How to Start a Fire

I still vividly remember the exact moment I lost faith in organized religion. I had already been flirting with doubts by this time, and I’d had more than a few heated debates on the finer points of Christian theology with the various Sunday school teachers I had over the years (one of whom, for example, taught that Biblical prophecy foretold the Pilgrim’s landing on Plymouth Rock, which in a miraculous proof of manifest destiny already had the date of their landing carved into it when they arrived!).

There were plenty of opportunities for a precocious kid who started life in Frankfurt, Germany, before being transplanted to the American South at age five to spot evidence that grown-ups all over the world were making it up as they went along where religion was concerned. But until this one moment, nothing ever deeply challenged my faith.

I took the little logical inconsistencies and factual errors that seemed to proliferate as I continued my religious education over the years to be nothing more than the honest mistakes of well-meaning but occasionally ignorant grown-ups. It never once occurred to me that some of them might knowingly embellish the truth, much less, that they might intentionally lie about something of a religious nature—I couldn’t imagine such a thing, because I naively thought they believed in what they were saying, too.

Until the year I joined the Royal Rangers and went to revival camp.

The Royal Rangers, in case you’ve never heard of them, are an outfit like the Boy Scouts, but with an overtly Christian orientation. For a short time, I was a member of a Royal Ranger troop (or were they called “cavalries”?), and during that time, I participated in one of the group’s weekend camping trips, which as it happened also served as a so-called Christian revival. I think I was ten at the time.

What I thought was going to be a weekend of outdoor fun-and-games and learning wilderness survival skills like how to start a fire turned out to be something more closely resembling an army boot-camp. I don’t remember many of the details of that weekend. What I do remember is pitching tents in the dark with my fellow campers, and then all of us being marched in military fashion out to a remote spot in the woods, where we were forced to stand rigidly at attention for several hours in the freezing cold as we listened to a seemingly endless procession of youth pastors delivering sermons.

A couple of younger campers actually passed out from exhaustion over the course of the evening. Many, many others spent the evening shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other performing what’s familiarly known as “the pee-pee dance.” But every request to step out of line—even briefly—to heed nature’s call was sternly rejected: We had to sacrifice personal comfort, we were told, and humble ourselves before God.

But here’s what I remember most vividly about that weekend, and what ultimately changed everything for me.

At the front of the area where the assembly was held, the wood for a massive bonfire had been carefully stacked up beforehand. Before introducing the first speaker, the lead pastor told us he would demonstrate how to start a fire at the conclusion of the revival, as he lit the bonfire.

That’s more like it, I thought, because this was exactly the kind of survival training I’d been hoping to get out of the weekend. And since it was winter, we were all freezing cold and wanted nothing more than to warm our faces and hands around that bonfire.

When the last sermon finally ended what seemed like hours later, the pastor stood up to address the assembly again.

“Earlier I promised we would learn how to start a fire tonight,” he said (or words to that effect). “And now it’s time to make good on that promise. We learned tonight that the Good Book tells us a mustard seed of faith can move mountains. Well, Amen, because faith in the Lord is a powerful thing. And to prove that here tonight, we’re going to light this bonfire with nothing but faith. Halleluiah! That’s right—all we need is faith! All we have to do is believe, believe, believe, and God will do the rest! Now bow your heads and pray with me: ‘Heavenly Father we pray for You to light this fire so that we may warm our bodies from the cold just as Your Love warms our everlasting souls, Heavenly Father, In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen!’”

As he concluded this trite little prayer, the pastor dramatically swept his arm toward the unlit bonfire and proclaimed, in a perverse echo of the book of Genesis: “Let there be light!”

And just as his arm completed its arc, from my vantage point nearby I saw him let loose a small amount of powdery substance he held in his palm onto the wood stacked up for the bonfire. As the substance came into contact with the surface of the wood, it crackled and sparked, until an explosive chemical reaction brought the bonfire roaring to life. To many of the other campers, it probably looked as if our prayers alone had ignited the bonfire; but I had seen the trick.

We were supposed to go home from camp thinking we’d witnessed a miracle that night. We were supposed to go on after that night to tell other kids about the miracle we’d witnessed at bible camp, so they might become believers, too. But the miracle was a fraud. And the pastor had lied to us. He hadn’t taught us how to start a fire at all.

But not only had the pastor lied to us—with his repeated urgings to witness to others, he meant to turn us all into liars, working on his behalf to spread the lie to the rest of the world, like some satanic mockery of the gospel.

What exactly was the lie that he wanted us to spread to the rest of the world? On the surface, it seemed to be something like the idea that faith alone—that is, faith without works—can produce miracles, making the impossible possible and changing the world in some observable way. But when I dug a little deeper, I realized it was something else, something even more sinister. The lie he wanted us to spread throughout the world as if it were gospel was the idea that if enough people unquestioningly believe a lie, it becomes the truth.

As these realizations sank in, despite the welcome warmth of the fire, I felt a chill deep in my bones, and it was at that exact moment I knew I would never trust any organized religion or its proselytizers again.

Book Review: "The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems" by David Kirby

This week, in lieu of the random observations, grandiose commentary, and generally over-blown marginalia the Museum usually foists on unsuspecting readers, I'm instead offering a book recommendation and review.

The book in question is a book of poetry, and the author is American poet, David Kirby, whose previous books include Big-Leg Music, My Twentieth Century, The House of Blue Light, and many others.

As recently as 2006 Kirby’s work was again honored with the closest approximation the world of contemporary poetry offers to an official stamp of approval: His poem, “Seventeen Ways From Tuesday,” was selected for the 2006 volume of the Best American Poetry series. This excellent poem and many others equally deserving of acclaim can be found in The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems, a recently released round-up of new and previously published poems by David Kirby, offered through Louisiana State University Press’s excellent “Southern Messenger Poets” series, edited by David Smith.

The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems offers a generous sampling of everything that Kirby does best as a poet. An acknowledged master of the long narrative poem, Kirby’s engaging, witty, and highly-literate narrative voice has the power to elevate the anecdotal to the universal, using the first-person perspective to transcend what I think T.S. Eliot once called the “merely personal” as he drags his readers breathlessly along on fugue-like reveries through personal imaginative landscapes that blur the geographic boundaries between memory and metaphor, fact and confabulation, the sublime and the mundane.

All of which is just a fancy way of saying Kirby’s poems go beyond the entertaining and often amusing stories they tell to touch on fundamentally universal human themes—like a modern-day Mark Twain, Kirby spins yarns that have the enduring quality of modern fables.

Over the years, Kirby has perfected the art of rambling coherently—of stepping out of the way of his own voice, so to speak, and letting each successive line of verse flow into the next so freely and naturally you can’t help but be swept along. And this subtle skill is on full display in The House on Boulevard Street.

Also on display is Kirby’s characteristic knack for setting up a big tent, and drawing everyone inside: Kirby’s poems are moral without being moralistic, absurd without being absurdist, culturally-literate but not elitist. And what makes such seemingly impossible feats of literary acrobatics possible is the richness of Kirby’s own voice, which by turns is witty, urbane, philosophical, and nostalgic. Each poem makes you feel as if you’re sitting down having a one-on-one conversation with the man himself.

If you were once an avid poetry reader, but lost the habit, or if you generally find poetry too dry or obscure to enjoy, but love a good entertaining read, give The House on Boulevard Street a try. After reading a few of Kirby’s poems, you’re sure to find something that makes you hungry for a few more. Then before long you just might find yourself with a healthy new habit. Vitamin P: It does the heart good.