07 - Ink on Vellum

Eva was now an ordained minister, at least in the eyes of “The Church of Our Lord” over in Houston, which issued her ministerial credentials, and of the State of Texas that recognised them. Pastor Deveraux’s church board was of mixed opinion. Eva had been given the youth ministry without ordination. They were not happy about her mail order ordination, but didn’t know how to rescind their prior decision without looking foolish. She was popular with fellow teenagers, so that was a factor as well.

The first wedding Eva officiated at was not in her father’s church. It was in a metal “T” hangar at the airport. It was a very private affair held in late summer 1970, mere days before Punch and George were to report at the induction center for transport to basic training at Fort Campbell Kentucky.

The minister was beautiful, beaming, and ready to begin the ceremony. She was also as naked as the day she had been born seventeen years earlier. So was the first groom, and the second, the brides and all the witnesses. It was a naked wedding, the first of five that Eva officiated at on that day.

In two years, after the boys got back from Southeast Asia, and we were working over in San Angelo we repeated the ceremony and registered Punch’s marriage to Lillian, and George’s to Kristin with the State of Texas. That ceremony was beautiful, and certainly more refined. It was held in Eva’s new mission, “Azusa,” but the one at the airport in Edwards was first.

After the experience they had with Eva, Pastor and Mrs. Deveraux did not send their two youngest children to kindergarten. So Lisa and I actually met Eva, who was a year ahead of us in school, before we met Lillian who was in our class. Lisa loved to read, and soon was going back to the parsonage or church with Eva after school.

Lisa says that it was not the act of having sex with me more than ten years later that made her gay. It was sitting in that study reading and comparing different versions of the same biblical passage with Eva instead of playing with dolls that made her gay. That makes sense to me. It wasn’t thinking about having sex with girls that made me gay. According to the boys in school I was gay long before then. According to them our dog was gay too, and my bicycle.

The Edwards plateau is a savanna not an actual desert, but to us growing up the parallels between the Israelites in biblical times and us were clear. The social upheaval of the sixties paralleled the Roman occupation of Judea. Our town was divided by the events of the 1960s, but it was also a small town where everybody knew everyone, and lots of people were related. It was a confusing family squabble.

Speaking of confusion, Eva and Lillian’s dad, the Pastor, he was a wonderfully confused man. His confusion was hard won. As a teenager of eighteen he was drafted and sent to war as an infantryman. His unit helped liberate Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Then he studied scripture, was ordained, and found that relatively few wanted to actually know what their sacred texts were trying to tell them. Someone else could just read them the Cliff’s Notes version.

Pastor Deveraux had read ‘After Auschwitz’ by Rubenstein and he had read its literary counterpart by Rebbe Fackenheim. He embraced Frackenheim’s 614th Commandment to deny true evil posthumous victory. He knew and taught us that before Emperor Constantine co-opted it and made it the state religion of Rome in 325, all Christians were Essene Jews, followers of the teachings of Rebbe Yeshua.

Yeshua bin Mariam, Jesus Christ had been executed as a revolutionary by the most powerful government on earth. The diaspora after Massada had spread the messianic word throughout the Empire. Unable to control the movements message through violent suppression he made it an “instrument of the Man,” as the hippies would say. Nixon learned from Constantine.

We had all read Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ, Jesus.”

He taught us that Galatians was written well before the separation, so in the simple plain vernacular English my grandchildren hear everyday it says: “get over it home-boy, nobody here is no better than anyone else here. We is all just peeps tryin’ to get along.”

He also taught us that we Christians were the Jews spoken of in that passage. That when read in the original Hebrew Yeshua-h (Salvation) was Yeshua (Jesus) plus one letter. That his name Yesh-ua and his ancestor Yesh-rael (Israel), Jacob’s name after wrestling the angel of God, start with the same root. That Judea, the name of the land was very similar.

The Pastor’s degree was in dissecting texts. He loved to explain the origins of words and ideas in a way that made it interesting. How God is without fault, but humans and their linguistics full of limitations if not fault. English suffers, and we suffer as English language speakers because there are only male and female pronouns in our language. Some languages have three including a neutral, some have a separate pronoun used only for the divine.

So we understood so much before we started to study on our own. One of the first things that we learned was that so many who hold their “good books” and claim a moral superiority to others because they supposedly adhere to the words in that book, have either never read or are unable to comprehend the contents of the book.

The Old Testament is the greatest piece of pornographic literature ever written. It took hundreds of years for dozens of writers to cram its every nook and cranny with lust, mayhem, power, sex, greed, deceit, avarice, sex, violence, plotting, insecurity, supernatural phenomena and sex. Did I say sex three times, well there is a whole lot of sex in there. Lots of that sex is between family members too.

Those who say the human race began with “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” tend to change the subject when the follow-on question is, “where did subsequent generations come from?” All of them must have been the children of Eve, the mother of all life. After the flood who did Noah’s grandchildren marry, those three boys were brothers, incest again.