THE NEW CHURCH: A SHORT STORY
By Roy Claflin
Copyright 2015 Roy Claflin
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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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“It’s important to remember,” the man on the screen said, “that whatever the end result might have been, these people, these believers, they did what they did because they knew it to be the right thing to do.”
Jonathan listened to the sermon playing on the vid-screen while he looked over the ship’s status readouts, half-ignoring both, sitting in the cockpit of the Elishama with his feet up on the console.
He’d heard the sermon before many times, and had even seen this particular preacher speak as a guest at his church back in Iowa. Jonathan was a teenager at the time, and the sermon wasn’t the same, but the preacher, Father Eliot, was well-known among the followers of the New Church.
“They sent their missionaries into these hostile lands, bringing their truth and light to the natives,” Father Eliot continued. “They showed them that they, too, could be saved, in spite of their surroundings and their lineage. In doing this, their numbers grew, their reach expanded. It was a glorious time indeed.”
“Indeed,” agreed Jonathan, and smiled. He turned away from the readouts to watch Father Eliot. He was an old man when the recording was made, with thinning white hair and a slow, grandfatherly way of speaking. He wore the standard white robes of the preachers and stood at a plain altar under the pristine white sphere that was the symbol for the New Church. The sphere floated motionlessly in the air, held suspended by magnets, and symbolized the whole of the Universe.
“But when sickness came, it hit these backwater places the hardest. Man’s medicine was all but non-existent, and survival was low. In some places, entire populations fell, leaving nothing behind.”
Father Eliot paused here, and Jonathan knew exactly when he would start speaking, the interval ingrained in his memory. “We know, of course, that the more civilized parts of the world fared almost as badly. Certainly the old religions were of little help against the sickness. Millions fell, crippling nations, destroying economies, leaving behind a horrendous aftermath, a sea of lifeless bodies to be sifted through by the horrified survivors.”
Jonathan stood and walked to the windows. The stars stretched out in all directions. The view never changed. He rested his forehead against the glass that wasn’t glass at all. Some kind of plastic, they’d told him.
“People had no time for religion,” Father Eliot said. “Or rather, they had no use for a religion that could not sufficiently explain the level of death and destruction they were seeing. The old religions were all but abandoned.”
“And thus,” Jonathan said in unison with Father Eliot, “the New Church was born.”
Jonathan had been a deacon at his church in Iowa. Like the deacons of the old religions, Jonathan assisted the preachers of the church, of which they had three. He worked as a pilot when he wasn’t at the church, operating a shuttle between Des Moines and Chicago. He’d never married, and led a simple, quiet life. These things had made him a candidate for the Elishama mission.
One of the preachers had called him into his office one day. Mother Gail was the highest-ranking preacher in their area of Iowa, and Jonathan considered it an honor to serve her while she herself served their modest church. To be called upon for anything personally by her was overwhelming.
“Son,” she began, “we have watched you. Your faith is simple, but strong.”
Jonathan could only nod.
“There’s been a call from the High Church for special followers. Their criteria were specific and their standards high, but we have chosen you as a potential candidate.”
Jonathan nodded again, wondered if he might be dreaming.
“It won’t be easy,” Mother Gail said. “God’s work rarely is.”
“What will I be doing?” Jonathan asked.
Mother Gail smiled. “You will be saving us all,” she said.
The Elishama was a big ship, but Jonathan spent almost all of his time in the cockpit and living quarters, two circular rooms roughly three meters across each. The rest of the half-kilometer long, cylindrical ship was composed of the massive engines, the fuel cells, and the payload. Everything about the ship was automated, and Jonathan only needed to be there to make sure it all worked as expected.
The ship had a library’s worth of video and audio recordings, as well as thousands of digital books. His days were filled with reading, listening to music, and watching old movies. And, of course, the sermons.
Sometimes he stared out the windows, watching the unchanging starfield. He knew he was, in fact, moving quite rapidly through space, though it was impossible to tell. There were windows all around the cockpit, along with a glass dome above. In the living quarters, directly below the cockpit, there were no windows at all. Below the living quarters, in tiny crawlspaces, was the food storage and life-support systems.
Jonathan stood at the windows, listening to Father Eliot finish his sermon. The New Church had been founded on the idea that it was possible to reconcile what man already believed about God and spirituality with what man had learned about the Universe and science. Followers of the New Church believed that God was among them all the time, in the form of the very matter that made up everything. The parts of God that made Him omniscient and sentient were not visible, were not measurable. The scientists of the early twenty-first century could clearly see the effect that these parts of God were having on the Universe, and called this invisible, immeasurable substance ‘dark matter.’
“We know God favors us,” Father Eliot was saying. “He sent pieces of His essence, the first two souls, to live here on Earth in the bodies of two of nature’s recently evolved intelligent primates. We know these creatures as Adam and Eve, and they were one of many of God’s experiments here on Earth. Could a creature defy God’s will? Certainly the beasts of the world could not. They lived as He expected, they died as He expected. Only with a piece of Himself would these creatures have enough free will to defy His expectations.
“And we did not disappoint,” Father Eliot said. “We did not.”
Jonathan switched off the sermon. He checked the ship’s clock. Time for sleep. The following day would be a big one.
After he’d been chosen, they sent Jonathan to Florida for tests and training. The Church’s own scientists oversaw the entire process, encouraging Jonathan and pushing him to keep going. The tests were hard, the training harder, but the support of the Church gave him strength.
Eventually they flew him up to Sydney Station, a space station in high-orbit around Earth owned by the Church. Jonathan had never left Earth before. They were being very secretive, in their evocative way, but he’d figured his ultimate mission would have something to do with space. But Jonathan wasn’t scared. It only made him more excited, more thrilled to be part of such a huge Church venture.
As they approached the giant, spinning, double-ring structure of Sydney Station, the scientists pointed out to Jonathan the massive ship docked there, and they called it the Elishama.
“That’s your ship,” they said with a smile.
Jonathan woke up and ate breakfast, then checked the ship’s readouts. The countdown timers were approaching zero, just another few hours to go. The Elishama had been accelerating ever since leaving Earth’s orbit, just slightly over three years earlier, by the ship’s clock. To an observer on Earth, according to the scientists, Jonathan had been gone several times that amount. They called it ‘time dilation.’ This method of travel, they said, is heavy on math and hard for someone like Jonathan
to understand, but it meant that a traveler could reach a planet that was thirty-five light-years away in just over six years.
Jonathan, upon hearing that, considered it one of God’s miracles.
Jonathan waited patiently for the countdown timer to reach zero. At the ten minute mark, an alarm sounded, and in a polite, calming voice, the computer warned Jonathan to strap into his chair.
Jonathan did as instructed, and looked up through the dome. That was the actual direction of the travel. The constant acceleration provided Jonathan with gravity, a fraction above the gravity on Earth. He waited, keeping an eye on the timer.
At zero, the alarm sounded again, and the engines stopped. The dull vibration that Jonathan had long been ignoring suddenly stopped, and Jonathan’s stomach heaved as his artificially-created gravity was