29 Songs: II. Whitecross “In the Kingdom”

In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-one, when Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee—no, wait, that’s a different story.

In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-one, when George Herbert Walker Bush was President of the free peoples of Middle-Earth, a boy sat with his sister in front of a very blonde, bald man with gentle eyes and a taste for checkered shirts. He was, they understood, the one who would decide whether they would attend middle school at the Christian Academy of Guatemala. Really, he was just the best teacher in the school, making sure they weren’t horrible kids who would destroy the classroom dynamic; the boy would have him as a homeroom teacher in eighth grade, and then again in ninth grade after his class had driven three successive homeroom teachers from the room in tears or rage. His name was Mister Mutchler, but the boy once called him Papa by accident, which the man charitably did not notice.

The boy was getting longer and his hair was brown now and starting to curl in unpredictable ways; his sister was still fairly blonde, short, and much more at ease in the world. (This was a sore point between them for years; he was ashamed of his poor social skills, and she was baffled by his taking it out on her.) He was quietly dreading going to school here, as he had quietly dreaded everything for the past year: the San Cristobal colegio where he and his siblings had been the only white kids; the language school in Antigua where they had received crash courses in Spanish and in middle-class Guatemalan culture; the move to Guatemala itself.

The boy noticed that even the man’s eyelashes were fair, which gave him an odd look when he blinked; since his face was ruddy and peeling (he’d just come back from vacation and he burnt easily), his lashes were lighter than his skin. The boy thought that he should remember that in case it became a useful descriptive detail in a story he would someday write.

(The boy had decided at the age of five that he wanted to be a writer. Not long after that, inspired by Laura Ingalls’ autobiographical Little House books, he began to describe everything that happened in the third person and past tense so that he could remember it better. After he said something memorable, he would repeat it under his breath, then add, “he said.” He later dropped the “he said,” but continues to repeat himself in whispers to this day.)

School had already started when the interview with Mr. Mutchler took place, because the boy’s family had gone back to the States over the summer to raise money, and their giant orange monster of a Suburban had blown its transmission in Veracruz on the way back. They had missed the first few days of class sitting in a hotel a few blocks away from the ocean and watching TV programs that the boy remembered as promising more sexual thrills than they delivered, while a Mexican shop worked slowly but surely on the vehicle. Even the ocean was disappointing, too choppy for swimming even if any of them had had courage for it; the last time they had been to the beach the boy, his sister and a brother had almost been sucked out to the Pacific by a powerful riptide, and only survived thanks to a fat Guatemalan doctor who would later go to jail for helping to funnel cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

Christian Academy of Guatemala was a small school; the boy was the sixteenth student in his eighth-grade class, which met in a small corner classroom facing out onto the dirty, grassless playing field. The rest of the class did not seem particularly to care that he was there; the brief curiosity aroused by his late arrival soon fizzled once he turned out to be physically unprepossessing and stammeringly inarticulate.

Nate was easily the most powerful personality in the class; a big kid, blond, hot-tempered, and rowdy, he was also one of the most culturally aware, quoting Bill and Ted and Wayne and Garth long before any of the rest of them understood the references, and headbanging to Nirvana before the rest of them had outgrown Stryper. In another school he probably would have been a bully (younger kids certainly considered him one), but the school was too small for the usual hierarchical divisions to solidify properly, and he became instead an graceless leader, half-resented but mostly respected.

Tony was closest to him, a handsome, compact Honduran who resembled a shark when he smiled. He had none of Nate’s joviality but plenty of unfocused anger, and it was probably hardest for him not to be cruel in the exercise of his adolescent strength. This was also his first year at the school.

Brendan had befriended Tony first, which was probably why Tony hated him the most; Brendan was an unapologetic geek, tall, pale and mulleted, a devotee of SeaQuest and Petra, who wore the same denim jacket every day for years and was physically inept enough to be shoved and called gay every day by upperclassmen who later went into ministry with some success.

Joel, an adopted Guatemalan with a learning disability and an inferiority complex, became Brendan’s only real friend, but his unquestioned, almost contemptuous mastery of basketball and soccer saved him from any similar treatment. In the absence of any shared culture—inevitable because everyone was from a different church with slightly different theologies, not to mention different geographic locations—sports was the primary way that boys at CAG created identities and found their place in the pecking order. (At least for now; in high school, life would become more earnest and intellectual.) Brendan was unusual in rejecting sports altogether, for which he himself was rejected.

Scott excelled at sports, but he was also more kindhearted and reflective than just about any other male in the school, and would be the class valedictorian five years later. It was Scott who said the first kind thing to the new boy, and it was Scott, the following year, who gave him outright the Whitecross tape.

So I take that back. There was one shared culture: Christian music. (Not entirely shared; Nate and Tony had nothing but contempt for the stuff, but then their parents had MTV.) But the Christian music that was admired was nothing like the Christian music the boy was familiar with. He had grown up with a taste governed by his mother and a cousin for whom Barry Manilow represented edginess. Petra was only a rumor, a source of heavy-metal unease (all hard rock was associated with Satanism in the boy’s childhood), when the family moved to Guatemala. But the boys at CAG not only listened to Petra, they thought they were kind of wussy. (Except Brendan. But then he was kind of wussy.) Whitecross was the fresher, edgier sound, the Rolling Stones to Petra’s Beatles, at least in the tiny enclave of Christian Academy of Guatemala’s eighth-grade class. And they actually were heavy metal (Petra was generally closer to Journey or Toto, although their guitars could get loud), though still highly processed and pop; Dio is probably the closest reference point.

But the song that we all knew, that somehow made the album acceptable even for people who vaguely associated loud guitars with evil, wasn’t heavy metal; it was a soaring anthem in the “We Are the World” mold, although less cloying and with an acceptably technical guitar line from one-time guitar-hero contender Rex Carroll. It was called “In the Kingdom,” and the album was named after it, and the video was on in the afternoons when the local music-video channel played Christian videos.

The chorus:

We’re alive, we are strong
We’re a nation, we belong
Let us all stand together in the kingdom
No more darkness, no more night
We are children of the light
Let us all work together in the kingdom.

Not exactly Joni Mitchell, but its lunkheaded directness appealed to kids raised on lunkheadedly direct worship songs. There is a half-memory of singing it in chapel; Scott played bass and Joel played electric guitar in the school’s rock band in high school. And it worked as a worship song, or at least the chorus did. The verses were a little too, er, timely.

Saw the headlines just the other day
Said the wall’s coming down
Said the peace is just a breath away
One world, one voice, one happy family
Yeah, that’s what the world believes

The wall is the Berlin Wall, of course, and the One World proposals being made in the giddy days following the USSR’s dissolution were regarded with fear and suspicion by the evangelical Christians who made up everyone the boy knew. American Christians probably paid more attention to these proposals than the American left did, ignoring the fact that it was absurdly impossible; the Antichrist is said to rule the entire world in the book of Revelations, which meant that uniting the world under a single government would be playing directly into his hands. If the Antichrist was going to rule the world, he’d have to work for it.

Read my Bible just the other day
Said the kingdom’s coming down
Jesus said the kingdom is just a prayer away
One Lord, one God, one faith eternally
Yeah, that’s what the church believes

Christian Academy of Guatemala was what’s known as an MK school: everyone there was a missionary kid. Their parents’ missions were all different (and even sometimes contradictory), but they all accepted the principle that the evangelization and conversion of non-Christians was the most important work in the world.

In five years at the school, the boy probably studied the Great Commission more than any other piece of Scripture, or indeed than any concept at all. He can still quote it from memory: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And behold I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (That’s the King James Version, more or less; he’s read, studied, memorized, and taught it in three or four different translations.) The boys’ own parents were not really baptizing anyone in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; his father taught construction skills to teenage boys at an orphanage, and his mother coordinated and translated for American medical teams who would go into the highlands and offer free medical care for anyone who came to the temporary clinic. One controversy in class (there were many over the years; several of the boy’s classmates loved arguing, even for things they didn’t really believe) was over whether ministering to the physical needs or the spiritual needs of the world’s poor was more important. The teacher, by the way, argued for spiritual needs, and frankly condemned the conversionless model of Mother Teresa. His mother’s medical missions never once occurred to the boy during these arguments.

But the shared belief was that it is the duty of Christians to bring about God’s kingdom by preaching to and converting the rest of the world. How this dovetails with the idea that the world was drawing near its end was once explained to the boy like this: When Christianity has been heard, understood, and either accepted or rejected by everyone on the planet, then the apocalypse will begin.

Heard a newsman just the other day
Said a war was coming down
Said destruction is just a breath away
One world, one war, one awesome tragedy
Yeah, that’s what the world believes

Ah, those foolish non-Christians (read: liberals), believing starry-eyed in some unattainable world peace but—contradictorily—in deepest despair because wars and other evidence of man’s inhumanity still exists. The military action that would be branded the Gulf War was naturally current events, but it meant little to the boy and his classmates, who weren’t even living in the country that was waging the war. Iraq existed largely as a laborious pun in service of an unfunny, usually racist joke then prevalent; the punchline was “I rack, I ran.” (To rack was once-popular slang for the most painful, and therefore the funniest, thing that could happen to a young male.)

Another debate, the following year: which public figure is the Antichrist, Saddam Hussein or Bill Clinton? Argued in all seriousness, with Scripture quoted to prove both sides. This teacher leaned towards Clinton, but sensibly refused to commit himself to any definitive interpretation.

Generally, though, the school was agnostic on the question of war; it was an acceptable activity because people fought wars in the Bible, but the romance, glamour, and poetry of war was never encouraged, perhaps because all romance, glamour and poetry were faintly disreputable.

Heard a preacher just the other day
Said God’s glory’s coming down
Just as the waters cover all the seas
One King, one crown, one reign forevermore
Yeah, that’s what we have and more

Whitecross’s singer, Scott Wenzel, has gone up an octave, and is shredding his throat in a fair Axl Rose imitation; it works well as an emotionally dynamic device. The simile, of course, is straight out of the Bible—usually the only excuse for poetic imagery in Christian pop.

There was no middle eight, unless you count a dramatic pause before the chorus plunged forward yet again.

It was at the Peri-Roosevelt that the song came home to the boy, or at least that the emotional swell of it matched up with an emotional swell in his hormonal development. He wasn’t listening to it, it was just playing in his head, and tears started to his eyes and a lump grew in his throat as he thought of everyone he knew, his family and the guys at school and the people back in Phoenix and thousands—millions—of people all around the world, whatever their differences and agendas and problems and failings, working together in the kingdom.

The Peri-Roosevelt was a mall just off the Periferico, a narrow highway circling Guatemala City; his family went there to eat at Taco Bell after church every Sunday, a way of visiting the States (CAG’s preferred diminutive for the home country) without abandoning Guatemala. The layout and structure of the mall is still buried deep in his subconscious, a place of American and European beauty and richness (especially the cool creamy smell of the Parma dairy store where they bought ice cream) in a poverty-ridden, diesel-choked, and ineffectually fecund country. He stood on the high concrete walkway with railings painted turquoise and purple, outside the food court where his family was still cleaning up from Taco Bell, and in the middle of helpless capitalism—it was rumored that the mall was built by drug money, and most of the businesses were American or European—he was choked by a vision of unity (“spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” —THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS) and cooperative joy that owed more to imagination than to his certain knowledge; but then he was so sheltered that imaginative interpretation was nearly all he did know. And still perhaps is.

Years later he would choke up while singing Tom Booth’s song “We Are One Body” as he swayed in shouldered unison with some fifty teenagers and young adults around a Catholic altar in another country, for much the same reason. But this time the uniting bond was less vague than “the kingdom,” and he thought he understood better what the purpose, need, and substance of the unity was. But that too is another song.


(“In the Kingdom” at iTunes. In the Kingdom at Amazon.)