"Some of it seems to make sense," I said, thinking about Skippy Miller and the Revealing.
"Sure it does. If it didn't, the people wouldn't keep forking over the money. I'm talking about priorities, not content. The content helps people, up to a point, at least. The priority, it seems to me, is keeping the cash flowing. If people get helped, fine; if they don't, well, keep the cash flowing anyway."
"And the cash does flow?" That was Eleanor, her chin on her hand. She never ate dessert, even when she'd made it. Her black blunt-cut hair framed the high bones of her face.
"It pours," Chantra said. "Do you know how much Listening costs?"
"What's Listening?" Eleanor said.
"How much?" I asked.
"About two hundred dollars an hour. And it takes fifteen, twenty hours to move up from USDA choice to USDA prime, or whatever the grades are. And when you get to prime, you find out there are about ten more grades."
"I asked a question," Eleanor said. "What's Listening? Is this something I could write about in the Times?"
"The Times!" I said.
"Didn't I tell you?" Eleanor said, watching with a satisfied air as Dixie ate.
I silently counted to ten. "Didn't you tell me what?"
"That I've been hired to write for the Times. The 'Style' section. On New Age phenomena. Every other week or so."
"No," I said, feeling affronted. "You didn't."
"Well, they called a couple of weeks ago," Eleanor said dismissively.
"Good for you," Chantra said around a mouthful of dessert.
"I guess it is. So what's Listening?"
"Nothing that would interest the Times, I think," I said. "A little Jung, a little Freud, a little high-tech nonsense." Chantra looked uncomfortable. "Get interrogated by a Listener a few dozen times, go into your past, find out what causes your knee-jerk reactions, and eliminate the Causes. That's what they're called, the Causes. Sometimes they're experiences, sometimes they're preconceptions. Sometimes they're people. Once you're free of them, you can begin to function in the eternal moment, which is now. Your past is your enemy, some rigmarole like that. You have to clear out your past before you can deal with the present."
"Your past is your enemy," Eleanor said. "What a perfect basis for fascism. It would give you a nice, comfortable moral high ground from which you could blow good-bye kisses to your ideals, your vows, your friends, even your family. So if the past is your enemy and the eternal moment is now, what about the future?"
"That comes later," Dixie said, emerging from dessert. "Yuck, yuck."
"Go back to sermons, Dixie," I said.
"It's like a sort of parody of confession," Eleanor suggested.
"Yes and no." Some of what I'd learned in my comparative-religions classes was coming back to me. I'd told my mother they'd be useful someday. "In confession the penitent accuses himself of sin in order to obtain absolution through the sacraments. But it's only necessary to confess the big ones-the mortal sins-although there's no harm in confessing venial sins. In Listening, as I understand it, the church member tells the Listener absolutely everything, from playing with matches to incest or murder, and the idea is to bring these hidden or forgotten-or repressed-experiences into the present, to deprive them of their power to shape your actions. Those are the Causes. Once you've illuminated them and the hidden landscape of your life, to paraphrase the only Revealing I've heard, you can deal with the present in the present, without dragging along harmful or irrelevant debris from your past."
"Whew," Dixie said. "I wish I'd said that."
"Also," Chantra said, "confession isn't humiliating. From what I've heard, a Listening session can be pretty humiliating."
"They could still have picked that up from the Catholics. In the early days of the Church, people sometimes confessed publicly," I said, "for the express purpose of self-humiliation. Remember, these were people who sometimes got dressed up in hair shirts and hit themselves with whips."
"Imagine your confessions being public," said Eleanor, who had less to confess than anyone I'd ever known.
"Well, in the Church of the Eternal Moment the whole point is secrecy," Chantra said. "Listening sessions are supposed to give you an absolutely confidential opportunity to work through your past mistakes."
"What about the little girls?" That was Eleanor.
"The Speakers?" Chantra said. "They're channels for Alon or Aton, however they're spelling it these days. They seem to be normal little girls when they're not Speaking. After a while they burn out or something, and go back to their movie magazines."
"Wait," Eleanor said. "You mean there's no permanent leader of the Church?"
"Actually, that's one of the reassuring things about it," Chantra said. "There's no one figure, like L. Ron Hubbard for Scientology or the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh running around buying fleets of ships or Rolls-Royces with the proceeds of the church. There's just these little girls, Speaking as long as the spirit possesses them, and then moving on."
"Somebody's keeping the books," I said.
"Honey, somebody's making millions," Chantra said. "Somebody bought that big old hotel they use as their headquarters downtown and somebody built that television studio next door where they do their cable show. Somebody's franchising the new churches and moving all that money around. But whoever he or she is, he or she keeps a low profile. Like the Hunts. But as far as the faithful are concerned, it's a little girl, her mother, and whatever the hell Aton is."
"This is so cockamamie I can't believe it," Dixie said. "You mean people actually have faith in something that's run by a bunch of little girls and somebody who's dead?"
"There have been weirder faiths," I said. "Automatism, for example."
"There was never anything called automatism," Eleanor said hopefully.
"Automatism is a twentieth-century belief, like the Church of the Eternal Moment. I'm sure this century isn't any weirder than any of the earlier ones, but we've forgotten a lot of the earlier aberrations. Automatists believe that man is a technological being, and that technological skill is what God gave man to set him apart from animals."
"I thought that was blushing," Dixie said.
"The automatists say that man will reach his height when he invents the machine that controls him. Or her," I added apologetically.
"Don't worry about sexist language in this context," Chantra said. "That's men talking."
"Computers?" Eleanor cast a hostile glance at her Macintosh, temporarily banished to the coffee table.
"Whatever. Faith is a peculiar thing."
"How would you define faith?" Chantra asked.
"I wouldn't even try. St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, says that faith is 'the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.' In the Church of the Eternal Moment, I'd say that the things hoped for are wealth, power, and a sense of self. The things not seen are Aton."
"And the management of the Church," Eleanor said.
"Bingo," I said.
"Just be careful with the Church of the Eternal Moment," Chantra said. From what I've heard, people have a way of going in and not coming out."
"From what I've seen," I said, "they sometimes come out dead."
"Sounds like the Times to me," Eleanor said stubbornly.
I looked at her for so long that Dixie burped twice. "Maybe it is," I said.
Chapter 11
"Are you sure this is the right place?" Eleanor said again.
The Congregation of the Present occupied a flyspecked one-story storefront wedged appropriately between the temporal parentheses of an open elementary school and a closed funeral parlor on a run-down block of Vermont Avenue. The flat-black asphalt and yellow swings of the school playground were slick with rain, and the funeral parlor's ragged hedges had snagged pounds of bright paper trash. I wondered how a funeral parlor could have gone out of business.