At the Vatican, the pope was sound asleep, having four hours earlier mumbled the simple benediction he had learned as a child. In New York City, the anchors at the major networks were preparing to sign off after reading the news of the most ingenious and entertaining samples of human depravity that had appeared in the last twenty-four hours. In Las Vegas, thousands of American parents were busy initiating their offspring into the deepest mysteries of the nation’s folklore. At a race track in Southern California, eight sleek thoroughbreds were pounding the turf and coming down the home stretch as the spectators either clutched their tickets in anxiously sweating hands or, resigned to their temporary fate, began to destroy those tokens of hope. 

​And in the Kansas metropolis of Kirkland, not its real name, two men were preparing for a meeting that would launch a chain of events that was destined to have profound consequences both for America and for the largest and most powerful ecclesiastical organization in all Christendom. 

The first thing you noticed about Abe Hamm, besides the fact that he’d show up in church sporting a bright orange tie under his striped bib overalls and hadn’t gotten around to shaving that morning, was that he was a lover of life. It’s not that he wasn’t religious; it’s just that he could hardly wait to get up in the morning and spread some joy around the place. This would sometimes get him in Dutch with Tante Anna, who could easily be embarrassed, being a Reisender born and bred. He’d say something a little bit out of the orthodox, like, “If Jesus was around, I bet you anything he’d be the life of the party.” 

She’d tut-tut and sigh and shake her head and say, “Abe, Abe.”

​He’d grin like a little kid out from under that ring of electric reddish-grey hair and repeat, “Yessir, the life of the party.”