“Both. Everyone.”
“But what if your attachment to your style is becoming a barrier to doing what’s most important to you? What’s the problem with cutting your hair?”
“I don’t want to cut my hair!” Symes said, his voice breaking.
“That is such bullshit,” Mutton said. “Where do you want to fight your battles? Do you want to be fighting about your tie-dye T-shirt and your painter’s pants? Or do you want to be fighting over civil rights? Immigrant workers’ rights? Women’s rights? Compassion for the disenfranchised? If these are the battles that matter to you, when are you going to grow up and cut your hair?”
“I don’t know—”
“When are you going to grow up and accept your authority?”
“I don’t know! Bob. I don’t know!”
Mutton could have been asking himself the same questions. Fellowship had been meeting in a Christian church for nearly a decade, whole years had gone by in which no Bible had been seen, “Jesus Christ” was the thing you said when somebody spilled soup on your sunburn, and George Benson, in his supervision of Mutton, wanted to know what the story was. Was this a Christian group or not? Was Mutton willing to stick his neck out and own up to his belief in God and Christ? Was he willing to claim his ministry? Mutton was getting similar questions from some of the advisors. They wanted to know on whose authority honesty and confrontation had become the central values of the group. On Mutton’s authority? Why Mutton’s? Who he? If the group wanted to be about more than Mutton and the group’s adoration of him, then where did the authority reside?
To Mutton the answer was clear. If you took away Christ’s divinity, you were left with “Kum Ba Ya.” You were left with “Let’s hold hands and be nice to each other.” Jesus’ authority as a teacher — and whatever authority Mutton and company had as followers of his teachings — rested on His having had the balls to say, “I am the fulfillment of the prophecies, I am the Jews’ gift to mankind, I am the son of Man,” and to let Himself be nailed to a cross to back it up. If you couldn’t take that step in your own mind, if you couldn’t refer to the Bible and celebrate Communion, how could you call yourself a Christian?
The question, which Mutton raised in supervision, pissed off Symes extravagantly. The group already had its own rituals and liturgies and holy days, its candles, its Joni Mitchell songs, its retreats and spring trips. Symes was amazed that Mutton, with his training in Freud and Jung, wasn’t repelled by the childishness and regression of Christian ceremony. “‘How can we call ourselves Christians?’” he echoed, goggling at Mutton. “Uh, how about by…trying to live like Christ and follow his teachings? What do we need to eat somebody’s blood and body for? That is so unbelievably primitive. When I want to feel close to God, I don’t read Corinthians. I go out and work with poor people. I put myself in loving relationships. Including my relationship with you, Bob.”
This was the classic position of liberal religion, and Symes could afford to take it because he didn’t need to humble himself, because he didn’t have to be the Jesus of Fellowship. Mutton was the bearded young machinist’s son who preached radical stuff to the young and the marginalized, hung out with characters of dubious morality, attracted a cadre of devoted disciples, wrestled with the temptations of ego, and had become, by local standards, wildly popular. Now he was nearing his thirty-second birthday. He would be leaving soon, and he wanted to complete the shift in the group’s focus away from himself and toward religion.
With Symes acting less like a tractable Peter than an obstreperous Jung, it fell to another seminarian, a red-haired former bad boy named Chip Jahn, to stand up at the end of a Sunday-night meeting in 1975 and make a confession. Jahn had been nineteen when Mutton put him in charge of a work camp in Missouri’s southeastern Bootheel. He’d spent a month with kids just two and three years younger than he was, making do with a food budget that was cut in half at the last minute, begging bushels of field corn from local farmers, trying to cook it into casseroles seasoned with strips of bologna from pirated government-issue school lunches. Since then, he’d decided to enter the ministry, but he still had the manner of a pugnacious sailor, leaning against walls with his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up tightly over his biceps; usually, when he addressed the group, he had trouble keeping his face straight, as if it never ceased to amuse him that he was working in a church. But now, when he stood up to make his confession, he looked weirdly serious.
“I want to talk about something that’s important to me,” he said. He was holding up a book that flopped over like a raw steak. When the group realized that the book was a Bible, an uneasy silence settled on the room. I wouldn’t have been a lot more surprised if he’d been holding up a copy of Penthouse. “This is important to me,” Jahn said.
MY DREAM AS a tenth-grader was to be elected to the Advisory Council, which was the in-crowd of sixteen kids who adjudicated rule violations and helped the advisors run senior-high Fellowship. Twice a year, in what were unabashedly popularity contests, the group elected eight kids to one-year council terms, and it seemed to me that I had some chance of winning in the spring. Somewhat mysteriously — it might simply have been that my face was becoming familiar around church — I no longer felt like potential Social Death. I tried out for the group’s fall play, Any Number Can Die, and was one of only two sophomores to get a part. On Sunday nights, when the big group broke into dyads for certain exercises, Advisory Council members came bounding across the room to partner up with me. They said, “Franzen! I want to get to know you better, because you seem like a really interesting person!” They said, “Franzen, I’m so happy you’re in this group!” They said, “Franzen! I’ve been wanting to be your partner in something for weeks, but man, you’re just too popular!”
It went to my head to feel noticed like this. On the year’s last retreat, I nominated myself for Advisory Council. The full group gathered on Saturday night, after the ballots had been secretly tabulated, and we sat around a single candle. One by one, current members of the Advisory Council took new candles, lit them on the central candle, and moved into the crowd to present them to newly elected members. It was like watching fireworks; the crowd said “Ohhh!” as each winner was revealed. I pasted a smile on my face and pretended to be happy for the winners. But as candles approached me and passed me by and descended—“Ohhh!”—on other lucky souls, it was painfully clear how much more popular and mature than I the winners were. The ones getting the candles were the people who lounged around in semi-reclining, toboggan-style embraces or lay supine and propped their stockinged feet on nearby backs and shoulders, and who spoke as if they were doing genuine work on their relationships. The people who, if a newcomer was looking lost on a Sunday night, would race each other to be the first to introduce themselves. The people who knew how to look a friend in the eye and say, “I love you,” the people who could break down and cry in front of the entire group, the people whom Mutton came up to from behind and put his arms around and nuzzled like a father lion, the people whom Mutton would have to have been Christlike not to favor. It might have struck me as odd that a group offering refuge from the cliquishness of high school, a group devoted to service to the marginalized, made such a huge deal of a ceremony in which precisely the smartest and most confident kids were anointed as leaders; but there were still two candles unaccounted for, and one of them was coming my way now, and this candle, instead of passing me by, was placed in my hands, and as I walked to the front of the room to join the new council in facing out to smile at the Fellowship that had elected us, all I could think of was how happy I was.