The Book of Matthew (The Alex Chronicles Book 1) (14 page)

God did nothing about Mr. Fraser’s dirty deeds. He went unpunished. Perhaps it was an indication that God was flawed. If God was a man, it stood to reason.

God must have convinced my father that because of his own dirty deeds, he should read the Bible. Repent for his sins by reading this book I knew so little about. And for whatever reason, my father believed it. Maybe he was afraid he would rot in hell.

Could it be possible that God and the Catholic religion were invented to keep people living in fear? Maybe that’s why the Bible was written. Maybe Jesus didn’t exist; he was a fictional character whose life was fabricated, as was every miracle he supposedly performed. Every person—indeed, every story—in the Bible was created to stand as a lesson for all of us. Never do bad things; only ever do good things. Otherwise, you’ll never go to heaven. Then the Bible, containing all these lies and fabrications was sold to the masses in order to make the Catholic Church a lot of money, and to emotionally manipulate millions of people into believing that if you were a sinner, life after death meant eternity in hell.

That seemed reason enough to scare people straight. And as long as people were scared, they’d continue to go to church and pray, and they’d continue to hand over their hard-earned money to an establishment that did nothing but lie to them.

If all this was the case, then my father’s hopes for redemption were for naught, and Bobby’s virginity was perfectly wasted.

I had some reading to do. And my best bet was to start with the Bible. But not my father’s Bible. No one must know the project I was about to undertake, or see me reading a Bible—especially not the one that recently had never left my father’s side. I had to do my research alone and in absolute secrecy. God forbid anyone should see me reading a Bible and think that I actually believed in him.

I placed the Bible back on the coffee table where I’d found it and walked outside into the hot August sun for the four-block walk to the library.

…

When I entered the large one-story brick library, I saw several people roaming the tall isles of the main collection of books to the left. Others were silently reading at long wooden tables to the right, and two librarians were manning the front desk that stood just inside the front entrance.

“Excuse me,” I said to the one librarian, a middle-aged woman with glasses. “Do you have a religion section?”

“Over there,” she said, pointing to the main collection. “Aisles J and K.”

I thanked her and made my way over to the maze of aisles. They stretched on from one end of the room to the other, like dominoes aligned straight in a row. Each aisle was marked with large, white paper labels, starting with A and ending with Z.

Each aisle contained five rows of shelves. The lowest was about ankle high. To reach the highest shelf, I had to stand on tiptoe. It was on one of the high shelves in aisle J where found books on Catholicism.

Dozens of books floated by as I traveled up and down the aisle. There were books about the life of Jesus, his family, and the Apostles; tomes about the historical significance of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee; and women of the Bible and the roles they played. This latter book intrigued me and I plucked it from its dusty home from a shelf that came up to my knee.

More books followed suit as I continued my search. I grabbed one of the books I saw about the life of the twelve Apostles. On a shelf below that, there was a book about the history of Catholicism. I rescued it from obscurity and plopped it on top of the other two I was already holding.

A little further along in Aisle J, my eyes came to rest on a leather-bound copy of the Bible. This was what I had come to the library to find. I pulled it from the shelf and it became book four.

Several minutes later another book emerged. By then, my heavy load had become a burden. I put the other four books on the floor at my feet so I could flip through the fifth book I found. I read the back cover and inside flaps. The book was written by a professor with a doctorate in one of the sciences and debated the significance and validity of Christianity. In it, he chronicled the violent and bloody history of the Catholic Church, and indicated that it’s steeped in hypocrisy and lies.

Overall, he believed that being a member of the organized religion of Christianity meant participating in farcical exercises of convenience. Furthermore, he said, fear and manipulation were the two most widely used tools of recruitment and retention.

In other words, Christianity preys on people like my father whom, because of immense feelings of guilt, pray for forgiveness for their sins.

More so than the Bible itself, this was what I was looking for, the book that could answer all of my questions.

I lugged the five books over to a wooden table and began reading first about the lives of the twelve Apostles. The book was an historical regurgitation of names and dates and occupations and interesting facts.

I learned that before being chosen by Jesus to be Apostles, most of the men were common peasants—they were fishermen and field workers and manual laborers.

The exception was Matthew. He was a tax collector, an occupation second only to the executioner as the most hated man in Capernaum, the town where he was stationed. How curious that Jesus had chosen him to be one of his followers.

Learning about these men was made even easier by the fact that the book was thin and the type was big, and it read more like an encapsulation of the most important events of their lives, rather than a comprehensive in-depth biography of them all. I scribbled down notes as I scanned the pages, and within an hour the first book was complete. I was now familiar with Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, James, Judas the brother of James, Simon, Judas Iscariot and Matthew.

I set the book off to the side and grabbed the second one. It was time to read about the ladies. The book I found on the women of the Bible was much thicker than the first book and obviously chronicled more than the lives of twelve people. Luckily, the book was arranged alphabetically. I could scan the list of names in the index and flip to whichever one I wanted. Among the A’s were Abigail and Anna, common female names I knew well, but never knew were biblically linked. Among the Z’s were Zebudah and Zilpah, names that elicited giggles from me every time I read them aloud. In between were Elizabeth and Hannah and Leah, and Mary and Rachel and Sarah.

I flipped through the book and stopped randomly on a page. My eyes came to rest on the name Mary Magdalene. I had heard the name, but the only thing I knew about her was that she was a prostitute.

As I read about her, I learned that that couldn’t’ve been further from the truth.

It was believed Mary Magdalene suffered from periodic insanity. She also had a malady believed to be epilepsy. Jesus cured her and restored her sanity. Forever grateful, Mary left her home to follow Jesus and became one of his most trusted and devoted disciples.

Mary was present at the most important events of Jesus’ life. She attended his trial where Pontius Pilate, egged on by a merciless crowd, condemned him to death for declaring he was God’s chosen son. She followed him through the streets of Jerusalem where he was spat on, mocked and stoned by the crowd as he carried his cross. And she stood helplessly by as Jesus was nailed to that cross.

Perhaps most importantly, she was a witness to one of the most pivotal events in all of Christendom: the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Mary had cared for Jesus’ every need, right up until the very moment he was buried. For all her care and devotion, Jesus chose to reward her by teaching her all his divine knowledge and allowing her to see him fulfill his destiny as he rose from the dead. It was an honor he had not bestowed on anyone else.

That was all the book cared to disclose on Mary Magdalene. It said nothing about her being a sinful harlot, the image that so often comes to mind when her name is mentioned. This book characterized her as a down-on-her-luck woman whose life was turned around through her love and devotion to Jesus. So where had all the negative connotations come from?

I wondered what the professor who thought Catholicism was a fraudulent scam had to say on the matter. I picked up his book and scanned the index in the back. There were two entries that pertained to Mary Magdalene.

The first dealt with the legends of Mary Magdalene. One legend dictates that an old, Jewish document called the Talmud affirmed her bad reputation. From this tradition, leaders of the Christian faith deduced she was a prostitute and characterized her as such in the Bible.

But another legend dictates that the early Catholic Church originated its own smear campaign. In a time before women’s rights, religious leaders were uncomfortable with the fact that Mary Magdalene was so important to Jesus and was second in command above all the male Apostles. To cover the truth, her written gospel, as well as other documents revealing the truth, were sealed in an earthenware jar and hidden in the Egyptian desert. To complete the plan, Mary was deemed a prostitute and written off as such in the annuls of history.

The professor’s book indicated that the reasons why anyone would be involved in such an injustice are unknown. There is, in fact, not one shred of evidence to support the notion that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. In the few places she is mentioned in the Bible, she is described as pure, devout, and faithful.

The second entry in the professor’s book dealt with the sad legacy of Mary Magdalene—Magdalene Asylums.

Magdalene Asylums were a network of female penitentiaries of sorts created by Catholic churches throughout Europe that sought to redeem fallen women. The women were mostly orphans and lower-class citizens who sold sex for money, were single mothers, sexual deviants, or had offended some moral code. The name given to these institutions, therefore, was no coincidence: they were named after Mary Magdalene, the supposed prostitute turned disciple of Jesus.

The belief was that through industrial labor and religious teachings of Christianity, the women would be saved from their sinful lives of immorality and possible early death from disease. It’s no accident, then, that these institutions primarily took the form of commercial laundries, the prevalent thought being that by scrubbing clean the dirty laundry of local organizations in the community, the wayward inmates could scrub away their sins. If not for the intervention of the Magdalene Asylums, it was believed these girls would fall into obscurity and perish.

Overseers of Magdalene Asylums maintained that incarceration was purely voluntary. Many girls, however, were whisked away against their will and without knowledge of their destination. There are reports that many girls were ill-treated and forced to work long hours every day without pay. The forced labor and brutal conditions left many girls and women physically crippled and emotionally broken. The isolation left some of them unable to deal with the outside world, so they chose asylum life over freedom. Some even remained until they died.

In Ireland alone, the Catholic Church housed more than 30,000 women and girls in Magdalene Asylums. The last surviving Magdalene institution was closed in the mid 20
th
century.

I closed the book and looked at my watch. Time, somehow, had slipped away so quickly and unnoticed. Could it be possible that I had been reading for three hours?

Then the revelation hit. Bobby and my father believed in a faulty religion. Bobby had forsaken the girl who would’ve given him anything; he chose to worship instead a fake God who could give him nothing. And who knows how many false promises and lies my father had fed me over the years? After his infidelity was revealed, he chose to follow a God whose religion gave him the exact same thing in return: false promises and lies. The revelation angered me, but it was the salve that glued back together my fractured heart and healed my wounded pride.

I stood and stretched and looked around the library. I was nearly alone. The librarian who had helped me was still sitting in her same position, motionless like a statue, as if she’d never moved.

I made haste to return the books to their home among the shelves and left the library just as the sun was starting to sink from the sky.

I.

Matt and I crunched across the snow-covered lawn on the east side of Kilmore University. Brick dormitories surrounded us. The Student Activity Center was straight ahead off in the distance.

Matt had stopped by my dorm several days after our last private guitar lesson to ask if I wanted to go for a walk. I said yes and abandoned the paper I was typing on my word processor.

It was the first time Lisa and Matt had met. She gave me the thumbs up as I walked out of the room. If she only knew the truth, her thumb might’ve been pointing in the other direction.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. I pulled my gloved hands out of my pockets and counted on my fingers. “You lend money to exert power and display authority over others. You’re getting revenge on your cheating girlfriend by having sex with me. And you play the guitar as a way to escape life and numb yourself to all the consequences of your actions.”

Matt adjusted the black knit cap on his head, pulling it down to completely cover his ears and forehead. His cheeks were pink from the cold. “Are you sure you’re not a psychology major?” he mumbled under his breath.

“Am I right?”

“You make me sound like an asshole.”

“I’m just saying there seems to be two recurring themes in your life—escapism and manipulation. Would you say that’s fair?”

“I don’t know, Freud. You tell me.”

“I just did. I’m asking if you think I’m right.”

He sighed. “I lend money because I like it and it’s fun, I have sex with you because I like you and it’s fun, and I play the guitar because I like it and it’s fun.”

“There you go. Now was that so hard?”

Matt grunted.

“Don’t be angry,” I said. “I just like to know who I’m screwing.”