This is a disclaimer. Believers, I am not here to harsh your vibe, ruin your faith, or any of that.

I studied theology and did fairly well at it, but in the end it's like being an expert in the rules of a table-top RPG: useful among others playing by the same rules, and that's about it.

What I am doing is documenting my own journey, and my feelings at the time. (Just for a spoiler, as my bio shot says, I've been a fervent believer, and a fervent disbeliever; now I just wonder.)

What you're about to read is a small piece of the large, unruly, and seemingly impossible-to-finish autobiography I've been working on.

=================================== =================================== =========================

Part 5 - A BOX OF FROGS

So far, we've come from heathen to holy-roller, and now here's me about to actually enter a pentecostal-type church as a believer for the first time. I sort-of knew what to expect: I'd been to a couple of those meetings run by the late Clark Taylor's enterprise in the mid-70s.

One visit, of course, was due to my usual reason: chasing girls, and one was as Support Heathen for my best friend, whose mother was pressuring him to go....

*****flashback*****

My friend and I were sitting well away from his family, of course. The music had gone from "Excite The Gullible While Endlessly Repeating Some Obscure Piece Of Old-Testament Imagery To A Tune That Sounds Like It Came From Sesame Street" and morphed into "Apprehensive Prelude To The Magic Show: We Might Start With Words But It's Going To Wind Up As One Endlessly-Rippling Arpeggio".

Down the front, Clark Taylor was playing Human Ninepins, getting overexcited congregants crosseyed and suggestible, then WHOOSHing toward them like a nine-iron. (It's certainly more dramatic than putting a chicken's beak on the ground and drawing a chalk line away from the tip, but rates about equal on a Scale Of Awesomeness.)

As the avenue of chumps was felled one by one, a second-banana on Clark's team was (relatively) quietly asking if anybody else wanted to come to the front.

Some self-appointed mouthpiece of god turned around to us. "God really wants you to go down there, tonight. He says not to wait another minute."

I snorted. "An important message like that, and he picked a pimply, little twerp like you?"

We didn't turn to stone or anything like that. Unless you count us getting a bit wasted later.

***********

Still, there are times when one really wants to feel the excitement. After all, there has to be something happening with all those people who fall down, get the giggles, cry or whatever... or the ones who come out with outrageous pronouncements (still in English so far, folks!) about what God wants, says, etc.

I tried. There was the thrill of anticipation, but no cigar. This would pretty-well be the story of my church-excitement experiences up until... (you're going to have to wait for that bit!)

I observed a few incidents that would only make sense later, such as the ex-football star making his pitch for a place in government... (let's take a small time-out to click on some Dominionism links for a moment, shall we? Scary shit, is it not?)

There were interesting people to meet, too. I've probably mentioned that I'm a misanthropic git, not a joiner of clubs per se, and I prefer to let my relationships and friendships be few and valued. Not so the pentecostals! Whether it's the pie-fight principle - "If I'm covered in whipped cream, then everybody gets covered in whipped cream, and I don't stand out as looking stupid", or some cockamamie idea that "what I enjoy, you will enjoy also, and I will assume you are too stupid to involve yourself and need me to involve you, even if I have to be really pushy about it", they're all over you like a municipal pound full of muddy Labradors. The results can be equally irksome to being rushed by soggy doggies, too.

I met the guy who was God's Insomniac as he (figuratively) got his muddy paws on me. He'd managed to approach me in a corner as I left church, and I had no way of avoiding him, short of a potentially embarrassing shoulder-charge toward an exit.

I forget his name, but he rabbited on and on, and stuff got progressively weirder. After a lot of overshare about his dreary life and wanting to earn enough to get his rustbucket car back on the road, blah blah, he came out with the (relatively) interesting fact that he was very tired, as he slept only about three hours a night.

As a practising insomniac (it is currently 1:50AM and I'm just hitting my straps writing this episode), I sympathised and asked the usual Being Nice questions about what he was currently trying as a remedy.

Oh no, he was doing this intentionally. For God, on account of God's promise!

I had to ask, dammit; I should have bolted for the hills, (from whence cometh my feeble cries for help). Was this one of these things like fasting for forty days?

No, it was one of God's promises. "And if thou wilt walk in my ways, to keep my statutes and my commandments, as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy days." - 1 Kings 3:14

Apparently, "lengthen thy days" meant "make your days longer" in Literal Dumbo Dialect, and he was going to get longer days, even if that pesky godless clock/calendar setup would only allocate him 24 hours. Not that he achieved extra tasks or quality-of-life: if anything, the whole show suffered as he stumbled through life in a perpetual haze of fatigue.

I later learned he was a bus driver.

You've got to love the King James-reading literalists. It's always fun to get them to agree that everything god says in the bible is for *them* to do, then drag out Ezekiel 4:12. Delicious!

The "mortification of the flesh" perversion was pretty widespread, too. I suggested to my pal from the helpdesk that we go and enjoy a Thai lunch at the restaurant near work: he was all coy and turn-away-the-head in refusing. I finally cajoled the reason out of him. He was on a Super-Secret Fast to reinforce some prayers or other he was doing. (Apparently God and Jenny Craig, they're, uh, like that!)

*****digression******

It's pretty ironic that the same people who can heap ridicule on the priests of Baal for all the ritual self-torture in the Elijah-v-Priests Of Baal showdown, are themselves given over to the "hurting myself for god" thing.

It also reflects pretty poorly on the god.

***********

I attended a bible study at helpdesk pal's geek-den share-house, once. (This was the first time I'd seen a house wired with Cat5 like the LANs at work: this was 1996, and pre-internet me was still in step with the four! gigabytes! of! storage! on the server reserved for the project I'd been in charge of until recently, and the half-day weekend sessions I'd been doing, propagating data changes over glacially-slow data links. Bloody gamers.)

The Chinese-born housemate who took charge of the study was a fairly wooden type of fellow. I inadvertently made a major gaffe, laughing about something fairly inoffensive, and was harshly reprimanded. "There is NO LAUGHTER in Heaven. God IS NOT MOCKED!"

Since I'd made such a great impression, or maybe because he also felt a bit put out by Serious Guy, my helpdesk friend suggested we attend the study evening of an older woman from the church. She had lost a few of her regulars and it would be "a bit friendlier".

I settled into a routine of church and bible study, once each a week, and accepted that even as a member of Jeebus's flock, I would most likely be the Odd, Scruffy Sheep In The Corner.

Still, wasn't this Christian life supposed to be Vital, Transformative and Dynamic? And where were all my miracles, dammit? It seems that if god wasn't coming to the party, my sneaky subconscious would come up with the goods on its own.