'My personal idea of God'

SHANNON

So the next Sunday when I climbed into the pulpit and looked down over all of those smug, disapproving, accusing faces uplifted, I had an impulse to shake them—so I shook them. I had a prepared sermon—meek, apologetic—I threw it away, tossed it into the chancel. Look here, I said, I shouted, I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this, this . . . this. . . . 

HANNAH

[quietly]

Senile delinquent? 

SHANNON

Yeah, this angry, petulant old man. I mean he's represented like a bad-tempered childish old, old, sick, peevish man—I mean like the sort of old man in a nursing home that's putting together a jigsaw puzzle and can't put it together and gets furious at it and kicks over the table. Yes, I tell you they do that, all our theologies do it—accuse God of being a cruel, senile delinquent, blaming the world and brutally punishing all he created for his own faults in construction, and then, ha-ha, yeah—a thunderstorm broke that Sunday. . . . 

HANNAH

You mean outside the church? 

SHANNON

Yep, it was wilder than I was! And out they slithered, they slithered out of their pews to their shiny black cockroach sedans, ha-ha, and I shouted after them, hell, I even followed them halfway out of the church, shouting after them as they. . . . [He stops with a gasp for breath.] 

HANNAH

Slithered out? 

SHANNON

I shouted after them, go on, go home and close your house windows, all your windows and doors, against the truth about God! 

HANNAH

Oh, my heavens. Which is just what they did—poor things. 

SHANNON

Miss Jelkes honey, Pleasant Valley, Virginia was an exclusive suburb of a large city and these poor things were not poor—materially speaking. 

HANNAH

[smiling a bit]

What was the, uh, upshot of it? 

SHANNON

Upshot of it? Well, I wasn't defrocked. I was just locked out of the church in Pleasant Valley, Virginia, and put in a nice little private asylum to recuperate from a complete nervous breakdown as they preferred to regard it, and then, and then I . . . I entered my present line—tours of God's world conducted by a minister of God with a cross and a round collar to prove it. Collecting evidence! 

HANNAH

Evidence of what, Mr. Shannon? 

SHANNON

[a touch slyly now]

My personal idea of God, not as a senile delinquent, but as a. . . . 

HANNAH

Incomplete sentence.

—Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana (1961)