Some of the kids nodded.
“Maybe so. Now, I don’t think Paul is telling you to become an addict,” the youth minister said, still smiling. “But I do think he’s telling you to be smart when it comes to the business of saving souls. Jesus washed Mary Magdalene’s feet, remember? Remember? He scrubbed them with his own two hands.”
After the youth minister’s talk, he’d asked if there were any newcomers present. Annie nudged me, and I raised my hand. I was one of five. The youth minister shook each of our hands. Then he said he wanted everyone to stand up, one by one, to tell the group when we’d been saved. I’d never been put on the spot like this. One girl said she’d been saved in the third grade at a Bible camp. Another girl said she came to know Jesus on the youth group ski trip last winter. “On a diamond slope,” she added, and everyone smiled. Annie told the group she’d been saved in the third grade in youth group.
I was next. The gymnasium doors were locked. Everyone was watching me. The easiest thing to do, of course, would have been to make up something, but I couldn’t do that. What would God do to the person who lied about being saved? I didn’t want to test him. I took these things very seriously as a child. I felt like God was watching me all the time. Uncertain of what to say, I jumped up off the floor, ran to the bathroom, and threw up.
I did my homework on The Church of Search. The church had no discernible creed, no tenets, no specific set of beliefs, but it was clearly situated within the Protestant tradition of worship. Jesus and the New Testament were not the exclusive avenues of salvation, but they were referenced and alluded to more often than any other spiritual leader or text.
From what I could tell, the church was a net for skeptics and wannabe born-agains, for Jimmy Carters of the digital age, for people who wanted to feel God but didn’t know how anymore, who worried their intellects and logic were getting in the way of a genuine spiritual experience, who liked Christianity generally but were ashamed of its history, for people who thought religion should make room for science and discovery. Predictably it had many critics. According to traditional religious folks, The Church of Search lacked the most crucial element of the churchgoing experience: pastoral care and leadership. To atheists, The Church of Search didn’t go far enough in its deference to science and reason.
I showed up at Annie’s church that Sunday unsure of what to think. Services were held in the old Masonic Temple near downtown, a white stone building with steps leading up to a single large door. I was greeted out front by a man with squiggles of red hair and a scowl on his face.
“No way that’s Jimmy Byrd,” he said, and seized my hand.
“Wes?”
“The one and only!”
Wesley Riggs. I hadn’t seen him in years. I’d once been friends with his younger brother, Michael, who lived in California now. Wes and I had never interacted much in high school as he’d been two years older than me. Vaguely I remembered him running for student body president, an election he’d lost. He had a dentist practice in Shula now, though we never really crossed paths. We ran in different circles, I suppose.
“Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to The Church of Search. Your first time?”
I nodded.
“You’re going to love it,” he said. “Come on over here, come with me, I’ll find you a good spot.”
He led me through a small lobby and into a large wood-paneled room with dark red carpets that looked as though they hadn’t been replaced in decades. Three empty wooden throne-like chairs sat on a low stage at the front of the room.
“Ignore all the Masonic stuff,” Wes said. “They don’t even meet here anymore. City owns the building, and we pay to use it on Sundays.”
He directed me to a metal folding chair in the front row. I didn’t really want to sit at the front of the room, but I thought it might be impolite to protest. He asked me if I had a phone, and when I held it up, he bumped his against mine.
“Now you’ve got the program, brother. This is a state-of-the-art church. My wife and I were attending services at a Church of Search in Nashville, when we were living there, and once we moved back to Shula we really missed it and thought we’d start up a satellite here, too. I’m a founding member. On the board and everything. We’re about to start, so I’ll leave you be, but we should get some coffee after this. You free? There’s a place across the street. We should catch up!”
He retreated to the back of the room. The other empty chairs quickly filled with congregants. I guessed there were maybe forty people here, but with only a few minutes to go before the service, Annie and her daughter were nowhere in sight.
I texted her: At the Church. You?
“Hi,” said the woman sitting directly behind me. “I’m Sudeepa.”
“Hello,” I said.
She had a baby in her lap, and toddlers on either side of her in chairs. One of the kids, a boy with shiny dark hair, was picking his nose gleefully.
“Bet you’ve never been to a church with holograms before, have you?” she said.
“Holograms?”
She smiled. “Oh, you’re in for a treat.”
A man in the corner of the room began strumming a guitar. Vaguely I recognized the tune as “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I’d never been to a worship service like this one. I’d grown up in the Lutheran Church—a compromise struck by my Baptist mother and my mostly nonbelieving father—and we’d spent most Sundays inside a pretty gray-stone church near downtown. I’d been an acolyte there as a teenager, though I hadn’t been back since leaving town for college. I’d always enjoyed its pomp and rituals, but I’d never felt moved in any real way by its prayers and creeds and hymns. What I remembered most from the services of my youth were chunky organ notes tumbling down from pipes behind the altar, the pipes embedded in the plaster like a sideways rib cage, the skin of the wall peeled back to reveal them. Staring up at that wall I’d often wondered if it was meant to put you in mind of Jesus’ emaciated body on the cross.
The Church of Search had no organ. No pomp, either. After the first song ended, the lights dimmed, and the group recited a prayer of thanks off their phones. The screens glowed faintly blue in the near-darkness, illuminating chins and mouths. Then the lights returned and there was more music. I looked back but still didn’t see Annie. Sudeepa smiled at me as if to reassure me.
The song ended, and everyone sat down in their chairs for five minutes of silence. Then a woman in jeans and pearls strolled to the front of the room, bracelets jangling on each wrist, and, with a lilting voice, read a Mary Oliver poem about the world being created new each morning. There were other readings—from the Gospel of Thomas, from the Bhagavad-Gita, from Carl Sandburg. The lights flickered, and the room hushed. I checked the program on my phone and saw that next up was today’s featured speaker: Dr. Mary Kendrick, a biblical archaeologist. When I glanced back up, a woman was standing before me, just a few feet away, in front of the three wooden chairs. For a moment she stood very still, staring out beyond all of us, as if waiting for the go-ahead from an invisible director at the back of the room.
She looked at us then with a grin and introduced herself. Since I was in the front row, I was looking up at her face. She had tan skin and large, crater-like pores. On her upper lip was a fine dark fuzz. A microphone headset curled around her right ear. If you squinted right, you could see that something was off about her. She had a slightly grainy and pixelated aspect. She wasn’t actually there. But where was she being projected from? I saw no machinery along the floor, the wall, or the ceiling—no mirrors or lights or little black boxes or futuristic glass pyramids. I couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t source it.
“Turn it up,” someone shouted. “I can’t hear!”
“Sorry,” Wes said.
He stood up in the middle of the room and fiddled with a small back remote control. Dr. Kendrick expanded in all directions, until she was almost twelve fee
t tall. A giant. A mythic being. At the back of the room a small child began to wail.
“Wes, you created a monster,” a man yelled.
A few people laughed.
Wes clicked the remote again but instead of shrinking, the pastor ballooned up like a Macy’s Day parade float, a cartoon character. The ceiling decapitated her at the shoulders. Was her head above the roof, looking out across the town?
“Sorry, sorry,” Wes said, pushing more buttons.
The woman’s body disappeared, but her voice remained. She was in the middle of a story about having been detained once in Israel, the result of some confusion over the Jordanian stamps in her passport. Then, finally, she flickered back into view, life-size again, normal. People settled down to listen.
Dr. Kendrick paced as she spoke. She gestured. She’d been involved with a recent effort to excavate a first-century fishing boat from the Sea of Galilee, the second of its kind exposed in the last twenty years as the lake waters receded due to drought. Though she had no reason to believe this boat had ever been used by Jesus and his disciples, she had no reason to disbelieve it either. Radiocarbon dating suggested the boat would have been on the water during the years of Jesus’ ministry, as a matter of fact. It was at least conceivable that he’d been onboard.
A 3D image of the boat, like the legless husk of a dead bug, popped into view a foot from Dr. Kendrick’s face, floating there, turning slowly so that we could see it from all angles.
At the conclusion of her talk, she zapped away. A few people clapped. Others stood immediately to collapse chairs. The service, apparently, was over. I looked for Annie. She still wasn’t here, but I saw that I had a text from her.
Fisher woke up sick. So sorry!!!! Will make it up to you.
I added my chair to the stack that was amassing on a long metal cart near the storeroom. Wes patted me on the back: Coffee now?
—
ACROSS THE ROAD from the Masonic Temple was a café called BeanHead. Wes and I sat down across from each other at a greasy table near the front window. We talked about a sixty-four-mile bike ride he was planning, about a black bear that had recently been spotted Dumpster-diving behind the Best Buy, about a new kind of doorbell technology that could scan your fingerprint and announce your arrival with a theme song picked especially for you, about The Church of Search.
“Do you know Annie Creel?” I asked him. “She’s the one who suggested I come today.”
“Annie Creel, sure. Harriet—my wife—knows Annie better than me. They’ve been out to dinner a couple of times. Such a sad story, though. You know about her husband, I’m sure?”
I nodded. “A little.”
“Drugs is what I heard.”
“Drugs? I’m fairly certain he drowned.”
“Not like the newspaper’s going to say he drowned ’cause he was fucked up, you know? Anyway, I’m not casting stones here. My brother—you remember Mikey—he’s deep into ayahuasca. He’s got some kind of guide, calls herself Stone Fox, and he and his friends go over to her house on Sundays, wear white pajamas, and throw up in buckets as they hallucinate.”
“Mikey does this? Really?”
Mikey had made a small fortune as a day trader and, last I heard, spent most of his time shuttling back and forth between San Francisco and Aspen.
“Scout’s honor. He calls it his church.” He smiled. “So—what’d you think of The Church of Search? I’m curious. We ditched the flat-screens last year and upgraded to holograms. Lots of other satellites are doing it. Didn’t it feel like she was really right there with us?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Nearly.”
He sipped his coffee.
The couple at the table behind us, whom I recognized from that morning’s service, were very politely discussing the end of the world. Their forks scraped against their plates as they outlined the various scenarios: climate change, biblical floods, alien invasion, nuclear disaster, overpopulation, the singularity, global pandemics. They seemed well versed in all the ways the human species might ultimately fizzle, their voices hushed but essentially un-frightened and resigned. They were very certain the end was near; the only real question, it seemed, the only thing worth debating, was the manner in which this fate might unfold.
Seated around another table, near the pastries display, was a group of sweaty men and women in spandex and shorts. They were slumped in their chairs, their legs stretched at odd angles, a maze of muscled thighs and calves. They were discussing endorphins, serotonins, exercise as a path to an ecstatic experience.
This was the new Sunday morning. Lattes and red-eyes. Runners’ clubs. Metaphysics in the coffee shop. Each table, another sect, another order.
“Jim,” Wes said, “how familiar are you with intelligent holograms?”
I shrugged. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Smart holograms, they’re sometimes called. Virtual assistants. Holographic artificial intelligences. One day, not too distant from now, holograms will be everywhere, man. When you walk down the street, half the people you see will be holograms. You’ll have holographic hotties modeling the latest fashions outside clothing stores. They’ll try to sell you things. Sandwich cards. Kombuchas. They’ll find you a table at the restaurant. They’ll check you into your hotel. The entire service industry will be upended by this, just you wait.”
“That’s a little depressing.”
“How much do you know about the Council of San Francisco?”
“Nothing at all.”
Very solemnly Wes explained that two years ago an ecumenical council of leading biblical scholars, priests, and preachers from various denominations, plus a team of advanced computer programmers and start-up billionaires, had convened in San Francisco in order to reach a consensus on what source material should be used in the creation of a digital Jesus consciousness. This group had gathered in a hotel conference room to debate what primary and secondary documents and research would need to be included to achieve a near artificial intelligence with a Jesus-based personality.
“The council never reached a clear consensus,” Wes said. “But The Church of Search has been in talks with a company that’s developing its own Jesus intelligence. ReJesus, they’re calling it. He’ll walk among us again. As a hologram.”
I asked if they’d use a model or an actor to create their Jesus, and Wes shook his head. Forensics, he said. With skulls recovered from ancient tombs in East Jerusalem, they would map and design his features. Not just any skulls, of course, but the skulls of Jewish men in their early thirties. Galileans, specifically. ReJesus’ face would be a composite of about a dozen different people who lived two thousand years ago, men who spent their days around Jerusalem, who toiled under Roman rule. Real people. The hologram would look like a man of Jesus’ time. Dark-skinned, fit, lean.
“Please don’t scare him off, Wes,” said a voice at my back.
I twisted in my chair. It was Sudeepa, the woman who’d been sitting behind me earlier that morning at the church. She was standing there with a child in one arm and a large iced coffee drink in the other the color of cardboard.
“Wes’s obsessed with this ReJesus idea,” she told me. “He thinks it will solve all the world’s problems or something. Did you enjoy the service this morning?”
I told her that I had.
“Well, you should come back again! Next week the speaker is a neuroscientist who thinks that God is talking to us all the time through magnetic waves.”
“That guy’s a quack,” Wes said. “I don’t know why they gave him a spot.”
“Is he?” Sudeepa asked. “Shame. I thought it sounded interesting.” She looked at me. “The problem is, with so many different talks, you never know what to expect. One Sunday you’re listening to a pastor from Texas who’s helping to settle immigrants from war-torn countries and the next week it’s a lady who thought she saw the
Buddha in her bathtub. You have to be a little discerning.”
“Here’s the thing,” Wes said. “The real Jesus—he was a hologram.”
“Oh, stop it,” Sudeepa said.
“A projection from God. Here but also not quite here.”
“But he was here, Wes. He walked the earth. As a living, breathing man.”
“Not according to the Docetists!”
“The who?”
“Group of early Christians. They thought Jesus was a phantom.”
“You can’t put a phantom on a cross,” Sudeepa said.
“Yes,” Wes said airily, “well, that was the eventual consensus, that you need a body to really suffer, to really sacrifice.”
I tried to imagine Annie in the mix of this conversation. Were these the sort of people she kept as friends? I felt as if I’d wandered into somebody else’s dream. Everywhere I went, it was the same. Even a trip to the CVS could be overwhelming. Wandering the aisles, looking up at the walls of hair-care products, shampoos, conditioners, waxes, pomades, curl enhancers, curl removers, thickeners, thinners, I would become disoriented and confused. Woozy. What sort of a place was this? I could no longer even tell you, not without a great deal of concentration and focus, what a 1099 was for. Or a swizzle stick. Or a motherboard.
Wes cleared his throat. “Sudeepa, you’re missing the larger point. This won’t be some dead recording. This will be an actual lifelike Jesus representation. Truly interactive. He’ll walk among us again! And he’ll be able to answer all our most pressing questions about God!”
“But what’s the point of that, when you can just pick up a Bible like a normal person?” Sudeepa asked.
“You don’t understand. ReJesus will be able to extrapolate. You won’t just get the same stale mustard seed parable. You’ll get an entirely new and contemporary story that explains a similar or related idea. Do you get it? This is huge. It’s almost like the Second Coming.”
“Except not at all like that,” Sudeepa said, annoyed.
The Afterlives Page 5