All these disasters that are befalling the world — the tsunamis and earthquakes and financial meltdowns or whatever — are just so alien to my life here. They don’t feel real. I’m ashamed to admit this because obviously to the people suffering through them they’re very real indeed but I have enormous trouble getting my head around them. And I very quickly reach a point where I think ‘If she tells me about one more disaster my brain will seize up.’ Of course I’m horrified by this failure of compassion, but the more I strain to overcome it the worse it becomes.
Another problem is that I find it almost impossible to talk about the Oasans to anyone who doesn’t know them. Not just to you, to the USIC guys as well. My communion with my new brothers and sisters in Christ seems to happen on a different plane, as though I’m speaking their language even though I’m not. Trying to describe it afterwards is like trying to explain what a smell looks like or what a sound tastes like.
But I must try.
The basics: The church is built. We worship in it regularly. I’ve taught the Oasans adapted versions of hymns that they can sing without too much difficulty. (The insides of their faces aren’t like ours; they have throats but I’m not convinced they have tongues.) I read to them from the Bible, which they insist on calling The Book of Strange New Things. They have a marked preference for the New Testament over the Old. Thrilling OT adventure stories like Daniel in the lions’ den, Samson & Delilah, David & Goliath, etc, don’t connect with them. They ask comprehension-type questions but you can tell that even on an ‘action’ level they don’t really get it. What floats their boat is Jesus and forgiveness. An evangelist’s dream.
They are gentle, kind, humble, hardworking people. It’s a privilege to live amongst them. They call themselves Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Two, etc. Jesus Lover One was the very first convert, dating back to the early days of Kurtzberg’s ministry. I wish I could show you pictures as I’m hopeless at describing them. Their behaviour is not that distinctive compared to ours, eg, I wouldn’t call some of them extrovert & others introvert, some good-humoured & others bad-tempered, some well-balanced & others crazy, etc. They’re all pretty low-key and the differences between them are quite subtle. It would take a novelist’s skill to capture those nuances in words and, as I’ve discovered to my embarrassment, I totally lack that skill. Also, they look physically very similar. Pure, unadulterated genetic stock. I never thought about this before coming here, but when we need to tell the difference between people, we get a lot of help from all the cross-breeding and migration that’s gone on in human history. It’s given us such a smorgasbord of different physical types — caricatures almost. By ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people in the cosmopolitan West, of course. If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, ‘She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three’ and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say ‘He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes’, and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd. Bea, I’m rambling here but the point is that the Jesus Lovers would all look the same to you except for the colours of their robes. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, I guess. In a future letter I’ll tell you about the contributions that some of the individual Jesus Lovers have made to the church.
He paused; recognised that Bea might have reason to doubt he would keep his promise. He racked his brains.
For example, he went on, Jesus Lover Five finally delivered her painting to be hung on the ceiling with the others. (Oh how I wish you could see them.) Her painting shows Salome and the two Marys outside Christ’s tomb, with the risen Jesus manifesting to them. He has His arms spread and He looks as though he’s made of light. It’s dazzling, I don’t know how she managed to achieve this with just pigment and cloth; it hits your eyeballs like car headlights on a dark night. You look up to the ceiling when you’re singing or preaching and you see this crucifix-shaped creature up there, blazing out of the dimness. So that’s Jesus Lover Five. A very talented lady (or maybe gentleman — I’m still not 100 % sure).
What else should I tell you? I’m struggling to think, which is incredible because so many significant, precious things have happened on this mission and I see so much evidence of God’s grace during each hour that I spend in these people’s company. So many moments when, if you could only have been by my side, I’m certain we would have exchanged a glance that said: ‘Yes! God is at work here.’
He broke off and stretched. He was coated with sweat, from his greasy brow to the tips of his fingers. His naked buttocks squelched on the vinyl seat. Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off the air conditioning and let this stagnancy take hold. He got to his feet and walked to the window. Another tumbleweed of rain was on its way, swirling across the scrublands towards the base. In five minutes it would be here, streaming down the windows. He looked forward to that. Although there was something sad about enjoying rain on the other side of a glass barrier. He should be out there.
Tired, he threw himself on the bed for a minute. The dishdasha hung between him and the window, silhouetted against the brilliance of daylight. He shielded his eyes with his hands, shuttering his peripheral vision so that he could see the dishdasha without the glare on either side; the garment changed colour from dark grey to white. Optical illusions. The subjectivity of reality.
He thought of Bea’s wedding dress. She’d insisted on getting married in white, in a church, and on him wearing a white suit. An odd decision for two people who usually avoided ostentation and formality. Plus, there would be alcohol at the reception. He’d wondered if it mightn’t be better all round if they just ducked into a registry office in their casuals. No way, said Bea. A registry office wedding would be giving in to shame about their past. As if to say: a guy who used to crawl around in shit-smeared public urinals has no right to repackage himself in a spotless suit; a woman with Bea’s family history should forget all about standing up in a church dressed in white. Jesus died on the cross precisely to wipe out that sort of shame. It was like the angel in Zechariah 3:2–4 taking off the priest’s filthy clothes. Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. A clean slate. And there was no bolder celebration of a clean slate than the wedding of Peter and Beatrice.
And in the end, quite a few of the guests got sloshed but Peter didn’t touch a drop. And everyone read their speeches from pre-prepared scripts and he hadn’t written a thing but when the time came God gave him inspiration and he spoke about his love for Beatrice in elegant, flowing sentences that made people weep.
Then he and his wife went home and Beatrice lay on their bed with her white gown still on, and he thought she was having a rest before getting changed but it soon became obvious that she was inviting him to join her. ‘We might get it dirty,’ he said, ‘and it was so expensive.’ ‘All the more reason,’ she said, ‘not to shove it into a box with a bunch of mothballs after one day. It’s actually a very nice dress. It feels good to touch.’ And she guided his hand.
She must have worn that dress twenty, thirty times after that. Always indoors, always without any ceremonial flourish or spoken allusion to its symbolic significance: merely as though she’d decided, on a mundane whim, to wear a white dress that evening rather than a green one; an embroidered bodice rather than a V-necked jumper. He never wore his wedding suit again, though.