Two weeks after his arrival in Simití Josè conducted his first services in the ancient church. After four years of silence, the rusty bell sent out its raucous call from the old tower that still morning and announced the revival of public worship.
As the priest stepped from the sacristy and approached the altar his heart experienced a sudden sinking. Before him his little flock bowed reverently and expectantly. Looking out at 77 them, a lump rose in his throat. He was their pastor, and daily his love had grown for these kindly, simple folk. And now, what would he not have given could he have stretched forth his hands, as did the Master, to heal them of their ills and lift them out of the shadows of ignorance! Ah, if he could have thrown aside the mummery and pagan ceremonialism which he was there to conduct, and have sat down among them, as Jesus was wont to do on those still mornings in Galilee! Instead, he stood before them an apostate vassal of Rome, hypocritically using the Church to shield and maintain himself in Simití while he reared away from her the child Carmen.
Yet, what could he do? He had heard the call; and he had answered, “Master, here am I.” And now he was occupying, while waiting to be led, step by step, out of his cruelly anomalous position and into his rightful domain. A traitor to Holy Church? Nay, he thought he would have been a traitor to all that was best and holiest within himself had he done otherwise. In the name of the Church he would serve these humble people. Serving them, he honored the Master. And honoring Christ, he could not dishonor the Church.
Josè’s conduct of the Mass was perfunctory. Vainly he strove to hold in thought the symbolism of the service, the offering of Christ as a propitiation for the world’s sins. But gradually the folly of Milton’s extravagant, wild dream, which the poet clothed in such imperishable beauty, stole over him and blinded this vision. He saw the Holy Trinity sitting in solemn council in the courts of heaven. He heard their perplexed discussion of the ravages of Satan in the terrestrial paradise below. He heard the Father pronounce His awful curse upon mankind. And he beheld the Son rise and with celestial magnanimity offer himself as the sacrificial lamb, whose blood should wash away the serpent-stain of sin. How inept the whole drama!
And then he thought of Carmen. He had seen her, as he looked out over his people, sitting with Doña Maria, arrayed in a clean white frock, and swinging her plump bare legs beneath the bench, while wonder and amazement peered out from her big brown eyes as she followed his every move. What would such things mean to her, whose God was ever-present good? What did they mean to the priest himself, who was beginning to see Him as infinite, divine mind, knowing no evil––the One whose thoughts are not as ours?
He took up the holy water and sprinkled the assemblage. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” But how is the human mind purged of error? By giving it truth. And does the infinite 78 mind purge the thought of men in any other way? His mind was full as he took up the Missal. “Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison.”
He hesitated. With a tug he pulled his mind back to the work before him. But why was he invoking clemency from One who knows no evil? Heretofore he had always thought that God knew evil, that He must recognize it, and that He strove Himself to overcome it. But if God knew evil, then evil were real and eternal! Dreamily he began to intone the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. All hail, thou infinite mind, whose measureless depths mortal man has not even begun to sound! His soul could echo that strain forever.
He turned to the Lesson and read: “But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.” He stopped a moment for thought. The Lord God! The mist of error watered the false thought––the one lie about God––and out of it formed the man of flesh, the false concept which is held in the minds of mortals. Aye, it was the lie, posing as the Lord of creation, which had formed its false man out of the dust of the ground, and had forced it upon the acceptance of mankind! Josè turned back and read the whole of the first chapter of Genesis, where he felt that he stood upon truth.
The tapers on the altar flickered fitfully. The disturbed bats blundered among the rafters overhead. Outside, the dusty roads burned with a white glare. Within, he and the people were worshiping God. Worship? This? “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” In Truth!
Josè recited the Nicene creed, with the thought that its man-made fetters had bound the Christian world for dreary centuries. Then, the Preface and Canon concluded, he pronounced the solemn words of consecration which turned the bread and wine before him into the flesh and blood of Christ Jesus. He looked at the wafer and the chalice long and earnestly. He––Josè de Rincón––mortal, human, a weakling among weaklings––could he command God by his “Hoc est enim corpus meum” to descend from heaven to this altar? Could he so invoke the power of the Christ as to change bread and wine into actual flesh and blood? And yet, with all the priestly powers which Holy Church had conferred upon him, he could not heal a single bodily ill, nor avert one human misfortune!