The Birth of a new moon

Ana did not think she was imagining the faint mocking tone in Steven's voice, nor the tiny quirk in one corner of his mouth. He would allow her to teach children because the school needed her, but unless she did something right now, he would forever see her as yet another middle-aged butterfly flitting from one spiritual flower to the next. She had to be taken seriously, yet without stepping outside her persona. She stared into the depths of the empty mug on her knee as if it would give her the words she so desperately needed to convince him.

'All my life,' she began, 'I have been, as you called me the other morning, a seeker. I've lived in half a dozen communities, followed the yoga sutras and done zazen, learned a little Chinese and a little more Sanskrit, and sat at the feet of any number of men and women who I thought could teach me something. I have never stayed with one discipline because none of them seemed to me complete: I found them either all ritual or all philosophy, negating the body or discounting the mind, either bogged down in their own tradition or else rootless and shallow, and none of them succeeded in integrating everyday life with the search for enlightenment, or Oneness, or revelation.

'Here, I get the feeling that you are trying to do just that. There's the day-to-day, gritty reality of raising kids and growing food, but not at the expense of nurturing the flame of spirit. Change is a flourishing plant with strong roots deep in the earth. I would like to be a part of that.'

Ana did not look up from her cup. She had thrown out a number of hooks here, from her linguistic background to the use of loaded words like 'ritual' and 'integration' to just plain flattery, and she held her breath to see what he would respond to.

'In what way do you see us—how did you put it? 'Nurturing the flame of spirit'?' he asked.

A wave of relief swept through her—she was right, fire was central to the belief system of Change. Perhaps on his trip to India Steven had picked up the Zoroastrian dualism of light and dark, good and—but there was no time for that now. She had to keep the tenuous upper hand, and impress Steven with the potentialities of his new convert. Keep it general; keep it provocative. Ana raised her eyes to look, not at Steven, but at the fireplace.

'The Hindu god of fire is Agni, depicted as a quick and brilliant figure with golden hair. He is young and old, eternal and ephemeral, friendly as a domestic fire and ferocious as the flames of sacrifice. The human spirit is the same—you can see it in those kids. Easily quenched but waiting to be rekindled, flaming out of control but wanting to be brought in to the hearth.'

She could spout this noble bullshit for hours; it was one reason why Anne Waverly was such a popular teacher. That she had not actually answered his question was beside the point, to Steven most of all. His face had gone rapt.

'Have you ever walked through flames, Ana?'

'Do you mean actual flames, as in Nebuchadnezzar casting the three young men into the fiery furnace?'

'Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. 'The hair of their heads was not singed, their mantles were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them.' '

'Well, no.'

'I have, Ana. I went in bare feet across a stretch of burning coals, and I was not harmed. On the contrary, I came out a new man.'

Firewalking, Ana thought—found in cultures as diverse as Polynesia and Greece, and closer to home as well among the New Age.

'I saw it once in the desert outside San Diego,' she told him with enthusiasm. 'It was unbelievable.'

'Believe, Ana.'

'Oh, I do believe. Maybe not enough to commit the soles of my feet to it.' She laughed in deprecation of her cowardice; he looked at her with pity.

'Perhaps you will,' Steven said portentously. 'Perhaps you will.'

' 'The fire will test what sort of work each one has done,' ' she returned, venturing into the New Testament to follow his line from Daniel.

' 'When you walk through fire you will not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.' '

Isaiah, she thought. Then before he could launch off on the burning bush, Elijah's chariot, or the fiery Day of the Lord, she asked, injecting her voice with earnest solemnity, 'That's what you're saying happened with the kids here, isn't it? That they have been through hell already, and some of them were merely hardened.'

' 'Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction,' ' he quoted, adding, 'Like your young friend Jason has been tried.'

Ana kicked herself mentally for assuming that anything she might do would be overlooked by Steven's eyes and ears. She hoped to God that she wasn't blushing.

'He's a fine young man.'

'I agree,' said Steven in his all-knowing voice. 'I have great hopes for that boy.'

Chapter Fifteen

Men and women seeking a time of reflection and spiritual renewal have always sought out the empty places. From time immemorial, God has spoken in the desert or in the mountains, away from the hustle of everyday life. Contemplative religious communities have established themselves outside of the towns, in places where the living is harsh, because the simplicity pares things down to the essentials.

There is a tendency to think of all such communities as slightly odd, if not dangerously antisocial, to see their choice of environment as a flight from rather than a seeking out. And it is certainly true, many of the souls who choose to live out in the desert are damaged, even unbalanced.

However, we must guard against our assumptions. A close analysis of the Branch Davidian community in Waco in the period before the FBI and BATF entered the scene reveals it not as a tightly self-isolated group of fanatic believers, but as an independent community with regular interactions with the neighboring individuals and communities. Branch Davidians came and went, held jobs in the area, formed friendships with outsiders. With the raid and the long standoff that followed, a community with roots and branches in the outside world was abruptly truncated, stripped down to an edgy leader and his isolated followers.

The Branch Davidians might eventually have withdrawn from the world on their own decision, but as it was, before that time came they found themselves walled up away from it. They were kept from communication with anyone but the FBI, they were not allowed to come and go, they were forced into an irrevocable choice between staying and leaving, forever abandoning their home and family inside what was now a compound.

Self-chosen isolation may be a positive thing; being cut off from all contact with the outer world is not, and must in a 'cult' situation be avoided at all costs,

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

In the days that followed, the sun grew marginally warmer, the nights fractionally shorter, and the community considerably more welcoming; slowly, Ana grew to have a deeper understanding of Change and how it functioned.

It did not take her long to verify that Change was indeed built around secret teachings, that initiates worked their way into the higher levels, moving by steps upward into greater knowledge and proximity to Steven. This was represented not only by the necklaces that certain initiates wore and the position each had in the multi-leveled meditation hall, but it extended to living quarters as well—the room Ana had been given was in a building populated almost entirely by newcomers. The only person in the building who had lived at Change for more than a few months was a young man with a vile temper, who had been demoted by Steven after getting angry at another member and hitting him. The young man stormed around furiously for a couple of weeks before he finally left, to the unvoiced relief of all.

Steven himself lived in the central building over the meditation hall, in the northern quadrant of the upper floor. The other upstairs rooms were all filled with the oldest, closest Change members. Most were men. The building to the northeast of the center was the communal dining hall with the kitchen and several offices, including Steven's, and upstairs the quarters for the youngest children. Walking around the circle counterclockwise, the next building housed older members on the ground floor and older kids above, then came a building filled with earnest but inexperienced members, and finally the recently completed building where Ana was housed.

It was a bit worrying: Ana had no intention of staying out her promised year, but in a hierarchical organization where secret doctrine is given out in slow degrees, it would not be easy to speed her trip to the inner