The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance
Subtitle: A Novel
Publisher: Picador
Published: May 1, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780312420680
Subjects: General; Fiction / General; Literary; Fiction - General; Fiction
First sentence: The founding member of the Monday Reflection Group noticed first, arriving at the church to find the pastor's driveway empty and the curtains in the parsonage still drawn, but she knew nothing of his sudden and astonishing disappearance, not yet, only that the Reverend Thomas Mosher, well-liked minister of the Pilgrims' Congregational Church ("An Historic Church with a Modern Message" they included below their name in all the literature) in W-, Massachusetts, spiritual mentor to his well-heeled but undeniably eccentric congregants, author of competent-if sometimes esoteric-Sunday sermons heavy on the Book of Psalms, culminating in his very last one, "The Shapes of Love," which had veered away from the usual Easter Cycle to explore the possibility that God is an "infinite sphere," an idea that had bored some members of the church dumb and had seemed to others inappropriate for a Trinitarian; eligible bachelor rumored to have carried on an affair with a married woman in the church, Bethany