I'm not sure yet if I'm going to tell people about this blog. Eventually, perhaps, I'll use it as a means to publicize the play, but for the moment, it's simply a place to put my thoughts. And my first thought is: this is going to be a long, involved, very complicated process.
But first, a little backtracking. Allow me to introduce Midnight Cross.
What is Midnight Cross? It's a play. Also a blog about the play. What's the play about? Two years ago in East Texas, starting on New Year's Eve 2010, two local boys burned down 11 churches in six weeks, with seemingly no thought to what kinds of churches they targeted. This in a tri-county area with an estimated 713 churches.
Read about it here.
People felt scared, naturally. And confused. Why in God's name would anyone do something like that? When the police caught up with the two, their motives became clearer: they were angry at God for not existing.
Saying they didn't believe in God misses the point. No one who grows up in Texas, or in the US for that matter, can completely escape from God. You grow up with this all-pervading image of an omnipotent old man in flowing white robes who parts the clouds to rain down fire or blessings, a micromanager with a vested interest in every aspect of your life, your thoughts, your actions. In Sunday school they tell you you have a God-shaped hole in your heart, that God is all you need. And you know you need something. The older you get, the more you find that you're drowning in a sea of chaos and you need something to hold on to. So they put you on a boat and tell you to wait until the ship comes, and the boat is called Faith and the ship is called God. And one day, oh one glorious day, that ship will come and you'll sail into the sunset singing Jesus Savior Pilot Me Over Life's Tempestuous Sea.
Except the more time you spend on that boat, the more you see that it's a beat-up piece of shit. There are holes everywhere, and while you didn't see the patches before, you sure as hell see them now that they're coming undone. You can plug some of the leaks, but a new one springs up every day, and when you dig a fingernail in to test the wood it comes up black with rot. You're sinking again and pretty soon you'll be right back where you were, adrift. They tell you to just wait a little longer, the ship will come soon, but you've been waiting a damn long time and there's nothing on the horizon and the night's starting to settle in and it's cold and it's dark.
What do you do then? Most people spend the rest of their lives trying to plug the leaks with their fingers, ignoring the ones they can't reach. Others find a different boat. A select few, the mystics, learn to walk on water. But there are some people who just say to hell with it and burn the fucker down.
People like Jason Bourque and Daniel McAllister, the East Texas church arsonists.
So like I said, saying they didn't believe in God is too simple. They both believed, like we all do at some point, that the ship would come. When it didn't, they got angry at God for not being there. That's why I'm writing this play. The story of humanity is the story of what we do when we find ourselves adrift on that sea, and all of us have been at the place where we want to burn it down and cast ourselves back into the ocean. The church burning is incidental. It's only an extreme expression of something that goes on every day in the silent corridors of the human heart.
In a little over a month, I'm going to travel to East Texas to learn what I can about what happened there. It's going to be a hell of a journey. Here's to taking the first step.
