Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(27)

Then, more skits. Here’s another: There’s a kid who’s rebellious, always complaining. One day, she’s out selling posters to the heathens. The posters had a picture on the front, a favorite being a cartoon caricature of random cultures—an Asian with a pointed hat, a cowboy, an Arab in a robe—holding hands around a globe. There’d be a message on the back, something about Jesus and the Family. I don’t know. I never read one. The point is they called it witnessing, because of the message, but it felt an awful lot like begging. Because it was.

Anyway, in the skit the rebellious kid doesn’t want to sell posters anymore. She complains. A demon hears her complaining, because demons are everywhere. And he piggybacks on her, right into the home. Now there’s a demon in the home. Scary shit. Everyone’s bickering and complaining. There’s a cool kitchen scene where the kids are all laughing at a dumb joke—being foolish—and the stove catches fire. It’s fucking chaos. So they hold a fellowship, figure out which little brat brought the demon home, and perform an exorcism.

   When I first saw this skit, it was particularly timely because it was performed right after one of my own exorcisms, for being gay. But the skit was the PG version. None of the beating and screaming. And for dramatic effect, they cut the exorcism down to a couple minutes. A real exorcism could last days. Depended, really, on how long it took a kid to break. Someone holding you down, sometimes sitting on your head so that you could hardly breathe. Someone hitting you with a belt, flyswatter, paddle, whatever. The whole time screaming and cursing at you, I mean at the demon to come out of you.

But it felt a lot like they were screaming at me. Funny what you can do to a kid when you tell yourself it’s for their own good, you’re saving their soul, when you tell yourself you’re serving God. They’d give me something to read. Make me write something about what I’d read. Pray about that and hope I’d shown sufficient contrition. I don’t remember much about the exorcisms. I learned to shut off my mind, crawl inside the dark, and I wondered, Is this how you go crazy? But they didn’t show any of that in the skit version. Just prayed and shouted a little at the demon. And hallelujah, the home was saved. Let us pray.

Kneeling, ass on my ankles, face in my hands—the desperate prayer pose, more effective than passive prayer, hand-holding prayer, casual prayer. My legs would go numb. Sometimes I’d doze off, but never for long. My knees would burn. My elbows and forearms would start to lose feeling. And we would chant.

   The chanting could last for minutes or hours during a fellowship. We’d kneel with our faces on our hands, until someone spoke in tongues. Soon everyone would join in. Tongues sound like gibberish because it’s gibberish. I had to fake it because it’s bullshit. But according to the Family’s interpretation of the book of Acts, tongues are the spirit speaking through you. Or Jesus, who speaks in King James English. I know this because another person in the room would shout out the interpretation of someone else’s gibberish prophecy. Usually some Bible verse or “I have heard my people beseeching me and will bestow my blessing upon them”–type shit.

Here’s the thing, these people weren’t faking it. It was real. The Holy Spirit. The gift of tongues. All of it. It was fucking gibberish, but this wasn’t something they believed. They knew. They knew the sputtering syllable salad coming from their mouths was the Holy Spirit possessing them, speaking through them, finger-banging them into fucking ecstasy.

They all knew it, felt it. And they all understood it. I know it was real because I watched it happen for years. There would sometimes be another kid I could make eye contact with, but we’d always look away, afraid to be known, even to one another, as not having the Holy Spirit. You never did know who’d catch it next. But those who caught it, those who could feel it, those whose brains were wired to catch a mass delusion, to flood their senses with oxytocin, they were fucking levitating.

   The prophecies continued, the tongues, the chanting when those faded, “hallelujahthankyoujesuspraiseyoulord,” until the Spirit returned and taught us the language of angels. We wept openly. We laid hands on those of us who spoke in tongues, those who got the prophecy. Someone would end the prayer with an amen, and shout “Revolution.” We’d respond with “For Jesus” and a three-finger salute, again and again. Until finally, we’d sing “My Family, My Family” again. Not a dry eye in the room. Including mine. It wasn’t hard to make the tears come. All I had to think about was what would happen if they knew.

For weeks after a fellowship, the home would run like a machine—record fundraising, new contacts for food and supplies, new trips planned to go preach the Gospel (and sell shitty posters and tapes), dazed adults who’d stop you in the hall for a hug and to tell you they loved you, kids happily scrubbing even behind the toilet bowl. Most of the kids anyway. I rarely felt so alone as I did in the aftermath of a spiritual awakening. I’d live in terror I’d be found out. I’d pretend. But I knew I was as obvious as a fucking cop in a Phish T-shirt at a rave. I was terrified that at any moment, someone would point to me and shout, “Systemite!” For the rest of the home, the catharsis, the bonding, the high they’d felt, was indisputable proof of their belonging.

This is the point of the fasting, the singing of familiar songs with known motions, the sweating and physical contact, the marching, the singing of jodies, the chanting. Our brains are made of meat, just animal instinct defended by cognitive dissonance. These communal rituals are meant to shut down rational thought and reduce us to those instincts. And among our most basic instincts is the need to identify with a group. Groups are safer when you’re dealing with woolly mammoths and there’s only one guy who knows how to make fire and Og found a sweet rock that’s pretty sharp. But if you want to use Og’s sweet rock to cut the fur off the meat, you have to be in the group. You have to fit in. So you mimic the group. And because the shit you’re doing, whether it’s crying to a song or speaking in tongues, is so fucking ridiculous, your brain tells you it’s real. So it is real. You felt it. You’ve lost something of your own, buried part of who you are, you’ve humiliated yourself to become a part of something, but now you fit in, and the group is stronger.