Nobody Expects the Nebraska Inquisition

You might ask, as Darren McGavin did in A Christmas Story: “What brought you to this lowly state?” 

Approximately 24 hours before moving into The Hovel, I sat in my five-bedroom house with my wife Pat who I had been married to for almost twenty years, two-thirds of my six children and our Sheltie/Dachshund Mitzi, in a situation that had become all too familiar: listening to Pat enumerate my many shortcomings. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any shortcomings, like most people I had, and still have, a lot. Somewhere, packed away with my high school graduation pictures, old KZUM radio program guides, vintage Chuck Taylors and 3-ring binders from years of management classes, are yellow legal pads with lists of things that she told me that I needed to work on, change, fix, or line up with the Bible. And these were just the things she knew about. But this time it was different. I was being given a choice: either move out and “get my shit together” or she would move out and take all the kids with her. Not much of a choice.

Due to a variety of factors, including lack of a college degree and scant evidence that I had any skills that someone would be willing to pay me money for, meager finances was frequently a problem at our house. Food Stamps and government cheese were familiar sights. It was less of a problem when we recognized that we didn’t have a lot of money and therefore couldn’t spend a lot of money, when we shopped at thrift stores and day-old bread outlets and, although paying the bills often required the skills of a Barnum & Bailey center ring juggler, the outgo was always less than or equal to the income, no matter how small. The expectations were also less than or equal to the income. This all changed when (cue echo effects) The Law of Believing reared its ugly head.

The Law of Believing as we experienced it was promulgated by the religious group that we had associated with on and off since the mid-seventies, which taught that whatever you “believed for”, you would receive. Now this went well beyond the normal person’s concept of praying, which usually included the possibility that God would say “no”, the creator of the universe working in mysterious ways and all that deep theological stuff. Most people, although they don’t say it out loud, understand that praying is an iffy proposition at best. When things turn out the way that they wanted to, then prayer works, when they don’t turn out that way, well, prayer still works but…um…okay, the great silent majority generally hasn’t worked out the theology of that just yet, although there are theories. The difference between regular praying and believing is that with believing, it's a law, i.e. it works all the time, in every situation, for everyone, as our group’s founder was fond of saying “For saint and sinner alike”. It’s kind of like gravity, momentum and other laws of physics: they always work; it’s woven into the fabric of the universe. So what happens when it inevitably doesn’t work? It’s the fault of the person doing the alleged believing of course; he or she must not really be “believing”, or, like any good glob of circular reasoning, the result would be there. (In some ways, this was more logical than regular praying, in that it posited an answer to “why didn’t I get the result that I wanted?” that didn’t involve an arbitrary, capricious deity who wasn’t all that clear about the rules.)

This Law was applied to finances by Pat and some of her "believer" friends. Over coffee and cigarettes one afternoon they all agreed that they would hold their husbands to this law. No longer could it be stated that we couldn’t afford something, no matter how little money we actually had. (And we always seemed to have money for coffee and cigarettes) I was to “take believing action” and receive that which I believed for. Now I know that I should have been thrilled to have the opportunity to receive all that I ever wanted or needed, delivered upon demand by a compliant deity ready to supply that pony that I asked for at Christmas, but something happened between the believing and the receiving, and that was reality. 

Our expenses grew, our income didn’t and any attention that I drew to these facts was derided as “lack of believing”. It’s difficult if not impossible to reason with someone who deals in dogma rather than facts, and that was certainly the case here. It didn’t make it any easier that in addition to our precarious financial situation, we were giving at least 10% of our income to the aforementioned religious organization, which was supposedly a form of believing that was to guarantee financial abundance. Keep in mind that no one in this religious organization was prepared for or trained in any kind of financial counseling to show people how to have that financial abundance; they just pointed out that if you didn’t have it you weren’t believing.

In the early nineties, with rapidly mounting expenses on one side and the Law of Believing on the other side, I made the fateful decision to get a credit card. The initial reason for getting the card was related to my job. I worked as a circulation sales rep for a statewide newspaper and often had to pay for meals, gas and hotel rooms out of pocket and wait up to a month before being reimbursed. The plan was to use the card to pay the expenses; then pay off the bill with my expense check. All in all, this was a brilliant plan, except that I followed part one (use the credit card) faithfully, but never got around to part two (paying off the bill).

It didn’t take long for me to start using the card for non-business expenses, and since they obviously weren’t reimbursable as the business charges were, I never got around to paying them. At first it was something small, a ninety dollar lawnmower that I swore that I’d pay for on the next paycheck, then it was a $200 clothes dryer, then it was a $750 used car from Weird Wally’s. I’d charge them, or withdraw cash and put it in the bank account and then write a check. We appeared to be “prospering” according to the Law of Believing, but a simple look at our bank account would have revealed that income hadn’t gone up, yet we were spending more than ever before. It’s a miracle! Praise God!

Soon I got a second credit card to help cover dental expenses since the kids were starting to require expensive dental work, including orthodontics not covered by insurance for every one of my children and possibly a few neighborhood kids who just stayed overnight, and maybe even a stray cat. The first credit card initially had a credit limit of $1000, which was soon raised to $1500, to $2000 and eventually to over $3000. The second card started at $3500 and eventually was raised to $12,000. I maxed out both of them. A third card was quickly maxed out and then a fourth. By the time all was said and done I had racked up approximately $21,000 of credit card debt with little to show for it except an abundance of straight, white teeth. Now at this point you might be saying to yourself: “Dumbass, get a second job, cut back on your spending, tell your wife to get a job (she was home schooling the kids and didn’t work outside the home) — do something”. That, I would answer, is easier said than done. (Since you brought it up)

Part of the problem that I got myself into was that I was afraid of two things: the wrath of God and the wrath of my wife. If you’ve ever met Pat, now my ex-wife, you might be scratching your head in puzzlement. First of all, she was tiny, with the upper body strength of a parakeet, and a pack-a-day smoker to boot. Her lung capacity on her best day couldn’t support a good sustained yell. Although she had many good qualities, she was just one of those people who never compromise on anything; everything was black and white; everything could be boiled down to either (cue echo chamber again) the Will of God or the Lies of The Adversary. (Our religious group referred to The Devil, as “The Adversary”) A lot of my waking hours were spent trying to avoid conflict and confrontation, without any success worth mentioning. I was between a rock and a hard place. Speaking up and saying that we didn’t have the funds to buy an item that the appearance of “abundance” demanded, meant being harangued incessantly for not trusting God. So more and more I took the coward’s way out and used the credit card with no real plan for paying it off. For a while I was able to use the mileage reimbursement checks that I received from my employer to pay off the minimum balances each month. I made sure that I drove enough miles each month so that I would have enough extra to make the payments. But as the balances continued to rise and the interest charges drove them up even higher, I despaired of ever even beginning to pay the cards off, let alone totally eliminate the debt. I stopped pretending to limit the use of the card to things that I was pressured by Pat to buy and started using it to get cash advances which I used to hit the bars late at night when I was supposed to be working.

The wrath of God comes in to play with a relatively new teaching by the leader of our organization that debt in any form was a sin. Pressure was being put on members to eliminate all debt: house loans, car loans, credit cards and any other agreement where you owed anyone anything. (One of my sons, after filling out his tax return, found that he would owe a few hundred dollars, rather than receive a refund. He was chastised for “being in debt” to the government.) Sermons were preached constantly how those who were in debt were cutting themselves off from God, and were contaminating the “household”. No surprise that I was hesitant in the early days to admit to anyone that I had started accumulating debt, and when it got as huge as it did, I was terrified of being found out. Eventually, my master plan to pretend that we didn’t have financial problems, that I was getting along with my wife and that everything would somehow fix itself, came crashing down with a call Pat received from one of my creditors.

The minimum payments on the four cards had gotten so large that I was no longer able to cover them using the mileage reimbursement checks and had started using our family checking account to make payments, faking the account balance in the checkbook to make it look like there was more money in the account than there actually was. At no time during this crisis did Pat ever ask to look at a credit card statement (I had them sent to a post office box) or attempt to balance the checkbook. She was totally in the dark when finally one of the credit card companies called the house to inquire about an overdue payment. Immediately following that call, Pat called the local “leadership” of our little group. Three of them confronted me in my living room about lying to my wife, being in debt, and, most importantly in their eyes, lying to the leaders of this group about being in debt (and lying about lying too). The fact that my hidden debt was now out in the open was a great relief to me, a great burden was lifted from my shoulders. I had gotten myself in so deep that I was afraid to ask for help, help from my wife, my co-religionists, or anyone. I was afraid of the reaction that my wife would have and the action that my church would take against me. But now what I had been afraid of had come to pass, and as bad as it was, it didn’t seem that it was the end of the world. 

When I was keeping it to myself, when I was lying to those around me, I couldn’t do anything to reduce the debt, because that would make everyone aware that there was a problem. Now I had the opportunity to pay off the debt and repair the damage that had been done to my marriage (Or so I thought). I admitted to the $21,000 in debt that I was in (Pat had only found out about approximately $3,500 from the creditor who had called) and to lying to Pat and to my religious leaders. The local leadership then contacted the next higher level in the hierarchy and convened another meeting. They considered my actions to be bringing Satan’s influence into their fellowship. Like many biblical literalists, our church leaders practiced a form of “shunning” that they called “mark and avoid”, based on a bible verse that said “mark them that cause divisions among you and avoid them”. They used this verse to justify cutting off all contact with people who didn’t adhere to the group’s standards or even with people who questioned them. Those who had been marked & avoided were considered by those who stayed loyal to be as good as dead. Active participants were not allowed to have any contact with those who had been marked & avoided. (Ironically, in the years leading up to this event, I had been called upon to sit in on many “confrontation” sessions that ended with people being marked and avoided. Not a period of my life of which I am proud.) An intermediate step, called “spiritual probation”, also cut off the offenders from contact with the faithful, but had a time limit, usually six months, after which the probationer would be evaluated as to their fitness to return to full participation. During this time the probationer was required to write a monthly letter to the state leader, outlining what was being done to correct whatever the problem was that got them put on probation and to continue to tithe, i.e. pay 10% of total income to the organization. This was the action that our group’s leaders took against me.

The fact that I managed to tally up $21,000 in unsecured debt confirmed Pat’s long-held suspicion that I was the cause of all evil in the western hemisphere. She had been critical of my fitness as a father and as a Christian for several years and had been regularly been complaining about me to our leaders; now she had something solid. She fully expected that these leaders would come down hard on me or perhaps put me in stocks before the village gate or at least entertain the possibility of burning me at the stake; when they meted out the same punishment to her that it had to me; she was shocked.

Looking back, her inclusion in my punishment was as much to blame for our future problems as was my own transgressions. It made her bitter, angry and that much more determined to blame me for any and all problems. But I didn’t see that at the time. I was so relieved that I had shed the burden of living a lie and having been given the opportunity to make things right that I didn’t perceive how bad things really were, how irreparable the situation actually was. Things seemed to be looking up. The problem with looking up is that you don’t notice the big steaming pile of shit in front of you until you step in it.

During the next six months I got a part-time job to begin paying off the debt, wrote my letter every month to the state leader, paid my tithes and attempted to heal the rift between me and Pat, who was adamant that I was doing nothing to change and was convinced that at the end of the six months the leadership would clearly see how depraved I was and permanently mark and avoid me, welcoming her back with open arms and vindicating her judgment that I was The Antichrist in training. Imagine her surprise when we both were released from probation with no conditions, convincing her that either the leadership of our organization was blind and stupid or that I had diabolically pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

Our church preached the point of view that good things happened because you were “doing God’s Word” and that bad things happened because you were “off God’s Word”. (Although if something bad happened to one of the leaders, it was proof that they were so godly that the Devil was after them in a special way, targeting them for an extra helping of devilishness. If good things happened to bad people that showed only that the Devil was rewarding them for being his faithful minion. You just can’t win with this kind of logic, can you?)

Those who fully believed this doctrine therefore had to assign blame somewhere when things went wrong, you could either blame yourself, or blame someone close to you who was “a conduit” for the Devil to cause problems in your life. Pat seldom if ever looked to herself as the source of problems and was extremely good at was identifying shortcomings in others; she had very definite ideas regarding what constituted “doing the Word”, and wasn’t shy about pointing fingers at those whom she felt were falling short. For years she had bullied and bad-mouthed the local leadership of our group regarding their failings as Christian ministers, and was very vocal about correcting those in the congregation who she felt didn’t measure up. In the mid-nineties she gained any ally in Fred, the newly appointed “Branch Coordinator”. Fred was a graduate of the group’s leadership training program and was assigned to our city as the coordinator of all their home churches in Lincoln. Fred’s graduating class had received specific instructions to “weed out weakness”, to “clean up the household” and essentially to purge those who were not meeting the standards that the head of the organization had set down. Interference in people’s private lives became the norm, and one by one, those who weren’t toeing the line were marked and avoided and thrown out of the organization. Pat happily went along with all of this; that is until they started coming after us. We were being accused of being “spiritually weak”, of being a “conduit for the adversary” and poor housekeepers, possibly even poor spellers. It was at this point that Pat, unable to bully this particular leader, unable to believe that she could possibly be responsible for any of her own problems, and convinced that somebody had to be the scapegoat, decided, since all her other targets had been driven away, that I must be the reason that we were being harassed and constantly reproved. It was into this atmosphere that my secret of the $21,000 debt was dropped. Her belief that I was a source of spiritual contamination for our family was finally confirmed.

About eight months after we were reinstated into full participation with our fellowship, a bombshell was dropped. The top leader of our group, who we viewed as the “Man of God”, who taught and interpreted the Bible for us, was accused by a former member of sexual abuse and in short order resigned his position as President of the organization. Shortly after that he was put on “spiritual probation” like so many others had been and expelled from the organization. This started for me a careful examination of all that I had been taught, leading to doubt in the correctness of the group’s teachings. I began to communicate with people who had left the organization and had been marked and avoided and participated in an internet forum where the group’s teachings and practices were questioned. Eventually I was told by the leader of the multi-state region that included Nebraska that I was no longer welcome at any of the group’s functions. I was being permanently marked and avoided. This was the opportunity that Pat had been looking for. Before my expulsion, if we had a serious disagreement, we would ask one of our leaders to mediate and help us come to an agreement. (Although looking back, even though she was often the one to initiate mediation, if the answer did not conform to what she already had decided, the advice was ignored.) 

Despite my many problems with this organization, I believed that occasionally they had good advice, and mainly just urged us to see the other’s point of view and to find common ground on our disagreements. Now, since no one in the group was allowed to have any contact with me, Pat took the position that in any disagreement, she was right by default, since she was the one who was “standing with the household of God”, her interpretation of events, her take on what the Bible said and how it applied to a given situation was by definition the correct one; anything that I said, was therefore wrong due to my expulsion from “The Household of God”. She began openly telling the children to not listen to what I said and eventually to not even talk to me, reasoning that she and the children were to “have no fellowship with darkness”. The smallest things became evidence that I was bringing evil into the house and the pretext for “confrontations”, where she would bring in one or more of the children as “witnesses” to the “reproof and correction”. In order to avoid this constant confrontation I withdrew more and more, working extra hours at my first job and putting in as many shifts as I could at my second, and not coming home until I absolutely had to after work; even saying I was at work and just walking around town. When I had a day off I would stay up late watching videos and drinking beer so I would be tired and hung over the next day so as to not have to interact with her.

Finally, after coming home from work on a Thursday evening I found the whole family sitting in a semicircle waiting to “confront” me. As usual the charges were non-specific and vague, the justifications quasi-biblical, but it boiled down to me being thrown out of my own house and most of my children having nothing to do with me.

Well, at least the credit card companies still wanted to talk to me.

The "Nobody" Series:

Nobody Ever Joins A Cult

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

So is it chicken, or is it steak? I’m relatively sure that I never consumed chicken-fried steak when I lived in New York, or on any of my subsequent visits back. But chicken-fried steak was my first meal in my new home, Sidney, Nebraska. After arriving in Sidney on an early Friday afternoon and finding a two-bedroom duplex to rent, then doing a little job hunting, we repaired to Dude’s Steakhouse for dinner. With an effigy of a giant steer on the roof, Dude’s is the happenin’ spot in Sidney; the restaurant is in the front and the sawdust-covered dance floor, topped by a mirror ball, in the back. One of the odd things about social life in Sidney in those days was the drinking age. Nebraska, like most states, had recently decided to increase the drinking age from 18 to 21, but was doing it gradually, grandfathering in anyone who was over 18 when the law was passed; if you turned 18 the day before the law went into effect, you could start drinking, if your birthday was one day later, you waited three years until you were 21 (At the time that I left, drinking age in New York was 18, I was 22 when I arrived in Sidney. The youngest member of our troupe was 20). Colorado on the other hand hadn’t raised the drinking age yet, so there was a steady traffic of 18, 19 and 20 year olds south across the Colorado border to The Hot Spot in the town of Peetz, while northeastern Colorado residents flocked north to the greater Sidney metropolis.

For a guy who grew up in New York City, Sidney was on the ass-end of nowhere, a population of about 5,000, most of them tobacco-chewing, pickup truck-driving, cowboy hat-wearing rednecks who, if they weren’t dating their cousins, it was because their sisters were better looking. On the day that we arrived, leaving the interstate and heading toward town, the first sight that greeted us was a trailer court, a grain elevator, a gas station and a bar, which for one horrible moment we thought was the entire town. The reality wasn’t much more attractive. Within hours of our arrival, it seemed that everyone knew that we had arrived and what we were doing there. The pastors of the two dozen churches in town had their people on alert for the “cult members” in their midst. The irony of it all was that we weren’t very effective cult members; we were terrible recruiters; they really had nothing to worry about.

One of the more common methods of recruitment employed by evangelical groups is door-to-door “witnessing”. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do it, fundamentalist mega-churches do it, the Mormons do it and we did it in The Way. The problem with door-to-door witnessing in a small town is that you quickly run out of doors to knock on. The average number of people per household is usually estimated at 3.5 according to the Audit Bureau of (newspaper) Circulation. For a city of 5,000 that gives you approximately 1,400 households. If you divide the group into pairs, each pair has to knock on only 700 doors, which you can do in a month if you set the modest goal of 25 houses per day. Since other than working part time, all that you’re supposed to be doing with your time is witnessing, this isn’t too difficult. In the bigger cities, where most of the growth in The Way took place, witnessing other than door-to-door was done in malls, parks and other places where large numbers of people gathered. This obviously was a problem in Sidney, which had no shopping center, and other than churches and bars, no place where people congregated in large groups. One of The Way’s recruiting pitches was that while they were ostensibly Christian, they viewed all other Christians as wrong in the details of their doctrine and/or practice, so if you really wanted to get to know God’s will, you had to get involved with The Way and take their Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class. So, by this logic, it made sense to go after church people who of course would abandon their stale, error-ridden churches for the shining light of truth to be found in The Way as presented by four marginally employed college drop-outs. The first church that we visited was the Sidney Church of the Foursquare Gospel, pastored by The Reverend Jerry Skinner, who would become our main opponent during our stay in the town of One-Horse, Nebraska, also known as Sidney.

One afternoon, the Foursquare Church was going to be hosting a “healing ministry” by a visiting pastor. Several of us decided to attend, mainly, although we would never admit it to ourselves, to feel superior to these poor ignorant yokels and maybe show some of them The Truth. Little did we know that the entire town of Sidney, and especially Rev. Jerry Skinner, was loaded for bear and couldn’t wait to confront us with a little of their own truth. After the service Rev. Skinner stood at the door to the sanctuary, shaking hands, and making small talk. I had no plans to speak with the man, but shook his hand perfunctorily, ready to make my exit, but Rev. Jerry wasn’t about to let me off so easily. He held my hand in an iron grip and fixed me with a steely glare; “You’re Tom, with The Way, your companions are Rosemarie and Gail, Steve isn’t with you today…” he continued to tell us where we were from, who we worked for and other details of our lives, nothing supernatural or anything, but this guy was obviously someone who had done his homework and found out all that he could about his “enemy”. One thing that we didn’t know at the time was that Rev. Jerry had been briefly involved with The Way in the early seventies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the same time and place where The Way’s new leader, Craig Martindale, had first become involved (There were several focal points of early growth for The Way in the early seventies, Wichita Kansas was one of these hot spots. The Way leaders in Wichita spread out to Lawrence during this time period). Unlike most people that we encountered who were against The Way, this guy actually knew and understood what we believed and taught and was on a mission from God (according to him) to prevent us from making any inroads into his town.

Part of the W.O.W. Ambassador program was the requirement that you “witness”, i.e. recruit, 6 days a week. You were supposed to take off one day from work and witnessing, preferably the same day! If I remember correctly a W.O.W. Ambassador was supposed to witness 48 hours per week, which equates to 8 hours per day, on top of however many hours you worked your part-time job every day. I don’t know of anyone who really followed that part of the program, we sure didn’t. 

Let’s do the math: Most places of employment didn’t open until 7:00AM, figuring a 20-hour per week job, that about 4 hours per day. So you’re done about 11:00AM. Go home and have some lunch, be done by say, 12:30PM. You’re probably going to eat the evening meal together as a “family”, so you’ve got to be home by 5:00PM to start preparing dinner. So you’ve only had 4 ½ hours to witness in the afternoon, assuming you got right out the door after lunch. By the time you make dinner, eat and clean up its 6:30PM. You’ve now got to get 3½ hours in by the end of the day, so you’re out until 10:00PM witnessing, unless of course it’s a “Twig Night”. That takes about an hour, so witnessing takes you out until 11:00PM — in Sidney Nebraska. If you’re out and about from 12:30 to 5:00, who are you going to encounter: Stay-at-home moms, retired farmers and the unemployed? There’s a very small pool of people around during the day in a town of 5,000. What about in the evening? Just how late do you think people will be answering their doors before they call the cops? So what does that leave? Considering that you will have knocked on every door in about a month without even trying very hard, cafes during the day and bars at night is where the witnessing action takes place, which brings us to Dude’s.

Dude’s wasn’t the only bar in Sidney, but it was the only one with a dance floor and a deejay. There was a pool hall that Steve, who was a pretty fair pool player, and I (a pretty poor pool player), went to some evenings. The routine was that Steve played pool while I leaned against a table and tried to engage people in discussions about God or the Bible. Although I never played, I could usually figure out what the best shot was since I had been watching Steve play as well as visualizing the geometry in my head. After about a month, guys started asking me for advice on what shot to take and even recommendations on what kind of cue to buy. Since I acted and talked like I was an expert, the habitués of the place thought that I was an expert (Oddly enough (or not) one of my sons has inherited this trait and has demonstrated his ability to bullshit his way through anything). Steve very seldom went to Dude’s, since he didn’t like to dance, so I usually “witnessed” over there with one or both of the girls. After a while a weird set of misunderstandings developed regarding our living arrangements. Usually I introduced whoever was with me as “my roommates”. Some folks jumped to the conclusion that I was a super stud based on my having two female roommates, while others assumed that Steve and I were gay, both groups blocking out the existence of the roommates that didn’t fit with their fantasies.

As out time in Sidney crept onward, it became more and more evident that there was a smoldering hatred of “cults”, a visceral fear and loathing that had started about a year before in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicide and related killings and had come to focus on most groups that swam outside the mainstream, which included The Way International, which in Sidney meant the four of us. Several overlapping and mutually exclusive definitions of “cult” exist, and most people don’t have a clear idea of what a cult is, how to recognize one or why they are bad. Especially back in the days before the internet, abuses within new religious groups were fabricated as often as not and a large percentage of anti-cult crusaders didn’t understand the theology behind the arguments against them and people sometimes confused the term “cult” with “occult” (Once a group of high school kids showed up at our door wanting to know if we could conduct a séance for them). The center of anti-cult, anti-us activity in Sidney was the aforementioned Foursquare Gospel Church pastored by Rev. Jerry Skinner, but a coalition of other churches in Sidney followed along and attempted to make our lives miserable.

One of the strategies that we were instructed to employ in our mission to convert the heathens of western Nebraska was to hold an “open house”. I’d actually seen this work while I lived in New York, but, as I was a bit slow to realize, I wasn’t in New York anymore. In the days leading up to our scheduled open house, the four of us utilized our witnessing time diligently printing up and distributing flyers all around town. What we were unaware of was that the local church leaders were following behind us and just as diligently tearing down our cute little flyers. As a result the only people who knew about our open house were the four of us and all the folks who had already decided that we were a grave danger to the American way of life. We didn’t see it then, but this open house was to be the defining moment for our entire time in Sidney. We spent the afternoon cleaning and scrubbing our modest duplex, arranging the furniture and setting out snacks while Steve prepared a teaching and presentation designed to convince all but the hardest-hearted that we were the purveyors of the truth that Sidney Nebraska had waited its entire existence for. And the hardest-hearted turned out to be our only guests that evening. The attendees that night included several pastors, including our nemesis, Rev. Skinner, and a handful of his youth group members. From an outreach point of view the evening was a resounding failure, but like most things in The Way, we redefined things so that they would fit with our preconceived notions of how the world worked. We chose to interpret the day’s events as proof that we were doing God’s will and that the “persecution” that we were enduring was evidence that “the Adversary” (aka The Devil, Satan) was all lathered up over the four spiritual heavyweights who were speaking the truth to the citizens of Sidney. So our focus became, not recruiting for The Way, not lovingly sharing what we had learned or making healing available, but patiently enduring and standing up to persecution. The good people of Sidney were only too glad to oblige us.

It wasn’t as if we had come up with the persecution complex all by ourselves, The Way’s founder, V.P. Wierwille was more concerned with the Devil and his minions than anyone I’d ever heard of. There was even a class, Dealing With the Adversary, (later, under Wierwille’s successor changed to Defeating the Adversary) that covered what Wierwille claimed to know about “The Adversary” (“Satan” is the English transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning “adversary”) and his “devil spirits”, constructing an hierarchy from what he called buck privates to five-star generals, all under the orders of the commander-in-chief, the Devil. The advanced class portion of the PFAL series of classes, while ostensibly covering six of the nine “manifestations of the spirit” mentioned in Corinthians (the other three speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues and prophecy are expounded upon in the foundational and intermediate classes) the class mainly focused on the manifestation called “discerning of spirits”, specifically,  recognizing devil spirits. Way members were constantly being urged to look over their shoulder for interference by the Devil, to check their thoughts for devilish influences and to listen for their inner holy spirit to alert them to the presence of devil spirits in others. We were seeing the Devil all over the Sidney metropolitan area, but the good people of Sidney were seeing the Devil in just one place, and that was in our little duplex on Jackson Street.       

Back in New York I had occasionally heard the word “cult” and had encountered resistance to our message from individuals and even from some groups, but it wasn’t until I moved to Sidney that people actually started doing something about their opinions. Nebraska values in action. One of the first of many actions took place at my job. We were all required to have a part-time job to support ourselves during our WOW year, since we arrived on a Friday it wasn’t until the next Monday, when most of the businesses were open that I found employment. Ken Pittam, a member of one of those families that had been in Sidney forever, owned a store that sold custom flooring and windows as well as a small café, both on Illinois Avenue, Sidney’s main street. Ken hired me as a kind of go-fer, to clean up around the flooring store, take orders and work as an apprentice to the glass cutters. One of my first jobs was to help remove all the plate glass windows in the town’s Safeway grocery store before it was demolished and install windows in the new building. I was on my way to learning a trade when Ken took me aside one morning to inform me that he was letting me go, not because he couldn’t afford me (20 hours per week at minimum wage), or because I was a poor worker, but because he had received pressure from the members of his church to “fire that cultist”. I was pretty sure that it was illegal to fire someone on the basis of their religion, but I didn’t exactly have the means to file a lawsuit, and my priority was to “move the Word”.

Even though I was marooned in western Nebraska ensconced in the arms of a religious cult, surrounded by a town that was in large part hostile to my very existence, I was still a New Yorker, and the strangeness of the whole environment sometimes trumped the strangeness of being in a cult. One of the first things that I ordered in the local café was a traditional New York breakfast: a roll with butter and a “regular” coffee. Now what I meant by that was a buttered hard roll, you know, the kind with poppy or sesame seeds, and coffee with cream & sugar. What I got was a huge cinnamon roll with a cold pat of butter setting on top, a black coffee and some funny looks from the waitress, especially when I asked “What is this?” One of the things that a New Yorker quickly finds out upon leaving “The City” is that familiar foods are called different things in the outside world. The custom of calling coffee with cream & sugar “regular” is only one among many. Another is that New Yorkers are notoriously picky about what foods are appropriate for mustard and which ones take ketchup. Mustard is for hot dogs (or “franks”) and ketchup was for hamburgers. In fact, Heinz used to sell a ketchup-pickle relish mix called “hamburger relish” and still has one with mustard labeled “hot dog relish”. McDonald’s and Burger King both routinely put ketchup, mustard and pickles on their burgers except in New York City. My first McDonald’s hamburger with mustard on it was actually in Albany, New York, which was not the real New York, but that region referred to as “upstate”. Rueben sandwiches, a New York delicacy, feature corned beef, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, but what is called Russian dressing in New York is called Thousand Island salad dressing everywhere else in the United States. And then you have bagels. Thirty years later, bagels have appeared all over the country, or at least round bread that is called a “bagel”, but back in 1980, the farther you got from New York, the scarcer bagels became. Don’t get me started on what toppings are appropriate for pizzas!

In addition to missing the uniquely New York take on food, there were also some Nebraska oddities. One afternoon I stopped for lunch at the Fort Sidney Hotel Restaurant, where Gail worked as a waitress. As a side I had ordered a “Jell-O salad”, which I assumed would be some fruit mixed in with Jell-O. What arrived was a small square of Jell-O with what looked like a little curlicue of whipped cream on top. Except that the “whipped cream” turned out to be Miracle Whip! Augh! As I contemplated this affront to fine dining I was approached by one of the managers of the restaurant who informed me that no members of The Way would be welcome to eat at Fort Sidney. While in theory a business can refuse service to anyone this is the first time I had seen it applied in regard to a person’s religion. Later that day, the daily mail included a letter from our landlord, informing us that we would be required to vacate our duplex apartment no later than December 31^st. A visit to the landlord elicited “I ain’t gonna rent to no cult” as the reason for our eviction. People started accosting us in the street and screaming “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”; the clerk at the grocery store “rebuked” me in the produce aisle; the bulletin board at my job started to feature notes and articles about the “dangerous cult” loose in Sidney; and a town hall meeting was convened on the subject of “cults” (which we all attended!). Not satisfied with verbal abuse, Sidneyites started swerving their cars to try to run us over, throwing rocks at us and standing in front of our house cursing at us. Finally, there came “The Jericho March”.

Lurking behind all of this was Sidney’s religious establishment, and right in the middle of it all was our old pal Rev. Jerry Skinner, pastor of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Sometime in late January, just as we were finishing up a “twig” meeting, we noticed a yellow Mustang, which belonged to a prominent member of Rev. Jerry’s youth group, circling our block. Shortly thereafter we began to see people walking, two-by-two, past our house, apparently walking around our block. Steve and I snuck out the back door and hid in the darkness of our backyard, which, since it was on a corner lot, had a good view of the participants in this late night stroll. As we lay on our bellies in the grass, we noticed that everyone on this promenade was part of the Foursquare Church. Steve, struck with a brilliant idea, leapt up and joined the parade, which snaked around our block a few more times and ended up back at the church, just a few blocks away. Bundled up in a hat and scarf, Steve blended in with the crowd and was unrecognized as he slunk into a back pew. Rev. Jerry, leading his congregation in prayer, asked them to close their eyes. As part of his prayer, he talked about the purpose of that evening: a “Jericho March”, named after the march around the city of Jericho in the biblical Book of Joshua which resulted in the walls falling down after seven days of marching around the city, culminating in a seventh day march of seven times around the city, followed by trumpet blowing and yelling. They were claiming our block back for God, who thankfully did not see fit to knock down our walls. When the prayer was over, Jerry and his congregation opened their eyes to see Steve, who by this time had removed his hat and scarf in the indoor heat, grinning from ear to ear at the back of the church. Steve waved to the group and walked out. These people were crazy.

Shortly after this incident the leadership of The Way of Nebraska decided that we were being pulled out of Sidney and reassigned. On a lark Gail and I decided to invite Jerry over to the house for coffee. We talked about this and that, discussed the bible and how he wished that he had people like us in his youth group, that but for our error he admired our commitment. He then went on about how “The Lord” had told him about our reassignment and how did we feel about being split up. Gail asked him what he was talking about and Jerry replied that The Lord had revealed to him that two of us were leaving town and two of us were staying. Gail followed with the best comeback of the year, “Jerry, the Lord threw you a curve; we’re all leaving!” Later that week we began the second half of our year about two hours eastward, in Kearney Nebraska. 

After this episode I moved on to other life adventures. My experiences in Sidney and in The Way were chronicled in the So, You Want To Join A Cult series 

The "Nobody" Series:

Nobody Ever Joins A Cult

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

Nobody Wants to Move to Nebraska

Here I am, lying on my belly in the weeds in the alley behind my house with my roommate Steve, watching as people from the local church march around our block two-by-two. The Reverend Jerry Skinner, pastor of the Sidney Nebraska Foursquare Gospel Church (you can almost hear the “hallelujahs” and the Southern accent as you read that) has staged a “Jericho March” to reclaim for God the block that I live on. Apparently God had abandoned his claim to the block bordered by 12^th, 13^th, Dodge & Cedar Streets so Skinner and his youth group were going to get it back for The Lord by marching around the block seven times, although I don’t recall any shouting, trumpets or walls falling down. Welcome to Nebraska. 

Sometimes I’m convinced that some of my New York relatives think that I live in Oz, not Nebraska. They view my adopted home as an idyllic yet backward throwback to a bygone era. People have been amazed that I can get “Saturday Night Live” on television. They make fun of my Nebraska accent, apparently unaware that they have an accent. For years people asked me why I moved to Nebraska from the center of the known universe, new acquaintances still do and I uses always lie.

In the summer of 1979 I was twenty-one years old, working in a May’s department store in the Garden Center, pretending that I knew something about plants, living at home with my parents and four siblings having taken a year off from college since I had done so poorly in the previous semester. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life or where I was going. I had also been regularly attending meetings of a chapter of The Way International, manifesting itself locally as a Bible study group. In August of that year, after attending for the second time The Way’s annual event, The Rock of Ages, on their former farm outside of New Knoxville Ohio, I decided to get a better job, applying for and being hired as a clerk in E.F. Hutton & Company, a large stockbroker, and to move into a “Way Home”.

Earlier that year there had been a push, as there was every year, for people to volunteer for the Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program, where Way members could sign up for a year of what amounted to missionary work somewhere in the United States. Assured that I wouldn’t have to wear a tie with black pants and a white shirt adorned with a nametag identifying me as "Elder” I signed up, as had my boyhood friend Joe Tully, but I backed out at the last minute. Feeling guilty about not doing my part to “move the Word”, The Way’s jargon for proselytizing, I accepted an invitation to move into a house with three others, called a “Way Home”, where we would run fellowships (called “twigs” after the smallest part of the tree), recruit people into The Way and run Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. (See Nobody Ever Joins A Cult and the So, You Want To Join A Cult series for more information on PFAL)

Over a year earlier, just a few months before my twentieth birthday, I had taken The Way’s PFAL class and spent the next year somewhat on the fringes of involvement with the organization. I attended their home fellowships sporadically; the one in my neighborhood of Rosedale had disbanded when local leaders Joe and Tom both moved, Tom to spend a year in Nevada as a WOW and Joe to move into a Way Home in the Queens Village neighborhood, so attending regular fellowships took a little more effort than it had before, but over the next year, for a variety of reasons, I became more and more convinced that The Way was worthy of my support and commitment.

One of the things that helped The Way galvanize support with young people back in the seventies was the perception that it was a counter-cultural phenomenon. The PFAL class emphasized the things that made it different and (they claimed) better than mainstream Christianity. Teachings focused on how those who opposed us were those who were comfortable in their error and that we should expect resistance. Those who stuck with The Way and the PFAL doctrines internalized them in such a way that those who opposed them were seen as opposing the truth, opposing God himself. Many of us reveled in the idea that we were following God in the face of near-universal opposition. When we received the inevitable resistance from our families and friends, it seemed almost like a fulfillment of prophecy. And resist they did. 

It was a vicious circle (or is it a vicious cycle? — I never can remember which) with our parents expressing concern or disagreement and we kids expressing our newfound spirituality, each round escalating and pushing the sides farther apart, culminating with the parents convinced that their kids were brainwashed, “changed” in some nonspecific way and the kids convinced that their parents stood on the wrong side of the God fence. Everything that our parents did and said was evidence that they just didn’t understand, that they were unwilling to look beyond what they had grown up believing. And there was some truth in that. Most parents didn’t want to know the specifics of why we now believed things that were at odds with traditional beliefs; they were as ill-equipped as we were to discern the real errors in biblical research principles and gaps in logic, but the fact that it wasn’t what they had been brought up on was a good enough reason for them to reject it. On the other hand, everything that we kids did and said was evidence to our parents that we had gone off the deep end. We were arrogant in our newfound knowledge and condescending to those who we perceived as ignorant and willfully blind. Of course our superior and holier-than-thou attitude was going to grate on them, of course our withdrawal from them and everything they had taught us would be hurtful. Parents and children were each basing their decisions on different premises. Both generations remained a mystery to the other, unaware of the other’s motivations and unwilling to find out what they were.

So here I was, in late August of 1979, moving into a Way Home with three other people that I barely knew, the first time that I had lived anywhere other than under my parents’ roof. After spending a year and a half on the periphery of The Way I had made a decision to commit myself more fully to “moving the Word of God”. Bernie, one of my fellow students from my initial PFAL class, would be the Way Home Coordinator and Twig Leader (Way jargon for household Bible fellowship leader). Two women, Wanda and Beverly, would be sharing the home as well. I was fully expecting to live a lifestyle that centered on God and ‘His Word’, i.e. The Bible, to spend my non-working hours surrounded by people who wanted to serve God as much as I did, and to see ‘signs, miracles and wonders’ come to pass in my life. The reality wasn’t quite so rosy.

Bernie, appointed as our fearless leader by other, even more fearless leaders farther up ‘The Way Tree’, turned out to be a heavy drinker who had lost his job due to his drinking and spent his 9-5’s pretending to go to work, and using our rent and utility money to finance his boozing. (Amazing how leaders who claimed to have a direct pipeline to God often missed simple, obvious things like this.) It was several months before we found out, but in the meantime, we were far from living a life of Christian fellowship and love. We hardly ever ate meals together and saw each other only rarely. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to be doing or what the point was to this Way Home. Late in the year we found out where our money was going when Beverly, home sick from work, tried to call her employer and found that our phone was disconnected. After walking to the pay phone on the corner, and calling the phone company, she discovered that the phone bill hadn’t been paid for several months — additional calls uncovered the fact that we were also behind on the electric bill, heating oil, water and the rent. All of our money could now be found in the cash drawer at the corner bar. That evening we confronted Bernie with this information and brought in the Branch Coordinator, who was the leader for about seven or eight fellowships and Way Homes in our section of Queens. It was decided that Bernie would continue to live with us, but would be replaced as leader — by me (yes, that’s as scary as it sounds), and that he would pay us back in full by paying all the bills that had been delinquent over the previous several months. Less than a month later all of the checks that Bernie was using to pay the past due rent and utilities bounced. Wanda, Beverly and I decided to throw him out of the house without any input from our so-called leadership — who supposedly had a direct pipeline to God. 

Even without Bernie around things didn’t get any better, we still didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing or why we were doing it; no one seemed inclined to enlighten us. The consensus among the local leaders and accepted by us was that Bernie had screwed things up so badly that we needed to just start all over, move people around and hope for the best. Besides, with Bernie gone, my mother was nervous that I was living alone with two women!

The New Year began with me being transferred to a different Way Home. Things seemed better. We were organized, ate meals together, witnessed together, pooled our money to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries and we had people flocking to the house to hear us teach the Bible. The Way Home Coordinator, Eddie, ran the Spanish language twig while I lead the English language twig. We convinced people to enroll in PFAL classes and experienced things that we interpreted as miracles — I thought I was finally immersed in that “Word-centered” lifestyle that I had been hearing so much about.

One of the things that we believed in The Way was that illnesses and disease could be miraculously healed. Part and parcel of the Law of Believing was that healing was a “manifestation” of the spirit, i.e. if the right biblically specified conditions were met, the desired result would naturally follow. So, not knowing any better, we would often pray for people after our twig meetings and usually they would appear to be healed. Twig attendees started bringing friends and relatives to get prayed for and healed; when they saw results they started inviting their friends and relatives. Eventually, our little group of half a dozen swelled to over thirty. And here I was a twenty-one year-old college student, ringmaster at the greatest show in Richmond Hill, or at least on Metropolitan Avenue.

Although things looked better on the surface, there were some seamy doings lurking just below the surface. Eddie held down a fairly well-paying job as an electrician, but despite being outwardly stable, spent most of his paycheck on alcohol. Eddie was disrespectful and dismissive of our local leaders, fighting them every step of the way and resisting their instructions, but in turn demanding that the people in his fellowship obey his directives without question. While there was more structure and direction at this new Way Home, there were still the same problems with ego, personality and the huge disconnect between the ideals of living for God and the reality of day-to-day life.

The company line at The Way International in those days was that to really grow as a believer, you had to “go WOW”, that is, serve for a year as a Word Over the World Ambassador, volunteering to be sent anywhere that God supposedly led the leadership of The Way to send you. On fire with some of the apparent success in the God business, and wanting to really grow, I decided that I would indeed “go WOW”, reasoning that I hadn’t yet fully committed myself to service to god and that this would do it. The process for going out as a WOW started with an application that was supposedly reviewed by the Limb (state) Coordinator with input from local leaders, although in practice few if any were ever rejected, including those patently unfit for the program. Applicants who passed this hurdle then were required to attend the Rock of Ages festival, held during the second full week of August at The Way’s headquarters on a former farm in northwest Ohio. WOW Training, the details of which changed regularly, took place at “The Rock”, including a second interview by someone on the staff of the WOW program. At this point in Way history, the WOW’s were the focal point of the whole Rock of Ages. Incoming WOW’s were “welcomed home” during opening night festivities while outgoing WOW’s were treated like royalty or like soldiers going off to war. At Rock of Ages 1980, the year I went out as a WOW, we received our assignments on Friday night, the festival’s sixth night, and we were sent off after night seven.

At our training session on Friday afternoon we all received envelopes with numbers on them that corresponded to the seven regions that the Way in the United States was divided into. We were given strict instruction to keep them sealed until told otherwise at the evening teaching in the ‘Big Top’, the huge circus tent where the major events of the Rock of Ages took place. I sat with folks from my twig and branch who were also going out as WOW’s as they opened up their envelopes — Chicago, Illinois!; Denver, Colorado!; Dallas, Texas!; Seattle, Washington!; and so on, until finally I opened my envelope — “Sidney, Nebraska" —  I sort of knew where Nebraska was, mainly because my old buddy Joe Tully had been sent to Fremont, Nebraska the year before, but Sidney? I had no idea what I was in for.

On Saturday morning I met with my new “family”. Steve, from Texas, 20 years old and the appointed leader of our little group by virtue of his status as a student in the Way Corps leadership program; Gail, from Philadelphia and a veteran of a previous WOW year; and Rosemarie, a relatively new follower of The Way from California. Included in the rules and regulations for the WOW program was a restriction on how much money you could take with you. Whether you had a bank account with inexhaustible funds, or didn’t have a dime to your name, you were required to leave the Rock of Ages grounds with exactly $300 in Travelers Cheques per person. For some people this meant scrimping and saving to collect $300, for others it meant being on the honor system to refrain from accessing their bank account for a year. The limit of $300 was to encourage us to "believe God" for our needs, rather than depend on a big bank account. A recurring figure at the Rock of Ages was the PFAL grad who decided at the last minute to go out as a WOW and spent all week asking people to “bless him” with money so that he could get the required $300 together. I was closer to the scrimping and saving side of things myself, but didn’t have to resort to panhandling.

The first Rock of Ages festival took place in 1971. Called initially “The Return of the Rock of Ages” it was the musical portion of a weekend “advance” (The Way didn’t like to use the word “retreat”) at the end of their summer school series of classes and seminars. At this time The Way was still relatively small, having only made inroads among young people within the previous two or three years. During the summer of 1971 V.P. Wierwille, The Way’s leader, authorized a group of about a dozen people that he called “Ambassadors” to travel around the country “witnessing”, i.e. registering people for his PFAL classes and generally working on increasing The Way’s numbers. He decided to make this experiment a continuing program and during the Return of the Rock of Ages weekend, he announced that he was seeking volunteers to go out for a year as part of this new outreach effort. The volunteers came back to his New Knoxville farm in October for “training” and were sent out to expand The Way’s base. A year later, the Second Annual Rock of Ages Festival was held to welcome the returning WOW’s back, and to send out a new group. (“Return of” had been dropped and any reference to the 1970 event was called simply “The First Rock of Ages”) A hallmark of The Way was changing the past to fit in with the present. Rather than the spur-of-the-moment idea that it actually was, the WOW program was described as well thought through and godly inspired.

This continued every August until 1995. The first several festivals took place at a local fairgrounds, until 1978 when it returned to the former farm that was the Way’s headquarters, where it remained until the final Rock of Ages. Starting out as a weekend get together, “The Rock” gradually became a seven-day affair before settling at six days for most of the eighties and into the nineties. Initially just a bare bones music and teaching event, it expanded into the central event of the Way year with specialized seminars, a bookstore, plays and continual entertainment.

My first Rock of Ages was in 1978, a few months after I had taken the PFAL class in New York. A group of people were heading out from Queens and I was recruited to help drive. At this point I wasn’t particularly active in the organization, but I was always up for a road trip. I took off with no idea where I was going to stay, how to get where I was going or what I was going to do once I got there: the perfect adventure! The car I was driving belonged to a couple with several small children who were going to be WOW’s that year. The husband was already in Ohio; my job was to drive the car so the wife could take care of the kids. Three other carloads of Way people travelled with us in a caravan. (“Caravans” were part of Way road trip culture)  After driving all day we arrived at the headquarters of The Way International and pulled into a large muddy field that had been converted into a giant parking lot. We slept in our cars overnight and awoke to find that the giant parking lot, relatively empty when we arrived about midnight, now harbored thousands of vehicles with more pouring in every minute. My first “Rock” went a long way toward convincing me that The Way was more than just a local group of Bible-thumpers. I was impressed with how well everyone got along and how clean and orderly the grounds were. Two years later I was to enter those same grounds as an outgoing WOW Ambassador.

In 1980, after our new “WOW Family” met, we had to work out transportation to our new assignment. There was no requirement that a prospective WOW actually have a means of transportation, so many did not. Looking back, it was probably this, rather than any great spiritual insight, that determined who would go where. Of the two groups of four people going out to western Nebraska there were two vehicles with a total of six seats between them. Two of us, Rosemarie and I, would catch a ride with some folks from Grand Island, in the central part of Nebraska, who owned a big yellow school bus. So far so good…until the bus threw a rod about ¾ of the way across Iowa and we were stranded, sleeping on the bus and in the tents that it was a good thing that we had; several folks stuck out their thumbs and hitch hiked back to Nebraska.

I was one of the folks who decided to stick it out and wait until the bus got fixed. We pitched our tents behind the gas station and pooled our resources to buy food at the café that was part of the service plaza. On the second day a flatbed truck carrying a load of pipes landed in a ditch and turned over, dumping its load. The station owner hired all of us guys to help reload the truck, which took all day, and ended up paying for all the food we were eating, if not the repairs on the bus.

Eventually we got the bus fixed and met up with the other half of our group, arriving in Sidney on a Friday afternoon, only five days behind schedule. Somehow I convinced myself that this wasn’t a harbinger of doom.

The "Nobody" Series:

Nobody Ever Joins A Cult

Nobody Likes Your Favorite Band

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part V (The Milieu of the Gospels and Apocalypticism)

It is important to understand the society during Biblical times. 

Around the eighth century BCE, according to the Tanakh, the Jewish people were divided into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. Around 720 BCE Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and deported most of the inhabitants while subjugating the southern kingdom of Judah as vassals. Around 150 years later the Neo-Babylonian Empire defeated Judah and there ceased to be an independent Jewish state until the brief reign of the Hasmonaeans. At the time of Jesus the Romans had taken over Judea via the client kingdom of the Edomite Herod family. Many Jews were extremely unhappy with being under the thumb of yet another foreign nation, especially after independence was still within living memory. 

The religious environment was tied closely to the political. After centuries of military defeats and rule by foreigners, after the destruction of their temple, and things generally just not going their way, a fatalistic view took hold: apocalypticism. The apocalyptic view was that it was futile to try to change the world through human efforts; that the world itself was under the power of evil and that the only way things were going to change was when God directly intervened and overthrew the existing order and ushered in a "Kingdom of God".  There were various strains of apocalypticism during this time, with characters such as "The Son of Man" and "The Messiah", references to reestablishing the Davidic monarchy and descriptions of what the "End of Days" would be like. This was the milieu in which Jesus lived and preached. If you read the Gospels like an historian it's fairly obvious that this is what Jesus preached as well. 

If you focus on the actions that Jesus told people that they needed to do to gain the "Kingdom of God" (or "Kingdom of Heaven", or sometimes simply "The Kingdom") it was very clear that it was the actions, and not believing in him, or accepting him, that got you into the Kingdom. I'm aware that there are sections that focus on believing in order to attain eternal life. A good case can be made that the later Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, represent a later development among the Christian Church, and were not what the historical Jesus taught. What Jesus taught was that pretty soon, within the lifetime of those he was preaching to, God would intervene in the world, throw down the kingdoms of the world, and establish God's kingdom on Earth. His comments about rejecting family, rejecting worldly goods, and especially riches makes sense in this context. It made no sense to to plan for the long term because he didn't think there would be a long term. He wasn't out to make the world a better place, because he didn't think "the world" was going to be around long enough to be made better. He was focused on giving individuals the opportunity to be better so that they would be able to enter the Kingdom of God. He gave instructions to his followers to change their ways so that they would make the cut when the Godly New World Order came to pass. Anyone who didn't straighten up and fly right would be outside gnashing their teeth or maybe getting vaporized by destroying fire. 

The first written Christian documents after Jesus left the scene, the epistles of Paul, also started out with the assumption that the New Heaven and New Earth were coming soon, although with Paul, the focus wasn't primarily on actions but on belief.

Did I mention they thought that this would happen soon?

This doesn't mean that loving your neighbor and living the way Jesus told people to live isn't a good thing, but the reason Jesus gave for living that way turned out to be mistaken. God didn't overthrow the kingdoms of the world and establish his kingdom within Jesus' generation — or ever. Jesus was wrong.

Oops.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part VI

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants to Fail That Drug Screening)

As a high school and college student I tried a fair share of marijuana, (which, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale) but my use was what I call in retrospect “situational”; if I was around people who were smoking, I smoked; if I wasn’t, I rarely sought it out. I stopped smoking soon after I “found religion” in 1978, and stayed away from it during the years that my children were growing up, but in 2001, newly single, and apparently going through a second adolescence, I rediscovered the evil weed.

Pam was one of my closest friends during the interregnum between marriages; she used to hang around O’Rourke’s, one of my favorite pubs, writing poetry in the afternoons at one of the back tables, all by herself. She dated my good buddy Drew, who also wrote poetry (as did I) and played a black Fender guitar (as I did not) that he named “Zero”. On one occasion I loaned Drew $80 so that he wouldn’t have to pawn his beloved Zero. Holding on to Zero myself while I awaited repayment. Drew fancied himself a drinker, but more often than not he fell asleep in the booth or started an argument with the bartender and got himself thrown out. I first met Drew one night at O’Rourke’s as I sat waiting for Sheila (not her real name), a woman who I had been dating for a few weeks, who was also an accomplished drinker. On one particular night Sheila arrived at O’Rourke’s, where we usually met when she finished work at ten on weekend nights to find me deep in conversation with Valerie (possibly her real name), a college girl with whom I often discussed politics and Nostradamus. Even though I excused myself from my conversation about 14^th century prophets and George W. Bush’s alleged lack of intellect, Sheila, who I had not previously suspected of jealousy, reasoning that her profusion of male friends precluded any problems with me having female friends, assumed that I had another girl on the side and let her ire manifest itself by flirting with Drew, who was about 30 years her junior. Drew and I became good pals after this, and happened to be sitting on adjoining barstools when Sheila, after yet another bout of raging jealousy tried to  apologize to me as I explained to her my low tolerance for baseless jealousy and psychotic behavior in general. (I had walked Sheila home from the bar and then on to my own apartment. I arrived home to find two messages on the answering machine from her and a third in progress, accusing me of cheating on her and demanding that I never set foot in O’Rourke’s again.) 

On that night Drew suggested that I find a girlfriend for him, since, despite all evidence to the contrary he thought I was a good judge of women. I began introducing him to women that I didn’t know who came up to refill their drinks until finally one of them sat down with us and offered him her phone number. We ended up sitting with this young woman and one of her friends for the rest of the evening; it was on this night that it sunk in that to most twenty-three year old women, forty-four year old guys were either invisible or “that safe old guy” who reminded them of their dads, or occasionally the “creepy old guy”. Drew never called that woman back because within the next few days he started dating Pam.

Pam was kind of a hippie-chick type. She wore a lot of tie-dye clothes and scarves and purposely stayed out of the sun making her one of the whitest white people that I’ve ever met. With five other people she lived in a sort of a commune south of the city called “The Flying Fish Farm”. Drew and Pam came together through their poetic leanings, though I had met Pam before through other mutual friends, it was by way of my friendship with Drew that we really got to know each other. Since we were closer in age than she and Drew, in some ways we had more in common and often would hang out while she was waiting for Drew or I was waiting for my girlfriend du jour. We would have long rambling conversations about religion and philosophy and in some ways she helped me start down the spiritual path that I now find myself on. She and her housemates at the Flying Fish Farm hosted Equinox and Solstice parties where I was exposed to a variety of ideas and lifestyles. The first time that I ever saw tarot cards was Pam’s hand-drawn deck.

One evening Pam asked me to accompany her to the home of Mark (his real name — he has since departed this mortal plane), her pot supplier. Mark had a specific way of peddling his wares. If you wanted to buy from him, you had to go to his house, sit in his living room, listen to music and smoke a joint or two with him, and then, and only then, would he sell you anything. So here I am, twenty three years since I last regularly smoked pot, sitting cross legged on the floor, blissfully floating through clouds of cannabis smoke and banging a wooden frog with a stick while we all sang The Doors’ Riders on the Storm. Finally Mark brings out his sales kit: a big Rubbermaid© container filled with weed, and closes a sale with Pam, who promptly gets up and leaves me there. To be fair to Pam, she didn’t exactly abandon me, I was pretty happy with the circumstances, and smoked a few more with Mark before getting up on my numb legs, fuzzily trying to recall with my numb brain which direction was home (happily, only about 8 blocks away) and staggered home, my whole body buzzing contentedly.

As it turned out, a lot of the people that I was associating with during this time were heavy pot smokers, so the situation was almost always favorable for lighting up. For something that is illegal, has always been illegal, and will probably remain illegal for the foreseeable future if the local Republicans get their way, there sure are a lot of people who smoke weed. During the slightly less than two years that I was engaging in this illicit activity, I was constantly amazed at the number of co-workers, friends, and casual acquaintances who regularly got high. Of course, most of them were amazed when they found out that I was getting high too.

The incident with Pam & Mark was actually the second time that I had lit up during Adolescence Part II. During the first summer that I was single I had been given two tickets to a B.B. King concert, with The Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood & the Destroyers, and Joe Bonamassa, (the opening act before anyone knew who he was) playing at an outdoor venue in Council Bluffs. My buddy Mike (also since passed away) and I were sitting in our lawn chairs, drinking Budweisers and enjoying the blues when a guy who closely resembled Jerry Garcia sat down next to us and started rolling joints, lighting them up and passing them around. The first couple of times I just passed it on, happy to be experiencing the music, but after a while I decided to take a hit, then another, and another. Ah, yes, I remember this. Now I just had to get home. As we sat in the parking lot in line behind hundreds of other cars, I glanced in my rear view mirror and was stunned to see that the car behind me was racing toward me up the hill. It was only just before impact that I realized that he wasn’t running into me, but I had let my foot off the brake and was rolling downhill into him. After the impact, the situation was quickly resolved when it was determined that not only was there no damage to either car, but no one in either vehicle was anxious to bring to the attention of the local constabulary the less than legal level of sobriety of all the incident’s participants.

One of my favorite hangouts during my second childhood was O’Rourke’s Tavern on O Street a few blocks from my apartment. One of the things that made O’Rourke’s a destination bar for me, other than the pretty Scottish barmaid, was that the clientele was extremely varied: all age groups, college kids to retirees; different socio-economic groups, from judges and politicians to people who couldn’t spell “socio-economic” and might even have a problem spelling “group”. One evening my friend Ken and another guy came into the bar, fresh from a discussion group about the Earth as a living, self-aware organism: “Gaia”. When I was told what the topic was I spouted off my own opinion about the subject. Ken smugly looked at his companion and said “I told you that the first person we talked to in here would be able to hold forth on ‘Gaia’!”

O’Rourke’s was also traditionally the last bar to shut down for “last call”; people flocked in from all the other bars to get their last drink of the night at O’Rourke’s. This meant that a seat right at the bar was highly sought-after from 12:45 – 1:00AM, (before the city extended closing time to 2:00 AM) because if you were sitting there, you could easily make eye contact with the bartender, resulting in quick service, while all the latecomers had to stand a row or two back, waving twenty dollar bills at the staff who raced back and forth trying to get everybody served before the lights came on at 1:00 sharp. Now just because O’Rourke’s bartenders were willing to serve you up to the last possible minute, didn’t mean that they were going to jeopardize the liquor license. It’s a City Ordinance that all drinks must be taken away from bar patrons no later than 15 minutes after the theoretical closing time. So, after frantically serving all the last minute drinkers, the bartenders came out from behind the bar, confiscating pool cues, unplugging the pin ball machines and yelling at everyone to drink up, yanking glasses and bottles out of people’s hands and pushing them out the door if it got too close for comfort to the danger zone time starting at 1:15AM. Then we all kind of stood around on the sidewalk outside, watching the cops rough up drunken Huskers fans and laughing at guys making that last ditch effort to get the girl of their dreams to go home with them, and to see if any “after parties” were forming.

One night, my buddy Kevin (also deceased — I see a pattern here) and I were standing outside O’Rourke’s at 1:16AM, when we were invited to one of the notorious “after parties” by a couple of our younger acquaintances. Neither one of us had to work the next morning, so, after being out all night drinking beer, we agreed that staying up all morning and drinking more beer was a great idea. After retrieving my car from my apartment parking lot a few blocks away, we took off. Along the way, Kevin and I decided that we should demonstrate that we, two guys in our forties, could keep up with all the younger guys and close down this party no matter how late it lasted. I admit that we cheated a little. Our twenty- and thirty-something party companions were chugging back the cheap beers, while Kevin and I operated with finesse the fine art of nursing a drink. It helps that most beer bottles are brown, thereby disguising the level of liquid in a bottle at any given time, and that nobody checked when one of us put down an almost-full bottle in order to accept a fresh (i.e. colder-than-room-temperature) brew.

One of the guests that morning was Angie, a young woman who Kevin and I had seen around O’Rourke’s but who neither of us knew very well. Sometime close to sunrise, Angie approached Kevin and me with a problem. She had given a ride from O’Rourke’s to Jamie, a guy who had apparently thought taxi service was actually foreplay; Angie asked if we would give her suitor a ride home to spare her an uncomfortable situation. We readily agreed. (Of course we agreed — we were drunk and an attractive woman was asking us for a favor) A short time later we heard Jamie; amorous, yet transportationless, badgering Angie for a ride home and being informed that we were his new ride. This was not a welcome revelation to Jamie, as he surveyed us two non-females, and he informed us that no thank you, he was going home with Angie (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean squire? (Monty Python, of course). Now at this point, despite the beer-nursing subterfuge, Kevin and I had been drinking steadily for about eight hours, possibly nine or ten, and it’s common knowledge, many really, really, stupid things seem like good ideas after a few adult beverages. Well, our what-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time plan was to grab Jamie and forcibly escort him to my car, where we roughly threw him in the back seat, Kevin holding him down while I quickly started it up and took off. We thought this was quite reasonable, although, not surprisingly, Jamie did not agree with our assessment, dissenting so thoroughly that he refused to give us his address so that we could drop him off, but not quite bold enough or irritated enough at the circumstances to jump out of the car, which I was driving randomly around downtown Lincoln. The conversation, as one might imagine was scintillating, Jamie’s side consisted of snippets like “You bastards, you kidnapped me!” while Kevin and I alternated with variations of “Did you really think that you were getting laid? Eventually Jamie admitted that the chance that he would have been engaged in sex with Angie was indeed vanishingly small and gave us his address, while Kevin and I allowed that we probably shouldn’t have risked the involvement of the F.B.I. by kidnapping him. We saw Jamie many times after that, but he never, ever admitted to anyone that he knew us. Angie on the other hand made sure that everyone knew that “the old dudes”, as she began calling us, had saved her with an impromptu abduction; she once dumped a guy in mid-date when he questioned why she was so nice to us “old dudes”, offered to beat up women who broke our hearts and saved seats for us on busy nights.  For some reason though, she drew the line at us hitting on her mom.

A lot of things contributed to my ending my dalliance with marijuana: drug testing at work, thinking hard about the consequences, both the legal ones and the effect on my relationships, but the very last time that I smoked any was enough to make me kick the habit for good. Kevin and I decided to attend another of the infamous after parties, this time at the home of the notorious Mark, where pot smoking was sure to be on the agenda. By the time I arrived at Mark’s, I had already consumed more beer than was good for me, and downed still more sitting on Mark’s ratty couch. But it was the multiple pipes full of weed that did me in. After a while the room started to spin and I felt an overwhelming need to get some fresh air, because somehow I had reasoned that the sensation that the room was spinning could be eliminated by going outside where the whole street would be spinning. As I sat on the curb across from Mark’s apartment puking, and then puking some more, much to the amusement of the party taking place next door. Eventually Kevin and some of the other guys came out to check on me and it was determined (as much as the word “determined” can be applied to a bunch of guys stoned on top of being roaring drunk at three in the morning) that Kevin would drive me home in my car and get me into my apartment. I was a pitiful sight, throwing up every couple of minutes and curled up in the front seat as Kevin took the wheel. We figured we were safe for the eight block trip back to the Hovel, since they were all residential streets and it was hours since the bars closed, meaning the police were not out in force looking for drunks like ourselves.  It promised to be an uneventful ride home until the white Cadillac driven by a guy who looked like B.B. King pulled out of a side street and in front of us with a patrol car pulling in behind us. This was not an ideal situation, so we turned off west on the next cross street as B.B. and the cops headed north. Kevin took the first available right, carefully aware that downtown Lincoln is a maze of one-way streets, only to have the Caddy pull in front of us again, and again the LPD cruiser pulled in behind us. This time we turned east and meandered around for a few minutes trying to get back on track when B.B. King and his big white Cadillac turned into our path with the police car getting behind us once more. This low speed chase went on for about a half hour, with the cops staying far enough behind the weirdly calm old man that we ended up sandwiched between the two again and again. In my diminished state I became convinced that it was a hallucination. Eventually Kevin navigated my Pontiac 6000 into the Hovel’s parking lot without further incident. I stuck to beer for the next 22 years.