CHARISMA
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Joe Butler mysteriously disappears from a party celebrating his high school graduation. His worried parents eventually discover him preaching with a fringe religious sect, and he’s rumored to have effected a bona fide miracle. Unconvinced, the boy’s mother, Maggie, takes steps to restore her son to his former self, a mission with which her husband, Roger, initially concurs. They call in Peter Mills, a self-styled deprogrammer, to kidnap and counterbrainwash the young pilgrim, a draconian process that succeeds only in driving Joe to attempt suicide. Then Dr. Katz and her team of psychiatrists are summoned to practice their healing arts, which include chemical and electroshock therapies. But by this time Roger, observing his son’s physical and spiritual agony, has begun to wonder whether the cure might not be worse than the disease–or actually be the disease.
Indeed, the zeal with which Mills pursues his mission to “make my piece of the world right again” comes far closer to fanaticism that the noncoercive methods of the Reverend Hatmore, and the stupors and convulsions Dr. Katz induces bear an astonishing resemblance to the trances and chorea they’re meant to combat. But unlike Mills and Katz, who owe their livelihood to the promulgation of their beliefs–and unlike Maggie, who owes her self-image to them–Roger is free to consider all the possibilities. He even applies canonical tests to the miracle his son allegedly performed (and it passes on all counts). Inevitably, however, he’s led back to the argument that if, as his own Roman Catholic faith claims, the ways of God are beyond our comprehension, then how can he declare with certainty that the path his son travels is false?
