Revival

by Stephen King

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said. “And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave. Would you like to see another one, Jamie?”

Selective memory is one of the chief sins of the old, and I don’t have time for it. They were not all good things. We lived in the country, and back then, country life was hard. I suppose it still is.

“This isn’t to frighten you kids,” he said. “There are ministers who believe in that kind of thing, but I’m not one of them. It’s just so you’ll know.” (This, I’ve learned, is the kind of thing people say just before they try to scare the living crap out of you.)

As well as being reticent by nature and upbringing, Yankees also have a tendency to be comfortably prejudiced in matters of religion and race.

“Let us say plainly what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of that darkened glass. He meant we’re supposed to take it all on faith. If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.”

the Baptists—both hardshell and softshell—the

it seems to me that religion is the biggest party line of them all.

Each and every church dedicated to Christ’s teaching thinks it’s the only one that actually has a private line to the Almighty.

Muslims, or the Jews, or the theosophists, or the Buddhists, or those who worship America itself just as fervently as, for eight or a dozen nightmare years, the Germans worshipped Hitler.”

The Romans fed Christians to the lions; the Christians dismembered those they deemed to be heretics or sorcerers or witches; Hitler sacrificed the Jews in their millions to the false god of racial purity. Millions have been burned, shot, hung, racked, poisoned, electrocuted, and torn to pieces by dogs . . . all in God’s name.”

I was frozen in place. By horror, yes, of course. I was only nine. But there was also a wild, inchoate exultation, a feeling that at last someone was telling me the exact unvarnished truth. Part of me hoped he would stop; most of me wished fiercely that he would go on, and I got my wish.

what do we get for our faith? For the centuries we’ve given this church or that one our gifts of blood and treasure? The assurance that heaven is waiting for us at the end of it all, and when we get there, the punchline will be explained and we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! Now I get it.’ That’s the big payoff. It’s dinned into our ears from our earliest days: heaven, heaven, heaven! We will see our lost children, our dear mothers will take us in their arms! That’s the carrot. The stick we’re beaten with is hell, hell, hell! A Sheol of eternal damnation and torment. We tell children as young as my dear lost son that they stand in danger of eternal fire if they steal a piece of penny candy or lie about how they got their new shoes wet.

Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”

“You’re right, Dick. Nothing I say will make any difference, anyway.” But it did. To one little boy, it did.

here, in this building? No. Believe what you want, but I tell you this: behind Saint Paul’s darkened glass, there is nothing but a lie.”

Saint Paul was all too right about that dark glass. We look through it all our days and see nothing but our own reflections.

“Never be angry with him for that,” Jacobs said. “Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves—like Con manufactured his muteness—but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

Jamie, I believe I tricked your brother. Or, if you don’t mind the pun, I conned him. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, although they call it kindling faith.

Then the greatest rage of my young life swept through me. It was as sudden as one of those lightning strikes Reverend Jacobs had talked about seeing up on Skytop. I swung my arm and knocked Electric Jesus all the way to the far wall. “You’re not real!” I shouted. “You’re not real! It’s all a bunch of tricks! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, damn you, damn you, Jesus!” I ran up the stairs, crying so hard I could barely see. • • • We never did get another minister, as it turned out. Some of the local padres tried to take up the slack, but attendance dropped to almost nothing, and by my senior year of high school, our church was locked and shuttered. It didn’t matter to me. My belief had ended. I have no idea what happened to Peaceable Lake and Electric Jesus. The next time I went into the downstairs MYF room in the parsonage—this was a great many years later—it was completely empty. As empty as heaven.

talent is a spooky thing, and has a way of announcing itself quietly but firmly when the right time comes. Like certain addictive drugs, it comes as a friend long before you realize it’s a tyrant. I found that out for myself the year I turned thirteen.

Mom’s head was on Dad’s shoulder. Her eyes were closed and there was a dreamy little smile on her face. My dad’s eyes were open, and he gave me a wink as they passed the bandstand.

In flyover country, they have a way of getting Christ and Santa all mixed up.

After a heavy meal, a banana split is not an object of desire but just an object.

I shook my head, smiling. “You went from preaching to huckstering.” As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized it was a mean thing to say, but the idea of my old minister turning tips still boggled my mind. He wasn’t offended, though. He just gave his perfectly knotted tie a final admiring look in the mirror, and tipped me a wink. “No difference,” he said. “They’re both just a matter of convincing the rubes.

he scared me. So did his secret electricity. He talked about it in extravagant terms—secret of the universe, path to ultimate knowledge—but he had no more idea of what it really was than a toddler has of a gun he finds in Daddy’s closet.

Are we clear on that?” We were. Crystal.

“Ordering in pizza. After the c&w chick exits, there’s a guy from Longmont . . . sheet says he’s ‘a baritone interpreter of popular song’ . . .”

“In a week, you’ll take it for granted,” he said dismissively. “That’s the way it works with miracles. No use railing against it; it’s plain old human nature.

I think most people who have suffered great losses in their lives—great tragedies—come to a crossroads. Maybe not right then, but when the shock wears off. It may be months later; it may be years. They either expand as a result of their experience, or they contract.

the three ages of the Great American Male—youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.

Did Jesus wear headphones?” “Probably not,” I said, “but I doubt if he wore wedding rings, either, being a bachelor.”

“Aren’t you listening to me? They don’t deserve the truth, and that’s okay, because they don’t want it.” He smiled, and his teeth appeared, the upper and lower sets locked together. “They don’t want the Beatitudes of the Song of Solomon, either. They only want to be healed.”

Or at the pharmacy in Castle Rock, where you could buy cigarettes at the counter right up front. If you needed actual medicine, you had to walk all the way to the back.

He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there’s really no difference.

Miss Knowlton is suspicious. That’s what the truth does, Jamie. It makes people suspicious.”

His computer was on, the extra-large screen showing those endlessly galloping horses.

If you and I didn’t know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds’ churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again.”

It crossed my mind that he might have had a fourth stroke, this time a cataclysmic one, and I kept an eye on the obituary page in the Portland Press Herald. Not exactly hoping, but . . . Fuck that, I was. I was hoping.

A shadow fell over me. I looked up and it was you. What I was thinking is that your shadow has been over me for my whole

Jacobs might not have heard her over the drumming rain and screaming wind. I did, but chose to ignore her. This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know—by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.

Did he want to know what lay beyond death’s door? Yes. But what he wanted more—I believe this with all my heart—was to violate that mystery. To drag it into the light and hold it up, screaming Here it is! What all your crusades and murder in the name of God were for! Here it is, and how do you like it?