Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

“All about me the lights were flickering like fireflies, and there was no sound in the auditorium except for his voice, and his voice was in my ears. In the ears of everyone there. I know it is an acoustical trick done with electronics, but it has a purpose: it symbolizes how Brother Cox receives his messages from God. It is the Voice of God speaking to each one of us through this chosen man.

“I can’t repeat what Brother Cox said that night. It is all documented, all on record, and for me to add to that record would be redundant. The non-believers won’t accept the truth of his words, and the believers don’t need further proof. Instead, I will try to explain my own feeling that night. I had been stumbling about in wolf country, daring fate, tempting evil to myself. I had had no religious training as a child. I didn’t believe in God, any God. I didn’t see that He was necessary, or even possible. If I had been tempted to believe in Him, I would have despised Him for all the evil He allowed to exist. God was an invention of man, used to excuse man his weaknesses, used as magic to bring about the unobtainable, used as a scapegoat to be blamed for the wickedness of man to man. I didn’t need such a God. I rejected him and relied on reason and humanism, as my parents did before me. I don’t blame them. They had rejected the same false god that I had cast from my life. They didn’t know that Brother Cox is invoking, not that false god, but the true God that the churchmen and scholars and secular interests had taken from mankind. They knew nothing about the space travel that would become a reality in this century; they had grown up in an age where other worlds, travel between suns, other people were fantasies of writers who were published in cheap pulps. They could not visualize or conceptualize a God of the Universe, the entire universe, not just this poor planet Earth. Not an anthropomorphic God, but a God who is so vast, so unimaginable, so unlike anything dreamed up by the poets and the prophets that to speak of Him in the same breath as the Biblical god of the ancients is to blaspheme. And this God is locked in immortal battle with Forces of Evil that are as vast as He is. This is the message of Brother Cox. A drop of water is not the ocean, yet who can believe in the ocean until he has witnessed it? A grain of sand is not the beach. But a blind man can be led to the beach and walk for miles on it, feeling the presence of the sea, feeling the stir within himself that proclaims this to be the ocean and the beach and come to believe in them without ever having seen them with his eyes. And once he has accepted their existence, the drop of water and the grain of sand can symbolize the boundless ocean and the endless beach. This is how I have come to accept this vast, unimaginable God. I have felt His Presence, have been stirred by the currents from within myself yearning for Him. I know He is. I can’t prove it, but I don’t have the need to prove it. Just as the blind man can deny the existence of the ocean and the beach by withholding himself from it, so can the non-believers continue to deny His existence. But the ocean is, nevertheless. The beach is. God is.

“The answer to those non-believers who claim that the Church threatens their lives is an answer I recall from my own childhood. My father, one of the most tolerant of men, a man of ethics so Godlike that I must believe him, said that any religion must be permitted just so long as it does not threaten mankind. The Catholic Church at the time, he said, was threatening mankind, all of mankind, with its policy on birth control. It was no longer enough for them to acknowledge the rights of others to practice birth control if they so chose, they were threatening mankind by their own adherence to dogma. So we see today that the non-believers are threatening mankind by their acceptance of the atheistic dogma that the Star Child is property belonging to the U.N. By refusing to accept God’s word that He will come to the aid of mankind only if His house, this Earth, is in order, the atheists are threatening to open Earth to the strangers when they return full of wrath and seeking vengeance. Today universal birth control is a fact although the Catholic Church was virtually destroyed in the battle to establish it. Mankind was saved, the Church was lost. Again mankind must be saved. At whatever the cost.”

That ended the essay.

Time Magazine, March 1990

In Dayton’s Coliseum, angry short-haired Christians stormed the latest-three-ring-circus service of Halleluja Shouter Obie Cox. After the two-hour brawl, 250 were treated for bloody noses, broken ribs, and assorted injuries. Firemen put out a blaze in the robing rooms, but not before flames had destroyed the street costumes of Cox’s all girl Heavenly Choir. Later in the week, charging Dayton’s finest with negligence, Cox’s strong-arm man, Robert Merton, announced the Voice of God Church would form its own private good squad, the Militant Millenniumists. Showing newsmen an artist’s sketch of their uniform (dove gray, with black belts, black boots, armbands), Merton said the MM will be trained and equipped like the U.S. Army, will recruit its members from among white, VofG churchgoers, aged 20–40, 5′11″ to 6′6″, weighing 175–230.

Governor Lyman Purdy of Kentucky, long a devoted Coxman, said he saw nothing wrong in the formation of such a private army. Justice Department head Elmore Freed, away on a fishing trip with Coxbacker William S. Jones, was unavailable far comment.”

As I have shown in developing the history of matrist societies in the past, when the degree of permissiveness exceeds that which can be allowed while still maintaining the security of the society, collapse follows. And the succeeding generation inaugurates the rigorous patrist society, in a twinkling, as it were. So we see that under the matrist society we have sexual liberation to the point of license; we have disorganization within the government to the point of anarchy; we have emancipation for our women, never however equalling that of men, but at times approaching it; we have a burst of creativity, with new ideas, new methods, new arts even being invented, much too much to be. assimilated within a lifetime. The very freedom that ushers in a matrist reign is also its downfall.

With the reversal that inevitably follows, we see on authoritarian governing body, whether it be secular or religious or familial, or any combination of the three. Morals become the concern of the government and are restricted to the most conservative ideals of the most conservative committees. Authority again demands obedience and punishes those who do not recognize its claim. Punitive measures are severe and swift, and so on.

In the present situation, however, we find a curious mixture of both kinds of societies, and while anthropologists are agreed that only with a mixture of the two types can a stable society emerge, the combination that we see now Is of the worst aspects of the two general societal organizations that I have outlined. We have the license of the most advanced matrist society, and at the same time we have the restrictions and the punitive qualities that have always characterized the worst of the patrist governments. What must be acknowledged, however, is the fact that where there is a combination of the two societies, there is also the inclination, no, stronger than an inclination, the propensity of this organization to be self-perpetuating….

IN September Obie finally was granted an audience with the Star Child, scheduled for October 15, six weeks away. The reason the interview was approved was simply that in the most recent poll taken by the official Automatic Data Bank Computer Pollster, 49 percent of the people indicated that the Star Child must be examined by a man of God, namely Obie Cox; 17 percent said that he should be left alone, and the others were divided, some saying that an objective interview should be arranged, others saying that the whole thing was nonsense, that he should be turned loose to earn a living like other young men his age.