CHAPTER 15

We gathered in our hotel in Tiberias that night to hear Rev. Cummins move from the summer ministry of Jesus to the autumn ministry, and after that to hear Rev. Martindale expound on what he termed "fragments from the scrapbook of my mind." What he found to say I didn't find worth recording. Just as well. Whatever.

What I didn't record in my notes I remember vividly from the scrapbook of my own mind: I was completely disgusted with The Way. Cummins was nothing but an apologist for the constantly contradictory records of the Gospels, and Martindale, for all his loud blather, so inspiring to the uninitiated, didn't know shit. Both of them could talk a good line, and neither of them convinced me for five minutes.

I was alarmed at my own state of mind, but I couldn't deny the obvious. The history of Israel, the evidence of the soil, ran ten thousand times deeper than The Way's facile explanations. The Israeli tour guides whose recitations we so disparaged knew more about history than Cummins or Martindale would ever know. They had studied the archaeology, the carbon-dating, the prehistory, the extra-biblical sources, the cultures that influenced Palestine, the sweep of history that preceded and followed biblical times. We knew one book, and that filtered through formulaic teachings insisting that no discrepancy was possible. I had come face to face with rhetoric versus knowledge, and knowledge was winning me over.

But the conflict was more personal than that. I was caught between The Way's destiny for me, which was to parrot the ministry line to the death, and the possibility of going my own way and deciding my own destiny. Traveling to Israel at 22 reminded me of traveling to Canada at 4, to Mexico at 7, to Alaska at 13, to Bolivia at 15. As a child I might not have had all the answers, but at least I was free to think for myself.

Now I had all the answers, predigested and spoon-fed to me, and they were starting to turn my stomach. But it wasn't my job to think, only to keep swallowing: it was Gergesa, not Gadara, where two men, not one, were healed of possession by Jesus, a prophet of God like Craig Martindale, whose every word was God's own truth.

I was sick of the confines of The Way, and at the same time I was shocked by my own heresy.

The tour resumed first thing the next morning, and when all was said and done my decision was to parrot the teachings of The Way with wholehearted conviction. There was no denying it: The Way was bigger than me, and I would have to subjugate my own ego to recognize that.

© Karl Kahler 1999