Ron Athey
“You’ve been born with the Calling on your life, Ronnie Lee,” my grandma and Aunt Vena repeatedly informed me from the time I was a baby.1 I was just becoming aware of what that prophesy meant—how being chosen for a ministry made me different from everyone else. According to this message from the holiest of holies, I was to sacrifice the playthings of the world, in order to fulfill the plans of God.
The holy woman
Through the course of my religious training, I encountered many great prophets, faith healers, mystics, and savers of souls. In church I would close my eyes and absorb the rambling vibrations given off from the Gift of Tongues, mixed in with the sounds of foot-stomping, and bodies hitting the floor hard as they went out in the Spirit. I would listen intently as people testified of physical healings, the exorcism of demons, and the detailed arrival of Armageddon. My childhood was spent among adults who believed that their lives read like the Book of Job. It mystified me that as mere test of faith God unleashed hideous diseases and allowed actual demon possession. Later, the diseases could be removed, provided a powerful Reverend Minister executed the laying of hands.
The rarest and least talked about miracle was stigmata, wherein the gifted would spontaneously bleed from the same parts of the body that Christ bled. Because the only two living examples with stigmata were women, there seemed to be some indication that women were more open to receiving the gift, but I believed with all my heart it could be given to me.
One day, Aunt Vena received a promotional flyer announcing “Sister Linda’s Miraculous Gift of Stigmata: A three Day Visit to the Indio Area.” It described how sometimes she bled pure blood, and other times she bled a clear scented healing oil. Putting the sweetest, holiest look on my face, I expressed my interest in attending. “Aunt Vena, I want to see this miracle.” So my family drove into the desert to let me witness Linda bleed.
That first night, after sitting through an uninspiring sermon delivered by the local Pentecostal minister, it became apparent that Linda was not going to bleed. I was disappointed, but still anxious to return.
On the second visit, the air was so still outside, I just knew she was going to bleed. Sister Linda had dark circles under her eyes that night, and her face was shiny with sweat. She sure looked like she had the Holy Spirit rattling around inside her. I joined the hymn singing, a chorus of twangy hillbilly voices belting out, “When we all get to heaven,/ What a day of rejoicing that will be!/ When we all see Jesus,/ We’ll sing and shout with victory!” Again, the minister tried for—but did not achieve—inspiration. Towards the end of the service, when she still had not bled, I wanted to throw a temper tantrum. I thought, “She’s a big fat fake.” I couldn’t understand why everyone else was so patient waiting for her gift to reveal itself. All she had shown us were pictures, cheap snapshots of her previous bleedings, as if that were sufficient evidence of a miracle. She also had told the congregation that impressions in blood would appear in her Bible, but I didn’t want to hear stories about psychic phenomena, I wanted her to bleed. I had gone there with the desire to be anointed in the blood seeping directly from her palms.
I wondered if she’d bleed from the place where the spear had been inserted in Christ’s side. I pondered on whether or not she’d expose the hole. Would she be modest like my Aunt Vena, or was a stigmata wound different? I imagined what the blood would look like, running down her forehead, seeping through her clothes. But she hadn’t bled from anywhere on those two nights.
Grandiose tears
During Joyce’s pregnancy with me, her 19-year-old sister Vena prophesied that I had the calling on my life, and would become a powerful minister. They said that once out of my mother’s body, I was surrounded by a crackling blue force field. So was the sign. I was raised according to the prophecy. Throughout my early childhood, many evangelists discerned this “Calling.” A particularly remarkable incident happened late in the fall of 1970.
I was 9 years old, and eager to understand the Gifts of the Spirit. My grandfather drove the family station wagon for over an hour to take my grandmother, Aunt Vena, and myself to a revival meeting that had been set up in Rubidoux, a town in the part of California known (with no little bit of irony) as the Inland Empire. When we finally arrived and parked the car, it was freezing and there was a moderate dust storm. We rushed from the car, rubbing the dirt from our eyes. The building in which the revival meeting was being held was nothing but a raggedy wood shack, really, standing alone in the middle of a totally barren landscape. But once inside, safe from the harsh weather, we took our seats. Down the centre aisle was a red carpet runner, which led to a wooden table set up as an altar. There were two floral arrangements on stands flanking a podium, the air was perfumed with the oil used to anoint the congregation, and slow inspirational music was being played on an accordion. We soaked all this in for many minutes, and finally a male evangelist came forth and took his place in the pulpit.
For a while he just stood, smiling humbly, framed by the glories of his altar, looking out over all, maybe 35 of us. This male evangelist delivered a loud and dramatic sermon, during most of which he left his place in the pulpit and walked up and down the red carpet runner, speaking directly into each face. When he had thrown down on something particularly profound, the congregation would punctuate the point by releasing a very precise “Hallelujah!” back at him.
After the sermon, his wife dragged her accordion and a chair onstage, and led in the singing of the hymns. “I’m So Glad/ Jesus Lifted Me” and “I’ve Been Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.” The minister stood up and announced a healing service, the real driving force—even more so than salvation—of a successful revival meeting run. Folks will drive to the end of the Earth to receive a healing
As a line calmly formed down the entire length of the red runway, the minister dipped his hands in the strong oil, stored in a large urn. The first woman in line stepped forward to the minister; she was turned around and announced to the congregation: “I have stomach cancer.” After the laying on of oil-drenched hands by the minister and his backup system—four women who were effectively a spiritual powerhouse—the sister vomited onto the carpet. The minister announced that she had thrown up the evil cancer, roots and all, and was healed. The minister’s wife flung a square of shiny light green fabric over the mess. These squares of fabric were in all the services, and in most cases they were used to cover women’s panties when their dresses rose up too high if they landed spread eagled after falling out in the Spirit.
The next three healing-seekers in the line-up hit the floor after their anointing, though it wasn’t vocalized to us what healings they had come to receive. I’d seen all this before, but there was a disturbing occurrence after that.
A semi-comatose, heavy-set woman was brought to the front of the line by two of her family members. The minister, the powerhouse, and the family all prayed over her body, commanding a healing, anointing her, shaking her, demanding that her body be released from the disease of diabetes. But something either went wrong or was already wrong, and in the midst of their prayers she went unconscious, into a coma. A man from her family had already been trying to force grapefruit juice down her throat—to boost her blood sugar—but it was beyond a citrus intervention and didn’t take effect. She was dragged out of the church and driven to a hospital. It made the healing service seem dangerous, but real. I thought people would leave, but no one left. Instead it intensified.
Members of the congregation testified to seeing visions of a consuming Holy Fire roaring up the inner walls of the old wooden storefront we were using as a church. It was after midnight, and I felt overwhelmed with the energy of the room. Tears streamed down my face. The minister came and put me in his arms, carried me up to the pulpit, and placed me on a chair. He raised my hands up towards God and stated—as my Aunt Vena had prophesied—that I was a special child, that I had the Calling on my life. I was on the verge of receiving the Gift of Tongues, my nerves started to tremble in my body, and I could feel my insides contracting up to the back of my throat, the tip of my tongue rapidly tapping against the front of my palate. I felt so close, yet all that came was more tears. The minister removed his tie and began unbuttoning his white cotton dress shirt, which he then took off and began tearing into small squares. The small rags were lifted to my face one at a time: one square, one tear. The congregation lined up and were instructed to pin this relic to the interior of their bed clothing, and pray for that miracle. After the dispensing, tears still streamed down my face like some beautiful transparent form of stigmata.
Grapes of wrath in the Inland Empire
The grandparents who raised my brother and sisters had come from San Antonio, Texas. My grandmother’s family also cited Corpus Christi, but they constantly moved around during the Depression. Grandma had stories of living in a car and surviving off meat from squirrels her brothers shot and cleaned. She voiced resentment that my grandpa and his mother, allegedly an Apache Indian, had lived on a small ranch via the reservation and had the “easy life.” They never told me how they met and married, just that they’d moved to San Jacinto, California, because my grandfather could get construction work there. They settled down in Hemet long enough to raise their two daughters, Joyce and Vena. Eventually he landed a job doing construction on the Claremont Colleges, and with a break for the Korean War, bought a house on the G.I. Bill in the city of Pomona. Neighboring Chino, Pomona was the gateway to the Inland Empire, the furthest suburb east in LA County, a small community of farming, milk and dairy, and large state and federal prisons. When they purchased the house in 1950, Pomona was a racially mixed area. But the late 1960s, due largely to race riots and Chicano gang violence, white flight occurred, except for my family. We were the only white family within a square mile. In the isolation of being whites in a fifty-fifty black and Chicano neighborhood, my grandmother’s racism isolated us even further. We were warned about bringing “colored” people into the house. Vena would qualify that at one point she had participated in a civil rights march or two, but her mother would interrupt and say “get off your soapbox Vena Mae.”
Back in Texas, my grandma and her mother had been devout Pentecostalists. My grandpa had protested that it was fanatical and seemed to take over my grandmother’s life. Her religion made him uncomfortable, so she vowed upon leaving Texas and the Pentecostal practice behind. And perhaps on her part she’d had enough of the scandals and gossip that seem to plague spirit-filled churches.
Raising children and enjoying a better quality of life in the 1940s and 1950s, she was able to abide by that decision. For no reason other than it was Protestant and nearby, she attended a Lutheran church with her family, all the while complaining about its mediocrity. She was just going through the motions of structure, teaching her daughter about the Bible, but her heart wasn’t in it. One day she and her youngest daughter Vena, a mama’s girl who was finally teenaged, saw a revival tent meeting set up. They went inside, and my grandmother recounts that she felt shame for ever abandoning the Spirit. Revivals were roadshows with more than a few ties to vaudeville, and loud miracles happened in abundance. She was reignited with the fire of the Holy Spirit, and filled with the Gifts of Tongues and Prophecy. Vena felt that this was also her future, and together they committed to the Pentecostal way. My grandfather wasn’t too happy about this, but eventually they broke him down some. He went to meetings with them and studied his Bible, but to his dying day, he was never born again. He would never admit to having received Christ. Taking the half-measure route, my mother Joyce had no problem with the showy Gifts of the Spirit, or taking a blasphemous approach. This was reflected in her tongues, which were so close in phonetics to her epileptic mumblings.
Joyce
I called my mother “Joyce” because my mother didn’t raise me. She was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and most dramatically suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures. I wondered if these involuntary acrobatics were trying to destroy her: besides the usual tongue chewing, she often convulsed face forward into the most dangerous settings. In the worst incident I witnessed, she leapt right through the dining room window into the back garden.
That particular day was the one and only time I ever remember her cooking. She was making batches of silver-dollar-sized pancakes at the stove, which we couldn’t wait to smother in butter and Karo maple-flavored corn syrup. After making a trip from the stove to the table, she stopped functioning and stared straight ahead, mumbled noises in an increasing volume while her body stiffened, then trembled, and took off. There was a crash and she dove through the plate glass window. Joyce was lying face down in the garden, still convulsing. I remember there being blood and glass everywhere, an especially thick paste of blood forming in her hair. My grandma and Aunt Vena came running out to help her, shooing us kids aside. An ambulance was called, and a wooden spoon was wedged between Joyce’s teeth. Waiting for the paramedics, I asked about the thick blood coming out of her head and was told it was strawberry jam, which I didn’t believe. I was smart enough to figure out blood was building up and coagulating inside her bouffant, and found an exit point through the top. Back to the nuthouse, Joyce never functioned as part of the household after that.
This spasmodic mess contrasted the statuesque, composed woman Joyce was outside of the epileptic fits. The only thing Joyce seemed to care about, or ever talk about, was how beautiful she was. Her glamorous good looks and style could best be described as a cross between Marlo Thomas (That Girl) and Jackie O. She spent hours poised in wool skirt suits and big hair, almost picture perfect, except for the rigid motions with which she’d take her hands—stiffened as if in salute—to smooth out the front and sides of her jacket, moving down the length of her skirt, continually fighting non-existent creasing and bunching. She was in a constant fight with her dignity, convinced her clothes were crawling up her body trying to indecently expose her.
Joyce’s final downfall was her acts of violence. She had raging temper tantrums, usually towards her younger sister, Vena, and later directed towards others. For no apparent reason, she would beat Vena down to the floor, or begin throwing dishes at her from across the room. She would hear my sister cursing at her through sound sleep, and pull her from the top bunk bed to the concrete floor at 3 a.m. Finally, she tried to shove Vena into the oven while Vena was bent over, removing an apple pie. Joyce refused to explain or apologize. For this she was sent to Camarillo, the state mental institution, and hence the schizophrenic diagnosis and heavy treatments. She spent the next years in and out of state and private care institutions, out long enough to have four children by two husbands. She was finally placed in a specialized “board and care” permanently. As one father was missing and the other denied visitation rights, my grandparents and Aunt Vena were left to raise us.
The Catholic envy of Vena Mae
Although Vena had only ever been involved in Protestant churches, she had an intense obsession with the Catholic Church. She found herself truly moved by stories of the lives of saints, and found immense strength in the way Catholics glorified the Virgin Mary, almost as an equal to Christ. As Vena proceeded with her exploration of “holy roller” revival meetings, she found more power of interpretation, fewer rules, less structure, and an entire world of the Spirit to draw off. She had a powerful authority in being able to channel a higher being. She knew better than to bring it to her church meeting straight-out, but she justified bringing Catholic rituals and icons into her daily life. Vena may have felt cheated out of the Catholic God-given right to publicly pray to a vast array of suffering idols, but she made up for it at home.
In any church she had ever been to, this form of worship was not only frowned upon, it was considered praying to false idols. She followed her conviction that she was Jesus-first, and personally, ecstatically, related to the saints. The graphic descriptions of martyrdom and the high drama rituals were spirit-state- and vision inducing. Devout Catholics, she knew, with the help of saints, would experience spiritual ecstasy through imagining the suffering of Christ during the exact moment of crucifixion. In contrast, the altarpieces in Protestant churches, minimal stylized crosses with no body of Christ, paled beside Catholic grandiosity. She could have converted, I suppose, but all of this representation of bloody spectacle still pales next to the Pentecostal’s receiving of the Baptism in the fire of the Holy Ghost. She stood by her conviction that in her spiritual life, she could have the fire of the Holy Spirit, and guidance from the Holy Virgin and the bloody martyr saints.
The 18-year-old Vena became so deeply involved in her charismatic Pentecostal spiritual practices that she began to question her lifestyle. She was engaged to an artist, and wore her hair in platinum waves à la Jayne Mansfield. She dressed “of the world,” in high heels and too-tight Capri pants. She realized that to become a proper church lady, it was time to develop appropriate presentation. For revival church-wear, she evolved into something quite gigantic, dressing in outlandish fashions only worn by gospel singers in poor, small Pentecostal churches. Typical was a floor-length powder blue dress with white side-panels, puffed sleeves, and a matching floor-length vest. Her hair evolved into a giant beehive in many shades of blonde, complete with curled bangs and tendrils, sometimes pumped up with winglets or falls hitched on the back. Though it would seem an absurd addition to her Grand Ole Opry styling, on special occasions she added a black mantilla, as a note taken from the older Chicanas in our neighborhood, who wore them to weddings and funerals. She would carefully pin the large lace square over her beehive, and wrap a matching black shawl around her shoulders.
When Vena spoke tongues, Latin flavorings would slip in. She would constantly insert “oh Christo, Christo” and “Yaysus” into her Babelogue of “she-kund-dera-mah-see-kee-yukz,” thinking she was speaking in Spanish. The Pentecostals explain the gibber-jabber tongues to be a channeled spirit language (glossolalia), which differs from the Gift of Xenolalia, the gift of speaking an actual but unlearned foreign language that missionaries were supposed to have been miraculously given in order to communicate with the natives. As I don’t recall many Spanish-speakers in our services, there was no practical explanation for Vena’s quassi-Español, except for her never-ending obsession with details from the Catholic Church, and Chicanos being her main reference point in the Inland Empire.
In the summer of 1958, according to Vena a sign came that she had personally made contact with Mary. She received a vision from the Virgin, which was to be the first in a series of divine messages. In this vision, she said that the Virgin Mary had come to her and told her she was going to have a worldwide ministry that would set up and deliver the Second Coming of Christ. But in order for this to happen, she and her family were to be tested by God. She was to break off her engagement and remain a virgin; she would be given bone cancer, but later be healed as long as she didn’t go to a doctor. It was understood that she was to be a nun of sorts, until deliverance. Deliverance was the day our family was to be released from spiritual oppression. On that day Vena would miraculously bear the Christ-child, via Immaculate Conception.
My grandmother encouraged her to pursue more of these revelations and directions from the Virgin. Shortly thereafter my grandmother prophesied, in the masculine voice of God (this was her style in prophesying), that she was called on to join her daughter in this journey. In order to become chaste as a nun, she would therefore stop having sexual relations with my grandpa Claude. They would stay up late at night, praying, and doing Holy Women activities, like fasting together. Thus I was raised by two self-appointed, self-styled Pentecostal nuns and prophetesses.
To say the least, Vena and her mother had a strange relationship, but the fact that they had shared a bed since before I was born never seemed odd to me. When our lot came along, it was my brother and I and our grandpa in one room, my two sisters (and my mother when she’d be home) in the other, and the church ladies in the third. I never thought it should be a different way.
What made me suspect the holiness, or even the normalcy of their relationship, was the enduring tradition they had of Betadine douches. Aunt Vena had “female” problems, and for reasons that were not to be questioned, her mother needed to give her a Betadine douche once a week. Vena and her mother would go into the bathroom wearing matching but differently coloured terrycloth robes, and disappear for at least an hour. At first I thought these troubles were legitimized by the doctor, as on a rare occasion no one was home and I could get away with investigating (though I had no idea what I was looking for), I saw there was a drawer in the bedroom full of prescription vaginal medications with plastic inserters, various douching equipment, a large container of Betadine solution, vaginal suppositories, and mysterious items such as feminine deodorant spray. In the bathroom, Vena needed her mother to repeatedly rinse her out with a solution of Betadine and hot water until she was clean. Apparently it took quite a few rinses. The door was always locked, as I tried “innocently” to walk in a couple of times. I pressed my ear against the door, but could only hear the shower running.
Later, when the door finally opened, Vena would walk straight to their bedroom and lay face down on the bed hugging herself, as if to disappear. My grandmother would emerge later after tidying the equipment. She’d go to her special L-shaped couch and read her dream interpretation books while Vena “napped.”
Automatic writing
Patiently waiting for deliverance, Aunt Vena began channeling the Virgin and random saints through one of her most prolific Gifts of the Spirit, automatic writing. She also began channeling the spirit of her dead grandmother, Audrey. Her mother’s mother was the first in the Pentecostal line, and was held in the highest regard. Vena “officially” canonized Audrey, and commissioned a psychic painter to create an icon in vivid colours, which was framed and placed above the wood cabinet that was used as an automatic writing table.
Though the task of bestowing sainthood seemed a bit grand for a nun to decide on, Vena was prone to do anything the Spirit compelled her to, which aside from the Catholic influence seemed to involve an array of mystical tools. I found nothing strange about her channeling the dead through writing, and was especially intrigued with the crystal ball she used for scrying, which was kept wrapped in cloth and boxed in cedar. The prophecies were fantastical and the persecutions melodramatic. Vena suffered from undiagnosed bone cancer, and was healed after three years of suffering and massive weight gain, which, I was clear, was part of the illness or an independent persecution. She also developed a stomach ulcer, which took the weight off. After the cancer healing, she received word from Mother Audrey, the saint, that after she bore the Second Coming of Christ, she would be wed to Elvis Presley and bear twin sons. Then grandma and Vena received word that whenever a celebrity on TV placed their forefinger on their nose in a straight line, it was a sign that they were waiting for their Ministry to start, patiently waiting for the day when deliverance came and all this would swing into gear.
By the age of nine, I spoke in tongues, danced in the Spirit, and was prone to visions and ecstatic catatonic states. A few years later, I was retold the story of St. Audrey, and it was suggested her Spirit could enter me. So I was sat in the chair desk beneath her portrait, where a pen and a paper had been placed, and they left me to conjure. I placed the pen, and felt nothing in the room, so I started riding the vibration in my body, and still nothing. It did not translate to words or even scribbles. I prayed, I meditated, I tried jacking it up. Finally, after almost two hours, I had to concede; I failed at this gift, at least in this first session.
One night my whole family was in the living room watching TV. It was the first time the movie Sybil (Daniel Petrie, 1976) was being shown, and I remember having unbearable feelings of embarrassment and shame: because my mother was schizophrenic, heard voices and bore different personalities; because my sister’s female organs were damaged; because Vena’s mother was still giving her weekly, closed-door Betadine douches in a red-hot, dripping, steamy bathroom.
All I had known up to that point was that we were the most important family in the world, chosen by God to kick-start Armageddon.
Notes
1 An earlier version of this writing was published as Ron Athey, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings from the Golden State, ed. by Nicole Panter (Los Angeles: Incommunicado Press, 1996), pp. 70–80. It has been extensively revised for this publication.