Bermuda at Last! (sort of...)

Bless me, My Beloved Sinners, but Bishop Quinine and I have finally arrived in Bermuda and I know you’ve all been desperately worried about what’s happened to us since my last homily, posted just prior to our aircraft's departure. We’ve been through a fascinating experience, and even though the FBI and CIA (along with another agency so secret they don’t even have an acronym) have combined their resources to ensure no details of this adventure are ever made public, let me assure you nothing could prevent me from sharing my testimony with those who, like yourselves, need to hear it most.

Everything about the flight was progressing normally; we were relaxing in first class (there was more room on little David Virtue’s credit card than might have been imagined), and Bishop Quinine was enjoying his eighth refreshing breakfast martini while I was studying the scriptures and checking to ensure the flight attendants’ lingerie was suitably modest (let me tell you this: Brother Andrew’s famous miracle about border guards not seeing his smuggled Bibles isn’t a patch on the answer to prayer that got my trusty mirror-on-a-stick through the pre-flight security inspection) when suddenly, as we approached Bermuda, our aircraft started experiencing strange electrical anomalies.

The compass began gyrating like a Pentecostal with a hula-hoop, and the satellite-navigation systems were placing us in a KFC drive-through just outside Milwaukee. The First Officer, clearly disorientated , began complaining the girl had only given him wings and that strange triangular part of the chicken which looks like it's distorted from the poor bird having spent too long in a cage. Fortunately his co-pilot could restore him to his senses, whereupon he began his final radio transmission: “Whitewater! Whitewater!” (Actually he said nothing of the sort, but I once heard this in a Charles Berlitz movie, and thought it would sound impressive here).

Moments later our entire airplane was drawn into a huge spaceship bearing an uncanny resemblance to something a “continuing” Anglican might wear, and small beings with large heads and big lidless eyes ordered us from our seats. Indeed, at first things weren’t going well: the little aliens seemed quite hostile, and Bishop Quinine created a panic among our fellow passengers when he explained the objects with which they were directing us were probes, and not just cattle-prods.

The situation soon improved, since when the alien in charge of the ship appeared he and Bishop Quinine immediately recognized each other as old friends, and by means of animated hand gestures began cheerfully reminiscing about a number of previously shared adventures - although as these obviously appeared to include the aforementioned probes only those passengers who’d been travelling in business class found anything reassuring in the joyful reunion.

As the other aliens grumbled among themselves about the delay, however, I made an amazing discovery: their native tongue was in fact JavaScript - the same language in which Brother Richthofen’s young Friend from Seminary wrote the clever little program that tells how often the Ould twins visit my site (at least once a day, if anyone’s interested). Naturally any language involving so many + and ++ symbols comes easily to one as well-versed in Anglicanism as myself, and in no time at all I was able to communicate with perfect fluency, barring the occasional error in syntax and punctuation, whereupon the polite response is for everyone to collapse in a heap and do absolutely nothing until the speaker corrects their mistake.

As you can well imagine, any beings prepared to fly 3,000 light years to burn crop circles and terrorize people who live in trailer parks are absolutely fascinating conversationalists, and sat entranced as I explained my own importance to the Global Schism and the future of Orthodoxy as Christians have understood it since at least the early-mid nineteenth century ( “Function GafCon()
var Anglican, Troll, DoctrinalWarrior;
if
{
(typeof Anglican != Troll)
document.body && document.body.style myForm
}else{
DoctrinalWarrior[0]++
document.write(txt.constructor).smiteAll}” – or something like that: they have a few more global functions than we do, but on the other hand Vista was considered too complicated for release in their galaxy).

Nor will you believe the story they told about little Peter Jensen – but that’s going to have to wait until my next homily: right now the Man-In-Black responsible for our debriefing wants me meet someone from the FBI called Agent Scully: apparently she’s been a long-term admirer and is most eager to review my case in person.

I’m Father Christian and I’m the First Interstellar Evangelist.