Highway 63
Two miles before Lolo my car stopped. I stuck my head under the hood. A dude in a passing pickup yelled “you-kaaay?!” When a tan Toyota purringly pulled over, I knew I needed a ride to town.
In the Toyota rode an elderly couple, the woman was the driver. Almost as soon as I took a seat behind them, I felt that they must be very religious folks. You need not much observation in such instances, your body tells you. It picks up a sudden drop in a self-centered vibe, which most of us exude most of the time.
“What church are you in?” I forthrightly asked.
The man in the passenger seat turned around and set his sight a notch above my eyebrows. His eyeballs were pulled in and their corneas milky white. He was blind.
He was 11 years old when — I’d learn over time — playing with a stick of dynamite he roasted his sight, the tip of the nose, and most of the fingertips. When he was 24 and a PhD student in history in Billings, MT, one Sunday he was sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for a ride. Two girls were passing by.
“Why are you so sad?” one of them girlishly poked.
“I am sad, because I’ve been looking for a church, and I went to this Baptist service this morning, and it wasn’t what I was looking for again.”
He began doubting he’d ever find his church.
“Come to our meeting this afternoon,” the girl said.
Max did, and two years later, after completing his PhD on the second Japanese expedition of Commodore Perry, he married the girl, raised with her five kids, and nearly 50 years later today Max Joner was one fulfilled beneficiary of a church way.
I called their church Confessionists, because like many solipsistically conceived bodies of faith it avoided labeling and thought of itself as simply the truth. Branding would make it one among the many, and the originator and then the devotees would find it debasing of what they earnestly professed. This one was founded in the summer 1932 by the glass blower Stanley Holocomb in Helena, MT, less than 150 miles from the place where I’d encountered Esther and Max.
Later on, when I aligned its timeline with the American history, it correlated for me with the summer when General MacArthur’s units removed the WWI veterans protesting in Anacostia Flats, Washington, D.C. It was the time of a momentous economic insecurity for the American folks due to the raging Great Depression. One day of that summer Stanley Holocomb, a part-time church goer and full-time seeker, was reading his Bible as diligently as any morning in his home. He stopped at Chapter 12, Verse 2, of the Gospel of Luke: “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.” And in a flash he saw a whole new church.
In Protestant Christianity it is nothing unusual for the whole faith-tribes to organize themselves around a single Bible verse. That’s how the Hutterites came about in 1528 in Bohemia, for one. Their Jacob Wiederman was what seemed like casually going through Chapter 2, Verse 44 of Acts: “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common.” And he was struck by an epiphany so powerful, that when nearly five centuries later I visited a Hutterite colony in Minnesota, USA, the non-Hutterite neighbors would tell me, good-naturedly to be true, stories of Hutterite kids pulling up by their farms’ gas tanks, filling up, and riding off as if it was at their grandfolks. That is, the lads knew they were off-side, sorta, but the respect for private proprietorship wasn’t that sternly imprinted in their soft brains yet. In the Colony, the members held everything in common, starting with pencils, cups, sleds, all the way to the trucks, homes, and the farms themselves.
Like Jacob Wiederman, Stanley Holocomb came to believe that the Lord had chosen the verse for him, so he would build a real true church on its foundation now. In this case, the formula was that once a week the faithful would sit in a circle in one of their homes’ living rooms and tell aloud what wrongs they had committed in the past week. Everything, down to the chanciest prompting and a passing thought. That’s why I called them Confessionsts.