Gospel (124 page)

“Well, here we are,” Farley announced, as a series of condominiums came into view. There was the omnipresent TPL logo in a circle with the sign Newlife Covenant Center underneath. “It's the home my daddy set up for unwed mothers,” he added.

Lucy felt her stomach tighten.

“I mean, it's well and good to be against abortion like a lot of TV preachers, but if you don't have an adoption outreach program, it's sort of hypocritical, don't you think?”

Lucy smiled blandly. At some point, she realized, I am going to have to escape the minions of The Promised Land ministries and get to a drugstore and buy one of those home-pregnancy tests.

“A lot of girls get in trouble,” Farley went on, explaining the obvious, how girls often get pregnant and have nowhere to go.

“How does the clinic work?” asked Lucy quietly.

“Oh well, it's all free. It's open to born-again Christians mostly but we'll take anyone and preach at them later,” he added, laughing. “We find a Christian home for the child and then the adoption papers are all signed. The TPL Newlife Center is the second-biggest adoption agency in the state, after the state itself.”

“How about…” She focused her thoughts. “What about the women keeping their children?”

Farley pulled the station wagon into the parking lot.

“They're just
girls,
” said Farley. “Fourteen and fifteen, that kind of thing. Can't take proper care of a kid, you know.”

Lucy found it a bit cruel to pose such a thing to a teenager. On the other hand: childless couples were made happy, the children themselves could have a better home, better opportunities. Then again, Southern Baptist morality runs these girls out of town, out of their homes in the first place, saying: give up the baby and we'll help you pay for all the shame and trouble you caused. Then the girls get saved and born-again to convince themselves it was the right thing to do.

(Might not it be the best thing, My child?)

Yes, Lucy thought starkly. It is perhaps the unselfish thing to do.

“But they don't get to see them,” said Farley.

“What?” Lucy asked, caught not listening.

“The girls don't get to see the babies. Because then it's just too difficult to give them up. So a lot of the girls want the baby to be taken right after they give birth. I mean, they get to find out what it was, boy or girl and all that. And they get to write a letter to their child that the child can open when they're eighteen years old, saying, you know, why the mother gave him up and that kind of thing.”

Lucy closed her eyes, imagining the emotional violence of the process. The physical pain of childbirth wouldn't be as great as the absence afterward, Lucy saw. A mother might well cherish the humiliation of being tossed out of her pious Christian home, might well venerate the sickness and labor pains of pregnancy: that was the time, my child, we were together.

The Newlife Covenant Center headquarters was an angular four-story building that looked like it might be a suburban office complex, perfect for a dentist or insurance firm. Lucy fought a feeling of dread as Farley and she entered the lobby, a sunny waiting room with a nurse behind a desk. Farley said many irate parents—once a disgraced Dad toting a shotgun—barge in to see their fallen daughters and are firmly turned away.

“I don't know why people have to be like that,” concluded Farley.

“One day,” said Lucy, “and it's already happening, a woman can be a single mother without a community thinking it's any of its business.”

“You think? What would
your
mother say,” he asked playfully, “if you came home pregnant?”

Lucy didn't say anything.

Posters in the lobby of the Newlife Covenant Center advertised the “TPL Fullness Festival,” posters that were ubiquitous in Philadelphia. Along one wall there were framed photographs of parents with adopted children and laminated letters mounted on polished wood thanking God for sustaining the mother in her ordeals and delivering a child to them at last. Lucy looked at one mother, middle-aged, hefty and careworn in Southern cat-eye glasses, flowing like an ikon of Mt. Athos with love and feeling for her precious adopted child.

Lucy noticed the woman behind the reception desk wore a lapel pin of two baby feet, tiny and toylike. Farley explained the pin was an idea from Jerry Falwell's center in Lynchburg on which this center was based; the tiny feet were the size of a fetus's feet at nine weeks. Lucy felt hot revulsion for this fetus-re-creation, the crassness of the appeal. Farley, meanwhile, was being accosted by three pregnant teenage girls who recognized him from TV:

“Farrrrrley,” sang one chunky, wide-faced country girl, laughing, “there's still time to marry me, honey, and make this baby legit!”

Lucy observed the girls.

How many times would they regret this decision? As they got older and saw a world that didn't stigmatize the single mother … would they not replay these months again and again in their head? Wouldn't they want to write the agency and meet the child? Or maybe that's where the strength of religion comes in; the constancy of faith that says: God led me to this decision and it is done. Forever and ever.

As Farley and Lucy went back to the station wagon for the rest of the grand tour, she found herself admitting that Reverend Bullins and his operation weren't entirely, as first suspected, wholly a money-grubbing scam. Misguided and self-serving, she wouldn't deny, but it was at some level … at least sincere. And Farley and his father seemed to be led by some sort of vision. She was pleased by the ease and laughter Farley had with the pregnant girls, so free from judgment, so eager to radiate charity and love, so no girl would feel she was the exiled sinner in the TPL family. Catholicism, admitted Lucy, has none of this community … though she wondered if it were more a function of the close-knit Deep South rather than Pentecostal Christianity.

“And now to the main campus,” said Farley, back at the wheel, slowing for a speed bump.

Lucy surveyed the population, changing classes now at three o'clock. The kids seemed normal. Unusually good-looking and fresh-scrubbed perhaps, but normal. She wasn't sure what she'd expected. Speaking in tongues and healings in front of the dorms, perhaps. Several students recognized Farley and waved vigorously. Farley, despite the air-conditioning, rolled down the window and fielded good-natured jibes and questions. How was Jerusalem? Did he bring them all a souvenir?

My gut instinct, thought Lucy, is to try to find the cynical underside to all this sweet-faced goodness and fellowship, but there probably is none. Southern kids from rural Christian homes and parents wishing their kids to meet a nice girl or boy, save sex until they are married, have a polite courtship in an atmosphere of prayer and counseling for the Christian marriage to come, and then upon graduation, a big wedding with the whole school turning out, everyone happy, everyone smiling and full of
agápe
and
karitas.

A question occurred to Lucy:

“What about evolution, Farley? Do they teach that here?”

“No ma'am.”

“So they actually teach that the world is 6000 years old, rocks and fossils notwithstanding?”

“That's what the Bible would have us believe,” Farley said untroubled, “and either it's 100 percent correct or it's the biggest lie ever.”

“Farley,” said Lucy, riled, “that's, forgive me, somewhat … ridiculous. The spiritual truth of the Bible can be intact without every fact or historical tale being true—”

Nope, Farley and his daddy know the Bible is infallible. Every little word.

“Do you think,” asked Lucy, “that your father is led by the Holy Spirit in many of his sermons?”

“I know he is.”

“Does that make him infallible?” She decided to appeal to his antipapalism: “Does that make the pope or any minister infallible?”

He paused. “No.”

“Then why should the writers of the Bible be held to be infallible? It's the same thing. They were inspired but they were still human.”

Farley insisted the infallible Bible was a different matter.

Lucy: “And the men who compiled it and chose which books got in and which were out, in the 300s—they were infallible too?”

“No, but…”

“Do you think the Bible just fell out of the heaven typeset by God? In vernacular 20th-Century English?”

Farley fell back on, “I just know that the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, the TBN broadcasting family, and the Southern Baptist Conference all hold the Bible to be infallible.”

“Oh and that settles it? I could quote many contradictory passages from the Bible, Farley—some that are direct opposites of each other.”

“Each gospel to some extent corrects the one that went before.”

“So you're saying there are human errors in the scriptures.”

He was quiet a moment. “Just differences in details, that's all. Nothing important.”

“Nothing important?” Lucy repeated. “
Acts
has Jesus insist, the Savior himself, that the disciples stay in Jerusalem to await the Pentecost, and
Luke
and
John
show Jesus never leaving Jerusalem.”

“That's right.”

“But
Matthew
has Jesus meet up with everyone in Galilee. ‘Nothing important,' Farley? Only the details of the Resurrection. Got a question for you. Remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane? All his disciples fall asleep.”

“That's right,” Farley nodded, back on surer ground.

“Then who overheard Jesus' prayer in the garden? Who took down his words if everyone was asleep?”

“I guess … I guess an angel must have appeared to Matthew or Luke and told them everything.”

“The same angel that messed up the details of the Resurrection?” Lucy smiled, amusing herself mostly. “So nothing in the Bible is figurative, is fictionalized, is purely symbolic? You don't believe Adam and Eve are to some extent a poetic symbol, a fable of man's relation to God in a non-Edenic world?”

“No ma'am, they historically really existed.”

“Jesus is said to be the Lamb of God.
Worthy is the lamb.
Do you think that means Jesus came to the earth as a man or as a four-legged lamb?”

Farley laughed. “That's clearly a symbol!”

“So what
you
think are symbols are symbols and anything you and the Southern Baptist Conference don't think are symbols aren't. My, how has Christianity flourished for 2000 years without you guys to explain it all perfectly and infallibly for us?”

Farley laughed, shaking his head. “You're some'n else, Lucy. I'll have my daddy get back to you.”

*   *   *

A young coed, early 20s, blond, makeup a bit thick, in a stylish pink summer business outfit met Dr. O'Hanrahan at the door to the auditorium. Her name was Jessica, and she was an adorable li'l of thing, smiling and laughing easily, speaking in a charming, uncalculated Southern drawl. Jessica was sent down to meet O'Hanrahan and lead him through the maze of offices and studios to Reverend Bullins's office in the center of the crown-shaped complex.

“Hot enough for you, professor?” she chirped.

“Hell, it wasn't this bad in the Sudan,” he said, drenched in sweat due to the dense humidity. The air-conditioning made him swoon as he walked into The Promised Land's main building, the God-Dome.

“Dr. O'Hanrahan!” said Bullins, as Jessica led him into Bullins's palatial office. “Welcome to Mission Control, as we call it.”

O'Hanrahan looked around at the lavish office. A wall of books—probably never opened—three TVs side by side and a top-of-the-line VCR underneath, sculpture and paintings, mostly of mawkish Bible scenes, adorned the walls, and Bullins's redwood desk was worthy of a major corporate chief executive officer, which, O'Hanrahan supposed, he was.

“Sit down, over here where it's more comfy,” motioned Bullins, leading the professor to leather chairs by the giant plate-glass window that overlooked the TPL development. We must be, deduced O'Hanrahan, in the highest point of the crown. Bullins took a seat behind his desk, looking regal.

Jessica: “Is that all, Reverend Bullins?”

“Thank you, darlin',” he quipped, waving her away. He paused to watch her saunter out of the room, her shapely calves, narrow waist. “Heh heh,” he added for O'Hanrahan's benefit, “you can't touch but the Lord surrrrely doesn't mind us sneakin' a peek!”

How much time, O'Hanrahan wondered, before Reverend Bullins and some female student, or some tramp, are caught in adultery?

(It didn't take you one month after arriving at Chicago, Patrick, to cheat on Beatrice.)

“I read in the
Times-Picayune
today,” O'Hanrahan began, “where the chairman of the board of Merriwether Industries was going to speak to oil executives in New Orleans this morning.”

“A fine man, Charles Merriwether! A good Christian, and a soldier for the American Right.”

“Why did he bankroll your search for the
Gospel of Matthias
?”

“As a favor to me, a personal favor,” said Reverend Bullins. “I've helped him with some things, and now he has helped me. But come, come, let's talk about this gospel. We've had a look or two at it and damn if we can get anywhere on it. I've had my Greek scholar give it a shot and, I gotta tell you, that is some kinda mystery, professor, some kind of mystery.”

O'Hanrahan didn't need to be reminded. “I have every intention of translating it, but I also have every intention of seeing the scroll returned to Hebrew University, its rightful owner.”

Reverend Bullins looked out over his empire. “Oh, my friend, within the next year there may not be a Jerusalem standing. Not if what the Lord foretells comes to pass … However, for a price Hebrew University can have it back—after you've done your bit, Patrick. After this college and your work are famous the world over. And after the False Prophecy of the End Times has begun its necessary work, leading astray the lukewarm of the Church Triumphant, the doubters, the insincere. What power we have, my friend!” Reverend Bullins rose and paced, talked of the Rapture and his ascension through the clouds, before stopping to lay his hand on O'Hanrahan's hand, trembling and unsteady since morning. “We are active partners in the End Times, you and me!”