Vault

It was so exhilarating to be set free to the west that, on July 15, I drove the 1000 miles from Rockville, MD to Little Rock, AR in one day. Maybe over past midnight, I don't remember. I had continued recording short dashcam videos with the car stereo providing the soundtrack. Blazing through Nashville with Henry Threadgill's "I Can't Wait Til I Get Home" at sunset, crossing the Mississippi west of Memphis into West Memphis to La Monte Young's Well Tuned Piano. 

An Alice Coltrane piece came on, Hare Krishna from her album Universal Consciousness. 




And it was exactly the right time somehow, the right time and place. This can happen-- a piece of music or art or a photograph hits you like a mattock right between the eyes, slices open your scarred, sacred heart, squeezes all the bitter acid blood out, and washes it with warm salt water, sews it back together and sends you on your way. Or maybe something less violent, not sure. But you maybe get the idea. Not sure about that either. 

Anyway, the dashcam vid is from one of maybe 15 plays in a row, along the endless dark and white lines of I-40 between Memphis and Little Rock. 



I started feeling something in my chest that had long been missing (especially right around where Alice calls and responds to that yearning line in the string section). That is, I started feeling my chest. Unaware that I had been wandering like a zombie with a shotgun blast that had shattered body of sternum, left true ribs to floating ribs mangled, made ground beefheart out of the mess inside and left me alive merely through cauterization (so violent!, RIP John mf Donne), for whatever reason this piece of music irrigated and pried open and washed and bee-balmed my battered heart. A murmuration of long held dark exacto knife blades of hatred went flocking out and clouded away into the Arkansas night, not a bad place for them. 

Most remarkably of all: I felt the first real opening to compassion and forgiveness toward A and her new person, unconditionally, with a sense of the bottomless humanity and ever-tangled mystery of the paths we walk or, more accurately, that walk us, the simple fact of our hearts in love. We just are not in that driver's seat. Blaming someone for falling in love with someone other than yourself is like getting angry about a dream they have. Sure, sometimes the behavior gets shitty around the whole shipwreck, but in this shining moment of cardiac repair, I also saw it all-- all of it-- as just one thing, part of the whole dance, and all of it exactly as it was "meant" to be. 

This is all just language trying to get a handle on something. That phrase "meant to be" for example implies too much and says too little. Because at the core of any opening to unconditional acceptance at any time, let alone regarding forgiveness, it's more like "it is" and there's a full integration that "it just is." My own heart opening up to this new woman a couple days before, I'm sure, also gave me some perspective for the first time in a long time. But when you swallow the whole thing whole, and have a sustained experience of being beyond categories, you sit in the middle of everything. You're a part of it, but you also ARE it. But it's so vast, so much bigger than you, also. And when you realize IT JUST IS, how can you argue with it anymore? 

At least for a while. 

I am grateful that I have had powerful encounters with universal, unconditional love. Complete acceptance, without reservation, of exactly what is. I think my very first fingertip touch of the infinite so to speak was when I was about 14, at a Presbyterian youth retreat. The youth minister, an incredibly wholesome man who once told me masturbation was okay if you were married and only thought about your wife, had spoken that evening at great length about "opening up your heart and inviting Jesus in as your personal savior. Jesus loves you exactly as you are and he wants to show you that he loves you. So just turn your heart toward Him and open it and let him in." I was sitting there surrounded by hormone-pulsing, pimpled, Lord of the Flies inclined 14 year olds, probably fantasizing about taking the shirt off of the girl next to me, thinking to myself, I would do that, I would try to invite Jesus in. But it would be so uncool. 

So after we were sent off into the Pocono Mountain late winter night, with the air still and dark, like ice water almost frozen, and we had "prayer time" before lights out (I think a lot of the camp attendees were out in the woods sucking face, which, after all, is one of the best prayers), I went off to this weird little playground where there was no one else at all. I sat on a swing and settled in there. I could see, up through the bare branches of the trees biding time until spring, the shimmering night sky. It was a moonless night. So I'm sitting there, on that swing, no one else anywhere. Swinging a little bit, forward, back, forward, back. Thinking. Remembering what Mr. Wholesome had said about just turning one's heart. Just trying it. Just say "Jesus, I invite you into my heart, it's open to you, come in." 

So I said it, in my mind. And turned. 

And I was destroyed. 

The most incredibly unexpected series of events happened. First, I felt like I was melting open. A feeling of warm bathing water flooded into my chest and heart. Second, what felt like a solid and real shaft of dense white/blue light shot up from my ass through the top of my head. Third, IT all swirled together into a feeling of being unconditionally accepted and loved exactly as I was. I was in particular not this or that, but all things and time, and all of that was me, and everything everywhere through all time was alive, and everything that lived was holy, which I would later discover was a saying of Blake's. 

Nobody prepared me for *that*. There was no context for *that*. No initiation, no story, no container for *that*. Mr. Wholesome, I secretly knew, had absolutely never experienced *that*. Never. If he had, he wouldn't split hairs about when it was okay to jerk off. I thought maybe inviting Jesus into my heart would make me Wholesome also. This experience had nothing whatsoever to do with morality. I had always thought following Jesus would make me a better person, a more moral person. This experience had nothing to do with any of that. Nothing whatsoever. In fact, it seemed to me to be just as dark as it was light, just as much mystery as it was the daylight of morality, just as much a wounding from which I would never recover as it was a healing that kept me always safe. It also seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with "Jesus" as construed within religious confines. 

I wept. 

And I mark that singular experience as a major turning point in my entire life. I have tried to eff the ineffable in this writing, in this microcosm of words. But I only offer metaphor. I can only say, "it was a direct and unmediated encounter with IT IS." 

The other thing that astonished me was the general sense that, even though I had no context and no container, and even though it was as much wound as cure, and even though it was as much dark as light-- IT IS GOOD. That's very important. How awful the black side of the encounter is, as well, which I would have a few times later-- the unavoidable IT IS that also feels evil and malevolent. An experience of an IT IS that would as soon extinguish you as ignore you, maybe worst of all eternally indifferent and oriented not at all toward you. The experience on the swing was not only IT IS, but also, IT IS GOOD.

I think these kinds of experiences are the only real fuel that religion ever gets. The flimsy shit about being afraid of sin, Hell, afraid of dying, wanting to live forever, being saved, going to Heaven, even "finding enlightenment" or any of the other all-to-human dimensions would kill all religion in a few generations if that's all there was. It's the direct encounter with the divine, so to speak, that provides the real juice. And the nature of the experience is: it doesn't have to take long and it doesn't have to happen very often for it to be of profound and life altering importance. 

But most of us also have to get off the mountain and back to the turning world. 

"I committed my life to Christ on the retreat," I said to my mother, because that is the language Mr. Wholesome used. "That's great! Wash your hands, it's dinner time," she said. This became the enduring problem of my life. In America, with the cultural context and values we have, how was I supposed to integrate, especially at age 14, a direct encounter with the divine into...being a 9th grader? It was an impossible task. 

More about that later, or much later, or never. 

For now, let's say shimmers of that encounter suddenly reappeared as I was driving through the hot wet woods of Arkansas. Alice and company, the long road, the wild ways of the trip leading up to the moment, the opening of my heart to my new person-- all of it conspired to offer another IT IS moment. Specifically, to have my first experience of total acceptance and unconditional forgiveness toward A and her new person. 

Of course, as a human being, this too shall pass. I have in my mind cursed them both since. It still happens, occasionally, that I think of her and the phrase that instantly pops into my head is "Fuck you, you fucking asshole." But-- and in the grand scheme of things, this is no small thing-- this happens less frequently. And a turning point is a turning point, even if the subsequent time is two steps forward and one back, over and over again. 

I was graced with yet another perspective on what my first AA sponsor used to say to me: "Love is, and it's the only thing going on."