October 1973
Let the Love Light Shine
Forget those horror stories about the Children of God. They've gone respectable, and they love you!
Apparently there's nothing that God has that the Devil doesn't try to imitate!
-Mo
IN FRONT OF THE ALLFORD Refrigerated Warehouses in Dallas, a willowy girl in a long dress seems to be swaying in the parking lot. Like most women of the Children of God, she keeps her smile hovering between spaciness and irony. It communicates nothing at all. She says her name is Deuteronomy, and that she loves me. I can think of no reason to doubt her, but even though she's beautiful enough to break my heart back there in the carnal world, I really have no words like that to say back to her. I mumble hello and go inside with Mireh while Deuteronomy stays in the parking lot.
Mireh probably loves me too, but he knows uptightness when he sees it and he doesn't seem much on high-pressure techniques anyway; in fact, he seems unusually reserved and tolerantly amused about everything, like a monk who has the key to the wine cellar. But there is no such thing as an unfriendly Child of God, and Mireh is cordial and articulate even though he seems to be repressing something everytime he speaks, laughing about the press version of the Children as a band of Jesus Freaks, kidnapping, drugging. hypnotizing the youth of America into a life of cretinoid worship and toil. It's hard not to laugh along with him, in this meeting room of the refrigerated warehouse, where no doubt close by pigs and cows are hanging skinned and scalded by their hooves; hard not to laugh because there's no discernible difference between the meeting that's about to begin and a PTA assembly.
It's the national meeting of THANK-COG, which stands more or less for "Thankful Parents of the Children of God," a group which has recently sprung into existence as a counterweight to the much-publicized activities of FREE-COG, the organization of parents who claim the Children of God are a Manson-like cult preying on the gullibility and material resources of their off-spring, inducing visions and obedience with drugs and mind-control. But FREE-COG has its critics too, among them the ACLU and the Children of God themselves, whose current lawsuit against FREE-COG protests what they say is FREE-COG's use of simple abduction to get their sons and daughters back.
But it's FREE-COG's view of the Children that for the most part has caught the attention of the media, and consequently the image of terrorism and fanaticism has been around a long time, has been dogging the Children since their beginnings on California beaches in 1968.
But whatever validity FREE-COG's charges may have, they seem a little superfluous here, in view of these clean-living and well-dressed "young men and women." The Children of God, at least the Dallas colonies, seem to have undergone a sort of transformation, and there's a slickness about the room that would not be out of place at a Young Republican convention.
But true, it's a slickness devoted to witnessing the soon-to-be-realized death of America, and it's possible to catch the faint aura of apocolypse as it touches down now and then like pentecostal fire on the taut and earnest young men in sport coats and stylish hair lengths, on the women, invariably in long dresses, frequently pregnant, with the insouciance that women have who've spent formative time in the wilds of hippie-land.
But the apocolypse stops short of the parents, who are looking dazed or delighted, embarrassed probably at the gushiness of their children, the fathers with the same looks they may have worn to their daughters' dance recitals. The parents are hard to figure out. There was a time when the Children of God came down hard on their parents, back in the repent-or-perish day when they were wearing sackcloth and trying to conjure up the image of hell in their street gazes.
Now the parents are being wooed back by their children who deserted them long before they found Jesus to take their place, they're being told how much they're loved and what a blessing they are at every opportunity. Welcome back Mom and Dad, since it turns out you're the ones who've been away.
And the prodigal parents seem a little wary of the desperate love of their children. But they sit, dour and bee-hived and patient, on the folding chairs, waiting for the meeting to begin.
Meanwhile it's not hard to find people to talk to. Genuinely affable people are everywhere. Secundus, a former medical student, is telling me about Armageddon and for no apparent reason I begin to feel a claustrophobia, a sense that there's a point in conversation beyond which these people won't go. Everything is visible, funnelled into Jesus at every opportunity, so that the threads of a conversation can lead only one place.
I ask Secundus what movies he's seen lately, both to find out something about his range and to change the subject, because I find, disastrously late, that I don't like to listen to people talking about Jesus.
"Well, I've seen Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and Man of La Mancha. Have you seen Brother Sun, Sister Moon?"
I tell him that I have, adding undiplomatically, since for some reason I've turned argumentative, that I thought it stunk.
In answer Secundus gives me a polite and concerned nod of the head, but it's the kind of courtesy he might use if Satan were a guest in his house. It takes a while to extricate myself from my own bumbling: it's obvious Zefferelli's wimpy life of St. Francis is sacrosanct in these parts.
After Secundus retreats in annoyance or confusion, I'm adrift for awhile, then snagged by Lakum, an affable dark-haired and moustached man who seems in his late twenties, six or seven years older than the majority of the Children. Lakum has an easygoing anarchic charm that makes him immediately familiar: he could be anything from a retired campus radical to a bicycle mechanic. But now he's with Jesus, and more than capable of asking, sincerely and unwincingly, the way you'd ask someone if they've had lunch: "Tell me, do you know the Lord?"
That was the question I knew I'd have to have an answer for, but I forgot to make one up. I mutter something appropriately confusing about terminology but Lakum's right on my tail, he wants to know if I've let Jesus into my heart.
And I could tell Lakum some pretty mean stories about when in fact Jesus used to worm around inside my heart during adolescence, but that would probably do more harm than good.
So I stall, I philosophize, and Lakum, good Christian that he is, gets bored and lets me off the hook.
There are of course good Christians everywhere about us—genuinely good Christians. You can see zeal and concern shining through layers of shyness a foot thick. The Spirit, in some form, is inarguably among the Children of God. There may be some lukewarm minds about, but there are none of the Lukewarm Christians St. Paul told us about. And it's all above-board: There's no acid in the punch, as FREE-COG reports, at least not here, and there's no hypnosis operating in the eyes which are, with varying degrees of finesse and desperation, focused directly into your own.
No, it's authentic, even if it is not quite real. A seductive, mildly hysterical community in which Jesus sops up any residue embarrassment: men can hug and kiss each other, do the same to any woman without fear of awakening covetous desires, can say "I love you" with alarming uninvolvement or "Jesus is really heavy" with a perfectly straight face. It's obvious that they're blissfully happy, but I'm unable to shake off the feeling that there's something weary and heartbreaking at the center of all this joy.
But it's easy to get buttonholed and a little difficult to clean your head out enough to think. Everyone wants to tell you how happy they are; they need constant reinforcement. And when they find out I can't give it they seem annoyed for a second, then exhilarated at the challenge the Lord has thrown into their path.
A Dallas policeman who for some reason is standing around "securing" this place comes up rather nervously and introduces himself.
"You're not with them, are you? I didn't think so."
He's immoderately expressive at his good fortune in finding another heathen here in the catacombs, and gives me knowing smiles about the Children which I return, knowingly enough: it's easier to sympathize with the police when they're confused than with anybody else.
"All these people here are supposed to be living like in the Old Testament. But they've all got short hair. You (indicating beard and hair length) look more like one from the Old Testament than they do."
Thus I undoubtedly become one of the few people in the world to ever be complimented for looking like a hippie by the Dallas police.
A girl who seems to be about 16 or 17 comes up to give me a nametag. The Children of God, if it's not obvious by now, forsake their "system names" and choose biblical ones. Hers is Jemima; mine remains the same and she painstakingly writes it down on a card mercifully devoid of either happy face or "Hi, I'm…" When Jemima finds out what I'm doing here she terms my presence a "blessing," which leads, through some elaborate logical synapses, to a one-sided discussion on my part about flying saucers: to talk, after just an hour, about something besides Jesus is a pure joy.
But there's a distracted edge to Jemima's earnest gaze when I finish. "Oh yeah," she says. "Well, we really love you."
