Barnabas and Bread

Father Barnabas was an old man and suffered from what would now be recognised as an unfortunate medical condition. At the time and in that part of the world, the nature of his illness was not widely understood and the villagers privately but without exception ridiculed him as a madman.

In those days it was still considered shocking to make fun of a priest in public, and so they did it around the family dinner table, in the school playground and, above all, in the pub. Everybody in the village keenly followed the latest gossip about his antics and traded cruel jokes at his expense over tankards of beer in the evenings. He earned a number of popular names which can be translated along the lines of Father Bonkers, and some nastier ones as well. In public, though, he was always accorded the respect deemed to be due to a man of God.

The village was a small and isolated place, concealed from view among hills where the paths were barely distinguishable from the streams. Their radio shadow effectively screened out the modern world, whose frenzy of communication had not yet reached today's heights. Few people came or went, and the villagers lived their lives largely undisturbed by anything that lay beyond the limits of their valley.

The same priest had given sermons in the church for as long as even the oldest could remember, and had been the butt of private but universal ridicule for decades. Lately, however, his condition had worsened and begun to manifest itself in the form of a series of holy visions in which various Biblical characters appeared and spoke to him.

At first they gave him nothing more than friendly greetings, which he excitedly recounted to his congregation to looks of suppressed mirth. As time went on, however, the visions became more frequent and more elaborate, until Father Barnabas began to receive missions from on high. Initially these were of a fairly harmless nature - he was to sleep facing south, mention a hedgehog in his sermon or avoid eating potatoes - and since they provided his congregation with an unrivalled source of secret entertainment they were tolerated and in some cases encouraged.

One girl, considered by the older and more conservative members of the community to be a terrible tearaway and a worrying example of what the youth of today are coming to, took great delight in teasing the unfortunate old man as they were leaving the church. She would put on the air of a keen disciple eager to learn more about all things holy, and ask him questions. What colour was the hedgehog? Was it of normal dimensions or was it exceptionally big and prickly? Was it because potatoes were sinful that he had given them up? She was gifted at keeping a straight face until she was safely out of out of earshot, while her friends hidden nearby nearly suffocated laughing. Her name would be rendered in English as Kate.

As Father Barnabas's condition progressed over the years, he became more troublesome to the people around him. On one occasion, in a surprising display of physical strength at the age of at least eighty, he cut down his neighbour's pear tree with an axe. When its angry owner came to see where it had gone, the old man (still waving the axe in the air) confronted him with the news that the tree had been guilty of acts so outrageous he dare not name them and had earned the wrath of Heaven. The police had to be called, but before they arrived the priest had wandered away and forgotten to take the axe with him.

On another, he painted terrifying devilish faces in lurid colours on the wall of the school. After this incident a number of parents forbade their children to go to his services, or even speak to him in the street, and shortly afterwards the teacher moved to the city and was never seen again. Kate was delighted at the whole situation and became a keen churchgoer, but on the whole church attendance went into a decline, and many of the villagers discovered other things they could do with their time.

Those were still religious times, though, and a thoroughly unexpected crisis arose when the priest walked into the bakery in the indigo light of one clear spring dawn and performed the rite of transubstantiation on the entire day's batch of bread.

The baker stood bemusedly watching him, failing to realise the consequences until the rite was finished and the priest walked calmly away. Then it occurred to the baker (who was no theologian) that he should perhaps be concerned about having several hundred large loaves of the body of Christ to dispose of, not to mention a number of rolls and iced buns.

It would, he reasoned, be unthinkable to cut the Saviour into slices, toast him on a fork by the fire and eat him for breakfast dripping with butter. He blanched at the magnitude of the sin he might commit if he were to sell (at a profit, too) enough holy flesh to make at least three plump Jesuses; on the other hand what else were they going to do with it? He was equally troubled by the thought of the hungry children crying for their breakfast, and the financial loss he stood to incur if they were denied it.

He consulted local opinion and the issue was discussed around the village all day, with people dividing into various parties over the relative importance of religion, business and lunch. The excited gathering that gradually assembled around the bakery as the morning wore on was the focal point of the debate. From time to time reports would arrive from other parts of he village – Kate was a frequent visitor, running up with messages like "Dad says he'll smash the bloody window in with a brick and get it for himself," which she delivered in as loud a voice as she could get away with.

As lunchtime gave way to teatime, they gradually came to the consensus that that the Bishop should be consulted on what it was proper to do with the loaves before they went stale. A messenger was dispatched on a bicycle to find the Bishop's number and a working telephone. The Bishop reluctantly agreed to do something about the situation if everybody would calm down and go home and they reluctantly agreed, resigning themselves to not having any bread that day.

For several more days the problem remained unsolved while the Son of God sat mutely going hard and mouldy in a back room of the bakery and people muttered that this was all a bit ridiculous really, what a waste. Then one morning the village awoke to find a strange glow in the sky and the bakery in flames.

It was never discovered whether the blaze had been caused by divine or human intervention, whether this was the solution chosen by the Bishop or whether the Lord had given a final incendiary mission to the unfortunate priest, who disappeared the same morning and was never found alive or dead. The villagers today are not quite sure whether he was real; he seems to have evaporated like the memory of a strange dream.