Pulphead: Essays Read Online Free PDF

that time-honored formulation)—we prayed the prayer together.
    Three years passed. I waxed strong in spirit. Verm and I were sort of heading up the high school end of the operation now. Mole had discovered (I had discovered, too) that I was good with words, that I could talk in front of people; Verm and I started leading Bible study once a month. We were saving souls like mad, laying up treasure for ourselves in heaven. I was never the recruiter he was, but I grasped subtlety; Verm would get them there, and together we’d start on their heads. Witnessing, it’s called. I had made some progress socially at school, which gave us access to the popular crowd; in this way, many were brought to the Lord. Verm and I went to conferences and on “study retreats”; we started taking classes in theology, which the group offered—free of charge—for promising young leaders. And always, underneath but suffusing it all, there were the cell-group meetings, every week, on Friday or Saturday nights, which meant I could stay out till the wee hours. (My Episcopalian parents were thoroughly mortified by the whole business, but it’s not easy telling your kid to stop spending so much time at church.)
    Cell group was typically held in somebody’s dining room, somebody pretty high up in the group. You have to understand what an honor it was to be in a cell with Mole. People would see me at Central Meeting and be like, “How is that, getting to rap with him every week?” It was awesome. He really got down with the Word (he had a wonderful old hippie way of talking; everything was something action: “time for some fellowship action … let’s get some chips ’n’ salsa action”). He carried a heavy “study Bible”—no King James for the nondenominationals; too many inaccuracies. When he cracked open its hand-tooled leather cover, you knew it was on. And no joke: the brother was gifted. Even handicapped by the relatively pedestrian style of the New American Standard version, he could twist a verse into your conscience like a bone screw, make you think Christ was standing there, nodding approval. The prayer session alone would last an hour. Afterward, there was always a fire in the backyard. Mole would sit and whack a machete into a chopping block. He smoked cheap cigars; he let us smoke cigarettes. The guitar went around. We’d talk about which brother was struggling with sin—did he need counsel? Or about the end of the world: it’d be soon. We had to save as many as we could.
    I won’t inflict on you all my reasons for drawing away from the fold. They were clichéd, anyway, and not altogether innocent. Enough to say I started reading books Mole hadn’t recommended. Some of them seemed pretty smart—and didn’t jibe with the Bible. The defensive theodicy he’d drilled into me during those nights of heady exegesis developed cracks. The hell stuff: I never made peace with it. Human beings were capable of forgiving those who’d done them terrible wrongs, and we all agreed that human beings were maggots compared with God, so what was His trouble, again? I looked around and saw people who’d never have a chance to come to Jesus; they were too badly crippled. Didn’t they deserve—more than the rest of us, even—to find His succor, after this life?
    Everything about Christianity can be justified within the context of Christian belief . That is, if you accept its terms. Once you do, your belief starts modifying the data (in ways that are themselves defensible), until eventually the data begin to reinforce belief. The precise moment of illogic is hard to isolate and may not exist. Like holding a magnifying glass at arm’s length and bringing it toward your eye: things are upside down, they’re upside down, they’re right side up. What lay between? If there was something, it passed too quickly to be observed. This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It’s not, as the adage has it, because they