Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [138]
Very early on, she had angrily given up trying to convince him that she had liked his penis.
And now, this woman, this supposed minister in the buff, had taken the comfort of his dogma away from him. She had challenged him. Stumped him. Embarrassed him. And for the first time in his life, the answers he needed were not readily at his fingertips in the one resource that trumped all other forms of wisdom.
If she was right about nudity not being a sin, that naked pastor had upset the delicate balance of his life by knowing more about ‘dogma’ than he did, and turned his certainties into uncertainties. If he had seen something in scripture with such clarity, such absolute conviction, only to be shown he’d seen nothing of the kind, where was he? What did that mean about his other ‘beliefs’? His other ‘truths’?
His harsh words to the girl from Toulon?
What was God trying to teach him by bringing him to this place? By tempting and testing him so? Where had the pious man fallen short?
Perhaps it hadn’t been in denying, or obscuring, or eradicating his feelings. Perhaps it had instead been in trying to deny, and obscure, and eradicate.
Was it possible that God was trying to tell him that He—as the nude, lady minister believed—had no problem with the human body being publicly unadorned exactly as He had made it? That His real feelings and intentions and ideas about the naked form had been hidden under layers and layers and layers of detailed tapestry woven from the beliefs and the teachings and the interpretations of others who could not and did not know the truth as well as He.
Perhaps God was trying to remind him that His will superceded the will of his mother.
The precipice of doubt loomed and the abyss of unexpected possibility lay below. Would he fly through it, angelically, or fall to his death?
Is this what Eleanor, his wife, had meant when she’d once asked him ‘Why must you always look for what’s “wrong” and never for what’s “right”?’ The parallels here to his arguments with her were so similar. His firm belief in something scripture said, and her firm belief that it meant something else. Being the minister, though, his supposed learning could more readily steamroll her.
But not, apparently, this naked woman in the church.
“If we don’t attend to the little things as if God were watching,” Reverend Winterly said, again, only to himself, “He will eventually remind us that we have fallen short—somehow—in His eyes.”
He sensed, in some profound way, that how he chose to face this crisis would change him for whatever might be left of his life. Whether for good or ill was entirely up to him. Though God seemed intent on hitting him in the head with lessons if he chose incorrectly.
This is why he had preferred Mindie’s company to the others. Mindie never challenged him. Mindie’s arguments were often his own—though perhaps more strident and rude. He had once felt certain that Mindie would have made a comfortable wife for him. But on this trip, she had been continually thrown up before him as a fool, almost as if to show him, in no uncertain terms, the wrongness of her point of view. More importantly, he now saw with looking-glass clarity that no one liked Mindie.
So what did that say about him?
While reflecting deeply on that disturbing thought, he turned and was caught off-guard by his reflection in the mirror. At first he was horrified to see a fat old man standing in his bathroom. Then he realized with even greater horror that he was the fat old man. His rumpled hair didn’t look as his mind remembered it. No longer blonde and wind-blown, instead,