Gold Teeth

I met a wonderful couple at Crater Lake. They road a Road Glide in tandem, switching on and off, for 9,000 miles. Turns out they were headed back from Pennsylvania. What are the odds. I want to say their names were Diane and Dane Cook, but I don’t remember. I do remember how sweet they were though. After we swapped stories and photos, Diane said “well, I’ll be praying for your safety the whole way!”. “Ooh kay!” I replied, taken a little off guard, but appreciative nonetheless. Earlier today I saw mural on someone’s barn, showing a fairly lifelike arm, nailed to a cross. Blood dripping down in buckets, if Jesus’s arm truly was 50’ across. Across it were the words, “Your Sins. His blood.” I thought about it for miles. My sins? I’ve done a lot of things in my life that demonstrated my deep character flaws. I’ve lied, cheated, stolen, been lazy, been gluttonous, been greedy. But I mean, I know this, and I want to change. I am changing. Every day I’m trying to be a better person by reflecting on what makes me tick, making affordances in my life to break bad habits, and reinforcing good habits. Is this the sin to which the mural referred? How was Jesus’s blood going to do anything for me at all?

I was a Christian once. Deeply ingrained, committed to the Church, the Cause, the Gospel, God, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It wasn’t just any church, though. It was a church in rural Pennsylvania, a small, poor community, extra pentecostal, extra evangelical, extra fundamental. It was a weird hybrid of spirit-filled southern baptist, mennonite, and some other weird third thing that I’ll try to unpack anecdotally. It had its own subculture within the subculture, surrounding a certain family, belonging to which was the pastor, several leaders, and as fate would have it, my ex-wife. I was married by the time I was 20, and stayed married until I turned 30. I’m not going to say those years were all bad, per se, but looking back, I am filled with regret and a sense of profound wastefulness. Like a decade of my life was stolen from me. I want to use this trip to reflect on that decade, and explore what lessons I’ve learned that relate to American culture, specifically the evangelical right, as well as try to make those years mean something. You make your own meaning in life, and this is me trying to retroactively do this.

I’ve already buried the lede for far too long with the name of this site. I’ve tried to email some friends, and I’m certain it ended up in their spam folder. The name is important to me, however, because it represents a single seminal event that happened while I was married that to me signified a turning point. From then, I knew I would get divorced, I knew I would leave the church, I knew my life would have to change. Sadly, it took five more years for that to happen, years replete with struggle within the Church and my family.

In the early 90’s there was a phenomenon in the Pentecostal church in the North East called the “Toronto Blessing.” During this time, the Holy Spirit would “manifest” in various ways in Toronto. If you’re not from this background some of these terms might be foreign. Many youth from churches in the North East would get on a bus, or a plane, and end up in Toronto for huge revival services, in which there would be worship music, potentially fog machines, lots of screaming, crying, singing, dancing, running, casting out demons, speaking in tongues, falling down (being “slain in the spirit”), and many other sorts of physical acts that ostensibly reflect in the physical world what was happening in the spiritual world. Sometimes the minister would do healing services, where he would do an “alter call,” which is to say, he would call students to get out of theirs seats to come up to the front of the church. The pastor would pray for them, potentially lay his hand on the student’s head, and pray for healing. Often, after loud prayer into the microphone, the pastor would should “FIRE!” and push the teen over. They would fall, convulse, cry. It was a spectacle, to be sure, one that I always watched with somber curiosity. I could never speak in tongues. I wouldn’t fall down. In fact, I would push back against the pastor. He would push harder. “FIRE!” I would stand resolutely. It’s not that I didn’t want to believe, its that I wanted it to be real. I wanted God to push me over. Not the pastor, or even myself.

In one of these meetings, my ex-wife was in attendance. I won’t use her real name, so I’m going to call her Terri. The pastor called for the youth to stand on their chairs, lift their hands to heaven, and receive the blessing that the Holy Spirit was to bring forth. This time, the minister said “Gold! The Holy Spirit is going to manifest in gold! Gold dust will fall from heaven, as a sign that the Holy Spirit is here. Some of you, with fillings, will be turned to gold if you believe!” This resonated with Terri. She shouted and prayed in earnest, believing that she would receive of the Holy Spirit, and that her fillings would be turned to gold. I’m going to also add that Terri was, and is, one of the most genuine, kind, wonderful people I’ve ever met. She’s sincere. We didn’t get divorced because she was awful. If anything, I was awful to be around for completely orthogonal reasons.

Suddenly, she felt something, and she stepped off her chair. She turned to the students to the right and left of her, and beckoned for them to look into her mouth, to see if her filling had turned to gold. Bedlam. Shouting, crying, praying, worshiping. A miracle had occurred, and for each student there that day, established proof positive that God existed, manifested himself as the Holy Spirit, and validated the worldview that trailed in his wake.

This miracle was made legend in our church. The elders, pastor, congregation, all attested to the reality that Terri’s tooth, had in fact, turned to gold, and that this was our personal revelation, a gift to the Church, a talisman of belief that could now forever be referenced should any sheep falter and doubt. The term sheep is not pejorative in the church. The church is often referred to as the flock, and the pastor as the shepherd, and Jesus the great shepherd. For years, traveling evangelist after traveling evangelist would visit the church, hold healing and revival services. I would bang on the piano with such fervor, leading the worship as people were pushed over in the spirit. My ears ringing with the crashes of cymbals, my chest pounding from the low THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP of the kick drum. My voice cracking when I was overcome with emotion, that GOD was HERE. And every so often, Terri’s gold tooth would make the cut, as the the proof that God works in mysterious ways, and is alive and active in today’s Church. And me, porn-watching, beer-drinking, closeted heretic, reading books that attempted to reconcile science and religion to assuage my growing doubts—I was her husband. I was blessed enough to be in the presence of this miracle every day.

As the years went by, my skepticism grew. I never looked at my wife’s gold tooth. Why? Looking back, it’s clear that I was afraid. One day, after arguing with her father, the pastor, that we shouldn’t be teaching the youth that evolution was a lie from the devil, and that the closeted gay kids in the youth group should be supported, not condemned, I finally had to see. I think we were watching How I Met Your Mother or something. As we sat on the couch, I asked. “Hey, can I… I mean this is weird, but can I see your tooth? The one that was turned to gold?” “Of course!” she gleefully replied with a quick laugh. Her lack of reservation was in itself comforting. Of course it was gold, of course God is real, of course I just need to struggle with my doubts harder until things make sense. I’m the one that isn’t yet “filled with the spirit,” and someday I might be. And yet, we got up, and walked into the bathroom. She opened her mouth causally and pointed, “Ehhhsh ohhnn!” I examined the fillings in her back molars. “That one, in the back?” I said. “Yehhh, aaack errr!” she pointed definitively. It was silver.

“It’s… it’s not gold, Terri.” I said carefully. I could feel an adrenaline rush, as if something extremely important was happening. “Of course it is!” she replied, opening her mouth and gesturing to the tooth in the mirror again. “It tarnished a little since I got it, but it’s right there, you can still see it’s gold.” I stood there, frozen. How could hundreds, if not thousands of people believe, with all their heart, that Terri’s tooth was turned to gold, when the evidence was there, in plain sight? It’s so… provable. Why lie about this? I looked again, and it was clearly the same dull silver, the same as the other fillings in her mouth, nondescript, ordinary. I realized in that moment that something was more powerful than I could possibly imagine was at work, and it wasn’t God. It was faith. I called it delusion, but from that moment, I was changed, forever recognizing the power that your perception has on what you believe to be true about the reality that surrounds you every day. To Terri, her tooth was gold, as real as gravity.