For the Love of God

 @copyright 2020/Mike Consol

Lava flowed from the pulpit of the Baptist Church of the Holy Apocalypse, Preacher Elias Gentry presiding. His was the most vocal and condemnatory Christian voice in the community and was on a campaign against the slew of “spiritual” organizations — whose beliefs were deeply embedded in Hinduism, Taoism and other far eastern religions — that had sprouted and gained traction in his community. There was one in particular that obsessed Preacher Elias. It was called Divinity’s Rainbow and he was thundering during his Saturday and Sunday services against its wicked appropriation of souls, under the guise of something called satsang, a Hindi word meaning something approximating “spiritual discourse” or “sacred gathering.” The weekly satsang of Divinity’s Rainbow involved its members taking standing one by one at the microphone and expounding about their spiritual beliefs and experiences. Preacher Elias had already been quoted in the local newspaper railing against the practice, which he dubbed “open-mic-night for the devil.” The article included a photo of The Preacher’s tense face. 

The head of the organization, a woman calling herself Aviana Virtue, was charismatic and ambitious and was growing the Divinity Rainbow membership quickly and in interesting ways. She had started a Saturday farmers’ market and a Sunday cost-free karma-free vegetarian lunch, open to the indigent and hungry. 

In that same article in the local newspaper, Preacher Elias Gentry called the Sunday lunches a “Depression Era soup kitchen.” 

“Pure chaos,” he was quoted as saying. “The woman in charge is turning this city into a socialist welfare state. She is the pied-piper of perdition.” 

The newspaper liked seeking comment from The Preacher on many matters ecclesiastical and secular because he was so quotable. What he did not put into words during his interview with the reporter was his secret admiration for Aviana Virtue, and how she had roped together some of the other New Age organizations into a collective that, in turn, rounded up volunteers to manage both the karma-free lunches and farmers’ market. The gathering gave this Aviana Virtue an opportunity to recruit new members, even if that meant peeling away the members of other witless organizations involved in the collective. He found it especially galling that Aviana Virtue had reached into biblical notoriety and strategically named the farmers’ market The Garden of Eden. It was a devious and brilliant attempt to lure unwitting Christians into the fray and start feeding them her propaganda. Participating farmers were charged almost nothing to sell their produce in return for donating some of the provisions for the next day’s vegetarian lunch. Hundreds showed up for the farmers’ cooperative and more than a thousand for the karma-free lunch, many of whom dropped cash into the donation kettles craftily positioned at entry and exit points. 

It was a page straight out of the playbook of the Hare Krishnas, who sponsor Sunday vegetarian feasts to feed the homeless in cities around the world and use the gathering as an opportunity to spread their propaganda. The Preacher had been reading up on the Hare Krishna Movement and its worldwide confederation of more than 650 temples and centers, including 60 farm communities looking to achieve self-sufficiency, 90 restaurants and 50 schools. It had rapidly expanded its membership in India and in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union imploded. Since then, however, the organization’s expansion and influence had mostly crapped out. And, yet, its modus operandi was being given fresh life by Aviana Virtue. 

 

 

 

 

The rodent face of Preacher Elias Gentry was in evidence at satsang one Saturday night. It was an outdoor gathering to take advantage of the good summer weather, and he was standing across the street, on the periphery, eavesdropping, wanting to find out what kind of damnable utterances were staining the air. 

Preacher Elias kept a safe distance from Aviana Virtue. He sensed the danger, but mostly he sensed power. The Preacher could plainly see the inappropriately named Ms. Virtue was a hypnotic and influential woman, and proximity was critical. One needed to keep some distance from her. Stand too close or make eye contact or listen to her drivel and one could become mesmerized. Just look at the following and the dedication. Her words, physical beauty, her ability to channel and radiate energy, they were all weapons. She was a Death Star. 

He approached her anyway as the crowd dispersed at the conclusion of the evening’s festivities and thrust an arm toward her, on the end of it was his hand holding a book whose cover read, THE HOLY BIBLE. 

“I don’t believe you own one of these,” he said, extending the leather-bound volume further still, careful to avoid direct eye contact. In Preacher Elias’ imagination, Aviana Virtue was going to spontaneously combust when she took hold; the fire would last for hours and leave a pile of gray ash with a perfectly undamaged Bible sitting on top. 

Instead, Aviana Virtue accepted it with a decorous bow and caressed the volume to her chest. Preacher Elias Gentry scampered away. 

 

  

 

Prudence Gentry, the former Prudence Swagler, was the daughter of a Baptist preacher and burned with even more holy fire and brimstone than her husband Elias, though hers was a demure and silent fury. She had been taught from her earlier memories that a woman was to be seen and not heard in public places, that her thoughts must be restricted to the confines of home and shared solely and discreetly with her husband. 

It was at the weekend services of the Baptist Church of the Holy Apocalypse that Prudence Gentry sat in her designated place in the first pew wearing a flowered dress, her knees primly pressed together as she and gazed adoringly at her husband while he sermonized about matters of life, death, judgement and eternity.  It was at the Gentry home that Prudence would pour kerosene on her husband’s fire, spurring on ever more fiery weekend services and homilies, including his campaign against Aviana Virtue and Divinity’s Rainbow. The more brimstone brought to the pulpit, the more Elias and Prudence Gentry’s marital bonds tightened. Prudence Gentry knew how to feed her husband’s perverse love affair with The Creator. 

Preacher Elias was tall, thin and well into the aging process, as evidenced by his bald pate and ferocious combover. That was only on the outside, though. On the inside his internal organs were strong and he still had the high, penetrating voice of a much younger man. Erections came easily, and he still had sex once per week with Mrs. Gentry, shouting for the love of God each time he reached climax. 

  

 

 

Preacher Elias Gentry had come to the dismal conclusion he had been born in the wrong era, that he would have been immeasurably happier had he come of age during Christianity’s heyday, when Roman emperors and British kings, despite all their power, had to express fealty to the Christian Church. It was a time when Christianity had real power, not like today when all the faith’s leaders were capable of doing was working at the margins of society. People in the United States didn’t give a rat’s ass anymore about what a religious leader had to say; leave the influential pronouncements to professional athletes and pop and film stars. At least that was the case for Christianity and almost every other religion in the world. If born a millennium earlier, Preacher Elias would have had the wherewithal to crush the Divinity’s Rainbow and to offer Aviana Virtue as a human sacrifice. 

The Preacher had to wonder: Who was he really leading, anyway? He could count on one hand the number of people who demonstrated subservience to him; in fact, he could count that on one finger, it was just wife Prudence and none other. Even his altar boys were known to push back on occasion. He felt ineffective. Compare that to that Virtue woman. She had subservience by the dozens, at least. The whole thing was one giant act of compliance and obedience. 

The only place religion was able to run governments these days was in the Middle East, and those were not Christian organizations. Preacher Elias was visited by a thought that startled him; it was empathy toward religious extremists who used violence, such as bomb blasts, to get their way. The preacher worked to banish the thought, in part because he didn’t even own a backpack, let alone the explosives to load it with. Even so it would be to no avail, he would cease to exist and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fruits of his lunacy. Yes, he would be in heaven, but he wanted some earthly dominion before entering a formless eternity. Was he ready to turn Aviana Virtue’s damnation into his own? 

The Preacher fantasized a half-dozen other ways to do violence to the organization, methods that didn’t involve self-extinction. Again, though, to no avail. He would be instantly suspected, arrested, interrogated, broken and incarcerated, where he would spend the rest of his life fearing acts of male-on-male sodomy being visited upon his Corpus Christi. He had already entered well over a dozen statements of condemnation into the public record. His quotations were right there in the local newspaper, in articles about Aviana Virtue and Divinity’s Rainbow, hellfire from the mouth of The Preacher Man. A scalding fury was fanning its way up the back of The Preacher’s bony skull. His hatred was molten; his blood ran dark. 

 

 

 

 

A rumor begun circulating that Aviana Virtue was not her real name, that she was operating under a stage name, the product of a courthouse name change or an outright forgery. Either way, it had been contrived to prevent discovery of her history as a topless dancer in Minneapolis gentlemen’s club called The Booby Trap. Somebody had even used an untraceable email account to send the falsehood to the local newspaper, city Police Department, the Chamber of Commerce, the Divinity’s Rainbow landlord and even to Preacher Elias Gentry, apparently in the interest of undermining Aviana Virtue and her organization. The perpetrator even provided a couple of email attachment, doctored photos of a woman appearing to be Aviana Virtue doing a naked shimmy under the strip-joint spotlights.

“Evidence aplenty that her name is a forgery,” The Preacher declared from the immunity of his pulpit, “and that she spent years making her living at a house of ill-repute.”  

Suspicions regarding the source of the rumor fell most heavily on two people: Preacher Elias Gentry, for obvious reasons, and the executive director of the local Realtors Association, who had been openly upset about the “riff-raff” the Divinity’s Rainbow cost-free, karma-free vegetarian lunches were attracting to the city, threatening to depreciate home values. Though the rumor didn’t originate with Preacher Elias, quickly sought to spread the rumor as aggressively and widely as possible. 

The Preacher smelled blood and, in violation of Baptist Convention covenants, dipped into church funds to hire a forensic investigator. It took three weeks for the investigator to produce a report, an electronic file sent via email to Preacher Elias’s in-box. The report gave him and the rest of Aviana Virtue’s detractors nothing to go on. Aviana Virtue was her birthname. It was real, legal and had never been changed. She was never an exotic dancer and there was no such enterprise as The Booby Trap in Minneapolis, though there was a strip joint that traded under that title years ago in Yavapai County Arizona, only to close years before Aviana Virtue was even born. 

 

 

 

 

Shortly thereafter a formal invitation from Divinity’s Rainbow was sent to Preacher Elias Gentry inviting him to take a turn of the organization’s lectern to say whatever was on his mind and whatever served the Lord. It was printed on organization letterhead and ornately signed by Aviana Virtue. 

The Preacher had opened, unfolded and held the letter with a pair of latex gloves and some tweezers borrowed from his hair-sprouting wife, fearful the brief epistle had been intentionally contaminated to his detriment. He immediately considered the invite disingenuous, to say the least. After sleeping on the notion for a fortnight, The Preacher began to see the possibilities. Aviana Virtue wasn’t the only person with the oratory skills to captivate an audience. She was misleading people, and he owed the misled an opportunity to reset their sights on the right path to God.

The Preacher, and his beloved wife Prudence, made a surprise appearance during a Friday night satsang, walking onto of the property with great determination and defensiveness. Aviana spotted him and began to walk his way to offer greetings. The Preacher held up his hand to ward her away as he stepped onto the dais. As soon as the person at the microphone finished his remarks, Preacher Elias made his move, but Aviana beat him to the microphone and announce to the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, please give your warmest Divinity’s Rainbow welcome to The Reverend Elias Gentry of the local Baptist Church of the Holy Apocalypse, and his lovely wife Prudence.” 

It was as though she regarded him a dignitary, which, like her invitation letter, he instantly considered disingenuous. The crowd burst into applause and whistles. More disingenuous artifice, he decided, and how did Aviana Virtue know the name of his wife, who was now standing six feet behind him and three feet to the side, staring adoringly at his right earlobe? Preacher Elias cleared his throat with the intention of kicking things off with The Lord’s Prayer before delivering his fiery condemnation of Divinity’s Rainbow and its leader. Before he could even do that, The Preacher’s ferocious comb-over had broken loose and was now flapping in the wind. It extended two feet from the side of his head and was undulating in mid-air, waving at the crowd. He was too involved in the stress of the moment, surrounded as he was by this swarm of hedonists and occultists, to perceive the urgent sensations being transmitted by his scalp. 

He began, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…” 

To his shock and awe, the audience and joined in, reciting the prayer in perfect unison and in high-spirited fashion. The volume grew with each passing line. When he finished the prayer, he repeated it again — and, again, the audience joined in with perfect pitch and with far more passion than The Preacher’s own congregation. Through his peripheral vision, Preacher Elias could see that Aviana, that wanton woman, was also reciting The Lord’s Prayer along with the rest of the group and she wasn’t bursting into flames. Prudence was wobbling on her flats. So overwhelmed was The Preacher, he recited The Lord’s Prayer a third time, buoyed by his powerful vocal support. 

After finishing the prayer, The Preacher shouted three times, “The Power of Christ compels you!” It was the one line that had stuck with him from The Exorcist. Then he dashed from the stage, his wife in tailing him, furious and saddened that he had been publicly moved to the verge of tears by a throng of heathens. He didn’t want anybody to think he could be so moved by an organization of such ill-repute. He was also saddened by the size of the crowd, numbering so many times larger than his own congregation, and infinitely more spirited. 

As he snaked his way through the crowd, audience members offered salutations, sacraments and pats on the back. 

Back at the church, Preacher Elias and wife Prudence sat in a pew, the Bible laid open on his lap, reading and re-reading its account of the coming apocalypse. He knew that almost everyone at the Divinity’s Rainbow gathering must have read his acidic comments in the newspaper, yet they were magnanimous nonetheless, an act of forgiveness for a sin he never committed. Indeed, they were the sinners and, yet, they found it within their hearts to join his Christian invocation. 

The next morning, the newspaper called every 30 minutes seeking comment as word of his surprise appearance leaked out. The Preacher refused to pick up the phone and never responded to the newspaper reporter’s voicemail messages. 

 

 

 

 

Elias and Prudence Gentry decided that an informant was needed at Divinity’s Rainbow, somebody who could look, listen, observe, take notes and report back to The Preacher. Someone who could be trusted to arm The Preacher with malicious information about what exactly was transpiring at the cult’s compound. A plant was needed, so he embedded a former altar boy, now in his early twenties. 

The chosen was a small, compact man with black hair, a lumberjack’s beard and a warm, persistent smile that ingratiated him to others. His habit was to wear flannel, button-down shirts with rolled-up sleeves. He kept one hand tucked in a front pants pocket at all times. 

His name was Wayne. Preacher Elias didn’t want to call him an informant, so he gave Wayne the codename John the Confessor. 

“It’s like the crusades, right here in our community,” Prudence interjected. “This organization is going worldwide unless we stop them.” 

The Preacher stood and took John the Confessor by the shoulders and gazed down at him, looking into the depths of his eyes and said: “Don’t look at her eyes. They will penetrate your soul. She’s very powerful. Some people say she’s magic; I say she’s evil.” 

John the Confessor and his winning smile easily insinuated himself into the Divinity’s Rainbow throng. He paid the small membership fee and was reimbursed by the church. The welcome was warm and widespread. People were immediately drawn to his friendly manner and started talking. After that first week and a couple of satsangs, Wayne, under the cover of John the Confessor, reported back to The Preacher and his wife. There was not a shred of nefarious information, or even controversial or heretical remarks. Certainly nothing explosive enough to use in a character assassination plot against Aviana Virtue. The Preacher picked up some extra communication from the young man’s face. John the Confessor was more animated than usual, his complexion aglow and speaking at the tempo of a man feeling elation. 

“You’re being devoured,” Preacher Elias said in his normal accusatory tone. “They’ve got you by the arms and legs. You didn’t look into her eyes, did you?” 

John the Confessor looked surprised and immediately curbed his enthusiasm. “No, I haven’t even met her yet. There’s always a group around her. People are very attracted.” 

The Preacher’s face dropped, and his voice went sad and small. “I know they are.” 

He led John the Confessor in a couple rounds of The Lord’s Prayer to recalibrate his emotions and ensure his parishioner remained committed to the humdrum worship and listless energy level at the Baptist Church of the Holy Apocalypse. 

 

 

 

 

Suddenly, Aviana Virtue was pregnant. News of her impregnation hit the community like a SCUD missile. Every citizen learned of the news pretty much simultaneously via text messages, emails and general gossip. Unmarried and not dating at the time, suspicions about fatherhood revolved chiefly around a few members of Divinity’s Rainbow. One rumor even predicted the father would prove to be Preacher Elias Gentry, in an errant act of passion born of hatred and jealousy. For the time being, Aviana was being mysterious about the conception and keeping the father’s identity under wraps. 

A woman skilled with Ouija boards called some like-minded friends together to call upon the spirits to reveal the man who had sired Baby Aviana. 

The postulation about Preacher Elias’s involvement in the matter was mostly extinguished when he stood at the pulpit inside the Baptist Church of the Holy Apocalypse and thundered against premarital sex and out-of-wedlock motherhood. He declared her pregnancy incontrovertible proof of moral turpitude in a woman acting as an intermediary to God. 

“She has sinned, she has sinned, she has sinned,” The Preacher bellowed at his congregation. Prudence Gentry held a lightly gloved hand over her mouth in mock surprise to amplify the scandal of it all. “This Lolita,” he shouted, “this Scarlet Woman is about to bring Rosemary’s Baby into the world.” 

Days later The Preacher — obsessively following media coverage of the situation — had been hospitalized. The cause of Preacher Elias’s hospitalization was listed as “exhaustion,” but his wife claimed he had become possessed. 

Eleven days later he was back at the pulpit donned in his black vestments and white collar, having been released from the hospital just days before. He launched into his sermon, which was smoking from the page, even after he had redacted several bits of profanity the night before. 

The Preacher had been humiliated by his absence, even though it had been portrayed as a simple bout of exhaustion, it was not becoming of a man of God. He didn’t want his followers to think he had run out of faith or fight. 

Despite all that, the words were delivered with his usual grandiloquence, even as he gazed out at the pews and noticed his congregation had shrunken. 

“This is how religions get started,” he said. “We will not be challenged, not the religion of Christ the Anointed One, the Lord thy God. Too many have come under this woman’s spell, too many souls have been lost.” 

His eyes brimmed with excess moisture. Mrs. Gentry was sitting at the far end of the first pew, staring fixedly at her husband. It came with the job of being a preacher’s wife. It was Mrs. Gentry who found her husband in the backyard, standing shirtless and mumbling incoherently to himself. His nuts and bolts had rattled loose. 

“I used to think a worldwide religion could never get started again,” he told the congregants, “because people are too cynical and suspicious for that, which is a good thing. We don’t want people led away from the one and only true path to God. We don’t need more imposters and pseudo-saviors. I think these Divinity’s Rainbow people are headed in the same direction as the Church of Scientology and the people following the so-called Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church.” He started riffing about the evils of the Moonies and Scientologists. More steam blew from his ears as the disquisition rolled on, until he got tangled up in one of his thoughts and decided to move on to The Lord’s Prayer, which he recited in a lugubrious Slavic tone. 

After the service, Preacher Elias had a private meeting in this chamber with parishioner Wayne, code-named John the Confessor, who was still embedded at Divinity’s Rainbow. He wanted to ask what he knew about the pregnancy of Aviana Virtue and the identity of the Lucifer Child’s father. 

“Who sired this unsanctioned fetus?” he asked. 

John the Confessor pled ignorance and noted that Aviana Virtue’s stagecraft remained the same. “The brilliance of this organization is that she keeps things focused and simple. Not too many moving pieces.” 

The Preacher sat back in his chair. “Brilliance?” It was not the kind of observation he was expecting to hear conveyed by his spy. “You’re making sure to stay away from that Scarlet Woman, aren’t you? That’s critical. She is too potent.” 

“Absolutely. I’ve been keeping my distance as best I can.” 

“She’s pregnant you know. It’s only a matter of months before Rosemary’s Baby is going to drop out of her belly.” 

“Oh, yeah. She’s never looked happier or more radiant.” 

The Preacher leaned back again. “Radiant?” 

“Well … you have to admit the woman has got a shine about her.” 

John the Confessor noticed the level of concern superimposed across The Preacher’s tormented face. It was more disconcerted than ever. Preacher Elias Gentry had finally come to realize that John the Confessor was unquestionably under Aviana Virtue’s sway. 

For the love of God, he cried out that evening. 

 

 

 

 

Preacher Elias Gentry continued to stand in his backyard, shirtless and muttering to himself at least a couple of times per week. Most of his rhapsodies were a combination of biblical passages and screeds against Aviana Virtue and Divinity’s Rainbow. 

His bearded parishioner, John the Confessor, continued to embed himself at Divinity’s Rainbow and meet with The Preacher when called upon to recount some of the conversations he had overheard, and any plans being formulated at the organization. In time, however, he sheepishly told Preacher Elias he was leaving the church and would quit filling the role of John the Confessor, that he wanted to be a full-fledged member of Aviana Virtue’s New Age movement, that it spoke to him in ways The Preacher and the fiery Baptist doctrine did not. The Preacher crossed himself. 

Things descended further into the abyss when John the Confessor said, “There’s one more thing I need to tell you. One final confession. I am the father of Aviana Virtue’s baby. The child will be mine too.” 

Preacher Elias Gentry sat motionless, nailed to his chair and reconsidering whether the Lord was displeased with him. 

John the Confessor officially shed his codename, withdrew his membership in the Baptist Church of the Holy Apocalypse, returned to being Wayne and apologized to Elias Gentry. Then he came to his feet and left The Preacher’s chambers for the last time.  

Preacher Elias stood shirtless in his backyard that evening. His beloved Prudence, apeshit angry about the betrayal of John the Confessor, who she now dubbed John the Defector, was out there with him, spitting fresh acid into her husband’s ears. 

The Preacher decided he had become ineffectual. His parishioners had lost their fear. They were not afraid of the Angel of Death and Judgment Day anymore. Aviana Virtue had even taken away their fear. His constant efforts to vilify her had backfired, filling his people with curiosity rather than dread, and that brought them to her weekend farmers’ market and free vegetarian feasts and, in some cases, her organization’s compound. Yes, Preacher Elias’s parishioners were still in attendance on Sundays, but not attentive to his religious prescriptions. Their allegiance had been lost. 

They had become the sitting dead. 

@copyright 2020/Mike Consol