The White Lily Blog

If Father Tim’s gonna get on board the shuttle, he’s got to get drunk.

“Let me ask you something, Tim,” while Al slid a ginger ale across the table. “And drink this first. Keep you from puking. Hopefully.” Al rubbed his forehead– how to put it?

“Are you actually going to do some kind of missionary thing on the way to Alpha Centauri? ‘Cause I just can’t see it. First of all, I can see how any human being could offer — what human beings have to offer, the mess we got ourselves in. I mean, let’s face it, we’re fleeing Earth. We’re not reaching out, we’re running! And then, I mean, Jesus Christ was human, a human guy.” And lily white, Al thought, not for the first time. Not for the first time. “What could he have to do with whatever forms of life we find out there?”

Father Timothy was watching the bubbles rising in the ginger ale and enjoying breathing. “Well, back at you. Why are you going, Al? Aren’t you taking human culture out there, too? Crappy as it is?”

Al thought again (what, it was his obsession now?) of the pills in his inside pocket where he was hoping security wasn’t interested in checking. Al had another option and he wasn’t sharing.

“I asked you first,” Al said.

“Okay. Fair enough.” Father picked up the glass and drank deeply as he considered his answer.

“Go easy on that,” Al remarked and laughed. “I mean it. So it’ll go into your bloodstream more slowly. We got time.”

“Who gets saved? That’s the real question.” Father glanced at Al, trying to judge if Al cared about the issue at all, but Al was poker-faced and anyway was making eye contact with the bartender to get those grey geese marching.

“The Church teaches the same as always, you have to believe in God to be saved, and you have to be sorry for your sins.” Al pushed a martini over to Father Timothy and thrust his chin forward: drink up. Father did. “You don’t need the Church to tell you that, St. Thomas taught that God gives every person the grace to believe in One God and the grace to be sorry for your sins.” Father took another drink. It didn’t taste bad at all. It tasted like winter, like Father, in Florida all his life, imagined that winter would taste, of bitter berries. (In two years would he say it tasted like deep space? If he lived?) “Are you sorry for your sins, Al?” The liquor made him dreamy. He’d never ask such a question of a perfect stranger otherwise!

Al didn’t think for a second. “Yeah,” he said, and let it rest there.

“Me too,” Father said. “Because it hurts Him.” Father took a manly drink and he made it seem liturgical. “I guess that’s why I’m in this game. I can’t explain it. I just love Him. Even if God does give every single creature in the universe I don’t care how many arms or heads it has, the grace to believe in God and be sorry for whatever sins the creature managed with all those heads, so that they can go to heaven with or without the Church, I don’t care.” Father threw back a mouthful of the silvery liquid and smiled. “They ought to get to know about Jesus.”

“Jay-sus,” Al murmured and shook his head.

“I don’t care,” Father said. “Go ahead and joke. But Jesus changed the world. Take what he taught about the poor! Do you know how pagans still to this very day care about the poor? They don’t care at all! They still have Untouchables in India, you know that?” Father had sprung to his feet in indignation and the whole packed room was suddenly looking at him. He sat down sheepishly. Al whistled. Alcohol did strange things to people! Al hoped this stage was brief, even though the priest was slight. A fighting Irish drunk, that’s all he needed. Mexican-Irish, even worse!

Father picked up his second Grey Goose and drained half of it like a thirsty man. “But not Christ. Not my man Christ,” he said with satisfaction. “Here’s what Christ said: whatever you do for the least of my brethren, you do for me. For me! That is a real revolutionary for you. And what do you think? The Church has actually walked that walk ever since. St. Paul baptized slaves, and sent them back to their Christian masters to be treated as sons. No other Church has a record like that.”

Al had to slow things down or this kid would be sick before he passed out. He pushed over the ginger ale and slid the martini back and distracted the cleric with a question. “How long you been a priest, Father?”

“Not very long,” Father Timothy replied thoughtfully, his mind elsewhere. “And now I’m a bishop! I’m the bishop of the whole rest of the universe.” He put the glass down and buried his face in his hands. Well, it was a tall order, Al thought. But Father recovered and said, like a man taking up his cross, “So if anybody’s out there, if they don’t know God, if there’s any slavery out there or any stealing or any lying, I’m bringing Christ. I’m bringing the Word.” Father took a sip of the soda. “Baptism by water. By desire. By blood. The whole shillelagh. Human beings without it are just too—dangerous. Probably aliens, too.”

“They’re pretty dangerous with it, Father,” said Al dubiously. But in his heart, he knew how it was. The kid in the Roman collar was right. Pagans were always killers behind their happy salesmen’s smiles. There was something civilizing in that cross. Which was strange, on account of how savage it actually was. Christianity wasn’t so different from any other life, not by that much anyway. It was like an eighth of an inch. Just the tiniest little bit more, saying yes instead of no to suffering. That’s what Mary taught him. ‘Cause make no mistake, suffering is part of the deal. And it’s got plenty to do with not killing. You live long enough, you find that out.

Not that Al had given it much thought in the past, Christianity and everything. Al only had one face to go with the word suffering, her face, and it came to mind unbidden. But that’s what the Buddhists said: heaven was just an eighth of an inch over. An eighth of an inch over from madness. An eighth of an inch of metal skin separating you from space vacuum!

Al slid the martini back over in front of Father Timothy. Finish this one, his gesture indicated. Finish this one and four or five more, and we’ll be getting on that shuttle. You can go ahead and bring that Christ into space. It’s okay by me. Father finished it. Al ordered up, got the bartender to hang on to their seats for a second, and they took a bathroom break to put on the specially designed undergarments required by the trip. The high-tech diapers would eliminate—that’s the word they used in the pre-flight instructions, nobody could say NASA was too dumb for irony—the need to use a flush toilet in the two day trip in weightless conditions, and Al was proud of himself for remembering it even if they were a little early.

The level of frantic merriment in the packed bar seemed to have up another notch. People were saying goodbye to the world. The world was going to let them. Al was counting on it, when he got this little man to the checkpoint. Time for some serious drinking, Father.

In two hours, more or less, the crowd began to drift toward the launch site and Father Timothy was completely soused. Seemed just about right. Al could count on him sleeping for several hours at least, through the launch, if all went according to procedures, which of course he couldn’t count on. Al’s own heart constricted briefly as they left the bar, but he didn’t have time to dwell on the fact that he, too, was leaving earth for what would probably be the last time, no matter what promises they had made to the evacuees. The way things were going, there probably wouldn’t be an earth to come back to, even to visit.

Al picked up Father’s papers from the table and put them carefully in his outside pocket, along with sis own. He gathered his duffle, and Father’s, and finally got his arm around the priest and hauled him to his feet. They joined the staggering crowd. The line went fast enough at the check point, the biological id having been completed outside the main gates. Papers, photo id, scanner wall to walk by. Still, Al had to wonder if they’d let an unconscious guy through. Being hauled by a big black guy with illegal pills in his inside right pocket. Father cooperated, though. He was more or less walking on his own, and singing some Latin tune that sounded surprisingly like a waltz.

“Stay away from the bad angels,” he said to Al, raising his head and looking his straight in the eye, which were only inches from his. “Stay way from those little devils,” he said. Al thought suddenly and guiltily of the pills in his inside pocket. Christ! Ditch ‘em!

And yet the idea of not having that power was really scary. It was life that was scary now. Living. It was like this huge pothole of an abyss. He guessed it was because she wasn’t with him now. How had he never understood who much she meant to him, when she was with him? It was that sweet smile he could count on at the worst moments. The generosity of her, always giving in first and smiling. Why hadn’t he been first sometimes? Why couldn’t he feel sorry that he let her do all the heavy lifting? Why couldn’t he feel anything? Why was he carrying little white pills that would make it all go away forever? Why was he carrying them instead of already dead? And why was he carrying this absolutely useless kid who thought he was some kind of bishop?