Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

But sometimes being born again didn’t last and the person who used to be loved was said to have backslid. Backsliding was the worst thing that could happen in the Apostolic Faith Mission. It meant all the spontaneous love had been wasted and that the devil had won. Mind you, this was generally seen as a temporary setback. To the Pentecostals the things of the flesh, tempting as they might be, didn’t compensate for the promise of everlasting life. Once you were born again and then became a backslider you challenged this premise and jeopardised the whole glorious presumption of pay now play later. The born-again Christians were all working very hard for their segregated mansions in heaven.

I think I instinctively recognised winners and losers and it seemed to me the members of the Apostolic Faith Mission were to be found more often on the losers’ side of life. This was a situation which they seemed to enjoy. ‘Blessed are the poor, for they shall see the kingdom of God.’ A converted drunk or a sinner who admitted to adultery was such an obvious loser that he just naturally belonged. Backsliding was therefore not easily accepted and a lot of work went into bringing the lost child back to the Lord. The stakes were pretty high. In return for bringing a really lost soul to the Lord you gained a fair amount of real estate in the sky, according to Pastor Mulvery. At least a two-storey mansion set back from the street with trees and green lawns where the soft breezes carried the glissando of harps. Which was a damn sight better than the crackle of hell and the dreadful moans of the everlastingly condemned.

For the drunks who were smart enough to become born again and then backslide, the Apostolic Faith Mission served as a sort of drying-out clinic where love and reassurance, fresh clothes and a new start could be found from time to time. Really juicy backsliding testimonies filled the church and gave everyone present a precious time with the Lord, and Pastor Mulvery a bigger collection plate. Church members put a lot more work and enthusiasm into a bad sinner than someone like Marie who came to them meek as a lamb without any spiritual blemishes, hardly worth a spontaneous halleluja and certainly not worth a good public weep to the glory of the Lord.

Marie’s spiritual moment of glory came later when she testified in front of the congregation and told how she had brought an eighty-nine-year-old Boer to the Lord on his death-bed. How he had been afraid to die and when she had brought him to Christ he had closed his eyes and with a soft sigh gone to meet his maker.

I had privately thought this an almost perfect solution. The old man had spent his life as a sinner and then, at the last possible moment, was snatched from the jaws of hell by a pimply-faced girl whose heart was filled with love and compassion. I wondered briefly whether this entitled him to a full heavenly mansion or maybe just the garden shed at the bottom of Marie’s garden? Anyway, she got a terrific response from the congregation. Snatching lost souls from the brink of the fiery furnace was pretty high on the list of important conversions and it immediately altered her previous status of sweet girl to that of a capable and resourceful soldier in the army of the Lord.

Like me, Dum and Dee were holding out, although to them the whole business was a bit confusing and their true status was never really known. They had been semi-ordered to be born again by my mother and naturally they had complied. My mother gave them a Shangaan Bible but it was left to me to teach them to read it and we had concentrated more on the Old Testament where the stories of the warriors, drought and famine were much more to their liking. Their favourite was the one about Ruth in the cornfield trying to find enough corn to feed her family after the harvesters had been through the fields. The concept of a white man coming along and forgiving everyone’s sins and then getting nailed to a post for his trouble to Dum and Dee seemed a highly unlikely story. As Dum pointed out, white men never forgive sins, they only punish you for them, especially if you are black. To accept the black man’s sins and agree to be responsible and even crucified for them only proved he must have been crazy. Dee then asked, if he’d already done the dying for black people’s sins, why was the white man always punishing the black man? I was prepared to agree she had a point and as I also found the miracles very suspect, we just naturally stayed with the Old Testament, which had witchdoctors like Elijah and great leader kings like Moses and fierce and independent generals like Joshua. A book like this made sense and posed all the problems and terrors their own legends told about.

My mother claimed Dee and Dum, along with Marie, on her personal born-again list. There were others, for on Wednesday afternoons she stopped sewing and headed for the hospital with a marked Bible and a bagful of tracts. The tracts had headings such as, Sinner snatched from certain hellfire and The man who talked to God about sin and Salvation: God’s precious promise. The one she claimed was the big artillery in the hospital environment was called, Hell is one mortal blink away. She had taken Pastor Mulvery’s place after I was released from hospital, and from time to time found worthy sinners lurking behind starched sheets. They were usually fraught with the anxiety of fresh stitches from a hysterectomy or a gall-bladder operation and ripe for the softening-up process. My mother began by enquiring about the operation. She was an expert, perhaps even the world champion, on operations. She seemed to have undergone all the major operations a woman can expect and a few others on the side just to round out her experience. At the drop of a medical complaint she could detail every phase of an operation from the first tiny suspicious pangs of pain to the post-operative depression. My gift for recalling every detail of a fight must have come from her, for she could do the same with operations, even the bits when she was under anaesthetic.

Having determined how long the sinner was likely to be in hospital and therefore how captive as an audience, the spiritual ear bashing began; Marie did the follow-up work for the Lord, keeping the sinner Christwise until the next Wednesday visit. They shared the souls they saved and often witnessed together at the Sunday morning meeting where they basked in the warmth of the spiritual love they received from the congregation. The Lord had a couple of stormtroopers in them, all right. Pastor Mulvery used to refer to them as ‘the sisters of redemption’, adding that the Lord had touched them in a special way.

Marie was still very conscious of her pimples. One day my mother said enough was enough, if the Lord cared about every sparrow that fell, then surely he cared equally about Marie’s pimples. The two of them went down on their knees and exhorted the Lord to cast out the pimple demon. To my complete surprise He did. Within a year Marie’s face was as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and she turned out to be quite pretty underneath. That was a mighty testimony session, with Marie crying and ruining her new-found prettiness and my mother telling the dramatic story of the Lord’s wonderful pimple cure. Pastor Mulvery did a neat little summary afterwards by saying the Lord’s rewards are not only in heaven where the big pay-out takes place but also on earth as instanced by the demise of Marie’s pimples. My mother’s faith and her work with Marie for the Lord had been rewarded personally by Him.

When I first told Doc about the concerted prayer campaign for the removal of Marie’s pimples, he suggested that I advise her to eat lots of salad, no fat, and lean meat only, twice a week. Marie tried it, found she liked it better than the stodgy hospital food, and kept to this diet fairly diligently. When I told him of the cure through prayer he declared that some things were too mysterious for words. I thought about it a little more and finally made the connection between the diet and the cure, and I asked him why he hadn’t pointed out the possibility of the change in diet making the difference.