Tonschmerz

I became extraordinarily proud of my Protestant heritage, though I was not a follower in any standard sense, based on teachings of Jesus Christ — I was a believer and yet I doubted that belief mattered. Doubting belief mattered was my inflection. Deists try to prove the existence of God. I do not doubt God nor evidence of the existence of Jesus nor Jesus' miracles. I merely wish there were more people like him — not to project heavenly salvation on people but to apply a simple compress to drive out foreign presences, if that is what they are or it is inside people's bodies that lead to misalignment and hideous dents. My brother, an evangelical Christian living in California who had followed The Grateful Dead for decades, foresaw me in hell one Labor Day Sunday within hearing of one hundred blue grass musicians and their girlfriends at Strawberry Music Festival. No one among those camping Christians came on the run to see if I was all right after my brother had shouted in camp. I had left the Revival before the sermon to read Alice Munro's Runaway. My reading Munro during the Revival endeared her to me and my brother to deliver his judgment, not prohibited in Leviticus except against a mother or father.