Conflict in the mind of clergy
The pew, wooden and cold, was empty except for him and a seventy-five year old woman at the other end. In between were a smattering of prayer books, bulletins and hymnals. It was Tuesday and they both sat in the front row just before the alter… under a statue of the virgin mother and child… he gripped a Bible his father had given him. As he held the book in his grasp his mind drifted and he slowly began to think the thoughts that he tried… desperately tried… to stop thinking. To the normal mind his thoughts were really sort of banal… many might even consider them healthy… but in his head they seemed perverse, dangerous, seedy. He wanted to escape them… to find comfort in the warm candle glow of the alter, but he still sat in a pool of doubt. He was conflicted. He had certain impulses… nothing like the impulses that some of his order had suffered with… but impulses he struggled to understand. He wanted to say things… to teach things… to live things that would get him reprimanded, removed, or possibly defrocked. He wanted to get up on Sunday… in front of his friends and neighbors… good and decent folk… and tell them what he knew… tell them that this building they meet in… this alter they pray to… this wafer they consume… he wanted to tell them that this was all a big play… a show, carefully forged in antiquity by men with control and power in their hearts. He wanted to spill the truth onto the pages of the book in front of him… he wanted them all to know that this was only the redacted version… the version that fit the political purpose of men. He wanted to tell them that they held the truth in their souls… that sin was a myth… that they could live Heaven now… they didn’t have to wait… they didn’t need a priest. They didn’t need him.
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