Passage Read Free Page B

borrowing money to buy a house, or meeting a woman who would want to be my wife. I need only follow the Leader – Brother Ruhamah – who made all the rules and would take care of everyone, forever.
    As a Young Brother, I was warned that my faith would be tested, not only by my own thoughts – Can we leave yet, Paul? Because sitting around eating garbage and talking jibberish all day is getting a bit boring – but by crude tests the Elders would set for me.
    I failed the first one. Brother Yoav got sick – or at least I thought he did. He was coughing up what looked like blood. I knew from Bible studies that I was supposed to sit with him and pray, but I sought out Brother Dawid instead, and asked whether I could walk across the paddock to the phone box to call a local doctor.
    Brother Dawid avoided my eyes but agreed, and so I set off, making my way gingerly across the potholes, feeling a little spooked – it was the first time in some weeks I’d spent any time alone – until I was stopped, part way to the highway, by two Elder Brothers, who castigated me.
    ‘How little faith you have!’ they said, chasing me back towards the commune where Brother Yoav was sitting upright and apparently well, and ready to join in my scolding.
    Brother Ruhamah, I was told, would not be pleased to learn of my transgression, but Brother Ruhamah was less of a presence at the commune than I’d been led to expect. It’s true what people say: he didn’t often sleep in wooden bunks with his followers; he had a penthouse apartment on the Gold Coast, where he spent a significant amount of his time. Leaving the commune was, it seemed, no big deal for Brother Ruhamah.
    It is well known that he forbids his followers from having any contact with their families, including their own parents. He justifies this cruelty by linking his teaching, wrongly, to a passage in the Bible: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’
    He also knows the ways of cult busters.
    From time to time, letters from agonised parents would come into the commune. Brother Ruhamah would occasionally read those letters aloud and the desperation of those parents is seared into my memory:
    ‘To the dear Leader of the Jesus People, true messenger of Christ! We write to you on behalf of our dearest Beth (known to you as the blessed Sister Rebecca). She has told us that she has found happiness with you, living for Christ. We are writing to say it is by her example that we now live! We, too, are studying His Word and yet it has been five years now since we’ve seen her … how wonderful it would be to celebrate our love of Christ with her. We understand that she cannot be allowed into the Outside World, but won’t you, in the name of God, permit a visit?’
    Depending on his mood, Brother Ruhamah might scrunch the letters into a ball, but other times – there was no pattern to it, or none that I could divine – he would say, ‘All right, invite your family here. See for yourself what you have lost, which is nothing but gossip and material things.’
    There was a catch, of course. Reunions between parents and children weren’t to take place at the commune, but in a paddock across the river from where we bathed. There were no facilities in that paddock and yet reunions had to be conducted not over hours, but days. The ploy is obvious to me now: the joy that people experienced when coming together after years apart soon gave way to tension, and then exasperation.
    Brothers and Sisters – ours, I mean – would soon want to go home, back to the commune. Once, I saw a mother fall to her knees and grasp her daughter, saying, ‘But don’t you know how much this hurts us, not to see you for years on end?’ Herdaughter – our Sister – said nothing, but peeled her mother’s hands off her tunic. The girl’s father said, ‘Get up, Pat. This is