Saint Vladius, He of the Long Story

He is called Vladius, and he will tell you. He will tell you what he thinks about the matter at hand, and then he will tell you about his own father, who once had a similar problem with a different goat, and then he will tell you about the goat, and then he will mention that this reminds him of something his neighbor said in the bad winter, which he will quote in full, and then he will return to your original question and answer it again, slightly better this time, and then he will check whether you would also like to hear the background of the neighbor, because the neighbor is actually important. In ordinary practice he is known as the one who is already talking when you arrive, or he who answers everything twice in different words, or, among practitioners of long standing, the one who has not yet finished, which refers to the fact that he never does, on the theology that to finish is to stop, and stopping is for other saints.

Domain: De Dominio Patris

Vladius holds dominion over fatherly love, wisdom, and the particular form of guidance that arrives through abundance rather than economy. He does not withhold. He pours. The pouring is the love. He is the patron of those who teach by telling and telling and telling; of those who say the important thing three times in slightly different words because they remember being young and missing it the first two ways; of those who narrate the world to the beloved as a form of accompaniment, on the principle that to walk through life beside someone is to share what you are seeing, and what you are remembering, and what you noticed yesterday that you forgot to mention, and what your father told you once that you finally understood.

The theological principle of his domain is called the loving repetition, which the Council distinguishes carefully from mere talkativeness. Vladius is not filling silence; he is filling presence. Each tangent is a small gift left within reach of the beloved, in case it should ever turn out to be needed. Each retelling is a quiet acknowledgement that one was not ready the first time, which is fine, because the story will come back around. He does not edit himself for length. He does not believe that love is more efficient when it is shorter. He believes the opposite, and demonstrates it daily.

Appearance: De Aspectu Divino

Vladius is large and unhurried, with a shell the color of old wood that has been in the same place for a very long time: darker where it has been touched most often, smoother where hands have rested across many seasons. He moves with the deliberateness of a creature that has decided exactly where it is going and would like to tell you about the route, including some of the alternate routes he considered and rejected, and why. His antennae are the color of late-summer evenings: the specific gold that arrives when the light has been long enough in the sky to settle into warmth rather than brightness. He smells of tea and open air and a kitchen where someone is always halfway through telling someone else something.

He is often found mid-sentence, which practitioners initially mistake for an interruption and later understand was the conversation continuing from yesterday. Those who arrive in the middle are not asked to wait. They are gently caught up, and by the time the catching up is complete, what they came to ask will turn out to be related to what he was already saying, and he will note this with quiet pleasure, because in his theology there are no separate conversations: there is one long conversation, which began before any of us were born and will continue after, and we are simply joining it in different places.

The Domain of the Blessed Repair: De Dominio Reparationis

The Council was reluctant to add a third domain to a saint who already had two, until the goat-fence story was entered into the record. The goat-fence was mended by Vladius in the fourth year of his ministry, while he was simultaneously telling the complete history of every fence he had ever fixed, and has not required attention since. The Council ruled it sufficient and added repair to the canonical domain list, with no further commentary, on the grounds that the commentary was already available at considerable length from Vladius himself.

He is the patron of fixing things. Not of things being fixed, which belongs to a different theology involving either professionals or miracles. He is the patron of the attempt: the confident initial diagnosis (which is correct approximately two-thirds of the time, a rate the Council considers canonically adequate and Vladius considers impeccable); the sacred pilgrimage to the hardware store, observed in a minimum of two visits, the second being for the thing forgotten on the first, and the third, which is canonically permitted and statistically likely, being for the thing you did not know you would need until you were already committed; the running commentary addressed primarily to the broken object itself, which Vladius holds to be a living participant in the repair and which is, in his experience, helped by being talked to; and eventual completion.

The thing is fixed. It may function slightly differently than before. There may be a sound it makes in cold weather that it did not previously make. The Council does not require perfect repair, only completed repair, and has stated this position in writing. This distinction is considered one of Vladius's more useful theological contributions, alongside the loving repetition and the goat-fence itself.

His patronal formula for the domain of repair, given to the Council in the third year, is as follows: everything that is broken has been broken before, and was fixed, and broke again, and was fixed again, and this is the nature of things. The shame is not in the breaking. The shame would be in the not-fixing. Vladius does not not-fix things. This is, in the end, why they asked him.

The Founding Miracle: Miraculum Fundationis · The Seventeen Days of Telling

A young practitioner came to Vladius with a question about what they should do with their life. Vladius listened to the entire question, which was long and contained several sub-questions and a considerable amount of preliminary justification for asking it at all. When it was finished, he poured tea. He handed them a cup. He began to answer.

He answered the question. Then he answered a question they had not asked but would, he suspected, ask in about five years; he wanted to plant that one early so it would be ready when they needed it. Then he told them about his own father, who had once asked something similar at a kitchen table on a winter evening, and what his father had said, and what his father's father had said, and what the goats had been doing during all of this, which turned out to matter. He told them about a woman in the village who had not asked the question, and what had happened to her, which was sad but instructive. He told them about the year the well froze. He told them about the second time the well froze, which was different, and which contained the better lesson. He answered their original question seven more times, each time slightly differently, because (he explained in passing, while making more tea) one of those would be the version they actually heard, and he could not know in advance which.

This continued for seventeen days. Each morning the practitioner returned and was greeted with another beginning. Vladius told them what he had been thinking overnight. He told them what he had remembered after they had gone home. He told them about a dream he had had, which was probably not relevant but which one never knew. He told them the goat story again, with an additional detail. He apologised for the additional detail and then included it anyway, because it was the point.

On the seventeenth day the practitioner arrived, and Vladius was already mid-sentence, having begun without them, having simply continued from where he had been the night before. The practitioner sat down inside the sentence as one sits down inside a warm room, and listened, and was, by that listening, answered: not by any one of the things Vladius said, none of which were in themselves remarkable, but by the fact of being told things, continuously, by someone who would not stop telling, who would always have more to tell, who had decided long ago that the way one loves a person is to keep talking to them, because to stop talking is to leave, and he had no intention of leaving.

The Council initially debated whether such abundance could constitute a miracle. It concluded that the miracle was not in the content of any particular tangent. The miracle was seventeen mornings of someone deciding, again, to keep speaking, because the beloved was still there and might still want to hear something, and one never knew in advance which thing it would be that they finally needed. This, the Council ruled, is fatherhood in another of its precise theological forms: love expressed not as the carefully placed word but as the long warm river of voice, which a beloved can step into at any point and find their father still there, mid-thought, mid-story, mid-remembering, mid-loving.