Faith of the Fallen

Faith of the Fallen
by R. Jordan Fischer


Another car breezed past, with the sort of sound as if the city itself were sighing at the departure of its child. A heavy, breathy sound that seemed to come from two sides at once as it echoed across the faded rooftops. Everything echoes in a small town, but especially so in the abandoned parking lots that define it purely through their stark lark of character. It was in such a lot that Donovan Marr stood, a lone figure remaining in defiance of the ever-present, screaming urge to escape before the city crushes one’s ambition and redefines the words “trapped” and “content” with equal measure.

Donovan shifted his weight and drew heavily from his fifth cigarette of the morning, matching the city’s sigh with one of his own as the welcomed poison seeped into his nerves. He stood quiet, not in meditation, but merely waiting until the cool air stole the warmth from, his fingertips. Known as Dr. Marr to his former patients, and Father Marr now only to nameless faces in his mind, Donovan was a man approaching fifty; in the sense that he had begun the slow, inevitable return through his past to remember where it all went wrong, and why. The latter question he found himself asking softly as he extinguished his cigarette and entered a building that for thirty-three years, an (what seemed) a lifetime, he had been avoiding. Now Donovan found his retrospective had come to life in all of its tarnished, smoldering glory; for what lie sleeping inside this building he could no longer leave lost

The church, for that was what Donovan now stood in, had decayed into nothing just as its congregation had immolated itself through hypocrisy and blindness. Under the eyes of their God they had proclaimed just and noble aspirations, until their voices broke and they were left in mute horror at the ruins of their wasted, yet not finished lives. The church had seen an explosion of growth, amidst its frenzied speech of belief and salvation, and had become so enamored of its love of God that it forgot to simply believe in him. One-hundred and fifteen Philistines, preaching a law they hadn’t begun to try and understand, found themselves spotlighted as frauds and were damned for their mockery of faith.

The fate of this church ran through Donovan’s mind as he picked his way carefully across fallen beams and broken shards of the graffiti’d walls. After its sack, the church had become a hangout for a generation of disillusioned teenagers who understood clearly its message, and took it to heart as they fled the town in droves. The building laid waiting for a second generation that the dying town was never able to produce, a generation that was replaced instead by the return of one man who, as the path of time showed, seemed damned at the end of either route he could have chosen. Donovan smirked as he though of this and remembered a quip about all roads leading to the fall of Rome. More presently, he was concerned about the fall of the roof, and his meticulous descent into the church offered only a few sickening blinks of nostalgia.

At seventeen Donovan had grown weary and disillusioned of his mother’s stillborn Protestant faith, and escaped from his first damnation into the arms of the Catholic Church. Though he would be known as Father Marr in time, Donovan’s faith began as little more than an acute interest in the details of Christianity. Dissatisfied with the bare-boned, simply translated versions of the Holy Word that were ever present but seldom read, Donovan took up the study of Latin, and later Greek and Hebrew. The young convert’s apparent religious fervor was mistaken as zealous devotion, and he was steered down the path of priesthood under an assumed faith that did not truly bear fruit until many years later.

As a priest, former if nothing else, Donovan felt stirrings of sadness at the state of his mother’s church; not just this solitary building, but the established Church as a whole, for as one member of the body fails so too must follow the rest. The disservice of Wycliffe and Tyndale’s noble intentions had evolved into a cruel parody; for in handing the Holy Word to the common man, they had handed him the choice of belief, and thus damned him. For a millennium the teachings of God had been known only by the priests, and passed down to the masses by the same. Belief and unwavering worship were inherent to the people, for they had no knowledge to cloud their judgement. In knowledge, one is not inspired to believe; and without belief one will find his motions inspired only by flames for all of eternity. It is a sad truth of life that without any aid, man will nevertheless conspire towards his own damnation.

Donovan’s breathing quickened, and the sound ricocheted off the narrow walls of the church basement. He was close now, close enough to imagine a pulsating beat intensifying with each step. While he sought something dead, there was no body within the hallowed walls and Donovan was not a murderer. Something more ephemeral laid waiting to be revived behind the more literal hollow walls.

Saint Theresa of the Ravens Monastery was among the most prestigious of universities in all of Christendom. Donovan enrolled later than most at twenty, but was still able to outshine most of his peers despite his lack of a Catholic upbringing. The rites and prayers, the very life of Catholicism came with unnerving ease to Donovan, and he was not always entirely comfortable with the development of his faith. In time, he found truth and a measure of completeness in his religion; never suspecting that time yet would turn it into his worst nightmare.

Father Marr, a young but proven priest of Saint Helena’s Cathedral, was a man respected by his colleagues and adored by his flock. He was merely twenty-seven, and if he were a bit headstrong there were few who would not be quick to forgive it. Donovan was charismatic, extremely likeable, unguarded even in his emotions, and yet always left one with the sensation that little more than the surface of Marr had been scratched. Perhaps it was this that inclined Donovan to the ministry of recently widowed women in his flock; and with war blazing at the very footsteps of his church, Donovan never found himself without work. Helen Takamura, Yoshima at birth but renamed at baptism after her church, was a woman struggling with the death of her husband under the weight of the fierce honor and pride of her culture. In her strength lie also her danger, for a passionate Marr could not help but love this woman who was his reflection in the form of an exquisite angel. Love for a priest, however, was a grim impossibility… a road with two ends: damnation or a sundered heart. Father Marr had taken the vow of chastity as all priests must, and the Vatican Law was in no way vague as to the consequences of breaking it.

Helen Takamura died due to complications in childbirth at 8:06 P.M. … twelve months after the death of her husband. The child was smoothly transferred to the care of relatives on the Japanese mainland, and was never allowed to be seen by Marr. Donovan found himself in a Hell reserved only for those whose punishment could not wait the death of their mortal bodies. The phrase “Hell on Earth” has somewhat more grim undertones to a fallen priest. Marr never spoke to his father superior; he merely laid his robe and cross upon the communion table and drifted into twenty years of grey suffering.

The wall cracked with one violent blow, and a second strike from the shovel afforded Donovan all the space he needed. Marr knelt and pressed his cheek harshly against the wall; he was nearly forced to hyperextend his arm as he reached into the cavity he had broken. Five minutes of blind groping yielded Donovan the end of a three year search. He withdrew a dust covered box, stark ebony wood with but a single silver cross to adorn the lid. His heartbeat raced, jumping for him to open the box, but the screaming pain of his partially de-socketed shoulder drowned it out and forced a final five minutes of waiting as he vigorously massaged his aching arm. Though he was filled with anticipation, Donovan still felt fear at the thought of the box’s contents, and some part of him was glad for the delay.

Somehow in the depths of his pseudo-psychotic haze Donovan managed to work his way through college a second time, this go-round with a major in psychology and an almost compulsory minor in theology; he certainly had the background. Had any of his professors known of his history they almost certainly would have passed him on the sheer irony alone, who in their right mind would feel anything but pity for a fallen priest struggling so obvious and vainly to understand it all. Donovan didn’t need their pity however, his days were hounded by an incessant drive to continue… and his nights were fueled by his ever worsening nicotine addiction and the fear of what visions sleep would bring him. Marr’s studies did not end with his graduation, aside from a healthy medical practice he forsook sleep to turn his degrees into doctorates. For twenty years Donovan lived this way, pouring over book after book, his already cramped apartment filling up with stacks of meticulously scribbled notes… until one day he found his answer. Twenty years after being cast from his church, Donovan walked away from his practice without a word.

The pain in his shoulder had trickled down his arm and was now an electric sizzle in his hands, dancing his fingertips across the box. Involuntarily Donovan crossed himself and began muttering a prayer before he realized that he had killed that mannerism two decades ago; “breaking the habit” was another one of those phrases that are only truly appreciated in all their grim humor by a fallen priest. No delays were left him, and Donovan painfully, slowly lifted the lid from the box. His eyes misted over as his hand felt the cool, smooth pearl surface of its contents.

Donovan’s only memories of his father were tinted with the innocent hero-worship of an eight-year-old boy. Richard Marr’s passing was then to young Donovan the end of his innocence, and of his place in the Catholic church. Every morning at 5:30 A.M. father and son had woken up to attend mass, but with his father now gone, Donovan’s mother was finally able to wrest her son away from the “heathen Saint-worshippers” and force his attendance in her version of Christianity. Richard Marr’s belongings were placed in their proper boxes and places, the more “dangerous” ones were hidden quietly by Donovan’s mother herself; had she known of the irony of one particular item’s spot she would undoubtedly have experiences convulsions of rage and indignation; she was not much one for symbolism. His mother never told Donovan where she hid Richard’s most prized possession, but after three years of searching, Donovan finally sat in a crumbling church basement with it in his hands.

Donovan lifted the trembling, clenched fingers of his right hand to his lips and help them there for an eternity in a kiss of salvation. A single tear fell onto the linked silver chain beaded with black pearls and adorned at the bottom as simply as its box; and soon Marr had broken into hysterical weeping. Donovan clutched his father’s last gift to him and shook, his head covered in ash from the ground. The forsaken priest cried as only a man with fifty years of tearless suffering bottled up inside him can, and when the wracking sobs abated he felt whole again as he hadn’t since he was a very young man. Brushing the dust off of himself, Donovan slowly made his way back to the world of the living, and accepted the harsh sunlight with an unwavering glare. The ashes of the morning’s sixth cigarette danced themselves to death behind his feet as the priest walked away.