The Boy Behind the Curtain

  The evening session was the gospel service. This was goofily upbeat and catered to a younger crowd, and in later years featured guitars and drums. Sermons were incandescent, the music relentlessly emotional, and the service always ended with an altar call that could last twenty minutes or more. While ‘Just As I Am’ trundled on, verse after wheedling verse, like a rag-and-bone cart that wouldn’t leave the neighbourhood until someone brought out their reeking junk, we sat tight until a tormented soul cracked and went forward to surrender his or her life to Christ. Whereupon we all cried from joy or relief and then limbered up for cake, witnessing and a bit of flirty fellowship. We rarely got home before nine or ten at night.

  When I was a kid the Day of Rest required grit; it was a marathon, a test of character. Looking back I wonder if we only went to school on Monday for a breather. Compared to church, school was easy; the demands it made were relatively inconsequential.

  II

  Even if the Australian society of my childhood was militantly irreligious, the church was my first and most formative culture. It was in effect the village I was reared in, and in many senses this meant I grew up in a counterculture, although it was the sort in which beads, feathered hats and granny glasses were worn without the sense of performance that arrived a little later with the hippies.

  Churchgoing was my introduction to conscious living. Nowhere else was I exposed to the kind of self-examination and reflective discipline that the faith of my childhood required. I’d be surprised if anyone at my boyhood church had read even a page of Tolstoy, but it seems to me now that the question that ate at him so late in his life was the central issue for us, too. What then must we do? Preoccupations of this sort may well have bubbled in the suburban life around us, but it’s fair to say they were not immediately evident. In retrospect we had more in common with the anarchists and Trots the state was so fearful of, for our loyalties were unfathomable to outsiders. We were reaching for something beyond the ordinary. Any striving impulse at school or in the sports clubs was largely a matter of surfaces, a competition for glory. Being a God-botherer marked you out. Even the word ‘glory’ meant something different. And strange as it might seem to a Brit or an American for whom churchgoing has always been respectable, religious life was like a childhood inoculation against social conformity.

  Thanks to my churchy upbringing I began to learn what a civil life might be; how crucial it is to cultivate disinterest, to free oneself from tribalism. These core Christian teachings are liberating and civilizing but they are rarely thought of as legacies of evangelical fundamentalism. Similarly, the dour nonconformist assembly is not conventionally seen as a crucible of democracy, as it surely was in the nineteenth century, nor as a nurturer of culture in the twentieth, but church life was my introduction to politics, high language, story and music. We were doers. If we stood for anything it was for ‘love with its sleeves rolled up’. Our calendar may not have been latticed with high days and liturgical seasons but the year was busy with eisteddfods, concerts, clubs and camps. There was always a study group to join, a working-bee to attend, a sports competition to enter, a song or poem to learn, a picnic to wash up for. And at a time when our suburb was literally being hewn from the bush in front of us, when even the street itself was still a rough work-in-progress, there was in church life a sense of coherence and communal spirit unmatched elsewhere. The nearest library was fifteen minutes away by car. There was no community hall in our suburb, no concerts. The state concerned itself with material improvements, but the intangible chemistry of community was not yet a priority. Citizens toiled and played in a dispensation of relentless pragmatism, a mindset bequeathed to many by settler forebears.

  That hardy, incurious and unreflective outlook has been a long time dying, but in the 1960s it was still going strong. Patrick White had been railing against its prickly, philistine defensiveness for decades. In his greatest novels, the nascent mystic and the dowdy pilgrim labour under the weight of its thoughtless certainties. I doubt our scowling laureate would have warmed to the cardigan-wearing seekers I looked up to as a boy. They were poorly educated and their life experiences were narrow, but they were the bearers of more culture and civilization than even he could credit. They were not drawn together by some gnostic destiny, hardly White’s shambling ‘elect’, just plain folk trying to follow the Way, but when I read The Tree of Man and Riders in the Chariot at nineteen I heard their voices and saw their faces. They had their sights set higher than many of the sleeker people I came to know.

  III

  I was the child of converts. My parents came to faith in the crusading era of Billy Graham and joined the local Church of Christ. Churches of Christ had their origins in nineteenth-century American revivalism and their first congregations appeared in Australia in the 1840s, not long after the Baptists. The new arrivals were primitivist dissenters with a history of disputation and schism that made Baptists seem laid-back by comparison. One of the sect’s founding fathers, Alexander Campbell, described the Bible as ‘a book of facts’ and while his Australian co-religionists had mellowed somewhat in the century since his day, theirs was still a denomination in which Scripture was the prime and unimpeachable source of revelation, and the reading of it remained doggedly literalistic. This was a theological line in the sand. Verse by verse and line by line, the Bible was the actual Word of God.

  So our tradition was a bare-knuckles, no-frills affair. There was in its history a deep suspicion of clerical authority, a visceral reaction to the structural snobbery and ‘spiritual dilution’ that a uniformed class of religious professionals had brought to more mainstream outfits. We guarded our unmediated access to the Almighty with a vigilance that could seem paranoid. We disdained received forms and sought personal authenticity, which meant that except for The Lord’s Prayer all prefabricated invocations and entreaties were rejected. Sunday prayers were raw and improvized and they had about them a jazz element of anxiety and freedom that produced everything from the profound and sublime to the painfully banal. It was not uncommon for the congregation to find itself captive for many minutes to an intercessor’s fervid verbal inspiration: like a soloing sax player he or she might follow the cryptic logic of their riffs and runs to their farthest imaginable limits, and like the smoky hepcats of bebop the rest of us were trained to abide and endure with murmurs of appreciation. Even if it was incomprehensible tosh. With a sensibility like ours, the thought of swapping extemporized prayer for its liturgical form would be like giving up Coltrane for Roger Whittaker.

  In our church there were no robes, no funny collars, no bells nor smells. All ritual was ritually discouraged. We did entirely without creeds – apparently our little motto ‘No creed but Christ’ didn’t count. The parish was governed by elected lay members, some of whom bore the added authority of eldership, and although the minister might have been the most visible and influential member of the congregation, his tenure was subject to the lay leaders and the collective vote of the membership. Parishes of this tradition were therefore not dependent on diocesan management from elsewhere. They were associated but essentially discrete. It was a form of syndicalism whose anarchistic tendencies were never really acknowledged.

  Like many evangelical outfits with dissenting origins, our lot restricted baptism to penitents of responsible age. There would be no tribal baby-sprinkling for us. And by baptism we meant full immersion; nothing else was sufficient. If you weren’t entirely submerged it didn’t count. Not that we entertained any magical notions about the water; it was just that if it was good enough for Jesus, then it was good enough for us. There was a tank set into the stage for this purpose and that’s where I was baptized at age twelve.

  Baptism was the only unreservedly sacramental aspect of our worship, although we wouldn’t have spoken of it in such terms. Words like ‘sacrament’ made us anxious. But as rites of passage went, baptism was unrivalled. Not even a wedding was as important.

  Sunday worship was conducted according to a rigid ord
er of service from which we rarely deviated. Scripture readings were delivered as if the verses contained not simply a sacred meaning but an inchoate power that bordered on the magical. Communion was celebrated every week with water crackers and grape juice – ours was a strictly teetotal affair. The ‘bread’ was handed along the pews on wooden plates and the ‘wine’ distributed in tiny individual shot glasses on purpose-built trays. We spurned the unsavoury common cup. Defiantly backward we may have been in many senses, but we were modern enough to know about germs. We didn’t pretend to conjure up any spirit by this ritual, either, as Catholics and High Church Anglicans did – the idea of that was scandalous. This was a ‘memorial feast’, not a séance.

  As befitted our sectarian aversion to ornament and elaboration, the interior of the church building was austere, the sole concession to iconography a wooden cross on the gable wall. Yet for all this bareness and lack of liturgical flim-flam, the services were not solemn. Somehow there was room for good-natured joshing and laughter. Along the pews, women grinned at one another and men winked. Infants said things that brought the house down. Dogs wandered in and babies were passed from lap to lap. Piety was one thing, but few of us could forsake our ingrained working-class ethos with its scorn of bumptious ceremony. And of course, there was all that lusty singing. Nevertheless Sunday with us was only for the hardy.

  IV

  Ours was a yeoman farmer’s religion, the province of humble folk and autodidacts. Its mindset and temper were rooted in a pre-industrial era. At church blokes often wore the only suit they owned. They were manual labourers, factory hands, farmers, trades­men. Their wives worked in the home and frocked up in floral themes for Sunday worship. These parishioners were frumpy but forthright, hospitable and cheerfully communal in their instincts, and although their theology was extremely conservative their politics didn’t necessarily follow. Like their parishioners, most ministers were men of very modest education. Outside of military service few adults in the congregation had ever travelled. Most had left school by fifteen and some had been pulled out at twelve. Education was revered and suspected in equal measure.

  The people I grew up with were socially uncertain but they were not cowed by the contempt of unbelievers. They were hungry to improve themselves and to be of service to something larger.

  Jeanette Winterson was an alumnus of a sect far more severe and lurid than ours. But she can still credit the ‘camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do’ against the miseries and cruelties she later fictionalized in her most acclaimed novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In her memoir Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? she writes: ‘I saw a lot of working-class men and women – myself included – living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church. These were not educated people; Bible study worked their brains. They met after work in noisy discussion. The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning . . .’

  Winterson’s rough-handed Pentecostalists could just as easily have been card-carrying communists or members of a repertory theatre group. Had they been held together by some broad purpose other than spreading the Gospel they would still have been weirdos to their neighbours: they sought to liberate themselves and transform society. Such dreams take courage and solidarity, personal sacrifice and no small measure of pig-headedness. Like Winterson, I saw the fruit of all that striving and self-improvement at the midweek Bible study. Church members were a bookish lot. They certainly knew their way around the Scriptures. Their mnemonic capacities were often breathtaking. It was common to see heavy concordances and commentaries in people’s homes. In an era when workingmen’s institutes had long since faded away, churches like ours provided a rare opportunity for civil debate and intellectual enlargement.

  It was in church that I learnt how perilously faith depends upon story, for without narrative there is only theological assertion, which is, in effect, inert cargo. Story is the beast of burden, the bearer of imaginative energy. My favourite stories were endlessly repeated and learnt by heart. Behind them all – from Jacob pulling a hamstring in his struggle with the angel to Elijah fed by ravens, or the Nazarene overcome by crowds at the lakeside – lay two great mysteries: the unfathomable presence of the divine, and the perennial enigma of human behaviour.

  And it was church that taught me the beauty and power of language. Recited and declaimed from the pulpit week after week and year upon year, these stories and their cadences, in the King James and Revised Standard versions, were deeply imprinted. Until I was sixteen and had Shakespeare rudely thrust upon me, I knew no other high language to rival it. Hamlet didn’t exactly make my spirit glow – it was confusing and yet eerily familiar. I can still remember the hot summer classroom, the droning flies, and the dread of being called upon to read aloud – I just knew I’d balls it up – but as each of us took our turn, halting, sullen, mortified and sceptical, I heard the sound of a thousand Sundays, the voices of balding men in Pelaco shirts quoting Saint Paul, riding incantatory rhythms toward the stifling reaches of noon. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties . . . At sixteen I was hard-pressed to keep up with what the Bard was actually on about but I recognized his sound from the get-go.

  Once I was old enough to attend the Bible study groups hosted in members’ homes, I began to see how potent words really are, how thrillingly they could unite people but how quickly they divided us. I was in the livingroom of a senior parishioner one evening when the gathering stumbled over the word wine. When Christ produced wine at the wedding at Cana, were those jars really full of an alcoholic beverage or did his miraculous provision only extend to unfermented grape juice? A lot hung on that single word, as it did later upon slave, demon and men. That was before we even got to the prickly business of fornication or what it meant for a man to lie with mankind. For some of us, though we didn’t know it yet, there were family traumas lying buried like landmines in those words. Matters of social organization, justice, mental health and sexuality could depend on the interpretation of a single biblical term. Expressing faith is not unlike expressing love, for both involve fraught searches for exactly the right phrase when it often seems there are none good, true or safe enough to do the job, and a wrong word at the wrong moment can be catastrophic.

  Many of those evenings of soulful study and pedantic debate were tedious. Some scarred me for life. But they weren’t wasted. Over time, by a process I don’t understand even now, the occult power of metaphor revealed itself. I was still years away from thinking of the Bible as a library, a storehouse of experience and longing rather than a discrete document that was the product of some sort of divine dictation; however, I grew increasingly enthralled by the paradoxes of its imagery. There was truth there. Somehow Christ was our rock, but he was also water. And by his account we doughty believers were salt. Even Paul, the apostle who spun so much mystery into dry doctrine, could pull me up by reminding me that the whole of creation groans in travail like a woman in labour. These constructions weren’t just apt, there was something organic and sustaining in them.

  Language, I was to discover, is nutrition, manna without which we’re bereft and forsaken, consigned like Moses and his restive entourage to wander in a sterile wilderness. As a novelist I seem to have spent every working day of my adult life in a vain search for the right word, the perfect metaphor for the story or sentence at hand, while so often writing about characters for whom words are both elusive and treacherous. I didn’t catch the bug at school, I picked it up in church.

  What church and school had in common was how damned boring they could be. You were a captive in both. But while kids in class and in the quadrangle blanked you out, and some teachers, recoiling from your adolescent mulishness, gave up and deleted you from their consciousness, at church whatever I did or said I was not made to feel inconsequential. I was never rendered invisible.
If anything I was endlessly noticed, sometimes to a wearying degree.

  Still, during a service I fidgeted and giggled like any other kid. I drew tits, peace signs and swastikas on the endpapers of hymnals and let off farts that could have justified a rush for the emergency exits. During epic prayers of intercession I liked to keep count of all the Thees and Thines and run little wagers on the tally with my guffawing mates. We developed alternate lyrics for famous hymns: ‘My chains fell off, my heart was free/ I rose, went forth, and took a pee.’ Brilliant, I know. Poker-faced we belted out our feats of lyrical resistance, but as heads began to swivel we were helpless against our own laughter.

  Older folks were remarkably patient. It was only after puberty, when I grew surly and sarcastic, that senior parishioners started to lose patience, and whenever someone pulled me aside to straighten me out the experience was always worse than a roasting from a schoolteacher. Somehow it mattered more that you’d disappointed a fellow member, especially an elder. And unlike teachers, who came and went, an elder was in your life for decades, sometimes forever; he was in your home some nights during the week, you went camping with him and learnt your first guitar chords off him. Besides, you often fancied his daughter.

  There were certain old people, including those with whom I locked horns occasionally, who took a particular interest in my spiritual progress, my ‘walk’, as it was known. For some of them this began when I was a small boy and continued long after I reached middle age. It was rare to have a schoolteacher take a similar interest. Some of those old folks knew me better than my grandparents did.

  When I was six I approached an older gentleman called George Smith to ask him about the size of my soul. I sidled up to him after church one morning and stood at his side until he registered my presence. He was younger then than I am now but to me he was a man of wise and ancient mien. Maybe it was the specs. I don’t remember why, at that age, I required soul dimensions, all I know is that my need was urgent. Mr Smith took off his glasses and gave them a bit of a buff. Eventually he took my hand, closed it and pressed it against my chest. He told me he’d never actually seen a human soul but his best guess was that mine was about the size of my fist. I considered this sceptically; I may only have been six, but I wasn’t stupid. Then I thought how sometimes my spirit ached like the aftermath of a sucker punch, burning right there where old George Smith had his hand and mine, like a thump in the chest whose afterglow left the feel and shape of a fist. And so his answer rang true.