Prayer (27 page)

After handing in my research thesis, I decided to write a book about the Christian nationalist movement in America; to this end, I thought it might be a good idea to go undercover and, if I could, join a fundamentalist Christian nationalist church. Texas seemed to be the logical place to do that. During the course of my research on the neurological effects of prayer, I’d heard of a secretive Texas sect based near Houston that believed in a complete Christian theocracy and in turning the Book of Leviticus into law, and that was in favor of the execution of gay people, adulterers, abortionists, and atheists, and that not only believed in these things but actively prayed to bring them about. As it happened, the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women is rather more than a sect, with almost ten thousand members; and the prayers they give voice to go radically beyond what most people understand by the idea of prayer.

So a couple of years ago I left my home in Washington, changed my name, got a job in Houston as a court reporter—I figured that if I worked in psychology I might meet someone I knew and my new identity would be blown—and set about trying to become a member of the Izrael Church. Only it took a while for me to be accepted as an ordinary member of the church—which is what you are if you attend only the Sunday services—and then to become a member of a secretive prayer group called the Kavanot that has something in common with the Kabbalah and that ascribes a higher meaning to the purpose of prayer that is nothing less than an attempt to affect the very fabric of reality itself. Admission to the Kavanot requires first that you have been an ordinary member of the church for a year; second, that you pass an IQ test with a score of 132 or more—which supposedly denotes superior intelligence and makes you a prayer power—and third, that you are interviewed by Nelson Van Der Velden himself. He decides on whether you are suitably equipped—intellectually, spiritually, and morally—to join the Kavanot.

Having passed all three conditions, I joined the Kavanot about eighteen months ago.

Currently, there are approximately five hundred men and women in the Kavanot and Van Der Velden’s aims are to make it larger and therefore more powerful. And here I’m afraid things start to become more fantastic. I could hardly believe it myself when I discovered the true character of the prayers that were being offered up to God in the Kavanot. But please try to remember, I’m not making any of this up. Just keep asking yourself if this amounts to my last will and testament, why the fuck would I lie about this?

But first let me tell you a bit about Nelson Van Der Velden.

First of all, he’s the son of Robert Van Der Velden, who used to run the Prayer Pyramid of Power in Dallas. Originally, Nelson was Robert’s anointed successor at the PPP, only there seems to have been a falling-out, the reasons behind which are now shrouded in secrecy. Some I know have speculated that Nelson wanted to turn the Prayer Pyramid of Power into something more than just a brand name, that he wanted to make it a spiritual reality; and it’s certainly the case that the PPP was the inspiration behind the Kavanot. But others I know have suggested that it was all about money and that Nelson refused to advance his father the cash that would have staved off his creditors. Because, make no mistake about it, Nelson is a wealthy man. Each of his followers—me included—is obliged to donate a tenth of their annual income to the Izrael Church. And with a membership of ten thousand people, that quickly mounts up. I once calculated his yearly income as being between twenty and thirty million dollars. Why do his followers tithe so generously? Because Nelson prays for them. If that sounds like a poor deal, believe me, it isn’t.

Nelson Van Der Velden is a very formidable intellect. As a boy, he went to Milton Academy in Massachusetts and then to Harvard Divinity School, after which he earned a doctorate in theology at Berkeley, which took him to study in Israel for a year. There he met and studied with several leading rabbis, including Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri and the more reclusive mystic, Rabbi Shimon Dayan, who teaches his followers a means of directing the intent behind a prayer—to specify the path along which a prayer ascends in a dialogue with God in order to increase its chances of being answered favorably. In this way, every word of every prayer—indeed, every letter of every word contained in a prayer—has a precise meaning and measurable effect.

I am not sure how it was that Nelson was able to ingratiate himself so effectively with these two influential rabbis, and there is certainly some detective work to be done on this in Israel; but it may have something to do with the fact that Nelson’s command and understanding of the Torah is close to perfect. He speaks and reads Hebrew fluently. Consequently, the story goes that he was able to impress these two rabbis in a way that no Jewish scholar had ever done. Now, I don’t know very much about the Torah, but it seems that there are certain hidden, mystical aspects called Sitrei Torah and Razei Torah. And I believe there’s another term that covers Jewish esoteric knowledge, which is called Chochmah Nistara. But the Hebrew names aren’t important. What is important is that Talmudic doctrine forbids the public teaching of this esoteric knowledge; in the Mishnah—or Oral Torah, as it’s sometimes known—rabbis were warned to teach the mystical creation doctrines to only one student who was found worthy. The gossip around the Izrael Church is that Nelson Van Der Velden was that student.

To be honest, I’m not sure what these secrets are that were supposedly revealed to Nelson Van Der Velden, but the quiet consensus among those within the Kavanot who are prepared to talk about these things is that these were nothing less than the secrets that God revealed to Adam. According to a rabbinic midrash—which is a homiletic teaching—God created the universe through ten
sephirot
or attributes. This is also common to the Kabbalah.

I hit the pause button on Ken’s iPad and snatched out the earphones as the waitress arrived with my beer and our lunch. Ken put down his newspaper and glanced across at the screen to read the number under the progress bar. I forked some food into my mouth, replaced the earphones, and hit the play arrow again.

The secrets that were supposedly revealed to Nelson include the true nature of Adam and Eve and stuff about the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life.
I was going to have to get used to the idea that Gaynor Allitt’s real name was Esther Begleiter
.

But the really important revelation from Nelson’s point of view was the seventy-two-letter name of God that was entrusted to him by Rabbi Dayan. This word was the same word that Moses used to speak to command the angels, to turn rivers into blood, to part the waters of the Red Sea and destroy the Egyptian army, to kill all the cattle in Egypt, and to kill all firstborn Egyptians. Jewish mystics used this word for meditation purposes. But, of course, no such constraints applied to Nelson Van Der Velden, and as soon as he had returned from the Holy Land to the United States, Nelson decided to use the name of God in prayer to suit his own ends. Having said all that, he keeps the name a secret known only to him. I myself have never heard him utter the name because he does so in a special little booth that stands in the center of the Kavanot, a little like the prayer closet I have here in my house. I’ll say something about that, as well, in a minute.

Anyway, this kind of esoteric Hebraic prayer, or empowered prayer—that’s what Nelson calls this—it didn’t work at all; and it had to be pointed out to Nelson—perhaps by his father—that he wasn’t Moses. It took further study of the Kabbalah to convince Nelson that what he needed was his own Prayer Pyramid of Power to add psychic energy—his words, not mine—to his own prayers. Thus, the establishment of the Izrael Church and the Kavanot.

When I joined the group, it was mostly devoted to its own profit and welfare. Van Der Velden would lead us all in empowered prayer to increase the wealth or health of the group. None of it made any sense to me, and I was Jewish. I mean, I’d heard of Kabbalah and the
sephirot
but never anything about the seventy-two-letter name of God and the Mosaic power of prayer. Of course, that might have been because I was a woman and that kind of knowledge would never ever be entrusted to a Jewish woman. But that’s another story.

At first I was entirely skeptical. Frankly, I thought they were all mad. But then something weird happened that freaked me out. Actually, there were several weird things that happened, but the first was that one of the Kavanot members who was suffering from inoperable cancer got better after we all prayed for him. Then someone else won the Texas state lottery after we’d all prayed for his business to turn around. Of course, I was already disposed to think of this in the scientific terms I was used to as a psychologist, to dismiss all of this as a prayer placebo. Except for one thing that sounds ridiculous, I know, but it could hardly be denied that you could really feel a sense of a power moving among us when we took our prayers to God as part of the Kavanot. It was really quite uncanny. And quite inexplicable. After a while, it seemed that there were lots of good things happening to people who belonged to the Kavanot. Even to me.

The fact is I fell in love with someone; this was a woman, of course, so we had to be really careful as, like most Christian theocrats, Nelson strongly disapproves of homosexuality. The woman’s name was Agnes. She had been a member of the Kavanot for longer than I had and she’s what changed my mind about a lot of things. Mostly it was she who convinced
me that I had been wrong about the Izrael Church because I’d never been in love with a woman who had been in love with me. So I put aside my ideas of writing a book about Christian nationalism and threw myself into my love for Agnes and, by extension—for had he not brought us together?—God and the Izrael Church. I became like all the rest of them.

But then Nelson began to grow more ambitious in the things he told us we had to pray for and in the way we prayed. First of all, we were taught to pray in shifts around the clock at the church and at home. Some of us were told to acquire a closet to pray in so we could pray undisturbed. Sometimes we prayed alone for hours on end, but sometimes we were allowed to have a prayer partner with us; naturally, I chose Agnes and there were times when we sat in my prayer closet, or hers, and our prayers ended with us in each other’s arms. Those were happy times for Agnes and me. We felt that God could hardly disapprove of the great love we felt for each other.

But we were much less comfortable with what we had to pray for now. It had come to Nelson in a vision, he said, that we should start to bring about God’s kingdom on this earth—his Great Reckoning, the Bible calls it—that we should begin the destruction of the unrighteous in order to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. In retrospect, it seems to me that this idea of using prayer as a lethal weapon was always one of Nelson’s aims. You see, the name of the church hasn’t anything to do with the state or the children of Israel as might easily be supposed. Nothing like it. Izrael or Azrael—the name means He Who Helps God—is also the name of the archangel of death, not just in biblical tradition but also in Islamic theology and Sikhism. According to Nelson, Izrael is none other than a fallen angel who, in spite of being a demon—that’s the nature of a fallen angel—is reverent of and subordinate to the will of God and has always done God’s dirty work—from killing Egypt’s firstborn, or annihilating those children who were foolish enough to laugh at the prophet Elisha for having a bald head, to killing those people who were unlucky enough to have caught a glimpse of the Ark of the Covenant.

This sounds crazy, I know, and I hardly took any of this seriously until the first prayer victim—that’s what Nelson calls them—until Dr. Clifford Richardson died suddenly. He was one of the country’s leading obstetricians and ran a private abortion clinic called the Silphium Clinic in Washington, D.C. That might just have been a coincidence, but when our next prayer victim, Peter Ekman, also died suddenly at his home in New York, I know that Agnes and I began to feel afraid. Not just of Nelson Van Der Velden, but of God himself. For it seemed that we had unlocked a dreadful power that had nothing at all to do with the Christianity we—or, to be more accurate, that Agnes—had embraced. This same fear and what we had read in Leviticus left Agnes convinced that we had been deluded in our notion that God might approve of our love. The more we studied the scriptures, the clearer became her impression that our love was damned. Agnes herself became very depressed about this, and with the death of a third victim, Professor Willard Davidoff, following our prayers for his destruction, she became suicidal.

You might ask why we simply didn’t leave the church and move away. Well, two people did: Norris Clark and Brent Pitino, both of whom met untimely and horrible deaths that Nelson took great delight in announcing before a meeting of the Kavanot. Clark was found dead on a railway line after wandering in front of an express train, while Pitino was killed after falling off a motorboat and being chewed up by the screws. At least those are the official explanations of what happened. If you’re still there, Mr. Lawman, then you might like to check out those two deaths for yourself. By all accounts, there wasn’t much left for anyone to put in a casket. Which certainly fits with what Nelson has told us about Azrael. If he doesn’t scare you to death, he tears you to pieces, just like those kids in the Book of Kings.

There had been no prayers in the Kavanot for their deaths; Nelson is too shrewd for that; but lately he has been able to identify those members who have the greatest capacity for powerful prayer and it is generally held that Nelson has established an ultrasecret prayer group within the Kavanot to carry out his express bidding in these matters. To punish those who disobey him or try to leave the church.

After that, fear gripped us all. And three weeks ago, unable to live with the guilt of what she thought we were doing or the terror of what might happen to her if she left the church, Agnes took her own life. She opened her veins in the bath.