A Wandering Star is Born

    It was a Summer revival service. Big tent. Big crowd. When such things were still common in the south. The Old Time Religion held sway over this modern Saul who had in his youthful dissipation lost sight of the image of his god. 

    A brace of preachers were queued on tonight's docket. Local boys who found religion at the end of their hedonistic exploits. A great reputation for invoking the spirit and moving the anxious to a profitable repentance. 

    The boy sat on the edge of his seat, eyeing the young evangelist, longing to ask of him the mysteries of god. Longing to beg at his feet, desperate to feel the divine presence so abruptly lost to the cruel edge of sin and doubt. A boy's faith, stillborn in the birthing, refusing resuscitation, forever drowned and swallowed up beneath the waves of life as lived. 

    The sermon was long, but the preacher kept up an admirable fervency. Hell was on the line. Hell and darkness, a pitch black and lonesome darkness which the boy could already feel seeping into his bones like an oil. A venom. The boy's name was Samuel. 

    The band played as the preacher's tone changed to a somber imploration. "Won't you come??" As the band played: "Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling . . ." And "Do not pass me by . . ." The boy lept from his seat. An offer likely to be withdrawn at any moment had to be seized upon like the offer of an unscrupulous merchant. He knelt and he prayed the words on the back of the card. He fought to read these through tears as he looked up and saw his own Father staring, judging, silently sneering at the emotional efforts of his anxious and burdened embarrassment. His unmanly son. His pensive son. Now crying as a supplicant before the deaf and dumb god of all the world.

    Such a desire, such an aching void, waiting to be filled by the spirit; such a resolve to live blamelessly, such a willingness to sacrifice all, had possibly never existed in such a small frame, and like the hollow of a submarine thrust too far beneath the deep, this boy risked being crushed beneath the weight of god's absence should this god not split the firmament of his stillborn heart and illuminate the blackness of darkness. 

    But this god remained hidden. Samuel means "heard of god," but as Hebrew has no vowels, it may well be Samael, the blind god, or poison of god. Coming to drink the ambrosia of god's fountain, the boy drew a full measure of this poison from the cup of wrath as the blind god laughed on his throne of broken promises, welding his scepter of indifference. The god who retains the power to damn, but not to save. The only god, most immanent god, the boy could ever know. 

    And as he walked away from that tent meeting, trembling in the absence of the divine as a suffocant writhes for want of air, he wandered back to the car. And his soul also beginning to wander, he in that moment hitched his star to the grinding wheels of fate; charting a blind and laborious course in a deeper darkness. A darkness which could be felt.