Father Jaime doesn’t like to converse directly with the Angels.
He has been taught how to do so using LSD. Pope John Paul did acid lying on a marble floor in the Vatican. It was how he commanded the Church from great heights, and it was very fine. Some of Father Jaime’s fellow priests are all about the Angels, and often move up quickly in the Church, while having creepy, weird problems. It goes against his grain to mooch off other people’s dimensions of Angels in the constant work of visions. They don’t really shine in the Church. So he pushes the Angels into the people, and his congregation is rich and full in the normal circuits of power.
The Indios of his native Mexico do a lot of work with those poppies. They know all about the flowers and how to use them to move into the Aztec worlds and the deep self’s past lives and the currents of time, backwards and forwards, and how they move from one lifetime to the next. Other lives are lived in concert with a life of power and they must have their precedence in some ways.
Their training, also.
It is not good to be always looking at the spirit world unless you are destined for it.
He knows he is an Aztec soul and that the Church is a compromise he has taken on partly for advancement in the world. It was his only way out of working in the fields and being poor. But it is also who he is.
He plays it straight up. He knows it is better, really, for people to focus on their own regular lives in the Church. If you have not solidified your destiny in your own religion, you do not have a leg to stand on in any Angel world anyway.
But he does occasionally hear the Angels calling him into their world. It involves a rearrangement of destiny. Most of the time it is not really appropriate to alter the course of a life, even to escape death. God is in command, and not a sparrow falls but God can see its suffering. This is something Father Jaime does know.
He can sense an Angel working in this situation of the crazy girl and her sad mother. Angels are often trapped in the meandering and intense soul images of the insane. It is no matter, but it will be bigger because of the trip wire of that old sailing club with the documented poltergeist activity. It is usually an ambient static of Bayonne’s past. He hopes it will stay that way.
He is not sure what is going to happen with the old ghost tribes in this new era of acid, Santeria, and graveyard summonings. There is reason in numbers. This was the witchcraft of the year 1000, newly returning in 2000. The millennium conjuring that was built by humanity and endowed with a vision and power from God who is a giant human-built machine that works. If enough humans decide to do a certain thing called change God they are able to do so and enforce it with considerable power.
Father Jaime thinks that Sandra will make the entire journey of investigating all of these witchcrafts, as has he, and in the end, will conclude that the best thing to do is the reasonable course of action, and that is a moderate return to the Church along with a good treatment regime of psychiatry for her daughter.
He goes into the Chapel to arrange this course of action with the Virgin of Guadalupe. That is who is in command of all matters involving the witches.
As he stands before her, another voice beckons from the shadows. It is St. Henry himself and the German ancestors who built the church.
This is a wing of the church that seldom achieves anything, though it does have an automatic energy functioning that often can fend for its own.
Father Jaime doesn’t have as much pull with it as he would like, but he is the parish priest and it is necessary for him to encourage things in a certain way. The old saint is in the dust at this point, not walking the streets with a pair of numchuks like Santa Marta. He will never rise and this world isn’t about the fineries of the human society in the Catholic life. There aren’t the prayers and the holidays and the feasting that such a saint would require to really shine for people in the routine and ordinary uptick in the life of the parish — not the brash and fiery miracles of the chicken sacrificers of the ATR.
It is part of the distant past of the Church, and, to tell the truth, these works were stolen from Odin, and once the old pagan witchcraft of Germany was beaten back far enough, it was no longer possible to blow out the lights and strike the fairy cursers of cows. Christianity is a world of the metronome, not the drumbeat, and it bestows dignity and civilization, with an assured place in heaven for its devotees, and Father Jaime knows that this is what Sandra should really be about, not peering into death worlds of uncertain allegiance and inadequate discipline with Voodoo and psychics. She could lose her own soul, not just the mind of her daughter.
Father Jaime goes to the altar of St. Henry and dusts off a candle slot. Crossing himself, he secretes a candle from the altar of St. James, and places it on that of St. Henry and lights it. Whooosh! The Saint blazes into wakenness and looks down on him, an uncertain presence, naked, raw, yet seemingly interested in achieving his innate capacity in this new era of NUMCHUKS, ANYONE? Especially for the descendants of his darlings who still flock to his Church.
He is a canonized and much-revered Saint, and has the scaffolding of a strait-jacket of delicate expectations. He is supposed to bless all of this beauty and to hold himself in a certain restrained dignity. He is not supposed to leap around in the joyous vitality of Papa Legba, sipping rum, lapping up candles a foot in the air, and powering lottery tickets.
Father Jaime is familiar with the procedure whereby a Saint suddenly flares up and causes miraculous healings, then falls flat, and the petitioners become embarrassed, defensive and angry. It is often fraud but sometimes not.
And usually not stable.
And always, to Father Jaime’s taste, a fiasco that brings out the worst in a parish. Do we need a souvenir shop? The people of Bayonne can hardly make ends meet as it is. In the former days, before this newfangled SNAP card reload, the offering plate often came in with a handful of food stamps.
It is the constant movement of flickering, intention, revelation, and blessing that are the hallmark of a reasonable Saint relationship, and if St. Henry is going to play that game, Father Jaime is all for it.
So he goes into the storeroom and begins loading the parish’s principal Saint up quietly with candles, at night when no one can see, but gratified that he is finally “in” with the deep worlds of Bayonne.
NOTE: The earlier chapters of this novel can be found at the Friothusibu Yacht Club Novel web site.
Steam Spiegel 