The sermon, a lengthy musing on some biblical verse, seems to be about the ‘motivation for being holy.’ Should it come out of fear, the desire for reward, or for the love of God? It’s a pretty simple question, but it takes half an hour to ask it and another half to answer it. He talks about a ‘holy lifestyle’ and a ‘God-pleasing life.’ In spite of some lingo borrowed from the self-help movement, it’s the same old fire and brimstone when he finally gets down to it, so I tune out and start to think about inventing a new religion.
This would definitely be part of it, this sitting here.
When I lived in L.A., a year would sometimes go by without my noticing. Even in New York, where there are at least distinct seasons to hew mnemonic notches on the short stick of life, still I’m always running: to the gym or be depressed, only ten hours left for work, find time for the wife, the daughter, friends, but someone’s trying to get me to switch phone services and there’s too much mail, much of it from total strangers wanting things I do not have, a pile of it, not enough time, not enough time, so I automatically rip up all the envelopes with charity requests without even looking inside and …
What? Not even look inside? I know, it’s terrible, but I’m just so busy, and with so much misery on offer, how do you select? Is a child with cancer more deserving than a lonely geriatric with Alzheimer’s? Should you look for bargains? Fifty bucks, for example, funds a brace of gay Manhattan AIDS sufferers for a day, while the same outlay feeds a six-pack of African heteros with the same disease for a month—but the Africans are probably going to die anyway, and to choose one is to deny another and it’s overwhelming how much suffering God showers us with and it’s all so horrific and I’m depressed already, and anyway I’ve got to keep shifting things aside, have to cut a path, a little leeway, please! Because there’s more coming down tomorrow, more work, more telemarketing pricks, switch or buy, more words to write, more life to organise and suddenly—in a New York minute—even with the seasons, years have gone by without a moment of reflection.
What life?
And that’s what church should be: a segment of time to interrupt, to terminate this frenzy of mindless activity. At worst, like now, the inaction is merely boring and the brain gets a chance to wander philosophically. At best, if one organised it right, the experience would jolt you awake and remind you of your place in the order of things, that you have a place in the order, that actions have consequences, that life is beautiful, ugly, serious, funny, very short but still magnificent.
It strikes me what a strange building I’m in. You don’t park in it, or eat in it, or work, sleep, or shop in it; it serves no material function and produces no material benefit (except to the pastor) and yet it’s one of the biggest buildings in town.
It’s ripe for takeover. Remove the imbecilities of conventional religion—including God—and what remains is no less incredible: a cavernous room purpose-built to provoke reflection! Incredible. Maybe one could even let God in now and then, like on the third Sunday of every alternate month. God—you never know … (The place would also remain available for AA meetings, these being the last example of faith at work still to be found in church. Twelve steps like twelve disciples, submission to a higher power, and the real chance of recovery through communion with fellow sufferers.)
How I wish I had more time to study all the religions, to pick and choose the elements I’d use in mine. A touch of Buddhist humility here, a pinch of Muslim asceticism there, the better hymns of Christianity, something Hindu (is that bare feet?), something New Agey, massage or whatever, and of course a large dose of Tantric sex to keep the congregation frisky.
‘Mrs. Wilkins, why don’t you show us what you learned last week? Any volunteers? Hold it! Just one! Okay, Jimmy, it’s your turn. Hmm, leg over that way, arm over there … Interesting. Hold still, Jimmy, here she comes! Oh, Mrs. Wilkins, how fine you are …’
Suddenly, everyone around me is standing. Lost in Mrs. Wilkins’ exertions, I failed to notice Pastor Johnson’s sermon coming to an end. There’s some singing to be done, so I stand up and listen.
Gale sings prettily, with a simple, unaffected voice. I look around to check the other songbirds. To my surprise, I see my little flock of visitors from last night. They’re across the aisle, chirping sweetly.
After the service, I go talk with them. They offer to take me up to the Pocket Wilderness right after the service if I’m free. There’s a swimming hole at the top of the creek. Along the way they could show me the ventilation shafts from the old mine and then we could all swim. I tell them I’m having lunch with the Johnsons but could meet them at the motel around two. Gale has to give a Sunday School class, which she doesn’t think will interest me, so I’m to be at her and Carter’s house in an hour and a half.
I drive up into the hills to a small white church I saw when cruising with Rocky. I enter and sit down. It’s a poorer, fatter crowd than Carter’s, but they seem to have more fun. There’s some Mexicans across the aisle and behind me an amiable hillbilly retard. The pastor is a good-looking man who cannot be much more than thirty, if that. His dark hair is well cut and in his Calvin Klein glasses, snappy plaid shirt and khakis, he could be a grad student or a preppie gay waiter, but his accent is almost incomprehensibly country. He never stops grinning, but never, and bounces from one foot to the other, as if the music’s in him, or the Holy Spirit, or cocaine.
‘I appreciate the Lord today, yes I do,’ he says every ten sentences or so.
The place is democratic in form, but conservative in content. A member of the congregation, a man around fifty, asks to be heard.
‘I don’t never seen a time in my life like this one. Young people using bad language in the schools and the teachers just turn away. As hard as it is for me to say this, we need to be responsible for our children.’
‘I hear ya.’
‘If they need the rod, they need to git it. That’s the way it is, no matter what the government says, it don’t make no difference. It’s not abuse, it’s love and correction. The Bible tells us if we don’t correct them, we don’t love them.’
‘Tha’s right, brother.’
Now a pudgy little fellow in his early forties gets to his feet and starts to ‘witness.’ He talks about being saved, ‘I am saved, yes I am!’ Oh, the great happiness of it! ‘Oh, I love the Lord!’ And now, as he gets into it, he jumps up and down in place like a fat, beaming child. It seems completely ludicrous to me, but everyone else claps and says ‘Amen’ with great admiration and much beatific grinning and he sits down well satisfied.
A mother comes to the front with her four-year-old child and they sit at an upright piano. She slams her fingers into the keys and the two of them start to sing old-style gospel music, and it doesn’t hesitate or hold back a thing. Everyone gets to their feet and joins in, swaying and slapping their hands together, myself among them. I’d have this in my religion too, this music, and this would be the way to go: upbeat, wailing. ‘Oh, yes, Mrs. Wilkins, you can dance if you want to.’
When the song is done, I see it’s time to go, and manage to escape before the collection box gets to me.
Half an hour later I’m inside the Johnson house, a comfortable but modest middle-class home on the suburban side of the highway. Gale goes off to cook, the kids are kept at bay, and Carter and I talk in the den. Carter comes from a medical family. His father was a doctor, as is his brother. His grandmother and sister were nurses. He was in pre-med himself when he changed his mind and decided to go into the ministry. He loves to teach and to watch the beneficial transformation which takes place in people’s lives if they commit themselves to God. I had thought, from his sermon, that there was something forgiving about him, something gentle, and this seems to confirm it; but as we start to talk about heaven and hell, his face, which had been suffused with pleasant enthusiasm, now becomes increasingly stern. His mouth turns down and becomes resolute and his eyes become hard. He is convinced there’s only one God (his), one heaven (where I p
resume he’s going), a hell (where me and the other seven eighths are headed), and so on. It’s in the Bible and the Bible is the word of God and has no errors. I ask him about TULIP, the five points of Calvinism.
He tells me the T is for Total Depravity of man. No man is pure, all are sinful, and every act is tinged with sin.
The U is for Unconditional Election. God has already chosen, or elected, who will go to heaven and who will not and there’s nothing we can do about it. (So perhaps I was wrong and I’m going to heaven and he’s not.) Man is so fundamentally bad that left to his own devices, he would never choose God. God, however, will interfere in some people’s lives to bring them into the fold. These are the elected. When I ask Carter why He would choose not to save so many of His own creations, he admits ‘that’s the $10,000 question, and the ultimate answer is—nobody knows.’ In Romans, chapter 9, Paul responds to the question by saying: ‘Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the object of His wrath prepared for destruction? What if He did this to make the riches of His glory known to the objects of His mercy?’ In other words, if you beat one of your children the others will be impressed by your mercy in not beating them.
The L is for Limited Atonement. Christ died on the cross not for all men, but only for the unconditionally elected. ‘His death was sufficient to pay for the sins of everybody, but it was effective only for the elect,’ Carter informs me. ‘All will not be saved. We don’t believe in Universalism.’
The I is for Irresistible Grace. Ultimately the chosen will not resist their salvation.
The P is for Perseverence of the Saints, which means that those who are chosen will stay chosen—whether they like it or not.
The concept of TULIP, particularly that of Unconditional Election, seems almost surreal. It’s as if the purpose of religion itself has been squeezed out by some perverse theological contortion. Under this system, there are no rewards for good behaviour. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, if you’re pre-selected for hell, hell is where you’ll go. Imagine how Mother Teresa must be feeling if she drew the wrong straw.
When I talk to him about the reality of hell, and how depressing it must be to walk among so many condemned people, he admits—as do so many Christians—to a sense of unease.
‘I think, Matthew,’ he says, hesitantly, ‘that the reality or the truth of hell has not gripped me like it ought.’
Gale enters and tells us it’s time for lunch. In we go to a slightly austere dining room, and grace is duly said. To my disappointment, the boys aren’t going to eat with us. I can usually ignite a spark of rebellion in even the most dour of children and had looked forward to sparking up these two juniors. Instead I sit alone with Gale and Carter, he at one end of the table, the master, she at the other, his wife. They are cordial and I appreciate their hospitality, but something grim permeates the house—a miasma of things forbidden, the bleak outline of puritanical displeasure—and something else too, an awkwardness, a distracted quality in both my hosts, as if they want to blurt something out but cannot yet bring themselves to do so.
When lunch is over and small talk exhausted, I check my watch and tell them I have to go meet my young Christian friends. No sooner do I stand than they pounce on me. Carter grasps my left hand.
‘Do you mind if we pray for you?’
Before I can answer, Gale has my other hand. I’ve just eaten their food, I still want the tape, and anyway there’s something about a preacher—the last remnants of some atavistic superstitious regard?—which can render even the staunchest atheist bewilderingly passive. Instead of objecting vociferously, I comply with a shrug.
So there we stand in a line in the dining room, three adults holding hands, heads bowed, me with my eyes defiantly open, flushing with embarrassment and shame. I’ve given few clues to my non-belief but they’ve got me pegged. Reverend Johnson prays for my salvation in a grave but hopeless tone such as one might apply when praying for a man who, dying of lung cancer, continues to smoke. It lasts about a minute and finally I’m out in my car, tapeless, but free.
I’m relatively fit. I swim and run, but these young Christians are a different species. They neither smoke nor drink and probably never have; they’re in their prime and they’re leading me up the side of a creek toward the waterhole at an unbelievable pace.
It’s killing me.
They came for me in Laurie’s car, a large old station wagon. Matt and a pleasant, handsome young man sat in the back. I sat next to Laurie, who drove the big vehicle with relaxed competence along the narrow lanes, her left leg drawn up onto the seat and resting against the door, a single hand working the steering wheel. When we got to the Pocket Wilderness, a craggy, wooded area with a boulder-strewn creek, Christie was already there in her car.
Twenty minutes later, I’m exhausted. We plunge on along a path above the creek. My friends spring over fallen trees and hop adroitly aside when a snake is seen lying across the path. I plod behind, trying to wheeze quietly.
Christie shows me a rough opening in the side of the hill, a jagged but deliberate aperture. It’s one of the ventilation shafts from the mine. Along here there used to be a railway delivering coal and iron back to the foundry; now there’s not a trace of it. When you see photographs of the valley eighty years ago, there are thousands of acres of industrial buildings, smoke stacks, railway lines, mine heads, winches—a valley crammed with vigorous commercial enterprise—and it’s all gone, nothing, not a sign except this: some holes in the side of a hill, the clogged breathing tubes of an extinct subterranean creature.
Having shown me another shaft, Christie turns back. That was it: she came along only to show me this and now, having some other obligation, she’s headed home without even the refreshment of the swimming hole.
The path descends into the creek. Now our route ascends in a series of jumbled and irregular steps, some in the form of boulders, steep and hard to climb, others in the form of long, shallow rises dotted with ankle-twisting stones. The kids leap from boulder to boulder, clamber friskily up narrow gullies, commit themselves to landings on slick, moss-covered plates of rock, land, slip, regain themselves (laughing), and gallop on. My legs are shaking and my shirt is damp with sweat and clings to my torso like a disease.
I have a morbid horror of breaking my wrists. Unable to type, I’d be at zero in a month and lose my apartment in six. I’m gasping and my head throbs. I want to remove my shirt, but what lies beneath is too disgusting. I’m white, oleaginous, saturated in foie gras and booze, no longer glamorously dissolute, merely pathetic in consequence.
Finally, a mile or so later, we arrive at the swimming hole, that quintessential emblem of idyllic rural America. Nor is it disappointing. It’s a waterfall amid a scatter of majestic boulders and tall trees, a clear and icy pool, a jutting rock from which to plunge.
Laurie removes her shirt to reveal a one-piece swimsuit descending into her shorts. She dives into the water with the shorts still on. The boys follow. I’m wearing long, baggy denim shorts and underneath them a red swimsuit which didn’t used to be as tight or brief as it now is but was always on the skimpy side even in secular company. I don’t want to remove my shorts but figure if I don’t I’m going to have to walk all the way back with an extra five pounds of dampness clinging onto my faltering buttocks and chafing at my sad old balls.
I drop the pants and dive in. The water is astoundingly cold. I swim under the heavy curtain of the waterfall and recline behind it and then swim out again. Matt and Laurie climb up the side of the fall and reach the jutting rock. It’s a twenty-foot drop. Holding their noses, they jump. Now the other boy does it, then Laurie and Matt go again. What about me? Aren’t I going to do it?
The coward grunts his declination and swims sportily below, showing off his marvellous stroke. Matt and Laurie climb up a third time and wrestle with ea
ch other on the edge. Matt pushes her. She falls and lands feet first, unharmed, then paddles to the side, smiling, not angry in any way. She lies back on a rock and watches Matt jump, twisting in the air. He swims to her and sits nearby. Although they do not touch, I suspect they’re going out together.
We talk in the heat, cooling ourselves occasionally with a dip. Most of the time they are engaging and engaged, and then they seem to inexplicably pull back as if collecting themselves. I don’t know if it’s because I swear without noticing and offend them, or if it’s just an awkwardness brought on by the difference in our ages. Then again, perhaps they have a plan—like the Johnsons—a sudden forced baptism, say?
Laurie tells me she and Matt hitchhiked to California together and had a great time. Now Matt is leaving in a few weeks to spend a semester at a college in Egypt. They discuss other academic programmes abroad. There’s an international network of Christian schools and colleges which they can attend, and after that missions, hospitals, and relief organisations where they can work. If you compare them to kids from similar economic backgrounds but in regular schools, their potential for an absorbing life seems greater. True, they probably won’t take as many drugs or go to as many clubs or have as many sexual encounters as their secular counterparts, but they can and probably will travel, study, and work all over the world via these church organisations.
Laurie has already had a more interesting life than most. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she lived in the Southeast until she was thirteen, when her parents moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, to work for SERVE (Serving Emergency Relief and Vocational Enterprises), a Christian relief organisation. Originally sent to care for the four million Afghan refugees who fled the Soviet invasion of 1979, SERVE remained when the occupation ended ten years later to help rebuild Afghanistan’s infrastructure. During this time, Laurie travelled in China, India, the United Arab Emirates, England, Switzerland, Germany, and France. Conventionally schooled in the early years in America, her parents later decided to try home-schooling, ‘or self-guided education,’ as it is sometimes called. This kind of schooling, she believes, while sometimes lonely, makes a child independent and self-disciplined. Encouraged by her father, she read widely, but still feels she has educational gaps.
Trials of the Monkey Page 35