come to the surface and steal away my ability to participate in the movement, please help me contribute in some fashion-lor the sake of this young man who doesn't care what means he uses to realize this strange idea of his. I suspect the physical love he allows me might just be one more means to an end for him, though even my suspicion is sweet.
When Ogi announced the end of the silent prayer time, several hands shot up in the row of reporters-a show of hands from those who wanted to question Patron about his sermon. Patron was standing behind the podium, gathering himself together, and Dancer leaned toward him to ask for instruc- tions. Patron gave a short reply. Reconfirming this, Dancer told Ogi what Patron had said.
"This is the time when we'd like to hear your responses to the sermon,"
Ogi said in a high voice, "and Patron said he would like to select the speak- ers. The person Patron has selected is Mrs. Shigeno, from the women's group that during these ten years was independent of the church and organized a communal life of faith. Mrs. Shigeno is also the person who, on the death of her husband, contributed the large hospital her family ran, as well as the land, to the church, as a special contribution to commemorate the church's becom- ing a religious corporation.
"In the early period of the church, Guide was in charge of finances, and he was not inclined to accept contributions from followers who had renounced worldly possesions, which meant the church's financial situation was unstable.
It was Mrs. Shigeno who convinced Guide to accept these monetary dona- tions, and it was through her that the church finally got on firm financial ground."
The old woman whom Kizu had noticed before, working despite her bad legs, was dressed the same as the other women around her, though her upper body, especially with the light gray scarf she had wrapped stylishly around her neck, took a backseat to none. Being careful of her legs, she rose serenely to her feet and took the wireless microphone that Dancer brought over. Her dignified face was full of tension, but the way she started her speech was appealing.