Category: Prose

The writings of C.S. Lewis also had a strong influence on me at this time. I was particularly impacted by his two books: The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. In The Problem of Pain he engages with the problem of evil and suffering in our world, and how that reconciles or doesn’t, with our human conceptions of good and evil. I appreciated his rational and logical reasoning around these issues, and his sincerity in grappling with this most difficult subject. The Screwtape Letters is a humorous fictional series of letters written by an accomplished demon to his nephew giving him advice on how to be a successful demon through the best methods for leading humanity astray. It is poignant as well as humorous, and I enjoyed the insights it provided into the nature of our struggle with sin and the role the fallen angels have in our daily battles.

It isn’t intuitive to know how to interpret the Bible, and since it is so complex and in many places confusing or shrouded in mystery, I needed to learn how to interpret this book I loved so much. I began to learn many of the tenets of the protestant perspective on this matter, without understanding that they were only one approach; I just accepted that they were the correct approach. I learned about the concept of sola scriptura in which we believe only what is written in scripture alone, which sounded very good and very simple and straightforward, until I discovered that even the founders of the protestant point of view diverged on many points of scripture right from the start while supposedly using this concept of sola scriptura, which was supposed to provide a self-evident interpretation based on a comparison of scripture with scripture, without any outside influence. Still, I didn’t know any alternatives to this idea, and even though this concept seemed flawed to me for this reason and other reasons as well, I kept it as my working hypothesis for many years, trying to make it work, and ignoring the evidence of its shortcomings.

Another approach to the Bible that I inherited at this time was to read it literally, as a work of historical and scientific truth, as if it were intended to be used as a history book and as a science textbook. Certainly it is filled with historical truth and scientific accuracy but these aren’t the reasons it was written or given to us by God. The Bible tells us about the nature of God; who He is and what He has done, why He made us, who we are in relation to Him, what has happened to us and why, and demonstrates His love for us, His plans for us here on earth, and His plans for us into eternity in the world to come. Understanding this purpose allows an entirely different approach to interpreting and understanding scripture. Had I understood this at the time I might not have allowed myself and my faith to be cornered by the attacks of the world and the arguments levied against my faith and the Bible by historical and/or scientific arguments that reasonably run counter to it.

I considered this dilemma: if I see the Bible, and my faith which is built upon it, as needing to be correct in every historical or scientific account found there, or else if it is in error on these points then my faith is false; if this is the point, then I am easily cornered, and my faith can easily be shaken or even destroyed by every new scientific discovery. Something seemed very wrong with this approach, but I didn’t know another at the time, so I stayed the course and tried to find and listen to intelligent and skilled apologists of the faith, and those who could reason passably in support of this approach.

The church I attended needed Sunday school teachers for various grade levels. I considered what level I was most suited for based on my ability and knowledge so I picked kindergarten. I felt I could keep up with this age group and even stay a step or two ahead of them, at least intellectually, if not physically. In addition to teaching the little ones, I also helped lead a couple mission trips to Mexico to build houses and an orphanage cafeteria. Building was great and the results were needed, but the best part by far were the relationships built with others in our group and with the children living there. My fondest memories from those trips are of kicking a soccer ball or throwing a Frisbee with the little children in the dusty streets of Tijuana and praying with the other volunteers.

It was around this time, after returning from a mission trip to Mexico, that V and I had our first real discussion about having children. There were surprisingly quite a few important issues like this one that we had never discussed together prior to getting married. As it turned out she had no interest in having children. I had imagined myself having children since I could remember first thinking about it in elementary school. However, after some reflection I could also imagine adopting and not having children of my own. But as it turned out, V wasn’t interested in adopting either, although I have to give her a lot of credit for subsequently trying to go along with this idea for several years. In the end though, she really didn’t want to be a mother of children whether they were hers biologically or through adoption.

I managed to adapt to this reality and come to peace with it, although I still thought it would be great, and harbored some inner desire for children. In lieu of children, we volunteered for an organization called The Family Connection in which we helped mentor a young single mother, assisting her in job training and how to take care of her home and her two little girls; in many cases we were baby-sitters while she went to classes or to work. Again, I have to give V a lot of credit for volunteering with me at this, considering she didn’t really feel comfortable around children. I expect she did it entirely for me.  She was kind and thoughtful.

Over the years there weren’t many things that could upset me or cause me to lose my temper but one recurring thing that easily could, which I’ve alluded to earlier in this story, was being unfairly accused of something, or feeling as though my good name was under attack. I attribute this entirely to my sin of pride and vanity, and it is the antithesis to what Christ calls us to do in laying down our lives for others, in taking up our cross and following Him, or as He tells us that we are blessed when we are persecuted, and when we are reviled and when others make false accusations against us.  Shamefully, on two occasions at least, I responded reprehensibly towards V when I felt she was accusing me, and in both cases I acted disgracefully; once throwing a dish into the kitchen cabinets so forcibly that parts of it stuck into the wood and were very difficult to remove, and another occasion calling her a ‘bitch’. Oh, how I wished I could take those words and actions back, almost immediately after I had committed them, and I apologized profusely, but they were emblazoned into the sky, and my world was forever changed because of them. As much as I wish they weren’t me, or could claim that somebody else made me do it, these things were done by me and they are my history.

Crimes are committed, sometimes in the heat of anger without forethought, such as these I’ve just revealed, while others are taken deliberately; they are measured, calculated, and executed with desire. Often we can look back on these and see that we were effectively out of our mind, or ignorant, but most of the time we were just plain selfish and uncaring. There was one such incident that occurred about a year into our marriage that even now as I write, I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes for sorrow and remorse. V never knew about it and I couldn’t speak about it to anyone for years; not until a couple years after she and I divorced was I finally able to confess it to my pastor and begin to find a measure of healing and restoration.

I met up one day with a friend, actually someone I had been in a relationship with several years prior to meeting and marrying V. We spent the day together and then we spent the night together. There were plenty of opportunities to take a different course, to say goodbye, to avert what was about to transpire, but I didn’t. I remember wondering what on earth I was doing as the day wore on and we headed towards that night. I could have stopped myself but I was entirely selfish and I didn’t. At the time I knew I was far off the mark, I was sinning, and acting unlovingly and hurting V whether she knew it or not.  Only later did I learn that I was also hurting God, as King David said, “against You, and You only have I sinned and done this evil in Your sight.” But now I believe that not only did I hurt V and God by this, and hurt myself too; but in an important way, I also hurt everyone else in this world, and I hurt creation itself. I tore at the very fabric of life by my sin, and while certainly most in the world didn’t know of my particular sin, and most will never know of it, nonetheless every act of unkindness and every action taken in selfishness and un-love has a universal effect on everyone and everything else. I cannot prove this, but I feel it to be true. As good food nourishes the body and bad food breaks it down, so too, virtuous life nourishes our world and vice degrades it and breaks it down. My heart doesn’t know if I’ve eaten good food today or bad, but over time it will feel the effects of both, so too, you may not know the sin I’ve committed today, or in the past, but over time we all feel the effects. I am sorry my heart, my love, all of you out there who must bear the suffering caused by my un-love and my selfishness because I’ve made our world a little less like paradise, a little less as God intended.

(to be continued)

~FS

After several months with V, as our relationship grew closer, I finally decided to leave the community in the spring of 1997. After all of the years of intensity with MD, the manner in which my time in his course came to a conclusion almost seemed anticlimactic. One afternoon MD came to visit me on a jobsite in Tiburon. S and J were with him and the four of us sat together on the curb in front of the home where I was working. Our visit together was quick, only about ten minutes, and I simply said that I wanted to leave the community and go out on my own. MD explained some of the cons of leaving in the midst of the course, having not completed it, but in the end we all agreed, I returned to my job and they left. That was it.

V and I moved to Santa Rosa and rented a place together, coincidentally from a former graduate student who had been a teacher’s assistant for my former good friend and mentor Professor Reynolds, the one who I had helped years earlier in his mission to distribute books for the blind throughout the world. My new landlord had just as many wonderful and quixotic stories of his former teacher as I did, and we enjoyed sharing these with each other.

My connection to MD wasn’t completely severed when I left the community. We still maintained a friendship and he stopped by my jobsites from time to time to check in and see how I was doing. These were very welcome visits because I loved him and enjoyed his company a great deal. However by the end of the year, in December, his visits to my jobsites ended because he turned himself in to the courts, satisfying a warrant that had been out for his arrest, stemming from the charges that K had brought several years earlier after she left his training.

I continued to make payments on the cars after I left, even though I never saw them again and certainly never drove them. The plan had been that the payments would be taken over by the others who remained after I left, but no payment was ever made by them. It was okay though, each of us did what we could and what we were good at, and I was good at making money and paying bills. So I made payments on their cars for a year or two until I finally gave up and had them repossessed. I suppose I could have taken them back myself and sold them but they were community property in truth, even if they were my property by law. An argument could be made that it was within my rights to sell them, since I was making the payments on them, but they needed the vehicles and I didn’t, since I had subsequently purchased my own truck, and I had agreed to let them keep them when I left. It frustrated me a little that they didn’t keep up their end of the agreement but I was determined to keep up my end, to the best of my ability, regardless of what they did.

I also reasoned that I didn’t really have anything in this world that wasn’t a gift to me anyway. I certainly didn’t make myself, or give myself any of the gifts or abilities that I happened to enjoy and make use of, so in the end whatever ‘right’ I had was insignificant compared to any debt I might actually owe for all the amazing things God had given me in this life.

In addition to the great debt I owed God for my life, I also owed my mom about fifteen grand for a loan she had given to us when we opened the auto shop in Fort Bragg. The plan had been to repay her but that hadn’t really materialized, so I assured her that I would pay her back for that gracious and generous loan, and I began to make monthly payments to her. It makes me smile now and seems so funny in a way, the financial burdens that I carried with me out of the community at that time. The reason is because while they were genuinely burdensome to me, I had also carried away such a treasury of peace and freedom within me, that these material burdens seemed somewhat trivial and easy by comparison.

In our final year together MD had directed all of us to visit local churches on several occasions. Each of us would pick a church and attend alone, not as a group. One Sunday I chose to attend Saint Seraphim of Sarov Church in Santa Rosa. This was my first experience of an Orthodox liturgy and my first time inside an Orthodox church. The beauty of the iconography, the music, the vestments and the people was thrilling, and the exotic nature of the incense and the candles and the practices throughout the liturgy made me giddy. I loved it even though it seemed very strange to me. After the service, the priest introduced himself to me and spent quite a long time answering my questions and sharing his faith with me. I was very impressed that he would take so much time for me and give me his undivided attention. I was also impressed by his humility and patience in the face of my critical judgments against the use of icons. Having come from a protestant background I suppose my sentiment was almost obligatory, but it was also prejudicial. I understood icons only as one who doesn’t understand icons; and unfortunately, in my pride of course, I felt it my duty to share my superior, though spurious knowledge with him, because in reality I knew nothing other than my own prejudice. Now many years later we are friends and I am grateful that he doesn’t remember this first exchange of ideas and my childish hubris so arrogantly displayed.

In retrospect I am not sure why I didn’t go back to this church and begin attending there after I left the community, since I was eager to find a good church and learn what it means to be a true Christian. In fact, at the time it didn’t even cross my mind to go to that church, I think because I was looking for something a little more familiar and comfortable. It seemed logical to return to the Methodist church that I had grown up attending, but I felt that I hadn’t received a very good theological education there the first time around, and I didn’t want to chance that same outcome again this time. I knew of a Presbyterian church in town that my former high school music director attended and the prospect of singing for him again excited me and filled me with joy so I went there.

It turned out, though he was still a member, he had retired as their music director several years earlier. The new director was also very good and he had a small a cappella ensemble that I auditioned for and joined. Finally, I was making music again! The joy of rehearsal; and the satisfaction of discipline and attention to detail demanded by a director who was a perfectionist! It was wonderful. We practiced intonation, dynamics, staggered breathing, enunciation, clarity of tone and everything else necessary to blend our voices into one. It was hard work and a lot of fun and we became a family.

I also began to read the Bible for the first time. I had read verses here and there before, even a few books of the Old and New Testaments, and I was familiar with the basics of the faith from my childhood and youth, but I didn’t really know the story from beginning to end. It was a profound beginning for me. I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t know, and how much I hadn’t been taught when I was younger. After I finished reading it, I started reading it over again, and then one more time. After reading the Bible through about three times, I bought it on audio tape and listened to it a couple more times while driving to and from work throughout the day. This took me several years, but it was quite an education, and well worth my time. I fell in love with the Bible and all that it was teaching me about God, man, Jesus Christ, morality and eternity. My understanding was limited but I was making a start and it felt very good.

(to be continued)

~FS

All of our vehicles had been placed in my name at the time of purchase because I was in charge of all of the bills and finances for our community and my credit was spotless. As things slowly came to an end for our community over the coming year or so, and as everyone went their separate ways, these loans would end up being the cause of several defaults on the part of the others in the group, the repossession of a couple cars, and the complete destruction of my credit for many years until I could slowly rebuild it again. But before that happened, while our community was still together I found myself in Novato when the car I was driving gave up. I took it to a nearby dealership and discovered it would need thousands of dollars in repairs which weren’t worth doing and was convinced to buy a new one.

However, when MD learned that I had bought the minivan he told me to return it immediately. As I look back on this now, I wonder if he was protecting me from further damage to my credit, because I had already quite a few vehicles in my name which would prove to be albatrosses around my neck as I worked to start a life on my own. I returned the car and found myself stranded in San Rafael with no work, no money, and no vehicle. I slept on a grassy hillside just above town at night and looked for work during the day. For years I had walked neighborhoods, knocking on doors to market our landscaping work, as this was how we drummed up the majority of our business, so this is what I did. I was walking door to door in a neighborhood in Mill Valley and landed a job for a nice elderly couple. They hired me to clean and re-stain their deck. This was easy work and paid well and didn’t require heavy tools or a truck which I didn’t presently have at my disposal. Nevertheless, I also didn’t have any money to buy the cleaner or the stain or any of the tools I would need to do the work, I also had no way to get them, or bring them back to site.

I told the couple I could do the work that afternoon but would need to go get supplies and I asked if they could give me a small down payment to help with materials. I walked to the bank, cashed the check and then walked back into San Rafael where I had seen several small used car lots. As I walked back into town I came up with a good strategy.

I went into one of the dealerships and expressed interest in one of the cars on the lot and asked to test drive it. We went through the necessary motions, they gave me the key and I drove off the lot. I knew of a Home Depot not far away and made my way quickly there, purchased the materials and tools I would need to do the deck project, and then dropped them off at the jobsite. By the time I drove back onto the lot it had been a long test drive but the dealer was forgiving. I told him I wasn’t ready to buy the car but I would think about it, and then ran back to do my job in Mill Valley. That night after I had completed the work, I had $600 in my pocket, and I finally broke the fast that life had imposed on me the past day or two at a nice little Italian restaurant in town.

San Rafael was also the place where I met the young lady who I would marry the following year. Again, walking door to door looking for work, I knocked, she answered the door and we had a nice conversation. As I left, and as she closed the door behind me, I remember thinking that this was a very seminal moment in my life and I had a decision to make. I could keep walking down the path and then down the sidewalk, and continue with my life as I had been living it, or I could turn around and go back to her door, knock again, and I knew things would never be the same after that. After a moment contemplating this, I returned to her door, knocked again, and this began the process that would eventually lead me to leave the community and begin my new life with her.

I enjoyed this semblance of normalcy in my life again. Spending time with my future wife, V, was easy, relaxing and comforting. I also enjoyed the freedom to direct my life as I wished again, to have control over the decisions that impacted my life. Although I had to admit that directing my own life hadn’t always worked out that well for me in the past, and in many ways going my own way was seriously problematic, and this concept of ‘doing what I want’ was overrated. External freedoms had led me into bondage to inner enslavement.

What had appeared as freedom to choose, the right to live as I see fit, was merely a nice way of saying I was free to enter the spiritual prison of my choice. I had followed my physical lust where it would take me and ended up being responsible, in part, for the abortion of several lives. I had followed my pride, and my sense of superiority, and wound up breaking the law in a sort of vigilante justice which I rationalized away in my own mind. I had followed my anger and hurt others by the things I said or did, or the things I left undone and unsaid. I had traveled any or all of these various paths and wound up nowhere better than I had been before I left.

That was my life before living in the community, before I had willingly humbled myself and allowed myself to be taught and directed by another, by someone who I believed could take me further than I could take myself. In the end, I think that this is why anyone chooses to follow a spiritual guide, teacher, master, or father; because of a belief in what they are or in what they know, and a faith that through obedience to them one can achieve heights that they never could on their own without this other person’s direction.

In a sense, this is no different than an athlete following the direction of a coach or a trainer. They follow in order to get better at their sport. The relationship between the athlete and her coach, or the disciple and his master is one of mutual respect and trust. If it is a healthy relationship, it is a partnership, and there is no aspect of dominance or power over the other. To the outside observer my relationship with my spiritual master in this community could appear abusive, but that was never the goal, or the intent of the course, or of our relationship. There was a mutual understanding between us and common goals were always before us.  While I failed to reach many of these goals in my four years with MD, at least to the degree that was intended, I did attain many of them to some degree.

(to be continued)

~FS

The ultimate goal of our training under MD, at least in part, was to become free of enslavement to our sin, to our addictions, to anything that would limit our ability to love others in purity and truth; and additionally, for the men at least, to be fearless in the face of danger and difficulty so as to be of benefit to others in their need, in times of great difficulty. I’m sure there were many other goals as well as these which I never fully understood, due to the narrow limits of my intelligence and perception, but also because I didn’t stay to complete the course. When I left in the spring of 1997 I had completed about a third of it so I will likely never know what more was intended.

Our final year together saw our small community living in many various locations, together and apart. We lived on the south shore of Lake Tahoe, in Santa Barbara, in an old chicken coop south of Sebastopol, and several miles up a dirt road off Highway 1, in the mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in what is known as the West Waddle Creek State Wilderness. The road in was essentially a path which led up into the wilderness and in several cases, it had washed out entirely and was impassable, and one would have to walk the final mile or two up the hill to get to the old shell of a cabin which was standing on the property which we rented. The name of the road was ‘Last Chance Road’ which I found amusing, and I wondered if there were some poetic and prophetic nuances to this which I should be aware.

While in Tahoe M finally gave up, and left the community one night after another particularly difficult scenario. It surprised me on the one hand because he was among the toughest people I’ve ever met, and he seemed to be able to endure anything, but then it didn’t surprise me as well, because he was pushed to an extreme limit repeatedly, and eventually everyone has a limit I expect.

Also while in Tahoe I was finally asked to sign the contract agreement that everyone else had signed several years earlier, acknowledging the potential dangers inherent in the course and our willingness to take part freely, without coercion. This also surprised me because I didn’t think I would ever be asked to sign this contract, especially now after so much had transpired and I had already gone through so much.

I continued to work on landscape projects throughout the bay area during the week along with S and J; and the three of us would return to visit with MD and W over the weekends. Another young woman had also joined our community during this time and she stayed with MD predominantly, although she also worked with us on landscapes. Over time she became an integral member of our community and we all cared for her deeply. So it was, one Friday evening the three of us took the long drive up ‘Last Chance Road’ to join MD and the ladies at the cabin for the weekend.

The next morning we joined MD as he was grading and leveling a large area beneath a huge pine tree on the property. I don’t recall what was going to go in this place, but he had been working throughout the week cutting and filling this location, and now the three of us came with shovels and picks to join in the work. I began to shave away at the uphill side of the excavation with a pick, loosening the clay soil and eating away at the hillside, while S and J worked together to grade the area smooth along with MD. I was working some thirty feet away from the others as I heard the familiar escalation of rhetoric and volume that denoted the beginning of a ‘scenario’. It appeared that I wasn’t involved as I continued to work, and it seemed that it was only involving S and J but I turned to observe as MD swung a shovel in wide arcs towards the others. They dodged the shovel and moved away as MD came around towards me. In a flash I discovered that I was involved in this one after all. The shovel came down upon the crown of my head and I staggered for a moment.

In the next moment I considered retaliation with my pick but I didn’t want to hurt anyone, then I considered escape over the embankment which I had been creating with my pick, just moments before, but I didn’t want to run away, so I chose to endure what was coming as best as I could. Another several blows from the shovel crashed down upon my scalp and I began to feel blood washing down over my face and neck. I staggered and fell to my knees as I raised my arms in defense. I felt the shovel blade hit my arms and I lowered them to support my weight now so I wouldn’t collapse to the ground. I felt it was imperative not to collapse and I willed myself to stay on my hands and knees against the coming blows. My world became very small now as I concentrated my consciousness within myself to endure the attack. I closed my eyes and focused all my effort to try to stand up again. I believed that I was doing it and felt myself rising to my feet and I was relieved and encouraged that I hadn’t been conquered. I thought I had risen by my own efforts but only later learned from MD that in the midst of my trial, my dear friend J had come to my side and held me and it was by his help and support that I was able to stand up again. The scenario ended and J helped me walk up the hill towards the cabin.

On the way up the hill MD walked past us by a different trail, and he and I had a brief exchange. I was covered in blood and had a number of wounds on my head and arms but I was in good spirits all things considered, and I imagined how strange I must look being up here in the woods and so damaged in my body. Maybe I was delirious, but I joked about how tough the squirrels are in these hills, implying that my wounds had come in an attack by an angry squirrel. We smiled and laughed for a moment, and then continued on our way. The others helped clean me up and bandaged me, and I went off to my small campsite across the road, out on a small rocky promontory overlooking the ocean in the distance far, far below.

Interactions like this one and others like them made me stronger, more resilient and increased my confidence.  I felt that I could face pretty nearly anything or anyone and nobody could really harm me. This of course was one of the goals of the course, but another was to be ready and willing to fight back if the situation warranted, and this goal I never reached. I just didn’t want to hurt anyone, at least not anyone I knew, if I could help it. So in subsequent altercations, when MD would try to get me to fight back and defend myself I never was able to do it.

Eventually we would be on our own again, the course would end, and we would be sent out to help bring healing to “a world at war with itself,” as MD put it, “to defend the weak against ravenous wolves intent on destruction, and to stand in the breach, offering ourselves in service to others.” My personal weaknesses precluded me from arriving at this worthy goal, but I achieved some small measure of it before I left and went out on my own.

(to be continued)

~FS

Of the many benefits to living outdoors, free from the confines of a stuffy bedroom, under a canopy of trees and stars, laying amidst a panoply of earthy smells which stimulate the mind, soothe the soul, and relax the body, one of my very favorite is the closeness it affords for interacting with other members of the animal kingdom.

Laying hidden in the grasses of a meadow, gazing up at the night sky, while a cool and then warm gentle breeze blows across my face and through my hair, it is inescapable the observation of how interwoven my life is with that of my surroundings. I exhale and the trees inhale, in the shelter of my tarp little creatures find warmth and comfort and perhaps even a little companionship.

This particular night I nested down at the edge of a meadow, under a tree, in a private setting and drifted off to sleep. Sometime in the night a doe found her way to my campsite and also nestled under the tree and drifted off to sleep. The next morning she awoke before me, so that when I opened my eyes and looked her way I saw her dark black eyes watching over me. “Good morning, my friend,” I said to her. “I hope you had a good sleep.” She shifted her weight and looked to her side. I yawned, and grabbed a sip from my water-bottle while she continued watching me. The sun was rising in the sky but neither of us were in much hurry to get started with our plans for the day. I had a job to get to and work to do, and she had food to forage, but we just continued lazily to enjoy the gathering warmth of the morning and the sounds of the birds singing from the neighboring trees.

As I began to gather my things together she pulled herself up and shook off the night sleep. I thanked her for joining me, and for giving me the honor of sharing my campsite with her, and then she slowly walked off into the brush and out of sight.

Another evening I settled into my sleeping bag at the edge of a small stream, under the dripline of a group of large, old, oak trees. I set my ground-tarp on the dry, dusty dirt beneath the trees and soon fell asleep. Towards midnight, as the full moon lit the sky and my surroundings, I began to dream a strange dream in which something was burrowing into my head. In my dream, I heard a continual scratching or a pattering, like water dripping on plastic, and I felt an incessant tugging at the hair on the back of my head. I slowly awoke and discovered this was not a dream at all. Something alive was in fact digging and scratching the dirt beneath my head, pattering at my plastic tarp, and yanking on my hair.

I didn’t move so as not to frighten whatever it was that was behind me trying to get into my skull. But it was difficult to stay still in this position, and with my concern growing, especially as I began to consider the possibilities of what creature might be behind me, practically and essentially on top of my head. I decided that it must be a squirrel trying to get at an acorn or something, so I slowly, ever so slowly, lifted my head slightly, and slowly turned to face my nocturnal hair stylist, to get a better look. All the while he continued to scratch and dig at the dirt, paying little attention to me.

I wished then that it had been a squirrel but unfortunately it was a skunk. My alarm increased dramatically but I held my position. He looked up from his labors and stared into my eyes. We were as close as lovers, eye-to-eye, and could easily have kissed, had we wanted to, and were he not a skunk. But I had no interest in being this close, yet I didn’t want to startle him by moving away too quickly, as he went back to his business of digging and scraping at the earth. I realized he had no interest in my at all, I had merely been in his way; so I slowly sat up, and then slowly slid out of my sleeping bag, and then scooted across the dry ground to a reasonable and safe distance, and waited.

In time, my smelly visitor either found what he had lost, or gave up searching, and turned and waddled away.

Not every close encounter with animals ends well. Sometimes people get eaten. As I sat on the beach in Santa Barbara watching a small pod of dolphins playing in the water about a hundred yards off shore, I reflected on a story I had heard about a poor tourist in Honolulu who had mistaken a group of sharks for a pod of dolphins, and had excitedly swam out to see them but ended up being attacked and killed by the sharks instead. I was certain the pod I was watching were not sharks however, because of the way they jumped out of the water playfully, and by their dolphin-like shapes silhouetted against the hazy summer sky.

I decided to swim out and see them closer and maybe get a chance to spend some time with them. I had never seen a dolphin up close in the wild before and these dolphins were clearly in a good mood and likely would enjoy my company. I knew for a fact that I would enjoy theirs.

As I approached the pod through the ocean surf, and as the water grew calmer further out from shore, I decided on my strategy so as not to alarm them. I would approach them not as a human, with arms extending and legs kicking, but as a piece of humble, innocent and non-threatening seaweed. My method of approach would be quiet and peaceful, as one treading water very slowly, with a smooth, long, flowing motion. I pictured myself as seaweed being carried along by the ocean currents as I drew near to them. I figured that this way I would be just another part of the environment, as far as they were concerned, and as innocuous to them as a jellyfish. In this manner, I inserted myself into the middle of their pod, as they swam in wide circles around me.

Without a doubt this became one of the truly memorable and most wonderful experiences of my life. In their midst I could hear them clicking and squeaking to one another. Two small calves stayed close to their mother as they made their rounds, lunging above the ocean’s surface, while occasionally she would stop and peer at me with a cautious eye, and then say something to one of her cohorts. These three, along with several others swam slow, tight circles around me as they spoke with one another, while another group of two or three swam at a greater distance breaching and leaping, sometimes very high into the air. I stayed with them for about twenty minutes as they continued about their business, until finally the pod moved off to the north and swam away.

(to be continued)

~FS

One Friday afternoon I returned from working in Santa Rosa, and joined the others who were spending the week at a Christian Retreat Center in the woods south of Fort Bragg. It was a beautiful rustic campground with log cabins, outdoor fire-pits and other amenities situated beneath the redwoods. Among the activities available for our use were river kayaks. That evening I learned that we were all going to go kayaking the following morning in a nearby river. This sounded like a lot of fun although I was a little concerned because it was early spring and the river was still flowing fairly high and fast, it would be an unguided trip, and several of us had never been in a kayak before. I had taken kayaking lessons years earlier and knew how to roll, and the basics of navigating a river so I felt okay about the adventure for myself but still had a foreboding feeling about the event.

Apparently a conversation earlier in the day between S and MD had spawned our impending kayaking challenge. In this conversation S and J had both addressed our world with a certain prideful disdain and had underestimated the power of nature, and overestimated the ability of humans in relation to the cosmos. MD devised this event as a means of educating us all firsthand of the awesome power of water, even a river which appeared to be relatively small and seemingly innocuous. Perhaps we would gain a healthy respect for the power of nature and maybe learn a little humility as well, and hopefully not sink along the way.

The next morning, as we gathered the kayaks and other gear into our trailer the idea of sinking seemed much more likely to me. I had always used a fabric skirt that covered the cockpit and kept water out of the kayak, so when I learned we wouldn’t be using these I was surprised, but then I figured since most of us hadn’t used a kayak before, it would likely be safer without them, and easier to get out quickly if needed. Even so, I wondered about water getting into the boats and how that would work out. Each of us was also going to be wearing large rubber boots as we navigated in our kayaks. These boots certainly offered excellent protection against sharp rocks so I was glad of that, but I could only picture them filling with water and transforming into big rubber anchors in the event we fell out of our kayaks and into the river. These boots became my biggest concern and I determined not to fall out of my kayak no matter what.

The seven of us took off from shore with little difficulty and a lot of hilarity. Shrubs and trees hanging over the margins created thickets which managed to trap several of us right from the start. Getting untangled from the overgrowth became our first obstacle as the current pressed us deeper into the branches and spun our kayaks. I managed to avoid this hazard but was unable to work my way upstream again to offer any assistance to the others. Not long though, all of us had worked our way out and were traveling together at a nice clip downstream.

There is something thrilling about a river adventure: the wild, rushing water, the beautiful and varied nature one passes as they, in a sense, fly past it; the joyful, almost childlike enthusiasm that is drawn out of one as they rise and fall on the currents, and as the cold water splashes them in the face. It is simply exhilarating. We were having a great time and everyone was staying upright and afloat. I supposed I had overreacted earlier and had been too concerned as I had imagined dangers that perhaps weren’t there. The fact that the river was still swollen actually had the benefit that many of the boulders which could have threatened us were deeply submerged and posed less of a threat, and were one of us to capsize there was a smaller chance of hitting our head on one of these submerged obstacles.

About midway through our river adventure we began to hit more frequent and longer stretches of whitewater, which became more difficult to navigate, and required greater finesse, or greater brute strength to get through. Because of this, our group began to get stretched out and greater distance grew between us, leaving us to fight our way downstream in smaller groups or alone. It wasn’t long before we began to lose each other around bends, in eddies, or finally underwater. One by one the currents began to claim the members of our expedition; toppling us over, carrying us submerged, or pulling us over rock-strewn shallows. Occasionally I saw an unmanned kayak float past me, or one or two of my friends pulling themselves, bedraggled, up out of the water and casting themselves, half-drowned onto the dry rocks at the river’s edge. We began our journey that morning, like children, joyfully laughing and giddy with the excitement of the day’s coming surprises and were ending it that afternoon in a struggle for survival.

My day on the river ended with me launching over a large submerged boulder, taking some air, and losing control when I reentered the water further downstream. To my relief when I fell out of the kayak my rubber garden boots didn’t turn into two large anchors as they filled with water because the river was shallow enough that I was able to scramble across the bottom, out of the main flow and into a calmer area near the river’s edge.

In a sense this river trip was a microcosm of our years together in the community; it began in pure joy, coupled with an overwhelming sense of anticipation, adventure and hope, and as the journey continued it grew more and more difficult, so that one-by-one each of us found ourselves in a struggle for survival. By the grace of God no one was lost, or seriously injured. However, we were all taxed physically, emotionally and mentally.

As the evening approached we somehow managed to collect all of the kayaks and gear into our trailer, and all of the members of our group into our van, and drive back to the retreat center. By nightfall we were all back in our cabins and ready to sleep. It was a quintessentially MD kind of day; a complex and complicated mixture of delight, adventure, thrilling fun and laughter interwoven with struggle, danger, tension, difficulty and fear. In short it was just another day at the office, so to speak; the kind of day I had grown accustomed to, and one that yielded an abundance of food for thought, a bounty of personal growth, and copious material for either a good story, or a cautionary tale—or perhaps a little of both.

(to be continued)

~FS

Why would I stay in a situation like this? What would draw me to this in the first place? Hope. I had hope that it would lead to something better. I had hope that this training would lead me to transcend everything within myself that was unloving, selfish, greedy, fearful, arrogant, lazy, all the qualities I wanted to overcome. I had hope that all of the beautiful and incredible ideas that MD had about how to transform our world, and to heal it, and give it meaning and wholeness could come true. With this hope I also had uncommon desire, and a willingness to sacrifice just about anything to attain it and help bring it to fruition within myself and hopefully into the world as well. The only reason I say it is uncommon is that my desire for an alternative to this world and what it had to offer, was strong enough to give all of my possessions away, to leave my friends and family and all the comforts I had enjoyed, and to suffer physical abuse. I believe all of us desire a better world and want to be better people but I wanted it more than money, or possessions, or comfort, or safety and that is all I mean by uncommon because I didn’t know very many people that wanted it that much and were willing to sacrifice anything in hopes of attaining it.

 

I also didn’t have a good theological understanding of man’s situation here on earth. I yearned for Eden, for Paradise and felt intuitively that we are still supposed to be there, but for our sin, however I didn’t have any concepts of the purposes of our suffering here in the meantime; the facts of our fall from grace and the curse under which we live, toiling by the sweat of our brows. I was impatient and unwilling to settle here, and I tried to squirm out of this suffering by seeking my own way. I was infected by pride and believed that I could do anything, and that transforming the world was possible.

 

I also didn’t want to participate in the tiresome daily grind of life. I wanted adventure and a different kind of challenge. I wanted something interesting and stimulating, as opposed to the boredom and drudgery I perceived in every other option the world offered me. I didn’t want to go to school any longer and just sit theorizing about things, I didn’t like any of the job opportunities or even the idea of going to job day after day, over and over again ad infinitum. And I couldn’t imagine having children, because I was selfish, in my own desires, and I doubted my ability to care for anyone else when I could barely make it in this world myself. I knew I needed to gain more strength and ability to endure and persevere in this world, before I could ever settle down and have a ‘normal’ life, and I was ironically gaining these skills in this community. I say it is ironic because one could say that by joining this community I was fleeing life and yet through it, I was gaining all the skills I would need in order to be successful in the world after I left it.

 

In addition to these reasons I also stayed because I liked the physical and emotional challenge that it provided. It was exciting and I felt empowered through the process of facing, enduring and overcoming struggles; and I liked the fact that they came in such an untamed way, outside the confines of ordinary humdrum life. The fact that it could be so difficult and potentially dangerous also appealed to my vanity as I could imagine myself to be exceptional and elite in some way. This personal failing or weakness, my vanity, can’t be underestimated, in the power it had to direct my decisions and motivate my actions.

 

 

 

While I was healing from the recent altercation, I stayed for several days living at the auto shop. One evening, as I was resting in my sleeping bag on the shop floor—the shop had closed and I was alone—suddenly there was a tremendous crashing and banging on the metal roll-up door and the deep thunderous voice of a man screaming that he was going to kill me, then he thrust shredded pieces of a manila envelope and its contents under the door and then continued to smash his fists against it screaming. I knew immediately that this was a local man who had been given a restraining order by our community, because he was extremely belligerent, clearly mentally unstable and violent. I assumed the shredded contents on the ground before me were the restraining order, that obviously he didn’t mind violating, which was surprising to me, since the police station was right across the street from our shop. He eventually gave up banging on the door and left and I returned to my sleeping bag. This was not the only time I experienced the wrath of our neighbors or those we had dealings with because, as I mentioned, MD could really push people’s buttons and he was typically several steps ahead of them, which can really make people mad.

 

As part of my role in the community I was often the front person for our business dealings or other interactions, so if someone was unhappy, they would often come to me and voice their displeasure so to speak. Sometimes it could be unpleasant, such as in this case, but other times it was mildly amusing. For a period of time we rented office space from an attorney in Occidental CA and he was a very sweet and gentle man. I really liked him quite a lot. I wasn’t involved in most of the situations that occurred with him, and I hadn’t spent much time at this particular office, but I was usually the one that paid him the rent and took care of things that needed to be related between our community and him. After several months, from which I gathered, there had been a lot of exasperating and frustrating interactions with us, he finally asked us to vacate. When I returned the key and we said our goodbyes he said to me, “Francis, you are a very nice person and I really like you, but I wish I had never met you.”

 

I didn’t take that personally and I understood what he meant. It could be really hard, and I represented this hardship. I was the face of his difficulties, in a way, even if I hadn’t been directly the cause of any of them. There was another situation with a client of our landscaping business. I was installing a large flagstone patio in the backyard of his new residence. Everything was going smoothly on the project until, at some point about midway through the project, MD began coming to site and calling me away to other tasks. I felt a great deal of responsibility to finish this job in a timely manner, but over and over again he came and had one or another immediate and urgent needs that I had to accompany him. I tried to find other times to work but almost every time MD would find a way to call me away. Eventually this client became understandably upset at me, and I promised, giving my word to complete the project by a certain date, and to be there every day. But of course, MD was creating a scenario which would stress the limits of this man’s patience, while putting me in a position of shouldering the blame and the client’s anger for a situation that I didn’t have much control over, given the fact that I had agreed foremost to be obedient to MD during my time in his course. In the end, the whole relationship with this client fell apart, my client lost every trace of trust in me, which I couldn’t blame him for, and he fired me from the job. I felt so bad about it. Instead of taking me to court, this client and I ended up in arbitration over the job, and it was decided that I had to pay him some fairly substantial amount of money due to the difficulty I had caused and because I hadn’t fulfilled the contract. It was fair, although I knew that I could have completed the project beautifully and on time, and I would have done so under other circumstances, but it was part of what I had signed up for with MD.

 

As I will explain more later, the thing in my life that can typically most easily bring me to anger or exasperation, is the feeling that I am being unfairly or unjustly accused of something, and this is exactly the reason MD created this situation, so that I would be accused by this client and held to account for things that appeared to be by my choice, but in reality had been orchestrated for me; and having to face the music, so to speak, and deal with the embarrassment and shame of being taken to arbitration, which never in a million years would I have allowed to happen if it were entirely up to me.

 

And the goal of all of this? To gain humility and meekness in the face of unfair accusation, and in the face of unjust or false persecution, so to speak. This trap that MD had set for me, pushed me up against one of the things that most worries me or annoys me: an attack against my good name, and by this scenario I had to either continue to defend my pride or let it go and humble myself before this client. To some degree I did let it go, and I gained freedom over my pride. But as I’ve said, this is one of my most troublesome issues in life, so it isn’t something that I conquered entirely in this one scenario.

(to be continued)

~FS

With MD, and life in the community with him, I never doubted that the goals were admirable and noble, and I have always believed that he wanted to assist others in achieving a higher level of spiritual life, in the sense of becoming free of vice, sin, or anything that held people enslaved to these things within themselves, so that they could be free, and live a life of love, as God intended us to live. The methods of his training course, and his methods in working with those outside of our community, I understood would always be controversial, and I’m sure he knew this as well. He wasn’t unaware of how these methods would be perceived, and how unusual they would appear to most people. But he believed that it was worth the risk of being misunderstood, perhaps disliked or even hated, and ultimately imprisoned, in order to help people get free.

 

To many people, including some within our community in the end, the methods were wrong and harmful, but for me they yielded positive and good results. This isn’t to say that I enjoyed the intense physical aspects of the training, or even that I always thought they were beneficial at the time they were occurring, but as I look at the growth I enjoyed because of his training and the freedom I have felt in so many areas of my being because of these methods I am grateful and glad to have had the unique opportunity of participating in his course and in staying as long as I did.

 

At the same time I’m not sure I could recommend it to very many other people as a way that they should try. One had to be able to forgive all things or very nearly, to trust in all cases or as close to that as possible, to not give in to anger or fear at least not for very long and certainly not after a ‘scenario’ had concluded, and had to maintain a mental and emotional equilibrium throughout the difficult challenges so as not to fall into some poor state of mental or emotional health. I think the pitfalls were many, and the dangers also, but with trust in the process it could work, though I believe the hand of God ultimately was behind all of it, and was the protection that truly carried me through. Even so, with all this said, there did come a time when I was no longer able to persist and I had to call it quits, but that is still a little further into the story, and there is more to say about my training with MD before I get to that.

 

With the tools we had gained in Santa Cruz we opened an auto repair shop in Fort Bragg in the spring of 1996. M was a pretty good mechanic and he did all the work. I had completed my projects in Santa Cruz and was finding new projects in Santa Rosa along with S and J who accompanied me on most of this work. It was only a couple hour drive between Santa Rosa and Fort Bragg so we were able to go back and forth between our work and time with the other members of the community during the week or on weekends. During the course of this time I was brought into a test that related to some of the primary precepts that MD wanted men to learn, that being honor and devotion to women, courage in the face of danger and evil, and gentleness expressed to all through our thoughts and actions.

 

I am unable to get into the dialog of this situation because the words escape me and I don’t want to misrepresent what happened but it came to a head one day while I was working in Santa Rosa and via a phone call with MD he directed me to drive back to see him immediately in Fort Bragg and that I should be very worried because this could lead to my death. Okay. For the most part I didn’t expect that I would actually die if I returned, I expected it was hyperbole or poetic in some way, however I had some doubt about this. I just couldn’t imagine that it would come to that especially after all the time we’d invested in my training and the future goals of our community of which I was somewhat integral, at least as I saw it.

 

In so many cases in life the fear of the unknown or the fear stirred up by our wild imaginings are so much worse than what ends up actually happening. In this case, they were about the same. Although the fear of anticipation was probably more nauseating, as I drove up to Fort Bragg, than the feelings I had once I arrived. I walked up to the front door of the house knowing I had an unpleasant fate inside, to say the least. I had considered not driving to Fort Bragg and calling it quits that day but again something inside me spurred me on and I wanted to face whatever possibly might come. I wanted to be brave.

 

I walked through the door and down the main hallway to the office near the back and it began immediately. I saw MD had taken up a simple ballpoint pen and held it firmly in his hand in a manner one might hold a small dagger. I could see he held it with only perhaps a half inch, maybe a little more protruding beyond his fist. I understood immediately this was the weapon, but I also perceived that it wasn’t intended to kill, or even maim, because he was holding it in such a way that were it to puncture me, it wouldn’t go but a half inch or so into muscle.

 

He came at me and stabbed me in the shoulder. As I fell back into the hallway he pursued and stabbed again in my arm. I shielded myself with my other arm and fled into one of the front rooms where he followed and began to stab with the pen repeatedly while punching with his other fist until I fell to the floor and then he began kicking. I don’t think this lasted very long, and eventually I made my way out the front door and back to my truck. It was evening and the roads were fairly empty. I sat in the driver’s seat trying to focus ahead of me but could hardly see. My eyes were both nearly swollen shut and everything was spinning. The auto shop was a couple miles south and that was where I needed to go in order to get cleaned up and get some sleep. M would be there and he could give me a hand. I turned on the truck and pulled slowly out of the driveway. It was impossible to make the world stop spinning and swirling; the lines down the middle of the road climbed into the sky, and the curbs on either side of me twirled and wouldn’t stay in place. However, if I concentrated very hard I could find a small tunnel of vision that remained in the vortex of all of this spinning and I followed that down the street, working with all of my effort to ignore and also recalibrate the spinning I was seeing, in such a way, that I hoped would account for the deviation from reality of what I was seeing so that I could drive safely to the shop and not hurt anyone.

 

Of course I shouldn’t have been driving, and I was fairly certain of this even as I was driving, but it seemed, as I went along, that I was managing and I didn’t see an alternative. I knew I didn’t have the strength to walk there and I didn’t want to involve anyone else that didn’t know the circumstances of my situation. I made it to the shop, parked and went inside. M saw me and knew immediately what had happened from his own experience. He more than any of us men, had experienced the type of thing I just went through. He helped me get cleaned up pretty well, treated my wounds, and then I set up my sleeping bag on the shop floor, and went to sleep.

(to be continued)

~FS

We arrived in New Mexico on a cold winter’s night. We had turned off of Highway 40 in eastern Arizona and headed north on Highway 12 towards the ‘Devil’s Highway’ as the sign said. This sounded foreboding, and as we exited and began driving into the deep night and the barren landscape, it also felt foreboding. Had I known then what was in store for us up ahead, in about an hour’s time, I would have clearly understood this foreboding. We continued driving through the deepening darkness while a light snow began to fall and the temperatures plummeted. I was driving the Taurus with MD in the passenger seat and we were leading the way, while S. was driving the Toyota pickup behind us, then J. in his car and lastly M. and S. driving the Suburban and trailer loaded with all of our supplies. It was a quiet night and I was tired from driving. We had been steadily climbing for a little while; outside it was pitch black and I had no sense of our surroundings. The road crested and then began its descent; not long after that, as we came around a curve, I lost control of the car. It began sliding across the road, gently and smoothly, as if in slow motion, but inexorably we slid in the direction of the utter darkness just beyond the other side of the road. MD grabbed the wheel, and turned into the slide, correcting us, as we had also begun to spin. The car straightened out and I saw the very end of a guardrail up ahead, which we proceeded to slam into, bringing us to an abrupt stop. A moment later we felt the Toyota slam into the back of our car; and a moment after that we heard J. plow into the back of the Toyota and then felt the force transfer into our car. I waited for a few moments more, expecting to feel the Suburban ram into all of us. It was a brief span of time as we waited, and in this moment’s pause I considered our position as the last two collisions had jogged the end of our car loose, and we were aimed squarely into the unknown. It seemed likely, even certain, that when the Suburban would hit us, with all of that mass, we would be thrust out into the darkness, and though I couldn’t see what was out there, I felt as if it would be better not to find out.

Several more moments passed and then, as I looked through our back windshield, I was relieved to see M. pass slowly by, in control, and on the proper side of the road. By God’s grace nobody was hurt and all of the vehicles could still be driven, though they had sustained a fair amount of body damage. Several miles up the road we found a small church and parked our vehicles there. It was very late by now, and we all were very tired from the previous events, so we set up our tents in a flat, open field to the side of the church building and fell asleep.

The next morning we awoke to find that it had snowed quite a bit and we were in the midst of a wide and expansive plain, with little more to be seen than the church building we had camped next to and a few other small homes in the distance, and mountains far beyond that. The church was at a crossroads of the little connecting road that we had been on, and the highway which headed back south to Gallup NM. We were about an hour or so north of Gallup and planned to go in that direction, but before we did, we drove back to the scene of the accident to get a sense of what had happened. Clearly we all hit a patch of ice on the road and lost control; fortunately the weight of the Suburban gave it more friction and connection to the asphalt, enabling M. to keep it going in the right direction. We pulled up alongside the section of guardrail that had kept us from whatever was on the other side, and as we parked, I realized that we had truly escaped death. Just the other side of the guardrail, the earth disappeared and there was only a vast emptiness. A deep and rocky gorge ran alongside the road and it wasn’t clear how deep it went, but it was deep enough. Across this chasm, perhaps sixty feet or so, the rocky face of the other side looked ragged and ominous. The early morning light cast gloomy shadows across the craggy rocks and gave them a threatening appearance. Leaning over the edge as far as was safe, and attempting to see into the depths, none of us could determine anything down below, unable to lean out far enough to see over the edge.

Our next campsite was on a plateau high above the surrounding desert, some twenty or thirty miles to the east and slightly north of Gallup, not far from Hosta Butte. We found a remote area along the ridge of the plateau, amidst the rock faces and outcroppings and settled in for the next month or two. I found a shallow cave to set up my sleeping bag. It was actually more of a deep shelf carved into the face of the rock. It was not much deeper than the width of my bag, and not much longer either; yet it afforded enough additional room to keep my few personal effects, along with my sleeping bag and a groundpad.

Before driving to our new campsite we stopped off in Gallup to buy a few provisions; and it had to be very few indeed because we only had seven dollars between the six of us. We found a discount grocery store and purchased a large bag of rice, a gallon can of honey, a large bag of beans and a substantial package of tortillas to live on until we could find work and make some additional money. We had enough money to get the vehicles to our campsite but not much further. However, the Toyota pickup still had enough to make a trip back into town so M. and I left the others on the plateau and returned to Gallup to find work and earn money for more food and gasoline. The others spent time setting up the camp. Because the weather was so cold and the wind was strong on top of the plateau, they didn’t set up the larger tents or the kitchen, but instead excavated into the earth and created a large protected living space roughly 4 feet deep and about twenty feet across. It was semi-circular, and in the middle of the straight side, they constructed a large fireplace using soil and melted snow. Over the top of this living space they erected large tarps set on branches placed vertically as pillars to raise the roof slightly, which allowed us to walk about the space only slightly hunched over; and then they tied the tarps off all around the perimeter to other rocks or vegetation to hold them in place. The fire generated a lot of heat in this small space and kept us very comfortable against the elements outside.

Meanwhile, in Gallup, M. and I struggled to find work by day, and slept in our truck bed by night. We found some day labor, unloading hay bales from a semi-trailer and stacking them into a barn, which paid three dollars per hour. It was back breaking work and we managed to make about twenty-five dollars each, after a full day of effort; but we slept effortlessly afterwards. Nights were cold in the bed of the truck, as the snow fell, covering us and our sleeping bags while we slept. During our stay in Gallup, he and I cobbled several jobs together and raised a small sum of money, enough to keep all of our vehicles fueled and enough for food and other essentials.

The desert rock and the towering plateau, from which one could gaze upon the world far below or at the mountains east of Albuquerque in the extreme distance, set the scene for our bucolic and austere life. Frugality was at the center of our existence, yet even closer to our lives’ center, was the sense and feeling of brotherly love and familial caring. The world’s vicissitudes had faded for us long ago, and now we lived simpler lives, hand to mouth, and close to the earth. It was easy here to feel as if the modern world had disappeared and gone away, and we could touch something beyond time, and taste a bit of eternity. It was also a good setting for living out the life that Christ exhorts of His followers; to live as one, sharing all things in common without private property, caring for one another and using our gifts for the benefit of the whole.

In January 1994 I was hired to work as a waiter in an upscale restaurant of a local hotel in Gallup. After weeks of sporadic day labor for little money I was relieved to finally have a job that could bring in steady and good income. I drove back to our home on the plateau to share the good news. The next day MD said it was time for us to move, so we packed everything up and drove southwest to Tucson AZ. I was a little stunned and disappointed and suggested that maybe I should stay for a little while to earn money and then join everyone later but that wasn’t to be our plan, so I quit before I started, and we moved our community to Arizona.

From a practical perspective it didn’t make sense not to keep the job at the restaurant, especially after the struggles of the previous weeks, but then I had to remember that our goals were not worldly, and while we certainly needed money to survive, it was a secondary consideration to the spiritual purposes of our training. In fact, struggling to get my job and then letting go of it immediately thereafter actually fit perfectly with the goal of being detached from the outcome of my actions; and leaving at that precise moment helped me to gain humility in the face of my imagined success, and also through the process of relinquishing my immediate goals and achievements.

(to be continued)

~FS

It turned out I didn’t have very long to wait; several hours later, around midnight, I saw headlights approaching in the darkness and soon we had the trailer hooked up and we were returning to our camp. Not many days after this we broke camp, packed up and began our trek south. We took the two-lane highway leading towards Mt Lassen late one afternoon as winter was beginning to settle across the area. Snow was already collecting in shady hollows here and there along the side of the highway and further up the surrounding slopes, their tops were already beginning to turn white. Just as the day began to turn to dusk we pulled into a remote state park, however, everything was closed for the season and the gates were locked. There were no alternative options anywhere nearby and we had a caravan: our mobile-kitchen Toyota pickup, the Taurus, our Suburban and trailer, along with J.’s little car which he still drove, though we intended to sell it; as he wasn’t yet able to accept the vow of poverty, and he still had attachment to his possessions.

Provision in our community was typically given to each of us, for our particular weaknesses, as we struggled to overcome them. I found that it was significantly easier to battle these things, with the help of MD yet, even so, weaknesses are strong within us and do not disappear overnight. For J. he had more difficulty with giving up personal property than others did, so he was allowed more leniency in this respect, but with the goal still being un-attachment and freedom from possessiveness.

One of the tenets of our training, as directed and taught by MD, was that whatever came between us and the noble virtues, such as selflessness, service, moderation, purity of thought and action, kindness and so on, these obstructions were the very things we must confront and overcome; this being done by experiencing again whatever it was that made us originally choose to cave in to these weaknesses or vices, and then in the midst of the struggle with these experiences, to choose this time, rather to act or think differently, and thereby create the beginning of a new habit that is more honorable and virtuous and loving, and which leads us to freedom from that old “stuff” as we called it. I had a whole litany of issues that I had to confront and work to transform, which I will describe in more detail as this story unfolds, but in brief I was weak in the face of conflict and needed to regain strength of love in the face of violence and anger, I also was very prideful and had thoughts of superiority over others, so I had to confront the pains of humiliation and through that find a new place inside that doesn’t artificially prop myself up by using these things as compensation; and there were many more things, such as lustful thoughts, and avoiding conflict, which I won’t go into now, but will share when the time is right.

So there we were, our caravan, far away from any towns, and without a place to park or camp for the night. To the side of the locked gates the hillside was gradual and the ground was hardened by the cold. It seemed possible for our smaller vehicles to weave their way around and past the myriad of trees that covered the hill and make their way through the forest and back down onto the asphalt further inside the gates where we could park and stay for the night. However, the Suburban and trailer combined were easily thirty-five feet long and also quite bulky. It was impossible to get these through the trees, there were hundreds of trees, large and small, scattered over the hillside and they were growing very closely together, and the route was several hundred feet to get around and back onto the park road behind the gate.

Nevertheless MD assessed the situation and told us to drive through and we would make it. The smaller vehicles went first and made it through to the other side without too much trouble, although in some places the angles and space available between the trees were sharper and tighter than I had anticipated, and we did almost get a vehicle stuck once or twice. But when M. began to drive the Suburban towing the trailer, up the hillside and into the trees, I was nearly certain he would end up getting lodged between several trees and it would be immovable. Each of us had a role as M. slowly inched his way through the trees; I was scouting one side and providing information to MD and M as they navigated forward. K. and J. and S. also had stations alongside the Suburban and trailer, and gave information about available space between the trees. All of us had the additional task of pulling branches back out of the way as M. continued to thread his way through the trees, while MD walked on ahead and plotted the route. On several occasions we used ropes and a winch to bend smaller trees aside, allowing passage, and multiple times we needed to unhitch the trailer, move the Suburban into a different trajectory, and then reconnect them again heading in a slightly altered direction. As we inched forward I began to realize that we somehow were actually going to get this camel through the eye of the needle, and then I began to realize another thing; that this was a lesson about facing the seemingly impossible and with perseverance, conquering it; and also it was about teamwork, and the joy of tackling something unimaginable together. Eventually, several hours later, the Suburban pulled off the hillside, out of the trees, and back onto the asphalt far down the road, on the other side of the gates; and moments later the trailer came out as well. We all enjoyed a brief celebration of our victory, and then proceeded to set up camp for the night.

The next morning we left the same way we came in, although we were better at it this time and did it more quickly and with less difficulty. We got back on the highway heading south and after several hours, we cut back west, across the state, and over to the coast. This was the beginning of one of the lightest and most enjoyable periods of my time in this community. I had no idea where we were going, or where we would end up, but we had such a great time getting there. We stopped along the coast to spend the night on a beach just north of Salmon Creek. MD gave me a well-known book to read, Be Here Now by Ram Dass. I found a shallow cave against the cliff-face and retreated to read it, while the rest of the group played on the beach and enjoyed each other’s company. Later in the day I finished the book, since it isn’t long, and then joined the others. In the morning I awoke as my brothers and sisters pulled me, in my sleeping bag, down the sand and into the surf. It was a surprising and entertaining way to be awoken.

We continued driving down the coast of California with our caravan. I was in the Suburban with MD and he began to talk with me in a more severe tone of voice. As we continued driving, the situation became increasingly tense as he confronted me. After several minutes of this he called to the other cars over our walkie-talkies to stop and pull over. He demanded I exit the vehicle, which I did, and then on the side of the coast highway, he began to yell at me and then motioned to pick up a stone to throw at me. I waited to see what would happen, my pulse had become quite elevated, and I was concerned about the possible outcomes of my situation. The scenario ended after a few more moments, then he got back in the Suburban and called me to join him, which I cautiously did; and then we all continued driving south again. This was the first time he had interacted with me in this manner and with this intensity. I was startled, and didn’t completely know what to make of it, though I understood, in theory, what we were doing and why. It was quite different however, to suddenly experience the reality of this type of teaching, and not merely think about it as a possibility.

As we continued driving, I reflected further on what had just happened, and also on my past. I have never been a person to get into altercations, and I have always tried to avoid any kind of escalation of bad feelings. I remember the one fight I ever had, in grade school, and even then I couldn’t bring myself to punch him, but only pushed and yelled for a moment, and then felt ridiculous and apologized. Even so, it wasn’t that I was above anger, but I avoided it because I was afraid, mainly, and didn’t like the idea of being out of control, or of bringing another person to a place of uncontrolled emotion; with the possibility that something bad could happen. I had never really experienced someone yelling at me like MD had just done, and in a strange way it was liberating, because I had always feared what that would be like; in the end it wasn’t that bad. I had survived, and actually felt stronger from the experience.

We continued driving through California and then turned east and entered Arizona. On long stretches of flat, straight highway, when no other cars were around, we would practice passing notes to each other from car to car through our open windows. Mostly these were notes that MD would write for us, with a fun message or lesson, specifically intended and crafted for each recipient. He crafted them to teach, but also to amuse. On one of mine he wrote:

“What is fear? It is the end of freedom, of faith, and of Peace. Do not falter.

Sever the fear besotten threads that have bound you. Do not let the maggots

of fear kick sand into your experience of being. Build up the fortress of the

will. Have faith. God will sustain.”

(To Be Continued)

~FS