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Show (f<f children, who had grown up without a father, or of children like me and certain others whoso father had been as omnipresent and yet as unredemptive as a bad conscience? The solutions to all these, I reasoned desperately, clutching my coffee cup as though it was a rope strung over a precipice, had to be within the individual. No leader could be trusted absolutely- No human being could be the oracle of another's spiritual destiny- One must 'Trust not in the arm of flesh,' as Mormon doctrine adjured. One must 'worship in spirit and in truth,' as Christ had recommended. And one must watch carefully, for 'by their fruits you shall know them. ' But being without a leader meant being without a group - being alone, beyond the comfort and reassurance of others who think and feel as you do. Thinking this, my own loneliness washed over me, and with it, enormous terror. The only group I had ever really belonged to was my family. And now, the strong body of members and its leader was threatened by a madman. The weaker fraction, my brothers - Saul, Jake and Danny - were threatened by a different, more personal sort of madness, born of li - rebellion. I longed to trust in someone, longed to belong again. But I had been deluded before, and perhaps could be deluded again. Perhaps even now, I was caught in someone's web of Psychological manipulation, or lost in my own forests of fear, susceptible to the wolves which waited there. Suddenly I felt as though I had been baptized in the snowbank outside the window. Someone always led - if not clearly, then surreptitiously, if not by one who entered by the door, then by one who climbed over the wall. People did |