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power-rich to give to the power-poor. Do give my regards to Verna. Ask her if there’s anything she thinks her uncle should be doing.”
    “Oh, she doesn’t expect you to do anything. From her description I thought you’d be much tougher than you were.”
    “Tough? Is that how she sees me? Then I think I really should seek her out. We can’t have her imagining she has a wicked uncle.”
    We parted without shaking hands, the boy holding his upper body at an awkward, tense angle so that his hand couldhave shot out quickly if mine had made a corresponding move. Since it did not (altogether too much handshaking has been introduced into American life, along with that inane wishing virtual strangers a good day, a great weekend, a pleasant holiday, a nice night), his eyes wandered to my walls of books—sensible-spined university-press treatments of all corners of church history, yellowing pastel journals of medieval and ecclesiastical studies, sturdily bound fat German tomes and debonair Gallic paperbacks, uniform theological sets like rows of stubby organ pipes, all flecked with torn bits of paper, page markers, giving a frothy look to the massive compacted rows, rather like those Japanese bushes at Shinto shrines to which prayer strips have been thickly tied, or those smaller paper petitions tucked into the crevices of the Wailing Wall. Amid these books and their prayerful frayed markers, in this tall office riddled with gray autumnal light, while the skies beyond the lancet windows roiled, Dale and I seemed souls as understood by the Gnostics, shards of shattered Godhead captive in the darks of matter, bewildered amid these shelves as if newly released among the ladders of angels, the impalpable hierarchies, with which popular Gnosticism unaccountably cluttered its common-sense dualism twenty centuries ago. (What is stranger in the religious impulse than its passion for complication, the love of clutter that renders most churches hideous and every living creed grotesque?) We seemed to float, Dale and I, in lightly etched immensities of space.
    “Good luck,” I said.
    “We’ll be in touch.”
    It seemed unlikely and not to be hoped for. My mind darted ahead to my lecture, its invariable close. In the history of the early church, Marcion is a giant negative. His image must bedeveloped from the works of others: Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius in their anti-Marcionian tracts. Marcionite churches flourished alarmingly, and some were still extant in seventh-century Syria. Marcion’s appeal not easy to fathom. Forbade marriage. Denied the physical resurrection. He did ofier his followers, interestingly, the first fixed scripture, consisting of ten sharply edited Pauline epistles and a Gospel close to Luke. This compilation goaded Valentinus and Justin Martyr and Tatian into assembling the orthodox New Testament canon with its blithe jumble of contradictions. Main point: in opposition to Marcion, Rome armored itself ever more thickly in authority and dogma. Though not a word from his hand survives, he continues to fascinate: e.g. , Harnack’s two impassioned volumes. And Paul Tillich detects Marcionism in the revelationist severity of Karl Barth, my own, I must confess, rascally pet.
    The seminar would titter. Barth, in this liberal seminary dominated by gracefully lapsed Unitarians and Quakers, was like sex in junior high school: any mention titillated. In the fall, the students are still open and anxious enough to be grateful for any flirtation from on high: grim gray teacher lifting his hairshirt to bare a patch of cuddly belly.
    Thus foreseeing my future, I was disconcerted by a strange unwilled vision: I foresaw Dale’s as well. In one of those small, undesired miracles that infest life, like the numb sensation of hugeness that afflicts us when we stand after long sitting or the nonsensical, technicolor short subjects the mind runs preliminary to falling into sleep, my disembodied mind empathetically followed Dale