CALL ME EARLY, CALL ME LATE
By ROBERT MEYERS

The telephone rang, buzzing like an angry bluebottle fly. He jumped to answer it, trying to smother the alien sound before it awakened the baby.

Sweetly querulous it came into his ear, the voice rising on the last syllable. “Brother Mintner?”

Not again; he thought, his patience splintering. He knew he had to be patient, that he could win no other way. He told his wife that every day. But when the calls piled up, his nerves frayed and he could not keep the edge out of his voice.

“Yes, this is he,” he said rather abruptly, and then reminded his caller of her forgotten courtesy. “To whom am I speaking, please?”

“Oh this is Ernestine Booker. You don’t know me (a half-apologetic high female voice, skittering on the edges of nervous laughter) I have heard about you, though. And your work over at Northside. And I just want to ask you a few questions, Brother Mintner.”

He waited a second, trying to get a good grip on himself. Here it is again, he thought. Another one. Will they never stop?

“Yes?” he said.

“Well, I’ve heard some things about you and I just couldn’t believe they were true of a Gospel Preacher. I mean, I didn’t want to think hard of you till I knew for sure.”

“I see. What are they?” But I know, he thought. I know the whole list. I know this oblique approach, too, this hiding behind the skirts of piety, this milky silky venom of a voice that murders in the name of Christianity.

“Well,” she said, “do you just want me—well, what do you believe about the Bible?”

Take five minutes and tell me all about the Bible. Desert nomads and el Shaddai. Glueck and Albright. Acrostic poems in the Psalms. Paronomasia and double alliteration in the prophets. Lowth and Hebrew parallelism. Canaanite literature and resemblances to Semitic legend. Masoretic pointing. It flickered like heat lightning through his head even while his mouth was moving.

“Perhaps it would help you to ask a specific question,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “I will try to give you specific answers.”

She giggled, and tried to choke off the giggle. He could hear someone else in the room laugh. It was fun for them, two women, pinning a man to the wall with their questions, knowing he was forced by his profession to be polite and patient. He could almost feel over the wires a heady, intoxicating sense of power possessing them. How often were they able to play judges and executioners, he wondered? Nowhere else in all their lives except in this strange religion that gave them the power of ignorance.

“Do you believe the Bible is inspired?” she asked.

For a second he thought of asking her whether she meant a mechanical theory of verbal inspiration, or some sort of guidance from God without compulsion. He thought of the repetitions in Kings and Chronicles, of the variant tellings in the Synoptic Gospels, of the strange mysticism of the apocalyptic books, of the difficulties of translations, and of the obscurities of many texts. But it would never do.

“Yes, I believe in the inspiration of the Bible;’ he said. Thank heaven he could say that honestly, he thought. It was not his fault that she knew of only one concept of inspiration, her own.

“Well,” she pressed him, “do you believe that Genesis and Job are inspired?”

“Yes,” he said, “I believe they are.” The rib, and Onan, and angels under the oak. Job and the curious debate cycles, with the doubling of all his blessings at the end. What could he say to her?

She was silent for a moment, expecting him to justify himself in some way. “Well,” she said, “I didn’t know, I just heard people talk about it. Now I can say that I asked you myself and you told me.”

“That’s right;’ he said.

“What about Jonah though,” she urged, as if she had suddenly remembered with relief some accusation. “Is it true that you don’t believe Jonah was in the belly of a whale?”

She was nudging him out onto thin ice now, he knew. Take away Jonah and the whale and the whole thing falls apart. He answered her carefully.

“I have said on occasion that the book of Jonah bears many of the characteristics of a Jewish parable. Some scholars have believed it was a parable, divorced from context. They have thought this for centuries. It is not a new idea.”

She disregarded his last words. “Well, was he in the whale’s belly or not?”

“If the story is literal,” he said, trying to be patient but unsure how to say these things to her, “then he was certainly inside the whale. The question is whether the story is literal. As I said, there are many good reasons for taking it as a parable, designed to teach a most important truth—that God didn’t want the Jews to be so exclusive in their religion.”

But we haven’t gotten the message, he thought bitterly. We are as exclusive as ever, whale’s belly or no whale’s belly! A cargo of rich and precious truth comes to us from God and we spend our lives debating about the vehicle in which it is carried.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said querulously. “It sounds to me like you’re sort of unsound in your faith. After all the New Testament tells us about how Christ spoke of Jonah and if He believed that Jonah was in the whale’s belly it looks to me like you ought to.”

He tried to laugh indulgently but he failed. “All right,” he said, “it’s a rather complicated thing. I don’t disbelieve in such a possibility, you see, nor doubt the power of God to do whatever He wants. It’s just that the strangely inappropriate psalm in Chapter Two, and a lot of other things, make me wonder if I may be wrong to read this literally.”

He could see, suddenly, just how her face looked as she heard this and he decided to change course. “Perhaps you’d enjoy reading the introductory articles on Jonah in something like the Anchor Bible or the International Critical Commentary or the Interpreter’s Bible. If you would do that, then we could have a very profitable talk about this, I think.”

“I never heard of those,” she said. “But I’ve read my Bible pretty well during the past few years and I think I know what it teaches, Brother Mintnero I don’t need sectarian commentaries and I think they’re a mighty dangerous thing, personally.”

I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said gently. But it upset him to know that what he really wanted to say was quite ungentle. Like, “Has it ever occurred to you, lady, what an arrogant creature you are, just about one micro-millimeter under that sweetly pious skin of yours? You wouldn’t know a critical commentary from the Sunday supplement, you’ve never wrestled hard with a textual problem in your life, but you feel perfectly capable of telling the world how it is!” But he dared not say it. He was supposed to be a nice man. He didn’t want her to lose faith in that, too. “Well, people are talking in the other congregations, Brother Mintner, and I sure hate to see The Cause hurt. I don’t know why you can’t make yourself clear. I know you’ve been in school a long time and everything, but it just seems to me like you have drifted away from the old paths and …

Her voice droned on, saying the phrases he had heard for twenty-five years. He hardly listened anymore, knowing that the parroted phrases would only enrage him. When she had finished, he had gotten control of his voice and he spoke quietly to her.

“May I say to you that you are welcome to visit in our home and talk about these things. You could bring up whatever you liked then, and I’m sure we could understand one another better.”

“Oh we’re leaving town right away,” she said. “We’re moving to Canon City, Colorado.”

He could not say what he was thinking. He said instead, “I suppose there is a Church of Christ there?”

“I think so,” she said, “but I don’t know anything about it. I hope it will be a Sound and Loyal Church.”

He said he hoped it would be, and that he knew she would undoubtedly be a strong new influence upon it. She agreed, deprecating meanwhile her talents, and at last she hung up.

Two more calls, he thought, just two more and I’ll crack. They know it, too. They know that you cannot be patient with them forever, and they simply wait until you break and then they become all injured piety and tell you that even if you are doctrinally unsound you can at least be humble and try to have the Christ-like spirit.

The top of his head was hammering painfully now and he knew he would have to get out of the house and walk for a while. It would not do to carry his frustration past the night’s sleeping. Tomorrow was Sunday and all those hungry faces, hoping against hope, would be lifted to him.