Beyond Belief (28 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
“Oh,” I said, looking down at my hands. I was shocked to hear this story coming from my dean, who had usually been quite professional. She was now stooping dangerously low, not only for an academic head but also for an Adventist. Though it was actually quite prevalent, gossip was frowned upon in the church, and her self-righteous tone made me anxious.
“So the dean caught him red-handed,” Dr. Hopp said gleefully.
“I guess so,” I responded, uncomfortable. “Listen, I just realized I have an appointment,” I said, gesticulating that I needed to wrap up our exchange.
“Sure. Almost done,” she said. “Anyhow, we all agreed that Hugh had to be dismissed. He and his girlfriend were both kicked out of the graduate program. Then of course this led to him being removed from the ministry.” With delighted finality, she ended her tale with the punch line she’d come in to deliver: “And, would you believe it, a few years later, Hugh got cancer and died.”
I flinched and felt my throat go tight.
She popped out of her chair and suddenly left my office with no explanation as to why she felt she needed to tell me this story,
giving me only a judgmental look of “see what happens when you mess with God and the church.”
My blood ran cold. Why had she told me this? Did she actually think I’d be glad to hear about this man’s demise? Or had she sensed my less-than-fervent commitment of late—was this a warning of some kind?
In the end, it didn’t matter. Her narration was enough to put to rest my own emotional struggle and deliver me to a decision. I no longer wanted to work under or be part of a church that had such vindictive and heartless leaders. Like the volume knob on a radio, my faith in the the Truth had been slowly decreasing; with this one final twist, it switched off.
I went home early that day, stunned. And yet, at the same time I also felt relieved that my years of questioning had found resolution. I no longer questioned walking away from the church, the only employer or faith I had ever known.
Fundamental Doctrine #11: Growing in Christ.
As we give ourselves in loving service to those around us . . . His constant presence with us through the Spirit transforms every moment and every task into a spiritual experience.
T
HAT SUMMER, JUST A
few months after the dean’s revelatory story, my family went to Lake Mead for a houseboat vacation. One Saturday morning found me sitting atop the houseboat sunning and reading a
National Geographic
magazine (condoned for Sabbath consumption). The cover story was about the age of the Earth and the early formation of its continents. Usually I’d bypassed these types of articles since I had been taught that God made the world in six literal
days only six thousand years ago. Now, however, sitting within the majesty of towering cliffs, I plunged into the article with an open mind. I read breathlessly as I acknowledged for the first time the irrefutable evidence of nature and geology. There was so much I didn’t know, so much I’d never exposed myself to.
I leaned back into the warmth of the sun hitting my face. In that moment, I didn’t need to search for the elusive impossibility of the Truth. I didn’t need to constantly beseech God for forgiveness, a practice that had only made me feel anxious and discontent. I no longer needed to ignore my cognitive dissonance or keep myself pure from the evil influences of the world.
In the stillness of that Sabbath moment, I realized that the most important thing for me was to have love in my heart and to be kind, to follow Christ’s words of being merciful, to be a peacemaker and to do good for other people. That was it. It didn’t matter what I believed about the State of the Dead or if I held that Ellen White was a prophet or if I wore jewelry.
In the months to come, I would continue my gradual and painful separation from the Adventist ways and community. I’d find other work and grieve my losses one by one. Lee and I would find new ways of thinking about faith and love. All of that would come. But for now, I closed my eyes, and as I did so, years of fear and anger gave way to a precious moment of peace.
I
guess I was always leaving. Even when it was my mother who drove away, waving through the dusty rear window of someone else’s car, while my brother and I went to live in someone else’s house. Even then. Especially then. She always promised not to leave again, then God and Brother Terrell came calling, relentless in their need.
For almost as far back as my memory stretches, my mother traveled with Brother David Terrell and his rolling revival show. She played the Hammond organ for the morning, afternoon, and evening services he held under his big gospel tent. When she wasn’t in the services, she was praying or reading her Bible or homeschooling the Terrell kids, all while trying to feed, bathe, and keep my brother, Gary. and me relatively safe. Everyone said it was hard to raise kids traveling with the tent. So when my mother began to
leave us behind, I didn’t blame her. She said she was doing God’s will, that he had chosen her to help spread the gospel. I wondered why God, who everyone called good, was so greedy. Why couldn’t he leave our mother alone? Why was he so utterly without pity? I tiptoed to the edge of these questions throughout my early childhood, then, seeing no place to go, backed away.
My mother had been a different sort of girl, gifted and full of faith instead of questions. The stories her father, an Assemblies of God preacher, related from the Bible took root in her imagination and shaped who she was in the most literal way. Like the boy Samuel in the Old Testament, she heard God call her by name, a sign he had chosen her as his own. She could play any instrument she picked up, and this too, she believed, was a sign of God’s favor. My mother believed God had something important for her to do, something bigger than marriage and kids, something that would use her musical talent and take her all over the world. Like most women who came of age in the fifties, she married anyway. When it didn’t work out, she returned home, pregnant and towing a toddler. She had almost given up on a bigger life when the whirlwind that was Brother Terrell blew through her father’s Assemblies of God church. She sold all our belongings and signed on as organist for his traveling tent revivals. I was three and Gary was one. This was the beginning of our time with the tent, a time that lasted for almost three years, before our mother began leaving us behind. So brief a time, and yet its memory flashes through the years, a welcome and a warning.
The tent was little more than a pile of rough moldy cloth until a team of men with names like Red and Dockery pulled it from the belly of the eighteen-wheeler, sewed it together, and cranked the winches on the center poles. By opening night they
had transformed a dirty brown canvas into a nomadic cathedral that billowed thirty feet in the air.
It was the dawn of the 1960s. Thousands of people came from hundreds of miles to hear Brother Terrell preach. People too poor, too black, too white trash, too uneducated to matter to most of society. I remember the slow, apologetic way they moved down the sawdust-covered aisles and between the long rows of wooden folding chairs. “Excuse me, excuse me.” Their eyes sliding toward the ground, as though their existence were an affront. The way their thin, nervous kids trailed behind. They came for hope, healing, salvation. They came to see the show. Brother Terrell ranted and paced and riffed on scripture for hours at decibels that exceeded legal limits.
“
Bles-sed, I say bles-sed, are the poor. You are the ones, the only ones, the ones ordained before time, the ones whose names are written in the book.”
He is bent over, running up and down the aisles; the veins on his neck pop up. Hundreds of hands wave in the air. A murmur rises from the audience and builds. Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. Thank you, Jesus.
“
The kingdom of heaven is yours. I said it’s yours! But you got to get up and claim it. I said get uuuuuup.”
People jump to their feet across the tent, arms outstretched, palms up, reaching for something none of us can see. From my seat in the audience I watch my mother on the platform, high above me, a gapped-toothed smile on her face. Her hands begin to pound out a backbeat on the Hammond and the music takes over. Feet shuffle and stomp. Bodies flail. Faces register utter forgetfulness, bliss. Mothers, fathers, and children churn the sawdust and dirt into a heavy haze that hangs in the air. I stand on my chair and watch, hoping that whatever has possessed them will take me as well,
and praying, always praying, that it won’t. I watch people stumble through the haze and fall against each other. I watch them wilt or slam backward like felled trees, slain in the spirit. I watch Brother Terrell on the platform, eyes closed, dancing with his hand on his hip. The microphone bounces on his chest.
I watch the crowd begin to move toward him. Everyone breathes the same breath, prays the same prayer. Here there is no separation. I want to belong in this tent, with these people. I close my eyes, but I cannot summon their delirium. What would it feel like to give myself to God, if I just stopped thinking? Would I see angels, speak in tongues; hear God’s voice like my mother does? Would I twirl in front of the altar until I too dropped in the sawdust? I open my eyes.
Brother Terrell stands at the edge of the platform above the prayer ramp and waits, his right hand outstretched, red and hot. Everyone wants to be touched by that hand. They carry stretchers to the front. Frail, knobby hands reach up for him. People say they are healed. A tumor vanishes. A woman with a huge stomach. Then,
whoosh
. Nothing. We tell the story again and again. The memory and the story distill over time into a mythology of belief, but no one says this. We say we believe.
We move the tent every two to four weeks. Brother Terrell preaches a gospel of sacrifice. He and my mother put all their money back into what they call the Lord’s work. We eat baloney and pork and beans. Brother Terrell’s wife doesn’t like it. She says her kids need better food, better clothes, a real home. My mother says Betty Ann doesn’t understand. Something in Brother Terrell reaches out for my mother. I can feel it, and then one night I watch his hand travel to her knee while we are driving. Betty Ann doesn’t want my mother to be alone with her husband.