Congregations

From the novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich.

"What is the whole of our existence," said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, "but the sound of an appalling love?"

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

"But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God's love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God's love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

"Divine love may be so large it cannot see us. Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

"Oh my friends. . ."

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

"I am like you," said Father Damien to the snakes, "curious and small." He dropped his arms. "Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope that I will learn the secret of whether I am loved."

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

"If I am loved," Father Damien went on, "it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace."

From the novel The Siege of Krishnapur, by J.G. Farrell

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

At the church, there was more feverish activity; a difference of opinion was taking place because the Collector had ordered food, powder and shot be stored in the Church; the Padre and some members of his congregation were entertaining serious doubts about the propriety of this. But while the more spiritual were entertaining doubts, the military were shifting the stores. He watched the great earthenware jars containing grain, rice, flour and sugar being carried into the Church and arranged in rows at the back.

The Padre was dismayed that his authority, which ought to have increased at this time of danger, had instead melted away. Even when he had taken the Sunday evening service in the expectation, at such critical time, of finding it full to capacity, he had found himself with a congregation of a mere half a dozen, all ladies.

He had intended beforehand, picturing to himself a large and anxious congregation, to preach a comforting sermon on a text from the Psalms. But seeing that a mere handful of worshipers in the empty, echoing Church, he had been seized by righteous anger and had preached on the theme: ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.’

As he continued to talk, somewhat at random, the conviction slowly gained on him that he was delivering his sermon not to the half dozen ladies in front of him but to the ranks of great earthenware jars at the back of the Church. They crouched there in their shadowy pews, perfectly motionless. He pleaded with them to listen to the Word of God, but they made no answer, Ignoring the ladies, who were becoming uneasy, he tried again and again to formulate the one elusive argument that would win over those dim, sinful ranks of jars, But they remained deaf to the exhortations which echoed round their stony ears.

Not as bad as Talking to a Brick Wall.