Free A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill Page A

electric organ, and three sets of drums—was off and running, slicing into standards like “The Old Rugged Cross” and country devotions like “My Savior Leads the Way.” People stood and clapped and expressed thanks to God for the music. The orchestra sounded like a tank town high school band.
    After “King of Kings,” the big finish, various of the Saved stepped up to the pulpit to give testimony. “I know there’s a burning Hell,” one crisp sister in gingham non sequitured, “because I experienced a little bit of it out in the World.” Hell, in fact, seemed to be the big selling point for salvation and it beat out heaven in terms of mention about ten to one.
    The words “born again” and “born again in the blood” were mentioned often. Very big was the phrase
I know beyond the shadow of a doubt
. The theme was drugs, rotten lives, torture, torment, filth, and despair in “the World” as opposed to “Peace” at the Foundation while “Serving theLord.” Most testimonies ended “so come on up and get saved.”
    “You may think you came here for a free meal,” the leader said, “but God drew you here for a very special purpose.” He hit briefly on the soul rockers: hellfire, the end of the world, judgment before the Lord, and the Prophecy of the Second Coming before revealing to sinners in the crowd that the Biblical promise of eternal life was within our grasps that very evening. All we had to do, it turned out, was to humble ourselves before God—and, of course, everyone else at the service—by kneeling in the little area between the first folding chairs and the pulpit. There we would publicly confess that we led sinful lives in the manner of American POWs taping war crimes confessions before international cameras.
    “I put before you this day both a blessing and a curse,” he said.
    The organist began a churchy solo, and elect Christians threaded through the crowd, looking for obvious sinners. Another short, rather pleasant-looking man in his mid-twenties stood by my chair.
    “Why don’t you come up and get saved,” he stage-whispered.
    I shrugged stupidly.
    “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”
    A few sinners and their Christians were moving toward the saving block. The organ finished, stopped momentarily, but at a signal from the man at my side, it started again. The same song, from the top.
    “I couldn’t say that prayer and mean it,” I pointed out.
    “It doesn’t matter. If you kneel and say it with your lips, God will come into your heart in a very special way. Why do you think God brought you here?”
    It was difficult to argue the point with every person in the place watching us, so I let myself be led forward to kneel on the hard linoleum floor, under a long fluorescent light. I said the prayer word for word and at no time did I feel God come into my heart, which, I suppose, is as it should be.
    “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-men,” everyone shouted.
    A brief announcement before dinner. Baby Christians—the newly saved—had another gift in store for them, “the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Our older Christians would tell us about it.
    “God promised that the saved would speak in tongues,” I was told by the man who was to become my teacher. “Don’t be denied. Seek for the gift with all your heart. Just keep saying, ‘God, you promised.’ ” The process, as it was explained to me, was that one started by “just praising and thanking Jesus.” At a certain point, he will begin to stutter, a signal that he is about to begin speaking in tongues. My older Christian invited me into the prayer room to give it a whirl, and since it seemed to be the thing to do after being saved, I followed him through the wooden door.
    Given a generally tense state of mind, the prayer room is no place to be reassured about the sanity of the Foundation’s saved. The room was a windowless expanded closet, perhaps four steps wide and ten long. There was a muted light in one