Man at the Altar

A pastor walks into her church one morning to discover a mysterious stranger in her congregation hall. He has some questions to ask her about religion, violence, and the nature of human existence. About 2,700 words.

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“Hello?”

Pastor Loving’s voice rang through the congregation hall. Rows of pews faced forward, towards a stage and empty cross that towered over it all at the back of the church. At the center of the stage was the altar, awash in the building’s dim, orange light.

In front of the altar, a man stood with his back to the Pastor.

“Morning, Pastor Loving,” he said.

The Pastor clutched her binder of prayers and sermons closer to her chest. Her eyes narrowed. Rain pattered against the rows of clear, glass windows on either side of the hall.

“Isn’t it a lovely morning, Pastor? Absolutely lovely.”

The person’s voice was smooth but gravelly and deep but shrill. A line of chills danced down Pastor Loving’s spine. She could not see his face, only his figure. The man at the altar wore a suit, shining shoes, gloves, and a wool cowl, all in black.  She took a breath and steadied herself

“This is private property,” Pastor Loving said. “You’re trespassing. You know that, right?”

“Of course,” the man muttered. “I must recognize my error. And trespassing is not the least of my moral shortcomings, as you will find.”

Pastor Loving swallowed and shook her pale face. “Wh—What?”

“But that is why we have God, yes?” the man said. He opened his arms wide as if to embrace the cross. “As an arbiter of morality?”

Pastor Loving cleared her throat and straightened her back, pulling her binder of sermons tighter against her chest again. She ran her hand through her thin, grey hair. “Look,” she started, “I don’t even know how you got in here or who you are. If you could just turn…around…”

“Interesting,” the man said, lifting his hands over his head and resting them on his neck. The empty cross hung like an enormous crosshair over the stage. “He straightened his hair when he saw me.”

Pastor Loving’s eyebrows furrowed. “Who?” she asked.

The man chuckled. “Pastor Billings. He let me in. A man of your house. He straightened his hair. You ran your hand through yours.”

Pastor Billings. His church protest at the nearby high school, in which he had commanded passersby to “repent or be damned,” had made the local news earlier this week. Pastor Loving had written a paragraph addressing Billings’ actions in her sermon for this morning. Pastor Billings, your protest was heinous, and I think it in the best interest of New—

“Why do we need God?” the man asked.

Pastor Loving shook her head. She shuffled forward, remembering that this speech on Pastor Billings had been her largest worry five minutes ago. Her mind grappled with the question that a hundred voices had asked of her before.

“Because we’re not perfect. I think that anyone who thinks they are perfect is kidding themselves. But God still loves us. And that’s…empowering.”

“All of us?” the man asked.

Pastor Loving nodded, stepping closer to the man. “Yes,” she replied. “I’m sorry if you’re here because of…what Pastor Billings said. I was actually thinking about it and was going to talk about it…actually.”

Still the man did not turn. Pastor Billings leaned on a nearby pew. “Mmmm,” the man muttered. He crossed his arms and looked down at the altar. “Indeed. Pastor Billings did not seem to profess this love for all. ‘Repent or be damned,’ if I recall correctly.”

“Yeah, I’m really sorry about that—”

“Is that not dictatorship, Pastor Loving?”

Pastor Loving stopped. Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed as she stepped away from the pew at her side. She started walking closer to the altar.

“Who are you?” she asked firmly. “Why don’t you turn around?”

“I’m from the high school,” the man hissed. His hand balled into a fist. Pastor Loving inhaled sharply. “And I didn’t come here to waste time explaining who I am. I came for an answer to my question.”

Pastor Loving paused, her eyes wide. She took a step back and leaned on the pew beside her again. “O.K.,” she muttered, taking a shaky breath. The man’s hand relaxed. Other than his head and hands, he still had not moved. Pastor Loving swallowed loudly. “What question, again?”

“Is that not dictatorship?” the figure replied, looking to the vast and empty cross once more. “To force love? To demand love and respect in exchange for entrance to a promised paradise?” He drummed his fingers on the altar. “Doesn’t that make God a dictator?”

“Well,” Pastor Loving started. She took a step forward, looking at her feet in a search for words. “He gave us free will, right? He lets us chose between this and that.” Pastor Loving looked up at the man. “I mean, if not, you’d be right.”

The figure chuckled. “Indeed,” he said. “Free will. But there is only one way into heaven. Love and respect for the creator.”

Pastor Loving’s lips tightened. She stepped forward. “No—“

“Love me or leave, God says. He seems awfully narcissistic, don’t you think? If one should offer to him anything less than love, this free-thinker becomes the target of God’s disdain.”

“Just love,” Pastor Loving said firmly. Through the pattering insistence of the rain on the windows, the persistent chills that danced up and down her spine, and the dark void of a figure that stood before her, she smiled. She walked towards him, reaching the base of the stairs and then extending a hand to the man. Her binders rested in her other hand at her side. “Love. That’s all you need to get into heaven. If you want to come with—”

“Love?” the figure asked. “Love for everyone?”

Pastor Loving swallowed her words. She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Even for those whom God specifically says are abominations in his holy book? Even for those who have everything and yet refuse to give? Even for those who hate before thinking?”

“They’re all just people, doing the best they can,” Pastor Loving said. “Even if they don’t see God’s love, we should love them.”

The figure inhaled sharply. His gloved fingers recoiled from the surface of the altar, twisting into a fist. His breath hissed back into his mouth, and a gust of wind forced the pattering rain against the windows at either side of the hall. “Such rhetoric sounds less like love and more like pity, does it not?”  Pastor Loving opened her mouth to speak. “They just don’t see the light. They’re blind, are they? Don’t they also contain some infinite part of this great complex called humanity?”

“I understand—”

“What about Satan?” the figure interrupted. Pastor Loving searched for words to offer the man, stumbling backwards and glancing at the side exit door to her left. “Should we love him? Because I find myself empathizing with the monster of Frankenstein. I too see Satan in my image. In the loneliness and emptiness outside the heavens.” His gaze remained locked on the empty cross above him. “In the irrevocable isolation of the human experience.”

Pastor Loving waited for the man to speak again. His voice made her heart tremble, and she wondered if it might shatter. Still, she stepped forward again, back to the base of the steps leading to the altar.

“That’s why we need God,” she said, extending a hand to the man. “Because with him, you’re not alone.”

“Hm,” the figure grunted. He looked down at the altar. “Like an imaginary friend whom the child believes he can feel. But we are alone, Pastor Loving. We can understand each other. Empathy does exist. But there is no way to live any life but your own. You are trapped for its duration in the prison of your conscience.” The man lowered his hooded head further, looking at some place behind the altar. “I think the fear of this reality motivated Pastor Billings.”

Pastor Loving started to speak. “I might—”

“What is the value of force, Pastor Loving?”

Pastor Loving’s extended hand fell. She stepped back from the altar instinctively. The twisting winds outside blew the pattering rain against the windows. In the corner of the room, one of the orange lights flickered and went out. The enormous cross faded partially into the shadows. The figure inhaled sharply, a breath like the hiss of snake.

“What?” Pastor Loving asked.

“Can a person live without eventually forcing someone into something? Is there a value in force? In threats?”

“Why are you asking?

“Because that is the schism of your God’s world,” the man at the altar said. He lifted his hidden eyes to the cross, now blended in twilight. “You seem to be of the opinion that forcing people into respect is not proper and does not work. But is that not what government does? We threaten murderers and thieves and terrorists with prison or worse, do we not? It would seem to me that if all people were like you, we should have anarchy.”

“God isn’t a government,” Pastor Loving said, stepping forward sternly. “He’s our father. Even then, if love governed—”

The man laughed a riotous cackle that shook the rafters from which the enormous, empty cross so delicately hung. His shoulders bobbed up and down as he rubbed his hands together and the cackle faded to a chuckle.

“Do you hear yourself?” he said. “You would have a paradise of love. But what is this love exactly?” The man’s fingers twirled like nimble shadows. The rain pattered insistently against the windows around them. “Is it respect? Is it kindness? Is it obedience? What is this love’s value when it is so easily abused?”

“If you can’t find a way to love—”

“What?” the man demanded, his voice reflecting back from the choir’s aluminum stands. “Am I condemned? What about every person who ever fails to love? What about every person who carries grudges and hatred in their heart? Every person who ever uses a forceful tone of voice?” The man pointed his index finger, shadowy and sharp, at something behind the altar. “What about Pastor Billings?”

A surge of tingling horror raced up Pastor Loving’s spine. The blood drained from her face. She stepped back and leaned on one of the pews. Her binders slipped through her fingers. They sank through the air, sailing towards Earth like white, oblong meteorites, and they finally crashed into the floor with a clatter that echoed through the hall and out into the church.

“What—where’s Pastor Billings?”

The man grasped the altar’s edge so tightly that Pastor Loving wondered if he might flip it in rage. “On the other hand, Pastor Billings’s hand, the constant use of force only fuels the isolation that perplexes us. It only makes us feel more alone.”

Pastor Loving’s arms trembled. She walked closer to the man, lifting her foot onto the first of five steps leading up to the altar. The man chuckled.

“‘If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary,’ said James Madison. The American government is founded on this principle, that the force of control will be needed to stop those who would use power to threaten the lives of others.” The figure stepped back from the altar and looked up at the cross again. “Human order cannot exist without the threat of force.”

Pastor Loving inhaled sharply and stepped closer again. She was only five feet from the man when he spoke.

“I’m afraid that, like our government, your religion is a construction, and it is just as fallible as the people who constructed it. But there is a critical difference between the two. Our government was built around a pragmatic understanding of man. Your religion was built around the impossible ideals of a paradise.”

“O.K., listen,” Pastor Loving said, quietly but firmly. The man’s head perked up. “Do you—do you know what Christ has done for people? Do you know the people who’ve been picked up? Their lives have changed! They’re happier, they’re more fulfilled, they’re learning how to love. Do you think that love makes the world worse? Because you’re wrong! Love is all we have, and that’s who I worship, the God of love who teaches me to accept people and let them into my life. I know you’re just being critical, but God makes me critical too. Don’t you get that? We’re the same like that! This church has done a lot of good. And I know God is real! I know he’s out there! And he loves us! HE LOVES YOU!”

Pastor Loving extended a hand to the man at the altar. “If you want that love, just turn around. It’s really life-changing.”

Pastor Loving’s hand dangled in the air. She did not think about how she had raised her voice or the raw, instinctual passion that had lit her from within. But she smiled. She felt the cold air around her, the flickering orange lights above her, and the insistent, angry rain thundering against the windows. Still she smiled. Still she extended an empty, pale hand to the man dressed in black.

The man at the altar turned. Pastor Loving smiled wider. She was about to see his face, about to have his identity as a real, living person confirmed. He was about to extend his hand and take Pastor Loving’s. They would go to her office and he would cry and he would start coming to the service every once and a while. He would meet people he liked, people who made him smile. And they would talk to Pastor Billings together. And finally, the man would be baptized.

The man stepped to his left, his body continuing to turn. Pastor Loving smiled wider and stretched out her hand further. The figure dragged his gloved hand along the surface of the altar as he stepped again in the direction of the side door leading out of the church. Pastor Loving’s smile started to fade as the man walked away. His footsteps clacked on the steps as he descended the stairs. He approached the exit and exhaled, sounding like the wailing wind pounding against the church outside.

Pastor Loving’s arm collapsed to her side with her heart and her dream. The man stopped at the exit, his hand on the doorknob. “Thank you,” he said, “for proving a point.”

The man opened the side door and stepped into the courtyard. The door clicked shut behind him. Pastor Loving watched the man through a window. He left the church, striding past the benches and the puddles and the blowing twisting rain.

Pastor Loving took a deep breath and looked back at the congregation hall. Her lips twisted. Then she looked to the cross overhead. She closed her eyes and prayed for the students who felt hated by Pastor Billings’s remarks, Pastor Billings himself, and finally, the man from the altar. She opened her eyes.

There was a finger sticking up behind the altar.

Pastor Loving’s eyebrows furrowed. She walked up to the altar and saw a couple of fingers there with the first as she walked onto the stage. Her heart thundered in her chest. It knew God was there beside her. It knew that he was watching. It knew that he had to care.

She stumbled backwards, her eyes opening wide with horror, and fumbled for her phone in her pocket. Maybe he hasn’t gotten too far, she thought. Anger roared in her, making her dizzy. Her vision spun and fixed on the empty cross. And her thoughts went to God. How could you? In your house? Where were you? Why didn’t you…

Pastor Loving fainted, and a dull thump echoed up the hall.

Pastor Billings lay on the stage behind the altar. Black marks peppered his neck, his lips a faint blue. His body was stiff, a hand leaning against the altar beside him and raised towards the air. His mouth was open slightly in a choked gasp, locked in his collapsed lungs forever. The bruises around his neck were shaped like the hands of the man at the altar.

His hand reached limply to the void. His dead, bulbous eyes looked to the cross, dangling from the shaky rafters in twilight, which had words imprinted on it, displayed on the plank that was parallel to the floor for the world to see. Est. by Peter Loving, December 25^th, 1920.