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? :) ]