Secular Mysticism

by Dennis Green

Funny how we forget, lose track of so many of the things we learn. So many things we find that resonate for us, with magic and with meaning…

For me, this morning, it was Joseph Campbell, who suddenly reappeared in my thoughts after vanishing for a long stretch of time. I had read his Hero With A Thousand Faces in college, had followed the interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, and poured over his The Mystic Vision, and then, “Poof!” he was gone into the mists of my own history.

Our pre-occupations since 1968 — with politics and economics and technology — have been secular, and largely pragmatic. “What works?” Without even realizing it, we’ve all been practicing the Pragmatism of William James for the better part of the past 40 years. Energy, war and peace, global economics, computer chips, entrepreneurship, red and blue states — we abandoned the rich and vibrant territory of the Spirit to the religious right.

And in the meantime, we’ve shown some disdain for mythology, calling it, along with faith, “going with what you know just ain’t so!” If there were any truths in the Bible, or the Koran or the Upanishads, we reasoned, they would just prove to be inconvenient truths, getting in the way of human progress. The Cold War, and “Star Wars Missile Defense,” now that was something we could wrap our best minds around.

In the Middle East, tensions between the Abrahamic tribes, the Persians, the Shia, Sharia Law, schisms in Islam, resentment of occupations and interference by the West boiled over. But these enemies, we told ourselves, are just backward, primitive, 14^th Century whackos. Religious fanatics. Pay no mind.

But at the same time, a small tribe of western scholars, including men like Campbell, persisted in attempting to document and understand the various mythologies from around the world, and what they might have in common. In cultural anthropology, this is called diffusion. An uncontroversial example of cultural diffusion is the practice of agriculture, which shares much in common from one tribe to another.

Moreover, some scholars realized that they could appreciate the beliefs inherent in mythologies only so much from the outside looking in. And this is when scholars like Campbell encouraged the practice of certain ancient traditions, such as meditation and contemplation. Campbell goes so far as to invent a new philosophy some call “following your bliss.” The phrase came about in an exchange with Moyers:

Campbell: "Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt?

Moyers: "Not in a long time."

Campbell: "Remember the last line? 'I have never done the thing that I wanted to do in all my life.' That is a man who never followed his bliss."

At the same time that such scholars as Campbell appreciated the truth in the various mythologies, they remained scholars, secular observers of these truths, even as they witnessed them from the inside, through practice.

In Wikipedia, we get this: “A fundamental belief of Campbell's was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately ‘unknowable’ because it exists before words and knowledge. Although this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of ‘metaphors’—these metaphors being the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, the Genesis myth in the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence.”

In my own way, I’ve been one of these secular mystics too, experiencing many of the spiritual truths from the inside, but never forgetting that they are still mythologies, symbolic reference points. Today, working on my novel, Mescalero City Blues, doing the research, imagining the many myths from the inside, I re-discovered Joseph Campbell, and my love for secular mysticism. I hope you will too.

©2010 Dennis Green

Catcher In The Wry

by Dennis Green

J.D. Salinger’s first book, published in 1951, and set in 1949, Catcher in the Rye, changed my life. I was 12 years old when I found it at the corner liquor store bookrack in paperback, and read it. Holden Caulfield, the sad teenaged boy, saw right through the American Dream, saw it for what it was, “a bunch of phonies,” and was the harbinger of change that intensified in a few short years, with the coming of the Beats, Brando and James Dean.

Salinger died just the other day, so all this work of his comes into focus, as an obituary sometimes does. His short stories, such as “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish,” also broke new ground, and were his best format in many ways.

America, in the few short years after World War Two, began to experience a cultural shift of enormous proportions. The A-Bomb, the Cold War, the imminent Korean Police Action, a materialism prompted in part by the returning war veterans, the G.I. Bill for education and housing, a new kind of prosperity.

Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver appeared to represent that domesticated America, but on the sly, the writers of one of those shows snuck in lines like, “I think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night, Ward!” Beaver Cleaver. Get it? Got it? Good!

So the subversion of all those button-down values was already at work. Before long, Soupy Sales and Pinkie Lee were even making fun of the kid’s show format, and “Miss Nancy” at KTVU, Channel 2, in Jack London Square was a very rowdy gal indeed. “I see you’ve got your big red heart on,” she said to one costumed newsman at a Valentine’s Day Party at the station.

So the undercurrent was already underway, in a subterranean sense at least, when Salinger’s book came out, and there is Holden wandering the streets of Manhattan in his strange woodsman’s hat, looking for something authentic, even some music that he can enjoy. But there is not yet any rock ‘n’ roll, he doesn’t stumble into any juke jazz joint, and his quest will go largely unanswered.

He talks wistfully about saving the younger children, being a “catcher in the rye,” who snags the kids before they can dance or wander off the cliffs of life and into a deadened adult life of Puritan domesticity. In a few years, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Lonely Crowd, Games People Play and other studies will confirm his suspicions that the placid surface of the Fifties concealed a swamp filled with leeches, alligators and water moccasins.

Holden’s discontent was infectious, and it led to a virtual epidemic of rebellion in the Sixties. But his cynicism didn’t contaminate that uprising, which was surprisingly idealistic, positive and hopeful. The Old America simply became irrelevant. We didn’t care about it enough to worry that it would come back to bite us in the butt.

If, as they say, the cynic is just a disappointed romantic, then the Day of the Cynic is here. Very few of us expect things to get much better anymore, or care to put our faith in politicians, or think corruption will be ended anytime soon. “Don’t follow leaders/watch the parking meters!” Holden knew it all along. And so did Dylan.

©2010 Dennis Green

Leaving the Lid Up

by Dennis Green

“Leaving the lid up” has become the apocryphal emblem of how boorish men behave in the bathroom. Nothing gets said about the women. Until now.

The toilet in our house, (I don’t know about yours…), has TWO lids, one with a hole in it that you sit on and that conforms to your backside, and one that covers the entire porcelain throne. Well-trained, I always put the first lid down when I’m finished with my business standing in place, and the other lid too, because…

Well, because, if you have an electric razor, or a hairbrush on a shelf above the commode, and it happens to get misplaced and falls…and the top lid is still up…WHOOPS!…under water. That doesn’t seem like a difficult concept to grasp. Even I, a male in his advanced years, can comprendo.

But the woman who graciously allows me to share her bed and board, and bath, doesn’t get it. Or else, she’s just channeling a lot of male energy these days. For she rarely puts the top lid down, and we’ve both had more than one of the accidents detailed in the paragraph above. Rather than having a hissy fit, however, when I see the lid is up, I just put it down.

And moreover — way back in the early Sixties, working in a gas station in Berkeley — I learned more about the sexes than anyone would ever want to know. When it comes to the use of public restrooms, it’s the women who are the real little PIGGIES!

Whenever I worked the graveyard shift, I had to give the restrooms a final cleaning for the day. When I worked the opening shift, or the swing, I had to inspect the restrooms every hour to be sure they were reasonably presentable for the rest of the day. Never once, in the 330 days I worked there, did I find the women’s room with nothing seriously amiss.

Perhaps it was a rebellion against conventional habits, the fact that so many of our female customers had to keep and clean house at home. Maybe it was that part of town, the edgy borderline between big University Avenue and the flatlands below Sacramento Street. Maybe it was just a refreshing break from cleanliness being next to godliness that I saw.

But every day, the women’s head was an awful mess. In spite of signs warning them to the contrary, all manner of…things…were flushed down the toilets, often backing them up and flooding the restrooms. But some women also…how can I put it…missed the john completely. Leaving a mess on the floor. Others left things in the sinks that I wouldn’t have found in a biology lab, I swear.

As for the towel dispensers, the toilet paper rolls, the seat covers… forget it. Trashed would be an understatement. On those mornings when I opened the station hung-over, (Who? Me?), I’d have to gag my way into the women’s rest room. To this very day, I cannot understand that phenomenon.

And by comparison, the men’s rooms were positively DULL. Nothing out of place, no strange left-behinds, nothing exotic going on.

And what really puzzles me is why, in so many of the gas stations I worked, there was so often a hole drilled in the wall into the ladies’ room. From the men’s room, from the lube room, you name it. Why anyone would want a bird’s eye view of what was going on in there, I couldn’t guess. Not me.

So when it comes to the gender wars, and which sex is most hygienic, I’ll have to defer to the experts. From my personal experience, it ain’t us guys who have the real problems in that area, that part of the house, or the gas station. But who am I to say?

©2010 Dennis Green

Speaking In Sound Bites

by Dennis Green

John Meacham, editor of Newsweek, puts it precisely. “There’s nothing wrong with speaking in sound bites. Jesus did it. Lincoln did it. FDR did it. But Obama doesn’t do it.”

President Obama is brilliant, articulate, a great speech-maker, but he also comes across as aloof, dispassionate, and he leaves the impression that he governs from his head, not from his heart. Politics is not a civilized tennis match, but a knife fight, and Obama doesn’t come across as having a vicious bone in his body.

For let’s face it, speechmaking isn’t leadership, which is the down and dirty work behind the scenes. That takes not merely pragmatism, but cunning.

And in fact, he is a naïf. His notion that anything can be “bi-partisan” about this nation’s politics, for example, is hopelessly naïve and unrealistic. John Heillemann and Mark Halperin, authors of the best-selling Game Change, say that “Rahm Emmanuel thought he would make the Republicans so weak they would have to compromise. But they felt so weak that they couldn’t compromise.”

Others say that Obama wants to treat the electorate like adults, but that we Americans don’t want to have to behave like adults. The Tea Party and the town hall meetings would certainly confirm that. Moreover, adults don’t fight with knives. Reckless teenaged boys do.

“No Drama Obama.” It served him well as John McCain floundered in the face of the economic collapse, and Obama kept his cool. But that was a brief, passing moment. While, in our more rational, adult moments, we might prefer someone with no drama, in everyday life, we’re still, all of us, Drama Queens. We get off on it.

So Obama’s ratings have tanked. No surprise. So did Reagan’s at this point in his presidency, before his “Voodoo Economics” seemed to kick in and work. So did Bill Clinton’s, before he discovered “triangulation” as a strategy teaming up with conservatives to pass a welfare reform act. Clinton was clever enough to turn the popular impression of the GOP’s “Contract With America” to a “Contract On America,” with all its thuggish overtones.

And it’s very likely Obama will pull his irons out of the fire, but whether they will be nine-irons or something less remains to be seen. “Tiger Would!” and “Yes, We Can!” but it doesn’t really matter what we hope for, only what gets done. The Stimulus, Health Care Reform, Cap & Trade..? It’s just all too wonky for the average citizen to comprehend, let alone appreciate or applaud.

And ultimately, that’s Obama’s main problem. He’s a policy wonk, even worse than the Clintons. He’s calm, he’s deliberative, he’s thoughtful. But where’s his PASSION? If we don’t know by now, neither does he, and without a sense of that, the one thing Joseph Campbell said is most essential to our humanity, he’s doomed to remain a cipher.

No matter how eloquent his books, his musings about his absent father, and his origins and his search for meaning in his life, without a sense of passion, he seems to be driven by…what? Just more American…ambition? Ye gods! Not that.

He protests that he wants to make a difference, that his only ambition is to made this a better nation. That he doesn’t even care if he’s a one-term president, like Jimmy Carter. Perhaps, like Carter then, he’ll do more good after he leaves the office than he will while occupying that griddle we call the White House.

But in the meantime, he’s learning, as we all are, just how dysfunctional American government and politics has become.

©2010 Dennis Green

Do You Believe In Magic?

by Dennis Green

Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart

How the music can free her, whenever it starts

And it's magic, if the music is groovy

It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie

I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul

But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll

John Sebastian and his Lovin’ Spoonful posed this question in 1965, and for the moment, it was the only question that really mattered. “Do you believe in magic?” Didn’t matter whether it was the magic of the White Rabbit, or Black Magic or Magic Mushrooms.

But the penalties for mere possession in those days were ferocious. Ten years in California, and in a more enlightened state like Texas, twenty years of hard time. You had to have some real cojones to believe in magic, let alone use it.

But it marked the dividing line between those hard-headed realists who believed only in what they could perceive with their five senses, and those dreamy Tribals who believed in magic. In things merely felt and yet unseen. In dimensions of reality beyond time and space. And for many of us, the jumping off place was psychedelic drugs.

A handful of Morning Glory seeds. Pearly Gates and Heavenly Blue worked best. A little toke of tea. Suddenly watching the world collapse into two dimensions. A tiny purple tab. White light.

For several years there, I stopped drinking alcohol altogether, and the evening cocktail became a pipeful of hashish. I had a huge print of Guernica over my front window, and learned to see through Picasso’s eyes. I learned the sort of serious empathy it takes to think and feel the way other people do. It has served me well over the years.

The magic is still there, right at hand, but very few people feel it, or believe in it anymore. They are too busy being contentious, scoring points in arguments about politics and the meaning of contemporary events to consider the possibility that it is themselves they mourn for.

A few months after the Summer of Love and the Tribal Gatherings in L.A., Sebastian was busted for possession of pot, and got off the hook by setting up a friend of his for entrapment in a bust. Serious betrayal, but this is also exactly what the anti-marijuana laws are set up to do, to intimidate ordinary citizens who don’t conform, who get out of line. But soon, in all the underground newspapers of the day, the talk was all about “The Lovin’ Lidful” and Sebastian’s days were over.

The “Death of the Hippie” came soon after, toward the end of ’67, and then came 1968, that year of horror. The Dispersal of the Tribes — to Canada, to rural farms and communes, to Bangladesh — and one killing after another. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy. All leading to the police riots in Chicago around the Democratic convention.

And the election of Richard “Slippery Dick” Nixon. The rest is history too. And some few of us kept the faith, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the magic is there, still there, always there, and wonderful indeed. In spite of Vietnam, in spite of Watergate, and the SLA and the shootout in L.A. In spite of everything since, we still believe in magic.

Do you believe like I believe Do you believe in magic

Do you believe like I believe Do you believe, believer

Do you believe like I believe Do you believe in magic

[Fade]

©2010 Dennis Green

The Manhattan Project

by Dennis Green

One of the most evangelical, fundamentalist “religions” abroad today is secular humanism. This is the notion that a life of the Spirit, a life taken on faith, faith that life is not really as meaningless as it sometimes feels, has been made outmoded by modern science and technology. It ranges from the outspoken atheism of writers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, (The End of Faith), to the assumption that all the woes in the world today are caused by religious fanatics.

An irony in all this is that the greatest threat from terrorists today is the possibility of a “suitcase nuke” being set off in the heart of New York City. In fact, a novelist friend of mine, Frank Frost, professor of history emeritus from UC Santa Barbara, was in the first draft stage of such a story, when he sent me an email saying, “The more research I do into the subject, the more inevitable it looks, and the more depressing. So I just gave up. No fun of the fictional sort there!”

We can debate whether Muslim extremists are religious fanatics or brilliant political manipulators. An interview with Omar bin Laden in this month’s Rolling Stone suggests that his father Osama is a very clever political strategist, and in his personal life a dominating bully. And not a man driven by religious faith at all, nor solely by sympathy for Palestinians.

But the suitcase nuke is possible, inevitable, only because of one man — Albert Einstein, who was not a secular humanist, let alone an atheist. Rather, Einstein wrote in Cosmic Religion that the more he knew about the universe, the more he sensed a unifying Spirit, Force or Principle within it all, and he regarded the pursuit of such a Unifying Principle as the inevitable and ultimate fruit of all his labors.

The men who did take his work to fruition in the form of the atomic bomb, in their own work on the Manhattan Project, were secular humanists, not religious men at all. Lawrence, Teller and Oppenheimer were all skeptical of Einstein’s cosmic religion, calling it a “romantic lapse in his thinking.” In this respect, they were the modern secular humanists of their day.

And of the three, only Oppenheimer had serious doubts and moral reservations, after the Project’s work was completed, about the applications of their work. And for that he was thrown under the wheels of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist bus.

I once met John Lawrence, brother of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who worked on the team led by Glenn Seaborg that discovered plutonium, who invented the cyclotron and founded the U.C. Lawrence Livermore Lab, which does research into atomic energy and weaponry for the U.S. Government. John and I had lunch at the U.C. Berkeley Faculty Club, and I did some promotional writing for his own projects — the Exploratorium in San Francisco, nuclear medicine at the Donner Labs, where he was director, and on behalf of his brother’s continued Lawrence Hall of Science Exhibits in the hills above U.C.

John was a Nobel Laureate, and a very interesting man. He felt a good deal of contrition about his brother’s work, and said so. “My work with the heavy ion medical accelerator is in part to redeem our family reputation,” he said. “We began our work at a time when we were confidant that with science in the forefront, all the irrational fanaticisms of mankind — the religious and the totalitarian — would subside, would be defeated. Instead, we got the calculations of fascists who claimed they were descended from the Norse Gods, and oppression from those who told us religion was ‘the opiate of the people’ — My God!”

So when my boyz were little, I took them to the Exploratorium and the Lawrence Hall of Science, where they gloried in the playful exhibits. And as for religion and the life of the Spirit, I let them figure that out for themselves as well. And the only Manhattans I care for anymore are the liquid kind. Hats off!

©2010 Dennis Green

Little Big Man

by Dennis Green

I had read a story in the Chronicle by Meridith May about “Relaxation Yoga,” and wrote the author an email about a class in yoga I’d taken in the early ‘80s from a guy named Donovan, who also taught yoga at Mills College. She wrote back that she’d taken his class there in ’87, when yoga was still a little exotic.

So that got me thinking about yoga and all the things I learned from Donovan, the visualization techniques, including the reading of auras. And recounting this, I realized I’d used the technique recently, interviewing a leading citizen of Alameda, a man who serves on an important board, and is instrumental in deciding critical policy matters that impact the whole town.

And I discovered, in the fact-checking and process of corrections, that the man is a bit of a bully. When we’d met, I’d read his aura without even thinking about it, automatically, as I always do, and it had appeared muddled, even molten, filled with a spirit of impatience and a need to be in control. So…in our exchange of emails following the interview, an interesting thing occurred.

He kept trying to make me make his case for him, instead of remaining, as the reporter I am in this relationship, neutral. And when I resisted using great stretches of language he wanted inserted in the story, he wrote, “If your story isn’t accurate, it will be easily dismissed.” This came when I insisted that I would correct inaccurate facts, but not my own independent conclusions.

So I wrote him back, “Considering the many populations of Alameda, anything we say can be easily dismissed, no matter how accurate it is. Politics is like that.” But he wanted to change my thinking. He wanted me to see the world exactly as he sees it. I once had a father-in-law like that. At least one.

And when I spoke with other people who know this particular Alameda prominent citizen, they told me, “You should see him in action in a board meeting! Yes, he intimidates as many people as he can.” So my reading of his aura was true to form: another bully-boy.

There was another “tell” about the man. Just as some pretty women have “Pretty Woman Syndrome,” and assume that they can get by on their looks, so do some men, a very few men of larger stature, have “Little Big Man Syndrome,” so used to pushing others around, and getting their way that they expect it to be always thus. Being over six feet tall, and even slightly athletic, can do that.

When I was a kid, we moved around a lot, and I was often the new kid in school. And the class bully always had to prove his dominance early on. I remember the last time I let this happen, in the third grade, in Springfield, Oregon, when the bully shoved my face into a big mud puddle after a rain, in front of a gaggle of girls.

I never tolerated such treatment again. I found that if I jumped the bully first, got on top, pounded his head on the pavement, he would never mess with me again. Worked like a charm. And once you’ve put the class bully in his place, nobody else messes with you either. There’s a new Big Damn Dawg in town.

If anything, once I learned about pack order, Alpha Males and Top Dawgs, I had to restrain myself. It’s tempting, and it’s easy, to become a bully yourself. But bullies are also cowards at heart, or they wouldn’t be so insistent about being in control. Nor so easily put in their place.

And nowadays, the bullying is more often intellectual, the effort put into imposing one’s notions of reality on other people, rather than simple classroom dominance. But the motivation, and the results, are all the same. You won’t let me act for myself, be myself, or think for myself, because you have the better way, your own way, the better way of thinking, of seeing the world.

I’d rather be a little guy with a big heart and a great fluttering uncertainty about just how this world goes, than a Little Big Man. Nobody likes a bully. And when you look in your mirror, what do you see?

©2010 Dennis Green

Haiti & God

by Dennis Green

I’m sure you’ve seen and heard some of the careless, heartless commentary about the earthquake in Haiti, and the suffering of all those hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings. Pat Robertson — described by one observer as “that senile old man who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a microphone,” — declared that the Haitian people are being punished for “making a pact with the Devil” in order to throw off slavery and French domination in the late-18^th and early 19^th Centuries.

I was, like most people, at first horrified by those comments. Is this a thinly-veiled reference to the Voodoo practiced by some Haitians? (A combination of French Catholicism and West African beliefs…) Of course, Voodoo is also practiced in Louisiana and parts of New York City, so perhaps, in Robertson’s view, Katrina and 9/11 were also signs of God’s wrath.

And when I did the research, sure enough, there were comments by Pat Robertson and also Oral Roberts attributing both Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 to the sinfulness of modern, libertine America. And I wonder how common, how far-reaching such theology really is. Do most Evangelical Christians believe that such disasters are visited only upon the sinful?

Were there no believing Christians in the World Trade Centers that day? No believing Mormons? Just as there might be a few righteous, believing Christians under all that rubble in Port-au-Prince…

Just as Muslim extremists slaughter devout Muslims in the marketplace with their suicide bombs, so too does God appear to slaughter his own children in his zeal for cataclysmic retribution. And is that a God I care to believe in?

No, I’m afraid not. If the Very Right Reverend Roberts is simply a little more outspoken than most Christians, but his views are commonly-held, conventional, even orthodox among American Evangelicals, I’d sooner make a pact with the Devil than with them. When I see the suffering of those poor people in Haiti, and imagine an all-powerful God who either caused this suffering, or allowed it to happen, or simply set tectonic plates in motion and withdrew to watch us squirm…well, let’s just say I’m not moved to Glory, Glory, Hallelujahs.

Except when I see how people have responded to the disaster. Even George W. Bush, flying in the face of rightwing pundits, has said, “Just send money. We’ll make sure it’s spent responsibly.” And the rescuers, and the doctors and nurses, and the pilots and cargo handlers, the aids workers, the millions of donors all over the world, even Katie Courick holding the hand of a thirteen year old orphaned boy suffering terrible pain — witnessing all this outpouring of compassion warms my heart and lifts my spirits. It also gives me hope for mankind.

Moreover, I’m learning a lot about the history of Haiti. The breakaway Independence of Haiti, for example, led Napoleon III to offer the U.S. the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of America, and giving us our entire Midwest. Sounds like a good deed to me. And if there is such a thing as “national karma,” I am worried for my country, and not primarily for the fact that we have fornicators and queers among us, or because our President is a light-skinned Negro.

Try our two current wars, torture, Vietnam, Korea, our own history of slavery, our treatment of the aboriginal peoples living here long before white Europeans arrived, and the Salem Witch Trials. If anybody deserves the wrath of God…

But that’s the nice thing about having Free Will. I can choose to put my faith in such a wrathful deity, or in the compassion and kindness of my fellow man or even in a benevolent deity who doesn’t beat his own children senseless. I think when all is said and done, the Pat Robertsons are a rarity, and even if they’re not, they don’t count nearly as much as they would like to believe they do.

All those millions of human beings around the world feeling genuine compassion for the people of Haiti, and helping out in any way, they’re the ones who count in my book. And I hope they count in yours.

©2010 Dennis Green

Jesus Freak

by Dennis Green

I’m reading a book by fellow Alamedan and writer Don Lattin, called Jesus Freaks, which inspires me to tell my own story along those lines…

1968. After the Gold Rush. The Hippie has been buried in a funeral procession in Haight-Ashbury. My old acid brother Jim Greene, who owns a head shop on Haight called “One Mind” leads the way.

I am still teaching freshman English in 1968, at UC Santa Barbara, but I had left the commune of sorts on that Goleta foothills acreage, the Walora Ranch, and am living on “Divorce Row” in Isla Vista. And dating a former student, Pamela, who is an Orange County Christian and a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

The Scene is going rapidly downhill, with kids sitting on the sidewalks of I.V. with their backs against storefronts, on the nod, whacked out on heroin. I see several of my own former students, dropouts now, derelict, crashing on couches where they can, or sleeping in cars, or on the beach.

I begin attending services at Pamela’s church with her — a strict Calvinist breakaway sect of the Reform persuasion, presided over by Dutch minister Dwight Poundstone. (And, yes, he has a daughter named “Paula.”)

One balmy evening, I am strolling alone on the streets of Isla Vista in the retail district near “Perfect Park,” and I wander into a storefront church where about a hundred students are gathered, including several graduate students I know well.

The place is run by an evangelical youth group called “The Children of God,” and they have centers throughout southern California. They are singing hymns this evening, and rocking out, and I am drawn to their joyful noise.

After awhile, the commotion calms down, and the youth leader, a passionate lad, offers to lead us all in prayer. We are all standing shoulder-to-shoulder in this big room, and someone turns out the lights.

Now, I’d been raised French Catholic, and had walked away from all that, or so I thought, at the age of 16. I’d been to a revival once, with a girl, of course, and had experienced the laying on of hands and a blessing. Nada. Or, as Hemingway puts it in “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name…”

But standing there that night in this storefront church in Isla Vista in 1968, something very unexpected happens. Suddenly, I become Jesus, nailed there to that cross, and I feel the weight of it as it is dropped into that hole dug into the earth on Calvary, Golgotha, and as it slams into the earth at the bottom of that hole, a shock runs through my whole system.

And that does it. I begin speaking in tongues, a torrent of language I learn later is almost certainly Aramaic. And suddenly, standing there in the dark, I feel a ball of white light descend on me, and I am one of them, born again, a Jesus Freak.

My faith endured unchanged for seven years, in spite of many disappointments and disillusionments. Pamela and I were married in that little Orthodox Presbyterian church. I helped landscape it. I saw the bank burning in Isla Vista half a block from our apartment. Anti-war protests and riots tore Isla Vista apart. The National Guard and L.A. Sheriff’s deputies were sent in, and I was arrested for breaking curfew, and the charges dropped.

A year later I was teaching at Westmont Baptist College in the afternoons, still teaching at the University mornings, and my little car was like a time machine. By the more conservative Westmont faculty members, I was shunned, but I was very popular with the students, most of them the children of ministers and missionaries.

At the OPC, I taught adult Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. At the University, I taught the King James Bible as Literature.

And then one day, Pamela left the marriage, and the Council of Elders of the Orthodox Pres blamed me, and kicked me out. A year later, I met a nice Jewish girl, and converted so that we could be married by a Rabbi.

And at a concert one night at the Warfield in San Francisco, Bob Dylan told me I could be a “Jew for Jesus!” In recent years, I’ve studied the cult of Isis, the religion of the Maya and even taken classes in Voodoo. This week, I’m wearing an Egyptian ankh.

So…what is a man to do? Ankh if you still love Jesus!

©2010 Dennis Green

[postscript: I sent this story to Don Lattin, and he wrote back:

Great story, Dennis. I love it. Are you sure the C of G didn't slip you some acid? :) ]