And although it doesn’t match up with my current situation in New York, I have in the past experienced the kind of spiritual community and connection Guengerich spoke about. In college I was fortunate to have close friends, but I always felt like something was missing, that endless conversations about Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and Twin Peaks reruns were stimulating and fun, but that some essential part of myself wasn’t getting the sustenance it needed. During my early twenties, while my friends were starting indie bands and taking summer internships at Sony records, I went off for weeks and sometimes months at a time into the Colorado wilderness, where I experimented with meditation, read Siddhartha, Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung, the Tao Te Ching, Leaves of Grass. In my mid-twenties, I turned back to skateboarding, making pilgrimages to empty swimming pools and Burnside skatepark with a clearly religious devotion.
From age nineteen to twenty-nine, I had a tumultuous, on-again off-again relationship with a woman named Nicole. Lying in bed one night the summer before our final breakup, she stated nonchalantly that she didn’t believe in God. No big shock there—I certainly didn’t believe in the kind of God that many Christians do: a gray-bearded curmudgeon imposing judgment on some and doling out favors to others. That all seemed like a fairy tale, and yet I wasn’t ready to say with ultimate finality that I didn’t believe. I’d spent too much time reading Joseph Campbell, who quoted Meister Eckhart: “The ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions.” I wasn’t ready to give up on Albert Einstein’s concept of a universal, mysterious God, or Martin Luther King’s kind hearted, forgiving God, or on the prayers of the famous religious ecologist, Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” Maybe I was a little like Melville, who, according to Hawthorne, could “neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”
After the final dissolution of my ten-year relationship with Nicole—which had serious flaws other than the religious kind—I went through a terribly difficult emotional period. I originally thought I’d spend my carefree bachelor days doing nothing but skateboarding and dating women, savoring the last scraps of my late-twenties marrow. I could never have predicted that I would instead find myself sitting in church, meditating and praying for release from a crippling pattern of attachment that had caused me and Nicole so many years of pain and soul sickness. This was all definitely a little strange considering that one of my all-time-favorite bands is Black Sabbath, or that I’d learned most of what I knew about the Exodus story not from Sunday school, but from the old Metallica song “Creeping Death.” But unlike a couple of my former skateboarding friends who’d gone the “born-again” route and joined conservative evangelical congregations, I attended a Unity church, the same progressive denomination that my prochoice mother and recovering-Catholic stepfather had been active in for years. And yet, despite Unity’s progressive politics, I kept my church-going mostly a secret, worrying that my friends would think I’d converted to the dark side. Mention to a crowd of twenty somethings, skateboarders, graduate school intellectuals, and writers that you’re headed to a yoga class or a Buddhist meditation circle and no one blinks, but tell them you’re going to church and you’ll be considered the worst kind of crazy. Even my lifelong best friend, Gabriel—who came from a Lutheran family of five siblings, all with biblical names like his—automatically assumed I’d joined some sort of cult.
The truth was that I went to Unity for myself—in hope of healing my guilt and loneliness, but also because I felt there was something fundamentally wrong with what the right wingers were doing to this country—condemning homosexuals and denouncing all other religions and supporting the invasion of Iraq and other essentially non-Christian acts. The ecumenical, all-accepting attitude at Unity seemed like the perfect antidote. There were gay couples in the congregation, warmly accepted and integrated—a relatively rare thing in rural Colorado. And the minister, Lynn Kendall, was like a cross between a wise sage, a chipper diner waitress, and a stand-up comedian. The first time I heard her speak she related a story about how, just after being dumped, she dove on the hood of her ex-boyfriend’s car, pounded on his windshield, and said, “Why won’t you love me?”
“I was trying to get him to do for me what I couldn’t do for myself,” Lynn said, and I knew immediately she had something to teach me.
Without a formal degree or ministerial training, she’d honed her spiritual chops in the real world, through surviving abuse as a child and a marriage gone bad, then finding eventual salvation in twelve-step programs. She never quoted from the Bible or spoke much about Jesus’s life; even on Easter Sunday she avoided the story of the crucifixion. She was more interested in helping us forge our own direct connection with spirit. Rather than telling us that we were all sinners or that Jesus had died for our transgressions, she assured us that we all contained within us a spark of the divine, like Ishmael’s serenely calm soul even in the midst of chaos. I met other seekers at Unity, all of them tremendously kind and supportive. They loaned me books about Buddhism and Gnosticism and mystical Christianity, including the now-classic Course in Miracles. I found some major resonance between the Course, which teaches that we’re more than just bodies, and soaring passages in Moby-Dick: “My body is but the lees of my better being…. Take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
Six months after our breakup, I called Nicole and invited her to lunch. I had a cracked notion that maybe we’d get back together, just like we had seven or eight times before, but that things would be different now that I’d started down a path of spiritual healing.
The day before the lunch I made an appointment to see Lynn Kendall, who offered counseling sessions by donation, a foreign concept for someone who’s spent thousands of dollars in therapy. The little Unity library where we met was well lit and warm and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. Smoking generally turns me off, but the fact that Lynn did it made me appreciate her even more—she was human and flawed just like the rest of us.
“I’m nervous about this lunch,” I said. “I feel like I have a big decision to make.”
“I thought all your decisions were made six months ago,” Lynn said. “When you broke up.”
“We’ve broken up and gotten back together so many times.”
“So you’re thinking it’s a good idea to do that again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I miss her. This might be my last chance to work things out. I want to have a plan.”
Lynn thought about it for a while. “Do you really have to decide about this today? Or tomorrow? What if you just allowed yourself not to make any decisions? Hell, you don’t even have to decide what to order from the menu. You can just ask for the sampler plate.”
For some reason this struck me as tremendously funny. I left Unity smiling, trying to hold on to this sense of levity, but it left me the moment I sat down across from Nicole at the Rio, a Mexican place we used to go for margaritas and combo plates on warm summer nights. I could barely look her in the eye, much less speak. She was and is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known: sea-green eyes and impossibly long lashes, olive complexion, an aquiline nose and thick dark hair. And she’s such an essentially good person—an accomplished grade school teacher who gives thoughtful gifts and loves animals, and who is well loved by everyone who knows her. Sitting there across from her, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we couldn’t make it work, how I’d transformed her love into what seemed now like barely contained spite.
“Please don’t just sit there and look at me,” Nicole said. “You have to at least attempt a normal conversation.”
After a long, uncomfortable silence, I finally managed to speak. “I’ve changed a lot in the past six months,” I said.
“So have I,” she said.
“I’ve actually been going to church. I think it’s helping.”
“Church, huh? I’m not surprised.”
“It’s not like you think. It’s a different kind of church, with progressive politics.”
“Okay, cool, I’m happy for you. But why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ve just … changed.”
“You change every time we break up. But nothing about us ever changes, not really.”
“But this time it’s different. I can be different.”
She turned and looked out the window. “I knew you’d try this again,” she said. “But the thing is: I’m happy. Things are working out for me. And I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking about tattoos and rock shows and skateboarding. Or church.”
I sat there nodding, the brick walls and bright Mexican murals and cute waitresses with trays of margaritas going all blurry as Nicole collected her things and walked out.
I drove myself home in a state of semishock. I wanted to scream. I wanted to sleep with three women at the same time, smoke cigarettes, beat the shit out of someone twice my size, put my fist through a plate glass window, pour whiskey on the wounds. I wanted to tear free from my skin and bury my bones in another state, as far from my own heart as I could get.
I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t.
Dawn came and I was still wide-awake. I felt shaky and hollow and sick, as if I hadn’t eaten for days. I tried standing up but my vision erupted with sparks. Something dark was descending upon me—God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee. I thought about calling my mother. I thought about calling Nicole, or 911, or the psychic hotline, or every woman in the phone book until someone came to help me. I fell to my hands and knees and crawled to the bathroom, where it all came spilling out.
Please help me, I said, over and over again. Please help me. God, please help me.
I thought of that scene in Boogie Nights, when Mark Wahlberg’s character, after taking too much coke and then getting chased by a half-naked maniac drug dealer with a shotgun, and subsequently having hit absolute rock-fucking-bottom, comes begging Burt Reynolds’s character for help. Who knew Burt Reynolds could be so god like? But that’s what he is, a white-bearded, divine pornographer who takes his blubbering prodigal son in his arms and welcomes him home. Prostrate, my face in my hands, I wept harder than I’d ever wept, begging for help, saying it over and over again, my Mark Wahlberg mantra.
Something cracked apart down in my core—a slow tectonic shift finally reaching its apotheosis, and then up from this raw, superheated fissure rose a tiny seed of a voice, small and still and warm. It was my own voice, of course, but also something larger, transcendent. The Sufis refer to God as the Friend, and that’s how it felt, like an ancient friend who’d always been there, since the beginning of time—the atman, my true self. What it said: You’re going to be just fine. How it said it: with the deepest tenderness I’d ever experienced from my own self-condemning heart. And in repetition, the same way I’d repeatedly pleaded, so that I was sure to hear and know this was the answer. So that I’d know for certain.
I stayed there in child’s pose, listening. I could’ve stayed there forever, but eventually I got myself up into a hot shower. The water felt like a million tiny, sparkling hands reaching out to hold me, like liquid grace, like the rain that follows in the path of a hurricane.
I dried off and called Lynn, saying that it was important, I needed to talk to her right away. I could tell that I was imposing on her schedule—she’d just seen me the day before, and she had a whole church to run.
She gave me fifteen minutes.
I rushed over to Unity, driving like a maniac, like the Blues Brothers on their divine mission. When I told her I thought maybe I’d had an encounter with God, she smiled, like it was no big deal.
“You mean the holy spirit,” she said.
“Like ‘father, son, and holy ghost’?” I asked.
“No,” she said, smiling, “that makes it sound so supernatural. What I’m talking about is special but also mundane. It’s the spirit of holiness and love that lives in all of us, that saves us when we ask it to. That’s what you experienced. Plus you really needed a goddamned good cry. So congratulations,” she said, collecting her things for her next meeting.
“Congratulations? That’s it?”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re back in the world of the living. And don’t forget what the Zen masters say.”
“What’s that?”
“First enlightenment, then the dishes. Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said, “you’re not the only one in spiritual crisis.”
CATHEDRAL
Lynn was right about the dishes. I was still the same person with mostly the same feelings and fears and hopes. And yet, after a white-light moment, I’d been transformed in subtle ways. That summer I went back to work as the head skateboard coach at my old summer camp on Mount Hood, Oregon—a place that I’d worked for many years beforehand and that was like paradise to me, with nothing to do but skate, swim in mountain lakes, hang out with the campers, and host breakdancing contests on the miniramp flatbottom. For some reason, camp was staffed that year by a large contingency of young, fashionable snowboarders who happened also to be evangelical Christians. During a trip to deliver an injured camper to the hospital, one of them explained to me that the Bible was the “absolute truth,” and that since the “absolute truth” was that all non-Christians were going to hell—courtesy of that oft-quoted and widely misunderstood Bible phrase “No one comes to the Father except through me”—he felt it was his God-given duty to convert as many non believers as he could. I pointed out that this was a form of spiritual imperialism, one that assumed the logistical improbability that of the six and a half billion people on the planet, only a fraction would make it to heaven, if a “place” called heaven even exists. He avoided me the rest of the summer, and certainly never invited me to Thursday-night Bible study, which was just fine with me.
A few nights later, I was standing on the deck of the skate bowl, just about to drop in, when a girl named Karissa Vasquez walked up and invited me to Taco Night at a bar down the hill. I’d met Karissa a few times in Colorado and then bumped into her randomly at a Fourth of July party at an indoor skatepark in Portland, where we climbed up on the domed roof and watched fireworks bloom over the Willamette River.
It just so happened we were both working on Mount Hood for the summer, both skateboarders, both single. At Taco Night, we drank beer and played Putt-Putt golf out on the large patio, trading quotes from the film Office Space. Her chestnut hair fell halfway down her back in two thick braids; she had dark eyes and a sweet, shy smile. Before driving home a couple hours later, we shared a stray can of PBR I found in the backseat of her Honda Accord.
“You might not know it from looking at me, but I’m full-blooded Mexican,” she said. She told me all about her big family, her favorite abuela in Arizona—the one who belts out traditional Mexican songs at weddings—and her darker-skinned brother and all her crazy cousins. I asked what her grandmother thought of her tattoos.
“She told me that if she was young again, she’d get a Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on her chest. When she passes away, I’ll get La Virgen in her honor.” Using our PBR like a microphone, Karissa then broke into an animated lip-synch to an Ugly Casanova song about dressed-up alligators and cum-stained pianos.
Back at camp we met up with some friends at her summer rental, a canary-yellow Swiss chalet with a beer bong hanging off the balcony that Karissa swore belonged to her younger roommates. Up in her loft bedroom she showed us her black hardcover journals, filled with Polaroids of her and her friends skateboarding, a trip to Pacific Beach in San Diego, cool line drawings of trees and birds interspersed with poetic journal entries and a few Bible quotes—In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy. Something lit up inside me when I flipped through her journals, but I was also worried at first she might be one of the evangelicals, especially when she explained that she’d attended a mega church service with a friend on their trip out from Colorado
to Oregon.
“There was nothing church-like about it,” she said. “It was a bunch of people sitting around talking about how they’re right and everyone else is going to hell. There’s no soul in that.” It turned out that Karissa was an occasional Unity-goer; that she and her closest friends sometimes attended the Unity in Boulder, a place I’d been a few times with my parents. It was a revelation—a sort of miracle. What were the odds of finding this kind of soul connection at a skateboard camp, of all places?
After she hugged me good night, I floated back to my cabin, chanting thank you thank you thank you in my head.
Karissa and I drove down to the Oregon coast the next weekend. During the ride, she complained about one of her roommates, a twenty-year-old snowboarder named Richie.
“He’s just an all around filthy person,” she said.
“You mean he doesn’t clean up after himself?”
“None of my roommates do. But it’s more than that with Richie. There’s something not right with him. He never showers. He spends his evenings reading dirty magazines and making lewd comments about women. I think he actually has dirt in his heart.”
We laughed about this for the rest of the ride, until we reached the parking lot at Short Sands and took the long path through a rain forest down to the beach, holding hands. Lying in the sun, Karissa snapped Polaroids of our friends surfing, then drew a series of hearts with the letters DLH on the inside.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 7