The Peripatetic Philosopher shares more of "Devlin":

THE DEVLIN CHILDREN

JAMES R. FISHER, JR.

© December 31, 2016

Reference:

This is another excerpt of the novel “DEVLIN,” which will be available on Kindle in the first quarter 2017.  Dirk Devlin, who is facilitating the formation of a new specialty chemical complex, is an often absent father and family man while his children are experiencing difficulty in acclimating to a new culture and country.  

The Devlin gardener has been murdered, a Bantu with whom Dirk Devlin has had a warm relationship, and with whom the American claimed represented the best in South Africa.  You get a sense of this in this introduction of the Devlin children.

*     *     *

While commotion grew in the Devlin household with the tension between the parents breaking into periodic outbursts followed dramatically by the murder of the Devlin’s gardener, Robbie, Rosie and Ruthie remained focused otherwise in the midst of the school year.  

Transitioning from American schools, it meant that they were now in an additional semester with the American spring leading to South Africa’s winter. Being constantly in school didn’t increase their happiness.  Rickie, being too young for school, was fascinated listening to his siblings discuss and complain about now being in school year around.

Ruthie and Rosie were enrolled in St. Teresa’s Catholic Convent School and Academy.  They wore uniforms of heavy coarse material with vertical black and gray striped jackets with the school’s crest over the left jacket pocket, along with a white shirt and black tie, black sweater, and skirt that touched the knees, and calf length black socks and black patent leather shoes.  Robbie wore the same uniform only with shorts to his middle thighs. 

St. Theresa’s was a series of tall gray somber buildings in the style of European Gothic architecture with the Roman Catholic Church and Convent School of the same rococo baroque style.  Missionary Dominican nuns from Ireland were the girls’ no nonsense teachers.

Robbie was enrolled at the King Edward VII School in Houghton, which was a community just outside Rosebank.  It had the status and decorum of Great Britain’s public schools and was well known in Johannesburg for its academics and athletics.  Several South African Springbok rugby players had graduated from the school including the internationally famous golfer, Gary Player.

Ruthie, who was tall for her age was automatically promoted to the next grade, as she represented an embarrassment to children her own age as well as to some of the nuns.  Only seven, she was already more than five feet tall.  It was clear school officials didn’t think her passport was accurate until they met her parents. 

Robbie, on the other hand, already nine was small for his age and nearly a head shorter than his sister, Ruthie.  He was given the lead in the American play, “Oklahoma” because he had the American accent.  

Devlin never saw the play because he was on the road when it was staged.  In fact, he never attended any school functions after the initial orientation, as his work took him across the country or to meetings during scheduled school affairs. 

*     *     *

Rosie in particular could not get used to dressing and sitting down to a formal dinner cooked by Gabriel, and served by him and Asabi with their hands in white-gloves.  Nor did she like the fact that her mommy sat at the far end of the long dining table with her father at the opposite end with the two sisters on one side and the two brothers on the other side, putting everyone worlds apart and making meals formal and therefore not much fun.  But that was not her major complaint.

“Why does Gabriel serve us those little potatoes every meal?” she asked her mother.

“Because they’re good for you.”

“Then why does he have to put them in our lunch, too?”

“In your lunch?” her mother looked at her husband.  “Do you know anything about this?”

Devlin shrugged his shoulders, and asked.  “Honey, what is wrong with the potatoes?”

“Daddy, he makes them into chips, but when it comes time to eat them at school they’re soggy.”

“I like them,” said Ruthie, “I’m too hungry at lunchtime to worry about them being soggy.”

“But is Rosie right?  Are they soggy?”

Ruthie touched her sister’s arm.  “Yes, they are soggy and Rosie ends up giving them to me.”

“Sarah, I think you should have a word with Gabriel about this,” Devlin said, “or better yet, show him how to make shoestring potatoes.”

Not happy with the big bastard passing the buck, she replied sarcastically, “Yes sire.  Leave it to mother to solve.” 

Devlin waited for a smile, but none creased her lips.

*     *     *

The children weren’t very nice to Josiah.  It was mainly because they didn’t know him, and weren’t used to being around dark colored people.  They called him “Shadrack,” and often made fun of him as he worked in the garden in his big sombrero.   It was unfortunate because Josiah could see they loved his garden, especially the roses, and would have shown them what he did to make them grow if they had been of a mind to learn. 

Devlin mentioned this to Sarah but she cringed at the suggestion.  “I don’t want my children to get too familiar with black people.  Why would I want them to fraternize with a Negro?”

The children heard rumors from classmates that Bantus were aborigines.  They didn’t know what that meant but thought it must be bad.  They were also told that Bantus ate food with their hands.  Ruthie didn’t see where that was necessarily bad.  “We eat hamburgers with our hands, slide food under our forks, and we see other white people in restaurants eating fish and chips with their hands.  Are we all aborigines, too?”  Ruthie never took anything at face value because someone had said it was so.

The children would wander beyond the gate of the estate to watch Bantu women passing by carrying the laundry of their employers on their heads.  Even little Rickie found this fascinating.  “Look, mommy, look at the ladies?”

When Devlin came back one trip from Cape Town, Rosie tried to demonstrate to her father how women carried a load of laundry on their heads, and forgot there were glasses in the bundle with shards of glass splintering across the floor as the bundle toppled off her head.  Fortunately, she wasn’t cut.

Asabi was a favorite of both of the girls.  They thought she was terribly pretty, and loved for her to read Dr. Seuss books to them.

One day Ruthie came home with her face so red that Robbie asked her what had happened.  “Kids at school bully Rosie because she is pudgy and wears glasses.  She was playing marbles with some girls, and won.  This red headed fat girl stole Rosie’s marbles, then pulled her by her braids and knocked her against the soda machine.  She also stole Rosie’s lunch money.  When Rosie told me about this, I went looking for the girl, found her and beat the crap out of her.  I told her if she ever touched my little sister again I’d sit on her head until she puked.

“The red head went to Sister Superior and told her what I had done, not what she had done. That was the first time I got my hands slapped with a ruler in front of my class.  After that, Rosie and I walked together at lunchtime holding hands to let everyone know we were sisters.”

Ruthie was not only tall for her age, but seemed to reflect the maturity and skepticism far beyond her young years.  Every Friday all the girls in each class were compelled to go to confession in the convent church.  Although only seven, she couldn’t see the point of the routine.  So, for two weeks she had hidden between buildings while everyone was going to confession, then broke into the line when her class was returning to school. 

She didn’t like entering a little box called a confessional, or looking at a man with bad breath through a lattice window, where he proceeded to talk in some gibberish that she was told was Latin, and wait for her to confess her sins. 

The priest would probe and ask her embarrassing questions, questions no one else had ever asked her, including her own parents, such as did she touch herself, did she touch other people in their private parts, did she lie, cheat, steal or swear.  She would say, no, and the priest would say, you should say, “No Father,” and so she said “No Father” to every question he asked her, only to have the priest ask her if she thought that she was a saint. 

She had no idea what he meant by saint, but decided to say “No Father” to that as well, which got her off the hook with three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.  

But after that, she avoided the whole ordeal, that is, until caught by a nun from another class who saw her come out from between two buildings.  She was punished with the ruler across her knuckles for that as well.

Rosie listened to her complain about the discovery, but she told no one else.  Whatever Ruthie told Rosie was safe because she adored her older sister.  Bad and these acts were, it was even worse when she attempted to cheat on a health test.  Ruthie thought for certain it would get back to her parents.  


She didn’t know the answers, and girls were circulating a cheat sheet in the girls’ restroom.  The girls put the answers under their felt hats.  Ruthie’s hat fell off when she bent down to pull up her stockings with the answers falling right at her feet in the clear sight of the nun teacher. 

Her knuckles were beaten blue with a ruler for that.  It stung so much that Ruthie peed her pants right in front of the entire class, while she held back her tears.  Nothing had ever happened to her before that was more humiliating then to feel pee running down her legs with snickering across the classroom like braying springbok. 

If this were not enough, she was the only left handed person in the entire class with all the ink wells on each desk on the left side of the desk as the desks were designed for only right handed students.  How did the nuns handle the problem?  They attempted to force Ruthie to become a right-handed person.  When she would try to sneak writing left handed, the nun teacher would again slap her left hand with a ruler. 

One day Ruthie took the ruler from the nun, who was at least two inches shorter than she was, and proceeded to hit the nun across the back of the nun’s knuckles in front of the whole class.  The nun took the ruler from her and slapped her in the face, neck and shoulders with it until Ruthie was finally reduced to tears.

As outrageous as Ruthie’s behavior, or as draconian as her constant discipline, the Devlin parents were never privy to any of this.  Moreover, there were no suspensions or disciplinary procedures directed against Ruthie or any other children of high-ranking foreign executives.  


Why?  It was quite simply because these international corporations carried the mother lode of expenses of the operation and upkeep of such schools.  Meanwhile, the faculty of St. Theresa’s were quite confident the children wouldn’t want their parents to know of their high jinx in school. 

Consequently, Sarah and Dirk Devlin had no knowledge of this abusive treatment, not even from their children.

*     *     *

Robbie went to a public school in the tradition of Great Britain’s private public schools.  He had a tough time being accepted because he was small but cocky and a good talker, and would egg the bigger boys on only to make more trouble for himself.  He received similar treatment to that of Rosie, but did not have a big brother or sister to defend him.  Again, none of this ever reached beyond the knowledge of the siblings themselves. 

With their mother in a state of high hysteria a good bit of the time, and their father practically never home, the three siblings gravitated to a form of deviancy bordering on if not juvenile delinquency at home.

On one occasion, they set Josiah’s tool shed on fire, and then laughed from the sanctuary of the house as they watched the gardener frantically attempt to put the fire out and save his tools, plants, chemicals and fertilizers. 


The Devlin children had no idea that the tool shed could go up like a tinder box for the stored fertilizers, exploding like a bomb and possibly killing the gardener and several others while destroying the main buildings on the estate.  Josiah never reported this to anyone, including to master Devlin.

When they were bored with nothing to do, they would make mud balls, and launch them over the seven-foot wall of the estate at passing Bantu natives.  Rosie would act as look out telling them when someone was coming down the road. 

Robbie and a friend from school climbed up a ladder and threw firecrackers down the chimney of Josiah’s house while construction workers were working inside.  Fortunately, the firecrackers failed to ignite.    

Delinquency wasn’t natural to Robbie.  He got good grades in school.  Although physically small, he had a sense that he was the eldest sibling and took care of his brother and sisters, listening to them, keeping their confidences, and suggesting what they should and shouldn’t do.  The shouldn’ts included not telling mom and dad. 

One day little Rickie saw the gardener put on a plastic suit and a net over his head with a canister over his shoulder and walk to a tree and spray something into the tree.  Later Rickie walked over and saw hundreds of dead bees on the ground.  He scooped them up and put them in a bucket and set them on fire, believing he was making honey until his mother caught him and spanked his bottom for playing with matches.

Being in a strange society with no real friends they bounded together as siblings and learned to watch each other’s back. 

Only nine, Robbie was already a gifted athlete even though frail and small.  There was music in his body, which is typical of exceptional athletes who hone their instincts to do what others cannot imagine doing as their muscles respond to intuitive commands.  Athletic intelligence is as complicated and complex as cerebral intelligence and equally as impressive. 

Devlin would come home and take Robbie to the Rosebank Golf & Tennis Club, which was nearby, and volley with him for an hour or more.  Robbie wasn’t but four-two but he could handle a tennis racket with skill and had already learned to use the power of his opponent’s speed against him.  Others in the tennis complex would stop what they were doing to watch this father and son volley with clear evidence that the son had superior skill to that of his father. 

*     *     *

The children had no experience with death.  When Josiah was murdered, they weren’t informed but they saw Asabi crying, and Gabriel whispering to their mother.  What was more confusing to them was how the death seemed to change their father.  They had never seen him with such a long face, not seeming to hear or see them when they tried to get his attention.  He was no longer interested in playing tennis with Robbie.  It seemed that when he was home he wasn’t there, and when he was gone he no longer called to see how they were doing. 

This prompted Ruthie to ask, “Why are you so sad about Shadrack?  He was just our gardener.”  He put her on his lap, looked into her beautiful blue eyes, and asked Rosie to crawl up on his lap, too.  Rosie brightened and then leaped on top of Ruthie.  Once the two girls were settled, he asked Robbie and Rickie to come over.  They did. 

“I’m going to tell you a little story about life.  Let us call it the life story and fulfillment of our greatest wish, a wish that only we know about, a secret we have never shared with anyone.  We carry this life story, which is our greatest wish, wherever we go, and know that it is there although no one knows that this life story even exists.”

“Is this a true story?” asked Rosie.

“I’ll let you decide,” Devlin said.  “You could call it a ‘made up’ story, but made up stories can be true if we think they are true.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, daddy,” said Ruthie.  “How can something made up be true when it is made up like stories we read in school?”

“Okay, can we agree that we can learn something from a made up story?”

Robbie said, “Yes, like Oklahoma is a made up musical but I think it is true about the people it describes, is that what you mean?”

“Yes, Robbie, that is what I mean.”  He looked at his children.  “Are we in agreement on this?”  They nodded.

“Now, let us say the fulfillment of a wish is to have a garden, and to have the freedom to attend that garden as you like without interference.”

“Like Shadrack’s garden, is that what you mean, daddy?” asked Ruthie.

“Yes, like Josiah’s garden.  I think we can say the garden was his life story.  When he was in his garden, he was free.  He was in charge.  He could talk to his plants and they would answer by growing healthy and beautiful for his loving care.  His plants knew him and he knew his plants.  He felt love and responsibility for them no matter what the weather, no matter who might try to harm them.  He was always there to nurture them to health and happiness, and by doing so, he fulfilled his wish by being healthy and happy himself.”

“And when he died, daddy, that was all taken away from him,” said Ruthie.

“Yes, his life story, the fulfillment of his greatest wish, was taken from him and he had done nothing wrong.”

Ruthie could see tears in the corner of her father’s eyes, something she had never seen before, and in that moment she knew something had been taken away from her father, too, but wasn’t certain what it was.  She was disappointed that with her father’s tears the story ended, but knew she would not forget this moment or this story.

*     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher asks for help:

 SEARCHING FOR A BOOK COVER

DEVLIN, a novel

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR.

© DECEMBER 23, 2016

REFERENCE:

What follows explains my interest in finding a suitable cover for this new novel.

NOTE TO A REGULAR SUPPORTER

George,

You may not have the time for this, so this is just a thought. I have been racking my brain for a book cover for DEVLIN, a novel.

I want the cover to be simple but emphatic.

There are images of the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald that depict the pseudo-sophistication, cuttingly handsome characters of his time that indicate the "Roaring Twenties" of the last century. These are usually in profile. I see if I can find one.

Devlin is cuttingly handsome in an androgynous sense, which will become signatory in the 21st century, when the demarcation between male and female becomes so ambiguous that it has ramifications far beyond sex role identity.

Not to confuse you, and certainly not to make the cover too complicated, Devlin is intimidating in a masculine sense, a former star athlete but using his feminine or intuitive brain as opposed to his masculine or cognitive brain as do the majority of his colleagues.

I am working systematically, patiently and thoroughly with this novel. When I have completed it, which will be soon, I am going to Kinko copy it as a manuscript document. Betty will read and criticize it much as Vera did for Nabokov and then I'll post it on KINDLE. I fully expect it to be picked up by a major publication because I think it is that good.

It is the story of an Irish American born in the Great Depression of a poor family who by the dint of focus, attention and determination is able to assume a role in the rise of the United States to a hegemony and imperial force in a world devastated by WWII.

Devlin has a solid scientific education but with the temperament and inclination of an artist. He has been trained to manage right, but scoffs at that suggestion, and instead leads by doing the right things.

His superiors and colleagues find him lucky when it is a simple case of preparation meeting opportunity as the United States in post-WWII is breaking out of its isolationist philosophy to perform on the world stage, having no choice as no one else is capable.

Physically, he is "Hitler's dream" of racial superiority -- Nordic, blond, blue-eyed, tall, strong and pure -- but there the resemblance ends. He is empathetic, sensitive and egalitarian, which even he doesn't appreciate until he leaves the comfort zone of the United States and its cultural biases to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company in South Africa.

It is 1968 with him soon to be thirty. While the world has been devastated with war and left in ruins, only a generation after WWII, the United States -- for actually the first time -- has to assume the role of hegemony as the empires of monarchies across the world including Great Britain, Russia, Japan, Austria and Hungary have vanished and America is now the lone super power economically as well as politically and militarily.

Polychem is a small specialty chemical company established by a chemist and salesman shortly before the Great Depression of 1929. WWII has thrust it into an international role in support of the war, a role it would never have anticipated.

Devlin, by the accident of his birth and preparation, comes of age just as his country is in the process of finding a role in the world.

Nothing could be more incongruous than he and his boss as corporate leaders of enterprise. Both trained as bench chemists, they have become movers and shakers in the wider world. Together, they make a complete executive force with his boss the velvet glove and Devlin the iron fist.

Devlin, if I can be so bold as to point out is "Trump like"(this book was first written decades ago), in being results oriented, tough, fair, consistent and uncompromisingly direct and in your face if you don't perform doing what you have said you will do.

He is intuitive rather than cognitive preferring to move symbols or concepts rather than to perform mechanized processes.

He was not a good bench chemist and had been planning to pursue a post graduate education in theoretical chemistry when his third child was on its way when he was 23. Not making enough money in the laboratory as a bench chemist, he answers a Chemical & Engineering News ad for a job as a chemical sales engineer, never having sold before, and again, quite by accident finds he excels at that function.

Incredulously, and this follows him everywhere, he is a loner with little interest in people collectively, or in things in general, while being almost obsessively driven by ideas. When ideas don’t compute, such as theology (Catholicism) or economics (capitalism), he is in conflict. Despite this albatross, he out performs everyone in Polychem in sales and rises to corporate executive status in his twenties against a world going through the agony of rebirth into a new age.

A devout Irish Roman Catholic, everything changed when he is exposed to South Africa's apartheid, corporate duplicity and his Roman Catholic Church's indifference to that practice.

He has an affair with a beautiful Afrikaner woman, his secretary, who teaches him about life and love and a reality he never knew existed. She is a mix of Afrikaner, Indonesian and Chinese and from the upper class of Afrikaner society while he comes from the lower class of American society.

The relationship between these two is very Dostoyevskian reflecting the isolationist cultures of the United States and the Afrikaans nation, both of whom are out-of-step with international reality and the world at large.

Devlin, by the accident of his birth, steps into this world at the precise moment the 20th century (1968) ends a little early as the world is suffering a nervous breakdown as it is unprepared for the disruptive changes brought on by the war or exploding technology, including the introduction of the atomic bomb. He is on the cusp of this new age and a new world in all his innocence.

The novel shows by inference how unprepared the United States is for the challenges of the world stage, as it lacks the sophistication, the history, the culture and the gravitas to assume such a role. Stumbling as the US does into this role, and again quite by accident, much that follows has the imprint of its naiveté with Devlin personifying that impediment.

The book begins with Devlin confessing his story to a priest in confession in Chicago, and ends refusing absolution from that same priest at the end.

I'm posting this on my blog, too, in case anyone else has any ideas for a cover.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and thank you always for all your help.

Jim

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

HANGOVER OF A NONDRINKER

JAMES R. FISHER, JR.

© December 14, 2016

REFERENCE

This is another excerpt of the novel, DEVLIN to be published in 2017. Devlin is in South Africa with apartheid acute yet secondary to his breaking through the prison of his idealism to embrace life as a human being, no longer content to remain "the puppet on a string" that had been his existence for his first thirty years of life. This chapter explores this introspection.

*     *     *

Devlin woke seeing he was fully clothed, wrinkled and disheveled in his living room, and remembered he had spent the previous day with his chief chemist.  There was a humid cloying yet putrid odor in the air as the fire in the fireplace had gone out in the night.  At some point in his sleep, he had had an erotic dream of Nina and awakened violently throttling the chair’s cushion, feeling the sticky reminder in his boxer shorts. 

How different they were.  She was the United Nations in one body, and he the United States of Anxiety in one soul.  She gave him peace while exchanging bodily fluids only to torment his soul.  How different she had been educated.

His Catholicism taught him there was a body, a mind and a soul, as if separate and discrete entities with only an accidental connection to each other and not one integral whole.  In him, these conflicting demons had different needs which meant they were in a constant war with each other, one moment uplifting and the next deflating, proving the spirit existed beyond reason and the need of such constraints. 

His mind tantalized his body with the need to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, while his soul released him from such needs.  Was making love to Nina spiritual ecstasy or the ultimate in depravity?  Nina is troubled by no such war as she finds spiritual ecstasy through the fusion of her mind, body and soul.  How he envied her.

He had had such a conformist adherence to every nuance, ritual and dogma of his Roman Catholicism, but now felt abandoned as if existing in an alien world where it no longer offered him succor. He had been so inner directed that he was practically unable to breathe in the bright new world of reality of which the church had not prepared him.  Consequently, his inner life meant more to him at all times than any of the accelerating and disruptive demands of the external world.     

He thought he understood the inner sense of the biblical words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  Since he thought with words, he believed through words he understood himself.  


For the German philosopher Johann Hamann had said, All understanding of anything whatever is self-understanding, for the spirit alone is what can be understood and to find it man need only look within himself.  Elsewhere the philosopher had said:  If a child cannot understand you, how do you expect to understand the child? Alas, crafty intellectualism is a prison and not an escape.  Was he self-incarcerated?

*     *     *

Freudian psychology is as inordinately weird as Christianity.  Indeed, Freud amplified and reified our obsessive attention to our damaged psyches, tampering with 2,000 years of guilt to rename sin as simply guilt.   God wasn’t dead.  He just introduced a new nomenclature.  Freud’s attempt to simplify human confusion compounded St. Paul’s flight into abstraction to make us all walking fruitcakes. 

For St. Paul, salvation is founded in the hereafter with life on earth little more than a living hell.  Freud is no better.  He charts a course to finding heaven on earth through the subconscious that is equally indefinable.  If this is genius, then these strange brothers represent its epitome as no one can confirm or refute their other world premises.

St. Paul talks of a “Second Coming” of Jesus, the Messiah, to save mankind, while Freud invents the “talking cure” as the ultimate gauge to coping with life's desultory demands.  For Freud, man is an instinctive social animal driven by his buried subconscious. For St. Paul, God resides in heaven while Freud’s exists in the earthy hell and subliminal world of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.”        

If there is any merit to this mania to define man, it invariably relates to man's dependence on a religious connection.  Theology and faith are predicates of science as much as they are of religion.  Neither talking cures nor Revelations can be proven in a laboratory.  


Although psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology adhere to the scientific method, they are essentially explanatory disciplines consistent with St. Paul’s Christology.  It is that old l saw: self-fulfilling prophecy.  If something is repeated enough times, it comes to be believed although limited to a modicum of probability.  In a word, everything seems to be faith based.

The world population in 1968 is 3.5 billion souls of which one-third are Christians, but wholly 80 percent believe in the existence of God.  St. Paul wrapped this consensus around a personal savior, Jesus Christ, while Sigmund Freud wrapped it around the personal construct of an Ego, Superego and Id, asserting that the subconscious was at the controls in a mechanized universe. 

Much of science, although it would suggest otherwise, is largely based on faith with its theoretical postulates such as evolution and climate change.  There is forever a war between self-direction and other-direction, between free will and instinctual enslavement, between an inner life and outer dominance, between belief in God and a discursive rationality. 

The Procrustean tendency of modernity is to examine human relations with the quantitative methodology of science, while qualitative interpretations are what people value as truth as they involve the diversity of natural and varied desires, aspirations, feelings and ideals providing a sense of worth and dignity, whereas the classifications of science (including those of Freud) see human beings only in mechanistic ways. 

The new religion of science (and he knew he was part of it) had created a power seeking elite mobilized to exploit and oppress others without redress while wrapped in the steel coils of denial, justifying this offensive behavior in the name of progress (as he was now doing) while being manipulated by remote masters on mahogany row as if puppets on a string.  Here that, Nina?  I’ve admitted it!

*     *     *

Devlin took solace in the fact that had he followed the dictates of his programming he would not have been given this assignment in South Africa.  His claim to success was the rejection not acceptance of his brainwashing.  


I’ve been trained to reason when emotions have been my primary tools.  I’ve been schooled in abstract logic when moral intuition has been key to my problem solving.  I’ve been told we are limited by the arbitrary construct of I.Q., as if intelligence is a fixed data point when intelligence is an ever growing phenomenon.  Intelligence is not a test score but what intelligence does. 

Americans bought into Freud’s surrealistic nomenclature whereas Europeans did not.  Americans are gullible to the new: to fads and fantasies, to anything that is expedient and promises to bypass the agencies of control.  With a cache in crazes, Americans are pushovers for the simplistic explanation to the complex riddle, solving problems they can grasp rather than the problems they face.   

Freud is the Jewish equivalent to the Christian Paul.  Freud thought he was unveiling a new science when he was giving birth to a secular religion where no gods could muck up the works.  Christianity has its dogma; Freud his explanatory models. 

What did Sarah say earlier?  “So what if I wake up your fucking brats!”   Pure Freudian, but was he a ventriloquist with her speaking his mind?  The words came out of her mouth but did they originate with him?  Did he make her like she was?  Or did she make him the way he was?  Were they simply two icebergs on a collision course?  Freud would have an explanation; the Church a sacred text, and both would skirt the basic dilemma of their damaged souls.  Why was that?

*     *     *

Devlin retrieved a notebook he had hidden behind a loose brick in the fireplace.  This notebook was dedicated to “Fragments of a Journal.”  He wrote them to Robbie, his eldest child, now nine, primarily because Robbie showed all the signs of being as much a displaced person as was his father.  He expected him to be equally as successful and equally as miserable.  Devlin reasoned that in knowing him better perhaps he would come to know himself better as well.  Disheveled and soiled in the quiet of the house at 5:30 in the morning, he commenced to write.

Dear Robbie,

Once again I’m writing to you while in South Africa.  I am now fully 30-years-old, successful and an influence beyond anyone has ever been in my family’s history.  Your father, however, is a fraud, and I fear of his four children you may follow in his footsteps.  You may not read this until you are fifty or sixty, but it is for you.

Your father is a sinner.  He sins and he continues to sin.  Given the culture of our times you will sin as your father has sinned and is sinning with no more clue as to why or how it came about.  It is the nature of the times, clueless.  Most numbing of all, however, is knowing you have neither the will nor the way to extricate yourself from this downward spiral into oblivion. 

The paradox is that I cannot disentangle my mind or my body from this pattern as I have committed myself to it in the name of ecstasy and in the person of a woman that God should never have created to tempt me so.  I can explain my enslavement because I live in an explanatory age, but in the explaining it comes to possess me even more deeply. 

I know this is absurd but we live in the Age of the Absurd.  Will it have faded when you are an old man?  I doubt it because we are becoming increasingly detached from ourselves, and, yes, there is a ready-made explanatory model for this called “self-estrangement,” which helps none of us at all. 

We live in an age of justification for inaction, rationalization and explanation.  It is easier to explain an action than to avoid the necessity for the action.  We have perfected self-deception to a science and we call it psychiatry.  We have idealized self-distrust to a phobia and now have a mania for secondhand information to guide us.  We have become addicts of information as surrogate for thought.  Without a foundation in self-knowing, self-trust, and experience life is an accidental journey. 

Your father is a passenger on this secondary life.  I look around me today, even in this land far from home, and I see those who would claim to be sophisticated and in charge all look alike, live alike, think alike, and wonder why they are bored alike, your father, of course, included.

South Africa has been a shock to your father’s system, not only in having an affair with a South African woman more beautiful than a movie star, but in the chicanery, duplicity and deceit that is “business as usual,” which to my amazement is the equal in depravity to that of apartheid.  This condition offends your father on so many levels and makes him scream in his dreams, but instead of doing anything constructive about it, he makes love to his multiracial princess, and comes home to fight with your mother at night.

Is your father a cad?  Yes, he is.  Is he immoral?  No, he isn’t.  That may surprise you that I’ll admit to not caring about another’s feelings, mainly your mother’s, but that I care about such moral issues as business practices and apartheid.  My hope is that when you are an old man the content of your character will mean more than the color of your skin, and that men will no longer desire to distance themselves from other men by the content of their portfolio.  But I suspect this, too, will not change.

Your father has a different take on morality than when he came to this country, but I’ll leave that for another time.  Don’t be hard on yourself when you read this, be hard on your father if you like, although that would serve no useful purpose, but mainly don’t punish yourself for being blood of my blood.  Your father is walking through the wilderness, alone, perhaps by choice, and there are no landmarks with which to mark his progress or to guide his way.  It is called, life.  Until later.

Your father

*     *     *

Devlin closed the notebook, placed it back behind the brick, then tiptoed down the passage way with his shoes off, went to the armoire, got a fresh suit, shirt, tie, socks, shoes and underwear, took them to the bathroom to take a bath, wishing they had a shower.  The tub was ridiculously short for his long body and had ancient legs on it suggesting another time, but he had come to love its quaintness nonetheless.  The warm water was soothing.

Once dressed, he tiptoed down the hall again, left all his clothes out for Gabriel to send to the cleaners, put his shoes on, and was hit by the invigorating morning cold air typical of the Transvaal at this time of year, got into his car, and thought, I hope this is an uneventful day.  If he had only known, he might have gone back to bed.

*     *     *

 

 

The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

CHRISTIANITY AS SYMBOLIC CANNIBALISM?

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© December 7, 2016

REFERENCE:

I had written  this to a deeply religious author’s short published essay on “Hypocrisy”:

We only know each other through this medium of words. I discern from this and your previous missive (on "Love") that you are in a special place in your life looking at yourself honestly with no other thought in mind. This is what philosophers and poets do, and I applaud you for it. They don't find the audience the audience finds them.

My wonder is if a less denominational approach might affect a wider audience given the fact that hypocrisy is a common concern to us all. That said if a denominational audience is your target then I stand corrected.

Emerson said that the route to self-knowing is through experience, a journey we take alone. If we capture a sense of that essence in self-reflection, it follows we tap into a common humanity as we are all one.

Words can be a bridge or barrier as not everyone is a Christian, much less a believer, yet believers and non-believers have common experiences that resonate with each other.

Bridge or barrier, that appears to be the key.

A READER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

I find this fascinating because it all boils down to a belief in something or an entity that has characteristics which if ascribed to a human being would be thought to be negative: the need to be worshiped and bowed down to like royalty, the condemnation of all nonbelievers to eternal punishment, along with a belief in human scarifies and total arrogance. So for me the ultimate hypocrisy is to believe in such an entity and called that entity a god of love.

The other aspect to this religious cult called “Christianity” is that its members believe in symbolic cannibalism to which no one seems to object.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Klaus,

I've never thought of it in those terms, but it is true. Holy Communion is symbolic cannibalism as the priest places the sacred host on your tongue in Holy Communion and says, "Body of Christ." That said the history of Christianity is simply incredible.

Jesus was not an atypical apocalyptic teacher and miracle man of his time. He like others of his ilk were preaching the "the last days," of the known world. Scholars claim there is little evidence he could read or write and spoke only Aramaic and not the Jewish language of Hebrew of the educated.

Moreover, his mission was that of a Jewish sect of a religion that he thought needed reforming. He died in 33 of the Common Era (CE), or there about, and the Jewish sect continued under his brother, James the Just, who remained scrupulously loyal to the tenets of Judaism as it was then known.

James the Just did not believe in a proselytizing faith as did Paul. He and his small group had bitter conflicts with Paul (formerly Saul) who proselytized the faith throughout the known Mediterranean world among gentiles abandoning the diet restrictions of Judaism and promulgating Jesus as the Messiah according to the Old Testament of the Bible.

James the Just was martyred in the 60s of the Common Era (some scholars say 62, others 69 C.E.), which essentially ended the messianic sect of Judaism that Jesus had created only to die on the Cross as a common criminal in 33 C.E. With the death of James, his followers scattered to avoid the Roman army with the Jesus movement (if you want to call it that) essentially ending.

Also, in the 60s, the Jewish Masada launched a revolt against the occupying Romans. This was put down by Emperor Titus in 70 C.E., totally destroying Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple; thus not only ending the reformation movement of Jesus, but Judaism as it was then known. Out of the ashes, a new Jewish faith emerged, and Christianity under the inventive style and bold diligence of Paul (much more than Peter), Christianity emerged.

The Four Gospels (or the "good news") of Christianity are something akin to "fake news" today on the Internet, as they were all written late in the 1st century or early in the 2nd century of the Common Era with none of the authors having known Jesus in his lifetime, which was also true of Paul.

[It has always amazed me that St. Peter's Basilica is in the center of Rome and the site of Roman Catholicism, while St. Paul's Cathedral is outside the wall of the seven hills, as if an embarrassment. I have visited both several times, both beautiful, while remaining an enigma in my mind.]

Most of Christianity (which includes Roman Catholicism) was invented by Paul, and after him by the Fathers of the Church including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Jesus, for example, never mention the "seven deadly sins," the Nicene Creed, or other beliefs that were subsequently treated as if originating from him.

Still, more remarkable after being persecuted up to early in the 4th century, Christianity leads to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, and later in that same century to become the state religion of the entire Roman Empire.

Now, in the 21st century, after suffering many scandals and wars and bad to horrible popes, Roman Catholicism has more than one billion members throughout the world, and Protestantism, which broke from Catholicism early in the 16th century, continues to thrive.

Why is that? I have spent a good part of my life studying the works of scholars on Christianity, but the reason it survives much less exists still escapes me. I know there are other Roman Catholics, like myself, who were once devout members of the church, and have fallen away.

In my case, I claim to have gained a great deal from the structure, discipline, tenets of the faith, as well as the ritual and ceremony of the church. With due modesty, I consider myself a Roman Catholic author and philosopher because I have been greatly influenced by the 18th century Enlightenment Period and the 19th Counter-Enlightenment Period, which both fed off of the controversy of Christianity. It is why my writing may appear at times circumspect to ambivalent and even ambiguous when it comes to the matter of faith.

While being somewhat of a product of Descartes and Newton, et. al., and the Scientific Revolution, I often find merit, and even significance in the irrational and intuitive aspects of the mind compared to the present prominence of the cognitive. Were it not for my right brain thinking, I doubt seriously if I would have had the career and life that I have enjoyed.

Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism fulfilled a need during my impressionistic years, and for that I am eternally grateful. As a consequence, I still believe in God, and still see the importance of religion in fulfilling a basic need of man beyond the known and the knowable. I have watched science in my long life duplicate many of the sins of Roman Catholicism in order to promote and protect its image of infallible and dogmatic authority. Science and mathematics are inventions of man and therefore have limits. They can learn from Nature, but they cannot change or improve Nature. Nature simply "is," or reality.

I think Einstein most cleverly hedged his bet on immortality when he said:

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

Jim

*      *      *

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a moving piece from his novel:

Another Excerpt from

DEVLIN, the novel

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 2, 2016

REFERENCE:

Devlin in driving around Johannesburg to clear his head wanders to the Johannesburg Train 

Station just as thousands of Bantu are heading home to SOWETO.  The experience is so shattering that he makes a visit to his parish church.  This is what takes place.  

THE CHURCH VISIT

As Devlin got in the flow of afternoon traffic winding through downtown Johannesburg past the apartment complexes and law offices, the rolling hills, and the manicured traffic islands along the way, he was glad Daniel was not driving him home today, glad, too, that he had the suspended pleasure of letting his vehicle take him where it would. 

He entered Rosebank and its small business district passing the food market, liquor store, clothing store, movie theatre, and the Rosebank Hotel all architecturally splendid, making a common declaration of uplifting dignity.  He then took a side street rolling through a venue of overarching trees, exquisite gardens and luxurious homes, only to find himself approaching his parish church, the Immaculate Conception. 

The surprise to him was not as daunting as the train station.  The church was a familiar sanctuary for him throughout the world.  To seek relief from fatigue, countervailing circumstances, ambiguous conflicts, and ambivalent strategies, he would find breathing space in the quiet of a church, where he could unburden his soul in the same manner as he did as a child at St. Patrick’s, St. Boniface’s or The Sacred Heart in Crescent City.  He would always leave with the heavy weight of the day surprisingly gone replaced by a sense of peace and tranquility that would shoot adrenaline through his body and quiet the agitation in his soul.  He rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the church, got out and entered the vestibule.

It was now past five o’clock and the church was empty, dark with the aroma of incense with the creaking sound of the timbers that held its majestic ceiling arched towards heaven.  Offertory candles flickered at the altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph on opposite sides of the main central altar where the red light of the candle beside the tabernacle door burned brightly to register the presence of the monstrance with the Sacred Host housed inside. 

He moved down the side aisle to the Virgin Mary’s altar and dropped to his knees on the cushioned kneeler and bowed his head in prayer.  He was home. 

After several minutes, he lit a candle and then wondered what specifically he wished to pray to the Virgin for, other than keeping his composure.  He found himself saying an ancient prayer he learned as a child, Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Our Life Our Sweetness and Our Hope to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve …” 

Sometime later, Devlin felt a gentle tap on his shoulder.  “Are you all right, my son?”

He looked up and it was his parish priest, Father Vincent O’Malley, a man about sixty.  His face was like a beatific vision, handsome, round, with silver hair, deep-set eyes beneath heavy black brows, a high forehead, and a jutting jaw.  

“Yes, Father,” he replied seeing the priest was even more distinguished looking in his black cassock and Roman collar than in the full colorful robes, the alb of precious lace and the golden Roman chasuble for saying Sunday Mass.

“I’ve been in and out of here several times,” the priest said in a melodious voice.  “Do you know you’ve been asleep on the kneeler?”

“No, Father.”  Devlin looked at his watch in disbelief.  “Is this actually the correct time, 6:17?”

“It is indeed.  Do you remember when you entered the church?”

“I believe shortly after five.”

The priest took Devlin’s arm, guided him up from the kneeler and across the red carpeted floor to the first pew.  Young as Devlin was, he moved stiffly but willingly as if an old man not sure of his muscles responding to the demand.  Once seated in the pew, the priest sat down beside him looking at him thoughtfully.  “Are you troubled, my son?”

“Am I troubled?” Devlin repeated.  He then brushed back his short blond hair, rolled his shoulders to expand his breathing, and said, “In the short time I’ve been in this country what I construed as reality has shaken my foundation.  If that qualifies to be troubled, I believe you could say I am.”

“What pains you, my son?”

“Reality pains me, Father.”

“Such as?”

“I’ve just come from the train station during the Bantu rush hour to SOWETO.”

“What in the world were you doing there?”

“I honestly don’t know.  I was out driving and I just wandered there accidentally.”

The priest grabbed Devlin’s shoulders gently but firmly.  “That is not where you should be.”

“I’ve already been told that.  Then where should I be, Father?  Should I return to utopia where there are no such train stations?”

“Well, stay away from there.”  The priest’s voice lost its melodious calm and became quite stern almost strident.  The color in his Irish face now took on the appearance of a drinker; his white hair seemed to gleam.  He was a little overweight but handsome nonetheless in that Irish way that always made Devlin nostalgic for home.  He could now sense a trace of Dublin in his voice, a place Devlin had only been once, but remembered fondly.  He found himself going to the Irish pubs nursing a dark Guinness beer while drinking in the conversation around the bar against a fiddler playing in a corner.  The dancing voices in the Irish brogue and the knee slapping music were like nothing else on earth. 

Father O’Malley was obviously a missionary from Ireland because the brogue was too thick to have arisen from this culture.  The brogue had tenacity.  He could hear it in his da’s railroad buddies who had never stepped foot on Irish soil, but lived their whole lives hugging the shores of the Mississippi River.  The Irish intonation was always most apparent when the speaker was on the defensive.  He wondered if this was now the case with the priest.

Devlin resented being scolded by the good priest.  He felt like a little boy who had lost his way and wandered into the briar patch when he sought the sanctuary of the church.  This upset him but he felt too much respect for the cloth to express his anger.  Instead he said, “Father, I am one of your parishioners.”

“You are?”

“Yes.  I’m Seamus Devlin.”

“Devlin?”  The priest rubbed his chin with his big hand.  “Devlin, the American Devlin?”  Devlin nodded.  A big smile came on the face of the priest.  Devlin was sure the cash register was kicking in, as Devlin was a thither.  “Yes, I see.  You’ve been very generous to the parish in the short time you’ve been in South Africa.  Have we ever met?”

“No, Father.”

“Not in any of our church functions?”

“No, Father.”

“I’m surprised you don’t take an active role in the parish.”

“Father, I don’t have the time.  I barely have the time to do my own job.”

“And that is?”

“I’m facilitating the formation of a new specialty chemical company.”  Then Devlin told him the details.

“My, my, that is quite a responsibility for someone so young.”

“I’m thirty years old, Father!”  He knew he looked younger and was haunted with this assessment wherever he had worked.  “It was not my intention of going to the train station.  It is where I ended up.  It is my nature to discover the ambience of a place I find myself by wandering around.  It is helpful in my work, and in my decision making.”  He thought he was talking too much and giving out too much information, but he couldn’t seem to stop.  “I feel I have to learn what makes this country tick, and I must say, I’ve experienced some difficulty getting honest answers from otherwise honest people.  I come from the Midwest, Father, to be specific, and we don’t have much patience with pretense and posturing much less rhetoric.”

“I dare say I hear American in your voice but not regionalism. I’ve been to America several times and find people in the East speak differently than people in the West, and people in the Midwest speak differently than people in the South.  It is easier to understand middle westerners because they talk slowly and enunciate their words in that slow nasal drawl that somehow you have escaped.  I don’t know where I would put you.”

Devlin broke into a riotous laugh, forgetting he was in church.  It gave him instant relief.  The priest looked suspiciously at him for the outburst.  “I apologize, Father.  That has been a common complaint.  People have had trouble labeling me.  It is as if defining me is more important than seeing me as I am.  Perhaps I’m an enigma.”  He laughed again, but more quietly.

“Why would you say that?”  The priest was wondering if this young man was high strung or had some basic emotional issues.  Anticipating the priest, Devlin added,

“Why would I confess to that?  Well, I believe the times to be out of sync with reality.   Denial is the sickness of the times.”  He saw the priest was increasingly uneasy.  “Let me explain. 

“I’ve lived in the American South for a few years and was at university the year Brown versus The Board of Education.  This led to the stormy struggle to integrate American schools in the South.  The Voting Rights Act followed, which ensured black voters couldn’t be kept from the polls, yet they were.  Since I’ve left the United States, the Civil Rights Movement that changed the calculus of race relations has led to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

“My observation of the Negro’s struggle for equal rights has been largely from afar.  Iowa, where I grew up, has few blacks.  I didn’t go to school with blacks, didn’t play sports with them, didn’t see them at the municipal swimming pool, in the movie theaters, in the department stores downtown, or even in the baseball stadium.  I only saw a few Negroes at my university 

“Before coming here, I checked the demographics for my hometown and discovered there were about 300 blacks in my community in a population of 33,000.  They were invisible because my eyes had been trained to see past them.  There were 3,000 American Indians in my area, but they were primarily on an Indian Reservation near my home, and likewise invisible to me.  I don’t remember ever seeing an Indian, but I’m sure they were there.

”Now I am in a sea of black people and am in the minority, only here they are invisible as whites have the power. I should see them, acknowledge them, and treat them as equals, not because they are the majority but because they are fellow human beings.  You see, because of this I am disturbed.  Things are out of balance.”

Devlin shuddered as things welled up behind the words, and then he lost it.  He cried, his shoulders shook, his head throbbed, thinking – We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  “Father, I feel such a fraud.”

The priest stood, looked down at Devlin, speechless, totally captivated and troubled by the mood swings of his parishioner, not knowing what to make of this confession. 

“Father,” Devlin said his voice cracking with sobs, “I need help.  I need help to reconcile my mind to this place.  I cannot be myself, the self that has led to this assignment, a self that has never had to play games with its conscience.  I’m having trouble, real trouble.  I wonder if I’m losing my mind.”

“Have you thought of psychiatry?”

“I’m with my priest, Father, with my confessor.  Is a psychiatrist better than my confessor?”

“Well, he’s trained, too.”

“Father, may I ask you a question?” Devlin’s voice cracked.  “I’m an Irish Roman Catholic boy who has tried to live up to the tenets of his faith, but has not prepared himself for what he sees.”  Devlin’s voice choked off into babble, but his eyes spoke clearly.  The priest never looked him in the eye but bowed his head and touched the cross that dangled from the front of his cassock.  

Then Devlin went into a feverish litany of self-justification common to the guilty.  “Before South Africa, I’ve only known my wife, I’ve never drank or smoked or caroused, I’ve only worked.  I’ve studied.”  Then he started to cry again, “I don’t even swear.  I wish I could swear.  I wish I could let loose.  I’m wrapped so tight I feel mummified.  I don’t know whether I feel too deeply or I don’t feel at all.  I need help.” 

Then incongruously, as if totally in control, his voice became level, his shoulders no longer jagged, but were drawn back, as his head rose from his chest to see that the priest looked terrified as if trapped by a dangerous animal.  Disregarding the discomfiture of the priest, Devlin asked, “Father, can I come to see you, talk to you about apartheid?”

The priest looked down at Devlin, horrified.  “Absolutely not!”

“Pardon me?”

The priest’s composure totally regained, he said again, “Absolutely not!”

“And why is that?”

“That is political. I’m not political.”

“You mean apartheid.  You don’t mean ‘that.’  You mean apartheid.  Why can’t you say the word?”  Devlin got up from the pew to tower over the priest.  “As for political, Father, if I’ve learned nothing in my short life it is that no institution is more political than the Roman Catholic Church.” 

The priest ignored this declaration.  “I am a man of God,” he insisted.  “I am your spiritual leader.  I am not a politician.  I have nothing to do with that.”

“But are not Bantu God’s children?”

“Yes, of course they are.”

“Is it right for them to be treated less human, less free than I am treated?”

“Listen, young man, I’m very busy.  It is clear that you are quite disturbed and need help.  You’re babbling and crying and making all kinds of accusations like a spoiled child.  Then you tell me you have this huge assignment.  I frankly feel for your company.  How could you be so outrageously sensitive and do what you do?  That is the puzzle.”

“I see,” said Devlin standing tall and now completely himself once again.

“You see what?”

“I am the way you’re supposed to be, sensitive. I take that as a compliment.”  The priest moved to say something and thought better.  Devlin continued, “You imply insensitivity is a function of corporate success, and it is.  Are you suggesting you have a lot in common with that perverse perspective?”  Before the priest could answer, Devlin added.  “American author Allen Drury in his book A Very Strange Society implies South Africa is a very strange society, but it has been my experience that South Africa has no corner on that market when it comes to my own country. 

“I apologize for losing control.  My senses have been bombarded with more stimuli than apparently my capacity to absorb them.  Then, too, I’m not getting much sleep.  That said it may be of little interest to you but I’m going to share it nonetheless.  It is because of my sensitivity in the present business climate that I have had the success that I have had.  Sensitivity has been a two-edged blade that cuts two ways.  For me, it has cut through some potentially embarrassing problems but it is equally true.  It could just as readily open Pandora’s Box beyond my capacity to cope.  That is my issue. 

“My colleagues deal with people as if they are targets on a dartboard.  I deal with them as persons with immortal souls.  I sense people as I sense you now.  I have a good gauge of fear and doubt because I live with mine, and of complacency which I have no tolerance.  

“It remains to be seen whether my magic will work here as it has elsewhere, but I am certain it won’t if I ignore what I see.”  Devlin was thinking about his visit to the train station.  “If I ignore the draconian practices of apartheid and its detention policy, I cannot do my job consistent with my beliefs. 

“I didn’t come here to see you.  I came for solace.  It was you who came to me.  I came here quite by accident.  I’ve always found solace in visits to the church, always found comfort in prayer, and I like the quiet of the church.  Since you were here, I pleaded with you for help, and the help I sought appears outside your purview.  And so I apologize.”

“You don’t have to get sarcastic.”

“Father, believe it or not I don’t mean to be sarcastic.  I appreciate that you have listened to me.  You are a good listener, and that is a powerful counseling tool.  Where we part company is when you suggest a psychiatrist, when labeling is the quintessential nature of that profession.  By allowing me to penetrate my implacable façade by listening, I have come to better understand it and appreciate yours. 

“My wonder is if you realize in helping me you help yourself.  We shall see.  In any case, Father, I’m going to be back, and I’m going to lay out the things that I’ve experienced before you and have a discussion with you.”

“And if I refuse?”  Father O’Malley was thinking he would quit tithing.  “What will you do?”

“Father, Father!  I will do nothing.  For example, I will not stop tithing.  I will not stop going to Mass and receiving Communion.  I will come back again, and again.  Did I mention that I have a reputation for being intractably insistent?”

“Is that so?”  The priest was doing his level best to hold his temper.  God help me, he thought, I despise this arrogant bastard.  Yes, he is a generous parishioner, the highest thither in the parish, despite many affluent families.  Blackmail is the price of my control.

“Yes, it has been my history.  So, I will be back, more politely I might add, and I promise not to lose it next time.  I will be back because this assignment could be a long one.”

“How long?”

“Possibly a year or more.  I don’t think I could stand it if it were a matter of years.”  Nor I, the priest whispered to himself.

They shook hands and Devlin left in surprisingly good spirits having had his conflicting spirit confronted and exorcized for the moment.  It was a beginning.

*     *     *