Revival

“‘God said, Let there be light, and there was light, and the light was good.’ Only I’m not God, so I have to depend on electricity. Which is wonderful stuff, Jamie. Such a gift from God that it makes us feel godlike every time we flip a switch, wouldn’t you say?”

King uses this passage to characterize Jacobs through his passion for electrical engineering. As a pastor, Jacobs is drawn to anything that brings him closer to God. In this case, harnessing electricity makes him feel godlike, which also hints at one of the major themes of the novel, The Dangers of Curiosity.

“That’s science, and science is fine, but it’s also finite. There always comes a point where knowledge runs out. What are electrons, exactly? Charged atoms, the scientists say. Okay, that’s fine as far as it goes, but what are atoms? […] No one really knows! And that’s where religion comes in. Electricity is one of God’s doorways to the infinite.”

Jacobs uses science to augment his ministry, arguing that there is a holistic way to understand the universe that marries science and faith. He points out that science is ultimately finite but allows people to find their way to God, developing the theme of The Dynamics of Science and Faith. This foreshadows Jacobs’s final experiment, where he uses electricity to open the door to the world beyond life; however, this “doorway to the infinite” does not reveal the benevolent deity Jacobs expects.

“‘So having that handy was just a lucky break?’ Claire asked. I couldn’t see why it mattered, but it seemed to. To her, at least.

Jacobs looked at her reproachfully and said, ‘Coincidence and lucky break are words people with little faith use to describe the will of God, Claire.’”

Claire is skeptical of Jacobs’s claims that he was testing his Electrical Nerve Stimulator for some time, clueing in the reader to the fact that Jacobs is always embellishing his claims. This passage therefore suggests that Jacobs is untrustworthy, which aligns with the fact that Conrad later suffers aftereffects even though Jacobs claims that his electrical cure was only a placebo.

“Years later—I was in high school and Claire was home on vacation from the University of Maine—I asked my sister why nobody had stopped him. We were out back, pushing the old tire swing. She didn’t have to ask who I meant; that Sunday sermon had left a scar on all of us.

‘Because he sounded so reasonable, I think. So normal. By the time people realized what he was actually saying, it was too late.’”

The novel makes use of time jumps to frame certain events like the Terrible Sermon and the Jacobs family deaths in retrospect. King uses this technique to amplify the importance of these events, showing how they continue to haunt witnesses many years later, which contributes to The Emotional Cost of Starting Anew.

“There’s no proof of these after-life destinations; no backbone of science; there is only the bald assurance, coupled with our powerful need to believe that it all makes sense. But as I stood in the back room of Peabody’s and looked down at the mangled remains of my boy, who wanted to go to Disneyland much more than he wanted to go to heaven, I had a revelation. Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”

The Terrible Sermon concludes with Jacobs’s assertion that organized religion is a scam that exploits the suffering of people to cheat them out of their money. This statement shocks the congregation of Harlow’s Methodist church but also hints at the motivation that will fuel Jacobs’s experiments in the years to come: He will discover the true nature of an afterlife, if it exists.

“Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain’t one.”

Jamie’s father, Dick, has a complex response to the Terrible Sermon. Repulsed by the content of Jacobs’s message, he at least concedes its fundamental premise: that people are drawn to reason in a reasonless world. This resonates with many of the terrible things that happen in Jamie’s life, including the sudden loss of Claire.

“‘I’ll never see you again.’

‘Never say that, Jamie. Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places.’”

When Jamie laments Jacobs’s departure, Jacobs reassures him that destiny will bring them back together again. Ironically, Jamie will come to regret his continued encounters with Jacobs, especially as Jacobs’s intentions for Jamie become clearer to him.

“Yes, but Conrad wasn’t convinced because Renault isn’t convincing. He’s able to treat the body, but the mind? Not so much. And the mind is where half the healing takes place. Maybe more. Con thought, ‘He’s lying now so I can get used to having no voice. Later on he’ll tell me the truth.’ That’s just the way your brother’s built, Jamie. He lives on his nerve endings, and when people do that, their minds can turn against them.”

In this passage, Jacobs implies that suffering is largely a psychological construct, asserting that people need to be convinced that their pain can be taken away. This insight informs his career as a revival minister later on, as he uses spectacle to draw people to his electrical cures.

“Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves—like Con manufactured his muteness—but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

This passage hints at Jacobs’s interiority, suggesting that his emotional pain stems from a lack of certainty over the fates of his wife and child. He wants sympathy and compassion, which is why he values Jamie, but he ultimately prizes his own fear and curiosity over the love that Jamie extends to him.

“When we look back, we think our lives form patterns; every event starts to look logical, as if something—or Someone—has mapped out all our steps (and missteps). Take the foul-mouthed retiree who unknowingly ordained the job I worked at for twenty-five years. Do you call that fate or just happenstance? I don’t know. How can I? I wasn’t even there on the night when Hector the Barber went looking for his old Silvertone guitar. Once upon a time, I would have said we choose our paths at random: this happened, then that, hence the other. Now I know better.

There are forces.”

Jamie reiterates some of the ideas from his opening narration, underlining the possibility that greater powers direct the shape of one’s life. Key to the ominous tone Jamie deploys here is the reference to plural “forces.” The Great Ones are ultimately revealed to be unfathomable to the human imagination, and this passage prepares the reader for their arrival at the end of the novel.

“But talent is a spooky thing, and has a way of announcing itself quietly but firmly when the right time comes. Like certain addictive drugs, it comes as a friend long before you realize it’s a tyrant.”

This passage foreshadows the complex relationship Jamie has to his drug addiction as an adult. He acknowledges that heroin had power over him during his addiction, which made it difficult to recover. On the other hand, it also helped him to cope with the pain of things he found difficult to bear, like Claire’s death. This makes heroin seem like a friend to him.

“Electricity! Although we take it for granted, it’s the greatest natural wonder of our world! The Great Pyramid of Giza is only an anthill in comparison! It’s the foundation of our modern civilization! Some claim to understand it, ladies and gentlemen, but none understand the secret electricity, that power which binds the very universe into one harmonic whole. Do I understand it? No, I do not. Not fully. Yet I know its power to destroy, to heal, and to create magical beauty!”

The pitch Jacobs uses for his Portraits in Lightning show bears some tonal similarities to his ministry in Chapter 2. He sensationalizes the power of electricity, leveraging his audience’s willingness to believe in powers they don’t understand. This allows King to draw comparisons between religion and entertainment.

“I shook my head, smiling. ‘You went from preaching to huckstering.’

[…]

‘No difference,’ he said. ‘They’re both just a matter of convincing the rubes. Now please excuse me while I go and sell some lightning.’”

Jamie observes that Jacobs has turned himself into a professional scammer. Jacobs takes no offense, reaffirming his conclusions in the Terrible Sermon. He “sells” lightning the way he used to “sell” religion, convincing his audiences that both respond to their innermost needs.

“‘Music matters,’ he told me once. ‘Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty years from now.’”

This passage resonates with the theme of reinvention. Hugh Yates tells Jamie that some genres of music never go out of style, even if they are objectively terrible. Similarly, some aspects of Jamie’s earlier life, like Jacobs, will never fully go away. He will always find himself reckoning with the consequences of the past one way or another.

“I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think healing was the goal. Running a revival biz was undoubtedly a cynical jape at the religion he had rejected as well as a way to turn a great many fast bucks via ‘love offerings,’ but Jacobs hadn’t healed me for money; that had been a plain old Christian hand up from a guy who had been able to reject the label but not the two basic tenets of Jesus’s ministry: charity and mercy.”

Jamie begins to guess at Jacobs’s true intentions for helping others. Notably, he rules out the possibility that Jacobs could be scamming him as well. It speaks volumes about Jamie’s trust in Jacobs that he is not skeptical about the way his old minister treats him, especially as Jamie’s trust proves misplaced: It is later revealed that Jacobs values Jamie as a conduit for secret electricity.

“Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism. He was feeding them shit and they were loving it. I had the dismaying idea that he was loving it, too, and that was worse. This was not the man I’d known in Harlow, or the one who had taken me in that night in Tulsa. Although when I thought of how he had treated Cathy Morse’s bewildered and brokenhearted farmer father, I had to admit this man had been on the way even then.

I don’t know if he hates these people, I thought, but he holds them in contempt.

Or maybe not. Maybe he just didn’t care. Except for what was in the collection basket at the end of the show, that was.”

Jamie thinks about the success of Jacobs’s revival tent scam, which exploits the suffering of people who could easily learn the truth about Jacobs. He concludes that this reflects poorly on Jacobs, who looks down upon his congregation as people willing to believe the lie he sells them.

“They don’t deserve the truth. You called them rubes, and how right you are. They have set aside what brains they have—and many of them have quite a lot—and put their faith in that gigantic and fraudulent insurance company called religion. It promises them an eternity of joy in the next life if they live according to the rules in this one, and many of them try, but even that’s not enough. When the pain comes, they want miracles. To them I’m nothing but a witch doctor who touches them with magic rings instead of shaking a bone rattle over them.”

Jacobs confirms Jamie’s theory that he holds contempt for his congregation. That contempt stems from a deep understanding of their psychology—namely, their desire to escape suffering even as they believe that they will find joy in the afterlife. Jacobs reiterates the critique of religion he offered in the Terrible Sermon, though this passage finds him embracing it to a misanthropic degree.

“Secret electricity aside, I can’t work for a man who’s taking revenge on broken people because he can’t take revenge on God for killing his wife and son.”

Jamie criticizes Jacobs’s pettiness, suggesting that the real force that motivates his old minister is spite rather than fidelity to a greater truth. This passage recontextualizes Jacobs’s motivations for delivering the Terrible Sermon, suggesting that it was an act of revenge against God rather than an act to awaken people against the fraud of organized religion.

“She was just a year old, but she had wanted me to stay longer. That’s how you know you’re home, I think, no matter how far you’ve gone from it or how long you’ve been in some other place.

Home is where they want you to stay longer.”

Jamie reflects on the challenge of starting life anew when he returns home to celebrate his brother Terry and Terry’s granddaughter, Cara Lynne. Having distanced himself from his hometown, he realizes how much he is wanted and valued there for his own sake rather than for his usefulness or his productive values. This contrasts Harlow against Wolfjaw and Jacobs’s Goat Mountain laboratory, where Jamie also takes up residence at various points.

“‘I also remember the man you were—how you got right down on your knees with me and joined in the game. I remember your smile. When you smile now, all I see is a sneer. When you talk now, all I hear is orders: do this, do that, and I’ll tell you why later. What became of you, Charlie?’

He struggled up from the sofa, and when I moved to help, he waved me away. ‘If you have to ask that, a smart boy grew up to be a stupid man. At least when I lost my wife and son, I didn’t turn to drugs.’

‘You had your secret electricity. That was your drug.’”

Jamie traces the character development of Jacobs, showing how he has turned into a spiteful, condescending old man. Important to this characterization is the fact that Jacobs has retained his faith (likened to an addiction) in a greater power. Instead of serving the Christian god, however, Jacobs serves the secret electricity, the means to his ultimate end.

“At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom. Did he want to know what lay beyond death’s door? Yes. But what he wanted more—I believe this with all my heart—was to violate that mystery. To drag it into the light and hold it up, screaming Here it is! What all your crusades and murder in the name of God were for! Here it is, and how do you like it?”

Jamie realizes that apart from Jacobs’s stated intention of proving the existence of the afterlife, Jacobs wants to vindicate his critique of organized religion by proving that its interpretations of the afterlife are all incorrect. This emphasizes Jacobs’s pettiness as a character, as he demonizes organized religion in response to his grief.

“Jacobs stared at her with bulging eyes. His face had gone a cheesy yellow-white. ‘Patricia? Patsy? Where are you? Where’s Morrie?’

The thing spoke for the first and last time.

‘Gone to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest.’

‘No.’ His chest hitched and he screamed it. ‘No!’”

This passage spells out the dangers of curiosity. Jacobs finally learns what became of Patsy and Morrie after they died, but the truth turns out to be more terrible than anything he ever bargained for. This begs the question of whether Jacobs was better off not knowing where his family had gone.

“‘You should have stopped, Charlie,’ I said. ‘You should have stopped a long time ago.’

But could he have done that? It would be easy to say yes, because that would allow me to lay blame. Only I’d have to blame myself as well, because I hadn’t stopped, either. Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it’s human.

So human.”

Jamie concedes that nothing could have stopped Jacobs from pursuing his final experiment because he was driven by curiosity. If he had chosen to give up his research, Jacobs would have spent the rest of his life in dissatisfaction. In this way, Jamie extends sympathy and understanding to Jacobs, proving that his love for the old minister was real.