Pettis-Lovell Independent Publishers Ltd. the parent company of Pine Flag Books has recently published a short story by a promising new author. D.E. Roberts' "J: A Short Story" is a subtle reexamination of what it means to be religious. Far too often contemporary people assume that religion by its very nature is consciously irrational. For most of the history of religion the assumption has always been the reverse. Putting aside the execution of Socrates and the forced recantation of Galileo, the finer nuances of the phenomenology of western religion have developed to make religion more consistent with common perceptions of reality rather than in opposition. Simplistic religion was the domain of simple uneducated people, not the power brokers and intelligentsia of a civilization.
The simple religion of any given era is replaced by the customs, writings, and thoughts of the ruling classes. The writers of the Pentateuch were no different. The way they approached their world was light years away from the modern American Fundamentalists not just because they lived the better part of three thousand years ago but because their social class was radically different from the Christians who brag the most about being "Bible believing."
Roberts presents a not so empathetic prophet, excluded from the halls of power who is spending his final years recording the almost forgotten mythology of his culture. With all the faults of a modern academician and the pomposity and conceit of a man who has only the most microscopically small reasons to be conceited the prophet sets out to accomplish a task he is not equal to. The prophet is a prophet not because he is chosen by the gods to preserve their truths, but because he is a smart man too stupid to see that he is not.
This is a must read for anyone who wants a critique of religion that is neither an ad hominem attack directed at charlatans and imbeciles nor a post modern obsession with the essence of religion in one's own naval.
The Boston Pine Flag has received permission to include a sample. Here it is:
J: A Short Story
By D.E. Roberts
If you want to read more you can get a copy of this story at Amazon here.In the beginning.
The prophet said, "Let there be light." Nothing. The room remained dark. Again he demanded, "Bring me light." Without a word a scrawny youth emerged from a doorway bearing a small clay oil lamp towards his master. The boy walked quickly to the old man, though not as one terrified, but as one who feels the need to show a certain disquietude to maintain an acceptably comfortable status quo. The weak flame flickered as it moved through the air, illuminating the prophet's chamber that had grown dark hours before when the sun had sent the last of its amber rays through the narrow window near where the prophet was sitting.
"Why did you wait for me to ask for a lamp?"
"You were asleep. I did not wish to wake you, master."
The courtesy that the servant had assumed was little more than pretense. He had not seen his master asleep; he had only suspected that the old man had dozed off when dusk had come and gone and naught but silence emanated from the prophet's corner. The boy had neither known nor really cared whether his master wanted light that evening or not. Rather, he had basked in the pleasure of ignorance--willful ignorance.
Willful ignorance, though any good master would describe it as a vice, is a self perpetuating vice. The life of a servant is busy, and if a servant wants a moment of rest he or she must become oblivious to the wants and needs of anyone else....
