Bebb said, "That man knows his
history, Antonio. It's his special subject, and he knows it inside and out. He
reeled off a whole list of times and places where he said we'd met before. He
told about the days they had children eight, ten years old and up working in
mines like pack mules maybe twelve hours in a stretch till their pitiful little
bodies were nothing but skin and bones and they couldn't hardly se in the
daylight while people like me went on looking the other direction and preaching
they kingdom come. He told about the days they tore the living flesh off people
with red-hot tongs and broke their legs with hammers because they didn't believe
like they should about doctrine. He went on how those old-time crusaders used
religion for an excuse to rape women and raise hell and how back in slavery
times there was ministers of the Gospel owned slaves just like everybody else
and proved out of scripture it was the way things was meant to be. I don't
suppose there was a single miserable thing anybody ever did in the name of Jesus
that Roebuck didn't spell out chapter and verse before he was done. He enjoyed
it. You could tell from the way he worked his face what a good time he was
having.
"He said each one of those times and places I was there, Antonio, and that's where we met before. He said I wasn't the type that beat the slaves and raped the women and tortured the heretics because I didn't have the balls for it. No, I was the type just closed my eyes to it and helped other people close their eyes to it by telling them a lot of fairy tales about Heaven. This trick eyelid of mine that goes shut on me sometimes without me even knowing about it, Roebuck said you didn't have to be a expert psychologist to explain that. He said that eyelid was a dead giveaway how the only way a man like me can go on believing in Almighty God is by pulling that eyelid down like a window blind between me and all the shit in the world that proves there isn't any Almighty God and never was or will be.
"You take a word like shit, Antonio. A preacher isn't even supposed to know there is those kind of words, and Roebuck, he thought he'd throw me a curve just using it. I said, 'Roebuck, you think I don't know about shit? What you've been telling me about isn't even a millionth part of all the shit there is because you've stuck to just the religious shit, and that's only one kind of all there is because piled up right alongside it there's a million other kinds. You take your big business, your politicians, your high-class colleges like Princeton. You take your haves and your have-nots both, your whorehouses and your W.C.T.U.'s. You take not just your red-neck nigger-haters but your N double A's and your civil rights parades, not just your hard-hat flagwavers but your peaceniks and C.O.'s and love-ins. You take anything people have ever done in this world, and the best you can say about any of it is that it's maybe one part honest and well-meant and the other nine parts shit. If I close my eyelid down on all the shit there is in the world, I've still got to face up to all the shit there is in me, because I'm full of it too, Roebuck. I'm not denying it. And you're full of it. It's the shit in us is part of what makes us brothers, you and me.' I used that word shit to him till it begun to sound like I invented it.
"He caught me by surprise. I caught him by surprise. A preacher talking about things like - Antonio, shit is what preachers have been talking about since Moses except the word they're more like to use is sin. Only Roebuck didn't know that. It shut him up for a minute. Then he said, 'If the world's mostly shit, Bebb, where's God?' Just like that - where's God? As if I could say, 'Look, there he is, Roebuck, He's squeezed into one of those books you got on your shelves. He's out there a zillion miles north-east of the Milky Way. He's catching forty winks over in Alexander Hall till the next Love Feast gets off the ground.' That Roebuck was like a bird floating in the sky asking where's air, only I didn't say that then because I didn't think of it till later.
"I said, 'I'll tell you about shit, Roebuck. Take it from an expert. There's two main things about it. One thing is it's stink and corruption and waste. The other thing is if you don't pile it up too thick in any one place, it makes the seeds grow.' I said, 'Roebuck, God's where there's seeds growing. God's where there's something no bigger than the head of a pin starting to inch up out of the stink and dark of shit towards the light of day.' I said, 'Roebuck, God so loved the world he sent his only begotten son down here into the shit with the rest of us so something green could happen, something small and green and hopeful.'
"Roebuck said, 'I don't even know what you're talking about, Bebb,' but I could see he knew more than he was letting on just like all of us do, Antonio. A man that believes in the Almighty knows worse than he's letting on and a man that doesn't believe in the Almighty like Roebuck knows better, but we all of us know more..."
"I said, 'Virgil, the night is dark, and we are far from home.' How come it was the words of that old hymn popped into my mind just then to say? I don't know, but it did. I said, 'The night is dark, Virgil Roebuck, and home's a long ways off for both of us...' "Who's going to judge which of us has got the farthest way to go through all the shit and the dark?"
(Frederick Buechner, "The Book of Bebb", 351-53)
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