Chapter 10  

Left Behind

I turned twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five at the same water-stained mahogany table in the same brick townhouse in Washington, DC, blowing out my candles with the same faces beaming up at me—my roommates and my family, who had driven the hour or so from Maryland. Every morning I woke up in that townhouse, pulled on the same slim-fitting pencil skirts and low heels, and rode my bike south on Mount Pleasant Road and west on Columbia to Eighteenth Street, past bodegas and falafel shops until I reached a gleaming steel-and-glass high-rise on the corner of Connecticut Avenue. I was employed by an aging minister who had founded an interfaith coalition to eliminate nuclear weapons, and I spent my days tucked into a fifth-floor cubicle, crafting catchy headlines for email action alerts and ghostwriting op-eds for bishops and rabbis whose names had more heft than my own. In the evenings I’d strip off those scratchy, synthetic fabrics and curl up in the loft bed of my tiny second-floor bedroom with one of the secondhand paperbacks I’d dragged around with me since I first left home. But I never finished them. Instead my roommate Annie would knock on the door and we’d squeeze ourselves into tank tops and mini-skirts in reds and electric blues and go dancing at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room, or Jared would text me to come meet him at the Raven, a smoky, dimly lit dive bar in the middle of Mount Pleasant.

I felt useful for the first time in my life, but after a few years everyone I knew seemed to be leaving. Annie went off to London to study sustainable energy, and then she found a job working for a solar advocacy group. Jared left to travel in Europe for six months, and another friend fell in love with a farmer’s son in central Maine and moved there to start a homestead. They had each developed some great passion, for a person or a place or a cause. I wanted that for myself, and every so often I caught the tail of that feeling, but it was a slippery thing that seemed to go out of my grasp as soon as I had made contact with it. Instead I ricocheted from love to love, picking up temporary passions and then putting them aside again.

And then a whirlwind came my way. After years of dating mostly women, I fell in love with a man, a bearded lawyer from Texas with a messy mop of brown hair and grease stains on his jeans from the stripped-down road bike that he rode all around the city. He had shoulders like a rugby player and West Texas manners. When we met at a bar in Columbia Heights, he gripped my hand so hard I had to shake it out afterwards. “You have a really strong handshake,” I told him. “You’re really pretty,” he responded.

Alex marched through life purposefully, firmly grounded in the physical world. He was always moving, never settled, but something about his manic energy made me feel at home. We met in the fall, and by the time the cherry trees around the tidal basin blossomed he had swept me out of my life in Washington to an adobe cottage nestled in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico, where he had taken a job as an attorney. When I think back to that time it was so stuffed with life that it seemed to glow. In that house I learned to make chicken tortilla soup and carne adovada and fresh tortillas. Alex joined a softball league and I cheered him on from the bleachers with the other players’ wives. We adopted a butter-colored cat who sat on Alex’s chest while he did sit-ups and then spent the evenings stalking mourning doves in the ravine. We wore out the wildness of our twenties hiking alongside Rio Grande Gorge, splurging on margaritas under the gold-plated ceiling at El Monte Sagrado, skinny-dipping at the hot springs off the mesa, drinking homebrewed beer over an all-night matanza in our friend’s backyard, playing shuffleboard and buying cigarettes for a quarter apiece at the Alley Cantina, drinking cheap Mexican beer late into the night. The more we drank, the sweeter we were to each other. We drank all the time.

In the spring the cottonwoods rained seedpods down onto the soggy ground and a southern wind blew up from the mountains, bringing the smell of snowmelt with it. In the summer the leaves were green and the air was cool at night, and in the fall the leaves rustled orange and gold and tourists from miles away to see them. In the winter the snow fell from the denim-colored sky in drifts on the street, soft and pillow-like. On Christmas Eve we drove to Taos Pueblo and listened to the priest celebrate mass in the San Geronimo Chapel, then walked outside to sit by the bonfires and watch the procession of the Virgin Mary. On the Fourth of July we drove to Arroyo Seco, where the children painted their faces red, white, and blue and waved American flags to the amusement of their hippie parents. When our friends began having children we lay in our king-size bed and tried to talk ourselves into starting a family.

With every month that passed Alex fell more and more in love with that town. He took up soccer and joined the planning and zoning commission. But over time I grew more and more restless. The life we led seemed at right angles to everything I had known before. As much fun as we had, our lives seemed empty. As the months passed, a drumbeat started up again inside me, a strange and nervous energy that made it feel impossible to continue the old routine of meeting Alex’s colleagues for drinks on Friday night, watching his softball games on Saturday mornings, and going grocery shopping on Saturday afternoons.

After a year in the mountains we moved to a small adobe cottage on a street lined with cottonwoods, just next to the town plaza. At the corner was a small Spanish-style church, a low-to-the-ground adobe building with a dark-brown cross nailed to the roof. It was an Assembly of God church, run by a pastor with the same story all the Pentecostal pastors had—lost and then found. Twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday nights the parking lot filled with chattering families. I saw myself among the girls—their dark ponytails bobbing behind them as they raced around the parking lot in patent leather shoes, floral dresses, and thick coats. They disappeared into the church for a few hours and I could hear the high hum of the worship service through the thick adobe walls. When they spilled into the parking lot again, wrapped up in their winter things, there was a new liveliness in their eyes.

On Sunday afternoons I watched them from the living room window as I drank tea curled up on the couch. One day, Alex ambled in from the bedroom, pulling his thermal running jersey over his head as he prepared to go out for a run, and made a snarky comment about the families who wasted a gorgeous Sunday morning cooped up in that church. I felt a rush of anger toward Alex and found myself snapping at him, telling him to shut up. What did he know about the transcendent? He lived in a world of things. There was a whole dimension of life that he’d never know or understand—the strange pleasure of keeping your body and mind pure, the raw terror of the coming apocalypse, that washed-clean feeling you had when you walked out of the church on Sunday. Alex’s world was one of action and sensation, and try as I might, I couldn’t get comfortable in it.

A wedge started growing between us. I’d always had a bit of my father’s temper, and it started flaring up at odd moments. I’d be washing carrots idly, chopping garlic, and then my blood would start simmering. I’d clench my lips closed and concentrate on the chopping, until Alex would ask me for a spatula or something, and then all holds were off. I can still see his face, surprised at first, like a toddler walking blithely through the park, thinking he’s holding his father’s hand before looking up to see a stranger. Then his own blood charged him up with adrenaline and fury, and we would fight over the food we were cooking. Later in bed we’d edge away from each other, cocooning ourselves far into the separate corners of our king-size bed until it felt like we were sleeping alone. Eventually I applied to graduate school and got into a three-year program at the University of Houston. Alex promised to take the Texas bar exam, but none of our friends were surprised when a few months later I ended up moving to Texas by myself.

Seven years after the collapse of Enron, Houston was a sprawling city that seemed to multiply on a daily basis, without the limitations of zoning. The downtown was packed with men in thousand-dollar suits and skyscrapers housing multinational oil and gas corporations, and my neighborhood in Montrose was full of bars and tattoo shops and townhouses under construction. I rented a four-hundred-square-foot garage apartment with a tilting floor and paid a guy on Craigslist a hundred dollars to go around with me in his pickup truck, loading up on cheap furniture from thrift stores.

My graduate program demanded a great quantity of reading and teaching, and I was dutiful, spending long stints at bookstores and coffee shops, reading Shakespeare and Woolf and Plato, grading my composition students’ triple-spaced summary-and-analysis papers. During the week my teaching schedule and coursework kept me upright, showered and dressed at regular intervals, but on the weekends I felt alone and untethered. In spare moments I tried to write fiction, but doing so required a certain kind of faith—in the words of William Maxwell, to send a hunting dog out and trust that he’ll come back with a bird in his mouth. But I was filled with doubt and my stories all had a short leash. The main character was always a stunted version of me.

I started spending Saturdays and Sundays on my couch in my pajamas, unwashed and nervous, watching movies on my laptop and reading novels, leaving the house only for takeout or to meet friends at a bar once night fell. When I did go out the conversation dragged, always circling around to the same things, but when I stayed home my apartment felt small and tight. It started sinking in that I had traded one cage for another. I tried to untangle the threads of what had gone wrong, but it was like trying to fold a king-size sheet in a space no bigger than a shoebox. I couldn’t unpack it all. I couldn’t make it neat. How had I ended up, at nearly thirty years old, broke and alone in the middle of a web of asphalt and highways, in a decrepit apartment with rotten beams and a crooked door? I couldn’t understand it, but I knew it had something to do with the deep dissatisfaction I had with the flat contours of ordinary life, a voice inside me that kept asking, Is this all there is?

At a house party later that fall I met a poet named Max with a long white beard. When we found out that we had both grown up Pentecostal, we retreated to the rickety back porch with our beers and split a pack of American Spirits. We told each other stories about the days when we thought we’d be carried out of the calendar at any minute, to a realm outside of time and language. Max went first. He leaned back against the wet, splintered wood and told me about something that happened to him when he was eight years old. The school bus dropped him off in front of his suburban home outside of Houston. He opened the door, threw off his backpack, and began calling out to his mother and brother and sister, but the house was quiet and still. His mother’s purse was in its usual spot on the dining room table, the cereal bowls still filled the sink, and his brother’s and sister’s toys littered the floor. He walked to the front of the house and saw that his mother’s station wagon was still in the driveway, and that’s when his heart started hammering.

Max raced through the bedrooms, opening closets and looking under beds, hollering names into the basement and laundry room, and then with a sickening realization he knew exactly what had happened. The trumpet had blown but he hadn’t heard it. His family had floated up to heaven to meet the Lord in the sky, and he had been left behind to face the end of the world alone. By the time his mother came home from a neighbor’s house with his brother and sister in tow, he was rocking on the floor, inconsolable, tears running down his face and snot plugging up his nose. Max was probably in his forties when he told me the story, but the beer in his right hand still shook a little when he talked about it.

I smiled and started telling my own stories. The way we’d celebrate Hallelujah Eve instead of Halloween at our church, building a bonfire and throwing ungodly books and records in. The time my brother’s cheeks broke out into a rash, which continued until we watched the 700 Club and heard a word from the Lord that there was a child out there afflicted with red cheeks because of too much citrus. My mother cut the oranges out of his diet and the rash stopped immediately.

Max grinned so I kept going. My father’s naming his firstborn son Obere—a word he’d never heard before—because he thought he’d heard the name directly from the Lord in a dream. The time I had approached my father after getting stuck on a strange passage from Genesis in which Onan “spilled his seed on the ground” rather than obey the biblical commandment to impregnate his brother’s widow and bring her children into his household. I couldn’t understand why God would put Onan to death for knocking over some vegetable seeds and asked my father to explain it. His mouth turned up into a strange kind of smile and he said he didn’t understand it either. “Let’s pray about it,” he said. “We’ll pray God will reveal himself to us in that passage.” But he warned me that not all would be revealed immediately.

I saved the best story for last. A visiting evangelist stopped me after church when I was twelve. He was a dashing African American man in a three-piece suit and snake-skin shoes, from one of the Carolinas. He’d given a sermon about asking and receiving, and it had been a hit. Everyone came to the altar to put their troubles down and walk away lighter. A half hour after the service wrapped up, I was moping around the foyer waiting for my parents to finish whatever conversations were keeping them. That’s when the minister walked through the swinging doors to the sanctuary with some of the elders and bounded over to me in just a stride or two. He sized me up from several feet above me. I was all knees in my too-short Sunday dress and patent leather Mary Janes.

Then he bent down level with me and up close he smelled like mint and cologne. “Hallelujah,” he said quietly, and put his arms on my shoulders while the elders smiled behind him in a proprietary way. In a booming voice he told me he had a prophecy for me. He said that God had ordained that I would be a writer, and I would write my first book by the time I was sixteen. He even had a vision of what it would look like: a slim, ivory-colored volume with a portrait of Jesus on the cover. I was thrilled, but not at all surprised. I was used to living in a magical world, so it didn’t surprise me that God had whispered in this fragrant man’s ear and sent him in my direction. We didn’t know each other, but we had a Spirit in common, and with just one look he could tell the desires of my heart. He could see me flopped on top of my white ruffled canopy bed, spending hours scribbling stories about rabbits and girls with glasses who looked and thought like me.

Max laughed again, softer than before. “You ever write that book?” he asked me.

I shook my head and took a long drag of my cigarette. When I was a kid I had tortured myself with that prophecy, convinced it would have come true if I hadn’t been so lazy, so incapable of sitting down and writing the book that God wanted me to write. Maybe it was no coincidence that I had walked away from the church before I turned sixteen.

Max and I smoked companionably, savoring the quiet and the chilly air and the thick, decadent scent of the jasmine that wafted up from the hedgerows in the back alley. It was a lovely night, one of those chilly evenings in early April that were all the more precious because we knew that soon the heat would crank up like a furnace and we’d be stuck in our air-conditioned apartments. After a few minutes the porch filled up with other smokers and then the moment was gone. I stayed on the stairs arguing with someone about the symbolism of the turtle in that Edward Hoagland essay and Max went back in to dance. But at the end of the night when only the drunks were left, he caught my eye across the crowded room and nodded, a sad half-smile on his face.

I knew what he was thinking. He and I used to live with the feeling that at any moment the world would erupt and the daily would be blown open at last. The Lord would come back to take his rightful place on the throne and the faithful would finally get their just reward. We wouldn’t be on the outside anymore, struggling to explain ourselves and our strange ways to the nonbelievers. God’s plan would come into stark and perfect fulfillment. But the years went by and nothing happened. The world didn’t end. There was no eruption. We kept on waking up to another day in which the sun stayed bright in the sky, another day where we were still stuck in the same bodies, the same stale lives. It took faith to believe that change could still be possible, and we were fickle people who had a hard time loving what we couldn’t see. Eventually we gave up and stopped believing in anything at all.

That night I walked the mile and a half home to my garage apartment on West Main Street. It was farther than I’d ever walked by myself before, all the way from Hyde Park past the gay bars on Taft and Fairview. It was late and there were hardly any cars, just a few guys on bikes. Barbacks probably, on their way home after a long night. The air was still clear and clean. I’d slept late that morning and had moseyed around the house all day, reading a little and straightening up, cooking sweet potatoes, grading some papers. All day long I’d felt foggy but now I felt wide awake, exhilarated. It had been a long time since I had talked to someone who had grown up haunted by the same ghosts as I was. Twenty years had passed since I first walked away from the church, but lately I’d been thinking about the girl I used to be. The zealot. Scrawny and shy, seventy-five pounds soaking wet, operating with the only currency she had. She knew she wasn’t enough on her own. She needed to make allegiances. She wanted power, the kind that heals the sick and raises the dead and lifts small girls from backwoods farm towns into the glittering, bustling, half-evil world. A world that for all its faults was still beloved to God. Back in my apartment, I lay awake listening to the air conditioner humming and rattling, a tight feeling deep in my gut.

That feeling stayed there for weeks, until one Sunday morning I woke up and went out on the porch. The sky was white instead of blue and a light rain was falling that had a strange smell to it, like some feral animal. I felt empty and leftover, untethered. I walked back into the house and showered with real fervor, scrubbing shampoo into my hair and raking a bar of soap over my arms and legs and belly. I pulled on one of the dresses I usually wore when I taught and drove to a church I’d noticed a few weeks before. It was one of those newfangled emergent churches and the building where the service was held looked like a warehouse. A chattering crowd was packed into the building’s foyer, while a team of tattooed baristas took orders at the coffee shop that flanked one of the walls. I slipped through the crowd and made my way to one of the back rows in the sanctuary, nodding to the young families sitting next to me and feeling a little dizzy. When the worship service began I sang haltingly along with the hymns, following the lyrics as they were projected on the white wall above the stage. Before the sermon there was a video about the relief work the church was doing, building wells in Central America, and then the sermon dealt with God’s promise to his chosen people. The pastor wore jeans and a goatee and sipped coffee while he preached, and throughout the length of his sermon a woman stood at the side of the stage, painting a picture at an easel. A stone being rolled away. I listened to the sermon warily, ready to walk out in the event of some sly reference to gay marriage or abortion, but the sermon was light and the pastor seemed gentle, tender-hearted. When I walked out of the sanctuary an hour later, ducking out of the coffee hour and striding quickly toward my car, I was filled with relief and exhaustion, as if I had run a mile in the Texas heat. I drove home and slunk into bed, my head throbbing.

For years I’d refrained from talking about my childhood faith, but that spring it seemed to come up constantly. When one of my fellow graduate students, a hipster kid from New Jersey in skinny jeans, made an offhand reference to Holy Rollers in one of my seminar classes, I surprised myself by pushing back angrily, defending the people who I myself had ridiculed for most of my adult life. The other students in the seminar squinted at me as I went on about how it felt to go about your life believing that you were one of God’s chosen people. My professor was one of those endlessly curious academic types, and after class he pulled me aside and asked if Pentecostalism was native to the southern United States or if it had actually started elsewhere. As he looked at me expectantly I realized I had no idea. When I was a girl experiencing it for the first time, that rollicking religion seemed to have come organically, from the world itself, like water or air. Pentecostals aren’t much for history, and the only origin story I’d ever heard was the story of how the Holy Spirit had descended on Jesus’s disciples centuries ago when they gathered to mourn his death.

When I got back to my apartment that night I opened my laptop and started reading about the early days of the church. The groundwork for the birth of Pentecostalism had been laid a century before, when circuit riders tore through the countryside, preaching God’s word and pumping people into a frenzy. It was a time of great optimism and great impatience. The optimism came from the feeling that something could still be done to redeem the world before the Lord’s return, to save those who still needed to be saved. The impatience came from the feeling that time was short, that any day the promised smoke and fire and vapor would swallow up the faithful and heathen alike.

At a revival in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, twenty thousand people gathered to worship. Seven men preached at once at different spots in the tent, telling their listeners that God used to speak to people directly and personally, that he was capable of healing the sick and raising the dead. They told stories of how the Lord manipulated physical matter for his own purposes and spoke to people in their own languages, if they could just forget themselves long enough to tune into his wavelength. They pleaded with their listeners to give up swearing and gambling and adultery, and to cleanse and purify themselves so God might see fit to touch them. They claimed that if people could just quiet their hearts, they might be able to hear the voice of God, shimmering through the air, struggling to make itself heard.

Their message fell on fertile ground. “The noise was like the roar of Niagara,” wrote a participant. “The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm.” In another account, someone wrote, “The people fell before the Word, like corn before a storm of wind, and many rose from the dust with divine glory shining in their countenances.” A Methodist minister told of how he “went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy.” He wasn’t the only one with a physical response. Some began contorting as they sobbed and shouted. “Their heads would jerk back suddenly, frequently causing them to yelp, or make some other involuntary noise. . . . Sometimes the head would fly every way so quickly that their features could not be recognized. I have seen their heads fly back and forward so quickly that the hair of females would be made to crack like a carriage whip, but not very loud.”

The miracle they were waiting for finally happened at midnight on the first day of the new millennium. In a Bible school in Kansas City, a milk-fed farmer’s daughter named Agnes Ozman lifted her voice to the heavens and got the promised gift. A halo appeared around her head and for three days she could only speak to her classmates in a language that sounded to them like Chinese. A preacher in his late twenties, Charles Parham, who would later become known as the father of Pentecostalism, spread her story far and wide, saying that the languages the Lord had given the apostles in that upper room so long ago had come to life again. Five years later, a revival broke out in a storefront church in the middle of a ghetto in Los Angeles. Hundreds of worshippers, Black and white together, packed into a tiny wood-frame church on Azusa Street. The church was poor, and the congregation lacked hymnals or programs, and used a stack of wooden crates in place of a pulpit. I could picture them, the men in beards, their hands work-worn and flecked with cuts and scars, their boots tracking in hay and giving off the smell of livestock. The women might have looked delicate in their Sunday dresses, but their hands were rough. They had no patience for high rhetoric or fancy turns of phrase. They knew what was good and they knew what was evil.

Their pastor was William Seymour, the son of former slaves, who had been exiled to the hallway back in Bible college because of his race. He had made the journey to Los Angeles in the segregated car of a train. But none of that mattered now. As he preached, a woman who had never before had a talent for piano played beautiful melodies while singing in Hebrew. People came from all over the country to see it for themselves, so many that the foundation of that little church collapsed, causing the front porch to fall into the yard. Reporters sat in on services and came away with a vague impression of what was going on. One newspaper headline read “Faith Gives Quaint Sect New Languages to Convert Africa.” The story continued below the headline in large type: “Votaries of Odd Religion Nightly see ‘Miracles’ in West Side Room. Led by Negro Elder. The leaders of this strange movement are for the most part Negroes.”

Critics from the mainline churches called the new movement “a disgusting amalgamation of African voodoo superstition and Caucasian insanity.” Some contacted the police in an attempt to shut the meetings down. They were suspicious of the way races mixed in the new Pentecostal churches and the way God seemed to speak to everyone in the same way, young or old, Black or white, male or female, poor or rich, illiterate or well-read. Frank Bartleman, one of the early scribes of Azusa Street, wrote that it seemed the color line had been washed away in the blood of Jesus Christ.

Reports of healings and miraculous conversions led thousands more to Azusa Street, and soon missionaries sprang out of the church to carry its message around the world. They believed that the strange languages they spoke in—a rollicking, rolling sort of gibberish—were in fact real languages from far-off places. They called them “missionary tongues,” and they believed they were a kind of divine shortcut that allowed them to speak directly to the people they wished to convert, without taking the time to learn their languages the old-fashioned way. Charles Parham embraced this view, saying, “Anybody today ought to be able to preach in any language of the world if they had horse sense enough to let God use their tongue and throat.”

The zealous poured themselves into the empty places on their maps, so convinced of God’s ability to shepherd them that some travelers to Africa or India even refused to take quinine. When pressed, they pointed out that nowhere in the Bible does God endorse pills and powders. When they arrived at their mission sites, many missionaries suffered greatly from malaria, but they received a far crueler blow when they realized they couldn’t speak to or understand the people they came to save. Some buckled down immediately to the task of learning languages, while others returned home, their faith shaken.

I read late into the night, following a rabbit trail of hyperlinks, reading about how the religion of my childhood, so marginalized in the United States, was now thriving in every corner of the globe. Scholars described it as the fastest growing religious movement in history. Forty years ago, less than 10 percent of Christians had been Pentecostal, but in another fifteen years, scholars were predicting that one-third would be. And for the first time in history, the majority of them would live south of the equator—in Asia, Central America, and Africa.

I read the story of one Nigerian pastor, Enoch Adeboye, who had grown up in a house made of mud bricks, the first son of his father’s third wife. His family were Christians, but whenever sickness or catastrophe struck, they went to the traditional healers for help. Legend had it that when Adeboye was taken to one of these healers as a child, the healer prophesied that he would be a great man, far outshining the other stars in the constellations. Pastor Adeboye had been the first in his family to own a pair of shoes, the youngest instructor in the history of the Nigerian university system, and the first to grow one of Nigeria’s small Pentecostal churches into a global megachurch with five million members in Nigeria alone. I’d never heard his name in my life, but the year before Newsweek had ranked him alongside Osama bin Laden and President Barack Obama in a list of the world’s fifty most influential people. I felt a strange sense of pride in Enoch Adeboye’s story, as if he were a cousin or an uncle or some distant relation. He seemed to be the embodiment of my favorite of all of Jesus’s promises—that the poor would one day be made rich.

When I finally glanced at the clock that hung over the couch, it was nearly two in the morning. My phone had long ago gone silent. The bartenders would be shouting about last call and my friends would be closing their tabs and heading home. I yawned and stretched my wrists in small, tight circles, then rubbed my elbows. They’d been pressed against the desk so long that they were imprinted with whorls from the grain of the wood. One more cigarette, I told myself, and then I’d go to bed. I pulled on my peacoat and slipped onto the narrow balcony of my garage apartment, pulling a cigarette from my pocket and lighting it silently. From the shadows below I could hear voices and footsteps, and I pressed against the doorframe to try to make myself invisible to my neighbors as they made their way up the driveway.

The air had gotten colder, but it still felt good. The blood hummed in my veins, fueled by the sudden burst of nicotine, and the pixelated headlines of the articles I’d been reading still swirled in my mind’s eye. Wonderful if true, ignorant girl acquires the gift of tongues. Nothing was as I expected it to be. The Pentecostal movement that I had long decried as backwards and closed-minded seemed to be born from a moment of interracial acceptance, and seemed to hold within it the potential for real revolution and change. The God that I had stumbled across through my web search, the God of Agnes Ozman, William Seymour, and Enoch Adeboye, was someone I hadn’t thought about in years. I had forgotten about his love for justice and mercy, his preference for the poor. I only remembered his anger and his obsession with purity and control. Eventually I had walked away. But maybe there was a chance I had turned my back on a God who lifted up the poor and downhearted and endowed them with miraculous powers. The God of William Seymour and Enoch Adeboye seemed untouched by conservative politics or moralistic thinking. Their faith seemed clean and good. Maybe it was something I could be proud of after all.

A cat yowled from the roof of a car below, startling me. The night had turned quiet and still. Everyone who had been headed home had likely made it there by now. I ground my cigarette out on the dingy white wooden rail of the balcony, and in the yellow stripe of light that filtered in from the lamp in my living room I noticed a whole row of marks from hundreds of stubbed out cigarettes dappled across the railing. I’d never noticed them before. Now they seemed as ominous to me as the marks a prisoner might scratch into the walls of the cell to track the days.

By the time I pulled off my coat and climbed into bed a few minutes later, I was already gone—back under the revival tent with my hands raised in the air and the language of the Lord in my mouth. A deacon behind me, ready to catch me when I fell. That scene blended in my mind with the scene of that revival in Azusa Street, where so many people crammed together into that tumbledown shack, crying out to God to remove them from the world they knew and lift them up to be with him in heaven. In the morning I’d wake up early and make my way through the maze of live oaks to the university library. I’d bury myself in the story of those early days of the Pentecostal church and follow a winding path through the library stacks to read about how Christianity had upended the global south. I’d sift through the history of the faith I’d walked away from, remembering how it moved me as a child. Maybe somewhere deep inside of me I still wanted to fall, to fall and be caught.