Why Religion? Read online

  Discovering music and poetry with these friends, I also found, through my friend Paul, a world of painting I hadn’t known, lit by his spirit and energy. Enjoying his enthusiasm, intensity, and quick intelligence, I responded to his extravagant declarations of love, and his vision of himself as artist, and me as his muse. Paul had quit high school at the age of sixteen, insisting that he hated it, had learned nothing, and wanted only to paint. He collected piles of books on art, especially the Italian painters he loved best: Botticelli, Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca. In the garage at his Atherton home, he stretched canvases, set up easels, tested and mixed paint on wooden palettes, pausing only to read Freud, Dostoevsky, Machiavelli, and anything else he could find. Often he painted furiously until dawn. Paul’s father was a well-known drama and music critic for a San Francisco newspaper who took us to the best restaurants in the city, where waiters lavished attention on him, and we could bask, for the moment, in his celebrity. Yet during the times we spent together, Paul often got calls from his younger sister pleading with him to come home right away, telling him that their mother was facedown on the yellow-and-white-tile floor of their elegant home again, dead drunk.

  When Paul quit school, his father, frustrated and angry, likely frightened by his son’s intransigence, forced him to see psychiatrists, and threatened to commit him to a mental hospital. But the psychiatrists he consulted advised him instead to let his son go on painting, as he did—with stunning talent. That episode shook me: What if his father had succeeded? Were the people whom society called crazy actually misunderstood artists, as Paul romantically insisted, or were they “mentally ill,” whatever that meant? Troubled by these questions, when I saw that the University of California in Los Angeles was offering a summer college course called “The Sociology of Mental Illness,” I applied, hoping to find out.

  The next summer, those of us accepted into the seminar lived in dorm rooms at the university. Besides participating in seminar sessions at the university, we took a bus every morning to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, a huge government building built on barren desert land outside Los Angeles where cowboy movies often were shot. Each of us carried keys so that we could sign in on time sheets to any part of the hospital, except violent wards. We also carried pads of lined paper to make notes for afternoon meetings, when we’d meet to discuss what we’d seen. The others, except me, were psychology majors, most of them careful to dress in ties or skirts so that no one would mistake them for mental patients. Our teacher, an intense, charismatic Greek sociologist, had challenged us to investigate the effects of hospital procedures on the six thousand patients at Camarillo.

  On the first day, after I nervously unlocked the metal door of the ward for “high-functioning” women, I encountered a thin, aggressive young woman who looked me up and down, and asked, “Are you a dyke?” When I said no, she turned abruptly, saying “Damn!” and walked away. I also met Maria, an eighteen-year-old Hispanic girl, nearly my age, with beautiful long, dark curly hair and brown eyes, her arms streaked with razor slash marks, some freshly opened; had the hospital staff not noticed? As we walked back and forth on the concrete floors of the corridors, ignoring the television sets blaring from every corner, she told me how she’d hated the sexual assaults of men in her family and neighborhood; she’d put on a hundred extra pounds to ward them off. Confiding that she was in for repeated suicide attempts, she asked, “Did you ever want to kill yourself?” The question stopped me. After thinking about it, I finally said, “No, but I would if I felt that no one understood me.” “That’s just how I feel,” she said. On a men’s ward, one man came up to display a large wound on his arm, which he kept tearing open to show to anyone who would pay attention. I was moved, too, by the young Mormon student, just my age, who spent his days intensely reading a pile of books he’d brought with him, including Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he’d hidden under a plain brown paper cover. He explained that although he would return to Brigham Young University in the fall, he’d begun to doubt his sanity when he was assailed by “bad thoughts” that impelled him to question his church’s teachings.

  Later that day, in the admissions office, I joined two other students to observe the procedures. Two hospital workers brought in a man in a straitjacket, unbinding his mouth as he shouted curses at his family members, who followed, ashamed and angry, turning their backs while they signed him in. We were horrified to see the aides forcefully inject him with Thorazine, then wheel him into a treatment room, bind his hands and feet, place him on a table, and administer electric shock that convulsed his body until he went limp. Wasn’t this torture?

  A few days later, to my surprise, a quiet older woman, gray faced with wispy hair, confessed to me that she periodically signed herself into the hospital for shock treatment—the only way, she said, to ease the horrific anxiety that often confined her to her room. Outside, in the yard, I met a group of men newly released from the army, trading information about various mental hospitals from California to Florida that could guarantee “three squares and a bed” when they chose to migrate during winter. Then I retreated to the ward that housed the children, where a six-year-old girl named Samantha with straight short brown hair, quick and alert as a sparrow, immediately claimed possession of me, demanding to hear stories. After that, I visited her every day to talk and read to her, and she began to learn to read herself. But every day I felt a sinking feeling, realizing that the more she counted on our visits, the harder it would be for her when I left in August, as everyone else had left her, including her mother, who, the aides told me, appeared only rarely, when taking a break from her work as a prostitute.

  Our professor explained that he’d intended to become a psychiatrist, but during his residency he’d seen that institutionalizing people, far from helping them, was making them more helpless. He’d designed our course so that we could see this for ourselves. We agreed with much that he said, although the only common denominator I found among the many and various Camarillo residents was that each of them had difficulty living in society. If there were misunderstood artists at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, I didn’t meet them; after ten weeks I was relieved to take the bus back to Paul and our circle of friends.

  At Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, where we gathered to drink coffee and finger the new books, we met Alan Trist, who’d come from England with his family, and Jerry Garcia, a shaggy-haired musician discharged from the army, who, after riding railroad cars all over the country, was weaving together the disparate strands of American music. Years older than we were, Jerry fascinated us with his daring, and the astonishing range of songs he sang in a gravelly voice, playing lightning-fast changes on his twelve-string guitar, despite having only nine and a half fingers. Now we learned to belt out “Railroad Bill, Railroad Bill / He never worked, and he never will / He just ride, ride, ride”—and heard, for the first time, the music of Appalachia, of Odetta, and Muddy Waters. Years later, Alan startled his parents by becoming the business manager for Jerry’s band.

  Every Friday I cut classes to spend time with our band of renegades. Four school days a week seemed enough. I was often bored at school, although I enjoyed some classes, and, with a friend, I had started a literary magazine that sold a lot of copies after we recruited several giant football players to hawk it for us. On Fridays, though, my friend Phoebe and I often drove to Los Trancos Woods, for the scent of the grasses, the bay, and the eucalyptus trees, or to the house on Perry Lane, where we found people who looked nothing like the Palo Alto where I’d grown up—more like Robin Hood’s band of outlaws.

  One day Jerry surprised us, saying that he was getting married—the following Saturday—to someone we’d never seen with him. Arriving at the Unitarian church of Palo Alto, we walked into a church shaped by the late sixties, the traditional cross over the altar replaced by a piece of driftwood. Several rows of Palo Alto high school girls, dressed in pastels, some wearing white gloves, were seated on the left side of the church, the bride’s side. On
the right, where we sat with the groom’s friends, an odd assortment of Jerry’s associates gathered in sparse clusters. Jerry shambled in, smiling nervously, his black hair in ringlets around his face as he stared at his feet and glanced quickly at his young and very pregnant bride. The minister concluded the brief service saying, “I now pronounce you man and wife, as long as this love shall last.” Hearing these unexpected words, I suppressed a laugh, turning it instead into a sharp intake of breath: How long would that be? Afterward, during the reception held at Rickey’s Studio Inn on the highway, the waiters refused to serve champagne to the bride, not because she was pregnant—no one thought of that then—but because she was underage.

  I still participated every week, sometimes twice a week, in the close-knit group of “Bible-believing Christians” at Peninsula Bible Church on Middlefield Road in Palo Alto, as I had ever since my adolescent passion for evangelical Christianity. As brothers and sisters in Christ, we read the Bible, joined the singing, prayed intensely, and drank grape juice from tiny plastic cups for the “Lord’s supper.” That passion lasted for more than a year and a half, until the night when Paul, exhilarated while riding as a passenger in a car racing nearly one hundred miles an hour, broke his neck in the crash and died.

  When I heard that he’d died, I was speechless, and lingered with our friends as long as possible, afraid to go home. When I did, I was shocked to hear my mother say, “It’s for the best; he was no good for you anyway.” The emotions roiling around in me suddenly went blind. In an unimaginable universe, I wanted to slug her, punch her face, see her crumple and fall. In the world we inhabited, I stared at her, stunned, then turned and fled to the bathroom, where I vomited until I lay panting on the stone tile. Then I crept quietly to the front door and opened it so that no one would hear, and left. I ran to find a newspaper, fearing it would confirm—as it did—that this thing actually had happened. When I opened the metal box of newspapers and saw the photograph of his face on the front page of every paper, I felt a flash of anger that anyone who casually picked up the paper would see that photo, and so I took them all.

  Later, as people gathered at Paul’s house, the Episcopal priest came and sat down next to me and quietly asked, “Do you know whether the driver was drinking?” Knowing that he probably was—Lee was a young, angry black army veteran with cancer—I refused to answer. “What difference does that make now?” At the funeral, hearing the priest who stood over Paul’s elaborate metal casket call him “a sheep of God’s own flock,” I flared in defiance: for me he was more the wolf outside than anyone’s sheep! By then I’d spent what felt like endless time struggling over whether to walk with the others to look at him for the last time. I was terrified to see his dead face, searing that image into my dreams. For years afterward, I realized the cost of having refused to look into that open coffin; my imagination played havoc with whatever I might have seen, distorted on an internal screen of horrific Halloween nightmares.

  My Christian friends, at first sympathetic, immediately asked, “Was he born again?” When I said, “No—he was Jewish!” they said, “Then he’s in hell.” That made no sense. Wasn’t Jesus Jewish? When that didn’t seem to matter, I realized that what they said had nothing to do with what had drawn me to that church, and to the faith we’d claimed to share. Instead of drawing people together, as Graham had when he spoke of God’s love for everyone, these people were like a club for people spiritually superior to everyone who didn’t share their beliefs. Numb, devastated, and alone, I left the church, and never went back.

  Starting the day after Paul died, I spent more time with friends who had known him. Richard and I went to the hospital to see Jerry and Alan, who’d survived the crash, as had two others, whom we didn’t know. Jerry had shattered the windshield as he was thrown out of the car, which rolled over twice; Alan, also thrown out, had broken his spine. Although by then I was a freshman at Stanford University, I could not concentrate on schoolwork, could barely tolerate what I’d loved: poetry, music, literature. How could these matter now? Instead, I sometimes wandered at night with Richard, Alan, Jerry, and a few others in a straggling group through the fields, talking or silent, then laughing and shouting, watching the night clouds move across the moon. Paul’s death had opened up huge questions for all of us—that quick, vivid life suddenly stopped. Where do the dead go? And how to go on living, alert to death’s presence, its inevitability?

  The following summer, when my high school friend Phoebe and I, as well as Alan and Jerry, moved to San Francisco, what connected us, besides what had happened, was the intense, powerful music we shared, and the apartment that Phoebe and I had rented on Noriega Street, where the others would arrive to sleep on the floor or any available bed after I got up at five A.M. to work in a hospital kitchen, earning money for college next September. When I got home from work around four in the afternoon, they’d be talking. I was startled to hear Jerry saying that now they needed more than music; why not lights and action? I couldn’t imagine what he had in mind—surely not opera? And it wasn’t; years later, when Jerry’s musicians were playing the Fillmore, their performance looked nothing like opera: more like rock dancing in trance. After I left California, when I heard that Jerry Garcia’s group of musicians had broken up and that he’d started another band that he called the Grateful Dead, I realized that the name must have resonated from the crash he’d survived five years earlier.

  The dark background of those years was formed by violent clashes fought in the streets and played out on television—first civil rights, then the Vietnam War. Those of us who grew up in California’s suburban cocoon were shocked to see racial hatred erupt from Arkansas to Berkeley, and to realize that the war was not, as we’d imagined, the patriotic cause publicly preached, but a disastrous blunder, perhaps even a crime. The marine from Camp Lejeune whom I’d occasionally dated in high school, returning to visit California on a short leave, told us how he had gone to ’Nam full of patriotic high feeling, and was horrified when he saw what actually happened there. Like so many others, he never came back, his name later engraved into the stone memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. While Berkeley exploded with political demonstrations, San Francisco burst out in psychedelic fever.

  I left Stanford without attending graduation, and, choosing the company of would-be artists, musicians, and poets, set out for New York to take classes at the Martha Graham School on East Sixty-Third Street, intent on devoting myself to dance. I loved the classes that challenged us to turn in spirals, leap, fall, and recover, feeling how Martha Graham’s dance evokes myth and ritual. Within a few months, though, I was dismayed, seeing that even the best professional dancers lived almost like nuns, working out like demons, eating nearly nothing, and supporting their uncertain prospects by waiting tables. Had dance been my only passion, I might have done that, but taking classes with members of Graham’s company made it clear that I wasn’t one of the best, only rather good—and that wasn’t good enough. What to do next?

  To keep options open, I applied to five graduate schools in five different fields. Having loved the work of art historian Meyer Schapiro, I applied to New York University, where he taught; second, I applied to the interdisciplinary program in social thought at the University of Chicago, which sounded fascinating; then to Columbia University’s program in English literature, and to Brandeis University, to study with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. What intrigued me most, though, was Harvard’s doctoral program in the study of religion, which offered opportunities to study Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, so I chose Harvard.

  Although I’d left Christianity, questions persisted. Why hadn’t religion died out by now—hadn’t Nietzsche pronounced God dead a century ago? My father was certain that after people gained a smattering of scientific understanding, they’d shed their Jesus and Moses like shriveled skins. Yet my own experience contradicted that. What made that encounter with evangelical Christianity so powerfully compelling? Was it Christianity, or could
any religious tradition evoke such response?

  Some things had become clear. First, the language spoken in that Crusade for Christ was not spoken in my home—an evocative, emotionally charged language that opened up worlds of possibility, to include legions of angels and archangels, armies of demons, Jesus’s bloody sacrifice, a divine someone who heard and understood even the secrets I ferociously protected. After living in a world that felt flat, where emotional intensity was suppressed, in a world devoid of a spiritual dimension, I’d begun to look for a larger life, perhaps on a canvas even bigger than the universe. Although for years I’d loved poetry, from John Donne and Christina Rossetti to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and C. K. Williams, I began to write poems only after I had entered spaces that those strange, impossible Bible stories opened up, offering paths that led beyond the reach of my family, the beige living room, uncomfortable silences at the dinner table. Among evangelical Christians, I’d begun to find a much larger family, in which people talked freely and passionately, hugged each other, and shouted praises to God because we “loved the Lord.”

  Now that I’d abandoned that and all other brands of Christianity, I began to wonder how such movements began. Who was Jesus? How did the unlikely story of a rural rabbi who preached that the world was coming to an end and God’s kingdom was coming, but who himself had come to a cruel and humiliating end, tortured and killed by his enemies, ever become the basis for a worldwide movement still spreading two thousand years later?