The Prophet Who Wasn't
Monday reading #36
Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!!
This weekend, I read Emily Harnett’s story for Harper’s about Elizabeth Clare Prophet (yes, really her name), a New Age religious leader whose apocalyptic visions had the members of the Church Universal and Triumphant preparing underground bunkers in the late 1980s; they were disappointed when the predicted nuclear strike that drove them underground for three days in March 1990 turned out to be a failed prophecy.
You know I love a cult story. It’s more than that, though. Like the Harper’s pieces I recommended last year, it’s written from the perspective of a writer seeking, suffused with ambivalence and tenderness. Harnett reports on the group’s surviving adherents and attends one of their quarterly conferences, and she finds some weird shit. She also forges a thoughtful profile of Prophet through unusual materials, including a huge archive of recordings of her preaching.
There are also some beautifully observed details. Of a Philadelphia storefront church, she writes
The room is purple, and Pamela herself wears purple: purple pants, purple sweater, purple T-shirt beneath it. The carpet is purple, too. It is a small room, made smaller by the cloying intensity of the color and by the windows, which, while large, are mostly covered up, letting in very little light. Outside, it is a June morning, golden and warm. The effect, inside, is of being trapped in an Easter egg.
Of an image she finds in Kierkegaard:
Fleeing the demands of selfhood, one spends his life with his “face inverted,” refusing to confront the despair that is “going on behind him,” trailing him like a shadow. I was struck by this image; it reminded me of Elizabeth, who sometimes began her dictations with her ringed hands raised and her back turned, waiting for the Masters to speak through her, to transform her into someone other than herself.
It’ll probably feel a little bummy, but in a good way? Let me know what you think.
See you soon.