In your benevolence, hear the Philosopher's plea for a sign of your loving indulgence.
Starring Annette Badland as Meridian Veccole, the Philosopher (she/her)
With additional voices from the season 1 cast
A sign of your loving indulgence
I Need A Miracle, season 1, episode 8 of 12
Written and created by Matt Boothman
Directed by Robert Valentine
Music by Katharine Seaton
Sound design by Sarah Buchynski
Casting by Fiona Thraille
Recorded at Jukebox Studios
Broadcast assistance from Teresa Milewski
Cover art by Dionysis Livanis
Produced by Sarah Golding of Wireless Theatre for Foggy Outline
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Transcript
Delicate synth and violin music plays; mysterious, calm but slightly haunting.
ANNOUNCER 1:
Foggy Outline presents: I Need A Miracle. A Wireless Theatre production.
A sign of your loving indulgence. Written by Matt Boothman. Performed by Annette Badland.
The music ends.
A murmur of many pleading voices, overlapping indistinguishably.
Out of the murmur, a single voice breaks through.
THE PHILOSOPHER:
In your benevolence … if that truly means anything … I implore you, grant me a miracle. Hear my plea, and deliver me.
The murmurs die away. THE PHILOSOPHER is in a high, damp cell, open to the elements. Wind whistles. Water drips. Her voice resounds off hard stone walls.
THE PHILOSOPHER:
They’re saying all this … is your will. I have been beaten in my own home. I have been incarcerated here, alone. And the ones who persecute me say they do it all in your name. They claim your blessing for this … inhumanity.
In your benevolence, can you truly allow this?
In your “benevolence”, is this truly what you want for me?
Do you think that I’m ungrateful? Is it that I’m undeserving?
I can’t help but to wonder these things. These “Lectors” say that to wonder the way I do is a crime. They say, questioning your benevolence disqualifies me from it. Makes me undeserving of it. I say, wonder is an appropriate response to your daily miracle-working. But saying so got me abandoned in a cold and lonely cell, high up here in the Penitent Apex. So I’m forced to wonder … if I may be wrong.
Water drips from the ceiling into a puddle on the floor.
THE PHILOSOPHER:
If I am wrong … if I am wrong and the Lectors are in the right, if they are right to do this, then it must mean something has changed. There must have been an Upheaval that I failed to mark.
It’s happened before. When I feel a new calling coming on, I let it absorb me completely, so sometimes when it’s run its course, I emerge into a world that has changed as much as I have. A new me must find where she fits in a new world.
I thought I fit in the plaza. I thought I might always fit there, however the world changed. Perhaps that was foolish.
It’s been my habit for years to sit in the corner of the plaza on market days, under the ice-leaf tree, and charmed against the rain. And anyone who dallied there with me long enough, I would ask them my question. It was a question about you. I would ask, why do you think our benevolent divinity grants some wishes, and not others? When our attentive protector hears all our pleas, why are some answered with miracles and others with silent inaction?
Over the years I’ve seen my question met with interest and with indifference, with fear, and with delight, with confusion, and the most frantic theorising. It’s only now that these “Lectors of the Divine Benevolence” have started gaining influence that I’ve seen my questions met with outrage. Not even at the implications, the possible answers; outrage that I dared to ask the question at all. That I dared to wonder, where they are certain.
One of these “Lectors” was passing through the square one day and heard me ask my question, or else, someone I asked it to went and raised it with the Lectors. And in his next address, the Apex Lector made me an example, naming me a blinkered, laughable clod, uncomprehending of your benevolence.
The next time I went to the plaza after that, before I could even sit in my usual spot, I was surrounded by bellowing acolytes. They called me a fool and … worse. They said I was endangering my neighbours with my idiocy, they hounded me out of the plaza, where I’d so many lively, enlightening conversations, where I’d made so many friends. And they warned me never to show my face there again.
(with a short, humourless laugh) That wasn’t enough for them.
The Lectors saw what their followers would do – given a target – and I think it must have delighted them to see the new power they wielded. Evidence of their influence growing, which I suppose one could easily interpret as evidence of one’s rectitude.
And so they did it again. In his next address, the Apex Lector fed his followers my name a second time, this time with even more confidence, knowing they had already taken away my voice in the plaza, knowing that his voice boomed out louder and farther. He named me a spiteful denialist, undeserving of your benevolence.
The address was still going on when the acolytes forced their way into my home. They charged me with rigid beliefs when my heart has always been full of nothing but curiosity and wonder. They claimed I denied your regard, as they fouled my humble home. They claimed I denied your benevolence, as they laid into me with fists and boots and … spittle.
They claimed I denied your very existence as they dragged me through the streets to the Penitent Apex and shut me in this cruel cell to serve as an example.
Is this truly the fate you want for me? In your benevolence? You see: I don’t deny your benevolence, whatever they care to claim; how could I deny your regard when I feel it upon me now? How could I deny your existence when you bless us with such wondrous proof every day of our lives?
(with a brief laugh at herself) More … questions. I’m afraid it’s in my nature. The Lectors say my questions displease you. They say if too many people ask the questions I ask, we risk discovering the limits of your benevolence.
I wonder. Is there such a limit? I wonder…
I wonder at the pleas that go unanswered. And I wonder at the pleas you grant, and I wonder at the world you shape with these choices, and I wonder … why.
I wonder: are they choices at all? Do you truly choose who to indulge and who to ignore, or do you see the shape the world must be, and simply grant those pleas that fit the mould?
I wonder: do you know which miracles would truly benefit us, were they granted, and which we only think we need? Do you know which of our desires would in reality do us harm, and in your benevolence, grant only those that truly bring us the relief we beg you for?
I wonder. Do you grant only those pleas … it is in your power to grant?
Does your power, in fact … have limits?
I don’t believe I wonder these things because I am ungrateful, or spiteful, or foolish.
(wryly amused at herself) Though perhaps I am foolish.
To wonder at these things is bliss to me. That’s all. So this is my plea. For my sake, and for anyone after me who discovers this same bliss and invites this same persecution. Send those Lectors a sign. Show them that in your benevolence, you indulge my little wonderings. Show them that I am not laughable or despicable in your eyes.
Unless I am.
I don’t believe that I am.
But I can’t make them see. They’ve made you the object of their entire existences. So you can.
A murmur of indistinguishable voices begins to swell up over THE PHILOSOPHER’s voice.
THE PHILOSOPHER:
In your benevolence, I implore you, having heard my plea, to grant me this miracle, and deliver me from this trial.
All the voices fade away.
ANNOUNCER 2:
I Need A Miracle is a Foggy Outline podcast produced by Wireless Theatre. Directed by Robert Valentine. Produced by Sarah Golding. Casting by Fiona Thraille. Broadcast assistance by Teresa Milewski. Music by Katharine Seaton. Sound design by Sarah Buchynski. Recorded by Stephen H. at Jukebox Studios. Find more audio gold at wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk and foggyoutline.com.
Thank you for listening.