The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(5)
“Never,” Lenson said, skeptically.
“After their investiture the emperoxs don’t tend to bother with the church much,” Prin said. “They have other things to worry about. And so do you, Lenson.”
“So you think I should just chalk up my vision to lack of oxygen.”
“I think you should view your vision as a gift,” Prin said, holding up her hand to calm her advisee. “However it came to you, it inspired you to a life of service in the church, and that’s a blessing to you and has the potential to be a blessing to the church. It’s already been life changing to you, Lenson. Are you happy with the path it’s put you on?”
“Yes,” Lenson said, meaning it.
“Then there you are,” Prin said. “In that sense it doesn’t matter whether it was divinely inspired or the result of a temporary lack of oxygen. What matters is that in the aftermath—and while you did have enough oxygen—you decided to make the church your vocation. So let’s you and I make the most of that, shall we?”
Lenson decided to make the most of it, and plunged into his seminary studies. Some of his early elective classes delved into the mysticism of the Church of the Interdependency, but ironically they were taught in a dry and unengaging style; the church’s approach to what otherwise might be forbidden or apostate writings was not to avoid them but to smother the romance out of them with volumes of commentary apparently designed to put the reader to sleep. Lenson read all he could stand and found his interest draining away, slowly at first and more rapidly as time went on.
Two things were happening to Lenson. The first was, simply, that the day-to-day needs of his seminary and pastoral education were taking an upper hand. The amount of time and interest he could give over to the more esoteric aspects of the church—as little as that eventually turned out to be—was shrinking as he managed the more prosaic topics of service and community engagement and did his time in Xi’an and Hub watching and helping priests and church lay employees tend to their duties, duties that he would one day assume. It was more difficult to stay engaged with the esoterica of one’s religion when one was helping stock candles for services.
The second was that Lenson’s own fundamental, practical nature, passed down to him from his parents through nature and nurture and never fully tamped down even at the height of his religious conversion, slowly and surely reasserted itself, aided rather than dissuaded by the Church of the Interdependency’s mundane aspects. Lenson found that the routine and quiet systems of control the church offered appealed to him and that he moved well within them. Over the course of his years at the seminary he transformed himself in the eyes of his professors and fellow students from an object of curiosity to a model seminarian, one who was marked for his potential for an upward path in the church.
Lenson let himself be carried along in this wave of approbation and affection, in his first postings after his ordination to Bremen (where his parents, after carefully waiting out certain statutes of limitations, had retired, comfortably), and then to his later postings back at Hub, and eventually to Xi’an itself, where in the fullness of time he was made a bishop, with a portfolio for maintaining church services to the poorest of the citizens of the Interdependency—a post that put a premium on the practical rather than the purely spiritual side of the church.
As Lenson, now Bishop Ornill, moved further up and deeper into the Church of the Interdependency, the more the instigating event of his joining the church, the vision of the Prophet Rachela, was demoted in his memory. From a galvanizing moment of conversion, it eventually became a quiet source of faith, then an odd event that had led to a life choice, then a story for close friends in the church, then an anecdote for parishioners and finally a punch line at cocktail parties, where it was dutifully trotted out for new acquaintances when another bishop asked him to recount it.
“It sounds like a beautiful moment,” one young woman said to him, at such a party.
“It was probably hypoxia,” he replied in a charmingly deprecating manner.
In some small corner of his mind, Lenson was aware that it was a shame that his sole moment of religious ecstasy had over time been rationalized down to the residue of a malfunctioning metabolic process, by himself no less than by others. But his response to that small corner was, he thought, a good one: that in place of one misattributed moment of mysticism, he had accrued a lifetime of practical service in a church that served as one of the cornerstones of the most successful and in many ways the most enduring of all human civilizations. The cynical would say that the church, so well integrated as it was into the imperial system, was just another lever of control, but Lenson was also aware that the cynical could afford the luxury of their cynicism because of the stability of the system they mocked.
In short, there was almost nothing mystical about Lenson’s religion, or in these later days, to his faith. But it did not mean his faith was lessened. In fact his faith was stronger than it ever was. But it was not faith in the Prophet Rachela. It was faith in the church that sprang from her, a practical church, designed to endure through centuries and to help the empire that grew up with it endure as well. He believed in the Church of the Interdependency, and its mission, and his mission, within the warm and solid and fundamentally mundane confines of its rule. He was at peace with his practical faith.
It was this Bishop Lenson Ornill who, with all the other bishops of the Church of the Interdependency as could be assembled within the allotted time, sat in the pews of Xi’an Cathedral awaiting Emperox Grayland II, the titular head of the Church of the Interdependency, who had, unusually, decided to address the principals of her church as the cardinal of Xi’an and Hub—which is to say, as the actual head of the Church of the Interdependency—rather than in her more prosaic guise of emperox.