Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 30, 1993 TAG: 9305270132
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It might surprise you to know that I'm in regular communication with God, and those who know him well.
No, I'm not talking about any local pastor, priest or rabbi. God doesn't live here.
He's in Maple Heights, Ohio.
His letters begin, "As Almighty GOD, I greet you," though he signs them as "Eugene Changey."
Eugene/Jesus, as he calls himself, writes periodically to remind my editors that he's still around and that he delights in verbal parry-and-thrust with those who doubt the in-dwelling of God's spirit in his body.
Often, Changey sends along a copy of a letter he's received from some newspaper person and his -- usually vitriolic -- reply to it.
An Orlando reporter advised Changey to "lighten up" and "hit the beach with his wife and kids."
Changey replied, ". . . You are a hell-bound gore! . . . I'll let you play and try your demented humor on LUCIFER . . . I assure you he will howl with glee to accept your putrid soul to purgatory!"
He uses lots of other words we can't publish in a family newspaper.
Editorial-page editors who dared to write Changey to explain that they don't publish copied or form letters also drew his wrath.
He would cut them off from his mailing list, he said, saving postage money that he has to pay out of his "meager allotment from Social Security and a small pension check which total $728.43 per month."
Just goes to show you it doesn't pay to play God.
Changey couldn't resist explaining who he is, however, in a last letter to those papers (and to us).
The letters are "PERSONALLY dictated [by God] through My Son," he wrote. "Some ignorant clods believe their asinine assertion that My humble Son, Eugene/Jesus (they are ONE and the SAME SPIRIT -- Reincarnated) wrote those Letters on His own. These clods are ignorant Hell-bound gores. I do NOT have to Answer to ANY puny mortal for MY JUDGMENT upon erring humanity!"
If Changey's life as he described it in a letter a decade ago is to be believed -- and it seems too convincing to be denied -- here's how he got started.
Born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1920, he says he "had a normal childhood" -- though his father died when he was "very young" and he dropped out of school at age 16 to support his family.
Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor he began hearing voices, "sparse and incomplete." He had a mental breakdown, was confined to a mental institution for six months and came to believe he was "two persons. I could not comprehend that it was GOD'S Holy Spirit in my body, taking form."
By 1948 he was confined again, this time for three months. He read his Bible "religiously," and became convinced that "my FATHER wanted to communicate with the world through me. We began sending Letters and Books to Editors and Publishers over the world after 1958."
He's remained a bachelor, he says, and is now disappointed by the "shabby" treatment he's received from the press.
Changey's letters, with their impeccable spelling and correct, if archaic, grammar, are too intriguing to be ignored. Even while pitying the delusions that are so obvious to the rest of us, Changey serves as a reminder of how skeptically any kind of "different" religious expression is received.
Unlike some other pretenders, Changey is a harmless guy simply trying to be recognized as Christ. Others have a more vicious message for society.
John-Wayne Johnson is a fax-master, preferring to spend his money on telephone toll charges from Southern California rather than stamps.
"Many people have wondered what Hell is but, simply put, it's where unbelievable stupidity prevails, i.e., America," his most recent fax begins.
Johnson lacks the coherence -- and the claim of direct incarnation -- of Changey, but he's just as provocative.
Apparently the nation's biggest problem lies in the fact that "the white man [whom he contrasts specifically to American Indian] was bathed in femininity." Women, he believes, "represent Satan."
Clergy have failed to enforce the biblical admonition to "let your women keep silence in churches" to the peril of the nation, he writes. Those who don't do what Johnson says "will be maggots one billion years when Reincarnated" after the final judgment.
Biblical prohibitions against women wearing men's apparel or men wearing women's clothes "must be absolutely adhered to and, effective October 1, females will not be allowed to operate any air, land or water, motor driven vehicle except the Wayne Whizzer motorized bicycle."
If it were not for the persistence of his message, I wouldn't even be sure this guy is serious. But he is. And I doubt that he's alone.
It could be argued that writing about these men is tantamount to endorsing their messages, or at least complicity in their distribution. I hope that is not true.
I thought you ought to know that people like this are in our midst, however.
Some are to be pitied. Some are to be denied. Some are not to be believed.
Cody Lowe reports on issues of religion and ethics for this newspaper.
by CNB