“I was so tired, and I had been so frightened, and here it was warm and safe. Gradually my heart calmed again and my breath wasn’t coming in gasps, and I could observe and listen to the speaker. I didn’t think much of him. Short, dark, with a heavy accent, he was talking about things I didn’t understand, and I found him very boring, much like the professors at school. Then he was finished. The choir sang a hymn. I didn’t know it. It was one of the new ones published by the Church a few years ago. There was something about it, though…. I analyzed what it was and decided that the composer had deliberately copied the style of Ravel’s Bolero, the same insistence, the same hypnotic building up to a smashing climax. Later I knew I was wrong about that, but then I was feeling smug and superior, and almost sorry for the poor innocent ones there who didn’t have the background to see what was being done. The hymn ended, and when the lights went down that had illuminated the choir, Brother Cox was standing on the dais. As if by magic. I had been watching critically and I hadn’t seen him enter. I still don’t know how he does that.
“There was a yellow light on him. I was close enough to see how bronzed he was, how healthy-looking, how alive. His hair and beard gleamed, his eyes shone as if he were giving off light. I was wishing that I had a notebook to make notes on it all. I was fascinated and repelled. But when he began to speak…. And here is the mystery: I had heard the same things from other people who had been converted, and I had read of him, and of course, in my home, we had discussed the Church and all it implied, but when I heard Brother Cox talk about it, explain the real reasons for his faith, explain the significance of the Church and what it was doing and what it stood for, I knew he was right. It was that simple. I was still able to observe the cleverness of the organization in the lighting, and the buildup to this moment, but even with this objective consideration of the mechanics of the proceedings, I knew that what he had to say warranted any means of gaining attention long enough for the people to understand it all.
“All about me the lights were flickering like fireflies, and there was no sound in the auditorium except for his voice, and his voice was in my ears. In the ears of everyone there. I know it is an acoustical trick done with electronics, but it has a purpose: it symbolizes how Brother Cox receives his messages from God. It is the Voice of God speaking to each one of us through this chosen man.
“I can’t repeat what Brother Cox said that night. It is all documented, all on record, and for me to add to that record would be redundant. The non-believers won’t accept the truth of his words, and the believers don’t need further proof. Instead, I will try to explain my own feeling that night. I had been stumbling about in wolf country, daring fate, tempting evil to myself. I had had no religious training as a child. I didn’t believe in God, any God. I didn’t see that He was necessary, or even possible. If I had been tempted to believe in Him, I would have despised Him for all the evil He allowed to exist. God was an invention of man, used to excuse man his weaknesses, used as magic to bring about the unobtainable, used as a scapegoat to be blamed for the wickedness of man to man. I didn’t need such a God. I rejected him and relied on reason and humanism, as my parents did before me. I don’t blame them. They had rejected the same false god that I had cast from my life. They didn’t know that Brother Cox is invoking, not that false god, but the true God that the churchmen and scholars and secular interests had taken from mankind. They knew nothing about the space travel that would become a reality in this century; they had grown up in an age where other worlds, travel between suns, other people were fantasies of writers who were published in cheap pulps. They could not visualize or conceptualize a God of the Universe, the entire universe, not just this poor planet Earth. Not an anthropomorphic God, but a God who is so vast, so unimaginable, so unlike anything dreamed up by the poets and the prophets that to speak of Him in the same breath as the Biblical god of the ancients is to blaspheme. And this God is locked in immortal battle with Forces of Evil that are as vast as He is. This is the message of Brother Cox. A drop of water is not the ocean, yet who can believe in the ocean until he has witnessed it? A grain of sand is not the beach. But a blind man can be led to the beach and walk for miles on it, feeling the presence of the sea, feeling the stir within himself that proclaims this to be the ocean and the beach and come to believe in them without ever having seen them with his eyes. And once he has accepted their existence, the drop of water and the grain of sand can symbolize the boundless ocean and the endless beach. This is how I have come to accept this vast, unimaginable God. I have felt His Presence, have been stirred by the currents from within myself yearning for Him. I know He is. I can’t prove it, but I don’t have the need to prove it. Just as the blind man can deny the existence of the ocean and the beach by withholding himself from it, so can the non-believers continue to deny His existence. But the ocean is, nevertheless. The beach is. God is.
“The answer to those non-believers who claim that the Church threatens their lives is an answer I recall from my own childhood. My father, one of the most tolerant of men, a man of ethics so Godlike that I must believe him, said that any religion must be permitted just so long as it does not threaten mankind. The Catholic Church at the time, he said, was threatening mankind, all of mankind, with its policy on birth control. It was no longer enough for them to acknowledge the rights of others to practice birth control if they so chose, they were threatening mankind by their own adherence to dogma. So we see today that the non-believers are threatening mankind by their acceptance of the atheistic dogma that the Star Child is property belonging to the U.N. By refusing to accept God’s word that He will come to the aid of mankind only if His house, this Earth, is in order, the atheists are threatening to open Earth to the strangers when they return full of wrath and seeking vengeance. Today universal birth control is a fact although the Catholic Church was virtually destroyed in the battle to establish it. Mankind was saved, the Church was lost. Again mankind must be saved. At whatever the cost.”
That ended the essay.
INTERLUDE SIX
Time Magazine, March 1990
In Dayton’s Coliseum, angry short-haired Christians stormed the latest-three-ring-circus service of Halleluja Shouter Obie Cox. After the two-hour brawl, 250 were treated for bloody noses, broken ribs, and assorted injuries. Firemen put out a blaze in the robing rooms, but not before flames had destroyed the street costumes of Cox’s all girl Heavenly Choir. Later in the week, charging Dayton’s finest with negligence, Cox’s strong-arm man, Robert Merton, announced the Voice of God Church would form its own private good squad, the Militant Millenniumists. Showing newsmen an artist’s sketch of their uniform (dove gray, with black belts, black boots, armbands), Merton said the MM will be trained and equipped like the U.S. Army, will recruit its members from among white, VofG churchgoers, aged 20–40, 5′11″ to 6′6″, weighing 175–230.
Governor Lyman Purdy of Kentucky, long a devoted Coxman, said he saw nothing wrong in the formation of such a private army. Justice Department head Elmore Freed, away on a fishing trip with Coxbacker William S. Jones, was unavailable far comment.”