Pulphead: Essays (4 page)

I stood in the center of a gravel patch between the food and the crowd, sort of gumming the straw, quadriplegically probing with it for stubborn pockets of meltwater. I was a ways from the stage, but I could see well enough. Something started to happen to me. The guys in the band were middle-aged. They had blousy shirts and halfhearted arena-rock moves from the mid-eighties.

What was … this feeling? The singer was grinning between lines, like if he stopped, he might collapse. I could just make out the words:

There’s a higher place to go (beyond belief, beyond belief),

Where we reach the next plateau (beyond belief, beyond belief) …

The straw slipped from my mouth. “Oh, shit, it’s Petra.”

*   *   *

It was 1988. The guy who brought me in we called Verm (I’m using nicknames; these people don’t deserve to be dragooned into my memory voyage). He was a short, good-looking guy with a dark ponytail and a devilish laugh, a skater and an ex-pothead, which had got him kicked out of his house a year or so before we met. His folks belonged to this nondenominational church in Ohio, where I went to high school. It was a movement more than a church—thousands of members, even then. I hear it’s bigger now. “Central Meeting” took place in an empty warehouse, for reasons of space, but the smaller meetings were where it was at: home church (fifty people or so), cell group (maybe a dozen). Verm’s dad said, Look, go with us once a week and you can move back in.

Verm got saved. And since he was brilliant (he became something of a legend at our school because whenever a new foreign student enrolled, he’d sit with her every day at lunch and make her give him language lessons till he was proficient), and since he was about the most artlessly gregarious human being I’ve ever known, and since he knew loads of lost souls from his druggie days, he became a champion evangelizer, a golden child.

I was new and nurturing a transcendent hatred of Ohio. Verm found out I liked the Smiths, and we started swapping tapes. Before long, we were hanging out after school. Then the moment came that always comes when you make friends with a born-again: “Listen, I go to this thing on Wednesday nights. It’s like a Bible study—no, listen, it’s cool. The people are actually really cool.”

They were, that’s the thing. In fifteen minutes, all my ideas about Christians were put to flight. They were smarter than any bunch I’d been exposed to (I didn’t grow up in Cambridge or anything, but even so), they were accepting of every kind of weirdness, and they had that light that people who are pursuing something higher give off. It’s attractive, to say the least. I started asking questions, lots of questions. And they loved that, because they had answers. That’s one of the ways Evangelicalism works. Your average agnostic doesn’t go through life just primed to offer a clear, considered defense of, say, intratextual scriptural inconsistency. But born-agains train for that chance encounter with the inquisitive stranger. And when you’re a fourteen-year-old carting around some malnourished intellectual ambitions, and a charismatic adult sits you down and explains that if you transpose this span of years onto the Hebrew calendar, and multiply that times seven, and plug in a date from the reign of King Howsomever, then you plainly see that this passage predicts the birth of Christ almost to the hour, despite the fact that the Gospel writers didn’t have access to this information! I, for one, was dazzled.

But also powerfully stirred on a level that didn’t depend on my naïveté. The sheer passionate engagement of it caught my imagination: nobody had told me there were Christians like this. They went at the Bible with grad-seminar intensity, week after week. Mole was their leader (short for Moloch; he had started the whole thing, back in the seventies). He had a wiry, dark beard and a pair of nail-gun cobalt eyes. My Russian-novel fantasies of underground gatherings—shared subversive fervor—were flattered and, it seemed, embodied. Here was counterculture, without sad hippie trappings.

Verm embraced me when I said to him, in the hallway after a meeting, “I think I might believe.” When it came time for me to go all the way—to “accept Jesus into my heart” (in that time-honored formulation)—we prayed the prayer together.

Three years passed. I waxed strong in spirit. Verm and I were sort of heading up the high school end of the operation now. Mole had discovered (I had discovered, too) that I was good with words, that I could talk in front of people; Verm and I started leading Bible study once a month. We were saving souls like mad, laying up treasure for ourselves in heaven. I was never the recruiter he was, but I grasped subtlety; Verm would get them there, and together we’d start on their heads. Witnessing, it’s called. I had made some progress socially at school, which gave us access to the popular crowd; in this way, many were brought to the Lord. Verm and I went to conferences and on “study retreats”; we started taking classes in theology, which the group offered—free of charge—for promising young leaders. And always, underneath but suffusing it all, there were the cell-group meetings, every week, on Friday or Saturday nights, which meant I could stay out till the wee hours. (My Episcopalian parents were thoroughly mortified by the whole business, but it’s not easy telling your kid to stop spending so much time at church.)

Cell group was typically held in somebody’s dining room, somebody pretty high up in the group. You have to understand what an honor it was to be in a cell with Mole. People would see me at Central Meeting and be like, “How is that, getting to rap with him every week?” It was awesome. He really got down with the Word (he had a wonderful old hippie way of talking; everything was something action: “time for some fellowship action … let’s get some chips ’n’ salsa action”). He carried a heavy “study Bible”—no King James for the nondenominationals; too many inaccuracies. When he cracked open its hand-tooled leather cover, you knew it was on. And no joke: the brother was gifted. Even handicapped by the relatively pedestrian style of the New American Standard version, he could twist a verse into your conscience like a bone screw, make you think Christ was standing there, nodding approval. The prayer session alone would last an hour. Afterward, there was always a fire in the backyard. Mole would sit and whack a machete into a chopping block. He smoked cheap cigars; he let us smoke cigarettes. The guitar went around. We’d talk about which brother was struggling with sin—did he need counsel? Or about the end of the world: it’d be soon. We had to save as many as we could.

I won’t inflict on you all my reasons for drawing away from the fold. They were clichéd, anyway, and not altogether innocent. Enough to say I started reading books Mole hadn’t recommended. Some of them seemed pretty smart—and didn’t jibe with the Bible. The defensive theodicy he’d drilled into me during those nights of heady exegesis developed cracks. The hell stuff: I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who’d done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared with God, so what was His trouble, again? I looked around and saw people who’d never have a chance to come to Jesus; they were too badly crippled. Didn’t they deserve—more than the rest of us, even—to find His succor, after this life?

Everything about Christianity can be justified
within the context of Christian belief
. That is, if you accept its terms. Once you do, your belief starts modifying the data (in ways that are themselves defensible), until eventually the data begin to reinforce belief. The precise moment of illogic is hard to isolate and may not exist. Like holding a magnifying glass at arm’s length and bringing it toward your eye: things are upside down, they’re upside down, they’re right side up. What lay between? If there was something, it passed too quickly to be observed. This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It’s not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it—many were—it’s that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping into a circle, one that closes with you inside. If this seems to imply that no apostate was ever a true Christian and that therefore, I was never one, I think I’d stand by both of those statements. Doesn’t the fact that I can’t write about my old friends without an apologetic tone suggest that I was never one of them?

The break came during the winter of my junior year. I got a call from Verm late one afternoon. He’d promised Mole he would do this thing, and now he felt sick. Sinus infection (he always had sinus infections). Had I ever heard of Petra? Well, they’re a Christian-rock band, and they’re playing the arena downtown. After their shows, the singer invites anybody who wants to know more about Jesus to come backstage, and they have people, like, waiting to talk to them.

The promoter had called up Mole, and Mole had volunteered Verm, and now Verm wanted to know if I’d help him out. I couldn’t say no.

The concert was upsetting from the start; it was one of my first encounters with the other kinds of Evangelicals, the hand-wavers and the weepers and all (we liked to keep things “sober” in the group). The girl in front of me was signing all the words to the songs, but she wasn’t deaf. It was just horrifying.

Verm had read me, over the phone, the pamphlet he got. After the first encore, we were to head for the witnessing zone and wait there. I went. I sat on the ground.

Soon they came filing in, the seekers. I don’t know what was up with the ones I got. I think they may have gone looking for the restroom and been swept up by the stampede. They were about my age and wearing hooded brown sweatshirts—mouths agape, eyes empty. I asked them the questions: What did they think about all they’d heard? Were they curious about anything Petra talked about? (There’d been lots of “talks” between songs.)

I couldn’t get them to speak. They stared at me like they were waiting for me to slap them.

This was my opening. They were either rapt or mentally damaged in some way, and whichever it was, Christ called on me now to lay down my testimony.

The sentences wouldn’t form. I flipped though the list of dogmas, searching for one I didn’t essentially think was crap, and came up with nothing.

There could have ensued a nauseating silence, but I acted with an odd decisiveness to end the whole experience. I asked them if they wanted to leave—it was an all but rhetorical question—and said I did, too. We walked out together.

I took Mole and Verm aside a few nights later and told them my doubts had overtaken me. If I kept showing up at meetings, I’d be faking it. That was an insult to them, to God, to the group. Verm was silent; he hugged me. Mole said he respected my reasons, that I’d have to explore my doubts before my walk could be strong again. He said he’d pray for me. Unless he’s undergone some radical change in character, he’s still praying.

*   *   *

Statistically speaking, my bout with Evangelicalism was probably unremarkable. For white Americans with my socioeconomic background (middle to upper-middle class), it’s an experience commonly linked to the teens and moved beyond before one reaches twenty. These kids around me at Creation—a lot of them were like that. How many even knew who Darwin was? They’d learn. At least once a year since college, I’ll be getting to know someone, and it comes out that we have in common a high school “Jesus phase.” That’s always an excellent laugh. Except a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.

Bless those who’ve been brainwashed by cults and sent off for deprogramming. That makes it simple: you put it behind you. This group was no cult. They persuaded, they never pressured. Nor did they punish. A guy I brought into the group—we called him Goog—is still a close friend. He leads meetings now and spends part of each year doing pro bono dental work in Cambodia. He’s never asked me when I’m coming back.

My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell or that Mole is at the window. It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ.

“The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.” He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read the Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read
The Logia of Yeshua
, by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There’s your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who knew Him.

Why should He vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?

Once you’ve known Him as a god, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won’t slacken.

And one has doubts about one’s doubts.

*   *   *

“D’ye hear that mountain lion last night?”

It was dark, and Jake was standing over me, dressed in camouflage. I’d been hunched over on a cooler by the ashes for a number of hours, reading and waiting for the guys to get back from wherever they’d gone. I told him I hadn’t heard anything.