Raising the Dead Read online

  I Party, Deborah Prays

  I went off to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where I took eighteen credit hours in subjects including calculus, biochemistry, and biology while majoring in “Fraternity Party.” I crashed and burned and had to come home after a disastrous first semester.

  While I was away, Deborah made key decisions about her life’s direction. Her brother had become a serious Christian and would in due course become a minister in the Evangelical Free Church. He was following his forebears in his choice of vocations, as Deborah’s mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister and her family tree was full of pastors and missionaries. As Deborah began her college career, her brother asked her a troubling question: “If you died, do you know that you would go to heaven?” He spoke of a personal faith that went far beyond the moralism of the church in which they had grown up, which Deborah had rejected as too much and unnecessary.

  The issue of Deborah’s destiny beyond death would not leave her alone. She drove a white MG Midget and during much of her first semester in college she took drives by herself, thinking over the question. Driving the car made her feel as if she was getting somewhere even as she remained undecided. She began attending a Bible study at the college, where she met friends who attended the House of Bread at Truro Episcopal Church—a center of the charismatic renewal then taking place across denominations. The charismatic renewal emphasized gifts of the Holy Spirit such as supernatural healing and speaking in tongues. More and more of the people she met had the same type of “too intense” faith as her brother.

  Deborah was very popular in high school, but she wasn’t by any means a party girl. She did not like it when I drank too much. Since I could take it or leave it, I cut back for her sake. Dating her, I realized how frightened—terrified, really—she was of situations that threatened to spiral out of control. “If you ever hurt me, that’s it!” she said. I had no reason to doubt her and never for a moment thought of jeopardizing our relationship—I knew from the beginning she would always be the most important human being in my life.

  I found loving Deborah unconditionally as natural as breathing. Who wouldn’t love her? She was fun, athletic, artistic, and her willowy beauty made me want to wrap my arms around her.

  Deborah was also afraid God would ask of her things contrary to her nature. She thought a lot about the unfashionable wardrobe she might have to wear. This may sound trite, but Deborah was just discovering her substantial artistic gifts, which would lead her one day into a career in graphic design. No one wants to choose between being fully human—fully who he or she is—and belonging to God. We actually don’t have to—God made us who we are, after all, and takes pleasure in the gifts, such as creativity, that He gives us. But that’s the way the choice to become an “intense Christian” seemed to Deborah at the time. Accepting God’s invitation to have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ felt like giving up on the person she hoped to become.

  Her Christian conversion came about quietly and unobtrusively. She was alone in her home one night, where she had been thinking all evening about praying in the way her brother had suggested, giving herself to God. By the time she had walked from her second-story bedroom down the stairs to the living room, she had surrendered herself completely to Christ.

  When she walked onto the Northern Virginia Community College campus the next day she found she had a compassion for her fellow students she had never known before. I’ve changed! she thought, wondering at what had happened. “I’m starting to care about people,” she told me a few days later. This came as a shock since I had always found her a loving person, not only toward me but her many friends as well. But think how much sense this makes as a sign of Deborah’s encounter with God. When a child’s relationship with a parent becomes unpredictable and troubling, the child naturally grows up wary and likely cold. This person also masters hiding his or her true feelings, wearing an encouraging smile even while edging toward the door. John’s First Letter in the New Testament tells us that if we claim to love God but hate our brothers, we are liars. Deborah’s newfound love for God opened her up to other people in a new way. God had brought about a substantial emotional healing that she had not even been looking for—likely healing she was not even aware she needed.

  What Deborah experienced was so real that she began telling me I needed to know God in a whole new way. I thought I knew at least as much about Christianity as she did. My family attended a Presbyterian church. I had earned my God and Country medal in the Boy Scouts! I was a Christian.

  Not in the way I needed to be, she kept claiming.

  This gradually introduced a rift between us. Just as she had let me know that I could never hurt her, she now informed me she would never marry me unless I came to know Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. She wanted me to be one of those born-again people. I went with her to the Truro church’s House of Bread worship service, where people were raising their hands as they prayed and singing at the top of their lungs. As much as I loved Deborah, I didn’t know if all that was for me. Perhaps it would turn out to be just one of her passing enthusiasms.

  Worm Motel

  I finally settled into my studies, at least in part, at Northern Virginia. I continued taking the basic sciences I would need for a premed major and I was also attracted to anthropology—the study of people groups and their cultures.

  In 1974, the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I took a trip to West Africa in the company of my anthropology professor and two other students, to the nation of Togo, in order to study the Kabre tribe—a people who lived on the savannah north of the coast.

  We arrived first at Lomé, the capital, which even today is a bare-bones city of rough-plastered, low-lying concrete buildings, gimcrack houses with metal roofs, and even more modest shops and bars that are little more than huts. Open sewers ran along the streets and there were more than a few beggars who lacked limbs. Lomé was a nightmarish introduction to the third world.

  We had barely arrived when we found that our professor, a PhD who also worked as a State Department official, had taken off to enjoy one of the city’s brothels. He had taken all our money as well, which we had entrusted to him for safekeeping. Toward evening my two fellow students and I found ourselves wandering the streets, asking people where we might sleep—cheaply. We couldn’t afford any of the hotels in town, as bad as they were. Finally, we found what might be described as a Togo “motel,” which consisted of a series of mud huts connected to one another like the body segments of a grub worm. My knapsack on my back, sleeping bag in hand, I was led through the connecting chambers of the worm to a room with a little bed. The bed was so disgusting, a breeding ground for bedbugs and lice, that I quickly abandoned the idea of sleeping there. But I had ten dollars in my pocket—that was it.

  The other male student in the group, Chris Croff, was at my side. He had a good heart but a scary appearance; he had been in a car accident and had a scar that ran at a slashing angle from his right temple across his left cheek. He liked the intimidating way it made him look—he had refused plastic surgery—and right then so did I; I wanted to keep his menacing mug as close as possible. While we were sizing up the situation, prostitutes kept traipsing by leading customers by the hand. “I can’t sleep here,” I told Chris and motioned for him to follow me back the way we came.

  We had first entered the worm motel through a larger room with a bamboo bar. The bar area was not being used and we found it deserted. “I’m sleeping here,” I said and rolled out my sleeping bag on the floor. When I lay down the trouble we were in hit me. What if the good professor never came back with our tickets and money? The suffocating atmosphere of the place pressed down with ever more weight on my chest. I started to have an anxiety meltdown, sweat beading up on my forehead. If I needed medical attention, where would I go in what was now the middle of the night in Lomé? I didn’t speak French, the language of the country. How would I communicate? I looked over at Chris, who ha
d laid out his sleeping bag as well, and said, “I think I’m in trouble here. I don’t know what I’m feeling, but it’s not good.”

  I looked around and noticed a global map behind the bar—the continents spread out from left to right, the tip of Siberia showing at the extreme far left and once again at the extreme far right. The map had a severe tear right through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas ruptured from Europe and Africa. Part of the tear flapped over the eastern seaboard of the United States. How was I ever going to get back there? I started weeping. I told Chris, “We are in trouble, man.”

  As we had tried to find a place to sleep, we had passed a voodoo fetish shop, where half-rotted dogs’ heads rested in a grocer’s bin like so many cabbages. In Togo death seemed to leer at you from every corner. Our professor had run off, we had no money, and we were sleeping in a prostitutes’ den. I was in total culture shock and more scared than I had ever been in my life. My friend Chris, whom I thought to be a believer, kept this mostly to himself. At that moment I was willing to try anything. “Listen, man,” I said to Chris, “we have to pray to get out of this.”

  I had never prayed in the way I did right then. I remember Deborah telling me, “If you ask the Lord into your life, you’ll have peace.” I cried out to God, “Father God, come into my life!” I started hearing Deborah’s words again: “If you repent of your sins, He will forgive you, but you have to repent of your sins and ask Him into your life.” “Yes, Lord,” I said, “I repent of my sins and I ask You to forgive me. I ask You into my heart and life and I am sorry, Lord, that I have sinned and been a sinner.” I prayed right out loud, and my friend with the scar on his face was looking at me as if I were the oddest thing he had seen in Togo. There I was, on my knees, with my sleeping bag around me, praying before a bamboo bar with a half-torn map of the world on the wall behind. Even as I prayed, prostitutes in sheer white gowns were greeting customers and leading them into the depths of the place. But as I cried out to God, I felt the Lord’s presence encircle me. Heaven was there, even in that place, and the glory of God fell on me, and then peace came over me, this unbelievable peace.

  I kept praying like that for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and afterward I turned to Chris and said, “I’m going to make it now. I’m okay.”

  What I didn’t know at the time was that on the other side of the divided world Deborah was praying for me right then in Washington, D.C. As we compared notes later, we found that she had been sitting on her couch in the basement of her parents’ home, watching a televangelist. He said, “Lift your hands and ask in the name of Jesus for what’s truly in your heart, believing with me that it will come to pass.” So she prayed, “Lord Father, I cry out for Chauncey, for Chauncey’s soul. I pray, Lord Father, that he gets born again in Africa.”

  The next day, two things happened. President Nixon resigned and our professor returned from his night of debauchery. He couldn’t be bothered with apologizing and simply loaded us into a Land Rover and began the drive north to where the Kabre tribe lived.

  Oppression: Spiritual and Physical

  The Kabre people lived in round huts with thatch roofs on a high plane or the savannah. They were animists, believing that all things are inhabited by spirits, some good, many evil. Certain areas in the surrounding country were marked off by goats’ and pigs’ heads to signal the presence of evil spirits, warning against entry.

  Despite my newfound faith, I took these beliefs as mere superstition, interesting only as artifacts of a primitive culture. I have now come to believe that I was entering a kingdom of darkness and was about to be slammed. I had at least some sense of this at the time, for I remember that odd things started happening to me, like falling into a pig sty and being covered with manure. I was freaked out that I would contract an infection.

  I don’t know if it was the pig sty or not, but I came down with amoebic dysentery. I begged my professor to be taken back to Lomé for treatment, but he kept saying my illness would pass. The other students and he were having too much fun partying and drinking. As for me, things were passing all right; in fact, everything I ate immediately exploded from my colon as if it were a fire hose, but the infection itself did not pass. I finally spotted a UN pickup that was returning to the city for a load of rice. I convinced the driver to give me a lift and strapped myself to the flatbed for the 250-mile ride.

  This time, having secured my plane ticket and some money from my professor, I was able to rent a battered room in a hotel whose concrete walls made the place feel like a bunker. I asked at the desk for four cases of Coca-Cola to keep myself hydrated and went to the room to sweat the disease out. I asked for a doctor, only to have a voodoo practitioner appear. He shook his beads at me and wanted me to wear a necklace of chicken bones, but I waved him off, again and again, until he finally left.

  After a period of delirium—which may have lasted as long as two weeks—I was joined by another sufferer. He and I kept each other some company, but we didn’t improve much. I prayed for God’s deliverance throughout this time, and I knew that my born-again experience was making a difference, even if I didn’t fully appreciate that my disease might be the devil’s way of coming against a new believer.

  I was finally able to secure some antibiotics from another student on his travels and recovered.

  I spent my last days in Togo ranging around the city, shopping in the local markets. One of the pieces that I bought was a round statuette with short arms that I thought Deborah might like.

  When I finally landed back at Dulles Airport—after a scare about our landing gear—Deborah was there to meet me in her white MG. She knew immediately that I had changed. The tension that had been between us due to my lack of faith was now gone. We took off in the MG with the top down. We were young and in love and together.

  Struggling Through School

  Over the next two years, I attended Virginia Commonwealth University while Deborah went to Virginia Tech. I majored in anthropology and premed and did well, maintaining a B+ average. The greater part of the wave of baby boomers was coming of age at that time and applications to medical school were at an all-time high. Even in those last two years of school, I still hadn’t gotten the message that I couldn’t work every odd job that came to hand, pursue an active social life that included torturous trips over the mountain in my underpowered VW van to see Deborah, and still ace my studies and my Medical College Admission Tests. Again, I performed well on the MCATs but didn’t achieve a score that would have trumped my B+ average. I did not get into medical school.

  With my limited prospects, Deborah and I didn’t marry upon graduation. We had not figured out how we could make a life together, and Deborah had a major health problem as well. Close to graduation, her appendix ruptured, spreading infection throughout her body. She almost died in the hospital. Her recovery was long and difficult and, as it would keep proving, incomplete. Obviously she didn’t feel much like being a bride.

  She began a job at the International Monetary Fund, where she retreated to the bathroom several times a day to inject herself with antibiotics.

  I worked at odd jobs while I took selected advanced science classes at Georgetown University and George Washington University. I felt that if I could ace these tough classes, improve my GPA, and do better on the admission tests, I’d be accepted to medical school. But when I applied again, I was refused once more.

  At that point Deborah and I had a talk. I asked her for one more year of preparation and a last shot at medical school. If I wasn’t admitted again, I’d give up my plans of becoming a doctor.

  By this time I understood that my checkered undergraduate record was a problem I’d have to find a way around. People sometimes caught a break who worked close to the medical profession. A position as a lab assistant opened up at George Washington University in the medical school’s anatomy department. It meant doing all the scum work—the nasty, dirty work—involved in running the gross anatomy lab, in which first-year medical students
dissect corpses.

  I met with the professor in charge, Richard Snell, an Englishman. He told me he had already hired someone. I told him that my family had an English lineage, implying we were countrymen under the skin, and that I would work 300 percent harder than anyone else he could possibly have hired. That I would do exactly as asked, never complain, and prove brighter than any of his first-year med students. He knew I was desperate, and he could see from my record that I wouldn’t be easily stopped; he hired me, dismissing the previous hire.

  I spent that summer cleaning up the gross anatomy lab, which meant bagging all the corpses from the previous year that had been sliced, diced, probed, amputated, filleted, and finally left as piles of rotting mush in lymphatic goo. Then the stainless-steel examining gurneys had to be washed down, disinfected, and made spotless. I spent weeks going about these tasks between bouts of vomiting and dry heaving. I would eventually become more comfortable in this environment, but the smell never left me. Still, I never complained and eventually gained a reputation as the best lab assistant George Washington had ever seen.

  When school began, I also took some graduate classes to further beef up my résumé.

  I raised a concern only when I was asked to collect five-gallon buckets of fetuses from the women’s hospital in D.C. I had to pour these out and label them. What I saw horrified me, as I thought some tragic mistake had been made and I had collected the remains of miscarriages, for many of the fetuses were nearly full-term—these were clearly babies. I went to Richard Snell and told him of the mistake. He followed me into the lab and explained, “No, this is perfectly normal. We get them all the time like this from the women’s hospital.” This was medicine? But I was too young and too intent on my ambitions to see that even great goods like modern medicine can be turned to evil ends. I felt it in my gut, though.