Revival, others said. The first breath of a New Great Awakening.
The remaining leaders declared what was happening not an Awakening, but an Insurrection.
Pastor Robinson was the last to go.
11
The question for those of us who remained (forty-seven in all) became the walls themselves: once we took out the support beams and lifted off the roof, did we, in fact, need them?
The sanctuary was three stories high, constructed of mortared stones from a long-defunct quarry halfway down the mountain. The stones had been carried up in wagons pulled by teams of oxen, the Whiteside Turnpike laid in 1867 for this purpose: sixty-eight curves, six reverses, three “W”s, a double “S,” one hairpin.
We asked Teddy Ellison to give us a bid on the demolition. Outside the sanctuary, Teddy ran his hands over the stones, his eyes wide.
Do you realize what you’ve got here?
We said we didn’t.
Pick any ten-by-ten section of this wall. What’s the smallest stone you see?
We pointed to stones eighteen inches in diameter.
Do you know what that means? Teddy asked.
We said we didn’t.
No plugs, Teddy said. Every stone laid out on the ground and fitted together like a puzzle. Before construction.
He paused.
No one builds like this anymore, he said.
We allowed ourselves a moment to regret living in an aesthetically denigrated era, one in which the use of plugs was no longer considered a blight on artistry.
Then we called in the wrecking crew.
12
We scheduled the demolition for the first Saturday in June. We’d planned on staging a ceremony: a short speech followed by a ceremonial cutting of the velvet dossal curtain hanging behind the altar. But in the hush of the morning—dripping from drainage pipes, hum of idling machinery, parachute cotton and whirlybird maple seeds twisting down around us like slow-falling meteors—we decided a ceremony would be a mistake. Words, we said, would only scum things up.
We waited in the empty parking lot of the church across the street, holding the hands of our children, who wore the plastic toy hard hats we’d purchased for the occasion. The empty sanctuary rose before us, red Danger tape circling its perimeter. Yellow lights flashed atop striped barricades. Machinery crouched around the building—bulldozers, articulated haulers, excavators, backhoes, cranes. Two fire trucks to hose down the dust.
Teddy Ellison stood beside a rumbling excavator. He looked at the driver in his elevated cab, who gave him a thumbs-up.
Teddy raised an orange flag, let it fall.
The excavator reared back, its bent arm blindly probing the air. Then it straightened and—with sudden, delicate precision—plunged.
13
Corbett Earnshaw returned the second day of the demolition. This time—with the crashing rock, the roar of machinery, the ground beneath us vibrating—we knew why he came. He had a new translator with him: a girl, about twenty, with long brown ringlets and pale skin overlaid with a light sheen of moisture. She wore a white skirt and a bandanna halter that pressed her breasts flat against her torso. Her clavicles were prominent and straight as a crossbar; her bare feet turned out when she walked.
I’m Claire, she said.
Earnshaw wore loose jeans and a black T-shirt. The hair at the back of his head had grown long enough to cinch into a ponytail, a question mark at the nape of his neck. He seemed unable to take his hands off the girl. When she signed to him, he touched her face and bare upper arms, brushed her cheek or the side of her breast. And though we guessed he was at least twenty years Claire’s senior, we couldn’t blame him for wanting such loveliness in his eyes and hands.
Now, standing before us on the lawn of the Baptist church where we sat watching the demolition, Earnshaw and Claire signed to one another. Earnshaw held on to Claire’s waist while she spoke, her hands graceful. She rose up on her toes en pointe. For a moment we thought Earnshaw might lift the girl over his head.
Claire turned to us.
He wants to lie down in the street, she said. He wants to feel it in his body.
With each rumble as the stone shattered and collapsed into piles, we watched Earnshaw’s prostrate body shiver. He extended his arms and pressed his face into the asphalt, hands clasping and unclasping as if clutching sand. Claire lay on her back beside him. She took his hand and placed it on her stomach, sliding her own hand beneath his, her fingers curling words into his palm. Then she laid her hand on top of Earnshaw’s, which began to spell in turn, making Claire’s knuckles tilt right, left, right.
Word becoming flesh, we thought, dust from the crumbling stone filling our nostrils. A secret dialogue, skin-on-skin—we would have given anything to hear what they were saying.
14
The church came down like an opening book. The debris fell outward, as if some center binding had heaved itself up, flinging back the walls. Bulldozers pushed a mixture of dirt and pea gravel into the rectangular basement, burying old doors and windowpanes. Workmen hosed the backfill at six-inch intervals. Steamrollers packed the layers down. Fresh asphalt was laid over the footprint, hot and black, smelling of burnt charcoal.
Two weeks after it began, the demolition was complete. Those of us who continued to visit the site noted two things: 1) a silence beneath the daytime drone of cicadas and beady nighttime noises of crickets and tree frogs; and 2) the expanse of blue above the tree line, the place the cross used to sit now just a point in the sky.
It was Daryl Lotz—Heinrich’s grandson, a philosophy major at Westminster College—who suggested we begin holding our Sunday services at the Natural Bridge Park. The Natural Bridge was a sixty-foot-long, fifteen-foot-high granite arch suspended between two boulders in a ravine below Bragg Avenue. Beneath the arch was the cave with a once-famous spring, now a slow trickle of water from a crack funneling deep into the rock. The Victorian Spiritualists believed the iron-rich water—chalybeate—would reverse the aging process, and in 1885 began importing mediums to distribute the water and contact the dead (Chattanooga was then a town filled with the newly-wealthy who had lost relatives in the Civil War—plenty of cash for longer lives and investment advice). The Sunday after the demolition, we walked down Bragg to the trailhead.
Earnshaw led the way. Why we allowed him to lead—why we followed—we couldn’t say, though we suspected it was because he seemed to have obtained, through a grace given only to persons lacking one of the five primary senses, a higher knowledge about the workings of God and the nature of the Universe. There was also something both thrilling and unnerving in his relationship with Claire. We’d learned she was nineteen—twenty-seven years Earnshaw’s junior. Whether she had access to the same secrets as Earnshaw or only translated them we didn’t know. We followed them down the trail, moving branches, pinching burrs off our clothing.
The path opened onto a clearing in front of the rock arch, beneath which sat three picnic tables. Earnshaw stood on one of the picnic benches, facing us, hands loose at his sides. Claire stood beside him. The rest of us found places on mossy boulders or patches of dirt.
For a full minute Earnshaw was silent. Then he drew back his arm, closed his eyes, and—using a twisting, backhanded maneuver, as if throwing a curveball—punched himself in the jaw.
Shame, Claire translated.
Earnshaw rubbed his fist, hard, into the palm of his hand.
Erase, Claire translated.
No—Eradicate, she said.
15
Onlookers—former members, residents, casual tourists—hiked down the trail. Some stayed in the woods surrounding the clearing; others approached and made hostile remarks.
How can you call yourselves a church without a building? they asked. Without a church home?
Our bodies
are His home, we said.
Miles Phillips showed up with the word Home tattooed on his neck; his girlfriend had the same tattoo on her wrist. Home began to appear in various places on each of our bodies—feet, calves, hipbones, forearms. Marguerite Dean’s mother had temporary Home tattoos made for the children, who transferred them onto their foreheads. From a distance, they looked like tiny symmetrical bruises.
To avoid questions, we began to meet in secret, after dark. We brought lanterns, cookstoves, tents, sleeping bags. Shared food and clothing. Took turns buying cases of bottled water, storing them in the cave—where, we’d discovered, Earnshaw and Claire had taken up residence.
16
Darkness. We sat in the clearing, our children asleep in our laps.
Earnshaw raised a hand and spelled. Claire began to translate:
For a long time, you have been told that the entry into eternal life will come about either after you die or when Christ returns. You have been told that humans might begin the journey toward individual perfection, but will never reach it in this life. That only one individual—a God-man—was able to reach a state of sinlessness while on earth. And that by some invisible, inconceivable act of substitution, you too will be counted as sinless, despite the persistence of sin, if only you believe it is so.
But the truth, Earnshaw said, is that we can enter eternity here, on this planet. Of our own volition.
Our ears burned. We felt we should contradict him.
Your calling, Earnshaw said, is to make this happen in yourselves, so that the planet might be renewed and evil might cease to exist.
Impossible, someone said.
Claire made a hang-ten sign with her right hand and lowered it into her left palm.
Earnshaw signed rapidly.
It isn’t a matter of changing one’s behavior, Claire translated. It’s a matter of changing one’s perception.
Sin is sin, someone else said. How can we perceive anything else?
Again Earnshaw punched his cheek, drove his fist into his palm.
Eradicate shame, Claire said.
It takes practice, she said.
17
We practiced. Julia Reynolds confessed her addiction to girl-on-girl pornography; Flynn Jamison admitted that every time she had sex with her boyfriend she imagined it was her father; Roger Bantam said he had been cheating on his wife for a year, having sex with both women and men, some of whom were strangers, in public restrooms; Bill Leavis said he euthanized his dying wife, fed her eight syringes of morphine when the hospice nurse left even though his wife tried to refuse the drug, clamping down on the syringe with her teeth so that Bill had to squeeze her jaws until the syringe tumbled onto her sheeted chest; Thom Daniel said he once tried to drown his four-year-old autistic son in the backyard swimming pool while his wife was at the gym but had chickened out when he felt the child’s limbs go slack, so he yanked him up and laid him on the deck and gave him mouth-to-mouth until the boy choked up the water in his lungs and when his wife came home and found Thom sitting in a pool chaise snuggling the boy, who was wrapped in a towel, she thanked him for spending quality time with their son, said she sometimes didn’t have the patience, and began to cry, and now the boy was nine and unable to speak and wore diapers and every day during his lunch hour Thom locked his office door and made lists of ways to bring his son’s fruitless life to a humane end.
Sound and fury, Earnshaw signed when the confessions ended. The very word confession is meaningless. There is no sin—there is only forgetting that sin does not exist.
We wept.
We reached out to touch his ankle where it showed beneath the hem of his jeans.
Who are you, we asked.
Earnshaw made a “V” sign on his neck, then flicked his fingers toward us as if brushing crumbs from beneath his chin.
The voice of one—proclaiming, Claire said.
18
The Christian, Earnshaw said, may perhaps best understand things from the standpoint of evolution.
Midnight. We were gathered around a small fire inside the cave, our bare feet stretched toward the flames.
If man evolved from lower types of life, Earnshaw said, then why haven’t we reached the Next Step? When is the Thing After Man going to appear? Think of what came before humans appeared on earth. Huge, heavily armored creatures. If anyone had been watching the course of evolution, he would have predicted bigger creatures, heavier armor. But what did Nature give us?
Men, we said. Women.
Comparatively tiny beings, Earnshaw said. Naked, defenseless—with brains to master the planet.
As we continue to evolve, Earnshaw said, we should expect not just change, but a new method of producing the change.
Earnshaw stood and signed with large, cutting strokes.
The next stage in evolution, Claire translated, will not be a stage in evolution at all; evolution itself as a method of producing change will be superseded.
Haven’t we read this in our theologians? we asked.
Your theologians, Earnshaw said, have told you that the Next Step is the transition from being God’s creatures to his sons. They have seen through a glass darkly. In fact, the Next Step will occur only when we recognize sin as an illusion.
Earnshaw punched his cheek, twisted his clenched fist in his palm.
Claire did not need to translate.
19
Who will be the first to undress? Earnshaw asked.
Now that he’d spoken the words, we realized it was the question we’d been waiting for all along.
Is this not the reason you have taken down your building, Earnshaw said, to look upon His creation without barrier?
Sarah Taylor, a single mother, thirty-six, stood. We closed our eyes, or looked down into our laps, until Earnshaw reminded us that the term modesty was a euphemism for shame.
Sarah’s body, Earnshaw said, is half the mystery of God’s nature. On mystery he curled his index finger against his forehead, furrowing his brow as if perplexed. Our children mimicked the gesture.
Sarah pulled off her shirt and unhooked her bra. She took off her jeans, so baggy and outdated the lace thong she wore startled us (but only for a moment) like a cussword. We suppressed the urge to cover our children’s eyes; they hid their faces anyhow.
Sarah bent over and slid out of the thong, then stood and lifted her hands. When she began to sing the Doxology, we joined in, some of us also removing our clothing, though we stayed in the darkness outside the circle of firelight, chiding ourselves for being trapped by the current of modesty, a weakness we would teach ourselves—and our children—to overcome.
20
Two nights later, when we arrived at the cave, Sarah was already undressed. She sat with her knees pulled up, arms crossed over her breasts.
We removed our own shoes, shirts, pants. Our children played in the clearing, or borrowed flashlights to explore the woods, or drew with sidewalk chalk on the smooth surfaces of the granite and limestone. They refused to enter the cave.
Claire spoke to Sarah in a low voice, Earnshaw signing beside them, using small hand gestures as if whispering. Sarah lay back, letting her knees fall open, the soles of her feet pressed together. We closed our eyes.
She is half the mystery of God, we heard Claire say. We should look upon His mystery without shame.
We forced ourselves to look upon the mystery, the gap-lipped pinkness.
Who will be the first to enact the mystery of God, Earnshaw said, with Sarah? To show us, in the flesh, His total nature, male and female combined?
We were silent.
Even Christ spoke in parables, Earnshaw said. Sexual union is not only profoundly natural, but inevitable as a means of expressing the desired union between God and men.
A young man stood—Dary
l Lotz, the philosophy student.
I will enact God’s mystery, he said.
Sarah’s breasts draped the sides of her torso. Daryl came forward, knelt between her legs, unzipped his cargo shorts. He put a hand on himself and moaned. If Sarah made any sound, we couldn’t hear it.
Daryl lowered himself till his body was covering Sarah’s. Then, abruptly, he crawled forward till his hips hovered just above her face.
Body of Christ, broken for you, he said, placing himself on her outstretched tongue.
21
Together each night, under the cover of darkness, we discovered the sacramental nature of oral ministrations. The men laid themselves on our women’s tongues—and on one another’s tongues—in humble acts of devotion. The women straddled waiting mouths, heads thrown back, eyes closed.
When we finished, we turned to Earnshaw (who watched, but, along with Claire, did not participate):
The Next Step, we said. Have we taken it?
Go further, he said. Think of the Son on the cross, the Father who put him there—dominance and subjugation also two sides of God’s total nature.
We went further. We accepted everyone, endured everything, turning one another over and over again, our faces streaked with dirt and tears.
22
In the aftermath of our rituals, a stillness would overtake us. And in the stillness, our limbs entwined, we began to understand that the entrance to eternity lay not in the gratification of the body’s desires, but in their denial. We discovered that on the other side of sexual union was a period of lucid stasis in which white roads unfolded on the insides of our eyelids, bright shapes rising on either side like backlit skyscrapers. In the stillness we allowed our thoughts, like clouds, to drift among the tops of the buildings. We observed our thoughts (Where are our children?) and watched them dissipate.
In the stillness we felt the approach of the infinite.
23
With fall coming on, in the sunlight of the clearing, leaves shrinking into bright stipple above us, we practiced being Awake to the Present Moment. Some of us mastered being still for such long periods of time that when we moved a limb we had to disentangle it from the kudzu. Lovely, we said, observing the coiling vines, purple flowers dotting our forearms, shins. Our children stayed in the woods. Sometimes we glimpsed them in the trees, peering down at us, hair hanging loose, obscuring their faces.
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