The hero of Nabokov's first novel, Mary, spends about 80 pages in a lovingly observed romantic entanglement with a girl, Mary, Mary, who ends their relationship and disappears. The hero spends another 80 pages pining for her, or, actually, pining for an increasingly idealized version of her. He discovers that she's going to marry some other man and works up to arranging and keenly anticipating a reunion on the final 2 pages, at which point (spoiler alert) in an unlikely burst of good sense, he has a change of heart. He chooses to leave his expectations intact.

This is better for him, because his illusions are more valuable than this girl. This is better for her, because she doesn't have to deal with this complete jackass. So the hero of Nabokov's first novel, at the moment of expected climax, suddenly takes a bus elsewhere.

This mysterious church is the Capstone Cathedral.

This is what makes it more than a local curiosity: it was designed by God. And God chose its location, which is an excellent site at the corner of Tatum and Shea in a relatively affulent part of the city, close to Paradise Valley.

Its vast parking lot is empty most of the time, there is no identifying sign out front, and its shape triggers all kinds of speculation (not only in my mind) about whether a good four-wheel drive vehicle like a Jeep or a light car like a Datsun 310 would stand a better chance of making it up to the green lantern. A Vespa might be best.

I had been wondering if it's out of business but on a recent Sunday, even though the vast parking lot was empty at 9:30, there were four dozen cars at noon. Churches rarely go out of business. The cost of producing each additional unit of hope is small. When it was built in 1971 it was way out of town, a conspicuous million-dollar Jewel of the Desert and the largest church in the valley. It's a curiously good-looking building with a nice swoop. It's introverted, like a good temple should be. Its proportions and profile and roofline suggest a sense of humor and familiarity with extravagant car-oriented California architecture. It is meant to be seen from 40 MPH. And that green-glass pyramid is itself 31 feet tall, 40 feet on each side.

Turns out the Capstone Cathedral is the built legacy of a splinter Pentecostal evangelist preacher named Neal Vincent Frisby, born in 1933 in Strong Arkansas, a veteran of barber college and the California state mental health system, who had been doing well in the Phoenix of the late 1960s in the line of healing the sick and feeding the poor and issuing prophecy. His organization was called "Miracle Life Revival Incorporated". Phoenician insomniacs of a certain age might remember the Capstone Cathedral from low-budget late-night television commercials in 1970s and 1980s Phoenix, commercials with a series of still photographs with a testimonial voiceover. This church was built at the height of Frisby's evangelical career.

Frisby has been described as one of the most secretive and bizarre of popular evangelists, and in a class with figures like Dr. euGene Scott and the Reverend Dr. Frederick Eikerenkoetter, Th.B., D. Sc.L., Ph.D, and Billy James "Honeymoon" Hargis, rising up on the magnetic strength of their personalities, that's a real accomplishment. At one point Frisby claimed to be the Rainbow Angel from the book of Revelation, Chapter 10. The Capstone Cathedral appears to mark the apex of Frisby's career; it was built as a church, headquarters, healing center, television studio and publishing house for Frisby's collected visions and prophetic writings.

If you're really interested, Frisby gets a thorough examination from Randall Herbert Balmer in a book called "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Through the Evangelical Subculture in America". A quote from Balmer about the building:

The Capstone Cathedral (also known as the Temple of Destiny, the Headstone, or the Great Pyramid), it turns out, is fraught with apocalyptic significance. Its construction in the early 1970s prefigures the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Frisby claims that God designed it, and that the dimensions were revealed to Frisby (who then apparently relayed them to Ray Parrish, an architect in Scottsdale). "He even told me where to build it," Frisby claims. The seven concrete layers that recede upward towards the cap represent the seven ages of the church or the seven thunders of Revelation 10…. For an understanding of the top pyramid of green and red glass, the capstone, Frisby asks his followers to look at a one-dollar bill. "On the back side of a dollar and at the left corner is the sign of the PYRAMID and at the top we see the 'Capstone' separated forming a 'Capstone Eye' with glory around it, revealing the 'all seeing eye' of God was rejected!"

Check that out: the Capstone Cathedral was designed by God. God fits the profile: a familiarity with California car-oriented Googie, and a sense of humor. And those exterior layers are concrete so a young thin person on a Vespa likely could make it to the top, although I don't recommend it.

As of Balmer's writing in 1987, Frisby had peaked. As a prophet he'd been predicting the world, throwing around scary words like the Tribulation, the Rapture, the End Times, for various dates like "early or late 70's" and "1977-83 or sooner" and "I definitely feel it will all be finished by 1986". As these dates came and went, Frisby offered less precision, and his congregation eventually wised up, stopped coming around, stopped buying stuff.

Frisby went into decline in the 1980s, retired from public life in 1990, died in May 2005 and, according to the Arizona Republic, willed this church to Robert Brooks, former wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers.

Based on the exterior appearance I had hoped or anticipated that the white part of the roof was translucent, but was certain that the bright hot sunlight would stream into the church from that green lantern and suffuse the place with a wonderful green light, like a rain forest. Otherwise you wouldn't be getting any natural light inside this huge building at all, and that would be silly.

The green capstone, I imagined, would be the dominant design element from the interior seats, visible from everywhere inside the clear-span space, functioning as a kind of celestial beacon, and framed and lit to emphasize the contrast. The sanctuary would be as deep as the building is tall, four broad shallow aisles aligned with the edges of the roof, leading down to four banks of seats facing an elevated speaking platform in the middle of the space, directly under the green capstone-pyramid. Perhaps a green triangular baptismal font. The interior corridors would make broad sweeps, wide enough for the ushers to deliver the parishoners to their seats in a 1968 Bonneville convertible. White. With red leather seats. No, green.

Balmer's book says some of Frisby's largely-African-American congregation would drive to Phoenix from Los Angeles every week to attend this church.

Based on that level of devotion, I hope or imagine or anticipate those who came up for healing were truly healed, that Frisby's prophecies contained wisdom and insight even if he repeatedly got the date of the End of the World wrong, and that all the money and attention and strong faith lavished on Neal Frisby, all that trust placed in his hands, was channeled to Godly purpose. It is better to avoid cynicism. Let's leave those expectations intact.