by William Poe
After the last of the teams had arrived, we gathered in the training center and sat cross-legged on the concrete floor. A New York church member stood behind a podium and led us in songs to raise the spiritual atmosphere in anticipation of Father’s arrival. One voice stood out. I looked around and saw Stanley, the only redhead among the brothers. We acknowledged each other with a nod.
Father walked through a door at the rear of the stage, followed by Sergeant Choi. We maneuvered a bow as best we could. This was the first time I had seen Father like this—not so much a cosmic parent as the church’s commander-in-chief. His dark suit had the look of a military uniform. Father spoke about the meaning of World Day, explaining many of the same points Marshall had covered in St. Louis. Then he challenged us.
“You are the top fundraisers from every state in the nation.” Father surveyed each face in the crowd. “Can you raise seventy-five thousand dollars over the next three days?”
No response came from the stunned membership.
“Can you meet the challenge?”
“Yes, Father!” we shouted.
Father smiled triumphantly.
Sergeant Choi laughed and said, “Father believes you will succeed.”
Raising my fist in a gesture of determination, as did those around me, I felt renewed.
The captains each received a map with a fundraising area delineated by a red marker. I spotted Stanley again. He was on a team heading to Long Island. I wished we had found a chance to talk, but there was no time to waste on pleasantries. Stanley looked troubled, but then, we were serving in God’s messianic army, a heavy burden for anyone to carry.
“Let’s get going,” Alfred said, jumping into the driver’s seat. We headed to Paterson, New Jersey, a name I knew only because it was the title of a poem by William Carlos Williams. The real cityscape was anything but poetic, comprised mostly of defunct manufacturing plants resulting in high unemployment. When Alfred bypassed downtown and headed to the suburbs, I felt relieved.
Pulling into the parking lot of an A&P grocery store, Alfred said, “Here’s a spot for you, Simon.”
I hoisted my box of peanuts and wished everyone good luck before charging toward my first customer, a tall businessman with an aquiline nose and lizard-skin loafers.
My Southern accent enthralled the man. It must have sounded something akin to “Hi, I’m fun’raisin fer m’eye church groop t’dai. Woodyoo lighk t’maik a dough-nai’shun?”
The businessman grinned and asked, “Where in the hell are you from?” but he didn’t buy any peanuts. His type rarely did, no matter what I sounded like.
My accent did prove to be an asset with some customers. If I slowed down my speech and put on an air of sophistication, some women heard Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind.
Every couple of hours, Alfred drove through the parking lot and happily resupplied me. By the end of the day, my pockets were crammed with bills. I had made over two hundred dollars.
When the stores closed, we sold roses in the local bars. After last call, we went to truck stops, finally checking into a dingy motel for a couple of hours’ sleep before beginning again.
Our team had such success that we assumed the goal, which had seemed impossible, was actually achievable. But returning to Belvedere after the three days, we learned that the combined efforts had barely reached forty-five thousand dollars.
Not long after the announcement of the totals, I spotted Stanley. His team had been among the worst performers. I fought my way through the crowd and finally met up with him.
“It’s good to see you,” I said cheerfully.
“I kept meaning to write,” Stanley replied, “but you know how it is.”
“Don’t I, though.” I pulled away from a quick hug to peer into Stanley’s eyes, still effervescent, if droopy from lack of sleep. “You look great.”
We had much to talk about, but Sergeant Choi sent word of Father’s approach. The members squeezed into the training center. An hour passed, spent mostly on the floor with our heads resting on our knees. Then someone flipped on a spotlight that illuminated the stage. We sat up straight.
Father appeared, wearing a blousy satin shirt patterned with red hibiscus flowers on a yellow background. His white linen trousers and sandals made it seem as though he had just arrived from the Bahamas. The casual attire put us at ease; this was again our cosmic father, not the commander-in-chief.
“What should we do?” Father asked. Sergeant Choi had just brought out a chart indicating the goal as compared to our miserable results.
Alfred, rousing himself, stood up and hollered, “We can’t accept defeat, Father! Let us go out again.”
He made me proud—but I wanted to smack him. I’d never worked so hard in my life as I had the last three days. Blisters covered the soles of my feet, and my back was as stiff as an old man’s.
The other team captains also indicated a desire to keep working toward the goal.
“Let’s go over!” the crowd cheered, taking a phrase from one of Father’s recent speeches.
“Go over?” Father asked in halting English.
“Let’s go over!” everyone shouted.
Father smiled. “You go over?”
“We will, Father! Give us another chance!”
As Father scanned the sea of faces, his gaze seemed to fall on each person individually. “Team captains,” he said, “come to the stage.”
Members separated to form a corridor so the leaders could get to the stage. Father arranged them in a row, tugging the ears of a representative few as if cajoling his children. The joviality prefaced a stunning announcement.
“We must follow the way of the Divine Principle,” Father said, addressing everyone. “New people must take up the challenge since this mission ended in failure.” He swept his arm toward the line of team captains. “Three days will now become three years. Are you ready to live by the Divine Principle?”
“Yes!” we shouted.
Everyone understood what Father meant. If someone failed in a task given by God, a successor completed the job. Numerological principles determined the length of extension. This rule had even applied to Jesus. Since he had not married and begun God’s family on earth, the mission passed to another man two thousand years later.
Father walked among the members. As he drew close, I wasn’t sure whether to back away or follow my impulse to “touch the hem of his garment.” Father scrutinized each person carefully, then, one after another, he touched a brother or sister on the head, motioning him or her to the stage. I was among the ones chosen. So was Stanley.
As the former team captains rejoined the crowd, dejection read on their faces. I tapped Alfred on the arm as he walked by, but he shrugged me off.
“Are you ready to fulfill the mission?” Father asked the new leaders.
“Yes, Father,” we replied, garnering what enthusiasm we could muster.
“Can you work three years to restore three lost days?” Father asked the gathering. “Can you be Father’s task force?”
“Yes!” came the response.
How could Father have chosen me as a leader? My only explanation was that working hard without complaint during the initial competition had paid indemnity, yet again, for my sexual transgressions.
“You are my personal task force,” Father told us. “You’ll be known as the church’s mobile fundraising teams—the MFT.”
Father revealed that he planned to speak at Madison Square Garden, which would restore the position of Adam, and, later, at Yankee Stadium, which was to indemnify the failure of the people to accept Jesus. A final rally at the Washington Monument would begin the new age of the Second Advent.
We didn’t know precisely what Father meant, but we didn’t have to understand; we only had to have faith and to raise money to pay for the events.
Father conferred with Sergeant Choi, who came to the microphone and explained that an office would be set up on the Belvedere estate. A familiar face appeared onstage
—Kawasaki, the elder brother with whom I had fundraised in Hattiesburg.
“Kawasaki-san will organize the MFT office,” Sergeant Choi announced. Then a Japanese man I didn’t know came to the stage, and Sergeant Choi said, “Mitsui-san will command the fundraising teams.”
Father, standing beside Sergeant Choi, patted the Japanese brother on the back and said, “Minoru Mitsui will answer directly to me. Treat him as you would treat me.” Father looked over the crowd. “Can you do it?”
“Yes!” we shouted.
Father left the stage, waving until he disappeared through a door. I could see him going up the path toward the main house, with Sergeant Choi walking beside him. Several church leaders followed close behind.
Mitsui approached the microphone. He reminded me of an Asian version of Montgomery Clift, with his dark hair, thin physique, and tailored suit with a narrow black tie. He appeared to be in his thirties. His English was tentative, but understandable. Mitsui’s first order of business was to have his secretary, Keiko, go through the crowd to gather information. She had a legal pad on which she wrote our names, along with information about what church center we represented. Keiko promised to inform our state leaders about the new dispensation.
“Your home states will be disappointed,” Keiko said to the captains, “but this is Father’s desire. Everything will work out for the best.”
With Father gone, the awestruck moment faded, and I realized that the outcome of the World Day competition had been expected. Mitsui and Keiko were organized and prepared to take charge. Kawasaki was ready to assume his role.
Mitsui walked among the members as Father had done, assigning each person to a fundraising team. After reviewing the ranks one last time, he reiterated Father’s message about the importance of our goal and the significance of the Madison Square Garden speech—leading to a glorious day at the Washington Monument during America’s bicentennial.
“Father has charged each of us with earning three hundred dollars a day,” Mitsui said, carefully studying our expressions.
I had never known anyone to make that much money in a single day. My own record was $260, made during a thirty-six-hour period without rest.
Mitsui gathered the team captains onstage. Keiko handed him a box containing folded strips of paper.
“Each of these has a location written on it,” Mitsui said. “Fate will decide your destination.”
Stanley fished around inside the box and finally grabbed one of the papers. He proudly held it up and announced, “It says Chicago.”
Teams would travel to Texas, others to Florida. Three captains chose California.
When my turn came, I closed my eyes and reached into the box. With great excitement, I waved at Stanley. The paper confirmed that God was at work.
I, too, had chosen Chicago.
CHAPTER 23
Iwas barely twenty and, except for my brief sojourn in Mississippi, had never lived beyond the narrow borders of Arkansas. I was terrified, but tried to hide it from the members. Like me, they had been the top fundraisers and were dedicated to their home centers. And like me, they had all come from smaller cities. We were unprepared for urban attitudes.
Resistance to solicitors ran deep among Chicago residents. We made less than a fifty-dollar average working sixteen-hour days. I had no skills for inspiring others, and overcompensated by becoming authoritarian, I was horrendously arrogant as a young leader.
I didn’t call Little Rock until a month had passed. Mary told me that Bruce had accepted the conclusion lecture. My heart leaped for joy, met by silence on the phone.
“Something happened, didn’t it?”
“Bruce cried tears of joy, just as you did when you accepted Father,” Mary explained. “Randall and I accompanied him home in his truck, far out in the country near Cabot. He wanted us to wait long enough for him to pray with his father and mother. We encouraged him to make a clean break, but he insisted.”
I expected Mary to say that Bruce had had an experience like Derek’s and that he had condemned the family for apostasy. But that wasn’t what had happened.
“We’re not giving up on Bruce,” Mary said resolutely.
“So you think he still believes? Please tell me what happened. I need to know whether or not I have a spiritual son.”
“Hopefully, Bruce will contact us,” Mary said. “As Randall and I were praying, we heard a funny noise. I looked up and saw a man cocking a shotgun. Randall realized what was happening at the same time. We got out of the truck and began running down the gravel road. The man didn’t come after us. Randall and I walked all the way to Jacksonville. A member who had recently joined was at the center and came to get us in his car.”
“I’m sure Bruce explained the Pentecostal beliefs of his family,” I said. “Almost surely, they forced him to stay in the house. I’m surprised they threatened violence, though.”
“We can’t do anything until Bruce contacts us,” Mary said. “Bruce is a good brother. He was so certain about Father. It’s a miracle how you met him, Simon. Let’s pray and have faith he will return.”
My weakness had caused this to happen. I had made a base for Satan that lustful first night with Jim, and though I had concocted excuses for it in St. Louis when I didn’t see the brothers the next morning, the encounter with the brother had been truly of the flesh.
Feelings of guilt affected the way I treated my team. I pushed the members even more relentlessly. During the next two months, one sister left the church, and a brother ran away to return to his home center.
I didn’t recognize how arrogant I was acting until Brenda Kramer, a sister who had been in the church for nearly seven years, tore into me for being abusive when I found her sitting on a bench rubbing the soles of her feet. I had grown to respect Brenda. She was in her forties and had left her husband and children to join the church, a sacrifice I could barely comprehend. Brenda made me understand that everyone was working as hard as possible, but that we were only human.
“Don’t be so high and mighty,” she scolded. “Get out of the van and work alongside us.”
I picked up Brenda’s box of peanuts and fundraised the rest of the afternoon, crediting her with the money. After that day, I treated my brothers and sisters with more respect.
When six months had passed, Kawasaki informed me that no team had come close to the goal of three hundred dollars a day. Although Kawasaki didn’t say it, I believed that, after the Madison Square Garden speech, Father would announce that three years of fundraising had become thirty!
The Divine Principle taught that God’s heart was one of sacrifice, loneliness, and silent suffering—exactly what I experienced as a team captain on the MFT.
At times, it seemed as though my little team was all God had to count on in the Chicago area. From the start, the local church, under the leadership of the elder brother Willard Bozeman, who had introduced Father at the Little Rock speech, refused to let my team stay at the Chicago center. In addition, he demanded that we avoid the best fundraising areas.
I did my best to comply, not wanting to cause trouble. When members of my team happened to bump into a brother or sister from the Chicago church, they exchanged harsh words. Once, a brother came back to the van with a black eye. The situation made me feel like a fourth-century Christian on the wrong side of a theological argument.
The manner in which Father had created the MFT made for tense relationships with the state leaders, considering that he had cleverly siphoned off the best fundraisers to form a national group under his direct control. We had become a church within a church. The state centers were under the president of the national corporation, who had always been an American. Japanese members, almost exclusively, comprised the hierarchy of the MFT and answered directly to Father. The conflict between the two groups—the American Church and the Japanese-led MFT—would come to define my later experiences with the church.
When I first arrived in Chicago, I had hoped to see Stanley and, together,
form an MFT family. But we almost never connected. After my team’s rejection by Willard Bozeman, we stayed in motels each night, which were usually so cheap they didn’t have a telephone in the room. Coordinating with the MFT office in New York, we divided the area so that Stanley stayed on the south side, into Gary, Indiana, and I took the northern part of the city and its suburbs, all the way to Waukegan.
My connection to the larger family consisted of a weekly phone call to New York. I would talk to Mitsui or Kawasaki to give them the details of wire transfers to the headquarters bank account. Mitsui never provided words of encouragement or listened when I needed to talk about my struggles. He was uninterested in my trouble with the Chicago center.
Kawasaki displayed far more sympathy. He often told me to fly to New York for a few days if things got too difficult, but that would mean admitting defeat, so I never considered it.
My team went through an encyclopedia of struggles during those early days, but one event left the deepest scar. Gloria Sanchez, a beautiful sister who had been a prostitute before finding Father, sold roses one night in Chicago’s Old Town. I found her cowering behind a dumpster when I came to pick her up. Gloria’s blouse was torn. I tried to approach her, but she rebuffed me. When I tried to lift her up, she screamed. I called an ambulance. After paramedics took her to an emergency room, we learned that she had been raped. The horrible incident happened on a day when I had taken time to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. My brothers and sisters were out working for God’s kingdom, while I squandered my time viewing art. Seurat’s masterpiece L’Isle de la Grande Jatte mocked me with its pointillist brilliance as I fought to escape the allure of the museum and return to my duties. The attack on Gloria was the result.
I telephoned Kawasaki as soon as the police had finished taking Gloria’s statement. He put me on speakerphone so Mitsui could hear as I described what had happened, including my visit to the museum.