The Man Who Quit Money

by Mark Sundeen

  I spent an evening there with Suelo and a young crew who believed they could improve the world one carrot at a time. We pulled weeds in the golden shade of cottonwoods, by a creek pouring down from the mountains. As we gathered for a feast of beans and squash and greens and peppers that were harvested within a hundred yards of where we sat, I believed in their dream, too.

  “I do envision money going obsolete,” says Suelo. “I envision communal living, making it possible for families to live moneyless. Communal living already exists in every society, even here in the most capitalistic. It’s called sharing, what we learn in kindergarten. We must cultivate it until it chokes out our selfish system naturally.”

  14

  . . .

  To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.

  —Lao-tzu

  ON A SUMMER day Suelo and I drove up the winding road to Mount Evans. I wanted to see the spot where he drove off the cliff.

  His survival has the trappings of a miracle. His last thought, as he floored the accelerator, was that if God had some purpose for his life, He wouldn’t allow it to end like this. As Suelo blacked out, the car soared off the road, tumbled along the rocks, then ground to a halt on a steep patch of grass, teetering over the abyss. He woke up. Everything was red. Shattered glass. A curtain of blood over his eyes. Oh shit, I’m still alive. He didn’t feel any pain. Well, there’s no way I could have survived that, he reasoned, and drifted off. He felt comfortable, sleepy. Soon it would be over.

  He awoke again. He was shivering. It was a cold spring dawn and the temperature was just above freezing. He would die soon. His survival instinct overwhelmed his death wish. I don’t want to die! he thought. I gotta get up to the road. He blacked out again.

  The next time he awoke, he was lying on the side of the road. He heard an engine above: someone was driving down the mountain. A man covered Suelo with a blanket, then sped down the hill to find a phone. The next thing Suelo remembers was being loaded into a helicopter.

  When I asked Daniel’s mother how she explained her son’s survival, she was quick with Scripture. “If you make the Lord your refuge, he will give his angels charge of you, and in their hands they will bear you up,” promises the Book of Psalms. But Suelo himself is not a believer in miracles. He doesn’t know exactly how he found his way out of the wreck and up to the road, but he doesn’t purport to have been carried by angels. He does not claim to be a saint or prophet, or to have a direct line with God. Even his breakthrough night of meditation in Thailand he considers to have been a moment of profound truth—no more, no less. When I asked him if he thought that he had attained enlightenment, he said no. He thinks enlightenment is a continual process, one that he struggles toward daily. What’s more, Suelo doesn’t consider himself a seer, like Hindu mystics or Indian shamans.

  “I like to spend long times meditating and fasting, but I wouldn’t say I have visions,” he says. “We think there is something better in another realm, but the purpose of this lifestyle is to live in the here and now. There is no need for the otherworldly visions.”

  His goal—his journey—has been simply to live as much as possible like the great religious figures: Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao-tzu. But he never claims to be like them.

  An evangelical Christian once snorted to Suelo, “What, you think you can live like Jesus?”

  “Well, don’t you?” Suelo replied.

  The exchange illustrates Suelo’s beef with organized religion: “Wasn’t that what Jesus said: do what I do? He was here as an example for us to follow. Same with all prophets. Didn’t the prophets tell us to be like them? That’s what’s wrong with Christianity. They make Jesus and the prophets into icons, take them off of earth, and put them in heaven to worship them, so they’re no longer accessible. You’ve taken a reality and made it into a worthless idol. Christians talk about the idolatry of other religions, but when they no longer live principles and just worship the people who taught them, that’s exactly what they’re doing.”

  For all his pantheistic exploring and complaints about fundamentalism, however, Suelo remains close to—and in a sense truest to—the values with which he was raised. His family still lives those values, too. After his brother died in 1994, the Shellabargers quit Motel 6 and moved to Fruita, to be closer to Rick’s widow and their grandson. They were approaching seventy, without significant income or retirement funds. That’s when Dick’s brother Les—he of Shellabarger Chevrolet—intervened. He built a new house and moved them in, said they could live there rent-free as long as they wished. The Shellabargers still teach Bible study classes in their home. They invite indigent people—drug addicts, victims of abuse—to stay with them.

  When Suelo and I drove the hundred miles from Moab to visit them, he brought unopened packages of eggs and cheese and bacon from a dumpster and prepared breakfast. While he cooked, Laurel showed me framed paintings that Daniel had completed over the years. A few days before my visit, she had emailed me a cordial invitation, adding, “We have some things we would like to show you that Daniel has done in the past and that mean so much to us.” One of the things Mrs. Shellabarger wanted to show me, as I presently learned, was a handmade booklet of passages from the Book of Proverbs, each accompanied by a watercolor depicting scenes of nature that Daniel had completed in high school. Another was a cloudy gray painting of ducks on a pond that Daniel gave them as a gift a decade later. “It’s a sad-looking picture,” said Dick, “because of his brother dying, see, when he done that.”

  Despite the warm welcome, I was surprised by their acceptance of—actually, pride in—Daniel for the life he leads.

  “He’s his own man,” said Dick. “I’m proud because he’s doing what he wants to do.”

  I couldn’t help but see the similarity between Daniel and his father. Both are the youngest in big families, with older brothers more successful with careers and finances. Both refused to work jobs where they felt exploited. Both are extreme in their religious views, taking literally what many dismiss as metaphor, and both are prone to deep exploration of Scripture, and to fierce debates about what it says and means—debates for which the mainstream cares little. Both have lived rent-free by the generosity of others.

  Indeed, most of the Shellabargers’ quarrels with their son are strictly theological, disagreements over biblical interpretation that to non-Christians might seem mere hairsplitting. “Daniel’s taken the Bible and spiritualized it,” Dick said. “For instance, he says that the Kingdom of Heaven is now, that Christ has returned spiritually, and there will be no physical return. We have crossed swords on it, but we decided we love each other too much to fight.” Dick Shellabarger also takes issue with Daniel’s universalism. “He’s mixed up with all these cults and false religions, see? Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism. He gets with these false religions and he goes haywire. Some of the emails he writes are really in left field. Christianity is being run down because we’re narrow-minded—but we are the only way.”

  Like his parents, Daniel’s siblings have remained traditional Christians, and they, too, take to heart the priorities they grew up with. None of them is wealthy. After raising eight children, Pennie and her husband got a divorce, and she recently remarried. Rick’s widow, Elaine, is raising her son alone in a modest home a few blocks from the Shellabargers. Ron is disabled and lives nearby in an assisted-living facility. Doug, who holds a master’s degree in counseling, suffered a spinal injury in a car accident and was unable to work for two years, after which he lost his job as a psychotherapist, and his wife divorced him. Now he works at Home Depot.

  I asked Elaine if she was embarrassed by Daniel’s life.

  “No,” she said. “The family does disagree with some points. We think he’s too extreme, but he’s fighting against greed, self-sufficiency, and impersonalness. If he moved two steps closer, we’d agree. Greed and pride are the two primary problems in America, and this current economy shows that greed is the worst.” When I asked Ron what he thought of his kid br
other’s life, he grinned and said, “It’s totally cool.”

  Doug, just fifteen months older, is closest to Daniel, especially after his own misfortunes forced him to rethink money and the decisions he had assumed would bring wealth. “The paths we’ve taken diverged—but didn’t. That’s the paradox,” Doug told me, smoking a pipe on the deck of his converted cabin in the mountains near Denver, not too far from the site of his grandparents’ dude ranch. “There really is a benefit when you come into contact with Dan, even if you don’t share his beliefs. He gives, and expects absolutely nothing in return.”

  And yet there remains Daniel’s sexuality, an area of his life about which his family maintains willful ignorance. Having a gay son continues to both vex and edify the Shellabargers.

  “I don’t know if he’s ever had sexual contact,” said Laurel. “You have to remain celibate. It’s not a sin if you don’t act on it. But Jesus also said if you commit adultery in your heart, that’s a sin.”

  Now we sat there wondering: Well, is it a sin, or isn’t it? Finally Dick ended the stalemate.

  “Being gay is a defect in the brain, just like my other son who has cerebral palsy,” he proposed. “But I can’t throw them both out because they have defects. I love them all the more.”

  “But are you worried he’ll end up in hell?” I asked the Shellabargers.

  “He’s accepted Christ as his savior,” Laurel said.

  “When was that?”

  “When he was seven.”

  After years of trying to convince them that his being gay was no aberration, Daniel accepted a sort of detente: his family assumes that he is asexual and he doesn’t tell them differently. Still, isn’t it painful to have his family view him as a eunuch?

  “I don’t necessarily disagree with it,” Suelo says. “My philosophy of life is that everything is true on some level. And besides, I’ve never been a particularly sexual person. As far as explaining everything in biblical terms, they do that with everything and everybody. That’s how they resolve things, find harmony. In that way I felt like my coming-out was a good thing for them. It gave them a koan to see how this fits.”

  Dick was working behind the counter of a Christian bookstore when a gay man came in to browse for books. The two struck up a conversation. Dick mentioned that his son was gay, and the man teared up, telling him how as a gay man he could find no Christian fellowship in Grand Junction.

  “I said: ‘God loves you as much as he loves me,’” remembers Dick. “He was so thankful. We talked for hours, after the store had closed. The man told me, ‘I have enjoyed this more than anything in my life.’”

  I remembered something Suelo had told me about his parents. As a young man, he’d resented their unshakable faith, and thought they were blind and narrow-minded. But with age he has come to appreciate it. “It’s allowed them to maintain such a pure, almost childlike innocence,” he told me, “which is a beautiful way of seeing the world.”

  One of his lessons has been that the religion that rejects him also gave him a lot. “We all have roots, and if we cut them off we die,” he says. “There were priceless things in my upbringing I needed to reconcile with. I was an ingrate for not acknowledging all the good that was given to me freely. When I reconnect with old friends, they say we’d love to go to your house because it was such a loving family, while theirs were fighting all the time, and alcoholism. I was realizing that every family on this planet is fucked up in some way or another. I’d been focusing on the negative parts of my own, and not seeing the good parts. My parents always loved each other, and didn’t fight, weren’t abusive.”

  Just as Suelo can admire his parents as they reject his sexuality, so can he reject the bigotry of their brand of Christianity while embracing its potential for personal and societal transformation. “So I somehow have to learn to take the good and leave the bad, remembering the things that were valid and profound with what I was raised with, and getting rid of the narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy.”

  Brian Mahan, Daniel’s CU professor, sees his former student’s spiritual path not merely as a route to personal holiness, but as a deeply moral act. Now a scholar-in-residence at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, Mahan is an expert on William James and the author of Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition, a meditation on the choices between worldly success and a meaningful spiritual life. He told me that Daniel’s was the sort of moral choice—albeit far more drastic—that he had encouraged students to make. The topic still preoccupies him. Dr. Mahan writes: “Poverty is indeed the strenuous life, James writes, without brass bands or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions, and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether the revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage, and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.”

  I asked Mahan if he felt responsible for Daniel’s way of life. Had he filled a young student’s head with lofty ideas about giving up ambition and money, not meaning them to be taken so literally?

  “I’m actually embarrassed that Daniel is so much more intentional about it than me!” he said with a laugh. “I never envisioned anyone being quite that radical.” More soberly, he reflected, “It is for all of us to answer, why we question the Dans in the world.”

  . . .

  AS DANIEL AND I drove up Mount Evans, we encountered a bicycle race to its summit. Car traffic crawled behind the cyclists. We pulled off to wait for the traffic to thin. Fifteen minutes later we resumed driving. We figured we’d catch the line of vehicles soon, but after five miles we still hadn’t seen another car.

  “Maybe they all decided to drive off the cliff,” Suelo said.

  Suelo will admit that he’s never totally outgrown the evangelical streak instilled in him by his parents. He thinks others will benefit from what he has learned, so he doesn’t hesitate to talk about it. “Is it a bad thing to want to change someone? Is just talking to someone an influence? Should I zip my mouth and not speak?”

  Moreover, he’s come to recognize the power of belief to effect change, even if no one religion has a monopoly on the truth. By studying Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he believes that the most effective social movements are those with a spiritual center. “It took me years to get beyond my antagonism against religion, which appears more destructive than constructive, until I saw at its core the paradox, the power of change, like a Trojan horse within the walls of commercial civilization,” he says.

  Wherever they are and whatever they believe, Suelo tries to reach the people he thinks really need his message. It can be a tricky balancing act. Secular leftists are attracted to his moneyless message; they already despise banks and corporations, and believe that greed is the root of most of the world’s problems. But they are generally not receptive to religious overtures. Suelo gets along just fine with freegan anarchists in the streets of Portland—until he drops the J-bomb. Broadly speaking, punkrockers think Christianity is the problem, not the solution.

  “When I’m up in Portland, people don’t understand that rural America is fundamentalist,” he says. “There’s a whole population of Americans that won’t budge an inch unless we speak their language. That’s why I’ve chosen to stick with religious language.”

  Take a look at the comments on Suelo’s blog, and you’ll see what he means. Most of his harshest critics are fundamentalists, quoting Scripture in their attempts to convince Suelo to repent and return to the flock. Suelo, of course, can quote Scripture right back at them.

  “When I was a kid I thought I’d be a missionary to the heathens, but now I think maybe it’s okay to be a missionary, but to the Christians, because they’re the ones who need it, because they don’t believe their own religion.”

  By that, he means that most devout Christians have become so obsessed with theology—with Jesus’s Second Coming and with p
reparing their souls for the afterlife—that they’ve stopped following His most basic teachings about loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, and blessing the meek. He thinks his path might illuminate the way for dissatisfied Christians.

  “I decided to walk away from fundamentalism, even with the threat of eternal hell looming over my head,” he wrote in a 2010 comment thread, debating some readers. “Walking away from the vise-grip of fundamentalism isn’t easy, so, please, you nonfundamentalists, have compassion on fundamentalists. I went through years of intense depression.

  “Then I found my liberation. I resigned myself to hell. Yes. I decided I’d rather be in hell with Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Mother Teresa, Buddha, Kabir, Rumi, Peace Pilgrim and, yes, with Jesus Himself, than to be in heaven with the torturous fundamentalist mentality that thinks itself right and everybody else wrong. I decided I’d rather be in hell for love than to be in heaven for bigotry.”

  Suelo’s ultimate goal is not to change a policy or repeal a law, but to live his beliefs. He found the material world a living hell, and when he tried to end his life, he was given the opportunity to start over, and live a spiritual life instead.

  High up on the road to the summit of Mount Evans, we found a tiny pullout and parked. We descended the steep slope to the site of Daniel’s wreck. Twenty years had passed, and though he had returned to the site a few years afterward, he now had some trouble identifying the exact spot. It was midsummer, but the flanks of the mountain were wrapped in cold cloud. We squeezed between white granite blocks, climbing with our hands over boulders, all the while eyeing the green lake far below. A patch of gray snow shivered in the ravine. Yellow and white wildflowers dotted the slope, along with bunches of grass with purple buds, and tufts of spiny-leaved plants.

  “Nettles,” Daniel said. “You can eat those.”