Playing The Field

The Good Seed

It being Thursday afternoon, the Catholic mission church hall was filled with people in search of tea, biscuits, warmth and human companionship. They were souls whose dreams and aspirations had been brought low by the unbending forces of fate, fortune and social progress, forgotten but for a statistical footnote on the pages of post-war economic philosophy.

Or to put it another way, they had fought a few rounds in the Arena of Life, and now were scratching out their last days with a little help from institutions ancient and modern. Today, the advent of spring had brought a faint new energy to these tired veterans of life's battle.

Mouths chattered and teeth clattered as palsied hands conducted mugs of tea on their uncertain journey from table to mouth. The thin, reedy tones of a foot-pedalled harmonium conveyed melodies of hymns ancient and modern, but as yet nobody was singing along.

The priest moved from table to table engaging familiar faces in what he hoped was concerned but not patronising conversation. He had lost his faith (such as it ever was) a long time ago, but rather enjoyed this part of his pastoral duties, which cast him more in the role of social worker than spiritual guide. It gave him a certain inner warmth being amongst these life-swept people, knowing that his church walls were giving them some small respite from the storm.

He knew that part of this warmth came from a self-serving, self-preserving sense that fractured though he was himself, he was still safely paddling in the shallows of life, while many of his guests were much further out at sea.

He was listening to an old man reminiscing about times when people were friendly and beer only two shillings a pint, when his attention was diverted by the sight of two young girls sat a couple of tables away. They were student volunteers who had come to the Thursday tea party for the first time and were uncertain as to how to integrate with the people they sat with, having had as yet little experience of the satanic mills that had chewed and spat out the lives around them. After some commendable attempts at conversation, they had now lapsed into silence and seemed to be sitting in their own slightly removed bubble of youthful purity, a displaced dimension sepperate from the evidence of suffering and impermanence around them.

They were both darkly beautiful with strong, sculptural features and they sat in stillness and silence while around them a few frail voices now rose in fragile accompaniment to the old harmonium.

“We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the ground...”

The priest felt his hard-won inner meaning structures stagger and wobble for a giddy moment. He had led a life steeped in humanistic compassion which he hoped would heal his childhood wounds and calm the animal side of his human nature. But there were moments when it became horribly apparent that these idealistic pretensions had little power compared to the visceral energies programmed into his male body.

Both girls – they may well have been sisters – were at the very onset of their youthful beauty. One had slightly sharper features, an aquiline nose and full, straight lips and her thoughts seemed troubled and inward flowing. The other had a more open face and her eyes - set like fan-lights in the arches of her brows – were turned upwards to the oaken rafters and the crucified effigy that hung there.

“I won't even talk to them,” thought the priest. “They are so far above me that I don't want to know they exist.”

“For heaven's sake, man, they can't be more than 20. They know nothing of life or men.”

“And after all, I've had some good women in the past.”

“I played the field for a time, but that's all over now.”

“Never forget the capacity of the young woman to humiliate the middle-aged man!”

He realised then that the old man was still talking and that part of his being had been mouthing replies and making his head nod. Yes, it was true that the city was no longer the friendly place it had been.

“But we're still here for you, Harold. Some things never change!”

He gave the old man a quick shoulder squeeze, momently re-establishing his sense of being a compassionate, worldly priest. But the two girls had swept into in his consciousness like a cold wind through rotten shutters and blown down his house of cards.

*

Next morning – after a restless night – the priest went out to the churchyard and lay himself down under a freshly blossoming apple tree. He looked up through a lattice-work of twigs with their candy-floss effusions and the equally effusive clouds above. The florid shapes merged in the eye of his mind into voluptuous female forms.

“One of them might fall for me. Some of these Christian chicks can take a shine to a man with a dog collar...”

“...I might become a father figure to them. They might both fall in love with my wisdom and life-affirming sermons...”

“...and of course, I wouldn't do anything about it...”

“...'You see, my child, I am so much older than you...I am flattered, deeply flattered but you must find someone your own age'...”

Then seeing his clichéd projections lumbering down their well-rutted neural pathways, he cried out to the sky above, “God, there must be another way!”

But where was this path? In his work he tried to condition himself into believing that every mortal being he came across was as vital and significant as the rest. No matter how ancient and life-beaten, each one was a fragment of the greater consciousness. Old Harold with his raw-steak, white-stubbled cheeks and tumbling false teeth was a little piece that had broken off in brilliance. He wished to honour that brilliance in each individual, and move beyond the anatomical and historical specifics of the body that housed it.

But for all his self-training in the spiritual quest, his body was constantly planting sign-posts that pointed in the direction of Young Woman. The troubled girl or the spiritual girl – both were profoundly fascinating in a way that was quite different to the rest of the human scrap-heap. It was as if nothing in the human universe mattered but Woman Young. Young men could be sent abroad to be slaughtered in heaps, but the young females would always be protected and venerated. You only had to look at the magazine rack in the newsagents to see that society's main concern was Woman Young. The priest continued his remonstrations to the apple-blossom above him.

“Does nothing in this universe matter but the fertility of young wombs?”

“Christ, even the good RC church worships her above all else!”

“Though of course, the good RC church excused her from the nasty excesses of the male half of the reproductive equation. They venerate the womb while damning the cock!”

“But I did the sex thing years ago. It never led anywhere. It promised transformation but never came up with the goods.”

“Is God just an evolutionary process on an irrelevant planet on the edge of nowhere?”

A breeze shifted some blossom, which fell on the priest's up-turned face. What purpose could there be for the middle-aged man on the downward slope?

“An older man can only ever be a father figure to the younger woman...”

“...or a parasite.”

A tractor was ploughing a field nearby, rich brown soil being sliced open in readiness for seed.

“So what is left to me now?”

“We plough the fields and scatter...”

More blossom was blown down, settling upon nearby head-stones and tombs.

“One day I will return to the source. I will have played the field. I will have ploughed the field. I will BE a ploughed field.”

“This little piece broke off in brilliance...”

And as he lay there among the graves, soul and body in mortal combat, a light rain fell and a profusion of fresh leaves began to unfurl around him.