Patron clearly relaxed when he heard this. He also seemed to show in- terest in this earnest individualistic woman, well into her middle years.
"Before I did the now-infamous Somersault," Patron said, "when I was quite involved in religious activities, I don't think I really seriously consid- ered my own salvation either. It was after I fell into hell that the question of my salvation became a pressing matter. When you lead a religious organiza- tion, you soon become terribly busy, rushing around like crazy all the time. I had no time to consider whether I was saved, or wasn't saved, or even whether I would reach salvation in the end or not. What I wanted most was to lead the suffering young people who came to us for salvation. I actually groped for ways to push them in that direction.
"What I know from my own experience-and this is the same both at the beginning of the church and when it was at its height-is that there was indeed a way for the suffering people who came to our church to find the salvation they sought. All of them were proceeding toward their own salva- tion. The greater their awareness that they were not yet saved, the greater their conviction that they were on the path to salvation, despite the difficulties they might encounter. In fact, it was the very awareness that they hadn't yet reached salvation that accelerated their faith.
"As I've thought about my own salvation, or my image of salvation in the ten years since the Somersault, my ideas have become simplified-boiled down to a single mathematical formula, if you will. When a person thinks about death or is actually facing death, if he's convinced that his life and death are fine the way they are, isn't he saved?
"In my new church, my followers should be able to say, when they think about death or are actually staring down death, Let's go! Hallelujah! is another way of putting it. The basic orientation of my movement is to lead people gently in that direction. In order to do that, though, one has to truly repent.
As long as one has a true awareness that the end of the world is near, this can be accomplished.
"The new church's religious movement I've been contemplating is that simple-that naive, even. What I want to convey to you is that in the ten years since the Somersault this is the kind of simplicity, naive, unadorned, and stripped of anything extraneous, that has occupied my mind."
"The Savior of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree, that's what we called my husband," Satchan said, "if the Savior were alive now, I think he might not see what you've said as so simple or naive. Quite frankly, he wasn't very educated when it came to religious ideas, yet he was possessed by spiri- tual matters and in that sense was an unfortunate person. He was still a sort of lackadaisical savior when his old enemies stoned him to death.
"He was called Savior like you were, but he wasn't the ultimate Savior.
He believed that until the advent of the ultimate Savior there would be count- less saviors, that when the final Savior appeared all other saviors, being linked with him, would-in the end-become real saviors. He gave a sermon on this, here in this chapel… "He recognized himself as a sort of lukewarm savior, one of those countless lackadaisical saviors… That's the sort of thinking he wanted to believe in. Fifteen years after his death, I've grown more sympathetic to that view.
"If I understand your remarks correctly, putting my own spin on them, since I believe my husband's one of the ones who will be tied with the real Savior, I know that even when I'm on the verge of death I'll feel saved. The details of my own personal history would surprise you, but I would like to second what you say, as far as my own life is concerned. Let's go! Though I have the feeling that when I'm actually on my deathbed and say that, there won't be anyone around to hear me."
"There is a God," Patron said, "a God who is the whole of nature, who encompasses everything, your spirit and body included. Even these ideas that have arisen from your unusual life were already included in the principles that God created tor the world."
From the moment that Satchan entered the chapel where Ogi and the others were waiting, and sat down in the row of chairs lined up beside the podium facing Patron, every church member was impressed. She was a beau- tiful woman, but something about her also gave the impression of a mild- featured man. She was also quite tall for a Japanese woman. Her curly hair, mixed with white, fell in a natural way on both sides of her prominent fore- head. Her face had not the slightest trace of fat. In the way she looked straight at Patron as she spoke to him, you could sense an independent tough-minded spirit but also a clear open-mindedness brought about by her experience.
"I came here because I wanted to meet the people who are taking over the building used by the Church of the Flaming Green Tree," Satchan went on, "and also because I feel responsible to the local people here for your activities. People in your group were involved in some major terrorist activi- ties, so the mayor and members of the town council asked us to find out what sort of group was moving in here. We do recognize, mind you, that your Somersault put a stop to the radical faction's plans.
"We had a group in our church, too, that began to make waves, and as we confronted this we began to steer the church back to the small gatherings with which it began. Right at that critical juncture we lost our leader, and our church fell apart. But your church is getting back on its feet, with this region as your stage. My main concern is that this radical faction might once again play a major role."
"I quite understand your concern," Patron said. "Our church started out much like yours, and until it reached a certain size it was basically just a prayer group. There was another person who made this group with me and helped me run it-Guide, the man whose terrible death I'm sure you've heard about.
His idea was to gather together young people who'd been specially trained in the sciences, and he created the Izu Research Center for them.
"While living there communally, these young people continued research in their special fields, and as they began reflecting on their own faith they started debating the entire direction the church was taking. In the end they came up with their own unique course of action, which could be summarized like this: Their faith tells them the end of the world is near, which allows them to repent and prepare themselves as righteous people. As the righteous, then, they call on all mankind to repent. But how exactly do you go about preach- ing repentance to the masses? The church was pretty vague on this point, and the young people needed a clear-cut model, so they began concentrating on a concrete direction their ideas could take. In the end they went past the point of no return.
"At the time I was at the Tokyo headquarters, my role that of spiritual leader for the ordinary followers in their walk of faith. Guide was in charge of keeping contact with the Izu Research Institute. Which isn't to say he was in charge of the movement that was starting there-he wasn't. The institute was self-governing.
"Guide would take the funding that the Tokyo headquarters had allotted to the institute and hand it over to their accountant. But he refused to exert any direct influence on the management of the institute. He was more like their sponsor. When things were pretty much all set up the way they wanted, he took me there to deliver a sermon, but I'm sure he never spoke to them on his own about faith. The self-governing board of the institute selected board members whose job it was to oversee everything-from all the various re- search projects to matters of faith.
"Guide wanted to make a research facility free of the archaic structures of universities, and by word of mouth he gathered together a group of re- searchers who felt stifled in their former institutions. Naturally, he also chose people who were already members of the church-people who'd graduated from college or graduate school and were already working, but suffered set- backs, either through illness or car accidents or the like. People who went through rehabilitation and then entered the church. One of those people was Dr. Koga, who'll be in charge of the clinic in the Old Town.