‘Are you here alone?’ said a voice beside Robin, who started. The young blonde woman who’d welcomed her at the door was smiling down at her.
‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘my friend was supposed to come with me but she’s got a hangover!’
‘Oh dear,’ said the girl, still smiling.
‘I know, I was a bit annoyed,’ said Robin, with a laugh. ‘She’s the one who wanted to come!’
She’d planned all this, of course: best not to look too keen, too desperate to ask questions; better by far to let her clothes and several hundred pounds’ worth of handbag make their own alluring impression.
‘There are no accidents,’ said the blonde, beaming down at Robin. ‘I’ve learned that. No accidents. You’ve chosen a really auspicious day to come, as well, if this is your first visit. You’ll understand once service begins.’
The blonde walked away, still smiling, as a loud bang to the rear of the temple signalled the closing of the doors. A bell rang somewhere, giving one single deep peal, and the congregation fell silent. The orange-sweatshirted attendants had retreated to standing positions along the walls.
Then, to Robin’s surprise, the first notes of a well-known pop song began to play over hidden speakers: David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’.
The static image on the cinema screen had unfrozen and the orange-clad temple attendants began clapping in time and singing along with the song, as did some of the congregation.
Onscreen, the camera was moving through laughing people throwing coloured powders at each other, and Robin, who’d lived in multicultural London long enough to know, thought she recognised the festival of Holi. The temple lights were slowly dimming, and within a minute the only light was emanating from the cinema screen, where joyful Hindus of both sexes continued to laugh and chase each other, and rainbow colours flew through the air, and they seemed to be dancing to Bowie’s song and personifying its lyrics, each of them a king or a queen who, in this glorious mass, could ‘beat them’, whoever they were…
The film cast flickering, multicoloured lights over the faces of the congregation. As the song faded out, so too did the film, to be replaced by a static image of the Hindu God Shiva, sitting cross-legged with a snake wrapped around his neck, a garland of orange flowers hanging down over his bare chest. A brilliant white spotlight now appeared on the stage, into which a man stepped, and as the brightness had made the surrounding darkness seem so deep, he appeared to have come out of thin air. Some of those watching broke into applause, including all of the beaming attendants, who also emitted a few whoops of excitement.
Robin recognised the man standing in the spotlight at once: he was Jonathan Wace, known to his adherents as ‘Papa J’, the founder of the Universal Humanitarian Church, making an unusual in-person appearance at one of his temples. A handsome, tall and fit-looking man in his mid-sixties, he could have passed in this light for a couple of decades younger, with his thick, dark shoulder-length hair threaded with silver, his large, dark blue eyes and square jaw with a dimple in his chin. His smile was thoroughly engaging. There was no suggestion of bombast or theatricality in the way he acknowledged the applause, but, on the contrary, a warm and humble smile, and he made a deprecatory gesture, as though to calm the excitement. He was clad in a full-length orange robe embroidered in gold thread, and wore a microphone headset, so that his voice carried easily over the two-hundred-strong crowd in front of him.
‘Good morning,’ he said, placing his hands together in the attitude of prayer and bowing.
‘Good morning,’ chorused at least half the congregation in return.
‘Welcome to today’s service, which, as some of you will know, is a particularly important one for members of the Universal Humanitarian Church. Today, the nineteenth of March, marks the beginning of our year. Today is the Day of the Wounded Prophet.
‘This,’ said Wace, gesturing towards the image onscreen, ‘is the kind of image most of us associate with a divinity. Here we see Shiva, the benign and beneficent Hindu God, who contains many contradictions and ambiguities. He’s an ascetic, yet also a God of fertility. His third eye gives him insight, but may also destroy.’
The image of Shiva now faded from the cinema screen, to be replaced with a blurry black and white photograph of a young American soldier.
‘This,’ said Wace, smiling, ‘isn’t what most of us think of when imagining a holy man. This is Rusty Andersen, who as a young man in the early seventies was sent to war in Vietnam.’
The image of Rusty Andersen faded and was replaced by grainy footage of explosions and men running with rifles. Low, ominous music was now playing over the temple loudspeakers.
‘Rust, as his friends called him, witnessed and endured atrocities. He was forced to commit unspeakable acts. But when the war was over…’ The music became lighter, more hopeful. ‘He went home for the last time, packed his guitar and his belongings, and went wandering in Europe.’
The screen now showed a succession of old photographs, Andersen’s hair becoming longer in each one. He was busking on what looked like the streets of Rome; making the peace sign in front of the Eiffel Tower; walking with his guitar on his back through the London rain, past Horse Guards Parade.
‘Finally,’ said Wace, ‘he arrived in a little Norfolk village called Aylmerton. There, he heard of a community living off the land, and he decided to join them.’
The screen faded to black, the music faded away.
‘The community Rust joined was, sadly, not everything he hoped it would be,’ said Wace, ‘but a simple life, living close to nature, remained his ideal. When that first community broke up, Rust continued to live in the cabin he’d built himself, self-sufficient, self-reliant, still dealing with the trauma left by the war he’d been forced to fight.
‘It was then that I met him for the first time,’ said Wace, as a swell of new music filled the temple, now joyous, uplifting, and a picture of Rusty Andersen and a thirty-something Jonathan Wace filled the screen. Though Robin guessed they weren’t too many years apart in age, the weather-beaten Andersen looked far older.
‘He had a wonderful smile, Rust,’ said Wace, with a catch in his voice. ‘He held fiercely to his solitary existence, though occasionally I’d cross the fields to persuade him to come and eat with us. A new community was starting to form on the land, one that centred not only on a natural, but a spiritual life. But spirituality held no attraction for Rust. He’d seen too much, he told me, to believe in man’s immortal soul or God’s goodness.
‘Then, one night,’ said Wace, as the photograph enlarged slowly, so that Rust Andersen’s face filled the entire screen, ‘this broken warrior and I went walking together from dinner at the farm, back across the fields to his cabin. We were arguing, as ever, about religion and man’s need for the Blessed Divinity and at last I said to Rust, “Can you know, for sure, that nothing lies beyond this life? Can you be certain that man returns to the darkness, that no divine force acts around us, or inside us? Can you not even admit the possibility of such things?”
‘And Rust looked at me,’ said Wace, ‘and, after a long pause, replied, “I admit the possibility.”
‘“I admit the possibility,”’ repeated Wace. ‘The power of those words, from a man who’d turned resolutely away from God, from the divine, from the possibility of redemption and salvation! And as he said those astonishing words, I saw something in his face I’d never seen before. Something had awoken in him, and I knew in that moment that his heart had opened to God at last, and I, whom God had helped so much, could show him what I’d learned, what I’d seen, which made me know – not think, not believe, not hope, but know – that God is real and that help is always there, though we may not understand how to reach it, or how to even ask for it.
‘Little did I realise then,’ said Wace, as the music darkened again, and Andersen’s smiling face began to fade from the screen, ‘that Rust and I would never have that conversation, that I’d never get the chance to show him the way… because within twenty-four hours, he was dead.’
The music stopped. The silence in the temple was now absolute.
‘A car hit him out on the road outside our farm. A drunk driver killed Rust in the early hours of the following morning, while Rust was taking an early walk, which he often did, being an insomniac, and a man who thought best alone. Rust was killed instantly.’
Another picture filled the screen: of a group standing with heads bowed, over a freshly dug and covered mound of earth, outside Rust Andersen’s cabin.
‘We buried him at the farm, where he’d found a measure of comfort in nature and in solitude. I was distraught. It was an early test of my faith and, I freely admit, I couldn’t see why the Blessed Divinity would let this happen, so soon after the possibility of Their revelation to a troubled soul like Rust. It was in this state of despair that I set to work to clear out Rust’s cabin… and on his bed, I found a letter. A letter addressed to me, in Rust’s handwriting. After all these years, I still know it by heart. This is what Rust wrote, hours before his death:
Dear Jonathan,
Tonight, I prayed, for the first time since I was a little boy. It occurred to me that if there is a possibility that God is real, and that I can be forgiven, then I’d be a fool not to talk to Him. You told me he’d send me a sign if he was there. That sign has come. I won’t tell you what it was, because you might think it stupid, but I knew it when it happened, and I don’t believe it was coincidence.
Now I’m experiencing something I haven’t felt in years: peace. Perhaps it will last, perhaps it won’t, but even to have this feeling, once more before I die, has been like a glimpse of heaven.