The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (9 page)

Maybe someday, I hope, I might bring my own children to a Texas attraction called the Midland Oiling Museum, where visitors will marvel at display cases lined with hundreds of old dipsticks, dirty oil filters, cans of Pennzoil and Valvoline. The larger rooms will contain antiquated oil derricks, photos of defunct refineries, well-preserved gas station pumps, lovingly restored Cadillac Escalades, and a half-scale model of the
Exxon Valdez
. All of this will be presided over by large painted portraits of the long-deposed Bush dynasty, Dick Cheney, and members of the Saudi oil cartel, edged with gilded frames and tastefully illuminated by recessed lighting. We will all stand around smiling, pointing, feigning interest while patronizing curators wax nostalgic about the relatively short lifespan of such a wasteful, violent, environmentally toxic, yet wholeheartedly American enterprise.

I
read somewhere that if you mention God at a Manhattan dinner party you’ll silence the room; mention God twice and you’ll never be invited back.

It’s for this reason—plus the fact that my roommates are non-religious and suspicious of anyone they think might be in a cult—that I sneak quietly out of my apartment on a Sunday morning. Walking past Neckface graffiti, children’s clothing stores stocked with infant-sized AC/DC T-shirts, record shops, and trendy pan-Asian restaurants, it’s a safe bet that of all my fashionable Brooklyn brethren, I’m the only one headed for church. The streets are mostly deserted, save for a few wasted-looking souls in tight jeans and leather jackets, just now heading home from strangers’ beds or coked-out afterparties on the Lower East Side.

My secret morning sojourn is partly research-based: I’m headed for All Souls Unitarian, where Melville and his family were members. Exiting the number 4 train at Eighty-Second after a long ride, I walk a few blocks north and find the old stone church, adorned with a regal purple banner above a wide staircase. As I pass through the corner entrance, a cordial volunteer offers me a service pamphlet. The main chapel’s vaulted white ceiling soars high above me, the whole room spartan and clean and bright. I take a seat and read the pamphlet, which explains that Unitarian tradition calls for transparent windows rather than stained glass, to “let the Light in.”

From my solitary back-row seat, I check out the artwork hanging above the altar. A large, three-dimensional piece made from hundreds of intertwining strings, it apparently represents the unity and interconnectedness of all things, like a more elaborate version of the cross-shaped “God eye” I made from popsicle sticks and orange yarn back in Sunday school. The shape of this Unitarian “God eye” is vaguely reminiscent of a Christian cross, but the overall effect is ambiguous—an apt symbol for the Unitarians’ ambivalence about Jesus and the Christian faith.

I feel a little awkward about being here—I’m one of the few single, youngish people in the room—but flipping through a Unitarian hymnal gives me some encouragement. Many of the hymns are adaptations of writings from the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist chants, Native American stories, and two of my favorite transcendental writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both famous Unitarians. I like the idea of this inclusive, literary brand of worship, especially since it involved Melville, who isn’t easily classified as a Unitarian or Transcendentalist, but nonetheless was concerned with the history and future of Christianity.

Though Melville’s connection to Unitarianism is questionable (Melville scholar Herschel Walker claims that Melville “hated Unitarianism” and only attended to appease his wife), his hope for a more universal, inclusive approach to religion is written all over
Moby-Dick
. It’s evident in Ishmael’s embracing of the tattooed pagan Queequeg, and also in his knowledge of Eastern ideas like meditation. It’s likely that Melville, like his Berkshire neighbors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, drew from his knowledge of mystical Asian texts like the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, and was moved by the description and actual practice of meditation. And like Emerson and Thoreau, Melville cited the fourteenth-century Sufi poet Hafiz as an influence. Like other famous ecstatics—Rumi, Ramakrishna, and Saint Francis—Hafiz believed that all individuals contain a spark of the divine: “You are a divine elephant with amnesia / Trying to live in an ant / Hole. / Sweetheart, O sweetheart / You are God in / Drag!” In letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, after reading the older writer’s positive response to
Moby-Dick
, Melville evokes similar feelings of mystic union: “I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book … I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.”

A young minister named Galen Guengerich leads the Sunday service at All Souls Unitarian. Dressed in a billowy maroon robe that seems straight out of a Harvard commencement ceremony, he looks handsome, pedigreed, slightly reserved but altogether kind, like a pious member of the Kennedy family. Given his appearance, it comes as a surprise that his service centers around the lyrics from a recent Green Day hit, a melodramatic ballad of urban alienation conveyed via the familiar trope of a solitary, defeated soul walking down Hollywood’s broken-dream boulevards. I first heard it playing at the deli counter of the Midtown skyscraper where I work, and it’s annoying in the way most Green Day songs are, but now that I’m living a somewhat isolated life in a shadowy leviathan of a city, I can relate to the sense of loneliness the song evokes. The point of Guengerich’s talk is that in a community like All Souls, you don’t have to go it alone, that you can instead walk together with others on a spiritual journey, connected and supported, with life’s dark paths illuminated by collective grace. The lecture is polished and sincere, and I appreciate his attempt to reach out to a younger crowd, however transparent the effort. I’ve never much liked Green Day, especially compared to my favorite hardcore punk bands like Minor Threat, Fugazi, or Hot Snakes. But looking around the room at mostly gray heads, I have to give Guengerich props for risking this pop-culture reference. Of the few young people in attendance, I imagine most are probably more familiar with Coldplay or even Vivaldi than with Green Day. It’s a safe bet that I’m the only one in the room with remotely punk rock roots: the only one with multiple tattoos, or who’s seen Fugazi live from the front row of a Wyoming cowboy bar, or who’s skated Burnside solo on a rainy Christmas Eve.

And although it doesn’t match up with my current situation in New York, I have in the past experienced the kind of spiritual community and connection Guengerich spoke about. In college I was fortunate to have close friends, but I always felt like something was missing, that endless conversations about Sonic Youth, the Pixies, and
Twin Peaks
reruns were stimulating and fun, but that some essential part of myself wasn’t getting the sustenance it needed. During my early twenties, while my friends were starting indie bands and taking summer internships at Sony records, I went off for weeks and sometimes months at a time into the Colorado wilderness, where I experimented with meditation, read
Siddhartha, Man and His Symbols
by Carl Jung, the Tao Te Ching,
Leaves of Grass
. In my mid-twenties, I turned back to skateboarding, making pilgrimages to empty swimming pools and Burnside skatepark with a clearly religious devotion.

From age nineteen to twenty-nine, I had a tumultuous, on-again off-again relationship with a woman named Nicole. Lying in bed one night the summer before our final breakup, she stated nonchalantly that she didn’t believe in God. No big shock there—I certainly didn’t believe in the kind of God that many Christians do: a gray-bearded curmudgeon imposing judgment on some and doling out favors to others. That all seemed like a fairy tale, and yet I wasn’t ready to say with ultimate finality that I didn’t believe. I’d spent too much time reading Joseph Campbell, who quoted Meister Eckhart: “The ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions.” I wasn’t ready to give up on Albert Einstein’s concept of a universal, mysterious God, or Martin Luther King’s kind hearted, forgiving God, or on the prayers of the famous religious ecologist, Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” Maybe I was a little like Melville, who, according to Hawthorne, could “neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

After the final dissolution of my ten-year relationship with Nicole—which had serious flaws other than the religious kind—I went through a terribly difficult emotional period. I originally thought I’d spend my carefree bachelor days doing nothing but skateboarding and dating women, savoring the last scraps of my late-twenties marrow. I could never have predicted that I would instead find myself sitting in
church
, meditating and praying for release from a crippling pattern of attachment that had caused me and Nicole so many years of pain and soul sickness. This was all definitely a little strange considering that one of my all-time-favorite bands is Black Sabbath, or that I’d learned most of what I knew about the Exodus story not from Sunday school, but from the old Metallica song “Creeping Death.” But unlike a couple of my former skateboarding friends who’d gone the “born-again” route and joined conservative evangelical congregations, I attended a Unity church, the same progressive denomination that my prochoice mother and recovering-Catholic stepfather had been active in for years. And yet, despite Unity’s progressive politics, I kept my church-going mostly a secret, worrying that my friends would think I’d converted to the dark side. Mention to a crowd of twenty somethings, skateboarders, graduate school intellectuals, and writers that you’re headed to a yoga class or a Buddhist meditation circle and no one blinks, but tell them you’re going to
church
and you’ll be considered the worst kind of crazy. Even my lifelong best friend, Gabriel—who came from a Lutheran family of five siblings, all with biblical names like his—automatically assumed I’d joined some sort of cult.

The truth was that I went to Unity for myself—in hope of healing my guilt and loneliness, but also because I felt there was something fundamentally wrong with what the right wingers were doing to this country—condemning homosexuals and denouncing all other religions and supporting the invasion of Iraq and other essentially non-Christian acts. The ecumenical, all-accepting attitude at Unity seemed like the perfect antidote. There were gay couples in the congregation, warmly accepted and integrated—a relatively rare thing in rural Colorado. And the minister, Lynn Kendall, was like a cross between a wise sage, a chipper diner waitress, and a stand-up comedian. The first time I heard her speak she related a story about how, just after being dumped, she dove on the hood of her ex-boyfriend’s car, pounded on his windshield, and said, “Why won’t you love me?”

“I was trying to get him to do for me what I couldn’t do for myself,” Lynn said, and I knew immediately she had something to teach me.

Without a formal degree or ministerial training, she’d honed her spiritual chops in the real world, through surviving abuse as a child and a marriage gone bad, then finding eventual salvation in twelve-step programs. She never quoted from the Bible or spoke much about Jesus’s life; even on Easter Sunday she avoided the story of the crucifixion. She was more interested in helping us forge our own direct connection with spirit. Rather than telling us that we were all sinners or that Jesus had died for our transgressions, she assured us that we all contained within us a spark of the divine, like Ishmael’s serenely calm soul even in the midst of chaos. I met other seekers at Unity, all of them tremendously kind and supportive. They loaned me books about Buddhism and Gnosticism and mystical Christianity, including the now-classic
Course in Miracles
. I found some major resonance between the Course, which teaches that we’re more than just bodies, and soaring passages in
Moby-Dick:
“My body is but the lees of my better being…. Take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”

Six months after our breakup, I called Nicole and invited her to lunch. I had a cracked notion that maybe we’d get back together, just like we had seven or eight times before, but that things would be different now that I’d started down a path of spiritual healing.

The day before the lunch I made an appointment to see Lynn Kendall, who offered counseling sessions by donation, a foreign concept for someone who’s spent thousands of dollars in therapy. The little Unity library where we met was well lit and warm and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. Smoking generally turns me off, but the fact that Lynn did it made me appreciate her even more—she was human and flawed just like the rest of us.

“I’m nervous about this lunch,” I said. “I feel like I have a big decision to make.”

“I thought all your decisions were made six months ago,” Lynn said. “When you
broke up
.”

“We’ve broken up and gotten back together so many times.”