Lillian laughs. “Less people listening, I know. But still, it isn’t fair! It isn’t the poor people’s fault if they’re poor, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy says slowly. She remembers Anastasia; got to visit her again next week. “Sometimes, though, you wonder.… Well, you can see where Reverend Strong gets his ideas.”

Lillian nods. The lesson last week was based on the parable of the prodigal son. Why, the reverend demanded, should God value the prodigal son more than the one who had been faithful all along? This was clearly unfair, and the reverend spent over half an hour discussing the problems in the Greek text and the likelihood of a mistranslation from the original Armenian dialect. “So that by the end of it,” Lillian says with a laugh, “he was basically saying that the Bible had got it backwards!”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He said that it was the elder son who would always be God’s favorite, for never having strayed away. The ones who stray can’t be trusted, he said. You can forgive them but you can’t trust them.”

Lucy shakes her head. The parables—some of them are just too ambiguous. The prodigal son story never seemed quite fair to the elder son, it’s true, and as for the parable of the talents … well, the way the reverend can use these stories! She finds it hard to think about them. And these are New Testament stories, too, the ones she has really committed herself to. The story of Job, and God and Satan betting over him—of Abraham and Isaac, and the faked sacrifice—she doesn’t even try to understand those anymore. But Christ’s parables … she’s obliged to acknowledge the authority of them. Still, when the reverend can take the parable of the talents and use it to prove that the poor in OC are poor because it was meant to be … and imply that the church shouldn’t waste its time trying to help them! Well, that was the reverend’s fault, but the parable sure gave him room to run with it.

So Lucy and Lillian discuss strategies for getting around the reverend’s biases. The programs that are already under way are the obvious channels to work through; keep the momentum going with those, and the fact that the reverend will never start another won’t really matter. It’s a question of fund-raising, of getting volunteer help, of going out there and working. Between them they should be able to do it.