This is a question I’ve been circling, on and off and in one form or another, since I was a teenager and began to peel away from the religion I’d inherited from my parents. I grew up going to youth groups and Young Life, prayer breakfasts and “retreats.” I once attended a happening called Promise Keepers—tens of thousands of men gathered in a stadium in Philly to pray and sing worship songs and weep and wave their arms together like reefs of sea anemones and share agapic embraces. We got hats. On the rare Sunday that my family didn’t attend church, Dad would gather my brothers and me in the living room for an ad hoc Bible study—memory outfits him exclusively in the cotton kimono he’d picked up on a mission trip to Japan, a soutane that often failed to fully conceal his inguinal hinterlands, parting instead upon an eyeful of tighty-whities and a most profane moose knuckle. But for all this activity, I never had what I conceived of as “an experience,” which is to say that a Whitmanesque God had never peeled back the corner of the universe to make moon eyes at me. That’s how I’d come to conceive of the countless conversion stories and testimonies I’d heard in church basements and on retreats, how I imagined my folks’ own experiences of being blessed by the Spirit. Mediation had been billed as a fundamental part of the deal: at some point He popped in unannounced to rescue you from a life of paltry to middling significance. Mom had spoken in tongues. Dad talked about hearing the voice of God. I didn’t merely hope to have a similar experience, I expected to.
I also knew that to expect or, worse, to demand such an experience amounted to a sin. It was with experience, after all, that the Devil had tempted Jesus in the desert. (Hence Matthew 4:4: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”) But I was a teenager and was having trouble setting the rudder of belief. Doubts as aggressive as kudzu crept in. Was I wired weird? Had my DNA shipped out before being fitted with the emotional modality that allowed for religious experience? Or was it that I’d been trying to access an ambient field of significance that didn’t exist? Maybe the grand mysterious meaning I’d been longing for was a sham. Because wasn’t doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result also a working definition of insanity? Of being delusional?
My doubts were as shallow and limited then as my conception of faith. It’d still be years before I accepted that faith, by definition, meant living with uncertainty, that uncertainty was faith’s lining. Years before I understood that chief among the things I should be doubting is personal experience. But the message had come down loud and clear: doubts were not to be dwelled on but gotten over, like a mean stomach flu or a broken heart. “Lord, I believe,” I was taught to pray. “Help my unbelief.”
There’s one event from this time, in particular, that has its brights on in my rearview. Dad and I were driving home from some gathering downtown. I was in my middle teens, which puts Dad in his early forties. We soon found ourselves in dangerous conversational waters: lay theology, amateur metaphysics. The dread sharks of opinion and speculation were about. I asked a handful of questions and managed to cause offense. Things escalated, voices were raised. My general thrust wasn’t much thrustier than a Mormon soaking: there are parts of the Bible that might be best understood figuratively, as a metaphor. Dad pulled us over for gas at the Village Exxon, a few miles from our house.
“The thing you have to understand,” he said as he got out of the car, “is that every word in there is literally true.”
Because it’s so absurd, I’d like to remember laughing here. On the evangelical doily it’s only the outermost lace that believes everything in the Bible is literally true. Was Dad really hanging all the way out at the fringe? Regardless of what he believed, it was abundantly clear that he was fed up with my probing and wanted to shut the conversation down.
How much can be said to hang on one conversation? Because I want to say that after this one, I knew in an unspeakable place down inside me that whatever was going to come of my faith wouldn’t involve him. Whatever ideological umbilical cord had bound us was swiftly and summarily snipped. Instead of indulging my questions and doubts, instead of “meeting me where I was,” as they said in the church basements of my adolescence, he’d chosen to wall himself up inside a tower of certitude. And there, warmly immured, I’m sure he thought I’d betrayed and abandoned him, that I was another in a long line of sons who fail to honor their fathers. But out on the gusty moor of religious mystery, I, too, felt betrayed and abandoned. It seemed that Dad was more interested in maintaining the infallibility of his belief than in fostering a conversation with his son about the very nature of ultimate concern. Point is, both of us were left to stew in resentment, to think, finally, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.” But more than confusion or frustration or anger, I remember, in the end, feeling just plain old sad. Sad for him, sad for me—sad for us. It was as if all at once, Babel-like, we started speaking different languages.
* * *
There’d been chatter about a recent sighting outside Portland, an unearthly polygon spotted in the night sky. It’d made the news. In my search for more information, I stumbled upon the website Keith runs for the Oregon chapter of MUFON. There I found a treasure chest of info about UFOs: logs of reported sightings, an extensive annotated bibliography of books, a glossary of key terms and ideas, and more. I’d never been big on sci-fi growing up and if I’d thought about UFOs at all, it was to dismiss them out of hand. The prejudicial wordcloud that popped to mind when I thought about UFO enthusiasts included things like: Mom’s basement, obesity or asthenia, Mylar-covered comic books, Twinkies, Star Trek, RPGs, pink eye, panniculus, old toys still in their boxes, retainer/inhaler, koro, Taco Bell specialty menu, heliophobia/scotophilia, cartoon porn, Asian fetish, impetigo, etc. But the hours of study and meticulous research the site represented confounded my expectations, scrambled my preconceptions. It was staggering and impressive, so methodical and patient and seemingly scientific, and I wanted an excuse to meet the man behind it. At the time I occasionally wrote for a little magazine and while I’d never done a profile before, I thought Keith might make for a good one.
He was game, but in our early correspondence, he also cautioned me: “I think I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you that UFOs are thin-ice material. Don’t fall in. To maintain your reputation in establishment circles, standard practice says you should maintain a studied distance from the subject. The reality aspects are to be avoided or at most treated in a very circumspect way. Writing about what the culture of UFO ‘believers’ is like is just fine. ‘Looky, here! This is what the freaks are like. How amusing!’ That tone is just fine, but not the tone and style of a person who takes the subject seriously as if it should be treated by academia as a normal part of human experience and the world. Just be careful. A Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard professor of psychiatry (John Mack) almost lost his tenure while in his sixties for treating UFOs seriously.”
* * *
The Oregon chapter of MUFON meets on the second Tuesday of every month. They rent a conference room from Mount Tabor Presbyterian Church in southeast Portland. To help pay for Muir Hall and other group needs, MUFON asks for a three-dollar donation to attend its meetings. But twenty-one dollars buys you a full membership, including a subscription to the organization’s monthly journal.
Keith sat behind a table at the front of the room, beside our leader, State Director Tom. On the night’s agenda was a MUFON-produced movie presentation, but the schedule first allowed for an open roundtable discussion. The vibe was awkward at first, with the fifteen of us unsure of exactly how to proceed, but the mood was broken by an Italian man in a baseball hat, who said, “I can just feel it. The world is uniting under the banner of antidebunkerism.”
The room relaxed and a communal spirit bloomed and soon folks were engaged in a spirited crossfire, such that it grew difficult to follow the most intriguing threads of conversation.
“We can’t destroy consciousness,” said a man wearing a camouflage Hawaiian s
hirt. “Not even in chickens.” He could prove chickens have souls, he continued. Take a chicken, any chicken, and cut off its head. If you point it to the south, it will flap about wildly. But point it north and it’ll go calmly about its headless business. Try it.
“Suppose humanity has an expiration date?” a guy in sweatpants asked. And when no one answered, he added, “I think it’s time for the bees to take over. The honeybees.”
“Are you farsighted?”
“Of course.”
“I’m trying to secure ten thousand debunker-buster bombs from the Pentagon! Who’s with me?”
“Do you know the role of bismuth in antigravity?”
Chicken Guy addressed the group: were we aware that when we die our bodies become lighter? that something measurable escapes us? “And it’s not just like a fart, either.”
The woman next to me called down to a man across the table, “But you might not have any conscious memory of being abducted.”
“True enough,” he replied, and they both went silent, appearing to ruminate on that epistemological chestnut.
State Director Tom soon called the meeting to attention. Before starting the movie presentation, he encouraged people to watch the premiere of a television show called The Event on NBC, which used UFOs as a narrative device. A flutter of excited assent rippled through the room. He reminded everyone, though, to maintain their healthy skepticism of the mainstream media, which had burned them over and over in the past. Did anyone recall the hatchet job Peter Jennings did back in ’05? Yes. Almost everyone did.
The lights were then turned off for the movie, a two-hour documentary lecture that recounted the eerie goings-on of late December 1980, at RAF Bentwaters, the air force base in England’s Rendlesham Forest. Tom had described this as England’s Roswell, and maybe a bigger deal in the grand scheme of things. It was the movie’s intention to debunk the debunkers’ explanations (or “explanations”) of the strange, mysterious lights that appeared in the sky and the top secret cover-up that immediately ensued.
By way of a preface let it be known that the great and sworn enemy of the UFOlogist is the debunker, the person who entirely discounts the world of the paranormal. “His extreme skepticism is used as a protective mechanism so that certain subjects are never looked into,” Keith told me. Debunkers are as invested in bankrupting the legitimacy of the paranormal as the UFOlogists and their ilk are on establishing that same legitimacy—they’re on opposite sides of the same coin. And this struck me as odd: why such strident and unrelenting dissent? If the debunkers think the UFOlogists are incorrigibly batty, then why not leave them be? What is it about UFOs that inspires such passionate reactions, pro and con?
The documentary was based on such careful and exacting investigation, such thoroughgoing attention to detail, to minutiae really, that for many of the MUFONites there in the dark of Muir Hall the effect was largely just soporific. About thirty minutes in, I looked across the room and by the screen’s glow could make out the Italian antidebunker, who had his arms crossed, his chin in his chest, and his eyes closed. Two others at the end of his table had their heads resting in their crossed arms. There was deep mouth breathing coming from someone on my side of the room I couldn’t see. At a little over an hour, we lost radio contact with our leader, State Director Tom, whose head had been moving like one of those water-sipping birds you find in joke shops. Through it all, though, Keith was a wide-eyed hoot owl.
When the movie ended and the credits rolled, a handful of people clapped. Someone flipped the lights on and there was the nervous, startled rustle of stretching and eye rubbing and seat adjusting.
“So,” Tom said as he stood, “any questions?”
The room erupted in gleeful laughter.
The first people to pipe up asked about plot details, as though trying to piece together a thriller’s twists and turns. “What happened to the camera?” “Did he ever get to see the pictures he took?” “How long was he unconscious?”
Deeper speculation began when someone brought up the topic of time travel. The events in Rendlesham Forest, as well as those at Roswell, presented a knotty nexus of past, present, and future. UFOs must have the ability to tap into whatever it is we understand as time and manipulate it, or themselves within it. The knot-of-time analogy provoked questions about memory retrieval and hypnosis. Could memory blocks be implanted in us, preventing us from accessing certain parts of our own histories? With every question, it seemed like we were being asked to solve an equation that had one too many variables.
“No one knows how it’s done,” Keith said. “But it is.”
“This is strange beyond the limits of imagination,” Chicken Guy said.
“We’ll never know what’s real,” said someone down the table.
“Zhey dezide vhat’s rill vhor us,” said a Russian lady in back who’d come in late.
Keith agreed: the intelligence and security around these occurrences were airtight and strictly need-to-know. He said the government ran “deep black projects,” about which we’ll likely never get a full accounting, the whole truth.
“Man,” bemoaned the guy in sweatpants. “It’s just gonna be a headbanger’s ball till the end of eternity.”
“This goes deep,” Keith said, drawing the meeting to a close. “So deep that it’s really about consciousness. There are no so-called answers.”
* * *
Martha’s Vineyard. Summer 2002.
There were other disagreements, other run-ins with Dad and members of my extended family, but still I couldn’t manage a clean break from the church. The possibility of having an experience of divine significance, and of finding fellowship, a group of like-minded questers and an uncomplicated sense of belonging, continued to haunt me on into college. I dabbled in fraternity life and in the faith-based equivalents of frats (Cru, FCA), but came away from both feeling equally dissatisfied and no less alone. Chalk it up to my Protestantism, but I believed that my failure to have a bona fide religious experience was the result of my never having been sufficiently serious about my faith. Maybe I’d never worked hard enough at it? I mean, didn’t the promised land lie at the end of forty years of toil? And so my spiritual whatever became a problem for me to solve. I’d give it the old college try.
There were nine of us students in the house—five girls, four boys. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to being part of a montage, imagining the midtwenties married couple assembling us on the merit of our application essays. They were pursuing graduate degrees in theology and were our leaders, but mostly by example. Imagine The Real World, only ditch the drunken antics for daily quiet times, swap the routine roomie diddling for weekly Bible studies. Aware of the temptations that a coed house could foment, our counselor-chaperones laid out two rules at the summer’s start: “dating,” by even the loosest of definitions, perhaps especially by the loosest of definitions, was verboten, as was drinking. And while not a rule, the guys agreed to shower pretty much exclusively outdoors—this was billed as a courtesy, a piece of chivalry, but I think it masked a deeper fear: that a glimpse of the girls’ exotic wash stuffs, a mere whiff of their aftersteam, might trigger a catastrophic backslide. A chore chart was posted in the kitchen. Every evening a couple was responsible for dinner and another for dishes, and the housecleaning duties, like bathrooms and vacuuming and the lawn, were broken out by week. Periodically throughout the summer we helped administer camps for middle and high schoolers at our host organization’s HQ, the Study Center, a compound of bunks and offices and assorted sanctuaries on a wooded knoll in West Tisbury. My most common job was to stand with the other guitarists and strum through the one-four-five chord progression that comprises like ninety percent of worship songs. With an eye to evangelizing (and making the rent), we all worked real jobs on the island, too. We were sandwich artists and traffic attendants and retail workers. As a clerk at Brickman’s department store in Vineyard Haven, I sold a sweater to Ted Danson and some beach amusements to Marty McFly, but wussed ou
t when it came time to invite them to our weekly small group. I’d always been a half-assed apologist, mostly because I had so little sense of what it was that I was supposed to be selling. The only person I invited from the outside was an au pair from Colgate I was briefly interested in dating (though only by the loosest of definitions), and by summer’s end my tally of souls remained a dispiriting null set.
I can’t say I didn’t try, though. What I lacked in natural aptitude I compensated for with old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness, by applying the elbow grease of earnestness. When tasked with strumming one-four-fives, I strummed with all the passion I could muster. Verily I played my infarcted heart out. And I prayed. All throughout the day I prayed. In the morning over coffee. Before breakfast, lunch, dinner. Before bedding down in what was, indisputably, the crappiest room in the house, a room I shared with a guy who suffered from allergies all summer and kept a growing stack of used tissues by his twin bed, which I christened, privately, Booger Hill. I read the Bible, too, memorized verses and discussed Paul’s epistles with my housemates. And yet still nothing, religious experience–wise. I was not flooded by sudden euphoria. My mind’s eye did not open upon supernal vistas. There were no gleeful fits of glossolalia. And so I feared I was doomed to become an aspirant manqué, barred forever from firsthand knowledge of the numinous. Left to live out my days in the wan half-light of the merely human.
But if my time on the island was an effort to redeem or resuscitate my religiospiritual past, it was also part of an awakening to other possible experiences of significance and meaning. This was the summer after my sophomore year, during which I’d started to read deliberately, with intent. It’d been the Year of the Library, when I’d haunted the stacks like Banquo’s ghost, when the chair at my favorite carrel practically became a mold of my ass. And I rode this new passion on into the summer. Our morning quiet times were supposed to be given over to reading the Bible and praying, and the journal I kept shows I was doing some of that, but it also shows that I was just as often thinking about Rilke and Eliot, Kierkegaard and Camus. I remember reading Fear and Trembling out on the weathered shingles of our house’s roof, remember getting a tenacious sunburn reading The Stranger on, fittingly, a small beach between Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs. And before I’d head down the road to work, Chris, the male half of the married couple, would give me a note card chicken-scratched on either side with quotes he’d come across in his reading, lines plucked from folks like Coleridge and Schelling, Hegel and Arendt. While pretending to refold stacks of Nantucket reds, I’d study the cards, wearing them halfway back to pulp with my handling. The ink often bled, too, the words smudging so badly that it became as much an act of memory as reading when I’d make out, for example: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” And nights after work, sitting on the house’s big front porch and smoking, no shit, pipes, we’d discuss the quotes.
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