The summer after the school year of my attempt at salvation-by-hemline, our family flew from Los Angeles to Detroit for General Conference. F. D. Nichol had just surprised everyone by dying ("He was doing so well last time I saw him," I overheard Grandpa telling Grandma), R. R. Figuhr was retiring, and so was my mother’s father, reluctantly, at age 70.

Grandpa was the quintessential Adventist, a vigorous, disciplined man with a resume that included 20 years as a "China hand" and a 16-year stint at the General Conference. Grandpa traveled the world for the Sabbath School department, introduced the Vacation Bible School concept to the Adventist Church, and even wrote a book, Our Priceless Primaries.

Grandpa and Grandma, an impeccable, reserved woman renowned for her lemon Meringue pie, were to meet us at the Detroit airport. It was our first cross-country flight together as a family. Mother, who was already scared stiff to leave the ground, failed to fasten her seat belt and nearly hit the ceiling, by my father’s account, when the plane took off. He chuckled when he said it, and I thought maybe he exaggerated the actual event, but was never sure.

This was a strange trip for my father, a former Adventist. Whatever he thought about our family vacation, however, he kept to himself. Over the years he had kept many things to himself. But it is easier to hide facts than feelings, and I grew up aware of his bitterness toward Adventism and his perfectly Adventist in-laws, if not of the events that spawned the feelings. Regarding church trends, my father was a man ahead of his time, and it hurt him.

Few ministers were preaching grace when Daddy’s local congregation disfellowshipped him for remarrying after a divorce. No one was making source-critical studies of the Spirit of Prophecy, or questioning its range of authority, when my dad told me he just couldn’t buy into all this "Ellen White stuff." It was not yet fashionable to publicly air dirty church business or question the ethics of denominational leaders when my father began disburdening himself on the nepotism, inequity, and unprofessionalism he encountered working for the church organization in the late 1940s. My father had no credible community to support his contentions, so most of the time he kept to himself. But the bitterness remained, stockpiled and waiting for the next fight with Mother or a smart remark from one of his kids.

At the airport, Grandpa and Grandma picked us up in their white 1964 Ford. Ford was so much a part of our family that I thought it was the Adventist way. Daddy had once strayed to a Pepto-Bismol-pink Rambler, but for the most part he had stuck with Ford-Mercury products. My grandparents, as far as I know, had never wavered. Whatever we thought of one another’s religious views, we seemed to believe in the same cars; whatever I thought of my dad’s character, I was proud of his stand on Fords.

Daddy showed himself friendly enough with the gather saints and relatives—too friendly, I worried. I lived in fear that he would say "Damn," or mention something nonreligious, like Lyndon B. Johnson, or the price of new cars. Or maybe he would tell one of his racist jokes. My dad was not exactly the most politically correct person to be taking to Detroit, not to mention to a gathering of Adventists, in the mid-1960s.

But at 14, I was more socially than politically aware. What plagued me, after Aunt Florence seated herself in the front seat of Grandpa’s Ford, was that my father had shaved that Sabbath morning. And then I wondered, to myself, "Can Adventists shave on Sabbath?" I had heard, after all, some debate about showering and bathing.

Aunt Florence did not directly address the issue of shaving, but she did seem uncomfortable and taciturn. I attributed this to her being "the nervous type," and to her possible disappointment of shaving on Sabbath. When she later demonstrated the warmth and generosity of her personality, I had to modify my theories of her behavior. Maybe being with my General Conference grandfather put her on edge. Or maybe it was Detroit.

The irony of gathering all those city-fearing Adventists in the middle of Detroit was not lost on me. Take them to San Francisco, to the Cow Palace, I thought. The Cow Palace was the biggest building I had ever seen. The Adventists did just fine in San Francisco; it had more nature. And more Chinese restaurants—good for all those returned missionaries. I figured even Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, San Diego, or Chicago would have been more harmonious to Adventists than Detroit. They hardly knew what to do with Detroit.

Even my worldly father explored Detroit in a surprisingly small-townish way. He, my sister, and I set out one afternoon to explore the bustling area around Cobo Hall. For two days and one night I had been living in the middle of this human melee, farther away from Fresno than I had ever been in my life, so far away that I thought I had come to an Eastern city. I was eager to venture into the grey urbanity surrounding Cobo Hall, to discover what rallied such honking traffic jams and hordes of pedestrians. So the three of us went forth. Amid this pulsing grandeur of skyscrapers and automobiles we found a newsstand, a shoe-shine man, and a shop hawking peanuts, popcorn, and candy. Detroit came unto me as a Butterfingers bar, and I ate, ignorant of its greater glories and sins.

But I was not much more successful at figuring out what was going on inside Cobo Hall. One image remains—a New Guinea bushman wearing war paint and hardly any clothes, brandishing a spear and jumping around the auditorium platform like a roaring human spider. It was the General Conference of Paul Piari.

Adventist leaders presented Mr. Piari as an example of the transforming power of the gospel—whatever that was. It should have known without anyone telling me. But it seemed clear that Paul Piari’s most colorful aspect had to do with elements predating his transformation. Whoever put him on stage—the spotlight following his feathers, paint, and loincloth as he jumped about in a pre-Christian attack mode—obviously believed in the power of the primitive to gain the attention of the saints and the rest of us.

The show intrigued me. My perfect grandparents sat at the end of the row, next to my imperfect parents and my sister (who worked as hard to demonstrate her vices as I my virtues). This was not one family, but two, stretching me out tight between the pull of their two realities. Right then it did not seem much of an advantage to be growing up Adventist. I didn’t know how to put it together in a way that made sense. If you’re a reformed cannibal or head-hunter, they parade you up front when, for the love of Christ, you quit cutting out people’s hearts. It’s harder when you’re 14 and have never done anything more antisocial than sass your mother. For us the church had a whole huge list of imperatives.

It confused me. Being an Adventist looked not like one thing, but twenty, or a hundred—an array of odd, disjointed allegiances encompassing everything from Fords and Fig Newtons to shaving on Sabbath and Christ dying on the cross. I didn’t know how to fit all those beliefs together in the one person without pulling that person apart into many pieces. I was already town between doing what felt natural and doing what was right, to the point that it seemed I must always go against myself if I would go for God.

But the man on the stage appeared to be having none of these problems. Paul Piari playfully hooted and leaped through an odd forest of pulpits and microphone stands, and I could not tell where the hooting left off and the leaping began, so seamless was his joining of song and dance. Of course nobody called it a dance; that’s just what it looked like to me. Here was God’s new instrument playing out before me in native wholeness and simplicity.

I wanted to dance too. But I knew I shouldn’t.

An unedited version of this article first appeared in the May 1992 issue of Spectrum magazine.

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