"Ishmael Into the Barrens" (1969/1971)

A few years ago, there was some discussion of “Ishmael Into the Barrens” on East of Laughter that made a few interesting points, and most of the interesting ones were made by Petersen. But it was clear that, for some readers, the story amounted to an old man yelling at hippies. There is some of that, but it is not the whole of it. What the old man is yelling about is the sexual revolution and how it decoupled sexual pleasure from procreation. The story will never be well understood or much liked. It is just too at odds with something most of Lafferty’s readers see as being beyond argument, and it is too biblically literate.

The Catholic Church, of course, teaches that artificial birth control is morally wrong because it separates the unitive and procreative purposes of sex, which the Church holds should always remain joined. According to its doctrine, sexual intimacy between a husband and wife should express love and remain open to the possibility of creating life. That includes a rejection of methods such as condoms, birth control pills, or sterilization, which are considered sinful. Instead, the Church encourages natural family planning (NFP), though there is still some grumbling about that from trads. NFP involves monitoring fertility cycles to determine when conception is most or least likely. The Church’s position also extends to in vitro fertilization, which it considers gravely wrong.

Last Sunday the bulletin at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston, a parish I sometimes visit, reminded cultural Catholics of this fact, given some recent Republican policy. I mention this because the bulletin was-responding to a major change in the laity of Church, though no social teaching has changed or doctrine developed.

How is this at all relevant to the story? Looking back on the period when he conceived the “Ishmael Into the Barrens,” Lafferty said to a correspondent,

“But the Heresy broke out in its full fury after Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) on July 25, 1968. By one count, it was exactly half of the priests of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa Diocese who signed a frothy-with-hatred letter rejecting the encyclical. This was before any of them had even read that wonderful and holy work. They already had their Covenant of Disobedience ready when they got the advanced word: ‘The Pope’s answer is No.’ Since that time I have heard only one priest of Oklahoma defend the Magnificent Document. He’s now a feeble and nearly blind resident at Franciscan Villa at Broken Arrow.”

It is relevant because his story lays blame on those outside the Church, yet over time Lafferty grew increasingly angered by the Church—specifically by its pastoral failure to uphold discipline in these matters. His later correspondence shows him arguing with fellow Catholics much as he does with the hippie movement in “Ishmael Into the Barrens.” This parallel should tell us something: the hippies were merely the local manifestation of a far larger adversary. They were the proximate target; the story’s true concern is broader—the incompatibility of the modern idea of sexual freedom and what Lafferty regards as genuine sexual freedom. For him, real freedom arises only through cooperation with grace. This why the story shakes its cane at the hippies, yet is more than mere cane-waving. It is an emphatically pro-sex story. He recognized the power of the social threat. Unsurprisingly, Lafferty’s position in the story is essentially that of Aquinas—but it is also, in its spirit, closer to Socrates than to the hippies.

Aquinas belongs to the classical tradition of virtue ethics, more in line with Socrates and Aristotle, than with certain later Catholic developments, such as the Jesuit (and Molinist) school. This could get deep fast, but suffice it to say that in the Dominican tradition, following Aquinas, freedom is the will’s rational assent to the good. This will is moved; it is aided by efficacious grace. True freedom, therefore, consists in acting well, in harmony with reason and truth.

By contrast, the Jesuit/Molinist traditions emphasize the will’s genuine self-determination and its capacity to choose among alternatives, even as God’s providence, through His “middle knowledge,” foreknows and orders circumstances without violating human liberty. I’m moving fast, and all this should be qualified to be fair to my old teachers, the Jesuits, but we’re really interested in Aquinas here.

For him and his Dominican tradition, freedom is not the ability to choose whatever one wishes, but the capacity to choose the good in accordance with reason and God’s will. Choosing evil diminishes freedom, for it turns people away from their true ends (for example, procreation if family is the vocation), the fulfillment of human nature in goodness and, ultimately, in God. Evil choices enslave the will to disordered desires, cloud reason, and restrict the clarity to act rightly. Being itself is diminished. This is just Ouden doing its thing.

On the other hand, one can choose to cooperate with grace. Grace heals and elevates human nature. It perfects the individual, enabling the person to act in harmony with divine law. Grace strengthens the will and enlightens the intellect of humans who are sexual beings. It frees the person from the bondage of sexual sin to enjoy the unitive and procreative aspects of sex. Lafferty clearly wanted to say something about this, which is why he kept retiring to it. In this sense, sexual freedom is not about doing whatever we want, not about choice. What makes one free is inner strength (through grace) to do what we ought. This is a very Western way of thinking. It is Socrates saying, “To do what one wishes if one wishes what is right, is freedom; but to do what one wishes if one does not wish what is right, is the worst slavery.” It’s also what makes Duffey complicated and at times perverted by Lafferty’s own theological commitments.

That might sound abstract, but it’s exactly what “Ishmael Into the Barrens” is all about: a dystopian sexual satire contrasting two visions of sexual freedom. Lafferty’s riff about “ancient hippies” and “trust no one under ninety” lands hard enough as a joke to sustain the theotropic dissonance without breaking it, for me at least, but I get it and agree with it. If you don’t, you probably won’t enjoy it on that level because it is calling you out. This is just to say that I know it’s not really just about the hippies. It’s also why Kevin Cheek is right to know it’s about something like his worldview even if he doesn’t see the theology, and for all I know, he might.

It’s one of Lafferty’s most overtly theological stories, a response to Humanae Vitae in 1968 affirming Lafferty’s position, so the exoterically biblical will be the through-line I’ll follow here. I usually move quickly on the blog, telegraphing information out of regard for the intelligence of the few people who read this blog/notebook, but today I am going to slow down and track in some detail how Lafferty’s theology works so nothing reads as merely associative or naively totalizing.

This time the story is set in a dystopian society in the 21st century, the Gentle World. Lafferty leans heavily into the idea that order, beauty, and sunrise itself are illegal, and he gives us some vivid world building:

As you can see, the Gentle World enforces a state-sanctioned randomness and ugliness. Population control is maintained by hunting and killing unauthorized children, known as nothoi, while the entire culture is organized like Bourbon Street in New Orleans: party at night, clean-up in the day.

We begin with two dissidents, a street-sweeper named Morgan Saunders and a flower-tender named Janine Pervicacia. They are yellow-card people. They fall in love partly because they both reject the values of the Gentle World. What Lafferty gives the reader is a modern biblical saga, centered on the birth of their son, Ishmael.

From the beginning, the birth of Ishmael is presented as the fulfillment of a prophecy. We are told that there is a sense of prophecy around our title character. Lafferty writes, “The people said that he (Morgan) would be the father of Ishmael. He didn’t know what they meant; neither did the people.” This kind of moment recurs in biblical narratives. It is an annunciation. It calls to mind angelic messages. Specifically, Lafferty wants the reader to recall the announcement to Hagar about Ishmael’s destiny (Genesis 16:11–12) and to Mary about Jesus (Luke 1:30–31).

Ishmael, as a name, carries biblical weight. In this story, it is important to separate that entirely from any association with Islam. Catholics reject the claim that Ishmael is tied to that tradition in the way its tradition holds, and Lafferty would certainly have rejected it as well. At the same time, he borrows the biblical weight of the name, building anticipation. An Official Instigator—a regime enforcer—seems to have some prescient knowledge of what is coming. He taunts Morgan about “the wild-ass boy Ishmael, who was not even conceived yet.” This, too, is biblical. Figures sometimes show a prophetic function almost against themselves. The Instigator acts as a kind of counter-prophet who knows a threat to the regime is on the way.

After Morgan and Janine marry, a friend of Janine marvels at the pregnancy in such a hostile world: “God knows the wonder of it, to send births in the early mornings.” This is a clear echo of the births of Isaac and John the Baptist as fulfillments of God’s word (Genesis 21:6; Luke 1:57–66).

Ishmael means “God hears” (Genesis 16:11), and Lafferty’s plot reflects the idea that God has heard the cry of the oppressed yellow cards by sending a deliverer. A Catholic priest known as the Papster marries Morgan and Janine and gives them a patriarchal blessing. He outlines the theological stakes of their illegal union, and he condemns the Gentle World while affirming their act as a cooperation:

“What you do is right,” he said, “no matter how illegal it is. This world had become a stunted plant, and it was not meant to be. Deformity can never be the norm. The basic and evil theory was: that (by restriction) fewer people could live better and more justified. But they did not. Fewer people live, and they live as dwarfs . . . We live in that which calls itself a biological world, but no one seems to understand the one central fact of biology, of the life complex. “This is the one biological fact that all present biologists ignore to their own incompetence: that every life is called into being by God and maintained in being by God at every instant of that life; that without God there is no bios, no life, and certainly no biology. There can never be an unwanted life or an unwanted person, ever, anywhere. If a person were not wanted by God, God would not call him into being. There can never be too many persons, because it is God who counts and records and decides how many there should be . . . ‘May the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, ah—the God of Ishmael—the God of Jacob be with you, and may He fulfill in you His blessings,’ the Papster said; then he said other things, and they married each other before him.”

I will have more to say about the ecumenical aspect of the story later, but for now I want to point out that it would be a mistake to associate the God of Ishmael here with Islam. Lafferty is being a little playful, but he does not believe that Ishmael or his descendants much to do with Muslims. The Catholic Church, of course, fought the Crusades over that very question. Lafferty’s view would have been close to what is expressed in his Catholic Encyclopedia:

“With regard to the various difficulties, literary and historical, suggested by a close study of the Biblical account of Ismael's life, suffice it to say that each and all will never cause a careful and unbiased scholar to regard that account otherwise than as portraying an ancient historical character, will never induce him to treat otherwise than as hypercritical every attempt, by whomsoever made, to resolve Ismael into a conjectural personality of the founder of a group of Arabic tribes.”

The story also ties Ishmael to the prophecy in Genesis 16:12 and, at one point, raises the problem of temporal sequencing. What is future, and what is past? Janine says of her unborn son, “He will be a wild ass of a man, and that is surely monster enough.” Like Hagar and Mary, this is her acceptance of the promise for her child. Although the Old Testament does not put it this way, it is co-operation with grace. Here Aquinas is helpful. He taught that grace was indeed present in the Old Testament, but in a more hidden or imperfect form compared to the New Testament. In the Summa Theologiae (especially I-II, q. 106 and I-II, q. 109–114), one finds the explanation that the Old Law could instruct people in what is good, but it could not give them the inner power—grace—to fulfill it perfectly. That power came fully only through Christ and the New Law of grace. The most complete and relevant place where Aquinas treats grace in the Old Testament is in his commentary on the book of Exodus.

In any case, the prophecy is fulfilled in the story. Ishmael is born. He has preternatural awareness, and he grows into an untamable survivor who will lead others to freedom.

Unsurprisingly, the story’s antagonists are biblical types, bridging the Old and New Testaments, just as Jane the Crane bridges Hagar and Sarah to Mary. The bad guys do not know it, but their fear of Ishmael is entirely biblical. Lafferty writes, “It was known, even before [Ishmael’s] father came to this city, that there would be a boy named Ishmael.” The nothoi-hunters anticipate his arrival. One gloats, “He’s the one of the kind we always hoped for. It will make our season whenever we kill him.” Here we are not far from King Herod’s fear upon hearing of a prophesied king of the Jews (Matthew 2:3, 16). The pursuit of Ishmael echoes Herod’s rage. As happens throughout the Old and New Testaments, the failure to capture a child affirms the biblical theme that divine prophecy cannot be undone by human schemes.

Going deeper into "Ishmael Into the Barrens," we can see how the society's oppressive nature turns traditional morality on its head and suppresses both divine and natural truth. This may sound old-fashioned, but it is exactly what is on Lafferty’s mind.

Take the poem that appears midway through the story. It is filled with Old Testament imagery: “I’ll climb Sinai’s rocks to the thunder-clad crest / And learn all that Moses forgot, / And see if the Bush is at Hebron or Hest / And if it is burning or not.” We find here references to Moses’ encounters with God at Sinai (Exodus 19:16–19) and to the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–2). Then there is the desire to “learn all that Moses forgot” and to see whether the divine fire still burns. It is an openly didactic moment. Lafferty is clearly hoping there are still people who long to rediscover a lost—or forbidden—truth in a spiritually barren world. It is a remarkably ambitious bit of narrative machinery: an insistence that one must be like Elijah, who sought God anew at Horeb (1 Kings 19:8–18).

Set against all this biblical material is a fictional document that Lafferty imagines, called The Analects of Isaac. Its philosophy is probably best summed up by a line from the story: “the conflicts created in a society which sees in population stability the only hope of the human race.” Isaac is the child of promise. He stands over the outcast Ishmael, and in the story, this alignment makes the regime’s ideology a form of enslavement. This brings us to the heart of the story and its theology of procreation. Recall that when Sarah became jealous, Abram followed God and sent Hagar and Ishmael into the barrens, where they found the well. The message is one of trusting God to provide for one’s children.

One of the story’s ironies is that The Analects of Isaac is closer to the jealous Sarah than to God. Its central tenet—population control—directly contradicts the biblical command to “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Morgan knows this is the wrong answer. He opposes his worldview to a secular pseudo-scripture.

One aphorism from The Analects declares, “No good person was ever the better for seeing the sun rise.” This line travesties the Bible’s equation of light with God and goodness (John 1:4–5), and of dawn with hope (Psalm 30:5). This is also where Lafferty confronts what I call theotropic dissonance, given the regime’s roots in the ancient hippie order. At first glance, it looks as if Lafferty is simply saying that hippies love both literal and spiritual darkness, echoing John 3:20: “Everyone who does evil hates the light.” But I think Lafferty is saying something else. There is spiritual darkness in the non-procreative, birth-managed form of sexual freedom that the sexual revolution utopianized. In contrast, the heroes in the story love the dawn. Morgan’s name means dawn, and Janine’s redemptive hope is described as “a new dawn.”

Before turning to the motif of exile and wilderness in the story, I want to add one last note. Morgan is tied to the Book of Job. Lafferty calls him a “battler,” quoting directly from Job 39:25: “He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off.” In a debate with an Instigator over the regime’s “gentle and wise” population control, Morgan calls it a pawning of deformity for form. I have called Lafferty’s short stories anti-secrets, but there are also deep ties in them to what is sometimes called anti-wisdom literature in the Bible, following the difficult Gerhard von Rad. We get some of this when Lafferty writes,

“We get you piece by piece, Morgan afraid to wander,” the Instigator said. “Today an ear, tomorrow another thing, and very soon we will get you all and entire. If you would not listen to reason with two ears, how can you listen with one? There was a question that arose many years before you were born, so it does not really concern you at all... The question was simply, ‘What will we do when there are too many people in the world?’ And the answer given was, ‘We will pass edict so that there never will be allowed too many people in the world.’ Why do you not accept the gentle and wise answer?” “The answer was out of order. Your whole complex is out of order in several senses of the term. That is why you will not accept order in any of the central things. That is why you must substitute deformity for form. I do not accept your answer because it is the wrong answer.” “How is it wrong, one-eared Morgan? What could possibly be wrong with it?” “It is the static answer to a dynamic question and therefore the wrong answer.”

One of the great acts of counterfiguration in the story is the Barrens. On one hand, the Barrens are a lawless zone where characters flee in search of freedom. This is the Israelites escaping into the desert (Exodus 13–16), or Hagar and Ishmael being sent into the wilderness of Paran (Genesis 21:14–21). Morgan finds that the Barrens are a wild paradise, with abundant food and water. This transformation of the Barrens into a kind of “land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) echoes the miraculous birth of the barren Sarah in Genesis. But if the wilderness is always a place of promise in the Bible, it is also always perilous:

One afternoon, after he had put away his brooms and rakes and shovels and was on his rest period, he walked out into the Barrens, which was illegal. He found no nothoi there at all nor any trace of them. He did find cattle that had gone feral, wild swine, and rabbits and deer. He found streams that were full of fish and frogs; he found berries and fruits and hazelnuts. He found patches of wild wheat and rye, and sweet corn and melons. “What is the reason I could not live here?” he asked himself out loud. “I could come here with Janine and we could live and flourish, away from the clang of industry and the clatter of the guitar-makers' factories. What is the reason I could not live here?” But his left ear left his head at that moment, and immediately afterward he heard (with his right ear) the sound of the shot. Angry and scared, he clawed and crawled and rolled and made his way out of the Barrens and back to the fringes of the city.

Of course, the wilderness is always a test in the biblical tradition, and one must rise to it. The great statement of this is probably Deuteronomy 8:2:

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.

That is where Ishmael comes in. Lafferty leans heavily on Genesis 16:12. Like the biblical Ishmael, the story's Ishmael is “a wild ass of a man” and “a wild colt of a boy.” As the first Ishmael grew up in the wilderness of Paran, this one is unruly, an outlaw who finds his home in the wild spaces of the city and eventually in the Barrens.

Here I'll add something about reading Lafferty. It's not as simple as saying over there is the biblical Ishmael and over here is Lafferty’s Ishmael, that is, if we take Lafferty on his own experimental-art terms. As in his story “Horns on Their Heads” (1971), he oscillates the relationship between prophecy and eschatology. He plays weird games with how we understand the axis of prophecy-eschatology. That is why he has Agar binned at the beginning of the story, and leaves open the possibility that it was Jane the Crane who was binned. In some way, his story is the Genesis story and the Exodus story: it is the validly discordered counterpoint of the scatter writing in the Gentle World.

It is along the prophecy–eschatology axis that the situation finds its order:

For this reason there will be anomalies and inconsistencies in this story, for all that we try to untangle it and set it in line. It was (in its first form) an illegal private record by a grieving friend, but we cannot be sure of the order it should fall into. We do not know for sure whether Jane the Crane was the doubled-up dead girl in the canister on the first morning or on the one-thousandth. We do not know when the destruction of Morgan Saunders took place, whether before the birth of Ishmael or after, but we have set it before. And we do not know whether the interlude of the odd man and the Odd God is truly a part of this account or whether it should be interluded at the point we give it or at another. We can but guess how long Jane the Crane was in a disorderly house, and we cannot always tell flashback from future glimpse. We try.

Typological truth enables the reader to discern the anagogical patterns underlying the scatter print. Of scatter-print—which might just as well be the amnesiac language of Flatland—Lafferty writes:

This is a love and hate story (both were illegal) from the False Terminal Days that were the middle or the twenty-first century. It is very difficult to decode the story and lay it out for the reason that (even in its illegal form) it was printed in scatter-print. No other sort of print was available. Every printing machine, even the small household ones used by private individuals, was both a scatter-printer and a randoming machine. Each letter could have many different shapes and colors, and these were so blended that no two colors or shape-styles might come together, or that nothing might range itself into lines even accidentally. Scatter-print was the flowering of 150 years of pop-posters. It shouted a complex nonlineate message, or else it did not: but it shouted. There was difficulty that about a third of the signs were not letters at all, had no meaning or sound value to them: and their blending in made the words difficult to read—if one were still a reader and not a depth comprehender. There was also a difficulty in that it was illegal to number pages; ever; in anything, long or short. Pages must be fed in unnumbered, and they were then randomized. And they are very difficult to unrandom.

So Ishmael eventually leads groups of illegal children out of the city and into the Barrens, like Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. Lafferty writes, “Ishmael led another hundred children into the Barrens.” The pursuing nothoi-hunters are like Pharaoh’s army, and their deadly raids recall the slaughter of innocents (Exodus 1:22). But they are also Herod’s men, carrying out a second slaughter of innocents. It is as if prophecy and fulfillment, type and anti-type, are being loosened and blended into a new kind of story—one that encompasses both by knowing both. To have type and anti-type, one must keep them distinct in the mind in order to understand fulfillment. Because they have already been fulfilled, Lafferty can redeploy elements of both in his own remix.

Here Lafferty gives us the nothos, the illegitimate child, and ties it to the biblical Ishmael, who was cast out from Abraham’s household (Genesis 21:10). In the Bible, that exile is part of a larger promise: a great nation will arise from the outcast, as God tells Hagar (Genesis 21:18). In the story, the children begin to multiply, with “wild-ass kids… breaking out all over the world,” taking on the biblical donkey imagery as a badge of honor.

As always, Lafferty does not shy away from how painful the struggle for freedom is. There is quite a bit in the story about martyrdom and sacrificial suffering.

I mentioned the Slaughter of the Innocents in the New Testament. That episode is itself a typological recapitulation of Pharaoh’s decree to kill Hebrew infants (Exodus 1:15–22). Ishmael, like Moses and Jesus, survives this slaughter by being hidden. Janine hides her pregnancy. She then hides Ishmael “in the sewers and on the roofs and in the trees… under the floors and in the walls.” Lafferty is drawing on the hiding of Moses as well as the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt.

By now, it should be clear that everything in "Ishmael Into the Barrens" is saturated with typology. So I will say a few words about how Janine’s character maps onto multiple biblical figures. After Morgan is killed by the hunters, Janine finds his corpse. Lafferty does something bold. He writes that the scene is like a “pietá.” Janine, pregnant with Ishmael, cradling the dead Morgan, becomes a startling image of Mary holding the crucified Jesus. Janine’s wailing and her curse upon the persecutors echo both Hagar in the desert and Mary at the cross.

Some of the typological game-playing extends to the antagonists. The chief hunter, Peeler, has a child named Onlyborn. In vengeance, Ishmael tricks Peeler into killing his Onlyborn. This recalls the tenth plague of Egypt, where the firstborn sons of the Egyptians were struck down (Exodus 12:29). What we see here is something Lafferty gives the reader more than once, though readers rarely talk about it as far as I can tell. It is Old Testament-style poetic justice. The chief child-killer suffers death in his own house. The episode becomes a vision of what happens when the Binding of Isaac fails—when human sin and vengeance result in meaningless, unredemptive death. I am convinced this is a major theme in Lafferty’s work, and I have written several posts that examine it in more detail. Attuning oneself to bad deaths and good deaths is one of the best ways to keep count in Lafferty.

The good deaths—and the acceptance that makes them good—can be seen in the story’s protagonists. They show a Christ-like willingness to sacrifice for what they believe. Morgan dies at the edge of the Barrens, much like Moses dying in sight of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34:4–5). His death makes possible the next generation. Ishmael is hunted down. His fall is “broken and burned” after he is caught in a trap. It is a martyr’s death.

Despite the suffering, Lafferty does what he usually, though not always, does. He ends the story with hope. There is a remnant—a small group that remains faithful in a time of apostasy. This is another thread that crosses between the Old and New Testaments, appearing in the writings of both Isaiah and Paul (Isaiah 10:21; Romans 11:5). The remnant is made up of irreconcilables and die-hards. It is a hidden community. Ishmael’s repeated survival and the persistence of his mission emphasize the indestructibility of this remnant. That may be the story’s biggest biblical idea, and with it, what Lafferty says about faith, joy, and refuge.

We see this most clearly after Morgan’s death. Janine moves from despair to hope. She says,

“Why am I mourning like one who doesn’t believe? . . . It’s the dawn of the world to me!” The narrative shows this is not mere sentiment but a profound, grace-filled transformation from agony to a fierce, life-giving hope: Another yellow-card street-sweeper, a man very like Morgan Saunders and a friend of his, came by with his working things. With great compassion he took Morgan from Janine's arms, bent him difficultly in the middle, and stuffed him into his wheeled canister. He also spoke some words to Janine in a low voice. We do not know what words they were, but they were like a flame. And now Janine became a new sort of flame. She brightened, she burned, she erupted with laughter. What? What? With laughter? Yes, with laughter and with a quick spate of gay words: “But why am I mourning like one who doesn’t believe?” she sparked. “It’s the dawn of the world to me! I am a birthing woman, and I will give merriment with my milk. I take the old motto ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ It’s a new dawn, and I have loved the dawns . . . Hurry, Ishmael, you leaping lump in my belly! We have to get you born and agile before they come to eat us up. But by tomorrow's morning we will see each other's faces. God knows the wonder of it, to send births in the early mornings.”

This recalls disciples’ joy at the resurrection and Paul’s exhortation not to grieve “as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Janine’s reaction to death is the hallmark of Christian redemption and the hope of refuge:

"And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.” — Exodus 33:21–23

Consider the “sealed vale in the Knockmealdown Mountains.” It is a sanctuary for a remnant of the faithful. In this valley, a Jew, a Baptist, a Muslim, and a future pope named Paul XIII live in harmony. God sends them “browned oaten pancakes” that appear on a stone. It is manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16:4, 15). This is probably the best example of an ecumenical community in Lafferty’s work, living in a miniature land of milk and honey—a fulfillment of messianic prophecies of peace and restoration (Isaiah 2:2). It is one of the passages that shows what is best in Lafferty, but one should recognize it as being also a moment of negative integration. What the group shares is a belief that ethical monotheism has no room for secularized actualization. This group achieves negative integration by defining itself in opposition to other groups, including most of the world’s religions. It does not make Lafferty softer on Jews or Muslims. (You should see what he thought about charismatics.) While it fosters solidarity, it is not pluralistic or really ecumenical; it is spiritual identity strengthened by contrast with outsiders—in this case, the ancient hippie, i..e. a false view of sexual freedom. It’s more like the Jews and Samaritans against the Seleucids than like putting Martin Luther on a Vatican stamp, which happened. (Stupidly.)

"Ishmael Into the Barrens" ends with Janine faking her own death and escaping with a new ally, vowing to “do it again — and again. She would be a birthing woman once more.” This act of defiance, paired with the vision of the sealed valley, affirms that the evil world does not have the final word. The remnant survives to carry humanity forward, fulfilling the biblical promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the faithful (Matthew 16:18). A story that began in despair and death concludes with a quiet but powerful vision of redemption. God’s promises of life, community, and grace endure and triumph.

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