The Revival

Jane Gill

I hit the scan button on the car radio and suddenly I was singing along to Brewer & Shipley’s 1971 hit, One Toke Over the Line. The music took me back to the days of button-fly bell bottoms, Mexican style tunics, and leather sandals. I remember the social unrest in America, fueled by a war half a world away, the demonstrators, hippies, and long-hairs. In The Age of Aquarius we believed our generation would change things.

        It was late summer when the buses, campers, and pickups trundled onto the open field across from the office. Rosie, Sandy, and I worked together and one lunch hour we watched a weighty 18-wheeler lumber to a stop on the side of the highway. “Christ Is The Answer” was boldly painted across the trailer. The next day the sidewalks were alive with long-hairs in leather sandals and gauzy shirts forecasting that the times they were a-changin. They said a revival was sweeping America.

Sandy said they were Jesus Freaks and California was overrun with them. She was a hippie who ran around the office barefoot, tossing her fly-away blonde hair over her shoulder. She claimed she’d lived out west in a commune until she’d grown tired of it and moved back east. “Christ is the answer,” she mused. “So man, like what was the question?”

        “It doesn’t matter what the question is,” Rosie, a preacher’s kid from Texas, said with a laugh. “Don’t you get it?”

        Sandy was the first woman I met who had silicone boobs and when I doubted her, she yanked up her tee shirt and showed ‘em to me. If that wasn’t enough, she refused to wear a bra, showed up in jeans, and wore little rectangular blue-tinted sunglasses. One of her favorite songs was One Toke Over The Line, and I knew why. Rosie said Sandy was a free spirit and that was probably why I didn’t like her. I said she was a pothead and a hippie.

        Sandy was vocal in her criticism of the war, her support for draft dodgers, anti-war demonstrators, and any underdog cause she came across. Unabashed in her opinions, she accused me of being way too uptight.

        Married to a sailor who was frequently on long deployments, I felt I had a right to be uptight. I lived my life with Holly Hobby, Winnie The Pooh, spilled milk, ear infections, and the daily letters I wrote to my husband who, lucky for him, was half a world away. Sandy offered to bring in homemade brownies to help me lighten up. I figured I knew what was in those brownies and I wasn’t going near them.

        The next day we watched a sweaty army of pony-tailed young men pound augers and haul fat ropes tight to raise a massive circus tent. Maybe it was the majestic way it rose from the earth, where there had been nothing, or maybe I was captivated by the sight of something I’d never seen before. I don’t know, but I watched with fascination. I was drawn to it, even though I would never tell my husband. There were other things I didn’t tell him, like how I secretly opposed the war and resented the way the military ruled our lives.

        By the time the weekend rolled around Sandy had goaded us into going to one of the free meetings over there. Me, with a death grip on my Kindergartener’s wrist and another hand on the stroller holding my three-year-old, and Sandy, blue sunglasses hiding her enlarged pupils, and Rosie telling us about tent revivals in Texas. We walked toward the setting sun, across the beaten-down dry grass, and under the flap of the green and white striped tent. The smell of fall hung heavy in the air as I hauled the stroller, forcing it over the dry earth. My six-year-old spun around in the last rays of sunlight, raising amber colored bits of grass like flecks of gold. Rows of metal folding chairs faced a wooden stage. We took our seats amid shirt-sleeved young men, girls barely out of their teens wearing babies on their hips, a fair number of Filipinos, no doubt from the naval base, and the long-hairs. Sandy seemed to know some of them, which I didn’t find surprising—she never met a stranger. I made sure we were close to an exit so I could get my kids out if someone started speaking in tongues. A small band on stage banged out rock music. I’d never heard that kind of music in a church and wondered what I had gotten myself into when some guy in holey jeans grabbed both my hands in his and shouted over the din, “I love ya man.”

        I was as uncomfortable as I’d ever been and wondered what I was subjecting my children to when the music stopped. The flaps of the tent fell closed, silencing the crowd. A long minute passed. Not a breeze wove through there. Not one person whispered, not a cough rang out. A young preacher appeared from the darkness and stepped onto the stage. A line of sweat trickled down the side of my face, but I didn’t dare move. The preacher, holding a thick black Bible, strutted back and forth surveying the small crowd. I braced myself for a scathing sermon about hellfire and damnation.

        His tone was conversational, but his voice carried well over the rows of seekers. Although I’ve long forgotten his words, I’ve never forgotten his message. He said he wasn’t going to talk about religion. He said religion was man reaching up to God, but God was reaching down to man. He spoke of a God of love, of forgiveness, a God who wanted to be my friend, who cared about my world and my struggles. He said this was the “good news.” I’d never heard that before. I shushed the kids and swiped a tear off my cheek. The God I’d been raised to know didn’t communicate with ordinary people. He had rules. But the preacher knew God, he said, personally, and the timbre of his voice rose.

        “I have a message for you from God,” he said. “He loves you—he loves every single person here tonight!” He said God had a heart big enough to look beneath the long hair, past the beard, and the bare feet—past the sin.

        “God has read the pain in your heart,” he shouted. “He came here to meet you tonight. Right here! He wants to take you in his arms, wipe away your tears, and heal the hurts you’ve kept hidden deep in your soul.” The pause was pregnant, his voice then barely above a whisper, “If you’ll let him.” He never mentioned fire or brimstone. He said “yes” there was a movement in America to embrace God but God was desperately waiting for us to accept His love and to share that love with each other, and that was the mission of “Christ Is The Answer Crusades.” He said what Rosie said, “It doesn’t matter what the question is.”

        The love-in was a world-wide movement lasting from the late 60s into the mid-70s. It didn’t change a lot of things, not politics, not the war, not the economy, but I believe it changed a lot of hearts. The evening news still showed the war in Vietnam raging on, the protestors being disbanded, and the gory details of the Charles Manson trial, but I no longer saw Sandy, or the hippies and peaceniks, with their long hair and beards, as a threat. No, the world didn’t change, but somehow I did. Freed from my uptightness by a soft breeze that hot summer night, I saw the world as a friendlier place when I left that tent.

        We’re all in AARP now and I’m disappointed. How many of us, I wonder, were part of that movement or were touched by it? How many who didn’t want our kids playing with toy guns now turn a blind eye to gun control, despite the growing numbers of shootings in our country?

        And we say nothing.

        How many of us used to openly care about the environment, politics, policies, about the lost, and the poor?

        And we do nothing.

        I stayed in touch with Rosie for many years. I lost track of Sandy, but I think about her sometimes. I think about the way she had of making a point and I wonder if she’d peer over the top of those blue glasses of hers and ask when we decided to sell out. When did we decide to trade social consciousness for social networking? When did we start labeling each other as liberals or conservatives? And when did we stop believing that if we could “buy the world a Coke” we could change it?

        I sure miss her. 

Jane Gill is a paralegal and a previous contributor to Doorways Memoirs. Her poems have been published in The Bridge. Jane’s debut novel, A Matter of Pride, published in 2010 by Double Edge Press, was named a 2011 finalist for a Royal Palm Literary Award by the Florida Writers Association. It is available online and in the Sarasota County Library. Jane spends her leisure time researching Florida history by exploring off-beat locales and listening for long-buried tales they whisper.