Pastor Pasture is a traveling revival speaker, a circuit man of the cloth who drives around the West in a faded blue 1990 Ford Econoline van, sharing his good news with those who are eager or just curious. One fine evening he had rented the social hall of the Warhaven Care Center and delivered his homily to a gathering of about 150 souls with faith for a Great Awakening. Pete and Sheila were there at Pete’s urging. He was one of the curious.
“I just want to hear what another P squared (Pete Petrovich, Pastor Pasture, they have this in common) has to say about the meaning of life and the world of faith.” Pete was Greek Orthodox, but respected Protestant perspectives for their liberations. Sheila was one of those practical agnostics yet was always interested in what the divinely faithful had to say.
Pastor Pasture appeared in a red plaid sports coat, white jeans, and gray Hush Puppies. He was a tall and gangly young man with bright, wavy, nearly white, blond hair. His face bore the pock marks of serious teenage acne. His eyes were pale. When eye contact was made, he gifted you with his sincere yet understated Mona Lisa smile.
Some of the highlights of his wisdom that evening include the following passages as recorded by reported Molly Marian Umtuck for the Warhaven Printed Plowshare:
“God did not make money. Man made money, our species’ symbol for value, for wealth, aye, for materialistic meaning. There’s a good chance that you are here because you think I will crack the hull to expose the nut, the marrow, the spiritual meaning of our lives. Sorry, neighbors! Life is not so simple as one circuit preacher pontificating on his or her personal truths.
“God did not create symbols. Man created symbols to represent the ideas, the ideals, the concepts the species thought about and dreamt on. Can you grasp the import of your own personal dreams and the symbols within? That is YOUR hard work of worship!
“What’s left? Well, God created humans and he gave us brains and we have used them. We created addition and algebra and calculus. Yet we invented murder and war as well. How does that balance on the fulcrum of life? Do poetry and symphonies and murals shift the balance? Sorry, neighbors! If only we had God’s slide rule or abacus on this urgent matter!
“Nothing can excuse us — either with or without the Garden of Eden — for the slipshod management skills we have honed, we must own as we step to the table of the Earth and the Milky Way. Cosmically we bring a frailty to the table, a nearsightedness, a severely short attention span.
“Your salvation is simple: Kindness. You must exercise kindness.
“Be kind remembering atrocities. Be kind remembering your hypocrisies.
“Oh, we human beings may be prone to lie, to glorify the depravity, to highlight the blemish, to civilize the contemptible. We may seek to steal and to cheat, to claim what we perceive as rightfully ours, to lead our enemies to squander their larder, their spirits, their wives, to covet their rewards and climb to the heights and conquer their guarded personal ant hills.
“Yes, our frail human condition can lead to perdition. Our heads may swell of heaven, but our compass points to hell, yet if you embrace the route toward Christian agape, this unconditional love of demonstrated kindnesses, this fountainhead of charity, grace shall right one’s course.”
Throughout his speaking Pastor Pasture stood calm and straight forward, neither gesticulating for drama nor thumping on the lectern-turned-pulpit for righteous emphasis.
“As individuals, we are alone. While we desperately seek to get off the island, we struggle to learn the currents and the tides about us and to learn to fearlessly swim, to gather a faith in the future … to keep the depths below us and fathom out through the unknown by way of risk-taking, hoping, and living purely for survival. All else will follow.
“The Founding Fathers may have considered us ‘The Mob,’ a roiling, single, ignorant organism, rolling and tossing about by the weather and the rum and gossip. Not so! For every one of us here is unique in composition and comportment. Any team or committee may act with a single resolve or one voice — BUT — but each one with its private, solitary voice of motives, desires, frustrations, blindness and deafness, with our special apathies and ambiguities must submit to the steering of a single rudder toward a single shore. Pretty daunting, this surrendering to kindness.”
When the hat had been passed, the take was about $1,200. Fifty percent went to the speaker, and a little less than half of that amount went to the Care Center. The remainder he donated to the Sisterhood of Kindness through the DuMont Foundation to use as that benevolent group saw fit.
Following the benediction and closing hymn, Pastor Pasture, at his own expense, served raspberry newtons and sweet tea, eagerly chatting and graciously listening to stories for the next three quarters of an hour.
The City Council is a work of fiction, written by Jim Tindall, appearing every other week in Columbia Gorge News.
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