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 at the booth for the bookstore of the Unitarian Universalist Association at the church’s annual convention called General Assembly when I was first started in the ministry. It was published in 1997 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 pick 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.

The stories are grouped under headings covering different aspects of faith.

MYSTERY

“Christmas” by Vladimir Nabokov (1925)
On Christmas Eve, 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.” The main house is closed up so 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 son’s belongings and then carries several things back to the annex. Sleptsov reads through his son’s diary and is amazed to see the breadth of his son’s life. Then, Sleptsov hears a crack. A chrysalis his son has kept in a biscuit tin has opened. A moth, awakened by the heat of the room, emerges.

DOUBT

“The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth (1958)
Ozzie Freedman has gotten in trouble again in Rabbi Binder’s Bar Mitzvah class. 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 slaps him. At class that Wednesday, Ozzie again offends the Rabbi. He runs from the room, chased by the Rabbi, up 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, sees a crowd of people gather: the Rabbi, his fellow students, his mother, fireman. Ozzie frightens the people (and the reader!) with the possibility that he might jump. Realizing his power in the situation, Ozzie makes the people below him kneel. He makes them all say that God can do anything. He makes them say they believe in Jesus Christ. He makes them promise that they will never hit anybody about God. Then he says he can come down and he leaps into the firemen’s net.

THE SUPERNATURAL

“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 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 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. 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. Mr. Bons is frightened. The boy describes all the wonderful people he met, real people and fictional characters. 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. 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.

“The Silver Crown” by Bernard Malamud (1972)

A high school biology teacher named Albert Gans is frustrated that the best medical doctors are unable to save, or even diagnose, his dying father. By chance he runs into a girl in the Bronx passing out business cards. She’s advertising a faith healing service provided by her father, Rabbi Lipschitz. Albert visits the Rabbi and is told that the for a price the Rabbi can make a silver crown that will cause a miracle cure. Albert doubts. Most of the story is Albert searching for certainty and the Rabbi encouraging faith. Albert comes back and orders the crown. Immediately he feels swindled. He comes back the next day, The Rabbi’s apartment is closed, but a different Rabbi, holding a Shabbat service in the storefront underneath the apartment explains that Lipschitz attends a different synagogue far away, and being Shabbat, he has to walk. Albert waits. At midnight the Rabbi appears. Albert demands to see the crown. It’s a mystical crown so the Rabbi has nothing to show him but he insists it’s made and working if Albert will simply believe. Angry about the whole episode, Albert curses his father and says he hopes he “croaks.” And the next day, of course, the father dies.

RECONCILIATION

“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver (1981)

A woman arranges for a visit from an old friend, a blind man she used to work for. The husband is initially uncomfortable, but the men eventually bond when they draw a cathedral together on a piece of grocery bag paper in response to a TV documentary.

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.