It was a morning when spring displayed her new finery. A morning that had broken cool and fresh, with dewed grass and a new hope scenting the air. It was still. breathlessly still, and the hush raised to awareness the sounds of life that are more usually masked. And the warmth of a newly confident sun was a warmth that flowed through the body cleansing and renewing to everyone but Bram. Bram, held fast by his depression, was beyond its reach.
Chrissie’s death and his own recent injuries might explain it. Yet these were not his only burdens. Bram had touched bottom on a slope that he had long concealed. Doubts had gnawed away at the very foundations of his being. From infancy, he had been taught to take each problem to God in prayer: to leave matters in His hands. And he had prayed, earnestly and often, begging for the comforting reassurance of faith. But his prayers had not been answered. God did not seem to be listening to him anymore.
Above him, in the flowering cherry, the single-minded bees laboured with urgency. Busy little soldiers, selfless, disciplined, serving a winter-depleted hive and indeed the whole world but even this sight was blighted to him. His canker pictured them weeks hence, wings frayed, bodies expended, dragged from the hive as now useless litter. It was so unjust! And yet….each of these tiny creatures would leave a memorial to itself in other life and this thought momentarily caught his interest.
There were, for the moment, scant workers for the task in hand. But somewhere, not too far away, in the warm darkness, eggs were being laid and brood cells tended. Despite the immediate needs of the field, the future was being cared for. While ever time remained, harvest would follow harvest and a revitalised army would sally forth to do its duty. There was an inherent wisdom there that mankind could not seem to emulate.
Bram was a soldier himself: a commissioned officer in Christ’s army. He had worn the uniform with pride until the pernicious anemia that gripped so many churches had come close to home. ‘The Army’ was wasting like the rest, down at least 25 per cent in recent years. In other warfare the generals would have been quickly replaced in the face of such losses. All hell would have broken loose. But Bram not longer expected anything decisive to happen. There had been efforts to improve operating efficiencies but that was hardly more than a delaying action: an effort to hold a front with an ever-thinner sprinkling of troops. And apart from that? Nothing!
But then, how many of the main-stream churches held the initiative now? The move in so many denominations to increasing lay ministry, union parishes, and the once-taboo women clergy, was a case in point. Advances supposedly and, in some cases, things that should have been done long ago. Except that they were now being applied as patches on an increasingly thread-bare garment. He was reminded of a photograph taken a day or two before the fall of Berlin. It showed a line of conscripts mustered for the last defence of the city. The final scrapings, poorly armed, their only uniform an armband, being prepared for the desperate struggle with no more than an hour or so’s training. And two in particular had wrenched at his heart. One, a young lad standing stiffly with naïve pride, a blind believer to the very end. And by his side, somebody’s grandfather, full of years, bent, myopic, and bewildered. Two lives to be carelessly thrown away to delay the inevitable, to buy hours, perhaps only minutes. The comparison might be unfair but he suspected that most who claimed to be Christian today were equally unfitted to be conquerers in Christ. They were nice people for the most part, they were good people. But!!! and it was a very big ‘but’.
Bram turned a little in his seat. In the far corner of the yard, his father was readying his vegetable plot for the new season as he had done for the past fifty years. His hair was whiter, his gait stiffer, but the quality of the man was unchanging. His quiet moral strength could not be touched by time. Yet time had also firmed a viewpoint that was now proof against assault. Attempts at reason had become subtle attack, a danger to the faith, and not to be counternanced.
Bram was aware of what he owed his parents. Life yes, but also that which, until now, had given his life meaning. They and his maternal grandfather, as faithful soldiers, had sought to lay a right foundation in him. Grandad Banks could take a young boy back to the days of the London Mission not that he had been there personally. Grandad Banks was himself the grandchild and child of Salvationists.
Ada Smith, ‘Little Eva’, ‘Fiery Elijah’, and all those others whoi challenged the Devil in those early days had been given life again. They had been larger than life while living and had become giants to a small boy. But one giant had loomed above them all, Grandad Banks. His stories, never without a moral, had captured the imagination of the child but, in capturing it, had also confined it.
He had not been christened Bramwell for a whim nor had he been trained without an end in view. Like Samuel, he had been promised to the fulltime service of The Lord before his birth. Circumstances had not allowed his elders to grasp this prize except through proxy. This was their desire and they had had their way. The boy, and later the grown man, had accepted his assigned role without question. Grandad Brooks had not lived to see the day but Bram knew that it had always given his parents satisfaction to have him wear the uniform.
He had tried to cope in the initial period after Chrissie’s death and to keep the destructive thoughts at bay but filling her gap with the service of others. Chrissie had never had doubts. She had been the unmovable one of the partnership: a rock to cling to in any torrent. Never questioning, always giving, with no apparent misgivings.
Although, looking back, could he be so sure? She was not silly. She would have seen the slow attrition just as he had. Maybe the same worms had been eating holes in her faith too. Hadn’t he himself always kept a bright and confident front? Had Chrissie been playing the same game? Could she have thought herself leaning on him?
Those first months alone had been hard enough and then had come his accident. What an idiot to ride across in front of a bus. His mind must have been far away. Perhaps it was a death wish. The bones had knitted quickly enough but, in spite of no spinal injury being found, his legs still largely refused to support him. He had come home to take stock and recuperate.
Desperate to talk out his worries, he had broached the matter of his doubts with his father. That had been a mistake. His efforts had caused pain and achieved nothing. The early history of The Army was still too close in time. Only yesterday as far as his father was concerned. The bravery in the face of hostile mobs, the stones, the dead rats and the spittle, the unjust imprisonments, the hostility of people in high places and, standing against it all, the blazing zeal of those slum converts. All these remained omnipresent.
He was not belittling these things but…..and again it was a big ‘but’ that he had tried to emphasise….none of these things were happening now and perhaps they should be. His father couldn’t or wouldn’t see that and Bram had tried a slightly different approach. “Didn’t Jesus say, ‘Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you.’? And don’t we read that the early Christians were ’everywhere spoken against’. But what do men say now? They say, ’thank God for the Sallies.’ That’s what they say and are we to think that the world has changed? Or are we the ones who have been changed, undermined by the world’s approval? Have they tamed us?” It had seemed a strong argument but it had fallen flat.
That The Army had drifted from its primary purpose, which was to win souls, was something that his father had shown himself unwilling to accept. He had countered everyone of Bram’s arguments by pointing to The Army’s unmatched humanitarian work. In vain had Bram kept stressing that they were supposed to be a ‘SALVATION’ Army. Hostel beds, cheap meals, friends in court, missing person bureaus, or whatever, were good in themselves but extraneous to The Army’s primary purpose for existing. They were not leading penitents to the Mercy Seat: to salvation. It was bold and inspired preaching that had swelled the tide in the early days and, without it, the dwindling number of committed people was making The Army increasingly just another secular charity.
It had been no use. His father had turned bitter and made scathing remarks about ‘groups who were only interested in making converts and ramming their own brand of religion down peoples’ throats’. He seemed to consider the making of converts somehow shameful and to call into question such people’s Christian bonafides. And yet, more than anything The Army needed converts, it needed fresh troops if it was to reverse the present trend.
To the old man, it was God’s Army that they were discussing. God had formed it. God was guiding it. To question its direction or the abilities of those in command was to question God himself. Bram having seen his father’s distress at a son going so dangerously astray could see that it would be futile to raise the matter again.
He had become so absorbed in his thoughts that the tea and buttered scones which his mother had long since placed at his elbow had been forgotten. Now that he recalled their presence, the tea was cold and distastful but he drank it out of duty and returned to his reverie. He should have expected his father’s response. Somehow, it had become wrong to push one’s religious convictions. Even a few bandsmen in the square on a Saturday evening with some favourite hymns and a brief sermon was ramming religion down people’s throats. Carols at Christmas time, religion for state and ceremonial occasions, religion as a necessary business or political expediency, show-funerals for murder victims, these were considered good and acceptable but to be ‘religious’ was to be a crank.
He himself could not escape responsibility. For years, he had enjoyed the popular approval accorded The Army’s officers. Many a civil ceremony had seen him calling down blessings on cue from an ever-compliant God. He had become the tame lap-dog of the establishment and it was no consolation to know that he was not alone in this. Where torture and death in earlier times had failed, and even fanned the flames, the more subtle fetters of public approbation had been wholly successful.
Was a turnaround even remotely possible? The bees suggested that there was a way. Right now, there were more than enough blossom to demand the full attention of every bee alive but the over- riding priority was still recognised as building numbers for the future. So for the present, many blossoms would have to go unpollinated. For The Army to regain control of its future, it would also have to leave things undone. Being endlessly obliging would have to stop which would be a radical change. He well understand the effect this would have on a fickle public and, almost certainly too, such a bold move would produce a body of disaffected Staff Officers, many perhaps leaving making numbers even more critical for a time. It would need a rare faith and it would hurt.
But would it happen. Pigs might fly, and even if it did, those remaining would not even approximate those unlettered evangelists whose courage, zeal, and pizzaz once took the world by storm.
“The Army had lost her claim to ‘Blood and Fire’,” he thought, “but then she’s not alone in that.” Two women had made the rounds of the hospital wards giving each patient a bunch of flowers with an attached card which read ‘This is a public service of the Such-and-Such Church’. Very pleasant ladies they were and Bram, curious, had sounded them out on the efficacy of their work. They characterised their visits as a ministry rather than social work. As they put it, they were available if people wanted to talk and the flowers were simply to provide an introduction. “And do you find people seeking help with spiritual problems?” he had asked and they had hedged a great deal. Obviously they did not. Exactly what Bram would have expected. Their’s was evangelism at homeopathic dilutions, inoffensive and sterile. A soother of their consciences and a not-too- demanding alternative to the cake-stall or the floral arrangements. They had departed unaware of feeding Bram’s despair.
And yet, had his own labours been better directed? Had he, or had any of them, anything of value left to give, even one spark that could be blown into life? Underneath today’s popular social gospel where boundaries were blurred, no man really accountable, and every ‘dear departed’ went automatically to heaven, did any vestige of the original remain? Could it be that the established church was not just terminally ill but dead, a vegetable caterpillar that maintains its outward appearance though now of totally alien substance? Even as the thought occurred to him, he recognised with dismay that he believed it to be so.
Bram’s eyes took in the garden but he was not actually seeing it. He was no longer aware of nature’s bustling resurgance. His cherished convictions, the structure on which his life had hung, had shivered to dust and blown away. His legs would give him an out and soften the blow for his parents but it was not excuses that he needed. More than anything, he needed something to hang onto. Scant months ago, he would have claimed for his lineage the Patriarchs and Apostles. Now he saw himself a foundling who had sold that birthright for the potage of worldly approval.