The Unspeakable
Authors: Charles L. Calia
F
OR
B
RENDA
,
C
AMERON
,
AND
C
ASSIE
N
OUS CORRIGEONS LE VICE DU
MOYEN PAR LA PURETÃ DE LA FIN
.
We correct the fault of our methods
by the purity of our ends.
â
PASCAL
Contents
N
ot Lourdes but a church in Minnesota.
Kneeling, a young girl, ten or eleven years old, dressed in white linen, cups her hands in supplicant fashion. Her knees grope along the floorboards of the pew, slight pressure as the cushions give, spreading out, buckling upward. As do her eyes. Drawn to the face of our risen Lord, beardless, hair cropped short and smiling, nothing like the pictures from Sunday school. He looms above her, fingers in the air, the bread of life already broken.
“Do this in memory of me.”
Crossing herself she offers up a prayer with her right hand, sign language, for the girl is deaf; then she gobbles up the remaining host from sight. Crumbs linger, a speck of eternity here and there, but they are quickly licked up by a mouth hungry for salvation.
The Lord again: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. Take and drink. And inherit eternal life.”
Inherit eternal life.
The girl takes the chalice, her eyes fixed on the Lord, who carefully spells out each word, one by one. She fingers the cheap edge of the cup with its stamped pictures of dead saints and apostles, and raises it. A long swallow. The swallow from the desert, parched and dry. A thousand years dry.
The girl crosses herself again, stands, and not more than a few
steps from the altar exclaims with a shrill but damaged voice the good news:
“I can hear!”
H
OLY
W
EEK
, 1991.
I'm sitting in the church where it all began. For several months now I have been receiving mysterious accounts, reports scribbled anonymously on the backs of old church programs, flyers, pages torn from hymnals, and then sent to me through the Archdiocese of St. Paul. Their author is unknown to me. But the reports are all similar. They show one person or another being healed, the lowly, the sick, the afflicted, not by physicians or hospitals but by one man. A priest.
The individual in question, Jim Marbury, possesses no special or mystical abilities that I'm aware of. He cannot read minds, nor can he levitate like some carnival magic act. He cannot raise himself from the dead, not even with the power of God, nor can he calm the storms on Lake Minnetonka or the Sea of Galilee. He knows this; at least, I believe he knows this despite suggestions to the contrary. Many in his congregation actually believe they have been healed of one malady or another by Marbury. Most of these healings have been minor, psychological at best, curing such things as colds and lumbago. But a few of them have defied all known science. At least they claim to.
These healings, always performed at night with a small prayer service, have few of the benefits that modern technology can provide. No cameras are there to record the events. No microphones, no skeptical doctors to perform examinations before and after, nothing but a shared experience. Even the reports that I've received have that fast, almost staccato writing, as though the author was swept in as well, believing what he or she knows is unbelievable. Not that knowing what to believe is always so easy. The real story is often difficult to track down. Documents fade. Witnesses forget or embellish. People up and vanish. My own attempts at finding firsthand the participants in these healings have largely been futile. Part of this I blame on the nature of this congregation, a special voice- and hearing-impaired church located in South Minneapolis. Many of the members are poor, often castoffs from the mainstream church, and they seem to exist on the fringes of the rest of society. Apartments aren't always there. Phone numbers are faked or just don't exist. As for church records, they haven't been updated in years.
Some folks drift off as well. The healed deaf girl, for one, off to Montana or some such place, and the truth along with her. Forget about finding her at school or tracking down her parents. They're gone. None of this surprised Marbury, who knew the conditions here when he accepted the call, or rather begged for it once that he knew that it was available. Several priests have come and gone in the last two years alone, each one telling me exactly how difficult it was to minister. The church was often empty or sparsely attended, and those that did show up sat glassy-eyed and uninterested. Donations, always meager, sunk to new lows. Bills were left unpaid. Heat was turned down in the winter, doors left open in the summer to save on air conditioning. But worse, the gospel began to sound like reading the local newspaper, void of hope, a droning repetition for people that already knew enough of repetition.
And then Marbury arrived.
I began receiving these reports soon after. And not just stories about healings but other stories as well. Stories about people working together, holding baking contests to raise money, and joining painting crews for much needed repairs. Stories too of people praying together, and building something here that before never existed. A real community.
Marbury scoffed when I asked him if he was responsible, not just for the healings, but for it all.
“I'm just a pipeline,” he said, “not the fuel. God's that.”
He spoke in sign language. The language of his church.
“What about the deaf girl?”
“Folks get better. What can I say, Peter?”
And that's how it began.
But this wasn't the real beginning. That started in Iowa when we first met almost twenty years ago. It was at seminary, and Marbury was thrust into my life in the most conspicuous of ways. We were neighbors, living on the same floor. But even back then he was evoking the name of God to wiggle out of his jams, theological or otherwise, spinning us all into mental circles. God, claimed Marbury, quoting the prophet Isaiah, controlled all aspects of life. Light and darkness, weal and woe. As I imagine He controls the whimsy of healing. Prayers are offered, even the laying on of priestly hands. And despite the fact that the hands are human, the voice now silenced, the prayers recited in sign language, people are, remarkably, healed. They are healed, it is said, as a testament to faith. Not in the spiritual world above us, nor even around us, but rather, faith that Jim Marbury, a man who in his youth had the voice of a cool radio disc jockey, lost it so he could hear the word of God more clearly.
For Marbury himself was mute.
Almost five months have passed since he returned from the trip that changed his life and altered his voice and faith irreparably. For better or worse, the doctors who studied Marbury after his ordeal, including the top neurologists and surgeons around, were all stumped. Prior examinations have concluded nothing was abnormal, and even state-of-the-art procedures like CAT scans and MRIs uncovered no physical reasons for his affliction. That Marbury doesn't speak is a given. But not, according to medical opinion, because he can't. His vocal cords and larynx, which pieces everything together, are completely normal, except when Marbury opens his mouth nothing comes out.
The church then, in her infinite wisdom, has concluded that Marbury doesn't wish to speak. Psychiatrists support this claim only
by noting the evidence, that Marbury should be able to say something. That he doesn't seems a matter of volition, whether his own or God's, nobody can say. One idea floated about is that Marbury doesn't speak for political reasons. By portraying himself as a mute priest in an even more silent church he hammers home some metaphor about his congregation, highlighting I suppose the social and economic plight of his flock. An interesting idea and one that I myself might subscribe to if not for one thing. Marbury knows why he is silent and he'll mention it anytime he is asked. God took his voice, he says, presumably because the Almighty needed it more. A nutty idea, made only nuttier by the fact that his congregation seems to agree with him. It was a point that made everyone at my office, my supervisor included, quite nervous.
“Something's brewing, Whitmore. I can smell it. And it stinks.”
The voice was Bishop Anton T. Fellows, D.D., of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, a squat man with an almost supernatural hankering for Cuban cigars who shifted his weight back and forth in his chair like a brass pendulum. We sat and reviewed the documents about Marbury and the healings in his office, but the more the Bishop read, the more disturbed he became.
Finally he said, “You know how that business in Portugal got started. A few kids seeing visions. And now look. Gads, a spectacle.”
Smoke, acrid and dense, clouded his own vision.
“What's next? A gift shop, postcards? You're his friend, you tell me.”
My voice: “A long time ago, maybe.”
“Well, I don't want to hear about his face appearing in the clouds or on the cover of the
National Enquirer,
do you understand me?”
I understood too clearly.
My real job, if anyone actually asked me, would probably sound
like something closer to that of a character out of a Mickey Spillane novel than that of a priest. My official role and title, as a Vicar for the Diocese, assigned I might add by the Bishop for this specific case, requires a variety of skills, not all of them advertised in the job description. Like investigating an old friend. In short, I face problems both theological and practical with Marbury, and my job, at least here, is to uncover the exact details of his affliction, details that if widely known might put individuals or the church at large in an embarrassing, if not compromising, position. Throughout my tenure in this office, now almost fifteen years, I have seen everything the papers in other locales have reported and more. Embezzlement, sexual abuse, infidelities of every kind, committed by both laity and priests. Many of these cases, unknown to the general public, are unknown for a variety of reasons, negotiation and tact only being two, along with a healthy scorn for the press. Scorn that Marbury didn't always seem to share.
“Your work's cut out for you, Peter. He likes reporters.”
The position, as one can imagine, carries with it a certain amount of implicit power, held though not always used, not terribly unlike that of an agent at Internal Revenue. Fear has much to do with that, or rather, the perception of something to fear. For the very fact that I'm investigating means that something is there worthy to investigate. In Marbury's particular case, it's the truth that I'm after. But more than that, a disavowal that he isn't what he's perceived to be by everyone around him. A man touched by God.