or not giving enough money to the church’s coffers so that Mr. Armstrong and the evangelists could spread the gospel worldwide. You could never pray enough, never give enough. God, who we were taught was good and merciful, was also insatiable in His demands. God was as inconsistent as the church, as my parents.
The screaming, dire certainty with which the minister announced that we were in danger of losing our eternal life—“If you are lukewarm in your love for God, if you are a spiritual DRONE, then your ETERNAL LIFE is at stake! You will NOT make it into the Kingdom!”—the fear of the End Times, the threats of the looming Lake of Fire where sinners would be tossed, and the incessant accusations that, as sinners, we needed to do more, be more, and give more, terrified me as a child. With their every exhortation, a sense of panic and doom squelched my childish optimism, my faith that tomorrow would come. We had to obey every command. Do it God’s way. Our lives, our salvation, were in jeopardy. The stakes were very high.
CHAPTER 4
For years, the question nagged at me: If my parents had to choose one of us ten kids to eat, who would it be?
It was a Saturday in 1968, and I was seven, sitting in church in a long row with my family listening to another sermon. “In the End Times, the time of the Great Tribulation,” the minister shouted from the pulpit, “there will be mass murder, corpses will litter the streets, and the world will reek of the stench of dead bodies!”
This was the fate of those who, in the End Times, had been left behind at Jesus’s Second Coming, and hadn’t made it to the Place of Safety.
“Jesus will return, like a thief in the night. Do not slumber, do not sleep, do not let your love wax cold! The great God is going to spank this world, and he is going to spank hard! Worldwide droughts. Starvation. Parents will eat their children!”
Alarmed, and with a terrible sense of foreboding, I wondered which of us our parents would devour first. A girl and skinny, I was hardly worth killing. Mary, four years older than me, was the nicest, always helping others finish their chores. They wouldn’t eat her. Wanda was the oldest and bossy. My parents wouldn’t dare eat her. Probably one of my older brothers. They were always in trouble. Jim did not close his eyes during opening and closing prayers, and Ed made blasphemous jokes about prayer cloths.
These small, white flannel cloths came from church headquarters in California. Someone there—an evangelist, or perhaps Mr. Armstrong himself—prayed on the cloth, thus making it a “prayer cloth,” then sent it to ailing members, including me when I had pneumonia. One woman believed that it could also repair her car and asked the minister for a prayer cloth so it would stop stalling. After hearing about this, whenever our car rattled or steam rose from the radiator, Ed would mutter an irreverent “prayer cloth.”
I worried that if I were slumbering when Jesus returned, the rest of the brethren would be lifted into the sky and transported on “wings of eagles” to a Place of Safety, according to the book of Revelation. Herbert Armstrong had identified that place as Petra in Jordan. According to the church’s booklet This is PETRA!, the ancient Jordanian city locked in by mountains and carved almost entirely of stone was the Place of Safety. Some members of the church were actively looking forward to living in caves.
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According to the church’s booklet 1975 in Prophecy, the world would end in 1975. A German-dominated Europe would:
. . . blast our [US] cities and industrial centers with hydrogen bombs . . . and so now God is about to punish! . . . It’s later than you think! You have been warned! . . . and I say to you on authority of God Almighty that it is absolutely sure!
The words were accompanied by illustrations that resembled horror movies or science fiction: a barren landscape with a hand sticking up from the ground; people fleeing a city where a hydrogen bomb flamed against the backdrop of the buildings; skeletal figures whose eyes popped out of their sockets; and frightened faces cowering against giant hailstones crashing from the skies.
I later learned that many of the horrors the church described were based on the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. The church itself was fashioned with a Nazi-like structure. The administrative offices in Pasadena, California, were referred to as “Headquarters,” and its hierarchy paralleled that of the military. Herbert Armstrong, the “apostle,” was akin to a general; and the counterparts to the church’s evangelists, preaching elders, local regional elders, local church elders, deacons, and members were colonels, captains, first and second lieutenants, sergeants, and privates.
This structure even extended to families. At one point, the church required children to address their parents as “Sir” and “Ma’am,” not Mom and Dad. Five-year-old children sharply and obediently said, “Yes, sir! No, ma’am!” as if they were speaking to a sergeant in boot camp. And just like in the military, you didn’t dare question authority. “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,” said the ministers, quoting the biblical verse. God who loved us was also a totalitarian dictator.
My father tried to maintain order in our chaotic household by insisting that we say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am.” My mother took to calling my father “sir” as well, and we all knew that it was a taunt of sorts, much the same as the way she snuck bits of beef tongue into the potato hash without my tongue-hating father knowing it.
As terrible as the horrors of the Great Tribulation, Jesus’s Kingdom was a fat, juicy, delicious carrot dangled in front of us. Once the Tribulation was over, as described in Matthew 24, “Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be,” then Satan would be bound for 1,000 years, unable to make mischief in the world, while Jesus ruled His Kingdom.
I prayed fervently that I would manage to get into the Kingdom. I prayed to have a converted mind, prayed for God’s Holy Spirit. I desperately feared being left behind when Jesus returned. Even though I went to church every week, even though I knelt each night at my bed and prayed, even though I tried not to be rebellious, there was no guarantee that I would get into the Kingdom.
The Kingdom, God’s harvest of souls, was exemplified in the annual harvest holiday of the Hebrew Bible, the Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot. It represented the Second Resurrection, the time when those who had died without knowing the Truth would have a chance to be saved. I did not know then or for a very long time that our holidays were Jewish holidays, and that modern-day Jews continued to celebrate them. I assumed God had created them just for the church.
My parents took us out of school to celebrate the eight-day holiday of Sukkot. My mother woke up her ten kids before dawn and bundled us into the car to drive to one of the church’s Feast sites. When we pulled onto the empty road, the stars were not yet absorbed into the still-gray sky, and I imagined that only God and my family were awake.
One year we drove to the church’s Feast site in Texas, another to Georgia, and once to the Poconos, but mostly we went closer to home, to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, staying at church-arranged hotel rentals and cabins. Just as the Israelites had not lived in permanent homes during those forty years in the desert after they escaped slavery in Egypt, we’d left our physical homes behind to remind us that they were temporal, but God’s Kingdom was forever.
In what almost amounted to a caravan, church members from around the country flooded the Feast sites with our beat-up cars. Every morning, clad in our Sabbath dresses and suits, we left our motel and drove off to attend services in the immense, aluminum-sided, unheated “tabernacle building,” where we sat from oldest to youngest on the typical hard, metal folding chairs.
Throughout the eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles, we heard sermons and sermonettes, morning and afternoon, from ministers and preaching elders and evangelists from around the country. At the top of the page of our notebooks we wrote the dates—October 8, 1968; October 17, 1970; October 15, 1973—and the titles of the sermons: “The Coming Armageddon,” or “The Plan of God,” and the name of the minister,