A Celestial Omnibus: Short Fiction on Faith edited by J. P. Maney and Tom Hazuka

I’ve owned this book for literally thirty years, followed me from house to house, apartment to apartment, through divorce and new marriage. I bought it when I was first started in the ministry at the booth for the bookstore of the Unitarian Universalist Association at the church’s annual convention called General Assembly. It’s published by the denominational imprint: Beacon Books. So why did I never read it? Who can say? Perhaps an eclectic selection of diverse authors, some well-known some I’d never heard of, was never as attractive to me as a collection of stories by a single author or a novel. Why did I read it now? Well, I haven’t, entirely. But I wanted something I had at hand to read in the bathtub last evening after I had finished The Great Gatsby and I thought I would finally dip into this. I read three of the stories in the bath, by three favorite authors. I’ll add more entries to this post as I read more stories.

“Christmas” by Vladimir Nabokov (1925)
A Russian father named Sleptsov has come down from St. Petersburg to his family’s summer home in the country in order to bury his son in the family vault. Nabokov writes, “after having babbled in his delirium about school, about his bicycle, about some great Oriental moth, he died.” Like Nabokov himself, the boy had collected moths and butterflies. It’s winter so the main house is closed up and the father stays in an easier to heat annex. Sleptsov asks a servant to open the main house and he goes into his boy’s room. He looks through his things: a collection of mounted insects, the chrysalis of the “great Oriental moth” that the son had been babbling about in a biscuit tin, some journals. He carries everything back to the annex where it’s warm. The servant has set up a small Christmas tree on a table because it’s Christmas Eve. Sleptsov is in no mood to be cheery and asks the servant to take it away, but he doesn’t. Sleptsov reads through his son’s diary and is amazed to see the breadth of his son’s life, including a crush on a girl that Sleptsov never knew about. Then, Sleptsov hears a crack. The chrysalis has opened. The moth, awakened by the heat of the room, emerges. It crawls up the wall. Slowly it extends its wings and they expand “to the limit set for them by God.”

“The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth (1958)
Ozzie Freedman has gotten in trouble again in Rabbi Binder’s Bar Mitzvah class. They were talking about Jesus and the Rabbi debunked the Christian notion that Mary could have been impregnated by God. Ozzie asks, isn’t it possible for God to do anything? For his impertinence, the Rabbi requires that Ozzie’s mother come in for a talk. When Ozzie tells his mother that evening, she, widowed and harried, slaps him. At class that Wednesday, Ozzie can’t help himself and again offends the Rabbi. He runs from the room, chased by the Rabbi, up from the basement classroom three stories to the roof of the Synagogue and then closes and locks the trapdoor behind him so the Rabbi can’t follow. Then, from the roof, Ozzie sees the Rabbi and the other boys from the class, and later a crowd of people gather below. Ozzie frightens the people (and the reader!) with the possibility that he might jump. Firemen are called. His mother arrives for her appointment with the Rabbi. Realizing his power in the situation, Ozzie makes the people below him kneel. They kneel. He makes them all say that God can do anything, including making a woman pregnant without intercourse. He makes them say they believe in Jesus Christ. He makes them promise that they will never hit anybody about God. They promise. And then he says now he can come down and Ozzie leaps into the net held by the firemen.

“The Celestial Omnibus” by E. M. Forster (1911)
A boy, unnamed, notices a sign at the entrance to the alley across the street from his house with an arrow pointing into the alley and the words, “To Heaven.” His parents dismiss the sign as a joke. Investigating, the boy finds another notice in the alley with a bus schedule that seems to confirm two scheduled stops each day at sunrise and sunset. He gets up early the next morning and exactly at sunrise a horse drawn coach appears. The boy gets in. He asks for a return ticket. The driver introduces himself as Sir Thomas Browne (a seventeenth century physician and free thinker). The coach travels through dense fog, up and up. Finally the mist clears and a rainbow appears that crosses a deep cavern. Wagner’s Rhinemaidens sing in the river below. The coach crosses the rainbow bridge. That evening the boy is back at home. When he explains where he’s been, he’s receives a caning for his lying and is sent to his room. When he’s released, he finds a family friend in the living room, a Mr. Bons. Mr. Bons is skeptical but curious as to how the boy seems to suddenly know about people and art he had not previously been exposed to. To “cure” the boy of his fantasy Mr. Bons says that he will call on him tomorrow afternoon and they’ll go together to the alley at sunset. They go. The omnibus appears again, a different coach and team, this time driven by a “Dan” that we realize is Dante Allegheri. It’s dark and Mr. Bons is frightened. The boy describes all the wonderful people he met, real people and fictional characters. Mr. Bons refuses to believe. When they cross the rainbow bridge the boy steps from the omnibus and is greeted by Achilles who raises him on his shield amid a cheering crowd. When Mr. Bons emerges he falls directly through the rock and is lost. Forster concludes the story with a newspaper death announcement for Mr. Bons whose body was discovered looking as though it had fallen from a great height. Foul play is suspected. He doesn’t say what happened to the boy, but because Mr. Bons was holding the return tickets in his pocket we assume the boy is still in the magic world.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.