G o d ' s++W a r r i o r s++i n++t h e++3 r d++M i l l e n n i u m
Illustration by Steve Johnson/Lou Fancher Illustration
On Thursday night Mark puts his Ford Econoline van on a small bluff overlooking the grounds of the Eagle Mountain retreat of Reverend Kenneth Copeland and camps too close to a family who lack the knack of keeping their small children in line. The children's playing is an irritation of some magnitude to a man who's driven 400 miles from Missouri pierced in his spine with the very spear that killed Christ crucified. It's hard enough anyway to sleep with his marriage in flames back home, his wife turned against him and their six children baffled and their pastor and the pastor's wife trying to convince him he's a disturbance to the congregation.
But as far back as he can remember he's felt the spirit of God in him, and he's not convinced that others feel it quite so strongly, study scripture quite so thoroughly, or find themselves quite so liberally gifted with discernment. He's suffering for it now, suffering the isolation of his gift, camped under a dome of stars on the grounds of this former Texas Air National Guard base, watching the sparks of scattered campfires and hearing the whacked guitar and lone hymnal wail of some cowboy believer. "Of those to whom much is given, much is asked." Last summer at the revival in Montreal, spiritual readers, several of them, and separately, approached to tell him they could see the spear of Christ imbedded in his back. It represents his sorrows.
Friday morning he turns out and surveys the campground below him, where still only a few dozen parties have found their places. In his inward self he greets his Maker and his Savior, and his Savior tells him to move his van down the hill and park it near another Ford van, a brand new shiny blue one, an airport rental, beside which a freelance writer from Idaho has set a ragged nylon tent and filled it with an air mattress and sleeping bag and then discovered he's locked the keys in the rental with the motor on.
As he usually seems to do when acting on the direct instructions of Jesus Christ, Mark starts presenting his message before the other has had much of a chance to study the messenger -- a tiny intellectual-looking messenger with spectacles and a goatee and a careful though very earnest way of speaking that makes him sound doctorly, or scientific. He does, in fact, identify himself as a scientist by trade, but gets no more specific than that, and it's clear from two minutes' conversation that Mark's a Bible wonk, the spiritual parallel to a computer whiz, and might understandably impress his fellow churchmen as something of an exegetical hacker, less a saint than a shit-disturber, who surfs scripture and verse mainly with an eye to running his own program. Anyway his pastor thinks so, and Mark's wife refuses to submit any more to the head of the household, and the pastor's wife supports her in her challenge, which has come to consist mainly of a general ugliness and a lot of hateful put-downs, and Mark has taken himself to various three-day spiritual revivals like this one here in the flat middle of Texas, seeking ... he doesn't say, exactly. Solace. Confirmation. Healing.
Next page: An emphatic okayness in the middle-American psyche
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