Conundrum

  The Last Prayer

  Maria, a middle aged spinster of slight build with her hair in a bun (as is invariably the case), knelt on the knitted hassock in the little parish church of Bilsington, with her hands resting on the wooden rail in front of her. It was midwinter and the rural landscape was blanketed in snow, with the totally flat Romney Marsh, just down the hill from the church, spread out to the horizon like a sheet. Maria relished a snowy scene, and the fact that even in London, where she now lived, the presence of snow could turn the most cluttered wasteland into a uniform neatness.

  Outside she could hear the breeze howling around the corners of the old, stone church, and the occasional hum of a vehicle passing by on the winding B-road, which bumped its way up and down the wooded Kent hills. It was a peaceful place, and this was her reason for coming here. But today, as she sat wrapped in her scarf and woolly hat, she wondered if it had been such a wise idea. Her breath wisped visibly upward, dissipating into the wooden rafters of the church.

  Maria had been brought up with a strong belief in God, but at this stage in her life she was not so sure, yet regardless of whether or not there was anybody there, this seemed a tranquil location to sit and think, and even on a dull winter's day the stained glass windows looked radiant and inspiring.

  She felt that these ancient churches were part of her cultural history and should be preserved, regardless of what she believed. Even if her prayers were heard by nobody at all, she still felt compelled to offer them, taking a gamble on whether they just ended up lodged in her subconscious somewhere, or found themselves speeding across space and time to a distant deity.

  This was a lot of 'whethers,' 'ifs' and 'evens', but over her 47 years she had come to learn that life is not black and white. It was easier to add caveats to her once-strong beliefs than to dismiss them altogether. And these placid visits to the church of her youth seemed to focus her thoughts, so there seemed to be no reason to stop coming.

  With a shiver, she rubbed her mittened hands together, summoned her thoughts upon recent events and began to whisper under her breath, “Dear God, if you are there, what do you think when you look down on the earth? If you are to return, as I was taught to believe, now would be a good time, surely?

  People have lost their way and the only thing they value is money. Some earn salaries that they could never spend in a thousand lifetimes while half the world starves. And if we dare to question the system that allows this to happen, they say we are against freedom. Freedom for what? To keep people starving? To destroy the planet? To put a short-term profit before the future of our grandchildren? To plough billions into weapons and waging war for profit?”

  Realising she had begun to sound like some of the less contented psalms she had heard from the pulpit as a child, she decided to reconsolidate her thoughts:

  “The world needs a revolution. The message that we heard 2,000 years ago needs a rerun. People have ditched those values. Humans were 'born to be mild,' but it is the strong and aggressive that are revered these days.

  The powerful use your name to control people. Fear has been used to motivate people into fighting each other, in the same way that you might use a story to scare a child into conforming. Fear of terrorism, fear of economic collapse and, once upon a time, fear of hell.

  But hell is already here on earth and it's up to us to stop it. There are sweatshops where people work fourteen-hour days just so we can have cheap clothes. There are battery farms where animals spend their whole lives in pain in the name of cheap food. When we believed in myths, humans were in a childhood stage. Now we are in an adolescent stage, too preoccupied with crassness and scatology on TV and in magazines to question what is going on. Will we ever wake up and enter our adult stage?

  If you are there, you must be able to see what is coming. How will the earth feed nine billion people by 2050? And just how many people will be fighting for food and water in 2100? What is the point of creating a world that ends up with more people suffering than those who are happy? And what is going to happen about climate change? Is it for real? Is the earth going to heat up indefinitely? Is this how the human race is going to end – the Armageddon of the bible?”

  Maria, was getting angry; “I don't wish to be irreverent but sometimes I can't help but wonder, what exactly are you doing up there? We have people down here who think that keeping power is more important than the people they are supposed to serve. We have religious leaders covering up abuse to protect their churches. We have governments who distrust individuals but allow businesses to do whatever they like, when all along we know that people are basically good and institutions are prone to corruption. Our leaders suffer from simultanagosia – they cannot see more than one thing at a time and never consider that all the problems are linked.”

  Maria worked in a bookshop and knew a lot of unusual words. She naturally assumed that God knew them too.

  “They are ultracrepidarians of the highest order, bluffing their way from one ministry to the next with no real expertise in any of it. Meanwhile we distrust one another, when it should be these so-called leaders that we distrust.”

  Maybe God showed up at this point, as the next thing Maria was aware of was waking up, slightly disorientated, with her head leaning on the rail in front of her. She had fallen asleep and felt a bit strange, as though one side of her face was numb.

  She looked at her watch; forty minutes had passed and she was beginning to shake with the cold. Maria thought about her life and how she had learned to discard the values of society one by one – money, acclaim, and finally the notion of finding a partner. And although at times she wondered why it had to be this way, she felt that it had given her an understanding of things that few people had time to even think about.

  Maria paused and concluded her meditation:

  “Thank you that I can question the world around me. If I had been rich and successful, maybe I would be only interested in wealth and not open to question things. Similarly, if I had been brought up in a very poor place, maybe I would just be working too hard to find thinking time.

  Maybe the fact that I spend my life alone helps me to value other things more - music, art, literature, the natural world, my family and friends. Maybe this is the silver lining to the cloud.” And with that thought, she rose to her feet, thinking that maybe this would be her final prayer. If anybody was there, she had expressed her deepest concerns and had assessed her life once and for all. Maybe there would be nothing more to say.

  With this, she signed the visitors' book (as she always did) and headed out of the empty church and into the blustery wind, which sent isolated flakes of snow scurrying into the air from the uniformly white ground.

  She had parked her small, blue hatchback at the end of the drive which normally had a line of grass visible down the middle. Today the track was just a snowy ribbon between the evergreen bushes. Most of the snow had melted from the roof and bonnet during her drive down from London, so her car was pretty much the only object in her field of vision that possessed any colour.

  It was a lonely enough spot to be able to leave the vehicle unlocked, but coming from the city, Maria was in the habit of always securing her car before walking away from it. Thankfully, the locks hadn't frozen again.

  Climbing back inside, she pulled door shut and once again found herself cocooned from the overcast skies and the biting wind that had been the most dominant sound for the last 45 minutes. It was then that she noticed a yellow Post-it note laying on the mat, in front of the passenger seat. 'How did that get there?' she thought, 'I don't recall seeing this before.' She leaned across to pick it up and examine it further.

  Upon it was a simple message written in block-capitals:

  'MARIA, THANKS FOR CHATTING TODAY. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM GOING TO DO ABOUT THE THINGS YOU MENTIONED AND I DON'T LIKE THE SITUATION ANY MORE THAN YOU DO. I AM GOING TO HAVE SOME SERIOUS THOUGHT ABOUT HOW TO DEAL WITH ALL THIS. SPEAK TO YOU SOON.'

  Naturally, she was confused. N
obody could have got into her car to place the note there - the windows had all been closed.

  She opened the door again and stepped out to examine the surroundings. There was one set of tyre tracks through the snow and two sets of footprints, one where she had walked from the car to the church and one where she had returned to the car. Apart from that – nothing!

  She got back in and looked at the yellow square of paper. 'The hand of God?' she mused.

  The mysterious note was on her mind all the way home. Not so much along the slushy, undulating B-road which required her to concentrate just to stay on the tarmac, but certainly as she cruised along the droning motorway back to London, with the North Downs ever to her right. She began to doubt her own sanity. Maybe the whole thing was in her head, like having one of those disorders where people have imaginary friends, except in her case it was a piece of paper!

  It was the next day that Maria concluded that she was spending far too much time thinking about this. It was taking over her life, and whenever things got like this, she had but one course of action – to get out of that situation and get back to normal living. This could mean only one thing – she would burn the note.

  Pulling out a lighter from a pot on the mantlepiece, she wandered out into the yard and lit the corner of the square of paper, watching it slowly turn black, with the flames licking gently at the writing that had puzzled her so intensely. When it became too hot to handle, she let go, and the final corner of the paper burned away as it dropped to the ground.

  Done.

  As time passed, this action didn't prove to be the 'miracle cure' to the enigma that she had hoped for. The problem was that, now the notelet had been destroyed, it seemed to take on an even more mysterious significance. After a few hours Maria was wondering if she had imagined the whole thing. But because she could no longer pull out the slip of paper and examine it, it seemed almost plausible that it had been some kind of supernatural message.

  And so, the beliefs that she thought she had left behind at the little country church that day began to return to her, for even if the note had been just a figment of an over-active imagination, maybe this was a way that her creator could speak to her – through her own mind playing tricks.

  As winter turned to spring, with all the positive feelings that sunshine, birdsong and buds on the trees bring, Maria began to think of that snowy day at the church as a turning point in how she viewed things. She had almost dismissed the ideals of her youth completely, but instead, through some kind of divine intervention, they seemed to be back!