The minister paced. He was eager to get it done with. An unlikely contender: old, with a crinkled neck; tall, but horribly thin now with the muscles shrivelled. Hands, liver-spotted, trembling and stiff all at once. But life still knocked within. He felt it now, amplified by anxiety. His feeble heart thumped soft as a pigeon's coo. Gentle and excitable as his watering blue eyes. He pulled the cigarette out from his lips and crushed it into the pavement with his brogue shoe.


The boy was late.
The street was empty. Full of early morning silence as the sun crept over the far off hills. At last there was the clapping of the feet upon the paving, echoing from blank bare walls of concrete and brick. Approaching, faint at first but nearer and nearer, promising relief and hope if only momentarily. Until the boy arrived breathless before him, and the minister's worry melted as he looked down into the bright cherubic face.

The boy smiled.

“Sorry I'm late,” he said. His large alert eyes were also anxious.

The minister smiled and ruffled the boy's fine blonde hair, forgetting what was to come. What must be.

“That's okay,” he said. “I appreciate your coming at all.” No-one else would, he thought. Then he remembered, and his bowels tightened. He saw the boy's anxiety return with his own and realised that he had to at least appear brave for the child's sake. He sucked in a deep breath and straightened to his full imposing height. “Well,” he said. “Let's go give 'em what for, eh?”

The boy took the minister's bible dutifully from his trembling hands. He saw that the black leather cover was glossy with nervous sweat. Silently, reluctantly, together they marched into the community hall.

The seats were mostly empty. There was a poor turnout. The minister had expected it, and was grateful. He tried not to look at his opponent, a muscular youth keen and energetic, flexing beneath a tight white laboratory coat he'd grown too big for. Contrasting the minister's traditional black apparel. His opponent seemed practiced. But most discouraging was the youth's corner man. An older man who appeared the same age as the minister, half hidden in the gloom beyond the perimeter of stark light which bathed the bright white canvass of the ring. The minister could hardly make out the mysterious figure. He saw only that he was certain in his movements, mechanical in his arranging of buckets, water bottles, towels, and an arsenal of thick, threatening volumes on a trestle table near the light's edge.

Courage, he told himself.

He tried to propel himself sportingly up into the ring. But the ropes that defined the border proved more elastic than he had supposed. He ended up staggering back again. A bald man in the front row, a fat sweaty man with an idiot's face, opened his gaping maw and laughed loudly as the minister crawled awkwardly under the bottom rope and slid himself into the light's stark circle. Panting, dragging his belly across the cold canvass like a wounded animal over snow. It was humiliating. His opponent smiled gleefully at the foreshadowing of faith's annihilation.

The fat idiot in the front row chortled, mindlessly pressing popcorn into his insatiable gob. The minister saw the light reflecting off his greasy chin. Who is the spectacle here, he wondered? Which one of us is pathetic? With renewed dignity and determination he slowly raised himself up; kneeling, then standing, then sitting gratefully on the wooden stool that his corner man - the boy - had placed in his corner ready for him.

The bell rang too soon. The minister had hardly recovered his ragged breath. His body yelled that he should remain seated, but the child patted his arm reassuringly, and the minister was up, facing his opponent who was now stripped to the waist. The youth's pectoral muscles gleamed and twitched. Inflated biceps flexed. The youth crouched, and opened his arms ready to embrace. Flexed his fingers ready to clutch and grapple.

The minister rolled up his sleeves, tying to appear casual and calm. He copied the youth's stance and then, quicker than he could have anticipated, the youth was upon him. He felt the strength, and swallowed hard. Felt nausea from pain's anticipation well in his stomach as the hands slid over him, fingers ferreting for a secure grip. One hand latching at his left leg. The other hooked under his right armpit, sliding about him like a serpent's coil. He closed his eyes. Felt the rollercoaster motion as he was lifted, turned in the air, and dropped. Then the canvass slamming against his back, the shock of it bouncing through his whole being then jarred to a dead stop as he was crushed by the youth's full weight falling onto him.

The wind was forced out of him in a rush, loud and painful at his throat. He tried to gasp in a breath to replace it but was unable. Then the struggle began in earnest.

The youth began to recite a meticulously prepared, strongly structured argument. A powerful litany landing one heavy fact on top of another. A merciless bombardment of scientific rhetoric. The words channelled logic's icy stream. The minister cried out at the sting of rationalism's sharp slicing, the tongue's scalpel dissecting and reducing everything under the sun.

He could not deny the facts. A point to the red corner. Yet somehow the words still failed to convince. They were insufficient by themselves, incomplete without the wholeness that the minister knew could only be achieved with meaning. He was agonised, stretched beyond endurance between two opposing poles. The necessity of accepting the truth which his opponent expounded, while on the other hand, unable to do so, pulled back by the necessity of belief.

“Submit! Submit!” the youth yelled eagerly. But the minister realised with horrific understanding that there could be no truce. He could no more submit than continue, and so he must continue. An illogical thought, he realised, but that thought in itself was a truth. And he was back on the rack of paradox again. Intuitive truth stretching him one way and logical fact the other. The two could never be reconciled, could they?

What then? Would he snap like a guitar string? No. the bell clanged, the clapper striking hard against it and the sound ringing out clear. One long sustained note of sound brought to birth by two opposing . . .

This made him think harder. He returned to his corner, aching and faint but somehow more animated. The boy sponged at his brow.

“He has a strong argument,” the boy conceded. “ And you're too frail to sustain if he keeps on attacking like that. You have to get him on the defensive. There's nothing else for it, you'll have to lead this next round.”

The minister would have been amused had he not been in such a critical situation. The boy's words and serious manner were comical in one so young. The sincere concern and encouragement were a comfort however. Though things were bleak now, perhaps they might not be so bleak in a time to come. He hoped that the boy's awareness might bring relief to some later, more enlightened generation.

In the meantime his opponent was limbering up for the next immediate round, consulting with his corner-man who in turn was consulting the books he had brought. The minister watched the dark figure flick quickly through the pages, arriving with a grin at some new possibility. The minister saw the corner-man's eyes briefly through the gloom; vacuous, empty, the life in them drowned beneath a deluge of unshed tears. He looked away quickly and the figure receded into the gloom again.

His opponent was up, bouncing nimbly with an expression of smugness and surety which sickened the minister. The unthinking arrogance so often apparent in the face of youth. The bell clanged again, its long clear sound born once more from nothing. The minister was galvanised into action.

Whatever the young man had planned, it never got to see fruition. His opponent's gross underestimation of faith's tenacity allowed the minister opportunity. Without hesitation the minister found himself on the other side of the ring, engaging the youth before he was able to get over the surprise. He caught the young man's hand and bent it upwards. Then with an agility that surprised everyone including himself, the minister stepped around his opponent so that he was facing the back of the young man's head. Strength came from somewhere. The minister forced the hand upwards. All the rage, despair, angst - all that energy went into that upward thrust, and the minister heard the almost inaudible crackle of sinew tearing in his opponent's shoulder.

The young man screamed. I'm a pacifist, the minister thought. What am I doing? But then, the realisation that he must never flinch from the task. He kicked down as hard as he could into the back of the young man's knee. The strong legs folded. After that it was a simple matter of falling forward and landing on top. When the youth tried to struggle free the minister only had to push the hand upwards again. He had him pinned.

“You have failed,” the minister growled into the young man's ear. “You have failed to prove . . . and as a scientist . . . that is what you're obliged to do . . . You're unable to prove there is no God . . . though that has been your secret intention . . . to disprove . . . and not discover. . . To reduce . . . and not expand . . . But your enquiry . . .has been limited . . . to the empirical only . . .and so you have failed . . .to conceive . . .of what is . . .beyond . . .behind the objective . . . Into the gaps . . .between the rational. . . you cannot go . . . You see only . . . absence there . . . But that absence . . . paradoxically implies . . . presence.” The minister was gasping, but wouldn't let up now that he had the advantage at last. Through gritted teeth he continued his hard-won sermon:

“Like a shape . . . cut from a piece of cloth,” he rasped, “God's very form . . . is revealed . . . by the nothingness . . . you strive for . . . It makes us hunger . . . for Him even more . . . don't you see? . . . And the hunger . . . has forced an awareness . . . of what it is . . . we lack. . . . which your logic . . . your equations . . . can never eradicate . . . Our mutual failures . . . are hammer and anvil. . . Faith is forged . . . shaped and strengthened . . . by the pain of the blow!”

He gave the young man's arm a last sadistic thrust and set him off screaming again. Finally he released his grip. The bell clanged again, the beautiful long clear note sustaining through the silence. In the beginning was the Word, the minister remembered. But how hard to conceive, to bring to birth. Like trying to describe the subtle, delicate flavour of vanilla - without using the word 'vanilla'. Or blueness to one born blind. The words available were not enough to say, to bridge, to join reality and the ideal. But to not attempt! That could never be sufficient either.

The minister retreated to his corner again. He watched his opponent raise himself slowly off the canvas. The youth was whimpering and the minister couldn't help pitying him now. He looked away. Into the rows of seats where only the idiot was left, to lazy to get up. He too was preparing to leave it seemed, his supplies of popcorn exhausted. This was not the sort of entertainment his kind enjoyed: it was too immediate to and too distant from his understanding all at once. It required an effort he couldn't muster, long-suffering before the gratification, a strength he would sadly never find. He burped loudly and wobbled from his seat, and the minister watched him shuffle away. The hall was empty now, except for the contenders and their corner-men.

The wrestling continued. The minister winning one round and his opponent the next. Neither side submitting. The mysterious corner-man continued searching, probing his books for answers.

“The answers aren't in your books,” the minister called across to him; but the man ignored him and continued his research. “You'll ware your eyes out with all that - become more blind than you already are. You're looking in the wrong place.” But no answer came back. Only more and more books accumulating on the table. Outside, the sun was sinking behind the hills beyond the town. The silence of the evening had replaced the day's bustle.

“Look,” said the minister. “Don't think I'm begging off, but it's getting late. I'm sure we could both use a rest, and my corner man here has to be home for his dinner. We can resume again tomorrow. Indeed, we're obliged to continue. But for now . . .”

The minister's opponent rubbed at his shoulder and stared into the blank of the canvass. Vacant with exhaustion, he sniffed. As a rationalist he had to agree. The minister was relieved, joyful at the prospect of sleep's darkness. A return to the origin, the root, free from the light's agonised flowering, the petal's multiplicity. The youth appeared relieved as well, though he was trying to hide it. the minister caught himself gloating, caught himself feeling heroic. He was ashamed to find his opponent's arrogance within himself.

The boy congratulated the minister on his untiring performance and told him he would return tomorrow. The opponent and his corner-man donned their laboratory overcoats and left also, leaving the minister still in the ring, sprawling on his stool. Recovering. He stretched his arms out along the ropes to either side. Hanging there, like the God he championed.

Thought possessed him then. The cross in which he found himself tenant was no hard thing at all, far more fragile than the mind which writhed within it. He looked down at the heaving ribs beneath the soaked shirt; saw the dry, paper-thin skin of his arms torn and bleeding; felt the blood pound and spurt in his brain; felt life returning slow as a tide, the pain reminding him the fight was not yet won. He must contend still. With chromosomes, cells, chemical elements collected and jumbled; a parcel of atoms, of gore: 'nothing more, nothing more,” the scientist would counter.

And there in the eye of the storm, the tranquillity of that space amidst the struggle, he discovered faith's gift. A prize so rare which prayer had failed to deliver. An intuitive certain knowing that he would outlast the doomed receptacle which contained him like the wine within the chalice. It would kill him, this cross of flesh. That was a scientific fact. But how much more valuable than the proven fact was the theory of a Third Day yet to be achieved?

Then suddenly there was clapping, slow and deliberate, loud amongst the gathered hush. A single pair of hands. Each strike dispelled the church-like quiet which had grown since everything settled. The sound dragged his focus back to the immediate present.

He realised he had been sitting there a long time; how long he didn't know. Long enough that he could no longer feel his backside against the wooden stool. He arose quickly from his trance and scrutinised the darkness beyond the light's circle.

“Who's there?” he demanded.

“Who's there?” came back the echo.

Silence settled in again.

“I know who you are, I think.”

And again the echo, as if someone was answering from a great distance, a mirrored enquiry.

There was a long silence again, until the minister said:

“Will you help me? To know you, to understand? To conceive?”

This time no reply was heard. The minister became enraged. He shouted at the darkness:

“Why do you hide from me? Whenever I'm near you pull away! Can't you see? How much I've struggled? How much I've suffered? Don't you care? Why have you abandoned me?”

There was no reply. But another voice emerged now, from the darkness within him instead. Or more like an instinct; swathed, long buried, rising from some defunct inner chamber. An atavistic whispering that warned.

The minister dropped to his knees. He tried to stop his body from trembling. Tears appeared, and he raised his bony hands in prayer.

“Lord,” he begged. “Please help me. Strengthen me!”

This time round the minister waited. Patiently he waited, kneeling on the canvass with his eyes raised imploringly until it was dawn, and the sun began to slowly raise itself from the earth once more. Strengthen me, strengthen me, strengthen me, he whispered. Refusing to submit. Then finally the answer came.

The message arrived with sudden fury. A presence no more tangible than the air itself, yet frighteningly present all the same. The minister closed his eyes tightly and braced himself, paralyzed with fear, unable to breath, nausea filling his stomach. He felt only the lightest touch of a finger, and then, blinding agony. The hollow of his thigh burned as though impaled with a white-hot lance, and his hip-joint popped with a loud crack. On his back he wailed and writhed until the canvass was soaked with his tears and pain at last subsided. The air returned to normal and he felt more grateful for that it seemed than for anything else before. He limped outside, seeking a fresher atmosphere still, the grace of light.

“I don't understand,” he mumbled to himself, squinting with every painful step. “Is this your blessing?”

Outside he rested against the wall of the community centre. This time he didn't pace as he puffed a cigarette. He was not eager to have it commence all over again, trembling and stiff all at once. Something was knocking within, but he ignored it, watching instead a white pigeon flapping free of a black slate roof. Hearing the rush of its wings like an applause. The street was empty, full of early morning silence until the boy's footsteps heralded his approach and echoed from the concrete and brick. Finally he arrived.

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