Virginia stopped humming, leaned into her sofa and grinned. Like many young teens in 1990, she had bopped ‘til she dropped to the bouncing, energetic music of the Apostle’s first hit, Baby You Will. Recently released as a dance mix by Rosario, a female soloist under Passion Sound’s label, the song was once again topping the charts. Virginia laughed out loud, remembering the abject horror that had possessed her father when he first heard the lyrics.
He had grabbed her arm, she could almost feel his bony, callused fingers, and propelled her to the round kitchen table for another one of his “talks” about the evil of Satan’s music and the dangers of that great unmentionable mystery, sex.
She heard her father’s unmistakable voice, blackened by tobacco, and the laugh caught in her throat. “Poor ol’ fool,” she whispered, eyes bright with tears. She blinked and hoarsely began humming again.
With the pop tune jangling in her ear, she riffled through her research papers, unable to believe that the Passion Ministry was celebrating its eighteenth year. As only a fraction of John’s pupils lived in his 150-acre Washington State sanctuary on the Olympic Peninsula, assessing the size of his flock was difficult.
Virginia Darrow, along with the rest of the world, knew the genesis to John’s spectacular singing career. Like one of those beloved Hollywood-star-discovered in-the-drugstore myths, John’s rise in the music industry was legendary. True to her terrier-like reporting skills, Virginia had spent days researching and chatting with anyone with the slightest connection to John the Apostle. She hadn’t gleaned too much, considering.
Though he had a catchy voice and a wide vocal range, John Jacobs’s early group efforts had always failed, ending in acrimony, often in debt, and occasionally with the smashing of instruments, early Who style. No one could tolerate his Olympian temper, artistic license be damned. What most people didn’t know was that John managed to sing his way to an undergraduate science degree with a specialization in genetics. It was at his graduation, when he was seriously considering chucking the vocal career and accepting a plum lab position at an Ivy League school, that it had happened.
The stigmata.
Within days of receiving the wounds of Christ, John Jacobs had been christened John the Apostle and signed to a multi-album recording career. Talk about a headline act. The star power of it made her groan with envy. On his first CD, Last Night, everyone made money hands over wounded wrists.
Then John, a lapsed Catholic, went religious. Amid much controversy, he broke his contract, founded the Passion Ministry and started his own recording company, dedicated to producing inspirational music for both soul and psyche. The business and music industries mocked the man they derisively called Johnny Passion, predicting failure for the holy music freak.
Though mocked by much of the world, John the Apostle flourished, initially spending time in Washington State—meditating, running his formidable charitable enterprises, carefully acquiring a new flock of rising stars through his company, Passion Sound—and globe-trotting, saving the world in jam-packed concert after concert.
One Billboard critic called the Apostle a terrific talent, saying his songs poignantly touched the essence of the everyday human condition and expressed life’s complexities in a way no other artist had, filling the void for a powerful male voice in the contemporary Christian community.
Emphasizing the graces of humility, peace and patience, Passion Sound soon became one of the world’s top praise and worship labels, winning Grammies, awards like Top Gospel Album, Adult Top 40, Golden Note, and achieving multiple gold and platinum albums.
In the last few years, he’d stopped touring altogether and retreated from the media maw, slipping into a reclusive life. No matter how hard she dug or how many people she interviewed, Virginia found no dirt. Millions around the world bought and listened to his songs, believed his old-fashioned messages and traditional values of honor, honesty, charity and love, and waited for spiritual rejuvenation at the Christmas concert and Easter celebrations, his only public appearances of the year.
With a sigh, Virginia pensively ran a finger around the cold neck of an iced tea bottle. She had uncovered only three disturbing items. The first was that some lunatic fringe in the pro-life camp was taking some of the Apostle’s lyrics as a call to arms to justify conducting a wave of terrorist activities. Although most people didn’t really believe the singer condoned the violent actions, there were doubts.
The second was more personal: a rumor that John received the stigmata less frequently every year. The big question was whether his followers, fans and critics would again witness the marks that always provoked wonder, fear and skepticism.
And the third interested her the most. It was a tale of obsessive parenting. John the Apostle had a son. A ten-year-old, never publicly photographed, who rarely left the Passion Ministry’s compound. She craved to know why.
