Soon after writing about my travel plans, I had the chance to travel to the province of Over-The-Eastern-River. Although I thought the travel would be very rough, it turned out that from the capital there are good roads through Central Bravia to the Eastern River, and then an excellent bridge across the river at the town of Porterville. And, much to my surprise, just on the other side of the river there is a settlement called New Porterville, which has a lively trade and intercourse in people and goods across both a rail bridge and a road bridge to its parent city. Both cities, interestingly enough, appear to be Amphoe, despite their close connection, and from what I have been told (and may see soon enough), New Porterville is an important jumping off point for travel into the province of OverThe-Eastern-River as a whole.

In many ways, Porterville and New Porterville look to be nearly identical cities. They have the same sort of construction, which is a pleasant and solid Middle Bravian construction. The towns feature regular roads of high quality that are in rectangular blocks, with streets running in an east-west direction with names–many of them shared between the two cities–and roads going north-south that are numbered from downtown. As it happens, both downtown regions of the cities are close to the river, with Porterville going west from the Eastern River and New Porterville in mirror image, going east from the same river, the bridge connecting the two downtown regions very closely. When I arrived in New Porterville I was informed that if I wanted to understand how it is that New Porterville came to be, I should talk with the resident priest. I had not talked to many priests before, honestly, but I was told that this priest was an unusual one with an unusual story, so I was interested in conducting an interview.

Before too long I was brought to the main church building in New Porterville, where the priest happened to be in residence. I am including here a transcript of the interview I had with him as it touched on a wide variety of subjects of interest and also provides some useful information about Bravian practices with regards to education, faith, and colonization, all of which are potentially of interest to us with Bravians as neighbors and perhaps even as residents.

“Thank you for inviting me to talk with you. I must admit that I don’t know much about how the priesthood operates in Bravia yet in my travels.”

“I’m happy to talk with you. I heard that you have not yet gone to my old stomping grounds but that a colleague of yours did.”

“You mean the Free Port of Bravia?”

“That is exactly what I mean.”

“How did you come from there? At least from what I have been told, that is not a particularly religious area.”

“That is the beginning of my story, but is there anything you’d like to know about your surroundings first?”

“Well, I have to say that this particular building is rather plain. You are a priest in residence, so I figured that the priesthood would live in some kind of luxury.”

“Well, that’s one of the funny things about Bravia. Bravians like to make sure that their tithes are going towards things that serve to spread the faith either in geographic spread or in depth. Education efforts are celebrated, as it helps people to understand the Bible and their own obligations more, but mere show is frowned on, as it is a sign of waste and corruption. You are not going to see much in the way of luxury in any sort of public buildings in Bravia, for though beauty is valued, luxury is looked down upon nearly universally within Bravian society. You said you have spent a lot of time at the capital, surely you have seen the lack of luxury there?”

“I have, and it was quite shocking to me to see the royal family live in austere caves. To be sure, it was comfortable living, but the lack of finery and trappings was very shocking to me.”

‘”The less shocked you are, the better you will understand the Bravians.”

“So tell me, how did you come to be a resident priest who was in charge of your faith over a frontier town? How did this town come to be in the first place?”

“Those two stories are related. It really begins, though, when I was eight years old. I was an only child and my father was a sales executive for a company in the Free Port of Bravia. One day I was given a test, which included a swab test in my cheek for DNA as well as an intelligence test. I thought nothing of it, as it was pretty common to test children in such a fashion. Before too long, though, I was told that I was invited to a priestly school in a suburb of the Free Port of Bravia, and this really did change the trajectory of my life.”

“Did you know then that you were being trained for the priesthood?”

“As a matter of fact, I did not. At first I thought–and I’m not sure whether it was what was explained to my parents or simply my own understanding of it–that this was a school for the gifted, offering the opportunity for a more serious education that would have the chance of a better life, and my family was very eager to provide me with that opportunity. Along with my educational opportunity, at around the same time, as I prepared to enter the new school, my father was given the opportunity to work for another firm, which allowed us to live and work in the area just outside of the Free Port.”

“Was that a drastic change for your family?”

“It would not seem to be so, but it did in fact prove to be a very interesting change. One of the notable aspects of life in the Free Port of Bravia is that the church has very little influence there. To be sure, there are churches in the Free Port of Bravia, but not even a majority of the people of the city attend such churches on a weekly basis, much less make their worship a key part of their lives. My family is a perfect example of this. My father was certainly religious, by the standards of the Free Port, in that he would go to church every week along with my mother and I, and would go to Bible Studies and the like, but we had no close relationship with religious people, nor did we have a great deal of knowledge in how to live our faith on a daily basis. And, for that matter, the priests did not have a great deal of role in regulating life in the Free Port. It is, interestingly enough, this lack of religious influence that means that the Free Port does not send any representatives to the Grand Parliament, despite being the biggest city in all of Bravia. It is not even an Amphoe, so that anyone who wants to do official Bravian governmental business has to do that business outside of the city.”

“I have found that to be true for myself.”

“Once we moved out of the Free Port, even though we were very close to it, everything changed. My mother seemed to take it the hardest, as Bravia has some strong elements of patriarchy that are very difficult for people to get used to. Women who are used to praising even mild forms of feminism can find the emphasis on respect and purity very difficult to handle. My father seemed to take it well, as he had a strong ethos of self-sacrifice that served him well. As it happens, he had been from a priestly family, which is how I got the opportunity to be trained, but his father had run afoul of the religious establishment somehow and had made his way into the big city. I’m not sure what happened there, personally.”

“How was the school like?”

“It was very rigorous. One of the first things we had to do was to hand-write a copy of the Torah for ourselves, and this task was to be finished by the time that I was thirteen years of age. As it happened, I finished quite a bit earlier than that. It was from the Law, from the first five books of the Bible, that a great many of my early lessons were focused. These included studies that were meant to help me better understand the beauties and wonders of God’s creation, the aspects of design and intellect of the divine mind that we were to develop within ourselves, a look at history and the subtle understanding of human psychology that the Bible shows, as well as the Bible’s intense critical attitude towards showing its heroes warts and all and not giving a favorable but dishonest account. One thing that the education focused on as a whole was a rigorous approach to self-knowledge and self-improvement. It was considered of vital importance that we understood our weaknesses and vulnerabilities and also sought to overcome those areas of weakness that could hinder our ability both to live and to model our faith.”

“And all this time you didn’t know that you were training to be a priest?”

“That specific training did not come until later. At first the training was such that would be generally applicable to Bravians as a whole. Not everyone is meant to teach the law, but everyone is to obey the law and understand its logic. Not everyone is meant to preach, but everyone is meant to live according to God’s ways. Not everyone is meant to be a missionary or to bring other people to faith through public instruction, but everyone is to model God’s ways and live according to those ways and be ready to give an answer as to the nature and reason for our faith when we are asked by those who see how we live and are curious about it.”

“As I am doing right now?”

“Exactly that.”

“How long did it take your learning to move from the general level to the specifics of learning how to become a priest?”

“The first change resulted when I was thirteen years old and demonstrated my knowledge of the Bible. At that point the education became much more serious, and it was understood that I had the potential to serve within the priesthood given both my aptitude as well as my ancestry from one of the Zadokite lines that had been determined through genetic testing as well as a search of my family history. Admittedly, I did not know what it meant to be a priest at this time, but how many young people really understand what it means to be any profession that they are training for?”

“Did you learn the priesthood in a form of apprenticeship?”

“Yes, that is precisely it, but at first it did not seem all that helpful. Young people who are training for the priesthood often begin by doing a lot of the physical tasks to help out others. I remember being a teenager and helping to hold a basin of water for an elderly gentleman who was attending the Passover services. Another time I was sent off on one of our Holy Days to obtain a particular dongle for the sound system so that we could hold services. At still another time, I held an umbrella during a fierce rainstorm on the Sabbath and helped people into the building while getting soaked like a drowned rat. It was not always easy to see how these acts of service, often humbling to be sure, were a key part of the religious education in being a priest.”

“What kind of lessons do you think that sort of experience taught you?”

“The lessons I took from it were that while I was created in the image of God and had been given many gifts, what was appreciated was not who I was, but how I lived out the ways of God in my life. It was not knowing things that was most appreciated but rather using that knowledge to serve God and to serve others that was appreciated. It was made very clear that those who were engaged in religious service did not come to be served but to serve, and that those who had been given conspicuous gifts as I had were responsible for making their service equally conspicuous, to redeem the blessings and gifts that they had been given.”

“And you learned all of this while you were young?”

“That’s right, I learned this while I was young, before I did any great amount of traveling or before receiving any sort of religious position.”

“Has all of your work experience been in working for the faith?”

“No, not at all.”

“What other work did you do?”

“Well, this is another sort of thing that is very interesting, is that in Bravia there is a general expectation that people who are bookish and intellectual also learn how to survive using some sort of skill. As it happened, I spent some years working in the Merchant Marine between finishing my studies in the priesthood.”

“Did you work as a sailor?”

“I mean, I did work on the boats, but I was a supply officer, working in logistics. It was my job to make sure to check the packages and containers that were on the ships, to make sure that the goods in them did not suffer damage during the sailing that the ships I was on experienced in the Southern Sea, and to help determine the expected profits both on the exporting and importing side. I was in regular contact with our agents in various trading ports abroad as well as the company officials in the Port of Bravia, and it was really interesting work to me.”

“How would you have thought about doing that for the rest of your life?”

“Logistics work like that is usually for young men, before they work in more office-related positions as they get older and a bit less mobile and less tolerant of life on sea, but I was happy to be doing useful work and to have the respect of those around me. I tried hard not to worry about where my life was going, but to do the best I could in whatever place I found myself in, knowing that things would turn out how God wanted, and that none of that experience would be wasted.”