Epistle to the New Age

Saint, Silas and I were at the back of the hall behind the stage with no one around and only a couple of smoky torches for light. Silas and I were busy counting the money while Saint was copying out names to put in the Rolodex.

Suddenly, like out of nowhere, the strange little woman reappears. She clutches at Saint's arm. 'I saw you at Lystra.' She had no accent at all, to my ear anyway. Yet she was certainly not Greek. 'I saw you heal the man with the crippled foot.'

'I know.' Saint was very calm. 'I saw you, too. Sit down, Madam. Timmy, give her your seat.'

'I'll stand.' She stared at Saint, eyes like inflamed egg yolks. 'Wherever you heal with faith, there I am. Or try to be. It isn't always easy to get through.'

'Where there's a will there's a way – as He said.' Saint's lack of curiosity about who she was – not to mention from where – should have clued me in that he was on to what I came to think of as the phantom phoney folks. After Philippi, there were a lot of them, particularly on important occasions. Odd. I haven't seen one for years now except for Chet. No, that isn't quite true.

Last month, I met one who was doing a study of Saint's correspondence. He tracked me down in the New Star Baths across from the proconsul's palace. He was very nervous and wore what I now know from the television were glasses and a hearing aid. 'I can't believe it,' he kept saying. We were in the tepidarium, never crowded at that hour. He was holding a folder in one hand. 'What have you got there?' I asked.

'New versions of Saint Paul's letters to Timothy. You . . . you . . . you must be Timothy.' Like a shepherd the man was aquake with awe while his hearing aid buzzed at me like a locust announcing a plague of same.

I took the letters from him. They had been typed up in Greek like the newspapers you see on television. I recognized some of our correspondence, with all of Saint's complaining and advising. Then I came across a very peculiar letter where Saint recalls his activities with Mossad and some of the early anti-Christian plots that he had been a part of, including arson at a certain well-known hostelry in downtown Jerusalem. 'He never wrote me about this,' I said. 'And besides, that was long before he saw the Light.'

'Are you sure, Saint Timothy?' The man gave me the chills, even in the tepidarium.

'I should know what he wrote me even when sometimes he didn't bother to mail it but had it copied and spread around the churches.'

'But our computer analysis, always correct, with a four per cent margin of error, clearly shows that this was written by Saint Paul . . .'

Then the man was gone as quickly as he had arrived from nowhere. He will be back. I'm sure of that. Why?

Now – back to Philippi and the little lady in black who said, 'Do you not agree with me, Saint Paul, that illness is simply a manifestation of a weakening of mind?'

'All things are contained within the single mind of the One True God in his three aspects.' Saint could dispense this sort of absolutely seamless theology while taking apart and reassembling a complex Rolodex machine, which is exactly what he was doing. He was a lousy tent-maker but when it came to any office equipment that involved paying customers, he had digital dexterity in spades.

'I study you every chance I get,' she said. 'Which is not as often as I'd like because I must make myself ill first, which goes against my whole nature, a perversion really, of mind itself. But I have no choice. That is why I deliberately fill up on Welsh rarebit, which I detest. Then I sleep and dream, horrid dreams of olden times filled with hideous people and ghastly smells,' she was staring with revulsion at Saint's tunic. Time to burn it, I duly noted. 'Then suddenly I am in the Holy Land, where I behold you in the act of healing through Right Thinking, and it is worth the rumbling bowels, the acid indigestion, the horrendous hangover next day because, in addition to Welsh rarebit, let me confess that I imbibe gin neat or even, sometimes, as now, a gin daisy, a tasty cocktail if one were not, as I am, temperance.'

'So, drunk out of your skull, Madam, you are transported to me, here in the olden, golden times. I am flattered. What is a gin daisy?'

'Three parts gin to one part Cointreau, and a maraschino cherry. Oh, it is vile.'

I realize now that this was my first significant encounter with one of the kibitzers, as Saint called them. When I asked him why they should want to . . . to kibitz, he would change the subject. He did warn me not to take anything they said seriously. This was easy since during our travels we must have met every freak in the world and they were all a kind of blur to us. Besides, who listened? After all, we were, to be blunt, in show business and there was a lot of classy competition in those days, particularly when it came to miracles, the heaviest part of anybody's act.

The lady in black had seen our Lord only the one time when he raised Lazarus from the dead. 'Oh, I had to be there for that caper. Because it proved my point perfectly. You see, Lazarus was not dead because there is no death. As death is bad and God is good, and if God is everything and everything is God, then death cannot exist.' Well, I've heard dumber arguments, and in our own church, too.

'Madam, Lazarus was dead as a mackerel.' Saint was smooth, fingers busy with the Rolodex.

'No. He may have looked to you like the proverbial mackerel but that was only his appearance. There is the appearance of death as there is the appearance of evil but these appearances are inside the viewer when he has been thinking wrong thoughts, negative thoughts, though they don't exist outside, where God . . .'

'Three parts of gin to one of vermouth?'

'Cointreau. I'm getting a headache now, and I'll soon be taking the channel-boat home. So I must be quick. I had no time at Lystra to ask you if you don't agree that it's all in the mind? Bad living, bad thoughts, death, illness . . .'

'Mind is God. God is mind, of course, dear lady, of course. But to be mackerel-defunct is the exact opposite of being merry-grig funct and so . . .'

The lady clapped her hands, eyes aswim with tears. 'You agree! I knew you would. I've based so much of my work in the lab on this higher knowledge that I am eager for your scientific validation. You see, I am, through God, a scientific healer not of souls but of minds. I am, I like to think, as strictly scientific in my approach as He was that day with the mackerel named Lazarus. Because, dangerously overweight or not . . .'

'Lazarus.'

'Jesus. Our Lord. Such a pity. The first of all doctors and healers cannot heal himself. Fat as a butterball. Bad colour. Short of breath. Naturally, he was obliged to live as a human being. But why gorge on codfish cakes? Scrod? Boiled beef, baked beans, Indian pudding?'

'Dishes not native to Palestine, I fear . . .'

'Scrapple. Whatever . . .'

'Halvah was a weakness of our Lord. A kilo of mashed beans with olive oil was also a favourite – usually as a pre-sermon snack. Give him the carbohydrates and he'd let the proteins go. Naturally, he was a martyr to flatulence. Even after he was dead when we met on the . . .'

'I know the story.' She cut Saint short. 'There is no death. It is all in the mind.' She gave a loud belch; turned pink with embarrassment. 'Oh, dear. Forgive me. The Welsh rarebit is repeating.'

'I had not finished,' said Saint mildly. 'Let me tell you His own words to me on the freeway. Although a ghost, he looked just as he did in life except for a certain tendency to let the light shine through him. "How," he asked me, "can I, at this weight, be a convincing Holy Ghost?" Well, I took the bull by the horns and said, "Look, there's been talk of splitting you up into three parts – dad, son, ghost. Now if you were to be in the three sections . . ."'

The lady gave a terrible cry. 'I hate this! I'm nauseated. Presently I shall be nauseous as well. Three parts . . .'

'Of gin to one of Cointreau. You've told me twice now. Anyway, I told Jesus, straight from the shoulder, that although this new doctrine was only on the drawing board, for his own peace of mind he could still go off to Gaza to this fat-farm, run by an old pal of mine from Mossad, Ben Hur. You remember him? How he beat the Roman in the chariot race by cheating? Well, he's now in the fat-farm business and, get this! health food, too. Ben swears that a gramme of marinated locusts and dried goat-dung a day . . .'

The lady gave an eldritch scream. 'My card,' she added, opening her reticule and withdrawing a calling card, which Saint took just as she vanished with the mournful words, 'Oh, my head!'

'I'll bet she has a hangover to end all hangovers. Cointreau with gin is a killer.'

'What's her name?' Silas was moderately interested.

'Mary Baker Eddy,' Saint read from the card. 'She's pastor of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, wherever that is.'

'Spain,' said Silas, who had travelled quite a lot. 'Is this the same Christ as ours?'

'I doubt it. But I do think we're in for a lot of copyright infringements.'

Automatically Paul put her name on the Rolodex. As he used to say, you never know who's got the money. 'It's tough trying to hang on to a trademark. James-brother-of-our-Lord even went so far as to hire this smart Jew lawyer in Rome who specializes in copyright cases but, so far, all he's been able to do is collect a large fee every quarter. James-brother-of-our-Lord is a schmuck because the problem is not how do you copyright the word Christ, which you can't, but the cross as logo, which you can. Of course Pauline Christianity might be easier to copyright but,' Saint whinnied happily, 'that would be sacrilege, wouldn't it?'

Silas and I then jumped him, tore off his tunic, and burned it by the Ferris wheel. Then we dumped the howling Saint into a nearby river.

Thus it was that we established the church at Philippi, in the presence of Mary Baker Eddy of Boston, Spain.

© Gore Vidal, 1990