A Tent Revival in Celina

clouds on the horizon

There was a tent revival in Celina, Texas. Technically, it was in the middle of nowhere, an unincorporated stretch of county land. Not quite Celina, not quite Mustang. A sea of beige and barbed wire with a tent in the middle.

I always heard stories about apocalyptic pastors clutching handfuls of snakes, conjurations of hellfire and brimstone, and the reverence of the Rapture. It was all legend – fables swept away in the Dust Bowl. I’m not sure any of those stories are true, but had I lived back then with no food, no hope, just hungry gray across the horizon, I might’ve thought the end was near too.

All I know is that the tents are long gone. Christ had blown away with them and was eventually replaced by Big Tex. The dust storms had ceased and left behind great open canvases for land development. The fury of Heaven is no match for the decadence of suburban sprawl. When the sun is out and the money is green, faith is easy, a loving God imaginable. But sure enough, there on the side of FM 455, was a black cross emblazoned on a white canvas tent.

I confess that I was never pious. There is a stone in my stomach that grows cold and heavy when I get too close to a church. My memories are not of scripture, but of children my age falling to their knees and communing with God in tongues. Even in a language without translation, I could tell they emphasized all the wrong syllables.

No one in that church ever talked to God – why the fuck would he be in there? The whole place was carpeted in grey, sequestered from sunlight, sterile polypropylene, and central air, with live-streamed sermons and a coffee shop up front. The only thing Jesus could do there was pay sixty bucks for an airbrushed shirt at a kiosk. Instead, he chose to wait outside with an ever-tapping foot, watching us furiously from the billboards.

“Jesus is coming, are you prepared?”

“Where will you go when you die?”

“When the Rapture comes, will you be prepared?”

The Christians I know don’t talk about a Rapture. Their eyes glaze across the scripture like ads in a tabloid, but they pause at the right moments and nod their heads when the pastor does. In 1382 the Lollards began translating the Bible by hand from Latin to English for the good of the common man. As payment for their services, the Church strung those very Bibles around their necks and torched them like plague-riddled vermin. Their leader, John Wycliffe, had the good sense to die by a stroke. Thirty years later they dug his ass up and burned him too.

The Christians of today are unencumbered by subtext. Their war on the forces of Hell is physical, literal, and in no way analogous. Demons walk in the guise of young homosexuals and women with cropped haircuts. Jesus Christ, King of the I-35 billboard, is eternally in arms against the infernal immigrant sodomites, and this war wages just beyond the wrought iron of their gated communities. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children” (Hosea 4:6).

There will never be a Rapture. The kingdom of Heaven never got the right permits, and in its place, we built a block of single-family homes. From where I stand the end will not be heavenly. It will happen all at once but somehow drag on for years, full of resentment and disdain for our fellow man.

No angels will pour forth from the Aether and deliver us to our creator. They are all earthbound, and if you drive to that tent in Celina you’ll find them. They’re in the mesquite trees, invasive and furious in armor of umber thorns. Their hymns twist beyond perversion deep into the soil, leeching the nutrients between the sand and clay, roots rippling beneath the surface like a predatory fungus. They have waited too long for the autumn winds to cool their blistered skin. They have gorged themselves and feel betrayed by empty plates – too much like us to be of any use.

I saw the tent, I saw the angels. I saw it all, got back in my car, and drove home. I have never needed a pastor to tell me to be thankful, and today I give thanks for all I have. In a year I will pack up my home and find dust in places previously unimaginable. I will spend months asking friends and coworkers for spare boxes, and blow a loving kiss goodbye to my deposit. My dog will grow deeply anxious about all of the commotion, and I’ll likely have to hire movers for all the crap I’ve collected, and our new apartment will be both smaller and more expensive.

Texas will fade into an uninhabitable memory. God left this place long ago if he was ever here, but his hatred has settled like dust over everything. I will forever miss the days before it first froze over. Perhaps the end really is near, but we’ve scraped by before and we may have a few more close calls left.