We often overlook the true meaning of Christmas, both left and right. It's not about propriety or presents: it's about redemption.
Some of you are familiar with my Christmas diary custom, as it has been for the past five years - sequential updates of a story about an especially despicable person on Earth, who dies and gets an unusual chance to make things right.
And chooses to take that path.
And I will do that. Next week.
However, given the popular political topic of the week - choice of reverends - I figured this story had special relevance right now.
You see, it's about a homophobe...
Act I: Heaven
Now Ake Green reached heaven despite his having beliefs that had some heavenly heads scratching. As a result, his processing was held up. Middle management could not believe that so-called Reverend Green had passed muster. Yet, here he was, wild-eyed and justified, his years of demonizing homosexuals seemingly validated. He was saved! They were in Hell!
Why, the good reverend had even brought his last pamphlets, praising God for his use of the 2004 Christmas Tsunami to destroy hedonistic resorts on the coast of Thailand. The citizens of heaven politely refused to take his offerings.
In a conference room in Judgment City, Saint Peter and a number of heavenly heavy hitters, the angels Michael and Gabriel among them, gathered around a computer console.
"'godhatesfags.com'," Peter read drily, pulling on the end of his long beard. Then he chuckled. "I guess Upper Management didn't get that memo."
Gabriel set aside his celestial trumpet and grimaced. "This is not funny! This guy's a menace! I can't have bigots like this running loose. What's he going to do first? Bring signs like that one to the next Jubilee?" The archangel thrust a finger at the screen, where a mock traffic sign declared 'Homo-Fascist Sweden'.
"No," the warrior-angel Michael added. "Your musicians wouldn't like that at all."
Gabriel glared. "Don't even get me started on that bone-headed 'don't ask, don't tell' policy in your ranks --"
Michael smiled. "Hey, ignorance is bliss...and nobody waves signs around. Besides," he paused "if the newly-arisen Reverend Green pokes his placards near my boys, they will make Heaven into Hell for him...."
Saint Peter jumped up. "That's it!"
"What's it?" the quarreling archangels asked in unison.
Saint Peter started pecking keys into the keyboard without answering.
"Hey! Are you rerouting him? Is that allowed?" Michael asked.
"Are you allowed to lay waste to entire armies and nations?" Peter asked over his shoulder
"Well...yes. But that's my job," the general of heaven's armies answered. "And I do so only under orders."
"Hmm...hmmm. Right..." Peter replied as he flashed through screen after screen, getting his rerouting requests processed by the superlatively efficient techno-angels that handle all the Paperwork of Goodness.
Gabriel chuckled. "He's got you there, Mikey."
"Hey. Anyone I zapped had it coming. Besides, if I was ever aiming for the wrong target, the Dad would pull the plug on the operation. You know how it goes..."
"...yes, we do. 'It's all part of God's plan'." Peter piped in. "And that's the point; if we're mucking up the works, we'll get an email or one of our mobiles will buzz or something."
"You got a point, there." Other onlookers looked at one another and nodded approvingly.
Peter finished, brushed his hands together, and leaned back in his chair. "Well, there you have it!"
Gabriel, Michael and others leaned in. The twitters and buzz began in earnest, and cascade throughout the seven levels of Heaven. (Secrets don't keep in an omniscient society.)
Then the big blue light on the conference phone lit up. A deep chime, no reverberation, stopped the conference room in its tracks.
Gabriel cleared his throat. "Ah...you want that on speaker, Pete?"
Peter eyed the light. "Ah, better not." Not that it would matter, what with it being the omniscient society and all.
And as is the case when Upper Management wanted to control the release of news, all the other celestial luminaries in the room heard was Peter's side of the exchange "Yes, Lord?...That's too much? That's not enough? You'd rather he go here instead of ....there. Sir? Oh...thanks. It was Michael who inspired me.." Michael glared at his colleague, mouthing the letters WTF?!!!
"Thank you, God." Then the light blinked out, and the room exploded with questions for Peter, the chief of which were:
"So, what's the scoop?" Gabriel asked.
"WHAT inspiration!?" Michael demanded.
"He says it's a go, but thought I needed to get an updated organizational chart, because I originally sent one request to the wrong department." Peter checked his email. "Yep. He send me a copy just now."
"You didn't get that? It was sent to the Seraphim Committee this morning," Gabriel asked.
Michael blinked. "You're kidding me. The Lord God rang you to see if you got the memo?"
Peter shook his head. "It seems Upper Management already has something in mind for our new arrival. All we were doing was..."
"Fulfilling God's Plan." the room completed in unison.
After a brief silence, Gabriel said "Wow. I never get over how cool that is."
Saint Peter, keeper of the Pearly Gates, Rock of the Church and a surprisingly good stand-in for Jerry Garcia when he dresses the part, just laughed.
"Oh, you ain't seen nothin' yet."
Act II: The Den
The former Reverend Green had long looked forward to his eternal reward for a lifetime of battling evil. For Green, that meant attacking any form of love that was not his own, namely, something suspicious, intolerant and more than a little misogynistic and homophobic. Green served a peculiar role in his life, an example of how not to interpret Christian scriptures.
Thus, Green had served his God, only not nearly in the way he thought. He'd help discredit the use of Scripture as a basis for bashing homosexuals once and for all; his dovetailing a prejudiced vendetta with a global disaster had set back the efforts of such fools for a while. Alas, Michael's predecessor, a bright-eyed fellow who had sought opportunities elsewhere, was always working to corrupt and diminish, and so long as the instrument of God's design was Humanity, Lucifer would never be short of fresh materials...and fresh ideas.
Green had served the Dark One's purposes, glorifying and validating fantasies of violence against homosexuals and all persons foreign, regardless of how they were foreign. Green advocated the end of community, the triumph not of individual free will but of alienation and personal irresponsibility. Green felt he did not have to care or comfort sinners of any sort. All the Reverend needed to do was declare the power of God, and interpret signs as punishments against people who aren't Just Like Me.
Green died at just the right moment; had he passed on most days he would have been sent the other way, and that would have been that.
But Mr. Green got lucky; he died in a repentant moment, as he realized that his caricature of all Swedes as globe-trotting perverts just did not fit with the image of a two year-old boy reunited with his weeping father at a hospital in Thailand. The rest of the family, the mother and all the other children, were killed.
I wish I could do something to help them, Green had thought as his heart went out....then went out for keeps.
Act III: Calcutta
There are many roles in the heavenly host, work for billions even with the most excellent efficiency ratings and infrastructure enjoyed by the Celestial Community. All tasks are valued and essential.
There is no lying about, eating lotuses and deflowering virgins, and one of the key responsibilities for all angels was comfort of the dying.
The archangel Gabriel and newly-minted guide, the former Reverend Ake Green, stood in a hospice in Calcutta, full of persons of many ages, but mostly under thirty...full of death, demise, and flies.
"It's so disgusting, so morally disgusting," Green sneered. "They're dying of AIDS and other sex diseases, aren't they?"
Gabriel took a breath, swallowed, looked up at the swinging fan that was the only air circulation in the hall. "Yes. They are."
There was plentiful quality medical care India; it was just not available these people and would not be forthcoming in time to make a difference to them. India was officially in control of HIV, the one problem that could take the its promise of imminent greatness away.
"And no one can see us? Just like in the movies?" Ake asked.
"Oh, no." Gabriel smiled. "They can see us, but they only notice us when it's important for them to do so," he said.
Just at that moment, his passing caught the attention of one bedridden person, who held a hand up. He smiled at her, then reached out and stopped Green from moving on. "Hold. This is your first customer. You can speak but they won't notice you for now; it's not time for that."
Gabriel kneeled next to the low bed and took a mottled hand. He spoke Bengali, but Green followed it as if he'd been writing gay-bashing signs in it for decades. "Tell me what you will, Tanvi, daughter of Meghraj. I am here for your peace."
Green blurted out "You know her name?"
Gabriel nodded. "She is Tanvi, which means 'delicate girl'. She has had a hard life. Her father's name means 'thunder', which is appropriate, for he was a violent and abusive parent, and I mean that in all that ways that should frighten and appall all fathers."
"The monster! Oh, how I've clamored against these perverts and their depradations on the innocent..."
Gabriel held a hand up. "Really, Green. Not now." He looked back at the girl, who was unresponsive. "Tanvi: I am Gabriel, though many mistake me for Shiva in this land, for I come to the dying."
Tanvi shuddered and whispered hoarsely: "You come to destroy me, lord?"
Gabriel smiled sadly. "No, child. This life has destroyed you. I am here to bear witness to your end and to comfort you."
Tanvi swallowed. "Water," she pointed weakly to the right side of her head; a dirty glass half-full of lukewarm water stood there. Gabriel nodded, lifted the glass, and morphed it with a touch into a crystal goblet of chilled distilled water, with the barest touch of lime flavoring.
It was the first actual miracle that Green had ever witnessed. He then noticed the video camera overhead.
"Isn't that trick going to be noticed?" He pointed up.
Gabriel did not even look. "Nothing that is unimportant for the living to see will be seen. The machines will record it. A room full of advanced gear would mark a very interesting and powerful energy signature and a slight change in the local gravitational field. Due to the drain of energy from the surrounding area, the temperature of the room is sufficiently colder that human skin could detect it, but it won't..."
"I'm cold, lord," Tanvi said, as she drew up her blanket.
"...unless it is important for people to notice," Green finished. He looked about, then at Tanvi herself, as she sipped the water some more.
"Perhaps it is this delicious ice water you have brought me," Tanvi said to Gabriel.
He set the cup aside and placed a hand to the side of her cheek, and smiled. "Perhaps."
Green gazed at Tanvi. A whore, laid waste by decadent choices and now paying the price for it. Having laid down with Lord knew how many strange men for money, now she received the archangel Gabriel herself by her bedside, serving her as if she were the Mother of God. He shuddered, unable to look at her blotched, emaciated body, her thin, short hair, the near absence of a figure. Why, the girl didn't even have a shift on over her nearly-absent breasts.
It was then that Green noticed the atypical formation between Tanvi's hips and the inside of her neck. Yep. An Adam's apple.
At which point Green snapped. "This...girl is a man! A pervert!" He exploded. This is the sort of thing he had fought, died and gone to heaven for. Surely, Gabriel was unaware that he was ministering to the damned. Green looked about. Row after row of poisoned, dying, damned queers and whores and perverts. It was his old self, his earthly self, the one that Heaven had no plans and no future for.
"Silence!" Gabriel ordered, and Green went utterly still, as if he were a frame on an MPEG. "You desecrate our work with your obscenities!" Gabriel got up and released the panting Green from stasis, grasping him angrily by the shoulders and bringing his wrathful, beautiful face close to the former reverend's.
"But she's a..he's a...f...homosexual!" Green said.
"Probably! No, wait..." Gabriel consulted his omniscience. "No, she, as she likes to be called, is! What of it?"
"But...I fought this sort of filth my entire life. I was accepted into Heaven for my work, right?"
"What!" Gabriel roared. "You were almost eliminated by your bigoted vendetta!" Gabriel paused. "Oh, silent on your own account now, are we?"
Green blinked, stunned. "But...what...why was I...saved..."
Gabriel shuddered, and gathered himself. "You were 'saved' on account of one prayer, just as you died." He paused. "God forgive me for saying this, I hate foxhole conversions. You clowns are so much trouble...and most of you end up under other management, regardless."
Green blanched. "What do you mean...that this isn't forever?"
"Why should it be? It wasn't for Lucifer and his kind, and they started off with far more frequent flyer miles than you! The universe is always changing, always expanding -- oh, and it wasn't created in just six days, thank you very much!"
"God answered your final prayer, Reverend: You are being given the chance to do what you prayed for a chance to do: to help."
Green folded his arms, shrunk into himself, a duplicate of Michelangelo's 'Descent of the Damned'. "No...no. Not them. I didn't mean that."
"Bullshit," the captain of the angelic host declared. "You repented of your blanket hostility toward the suffering, and your heart went out to aid and comfort them.
"Were it not the case, you would have been sent to the care of my old friend, the Prince of Darkness. He never has enough hands to do the work of prejudice and pogrom, excoriation and extermination." Gabriel paused momentarily, looking into Green's mind. "Unbelievable. You're actually thinking it over."
"What! No...no...yes. This is so...painful for me."
Gabriel nodded slowly, then directed Green's attention to the dying Tanvi. "No doubt.
"But is this really your time to feel sorry for yourself?"
Green held his silence, tears welling up in his eyes. His life's work would earn him high regard, but only among the fallen angels. All that had saved him, had let him past the gates of Heaven, had been a lapse in his hate-filled resolve.
Gabriel noted Green's grief, nodded with grim approval. "Tears, at last. What's more, they are not even for yourself."
"I hurt...so many people, and I thanked God every day that I could do exactly that."
"Yes. you did."
"I...don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here." Green fell to his knees, sobbing.
"No, not in the least. There's no question at all about that," Gabriel declared, looking down, frowning. Then, as suddenly, he knelt down beside his new protege, and lifted him into a standing position. "The only question is what you will do to make good on the gift."
"It..it would take forever to pay for what I've done on Earth."
Gabriel smiled. "Then perhaps you have come to the right place, after all."
Green nodded, self-awareness taking hold in a way that he had never allowed in his material life. "It may take forever for me to change into what I should be, too."
"Then we had better get started." As Gabriel said that, time resumed elsewhere in the hospice gallery. Tanvi blinked, wondered where her visitor had removed to, then saw not one but two radiant figures standing near the foot of her bed.
"There are now two of you," Tanvi said.
"She..he...umm..." Green swallowed. "She can see me now."
"It must be important that she do so." Gabriel crossed his arms and nodded in Tanvi's direction. "Go and minister to her. She is dying and has little time left. No family will come to her; what friends she has have either died or forsaken her. The hospice workers here are state employees and act as little more than teamsters for the almost-dead; they will not sit with the dying, either."
"More water, lords, if you please," she asked.
"That sounds like a good start," Gabriel added, as he made to leave the room.
"What? You're leaving me here alone? What do I say? What do I do? What if I say something...typical?"
Gabriel laughed quietly. "You have a simple task here, no need for miracles, which is good since you're not empowered to perform them just yet. Just be a good listener."
"I never was before," Green frowned.
"You can be now, if you choose." Gabriel walked away and added, "We will have time to talk later. We have an eternity." And the archangel walked away into another space, and faded.
Green gathered himself with a nod, and turned to Tanvi. He walked to the bedside slowly, stood there for a moment.
"Who are you, lord?"
"Do not call me 'lord', child," he answered, feeling much like a Catholic priest delivering last rites at the moment. "Call me Father Green," he smiled and, remembering he was already dead and beyond disease, reached to hold the head of an AIDS patient and bring a cup of water to his, no, her lips.
"Thank you," Tanvi said. Taking a series of fast, shallow breaths after settling back onto the cushions. Green remained close by, taking the youth's hand. Between coughing fits and fitful naps, they talked the day through. Tanvi even sang for Green; she been in a club act in Calcuttta, drawn by an easy start in a hard business. It turned out to be the sort of club where the acts paid the owner, in return for the right to sell themselves. Tanvi had wanted to sell her talents; she wound up selling her body just to survive. That path brought her here.
Tanvi's family knew she was here; her father Meghraj had come two days ago. He looked from the entrance on the far side of the ward, shook his head dismissively, then walked away. Tanvi later learned why he'd shown up at all; when she died, there was a small sum paid to the family for burial purposes. The father had come to collect the money in anticipation of Tanvi's death. "He won't come back, I know it," she cried into Green's arm. Hot bitter tears, then she fell asleep.
Green sat there, watching her sleep for a long while. There was plenty of perversion to accuse, he decided. He'd just picked the most obvious, weakest, easiest to afflict target for his outrage. His imagination went out across the fetid metropolis; so many parts were modernized, clean, comfortable, a city that in three generations would be the envy of Asia and all the world for its clean safe streets and its revolutionary "social zoning". A flood of prophetic visions filled him. He wondered how he knew this, then smiled. It was important for him to know, so he could share this with Tanvi.
So he told her of the Calcutta-to-be. Tanvi was fascinated with the future. "Tell me what will come, lord, please.
Green smiled. "Your people will invent entirely new sciences. Indian culture will take its place as a foundation of the society to come. Your people will settle the oceans, help turn the deserts of Asia and Africa into pastures, raise cities on other worlds, and in time scatter across the stars. One of your relatives will find a cure for a deadly disease."
"This one?" Tanvi asked?
Green shook his head. "No. But she will be inspired by your story, and grow up to be a doctor."
Tanvi shook her head weakly. "My family has forgotten me. My story will never be told."
Green smiled, and said nothing. They were both silent for a while.
At length, Tanvi said. "Father Green - Thank you for staying with me. You are a good person."
"I wasn't always, child."
"Haven't you always been a servant of God?"
Green choked back a few tears, then answered. "No.
"Actually, I just started today."
Tanvi looked with bright eyes at Green's, smiled slightly, then gradually the light faded from her gaze.
Reverend Ake Green bowed his head and rested his forehead on the chest of a person who, born male, had chosen to be woman, too. And he found he had no problem with it at all.
His problem was elsewhere.
The House of Meghraj
No one in the clinic noticed or cared that Tanvi Kumar's cot was empty; a space was now available for another sad victim of unconcern for the plight of the HIV poor.
In plain sight, Green had scooped up the frail body and began walking throuh the streets of Calcutta. No one noticed him, past the inattentive way that persons might walk around a stranger with a heavy parcel. Cars and trucks slowed as he crossed their path. He found he was quite strong in this afterlife body but he could indeed get tired. So he found a train going his way. He did not even pay for a ticket. People made way for the nice man in the robe and his large parcel. One kind man even helped him get the body off the train once he arrived in the suburb of Naihati.
The history of the region flooded into his mind; a million refugees had fled in waves from modern-day Bangladesh. Some had made it, some camps had faded. Some had not. Naihati was a mix of squatter towns and modern enclaves. India ascendant, despite itself.
Green knew precisely where to go. It was not the slums. Meghraj Kumar had done rather well for himself; he was getting into politics. While a monster at home, bitterly ashamed of his son, as he insisted on thinking of Tanvi, he was for public consumption a man who knew people, who Got Things Done.
Tanvi, of course, could never be acknowledged by a family burial. The runaway had gotten lost in the city, never returned. The boy had been mourned two years ago. However, India if anythin had a very efficient civil service, and there was still paperwork to be filled out. Best to be proactive and bite the bullet, and go to the hospice rather than having medical forms chasing the aspiring MP up the Korkata Suburban Railway.
Green stopped before a an iron gated entrance to an apartment building, and set the sheet-shrouded body of Tanvi Kumar down on the short steps. It was a modest apartment by American standards, appropriately demure for a candidate of the Communist Party of India. Regardless, it was a move up for Mr. Kumar, who had even taken the generic name to flout any notion of caste.
Green wondered what to do next.
"Ring and run," Gabriel's voice answered the question.
"You're kidding."
"No," the archangel insisted. "I am not kidding."
Green smiled, and pressed the button for Kumar over and over again. Loud quick steps and angry curses approached from inside.
Meghraj Kumar was about to learn just how important public relations were in any bid for public office.
"Welcome home, Tanvi," Green said, then looked up at a little girl, not more than six years old, peering through a grill balcony. He smiled.
"Are you a deva? An angel?" she asked.
"No, Tripti Kumar," Ake Green laughed. "I just work for one."