The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Read Free Page B

sunrise service were few, the land around here being generally flat and uninspiring. One of the highest points in the area is the mine hill out at the Greater Deepwater Coal Company, an old slag heap from earlier in the century, now part of the landscape, but since the terrible disaster out there five years ago and the Brunist cult’s temporary appropriation of it for its own heretical purposes, it has acquired an unholy aura, for which reason it was not even considered. The rise at the sixth tee at the country club golf course was proposed, but not only was it deemed a secular and elitist location, there was also drinking out there and dancing and card playing and other even more un-Christian behavior. So when the wealthy owner of South County Coal and former member of the Church of the Nazarene congregation offered this ridge, it was hastily and gratefully accepted. There was some talk about canceling the event when foul weather was predicted, but as several pastors declared: What if Mary and Magdalene had stayed home on the day of Christ’s rising merely because of a few showers?
    Easter sunrise services being a modern invention of American Protestant churches, there are no Roman Catholics in attendance—indeed, they have not even been invited—but there are also many Protestant denominations whose spiritual leaders oppose the very idea of ecumenism as a dilution of the true faith and a liberal corruption of the Word of God and who have discouraged their congregations from participating in this service, offering them pancake prayer breakfasts in their church basements in its stead. One world, one church: this is not the American way, and it is not God’s way. There are those who are with God and those who are not, and there always have been and always will be until Judgment Day. It is by our differences that we know one another, and those differences divide and cannot be denied. Some will be welcomed into the Promised Land, but most will not, and that’s a plain fact, the Bible says so. It’s either/or: step up and take your pick, brothers and sisters. It’s your eternity. A sign outside the First Baptist Church says as much.
    Others, however, including the Presbyterian hosts, take a more generous view of their fellow religionists and welcome these opportunities for interdenominational Christian fellowship. Chief among them is the pastor of Trinity Lutheran, whose grand vision is of a global one-world, one-church ecumenical order focused on social reformulation, a contemporary articulation of meditation, contemplation, and prayer, and a recovery of the Holy Scriptures while embracing secular spirituality, for God is good and everywhere. He has written about this, though none here have read his writings, nor would they likely understand them should they try to do so. His parishioners have occasionally heard such thoughts expressed in the pastor’s Sunday sermons, but they have not understood them there either.
    The black-bearded South County Coal Company manager, whose task it has been to prepare the site for the morning’s service at his boss’s request, detests this entire pagan event as an unholy abomination. He has stood sullenly on the shadowy slope in his black slicker, a lit cigarillo dangling under his rainhat, hands resting on the butts of his holstered guns, watching the fools slip and fall on their climb but helping none of them. They are the condemned; let them get used to falling. The so-called Christian church is not Christian at all; it is an evil and degenerate institution, infiltrated and controlled by Satan, who, as the Holy Book says, deceiveth the whole world. The whole world. Christ was not crucified on a Friday, did not rise on a Sunday. Can they not read their own Bible? Do they not have fingers on which to count? The very notion of Easter, absorbed into Christianity by the early church fathers, so-called, in their corrupt lust for power and named after a whorish pagan goddess, is obscenely