Chapter 4  

Revival

A few years after the church was built, Pastor Jim said we were all getting lazy and bloated with sin, like the cattle in Pharaoh’s dream. We needed to sanctify ourselves, to wash all that worldly doubt and dirt away and get right with God again. Only then could the Lord do a great work in us. So the deacons pitched a big white tent near a cornfield in Port Republic, borrowed a couple of generators, and bought straw bales from the Amish to serve as a floor. I must have been ten years old and all week the prospect of that big white tent loomed large in my mind. Over breakfast my mother asked me four times to pass the maple syrup and I just stared at her unblinking, thinking maybe tonight would be the night when I finally got the gift of tongues.

Pastor Jim had told us so many times that the ability to speak in tongues was pure grace, but I knew better. Baptism was kid stuff. Anyone who recited the words to the salvation prayer could make an appointment to receive the sacrament on the third Sunday of every month. But the gift of tongues was from the Holy Ghost himself. He knew your innermost thoughts, and only if you were pure would he make a home in your heart and bless you with supernatural gifts—the gift of prophecy or healing, the gift of tongues or the ability to interpret tongues. I wanted all those gifts for myself, to hoard them like spiritual badges of honor. It was frustrating to me that there was no timeline for sanctification. The gifts could come to anyone, anywhere, at any time. I knew a woman once who received her prayer language while leaning over to remove a cauliflower casserole from the oven. The Lord struck her with great force, and when her mouth opened God’s words came out instead of her own.

When we gathered for worship as a congregation, anyone with ears to hear could tell who had the Holy Spirit and who didn’t. Those who were blessed with a new language lifted their chins proudly and howled it to the heavens; while those who were stuck with English tucked their heads and mumbled boring words anyone could understand. My parents already had the gift. My father’s prayer language was guttural and vaguely Germanic, and my mother’s was higher-toned and melodic. But no matter how hard I prayed, God would not give me a latter-day language of my own.

By the time I finished my breakfast, the sun struck the top of the eastern windows in the dining room, bathing us in its buttery light and illuminating the dust motes in the air. Last night’s dishes were still piled high in the sink, the litter box was dirty and the wood box empty, but it was still early in the day, and my mother was optimistic that all the tasks she had charted out for us in her cursive handwriting would still be completed, and she’d manage to finish the laundry and get dinner on the table and iron her dress for the revival.

She called out to us from the living room and we came running, squabbling about who got to sit next to her for our morning devotions, the start to our day of homeschooling. Obere and I won like we always did, and Sam perched on the side of the couch. I curled up beside my mother, squinting through my bottle-cap glasses, knobby knees tucked under me, one hand resting on my mother’s pregnant belly in case the baby kicked. She placed one hand on my neck while she read from her well-thumbed, olive-green Bible.

Today it was one of our favorites, the story of Daniel, a man of God who was sentenced to a night in the lions’ den by a jealous king. But then an angel of the Lord closed up the lions’ mouths so they couldn’t touch him. My brothers gaped at each other and my mother kept reading, telling us how the king was so impressed by Daniel’s witness that he decided to throw all his evil advisors into the den along with their children and wives, and the lions leaped upon them and tore them apart before they even hit the bottom of the den. And then the king ordered everyone to tremble in fear in front of God. Obere asked my mother to read it again, but I squirmed. It didn’t sound like that was something God should do—throw children to lions. But then there was a blur of hands and elbows and Sam fell off the couch with a thud and my mother shouted at Obere. She told us to close our eyes and we suspected that after the final prayer she’d cancel school for the day if we promise to double up on math and reading on Monday.

When we were free, the boys raced out of the house and set off for the creek. I ambled through the garden to see if anything was ripe and then climbed onto the rope swing my father had built. I started turning the story of Daniel around in my head as I kicked off the locust tree. If God could save Daniel from the lions, then why didn’t he save Obere from the German shepherd who took a piece out of his leg when he was biking in front of the house last week? Maybe Obere wasn’t pure enough. Maybe God wanted to teach him a lesson. I thought about the children in the lions’ den, the ones who got torn apart. I wondered if they died in the fall. I hoped so. And then I wondered if that was the right thing to hope. Maybe God didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for them.

The rope on the swing got tangled up and I spun around in tight circles trying to get it free. Maybe I hadn’t gotten the gift yet because the Holy Spirit had read me like a book and saw everything that was wrong with me. I wished I was an only child. I thought I was the smartest person around. I read the books about the evils of pornography that my mom ordered from the American Family Association, and when I lay in bed at night I turned those images over in my head.

I heard voices coming over the hill down by the chicken coop and Obere ran toward me, Sam following closely behind.

“I want a turn!” Obere said.

I was instantly furious. “Leave me alone! Go away!”

His face fell and he shrank away, grabbing Sam by the shoulder and pulling him along with him. My eyes burned. I tried so hard to be good and I just couldn’t manage to do it.

The screen door slammed and my mother stepped outside with the wicker hamper on her hip, piled high with wet towels. She called out to me and I slumped over to her, pushing my hair out of my face.

“Grab those clothespins, honey,” she said. I reached for them and handed them over but stayed silent. She was humming some stray tune under her breath and her face had that washed-clean look that she got whenever she’d had a half hour to herself to read the Bible and pray.

“What’s wrong?”

I shrugged. She searched my face and then put the hamper down and took my hand. She deposited me on a wicker chair on the porch and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a glass of iced tea.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would God let the kids be eaten by the lions?”

I remember the way she smelled then, like oranges and pine-scented dish soap, and I remember that she held me close, but whatever words she used are lost to memory. It was probably something about how God’s ways are his ways and sometimes our minds are too small to understand the great plans he has for our lives. But the words didn’t matter. The fact of her presence was enough to soothe me.

When we heard our father’s truck pull in that evening, we raced into the yard, the screen door banging behind us and the terrier barking furiously about being left inside. But my father didn’t look at us, and he just grunted when we asked if he had brought anything home. He snapped at my mother when she tried to hurry him into the shower to get dressed for church. Sam and I looked at her questioningly and she shrugged and told us to go upstairs and get ready. When we came back downstairs, the smell of burnt hamburger wafted in from the kitchen and Obere was loading the wood box with a tear-stained face.

We weren’t sure what had happened. Anything could have set my father off—his life was balanced on such a precarious point that so many different things could have gone wrong. A fight with one of his clients, probably, or traffic on the Beltway. Maybe a potential client had turned down a quote because he didn’t carry insurance. Or sometimes his moods had nothing to do with any of that at all. Maybe he was just wrestling with his own demons on the long ride home from Virginia, and maybe something about our faces had reminded him of something in his past that he would have liked to have forgotten.

Sometimes it felt like our whole lives rocked on the axis of his moods. It didn’t take very much to get our father thundering like some Old Testament prophet. Whenever we saw his storms forming, my brothers and I sought small spaces, tucking ourselves into the fold of the long closet under the attic stairs, breathing in that mothball smell, and running our fingers along the mottled plaster. Or we’d slip out the front door and make for the weedy strip of gravel under the tall boxwoods that lined the front of the house. If his thundering reached a particular level, we’d run for the empty silo in the barn next door and curl up at the bottom, watching the swallows cut into the blue circle of sky above us. But sometimes he’d spy an ankle as we ran by him, glimpse a curl of my hair from under the boxwoods, and then he’d rush after us, all the while yelling. We were bad, we would always do the wrong thing if presented with a choice, there was no way to right us, not even the rod would right us, though he would certainly try to right us, and we would sink lower and lower with every shout, as if his voice was a post-hole digger driving us down into the ground.

An hour later, when the five of us finally piled into the Datsun hatchback, Obere’s eyes were still a little red. He’d refused to wear socks until my father threatened to take off the belt he had just put on. My mother wore a freshly ironed dress with blue and red roses on it, a little gel in her hair, and a splash of drugstore perfume. My father had managed to scrape the dried-up concrete out of the hair on the back of his hands and traded his work boots for the dress shoes I’d shined the day before. He steered the car with one finger and eyed Obere in his perch in the middle of the bench seat in the back. My mother talked brightly to lighten the mood.

Slowly we made our way down a ten-mile stretch of highway, the pitch-black woods hugging us on either side. The Chesapeake Bay flowed just beyond those woods to the west and the Patuxent River wound around to the east, and the revival was in a borrowed patch of field that was cut out of the woods. My father nosed the hatchback into a parking spot and we all piled out and filed into that glowing tent. We took our places in a row of chairs toward the back, set the Bibles down, and joined in the singing.

Back at church we sang worship songs that sounded like pop music, but tonight in the tent Miss Kathy led the band through the old hymns, the ones everyone knew by heart—“Amazing Grace,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” My father took my mother’s arm. She resisted at first, then he caught her eyes and they smiled secret, closed-lip smiles. My mother’s lilting soprano joined my father’s baritone and even Obere fell in line with the melody. My heart lifted in my chest and for the first time all day I felt like I could breathe. I closed my eyes with relief and lifted my voice with the music, clapping until the palms of my hands stung. Then we stretched our hands toward the top of that white tent, and those who had the gift spoke in that beautiful heavenly language that came from the Holy Spirit. For a minute, it felt like the Lord himself might come down to meet us.

There was so much we wanted in that moment. We wanted to tap into the force that spun mountains and oceans out of air and take it into us. We wanted to know all the names for God. We wanted to speak in a language we couldn’t understand. We wanted to burn away our old selves and peel off the burned skin and find new skin there. We wanted to grow like seeds in the light of God’s all-encompassing presence. We wanted to make heaven here on the earth. We wanted to confront evil and blot it out. We wanted to be bigger than any single one of us could be on our own. We wanted to be pure.

Outside that glowing tent it was the mid-eighties and the world marched in sync to the plans already laid out in the Book of Revelation. Madonna strutted around in a studded leather bra and Michael Jackson moonwalked, but none of our families had cable and we wouldn’t know those songs until later. There were two types of people out there, believers and doubters, and to the believers God promised every good thing. But still we had to be vigilant. Too often the daily interfered, and we ended up doing and saying things we didn’t mean, things that didn’t line up with who we wanted to be. Sin was always tempting and luring us away, and with that came a susceptibility to sickness and disease. I had the feeling that if I left the halo of light and moved closer to the woods, any kind of evil could creep up and slip under my skin. It was true that I was redeemed by the blood of the lamb. I read my Bible and prayed every day, but that didn’t mean I was entirely safe. I needed to stay close to the fire so I’d stay pure. Outside the circle of light you just never know.

The guest minister had come up from North Carolina or Tennessee. He combed his eyes over us and spoke quietly and seriously about the evil that lurked somewhere among us. There were some out there in the crowd, he said, who were possessed by the spirit of hypocrisy—they acted like Christians on Sunday and didn’t think of God a bit until the end of the week.

“There’s someone here tonight,” he said, his voice growing louder, “someone who believes they can hide their sins from God and their community, and I tell you now they’re wrong!” A thin man I didn’t know very well slipped past his wife and daughters and made his way to the altar, and then started shaking and crying. Suddenly a quiet descended, and the congregation’s separate attentions funneled together. And still the guest minister kept going, calling out all kinds of spirits, all kinds of struggles. Somewhere among us was a child with a rash on his cheeks, a woman with female troubles, a man whose back was keeping him up at night. He shouted the words, his voice hoarse with emotion. Sweat poured off his face and his hair was matted and wet. But healing was possible! You just had to get down on your knees and repent.

He called out all the sins in the world, like he was taking attendance, and when people’s numbers came up they headed for the altar. I fixed my eyes on the floor. I was shy, but when the minister named the sin of pride something caught in my throat. I thought about how I felt when I overheard my dad bragging about me to his clients or our neighbors, telling them how I’d learned to read when I was four and then skipped second grade.

“Put it on the altar,” the guest minister said gently, and it was like he was talking to me. “Let him take it. You’ll be okay without it.”

My heart raced faster. I swallowed hard and got up to brush past my family, but there was no one left in the row but me. I spotted my mother on one side of the altar, her hands on her belly, head bowed. She prayed out loud and clasped her hands. My father was a few steps away from her, his hands lifted. He tilted back and forth on his heels as he prayed and his eyes were closed.

The minister kept at it until all the folding chairs were empty. He made his way down the row with Pastor Jim and some of the elders, and before long we felt calloused hands gripping our temples, blessing us and pardoning us, driving out any lurking spirits. People keeled over and fell out, rent motionless by the sheer emotional force of it all. They were like balloons that had suddenly deflated. Their leg muscles went weak and their core collapsed, and their eyes fluttered and closed. They were there one minute and the next minute they were with God.

I watched Obere fall under the weight of the pastor’s hand. One moment my brother was standing there beside me and the next moment he’d darted backward in his cowboy boots, hitting the ground with all the force of a man, his head knocking back into the dust. I wondered what sins he whispered about to God. Leaving my father’s tools out in the rain? Pushing Sam off the couch?

I wanted to fall too, more than anything. But when my turn came and the pastor pushed at my forehead and the deacons stood behind me at the ready, my legs refused to give out. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to put my thoughts to sleep. I knew that if I could just let go, then I could get the blessing too. But my mind darted around and I couldn’t get a handle on it. I was already thinking of the next thing—what my knees would do when I fell, whether my skirt would come up and show my underpants. And then the thought flashed through my head—maybe I couldn’t fall because my belief wasn’t pure; it was salt and pepper mixed together. I had all these nagging questions and doubts, and that must have been why the Spirit passed me by.

My face went red and my eyes filled up with tears. The pastor grimaced and moved on to the elderly man next to me, and I stood there by myself in my saddle shoes, wishing I too could have been swept away by the Spirit. Beside me the deacons shook choir robes over the women’s legs as they lay there dumb in the straw.