Let the Love Light Shine
Forget those horror stories about the Children of God. They've gone respectable, and they love you!
(Page 2 of 3)
While I'm digesting this declaration of love, a procession is making its way through the folding chair aisle to the stage. The meeting is beginning. A song about a gypsy caravan is being sung with an enthusiasm only a little more laid-back than that of the Johnny Mann singers. The people singing and dancing are the same Children who've been milling around the room; now they're up on stage, about 20 of them, ponderously accompanied by four or five guitars. Several kids of about five or six are dancing unabashedly at center stage. It's a fairly stirring beginning for a meeting that is going to be sedate and low-keyed and endless.
The program opens with a prayer by a middle-aged woman named Mrs. Good, who apparently is the president of THANK-COG. She in turn introduces four parents to give testimony about their sons and daughters. The first, a man about 45 wearing a pink shirt and purple slacks, delivers his with the ease of a seasoned club speaker, drawing laughter from his audience as well as oohs and aahs and exclamations of "Heavy," the official adjective of the Children of God. He talks about his son, who consistently turned his back on God & Parents until one day when Jesus entered his heart and "Greg rushed into Estelle's and my bedroom and said 'Get the Bible.' His eyes were sparkling and, I might say, his beard was bristling with joy."
He then leads the audience in a cheer: God is GOOD! God is G-G-GREAT!
The other speakers are more sedate. One mother tells about visiting her son at a COG colony in Denmark after not having heard from him in years.
"I tell you—it tore our hearts because we didn't know where he was at. Now wherever he's at we don't have to worry any longer."
This testimony is followed by are port on the education of the organization's children. A woman of about 23, as loose and elegant as any kid's dream teacher, explains at what becomes great length the Montessori methods for bringing up children in the Spirit.
Next Ekhana, who seems to be a sort of efficiency expert, with an air of shrewdness that makes him resemble a meteoric young business executive, gives an interminable account of the Children of God's global expansion, a speech that reveals at least one stunning fact: Two-thirds of the members of the organization are now outside the United States. This is in keeping with the belief that the Apocolypse is coming in our lifetime, and America is the corrupt kingpin that must fall before the scriptures can be fulfilled. But the basic physical movement of the Children of God from America—Bear witness and get out before it falls on you—seems drastically at odds with this solidly institutional gathering; it's as though the Apocalypse were a Knights of Columbus banquet.
But for the Children boredom seems a small price to pay for salvation. "To the Jew I beoame as a Jew, to the Greek I became as a Greek" is to be quoted to me later as a rationale for the slickness of the ministry these days, and there's no reason to deny that that methods gets the Product, suitably diluted, to the Consumer. But the image of sackcloth, of hand-to-hand combat with the Devil for individual souls, is not altogether pleasantly dispelled.
There is only Ekhana to listen to, describing the proliferation of the movement in terms that flood the mind with images of cartoon maps darkening with communist domination.
"The Lord's forming different pincer movements throughout the world," he says in describing the logistics of the conquest of South America.
Then he tells how Federico Fellini is making a movie featuring the Children of God as a solution to the world's problems. This brings a lot of "heavy's" and scattered applause: the name of Fellini has survived and now that it's been de-secularized it can be said aloud once more.
Despite its length Elkana's speech does not seem to tire his audience: only a few itchy parents and Your Correspondent seem anxious to move on. And when it's over the speech is warmly applauded and spoken for.
Finally, after a demonstration of Spanish religious songs, all the members of the Children get up to do up-tempo versions of "Amazing Grace" and "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," leaving a spotty and only moderately responsive audience. Seeing them up there all together, they're a remarkably pleasant-looking assemblage of people; they're not, tooth-and-nose, actually that physically attractive, but they've conjured up a radiance that blurs everything about them but that happiness they've managed to wrench into their lives. You can't help but like them and feel a little regretful and mean about your own precious cynicism.
The meeting, after this finale, is scheduled to become a reception at the Rock House, of "Upon this rock" fame, the home of the Dallas colony.
As we're leaving I'm embraced without preface by someone named Thomas, moving my friend the policeman to give me a manly handshake on the way out.
"Goodbye," he says. "I hope you don't get hugged too much."
Oh, but I'm to be hugged by an unnatural number of people in the next day and a half. I'm to be hugged and kissed and engaged in endless smiling and staring contests, preached to, chided, read to, and told how much, sight unseen, I'm loved.
This begins when we reach the Rock House, a large, old two-story house in one of the lesser Dallas neighborhoods, where about 20 people live in segregated communality .There's a tour going on when we arrive, featuring mostly the parents who have managed to stick it out this far.
It's an appealing old house, with a long living room, mostly bare, which is furnished with a donated carpet and TV, a couch and a Last Supper rug on the wall. There's a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom and a greeting room downstairs. Upstairs is a study of sorts, containing a library with bibles and foreign language dictionaries, and the "Boys" and "Girls" dorms, two ordinary sized rooms with four sets of bunkbeds apiece. Married couples, of which Jada and Japhia, the colony's elders, seem to be the only one in evidence, have a private room.
There is no unmarried sex among the Children of God, officially, and there really doesn't seem to be any question of it occurring. There's a neutered look to everyone and everything, the abstinence that follows being wasted and disappointed and used.
And the people who live here have stories like the kind that get quoted in Readers Digest: sex, motorcycles, drugs, bate, crime: Things to Try that faded out bitterly, became points on a map that had no destination to offer. And for an outsider it's hard to tell from this distance whether Jesus has his arms open for them or if he's just pointing down the road.
By now it's 5 p.m. and most of the parents have started going home, leaving maybe 50 people, mostly Children from colonies around the state who come up for the THANK-COG meeting and are going home tonight.
Dinner is hot dogs and potato salad, donated, like everything else, by local businessmen. Afterward everyone sits around on the floor reading their Bibles in small little clumps, withdrawing them lovingly from the holsters they keep them in on their belts. It's a pleasant evening, the threat of a thunderstorm making a breeze through the as-yet-un-air-conditioned living room, a nice long summer evening in which the muted voices discussing the fall of cities and the end of the world take a rightful place.
Elijah comes up to introduce himself, a short, unsentimental person of about 24, who "used to make drugs down in Austin." And he does indeed seem like a master-craftsman newly reformed from a life of high-minded subversion. But his academic training is stored away somewhere. That claustrophobic impression returns: Elijah has staked out the perimeters of his intelligence and he won't cross them. We end up talking about Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
Brother Sun, Sister Moon, it is probabaly a good time to throw in, comes recommended by MO, for Moses, nee David Berg, the founder and leader and interpreter of the Children of God, a Wizard of Oz-like presence who sends out periodic MO-letters, full of dense underlinings, dubious biblical interpretations and first-hand revelations. From his writings, which is apparently the only way he communicates with his followers, MO comes off as a rather eccentric and ingenuous and opportunistic prophet, one of those 50-year-old men who hang around campuses waiting to become gurus.
But MO has found his following, and they're passionate and blind in their allegiance because he found them when they were in the dark and he was, if not suffused with light, at least mildly incandescent. It's he who makes Jesus real for them and he who sits in front of the TV and goes to second-rate movies and reads weird doom-forecasting books from obscure presses and ties it all into the Bible with the finesse and gall of a dropped-out English major. I could find no evidence of record listened to or thought uttered or one book read or one movie seen that didn't come from MO: the form of the movement is at the mercy of MO's protean consciousness.
Elijah promises to send me some back issues of MO-letters, which he kindly does, but when they come I find myself unable to do much more than skim over them. And I can't get moved to actually read a 39 stanza poem called "The Spirit of Shangri-la," about the applications of the teachings of Ross Hunter's dreary Lost Horizon remake, 39 stanzas all sounding exactly like:
In the spirit, in the spirit
You can go to Shangri-la.
In the spirit, in the spirit
You can meet the High Lama.
My Library
