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CHAPTER 5

THE INTERVIEW

While Hu sought solace in his latest wines, Harry sought help in God.

It was likely to be a last interview, if it failed. Hu was not inclined to tolerate what he deemed fools, gladly. The ultimate fool, in his book, was the one who sacrificed himself, for, he thought, when you were the best there is, to lose yourself was to damage everyone. Meekness was not a primary passion in his make-up, just as compassion was for the fact that some had lost what they might have gained, rather than for their actual condition. He did not really understand personality, seeing it merely as a means for pleasure, comfort, achievement of this or that, or operational self-congratulation.

Truth did not bother him, for he had long ended in a total and insidious cynicism, believing in nothing but himself, dismissing God as too hard, life as to be lived to the full and won in every field, leaving the rest for itself. If you were first, why worry ? there was a long way to the last.

Harry entered, ushered into the Facial Presence by a servant or two. They shook hands, Hu not rising from his desk.

Now for your studies in arithmetic! came the voice of Hu, insolently insidious, invidiously cool.

Your time, Sir, is precious as you have reminded me, so I shall dump the metaphors, said Harry.

A useful act, whispered Hu.

Dad, your recent speeches and conversations suggest to me something so perilous that I feel it would be loveless to ignore it; and believe me, it is not easy to have to speak of this to my own father.

A little wisdom for an older man! why my son, how pleasant and liberal of you to think of me, amidst your many beneficiaries whose solace is your voice, whose help is your conversation and whose delight is in your presence.

Dad, when the ironies are past, there is the iron. When the traps are all filled, there is the hunter.

What is this supposed to suggest ?

Your avaricious seeming lust for world eminence could be considered ambition, and this could be construed as an  effort to deliver others by the full application of one's gifts, maybe. But just in the last few months your words have tended to have a sovereign air, a brisk, almost brusque edge, as if your finding is THE finding, and your Earth Unity Force is THE WISDOM.

Well, thank you for your most officious, and humble presentation to mitigate my supposed moral crimes. By the way, could you actually state what is wrong, rather than damn with faint praise, son, for you have exactly ten more minutes.

One should have thought, my father, that the words wrested by truth from me, 'Avaricious seeming lust for world eminence ...' ...

Oh come, you were saying that perhaps it wasn't all bad.

Nor all good. Nor was this all. It seems to be turning into a desire for world pre-eminence. Sovereignty seems to flow from your robes, importance from your expression, finality from your phrasing,  and your organisation is becoming increasingly treated as if it were your fief, your underling, your servant, your group of savants who serve you, making your mastery to have its subsidiaries, like planets for your sun, galaxies for your universe. For example, in one speech you actually said that there could be no doubt that the world waited for the Earth Unity Force to find all the solutions, and could assure the world that under your leadership, it would.

What were your actual words ? These: We appeal to all to listen to some, and I am their voice.

Well, son if this finishes your parade of humility and kindness to your cheque-source ... ?

Dad, IF you COULD have the answers, you would be God. He made it all, not from chance, which is merely the operational way of what is made to be such, without intrusion of other purposes: it is not something creative in kind.  He caused YOU, not some pillar of meaningless fire or energy or inert matter, to be able to understand yourself, in part, your world, in kind and to will in it with effective application. This did not roll up from nowhere in particular. Jaguars do not do so, and this leaves them the simplest of deficiencies compared to your own body.

My own body has served us both pretty well, son, and I do not choose to consider God. He is too hard.  He is always beyond, above, over everything, and yet I do not see Him.

Nor do you see your own thoughts, until you express them and write them; but this does not mean they do not exist.

I CAN write them.

God HAS written His.

How  do you know ?

How do YOU know that you write yours ?

If this is the seminary wisdom ... ?

How then, answer if you can.

I cogitate and think them, refine and polish the words, clarify them, articulate them in constant thematic mode, apply them in intimate personal accord with the particular audience I have in mind, and then, supplying them to my secretary, have them presented through her computer, ready for reading.

When I see them, how do I know they are yours, and not those of some artful deceiver ?

Because, my son, of their eminence, of my style with its knowledge  and unmatched data base,  unequalled access to all departments and sciences ...

By the quality, and the consistency of the style and the eminence of the substance,  then ?

You might put it shortly like that.

Then this is how I know God's writing. As for you, I know He is there by what He has done, and its very distinctiveness which prevents over the millenia anyone else from even beginning to duplicate it. In fact, ironically, He duplicates it Himself in every baby.

Thus,

Ø        if your words, dad, had lasted over three thousand years, and no one could find fault with them,

Ø        and if your claims in those words were unmatched on this earth, as to performance power,

Ø        and if they carried an indication of a coming Messiah who came at the date stated,
and predicted a Jewish murder of Him who CAME as a Jew, and acute and perennial suffering
as a result, for that nation, because of their unbelief in what you, dad,  call Number One,

Ø        and if the Gospel which you gave millenia ago, was the one which actually arrived
when the STATED and PREDICTED time came,

Ø        and if this Messiah you predicted did things intrinsically impossible
as one of the testimonies to His truth as God in human format,
and if He had to rise from the dead, after they killed Him as predicted,
and in the way predicted, and could not produce Him afterwards,

Ø        and if the whole way of this present world in detail was also predicted,
including the exile of the people who killed the Messiah,
AND their return AND their famous triumphs over much bigger foes when they did this,

Ø        and if you had also presented a Gospel which worked in lives which took it, and which gave a prognosis for those who took Him, and was as predicted centuries before it came ...

then …

Dad, are you listening ?

In a way, yes.

Then Dad, I should have believed you; for if you could use people over millenia to present a composite picture of this kind, and have it never fail while science changed and failed in cases too numerous to mention, then simply, because HUMAN WISDOM as per science is far less, does not even begin to branch into this sort of ultimate predictive power over mankind and history: there are results. If there were nothing else in view but human science and such vast stores of knowledge as this, the one or the other, I should logically HAVE to believe that this was from God. No-one else has the means for such results as this. Nothing can match it, if you like, only He can hatch it! Find it, and there is the testimony of God. It IS found, so that is that. If you had shown this for millenia, you would be it. You didn't and you aren't; He did and He is God. I am quite impartial: the testimony is irrevocable, and it so happens, it is HIS!

It is as simple as that.

Yes, yes, yes, my boy. You please yourself about what you believe, but I for my part believe in myself.

When you die, will you still believe ?

I do not know the answer to that one: there may be some acknowledgement of my efforts, hereafter for all I know. It would not entirely surprise me.

NOT believing in God then is your way to glory ?

Frankly, yes.

How COULD there be some kind of acknowledgment of such an achievement as that, FROM God ?

And, Sir,  for that matter, how COULD you know what man is not able to find out, the future of mankind, the works of his spirit, the defeats, betrayals, madnesses, yearnings distraught, breakages and the whole future schema for the universe, which coming not from nothing, is going not to nothing. It stands to reason Dad, it is going to its Source who having created, also assesses. It is there because He is; He is there while it is; and when its time comes, He is STILL there. His word is verified by its power; His presence is shown by His word; His intentions are ... IN IT! Judgment is one of these.

Since you do not and cannot do what He has done, why pretend ?

Thus may I repeat the point, dad : How COULD there be some kind of acknowlegment of such an achievement as that, FROM God, when you wilfully part company with Him whom reason attests, and put yourself in His place ? Two into one won't go, and God into you does not fit. You cannot become what is eternal. You began, and when you end, you will end up facing Him who made you.

Look son, I am a practical man, and the idea that the source of truth, the only way to know it, is God, that the source of justice, the only reason for its existence, is God, that lies are an inferno blasted by divine wrath, sure of divine retribution, that the God of Creation has spoken as the Redeemer of miscreancy, from which we all suffer, has actually been propounded by you before.

Dad, that was brilliant. In presenting what I might say before I say it, you must think your little yacht has swung in front of mine, and taken away my wind, letting you win the race. However, since you are so well acquainted with a brief outline of what might be our course, why not answer it ?

Son, it is too wearisome. You speak; I hear. I do not choose to respond.

When you are used by becoming Number One, a flattered means to the ends of other people, you may forget what you now remember, and confuse your palpably vulnerable and inadequate self with divinity itself. In fact, all of those nations who thought that you could help them, while you lack what God has - which alone is enough for poor sinful old mankind - will not be helped; and more mordant for you still,  your life will be forfeit. Dad can I send you something ? (Appendix II, as here reproduced, is what he had in mind, and then he resolved to add Appendix I as well - why not, his father was not likely to listen much longer ... at all.)

Do as you please. Now, son, I wonder if I could suggest something to your holy personage ?

Dad, you could, but remember this, I shall still be praying for you.

Take your sanctimonious sacredness elsewhere.

Dad, with respect, sanctimonious sacredness is precisely what I came to warn you about: for when God is my help, there is sanctity, not sanctimony; and where help is offered for all, without God, there is a gulf so broad, and an abyss so deep, that the one never finishes pouring into the other, downward.

Sanctimony is placing sacredness where it does not belong, father, as in your case, where you refuse to see yourself as less; and all that is sacred about me, it is not myself, it is the Lord who is alive in my heart, directs my ways and gives wisdom as a grant, but not to make ME into something for admiration, rather to enable me to be His and act like it.

Get out, sir, if you please.

I go without losing the love for my father which brought me in. Good-bye.

 Hu leaned back. He had liked his boy, and had once had great visions for him; but gradually his own success brought him so high that there was no more room at the top. This religious business that so fascinated the young, this Bible, which had even drawn himself: it could wait. HE would present his own big red book, and if after that people settled down, then maybe there could be room for religion.

He lifted the phone, and called his secretary. I want a meeting of the Religious Administration Committee today, he called.

Sir, there are some away.

Then tomorrow, and I want them all present.

What topic, sir ?

The Need for Necessary Progress to Close Peripheral Seminaries, those set against world unity.

Thank you sir.

And Maria ?

Yes, sir ?

Use that file of mine which I prepared last time I saw my son, you know, the one about the necessity of religious synthesis and syncretism, for survival, as a preliminary step until we settle down as a race.

I hope Sir, that it won't affect my religion ?

Maria, yours is safe for a while yet. I have been having talks with the Pope, and he sees the point, and I am showing him a beautiful proposition at which he is nibbling: all for the best in the long run, you know.

I know sir, that many have been saying that we need a new leader, who will embrace all that we have found out before. When the Pope allowed a Buddha to be put on the altar in the Assisi case (Stand-By), it did suggest that some new synthesis was coming; but I hope we don't have to change our ways.

Not a bit of it, Maria, just a name, that is all.