This is how it happened:

In the middle of one frozen February night Jonathan, my grandfather, woke abruptly. ‘Sleepest thou?’ a voice said to him. ‘Couldest thou not watch one hour?’

Hearing these words come to him out of the darkness, he did not for one minute doubt that the voice he heard was the voice of Jesus Christ Himself.

14

It will probably turn out in the end – when the cosmologists finish and the computers grind to a halt – that nobody can find a beginning for this disorder around us, for this universe that refuses to behave, simply because it has no beginning. We probably live inside some cosmic snake that has swallowed its tail, some tobacco worm that has eaten out its own insides just like Jonathan’s nightmare. Not a nice thought. God is so much tidier. Things begin. Things end. There’s peace of mind, an end to aimlessness, no need for tinsel and sham. Control is possible in such a life. So is meaning. Despite Atlas’s interpretation, this is what lies behind my grandfather’s enchantment with divinity. I’m sure of it. With God, he escaped the tobacco worms; he says so himself: with his conversion, his recurrent nightmare stopped.

His father? He had a heavenly father. He gave up searching for an earthly one. George? George was the routed enemy of his youth, now dead, now past. Within a year Jonathan read well. In three more years, he took and passed examinations in philosophy, mathematics and Greek; he became assistant to the Reverend Garson Walter Grayberg of Ellsworth, Maine: a difficult time.

The Reverend Grayberg was not anybody’s image of an East coast parson: short, irascible, coarse-textured, soup slopped on his shirt front, gravy on his trousers. He shouted and wept when he preached; he stamped, thumped, shook his fists; he ranted on against the depraved elegance he saw around him – and managed to flatter it at the same time. To Jonathan he said, ‘Of course I ain’t educated so fancy as you.’ And he said, ‘I learned me my trade on the hard side of life: what a kid like you don’t know from fuck about.’ Jonathan prayed for Christian forbearance (a virtue God was stingy with in his case), and his heart sang when, at twenty-eight, he took examinations on Wesley’s Explanatory Notes and the Forty-Four Sermons, entered the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and escaped.

Today’s PR material for Moody shows dull eyes and foolishness in the faces of staff and students alike. And the courses they study! Hermeneutics and Homiletics, Techniques of Evangelism, Apologetics, Church History, Old and New Testaments, Principles of Discipleship: you can see the dull eyes grow duller as you read the list. But in Jonathan’s day, God was still lively enough to give a fizz to the air. In the excitement of it all, he began to do a little writing of his own. He even wrote a few verses.

When he was thirty-two, the District Synod granted him permission to set up a tabernacle in the wilderness on the south side of the Columbia River, not too far from Cathalamet, Washington. I find charm in this, that I should have sought truth at Columbia University while my grandfather sought it on the Columbia River. Rayner my father used to sing