Bill Lychack – on the epiphany business.

New York City
July 27, 2000

Dear Joel,

And the Lord says, Go to Peoria.

Give away all you possess and go to Peoria.

He says, If you desire to do my will, if you truly want to be my servants, go to Peoria.

He says, I have a place for you there.

And so what do you do? I suppose – if the word really comes and comes clear enough – you don’t have much choice, you have to listen and do what God tells you. You have to divest yourself of every single thing you own, break the news to your friends, your family, mother-in-law, neighbors; turn off the gas and electric, stop the mail, quit your jobs, pull your kids out of school, pack up a van, leave everything and everyone you know and head off to Peoria. You drive all day and night and reach, at long last, the outskirts of town. You cross the town line and pull off by the side of the highway, the fields lying flat and covered with dirty snow. And you wait and pray, pray and wait.

I spent all morning on the phone with the man who did this, just gave away everything and led his family to Peoria and sat at the outskirts of town as the light faded, his wife and kids shivering in the cold, the trucks and cars rushing past. (God had only directed him as far as Peoria, which is why they waited for the next directive at the town line.) It all sounds crazy to him, too, he says, which makes me respect him. He knows that this is beyond reason. He knows that it’s a thing no one could understand, the fact that he and his wife both received word from God like this, that God would be so specific, and that they would actually do it, give away everything and follow this voice to Illinois.

The story was sent to Guideposts, a religious-minded monthly where my job is to rewrite these “true stories of hope and inspiration.” It’s not sold on newsstands, but the magazine has more than three million subscribers, and the somewhat slippery mathematics of “pass-alongs” raises our readership to twelve million or so. For more than fifty years, Guideposts has been rolling out its brand of good news to the world: first-person accounts, taken from actual events, that are testaments to faith of some sort. As the magazine’s mission statement says, our “articles present tested methods for developing courage, strength and positive attitudes through faith in God.”

Most of my days at work are filled with people who talk to God – help this, rescue these, give us that, thank you for those – though God’s corresponding silence becomes, usually, part Rorschach test, part sphinx-like oracle, part expression of what the narrator needs or fears or wants from his or her life and circumstance. What made the Peoria story so fascinating was that God not only spoke back to these people, but that he got back to them in such a specific, puckish way.

I love the image of them on the side of that highway, wondering what to do next. They’re all cold and hungry and scared and disheartened, and dispirited in the dark they drive to the first cheap motel they see. The five of them stay until they’re down to their last twelve dollars. Again, their prayers are answered and they find a church, and so on. It’s a crazy, miracle-laden story, which barely makes sense, really.

Yet talking to this man, he isn’t the unquestioning fanatic that I had imagined. In fact, by the middle of our conversation – which ranges from the grace of Tiger Woods to why pride is the last possession we release – I’m convinced that something extraordinary has happened to this man. I’m convinced that, in his own way, he heard the voice of God. And I’m convinced he made a cold-sweat leap of faith, that he had doubts, and that he has a deeper faith now because of this test. And whether you call it religious or not, no one goes through any kind of trial without having something spiritual happen to them.

My job is to make sure that the story becomes a Guideposts story, make sure that it conforms to the expectations of our readers: the story needs to have its all-walks-of-life beginning, its crisis or test of faith, its dark night of the soul, and its triumph of spirit, its turnaround. God’s goodness, whatever that means, must shine through somewhere, someway, somehow. My job is to make the true story fit into this unalterable template, and to shepherd the author through the process to the point where he or she signs off on it, attests that it’s real and true.

In other words, I set up the pay-off: everything works out; they find their home in Peoria; even better, they find their home wherever God wants them to be. A guy rescues manatees in Florida; the cropduster or beekeeper or fisherman survives some great accident or addiction or loss; someone finds an unopened letter from WWII and forwards it to the widow; a man goes to Peoria – the variations are endless for us line-workers at the epiphany plant. In the epiphany business, each epiphanic moment goes by the more durable, in-house name of “the takeaway.” Takeaways need to be short, sweet, and positive – variations of the “I trusted in God and that has made all the difference” theme. Amen.

I feel like a whistle-blower telling you this. These inner workings of the ghostwriter, the anonymous content provider, the humble commodifier of insight and faith: the sad truth is that I spend a couple of days on the Peoria story, then it’s gone and the next thing is on my desk, roughly one story per week. Next week is wedding lady. The week after is Iwo Jima guy. And I know we rarely do justice to the stories that deserve it, and do too much justice to others. Yet still, there are worse ways to make a living. I work three days a week, get full benefits, the hours are good, the work strangely interesting, the people in the office nice, and the product really does seem to help a great number of people, mostly elderly people (you should see the sacks of letters lined up by the elevators every day).

So what bothers me about all this? The fact is that I hear commandments as well – vague and small-voiced – everyone I know hears them. And what, really, is the difference between “Go to Peoria” and “Make the film”? Or “Write the book”? Or “Become a Sumo wrestler”? Or any of the countless passions that guide our days? These are all things my friends expend great amounts of energy working for and dreaming about. And they’re all acts of faith, in one way or another, all the urges that carry us through our lives and give us meaning and help us make sense of the accidents that befall us. Maybe I’m not so bothered when I think of it this way, when I think that we have to admit that the best in us is utterly mad, or started out utterly mad, a dim voice urging us on to our own kinds of Peoria.

As ever,

Bill