"Almost" Part 7: Chapters 21-23

Chapter Twenty One

Martin was a priest of the old school, which meant that for him – as for millions of men, women and children across Germany – that God was alive.

God was alive, and God was everywhere. Hell was as real as a car crash; heaven as possible as a good night’s sleep. And not just God in the abstract, but God as a vital Christian. God was not a crutch for times of crisis. God was not vaguely present at marriages and funerals. God was not something you dressed up and gossiped on the church steps for. God was not ‘what all religions basically worshipped.’ The Muslims and Jews might share the Old Testament, but anyone who denied the divinity of Christ was wrong – sinfully wrong. Against God. A heathen. Going to hell.

Now, this kind of faith had its last holdout in certain countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Germany was one. France was not. England, Spain and Italy were not.

In Germany, God was the final arbiter. There was no room for doubt. Doubt was evil; it was the cloak of Satan before the sun of God. Germany was the home of the Reformation, the spark in the mind of Martin Luther which set Europe ablaze for a hundred years. Hundreds of thousands died in religious wars. And what of it? Saving souls was grim work. To save the soul at the expense of the body was a virtue. No moral man, no Christian, could stand by and watch his fellow men marching over the cliff of error into the fires of hell. Compassion demanded that error be corrected, before it spread, before it ate like a cancer into the souls of the undecided.

Martin had been called to the priesthood early, when the fires of childish imagination were at their strongest. There was hatred, tension and terror in his heart. He hated the world, hated sin, hated the devil. He walked the tightrope of having a pure soul trapped in a fleshy case of sin, in a body which could be played by the devil like an infernal organ. He was terrified of hell.

There was love in his heart as well. He loved God. He prayed and wept; his soul soared high as his tears fell. He loved his fellow man, and feared for the errors of their ways.

Martin was not a humanist. He did not believe that there were many roads to salvation. God did not allow each man to pick his own path. There were endless paths to hell. There was but one path to heaven. The Protestant path.

People were weak. That much was clear. People were weak, and the devil was patient and cunning. To set oneself against the devil was the highest calling of all.

Martin had laid low all his doubts. Any which remained had long since left the light of day. He knew that he was capable of error, of misplaced sympathy and false compassion. His particular weakness was a desire to forgive where he knew that God would never forgive. This was true for women in particular. Women who came to him broken in mind and heart, weeping over tainted desires, infidelities, jealousies and thwarted hopes – his heart ached to wave their terrors and losses away. He always hesitated to cast their souls into the pit of despair – though he knew from his own experience that this pit was required for salvation. His own heart contracted agonizingly in the face of their pitiful requests for absolution, for the word from him which would save the remainder of their days.

The words always came to him: ‘sister, be forgiven, and go in peace.’ They rose in his throat like sugar, but turned to bile on his tongue. For he knew that they were not his to give. Forgiveness was only God’s to give.

And the rules were clear. The rules were clear.