Trepidation | Trepidation Trilogy | The Empty World Sequence

Six

Karina had been helpful, told Danjel that she liked him much better than his brother. She offered to go along with them, if she could stop back at her apartment first. Danjel had sat in the mini with Karl while she ran in for some things. He had been asking about the church, and was explaining this has family were Lutheran, but that in recent years he had gone away from the church because he was dissatisfied.

      "Doesn't it all ever seem irrelevant to you?" Karl asked.

      "Not to me. I understand that others mock me, but I really love Jesus. Also, if you knew about many of the saints, you would see that their stories are very romantic, and tragic. Sure, going to the building every week and seeing the same people from your neighborhood might get tiresome rather than inspiring, but that's not how I worship anyway."

      "How can you have another way to worship, aren't you Catholic?"

      Danjel nodded. "Maybe I am blessed. I can just feel holiness and spirit around me. Trees, sometimes I look at trees and feel it. And older church buildings especially, with lots of statues, I get this feeling there of so much...love."

      "I still do not understand."

      "Don't worry, Claudia doesn't get it either." Danjel shrugged. Karina was coming across the sidewalk with a shoulderbag. "Maybe at the church you will understand, maybe not."

     

                      †               †               †

     

      Karina knew the church, all the locals did. It was that place where the two churches stood, with a graveyard that had millenia old graves, and mausoleum with older remains. In a wooded lot, it even had an ancient charnel house, but the bones were gone now, lain in a mass grave elsewhere. Danjel sometimes went to the charnel house, but unlike Casimir's church, it was said to be haunted and evil.

      Father Kit was in the house, just behind the new church, where he lived with the two older priests, Father Rej and Father Zilla, both now white-haired men who claimed to know every bishop you spoke of, and sometimes claimed to have dinner with the Pope. It was afternoon, and there were no masses to be given presently, though they were told father Zilla was visiting with a sick parishioner.

      Kit invited them into the house and asked the three to sit in the parlor. "He's very young," Karl whispered.

      "I thought you were going to bring Claudia," Kit said.

      "She wanted to meet you also," Danjel told him, "but she had something else to do. I can never drag her from her machines when she is busy with them."

      "Well, I thought you would be alone or with Claudia. Maybe you would rather do your penance another time," Kit asked in firm voice that Danjel suspected they taught priests in school.

      Danjel shook his head. "They are friends. Actually I wanted to tell you I may have found my purpose here."

      "You've had a calling?"

      Danjel glanced for just a moment to Karina and Karl. They were both busily looking about the room, uncomfortable with the conversation perhaps or the priest. They looked at the many small figures the priests had crafted for sale and which Danjel was too familiar with to really notice. "I had been thinking I had to chooses sides, but I realize that what I want to do is save all the people I can from being hurt by war. I mean everyone, humans, other people, Germans, Russians, whoever. Claudia says it is a shame the old tribes fought, but that they had to, so that now we could appreciate the absence of cruelty, or something like that. Did I tell you how she looses me when she goes all Existential?"