Dina Barker, a stunning, olive-skinned, brown-haired, green-eyed college freshman introduced me to the divine. I saw her the day I arrived on campus and thought to myself, if this is how all college girls look, I am going to flunk out in one semester. I couldn't get her out of my mind and talked about her incessantly, annoying the hell out of my roommate, a rather irritable fellow from Georgia. His name was Pete Sherbo and he was serious – serious about school, serious about sleep, serious about studying. I don't recall hearing him laugh or even seeing him smile. I was thankful when he decided to transfer after the first semester and further delighted with his replacement, a guy named Adam Schecter who was from Michigan and was decidedly not serious. Not that he was a goof off or anything...I mean, the guy made decent grades and never studied...at least that I saw. But he was funny and fun. He thought he knew how to pick up girls and didn't hesitate to share his knowledge with the rest of us. He was a hoot.
Except that I took everything he said to heart because as far as picking up girls went, I was clueless. Of course, I never let anyone in on this, but I paid particular attention to Adam's mini-lectures on the fine art of seduction. And it was he who helped me finally get a date with Dina Barker, who, according to him, was quite a looker. I knew this already, of course, though his approval made me feel at least somewhat capable in at least evaluating looks. In any event, Adam found out that Dina had joined a club called COC, Christ On Campus, so I promptly went over to the student center and signed myself up as well. Now, I suppose I must tell you that I was not a true believer. I mean, I just didn't really think much about God. I guess I believed, but honestly, I had never really given the idea much consideration. I had been to church a few times, but only to qualify to go on trips with the youth group. My primary extra-curricular activities in high school had been sports, dungeons and dragons, experimenting with alcohol and marijuana without getting caught, and most of all, girls.
Girls. That was the ultimate mystery to me, not God. So here was the ultimate girl who was apparently interested in God, so I magically became interested in God. This group of about a hundred students met every Thursday night in the student center. They gathered and sang a few songs and then they usually had a couple of skits, some announcements, and then some featured speaker...who was often another student. The songs were kinda corny but the skits were usually pretty funny and I met some pretty cool people there. In fact, I got to be pretty good friends with a few of them. And of course, I got to meet Dina.
“So tell me about how you were born again,” she said to me on our first date.
“Um...,” I stammered, putting my brain into overdrive trying to come up with something. What could I say to her? I knew she made a big deal about being born again – the whole COC group did – but I had no idea how to talk about it.
“Well,” I said, “I guess I've never really been born again.”
She gave me a look of utter shock. “What?”
I shrugged. “I don't think it's that big a deal. I mean, I believe in God. I believe in Jesus. Why do I need to be born again if I got it right the first time?” I thought it was a clever retort. She didn't appear to agree.
“You have to be born again,” she said. “You can't be a Christian if you aren't born again.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The question seemed to throw her for a loop...like something she'd never considered because there could simply be no reason to consider it. “Because that's what the Bible says,” she finally spat out, somewhat frustrated.
“So?” I asked without being argumentative. I was genuinely curious.
She narrowed her eyes and peered at me as if to see the real me – like she suspected I was a pod person or something. “The Bible is the Word of God,” she stated emphatically. “If the Bible says something must be a certain way, then it must be that way.”
Suddenly, Miss Perfect was no longer that attractive to me. What the hell was she talking about? I mean, I'd read the Bible and it had some good stuff in it, but it had some really messed up stuff in it too. Did she really think God had destroyed the entire planet with a flood? Or send a couple of angels to destroy a whole city? Hell, there was one story in there about some old prophet dude who asked God to punish some kids for calling him “baldy” and God sent a bear to kill forty-two of them. Did she believe that really happened? I shook my head and eyed her curiously.
“Well,” I said, “I believe in God and Jesus and I think the Bible is okay, but I'm not really a fanatic about it.”
Needless to say, we didn't have a second date and I didn't bother to attend COC the next few Thursdays. Weird thing was, I missed it. I don't know if it was the singing, the skits, or just being around generally upbeat people, but I missed something about it. So, about a month after that disastrous date, I went back to COC. It was a little strange, and Dina was certainly cool toward me, but most everyone was friendly and welcomed me back with hugs and smiles.
Over the next few months, I began to garner some understanding of Dina's theology, a theology apparently shared by most of the COC members. While I gained some appreciation for how these folks thought, most of it seemed juvenile to me. There was one aspect, however, that captured my imagination and kept me coming back again and again: mystical experience. The more people in the group I got to know, the more I heard about these mystical experiences. Many of my friends in the group often spoke about “hearing” God or God “speaking” to them, and while I initially dismissed this as just talk, I honestly began to grow curious about the phenomenon, eventually developing a desire to experience it for myself. I began to pray, to earnestly ask God to open my eyes and ears and mind so that I could see or hear or otherwise experience His presence. I remember kneeling by my bed, pleading with God, tears flowing, sobbing out my sincere desire for something...anything that would fill the hole in my soul that seemed to expand daily.
This went on for months and I began to despair of ever hearing God's voice. I never lost faith, though my self-esteem continued to wane as my failure to do what my friends spoke of as an everyday occurrence taught me that there was obviously something wrong with me. I read of John Wesley's evangelistic failures in Georgia and his subsequent faith crisis and was somewhat heartened, attempting to apply his “fake it 'til you make it” remedy to my situation. This worked for a while, but eventually I could no longer keep the doubts at bay and began to cautiously entertain them. Perhaps God didn't actually exist. Just thinking this made me feel strange, as if I were trying to convince myself. I felt completely lost and it seemed whichever path I chose left me feeling shallow and false.
Then one evening, while walking around the small lake on campus, I softly whispered, “If you're there, show me, or I'm done.” I took four or five more steps and in my peripheral vision, I noticed a ghostly apparition in the trees to my right. I quickly turned my head and it was gone. Had I imagined it? I asked for confirmation and received none. What was that? For the next few days, my existential angst was simply transferred one level. Rather than agonize over God's existence, I agonized over whether what I saw was real or imagined and if real, what it meant. The few COC friends in whom I felt comfortable enough to confide all assured me that it was a sign from God. No surprise there. My two agnostic friends spoke about wish-fulfillment and the power of the imagination. “It's all in your head,” they said.
Oddly enough, the “vision” set my life on a previously unimagined course. I took a class in psychology and then another and eventually declared it my major. I devoured psychology texts, especially those that dealt with the intersection of psychology and spirituality. I read everything I could find by and about Carl Jung and after discovering Ken Wilber, I felt like I had found someone who wrote just for me. I found great joy in studying and reading, and while I discovered many theories, I never found a definitive answer to satisfy my old questions. I still didn't know if God existed, nor if my “vision” was real or imagined. I simply learned to cope with doubt, to survive and not allow it to consume
me from within. Eventually I got comfortable with it, and oddly enough, that is when I got my confirmation.
Over the years, I “heard” God speak to me many times. I almost always wondered if it was God or my imagination that had “spoken.” A few times, I became aware of things that I found difficult to rationalize as my own thoughts or imagination. I had studied enough to understand the idea of collective consciousness, and while I gave some credence to this possibility, it was quite another thing to simply accept this as the answer. To me, the idea of collective consciousness was no more unlikely than the concept of a deity, so I had no compunction about assigning my “hearing” to either. As far as I was concerned, they were equally plausible.
As the years morphed into decades, I “heard” from God more and more often. In fact, it got to be a daily occurrence. Ironically, the further I moved away from my old friends philosophically and theologically, the closer my experience began to resemble theirs. I never did develop the same level of reverence for the Bible as they, though I have come to appreciate it as a wonderful teaching tool and often a conduit for perspectives not yet considered. In conversations with friends and neighbors, I've been asked, “How do you know God is speaking to you?” Well, that's an excellent question...one might say a fundamental question. In response, I must confess, I don't know. I just know without knowing how I know. Oh, and just as a matter of course, in conversations I rarely use the term “God” anymore since people have so many a priori assumptions about what that term means, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that assumptions tend to close doors of opportunity.
I guess that's what I meant when I wrote that I received my confirmation when I embraced the concept of not knowing...or not needing to know. By letting go of that perceived need to know, I became open to a multitude of possibilities and perspectives that had heretofore been closed for me. I began to see the world in a whole different way and my understanding of reality changed a great deal. Not that I can explain it. That's another thing I've learned...that most of what's important cannot be explained, defined, mapped out or controlled in any way, shape, or form. It really is a delicious irony that the true things of life are those which defy categorization, definition, or explication. It's like trying to describe a beautiful melody with words. The music has to be experienced...a description of it is less than useless.
Even though I embraced spirituality and God, I've never really been a church-goer. I tried it – it's not for me. I'm not knocking it for others, since I'm confident that plenty of people get a lot of good from church. I'm just saying that it isn't for everyone and just because people don't go to church, that doesn't make them somehow less spiritual. I just get the feeling that churches seem to be in the business of promoting theology and morality and I don't believe God has much to do with either. That may sound odd, but hey, that's where I am. The really cool thing about embracing this whole “I don't know” thing is that I can cheerfully and enthusiastically share my beliefs and just as cheerfully and enthusiastically let them go if they prove to be unhealthy. I guess you could say that I hold my beliefs rather than my beliefs holding me.
In any event, I'll forever be grateful for my youthful attraction to a lovely young girl named Dina Barker. On rare occasions, when I am feeling particularly nostalgic, I wonder what she's up to. Part of me would like to talk with her and tell her this story. I suppose the act of writing it down is my way of saying “thanks” to her, in some small way, for directing me toward a path I had not considered. Would I have wound up on this path apart from that young girl all those years ago? How would my life be different if I hadn't joined that COC group? Would I believe in God? Would I be an atheist? I don't know.
The Crossing