The Rake Magazine

Author: Alyssa Ford

  • Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

    Sally Strle was showering in her house in Virginia, Minnesota, when the vision appeared in her mind: an open Bible with the words Rest On His Word scrolled on the pages and a pillow adorned with Catholic art and scripture.

    “I could see the beautiful pictures, even the phrase ‘Rest On His Word’ there, and I knew that God was calling me to do this business,” recalls Sally, fifty-four, a full-time mother and grandmother.

    She hopped out of the shower that June day in 2005, and, at seven o’clock in the morning, called her older sister, Barb Johnston, to share the news about her God-given business plan: Catholic-themed pillowcases. Within two months, the sisters had found a place that sells Catholic artwork in California, had nailed down a digital printer and contacts with a pillowcase manufacturer, and were ironing and packaging hundreds of pillowcases in Barb’s tiny brown-sided house off Minnetonka Boulevard in St. Louis Park. “Oh, it was just absolute madness,” recalls Barb, sixty, an ESL teacher. “We had five ironing boards set up, our sister Bonnie was cutting ribbon, Peggy was messing with the packaging, and I think we went through thirty dozen pillowcases that day.”

    They set up a website and dipped their toes into a $4.63 billion-dollar Christian retail industry that traffics in books, Bibles, and sacramentals, as well as all manner of Christ-themed accessories and products for even the most secular of challenges, right down to bad breath and fitness fatigue. Christians no longer have to settle for Altoids, Aquafina, and Luna Bars; they can pop in a Testamint, chug a bottle of Formula J’, or grab a Bible Bar on the run (fortified with the seven “good” foods in Deuteronomy 8:8—wheat, barley, honey, figs, olive oil, grapes, and pomegranates.)

    And, as it turns out, God has a pretty good ear for marketing, because Rest On His Word pillowcases turned out to be a hit, and the sisters have been receiving more than a thousand orders per year from Texas and California, to Ontario and New Jersey. One enthusiastic woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, started using the twenty-dollar pillowcases as a Catholic school fundraiser. Another group inquired about selling Rest On His Word in Hungary, and several people have asked for the Our Lady of Guadalupe pillowcases in Spanish (the sisters are on it).

    Then the stories started to come in. They heard about a young girl who didn’t feel so scared going to sleep because she knew the saint printed on her pillow was going to protect her. They heard about a Canadian homeschooler who gave a pillowcase to the “atheist” boy next door, who cried and asked his parents if he could be a Christian. Barb gets teary-eyed when she talks about the daughter and father who slept on identical “Guardian Angel” pillowcases while Dad was stationed in Kuwait.

    “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown a pillowcase to someone and they’ve just started crying,” says Sally. “You can see the presence of God when you see the artwork on the pillowcase.”

    But perhaps the biggest change has been felt by the sisters, who say they have been validated in their faith like never before. Sally was once a lackadaisical Catholic, and now goes to mass every day. Barb reverted to her childhood faith from Lutheranism, her late husband’s faith, and says, “Since we’ve started the business, I’ve just never been more in love with Catholicism.”

    In the few years since founding Rest On His Word, Sally’s family has traveled to the Holy Land, and Sally went to pray with a stigmatist in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Barb and Sally traveled to Medjugorje in Bosnia and Hercegovina to see the shrine where apparitions of Mary have been reported. While there they absorbed the indigenous Christian products economy, stocking up on Our Lady of Medjugorje medals and rosaries. But they imparted little blessings from America, too: The sisters left behind Rest On His Word pillowcases at a Hercegovinian addict’s shelter and an orphanage.
    —Alyssa Ford

  • Do You Really Believe?

    One morning last summer, leaving my apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, I noticed there weren’t many people outside. It was a fine June day, but there wasn’t the usual line of cars in front of Starbucks. No commuters schlepping insulated mochas, no dog walkers, no window washers at Cafe Latté, and no one else waiting for the 7:23 bus to downtown Minneapolis.

    On the bus there were about a third as many riders as usual, and the kindly woman with the thick black braid was not in her usual seat. I tried to read, but panic was setting in. By the time I reached the skyway, my stomach was a prickly ball. I passed the jewelry store near the U.S. Trust Building and checked my watch. At least two clerks should have been in the display windows, draping necklaces and stabbing rings onto their holders. But the shop was dark and empty.

    I knew it had happened: Jesus had fulfilled his prophecy, returned to Earth, and taken the believers. Now the Apocalypse was beginning. My hands were clammy as I dialed my mom’s number; I was certain she would not answer, now or ever again. When she picked up and chirped “Why … good morning!” my shoulders eased, but my heart was still pounding from the adrenaline. “Hi, Mom,” I said weakly.

    It’s strange being the kind of person who sees a half-empty bus and thinks “Apocalypse!” In part it’s the result of watching Armageddon-inspired movies like Left Behind, but mainly it comes from being raised in an ultra-conservative church. When I was growing up, our congregation in the hamlet of Phillipsburg, Missouri, interpreted the Bible with the kind of literal fervor with which a non-believer might read IKEA assembly instructions—midway through a construction effort. On the outside, we looked like any other Christians: we dressed up, we sang, we went to Sunday school, we read the Dr. Dobson inserts in the church bulletins. But we also followed rules against women preaching, praying aloud during church, or serving communion; as well as the tenet that the only way to heaven is to make a public testimony and be fully immersed in water. Most of all, we believed that we had the one true way to heaven. In other words, we actually took the Bible at its word—unlike the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Seventh-day Adventists who were, sad to say, bound for hell.

    Given this background, and my family’s continued devotion, I was rather smug during the 2004 election campaign, when national magazines were breathlessly reporting on the huge swaths of the voting public who considered themselves “born-again Christians.” “No shit,” I thought. (I had already left the flock.) After Bush’s win, I read how Karl Rove and the president’s other operatives had used a database of some 5,000 churches, as well as church directories gleaned from across the country, to home in on and court evangelical voters. Some 350,000 “pro-family” conservatives volunteered for the Bush campaign and nearly six million evangelicals—including three and a half million who hadn’t voted in the 2000 election—cast votes for Dubya. As Bush moved into his second term, the power of the religious right seemed palpable. Pundits talked in awe about Dr. James C. Dobson—the one who we read in church bulletins, the so-called Protestant Pope who built Focus on the Family, a $130 million, 1,300-employee media ministry in Colorado Springs, and the venerable National Association of Evangelicals, with thirty million members. It seemed like Rove had indeed established a “permanent majority” of conservative Republicans.

    But behind the scenes, in the conservative Protestant capital of Colorado Springs, there was some serious soul-searching over a study released by George Barna, a well-respected evangelical pollster in southern California who had developed a reputation for delivering scientifically sound data on U.S. religious trends. In December 2003, he conducted a telephone poll of 2,033 randomly selected Americans from numerous cross-sections of the population, who were asked a series of questions:

    1. Would you call yourself a Christian?
    2. Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?
    3. Do you believe that you will go to heaven when you die because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?
    4. Do you believe that you have a personal responsibility to share your religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?
    5. Do you believe that Satan exists?
    6. Do you believe that eternal salvation is possible through grace, not works?
    7. Do you believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on Earth?
    8. Do you believe that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches?
    9. Do you believe that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity?
    10. Do you believe that God created the universe and still rules it today?

    Barna discovered that a solid thirty-eight percent of the U.S. population could be classified as “born-again” Christians, meaning they answered yes to the first three questions. The part that knocked strict Bible literalists on their heels was how few of those born-again Christians have a “Biblical world view”: only nine percent of them qualified by answering yes to all ten questions.

    Worse still, Barna found that the ideological move from being “born again” to having a “Biblical world view” is crucial to developing evangelically “correct” views on divorce, gay sex, pornography, gambling, abortion, and other social issues near and dear to Bible literalists. As it happens, born-agains are not all that statistically different from their heathen counterparts in terms of how they act, or what they believe. For instance, the divorce rate for born-agains is exactly the same as for those who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their savior: thirty-five percent. But overall compare those with a Biblical world view to born-agains and there are marked differences down the line. True evangelicals (those who take the Bible literally) are thirty-one times less likely to accept cohabitation, eighteen times less likely to condone drunkenness, fifteen times less likely to condone gay sex, and on and on and on.

    “There was a growing sense even before the Barna study that things were bad, that a large number of Christians were not living the Christian life,” says Marc Fey, an evangelical life coach and consultant in Colorado Springs, and director of something called “Christian Worldview” at Focus on the Family. “But what the Barna study really did was galvanize us in our belief that something had to be done.”
    The question they faced: How do you convince ninety-one percent of born-again Christians that showing up at church, voting Republican, and putting a Jesus fish on the SUV isn’t enough?

  • The Doom Boom

    Echo Bodine, a south Minneapolis psychic, sees it in people’s auras. She sees it in the number of angels and spiritual guides hovering around the living (“So many!”). She sees it in the number of calamities and catastrophes, and the number of people laid off, divorced, and dying.

    According to Bodine these signs all point to a massive metaphysical shift, when the Mayan calendar, after 1,872,000 days, runs down (and out), on December 21, 2012. The date will be preceded by a rare astrological alignment: The sun will cross the galactic equator on the winter solstice, an occurrence that happens 30 times every 26,000 years.

    “There’s going to be a big push in the next five years to clean up our karma,” Bodine told a crowd of roughly seventy-five at the Minneapolis Convention Center in November. The audience members paid 36 dollars to hear her speak at the annual Edge Life Expo. “There’s a high level of anxiety and turmoil in the atmosphere, it’s very intense. A lot of people are saying that 2012 is going to be the end of the world, but I would say it is the end of the world as we know it now.”

    Bodine, fifty-nine, claims to have done her first healing in 1965, when she placed two hankies on her father’s forehead and cured his migraine. At the Expo, she looked like she was battling one herself. Her mannerisms and expressions were very tense—at one point she looked startled, and she explained that a spirit had grabbed her arm. Her hair, streaked with gray at the temples, was brushed back into a well-styled coif. She signaled to her assistant to turn up the lute music, then launched a group meditation.

    After Bodine’s session, the crowd of mostly middle-aged women flowed out into the main rooms for the Expo, where they could get their chakras balanced, past lives cleared, animal spirits counseled, akashic records revealed, and auras painted in bright watercolors. More than 150 exhibitors had set up karmic booths, hoping to shake a few dollars out of the cosmos with their singing bowls, pendulums, silver-plated jewelry, and crystal prisms. Most reported doing very well; over the course of three days, 11,000 people would wander through the Expo’s exhibits.

    In the middle of one aisle, an Iraq vet was hanging out at the Hemi-Sync booth, selling CDs that promise to alleviate sleeplessness, ADHD, and emotional trauma through “evocative sounds and specially blended frequencies.” When pressed about how the CDs work, the vet admitted, “I’m just standing here for a friend. But if you want something that really works, you should get a copy of The Secret.”

    The University of Metaphysical Sciences booth was draped with Christmas lights and ropes of fake ivy, promising a bachelor’s degree in metaphysics with six weeks of written and audio lessons, followed by a master’s degree that, according to the brochure, “leads to creating a more professional image for your books, classes, practice, and other endeavors.” One booth was selling “Premium North Dakota Golden Flaxseed.” Another, carved emblem necklaces made of “genuine mammoth ivory, 14,000 to 40,000 years old.”

    Deep in the sea of booths, Eric Waite, a 23-year-old from Lakeville, was handing out pamphlets and spreading the word about Maitreya, one of the purported “Masters of Wisdom” who is expected to hold a worldwide press conference (“probably within the next two years,” according to Waite) and communicate to all the peoples of the world, in their own language. “When that happens, everything in the world is going to be better,” insisted Waite, who was fresh-faced and clearly full of hope.

    Waite, like the others in “Transmission Meditation” groups (held each week in Lakeville, Mankato, St. Paul, and Waseca) get their marching orders from a British New Age futurist named Ben Creme, best known for sending out a rash of videotapes to journalists during the millennial panic. Creme’s website, www.share-international.org, documents Maitreya sightings. For what it’s worth, the all-knowing entity has made appearances as a man in bicycle shorts in Baltimore, as a woman with golden hair in New York, and as a character in a white robe and red socks, sitting in front of the Bulgari jewelry store in Beverly Hills.

    Edge Life Expo producer Gary Beckman isn’t necessarily a Maitreya follower, but he certainly believes in the 2012 phenomenon. It’s a topic he’d like to see his magazine, Edge Life (“the premier monthly magazine on holistic living in the Upper Midwest”), cover more thoroughly. Beckman’s a former computer salesman from Coon Rapids, and he foresees more workshops on 2012 at future Edge Life Expos, as well as at his newest holistic expo ventures in Fargo and Des Moines. “We’re helping to make people happier and we’re sharing some real good, clean spirituality that is not God-fearing, but God-loving,” wrote Beckman in the September 2007 issue of The Edge.

    If the world did collapse in 2012, it would presumably be at the crest of a massive wave in sales for holistic products and services, which would make it sort of the ultimate good news/bad news scenario for people like Beckman.

  • Dispensing with Formalities

    A white-haired man in a finely tailored suit is breezing through the lobby of the Chambers Hotel with three black-garbed hotel employees, including the general manager, at his heels. He glides past Subodh Gupta’s stainless steel sculpture that evokes Animal, the wild-man drummer Muppet. He cruises by the bull’s head suspended in a formaldehyde-filled tank, a work by British bad-boy artist Damien Hirst, without blinking. What stops him is a throwback from the days before smoking bans. “There’s a cigarette machine in here?” he asks.

    The machine at the Chambers is a true antique, but there are no Pall Malls for sale. As Minnesota’s first Art-o-mat—one of about ninety such contraptions in the country—it has been retrofitted to dispense original artworks for five dollars—not much more than a pack of cigarettes.

    The man who founded Art-o-mat ten years ago, Clark Whittington, is in town to officially introduce the machine and to present a slide show about Artists in Cellophane, the collective of more than four hundred artists who create cigarette-pack-size artworks for the machines.

    The crowd of three dozen is made up of mostly curious onlookers, but Whittington is a rock star to a few. There’s a middle-aged woman from Minneapolis who enthuses about her collection of more than thirty Art-o-mat artworks, and Laura Gentry, a pastor, “laugh therapist,” and resident Artist-in-Cellophane member, who drove four hours from McGregor, Iowa, to meet the self-titled Art-o-mat National Bureau Chief.

    Whittington, forty-one, is playful and approachable—he’s an artist, but also a dude, with a military-short haircut, hipster glasses, and grease-monkey shirt with embroidered patches above each pocket that say “Lucky” and “Clark.” Fresh from the Van Halen reunion show with David Lee Roth in Greensboro, NC, he’s proudly sporting a gold VH necklace.

    Art-o-mat was launched in 1997 as a one-time installation, but Whittington now cultivates the project full-time. The range of offerings is impressive, from the crafty (handmade beaded earrings, or the tiny ceramic eggplants that Gentry makes) to the political (“Bad Boy Pincushions” that feature the smirking faces of Bush, Cheney, and other politicians).

    Whittington says he was influenced by Fluxus, the ’60s art movement described by one founder, George Maciunas, as “a fusion of Spike Jones, vaudeville, gags, children’s games, and Duchamp.” Fluxus was a kind of slapstick movement that snubbed the idea of gallery art, juried shows, and exclusivity in art—Dada without the nihilism.

    Jennifer Phelps, the curator who oversees the Chambers’s cutting-edge art collection, agrees, calling it “Fluxus for the twenty-first century.” She especially likes the arcade-like aspect to Art-o-mat: insert token, make your choice, and pull the rusty lever. That carefree act creates a bond between artist and buyer, even at the five-dollar level, and the artists play that up. Christian Andrew, who makes tiny modern houses from paper, will catalog the sold artworks as “[owner name] residence” on his website. Gentry posts photos of people with her cheeky ceramic aubergines in her online “Eggplant Owners Gallery.”

    Fluxus, wrote one critic, “happens when one feels that life and art must be taken so seriously, that it becomes impossible to take life or art seriously.” In that respect, Art-o-mat’s sense of democracy—and its price point—may be right on cue. Christie’s, the famous auction house, set an all-time record for single-week art sales this June: a jaw-dropping $485 million. No one better embodies the mania of the current art boom than Hirst, notorious for displaying various animals in formaldehyde; this year he created a platinum cast of a human skull, covered in 8,601 diamonds, which reportedly sold for $100 million. He titled it For the Love of God.

    At the same time, some 25,000 pieces of art are selling each year via Art-o-mats located in community centers, cafés, and even supermarkets. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful machines are at places like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

    On this night, at Ralph Burnet’s $30 million art temple masquerading as a hotel, a swarm of people has gathered around the Art-o-mat. A student who wandered down from the nearby Art Institutes International happily snaps onto his backpack an R-rated key chain, featuring an artsy photo of a nude woman. Another agonizes over whether to choose a Styrogami, a miniature Styrofoam sculpture by J. Jules Vitali, or a Bar Code Tattoo by Omaha artist Scott Blake.

    A U of M freshman is interviewing Whittington for a research paper, while Phelps gingerly opens a ceramic ArtBar, a sort of anagram game. (If the pieces spell A-R-T-B-A-R you win one of the artist’s larger works.) “Darn it!” she says, when she doesn’t win.

    Whittington, standing off to the side, is documenting the night with his camera. He laughs when Gentry hands him a tiny eggplant stamped with the words “Gimmicky Bastard.” “Yeah,” he says. “That’s about right.”