Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  I could tell that David’s absence from Jason’s life was starting to take a severe toll on him. Now, at fourteen, he seemed like a boiling cauldron. Considering Jason’s mental state, I thought about the gun I had hidden underneath my pillow and went to retrieve it one afternoon, to hide it in a more secure location. It was gone. I instinctively knew who had taken it. My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, as I sped toward the house of his buddy Brian, with images playing in my mind’s eye of my son accidentally shooting someone. I felt as if Jason was within seconds of changing everyone’s life forever. Regrets buzzed around my mind, as ineffectual as houseflies. I rolled the window down and let the crisp November air hit my face.

  The car screeched into Brian’s driveway, and I jumped out onto a thin crust of frost that cracked under my shoes. Leaping up the front steps, I knocked on the door. I could see Brian’s father, a husky Vietnam vet, ambling up to the door with a beer in one hand. “Well come on in, lady, have a sit-down,” he said.

  “Keith, I think the boys have my gun,” I said, my legs turning to putty as I collapsed into the red velour easy chair. He looked at me as if he needed a moment to contemplate the idea.

  “I’m sure if the boys have your gun, they’ll know how to respect it”—a hopeful notion that didn’t calm my internal hysteria one little bit.

  Just about then we could hear Jason, Brian, and three other teenage boys laughing and hooting as they charged through the back door.

  “Do you have my gun, Jason?” I hollered.

  “Mom, slow down. Don’t freak out. We were just down at the river, target practicing on ducks—we didn’t kill any of them.”

  I was ready to nail his pelt to the side of a barn and brand it with gun control slogans. But I knew that if there were any pelts to be flayed, it should be my own. So ended the illusion I had taken shelter in: that we were all safer with a gun under my pillow. The next day I took the pistol back down Highway 99. As I walked into the same gun shop at which I’d bought it several years before, the aged proprietor lifted his eyes from his workbench. He rose and limped toward me, fixing me with the same unflinching gaze. He acted as if he didn’t recognize me, but I suspected that he did. “I usually don’t take guns back, but I’ll do it this time,” he said without hesitation. I had a feeling that he knew I would return someday: the woman he figured wouldn’t have the disposition to kill her ex. A gun in such a woman’s house was no help to anyone—just a danger to the kids.

  One afternoon not too much later the principal called to tell me that Jason had been expelled from school. During a surprise inspection they had found marijuana in his locker. When I questioned his sisters that evening, they told me that Jason had been selling it to his classmates. Many of his friends had dropped out of school; several had been sent to juvenile detention; one would soon be sentenced to prison for stealing a car. Nothing I did seemed to help: counselors, books, sports, pleading, threatening—he still continued to slip away from his family, his life, his potential. All I could think to do was uproot him and force him to make a fresh start, so I packed our belongings and moved us onto an island off the Seattle coastline.

  The next fall Jason enrolled as a sophomore at Bainbridge High. He was eager to give his new life a chance, trying out for soccer and making the high school team. I was overjoyed and would sneak out to the sidelines after work at the university and watch the squad practice. I loved seeing Jason playing sports again, his quick, agile body racing down the field, in complete control of the ball. The coach was happy with his good fortune, and Jason even said he liked his classes. Relief enveloped me.

  Then one day Jason called and in a muffled voice asked me to come and pick him up. I pulled into the Safeway parking lot to find him sitting on the pavement, his hair hanging down over his face, his arms hugging his long, gangly legs to his chest. When he stood up, I was horrified. His face was swollen like an overripe pumpkin, his eyes already reduced to twin slits between blue-black lids; his shirt was torn down the side, and his face was bleeding. He had gotten into a fight with one of his teammates, and a group of other boys said they were going to beat the living tar out of him as soon as they caught him alone.

  The next day the assistant principal, Mr. Davis, a watchful, kind-faced man with thick black glasses, phoned and asked me to come and see him in his office. Once I sat in the chair opposite his desk, he closed the door and said, “The kids at Bainbridge High School don’t like outsiders. Most of them are from very wealthy families and have been in school together since the first grade. The fact that Jason came in and immediately made the soccer team got some of them really mad. He took a slot away from a kid who grew up on the island. I have to tell you, I’m sick of watching this kind of thing happen. I’ll help Jason in any way I can.”

  “Do you think they’ll really gang together and beat him up?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do. But tell Jason I’ll try to protect him as much as I can.”

  I went home and told Jason about the conversation.

  “What, is Mr. Davis going to follow me around all day with a billy club in his hand?” Jason said. After that he wanted nothing to do with Bainbridge High School, and when he stepped off the school bus in the morning, instead of going to school he would walk to Safeway and hang out there all day.

  I decided that being the parent of a teenage boy was like being a test rat in an experiment intended to induce psychosis. Researchers teach the rat that by simply pushing a lever, it will get a nice serving of grain, making it feel relaxed and comforted. Then one day, instead of a succulent treat the scientist shocks the hell out of the poor little rodent. The next time, a satisfying delicacy … maybe several times a delicacy … then, zap. The researcher switches this routine back and forth indiscriminately until the rat breaks down and goes completely mad. Vacillating between hope and ruin sends the beleaguered creature over the edge into insanity.

  I was following the rat psychosis routine when an acquaintance whose son had a similar experience during high school told me about Job Corps, a government program designed for kids like Jason who didn’t fit into a traditional school yet wanted to get an education or learn a trade. I talked to Jason about the program, and he said that he would go. When the time came, we loaded his things in the car, took a ferry to the mainland, then drove north to Sedro-Woolley, Washington. Soon we were speeding up Interstate 5, past stands of pine trees and thickets of Scotch broom. Fifty miles north of Seattle we turned off into farm country, past wide red barns and rolling wheat fields ripe with harvest, snaking along on a narrow two-lane through the backcountry of Washington State. The last leg of the drive, we turned down a dirt lane that curved peacefully through the countryside, bordered by enormous poplar trees, six feet across the trunk and at least a hundred feet high, their branches shimmering with gray-green leaves. After a bend in the road, a large group of brick buildings came into view—a high-security compound fortified with guard posts and fences—and suddenly my heart felt as if it were being cinched tight with barbed wire. The complex had been built early in the century as the state’s first mental institution, so famous for its look of madness that Milos Forman had filmed segments of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest there. Enormous security buildings, uniformed sentries, and guard dogs combined to give the scene a nightmarish, gulagesque feel.

  As we approached the front gate, an armed officer stopped us. “Absolutely no vehicles beyond this point,” he barked. “You’ll have to get out and register before entering. No one in or out without security clearance.”

  “Why do you need such heavy security?” I asked, feeling as though I were delivering Jason to San Quentin rather than the Job Corps.

  “We’ve got former gang members living here, ma’am. Can’t take the chance their rivals won’t come looking for ’em,” he answered.

  As we walked onto the campus, I immediately realized that most of the students appeared closer to twenty than my son’s sixteen years—a pack of young men so brimming with agitation th
at being in their presence was like standing beside some turbulant spectacle of nature, a geyser blowing its top or a swarming hive of bees. Next to them Jason looked immature and awkward—no match for the streetwise men sporting tattoos and bandannas leaning against the corners of the buildings. I felt physically ill. Living with me, Jason would become a high school dropout; on the other hand, leaving him here seemed like a Faustian bargain. Although Jason acted tough, I knew he was as frightened as I was. I left him waving from the huge front door of his dorm with veiled terror in his eyes. As I drove away, I hesitated several times, my shirt stuck to my back wet with sweat, fighting the urge to return and rescue him. How could I possibly leave him in such a place?

  I pushed on the gas and sped down the curved lane, past the stands of poplar. Once the chilling institution was out of sight, I hit the brakes and opened my door vomiting while the car was still moving. I fumbled around under the seat and brought out a bottle of water. The plastic container was hot, and its contents warm as tea. I rinsed out my mouth and spit onto the damp ground smelling of moss and humus. Sitting in silence, I felt a heavy blast of cool air hit my face, and a quiet maternal intuition urged me to drive away—this difficult place was where Jason needed to be. Tears blurred the road as I drove out of Sedro-Woolley.

  In my mind Jason was a newborn again, bundled in the fold of his father’s arm as we brought him home from a Chicago hospital, his sisters examining his fingers and toes with enthusiasm, and kissing his bald head and fat cheeks. From that point on, he had become the repository of their unbridled affection, and they had become the only two people on earth he shared his real feelings with. He had tumbled through life, bantering with his sisters—the youngest, the only son, the least able to deal with the absence of a father. I bit my lip and tried to hold the images in my mind before they sank back into the past, but they shrank from my grasp as if I were trying to pluck moonlight off the water.

  Jason’s face was still before me an hour later as I continued down the interstate, when suddenly I saw the exit to Calvary Baptist Church. Without thinking, I veered off the freeway onto an overpass I hadn’t traveled for ten years. It was Saturday, and I knew that the churchyard would be teeming with church gardeners, so I put on my sunglasses and pulled down the visor. I imagined them: Mrs. Daniels bending over a solitary weed that was trying desperately to push its way through a cluster of bright purple irises; Mr. Plye, in a feat of painstaking grace, delicately trimming the burgundy, and butter-cream colored roses; Mrs. Bligh sweeping grass off the sidewalk. As I crested the hill, I saw it: the tall white building still jutting into that open sky, as it had looked sixteen years before, when David and I first laid eyes on it. But now its appearance made me inhale a sudden ragged breath. My heart dropped, and a black emptiness opened in my gut.

  The rust of time and neglect had faded the previously vibrant sign, CALVARY BAPTIST, A MEMBER OF THE INDEPENDENT BAPTIST CHURCHES OF AMERICA, into illegibility. The once colorful rhododendrons blooming in fuchsia and white were now lifeless, parched and wilted, much like Calvary Baptist itself. Weeds, filling what had been immaculate flowerbeds, now crept up past broken basement windows. White paint hung from the clapboard siding like ragged strips of clothing from a third-world beggar. I pulled into the deserted parking lot and stared at the desolation.

  Getting out of the car, I moved down the sidewalk, disturbing the dead leaves with my feet. As I peeked into a cracked and dirty window, memories of the people who had attended Calvary materialized like apparitions from the past. I could hear the click of their footsteps, the laughter, see their bright and curious faces that filled the room with expectation. The hymns that once rang inside the white walls came alive again. I began humming one softly, a song by Fanny Crosby, the words as comforting as the melody:

  He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock

  That shadows a dry, thirsty land;

  He hideth my life with the depths of His love,

  And covers me there with His hand.

  That was all I could remember; the years had erased the lyrics from my mind. But the melodies had imprinted themselves inside me even if the words had vanished. Now the faces of the people came into focus, fine-hearted, decent people who had come to find God—people I had forgotten too easily. Instead I had chosen to remember the extremists: the Davids, the Roberts, the Jerry Falwells. I had lumped them together and evicted them all from my life. Some of the sincere souls at Calvary Baptist had reached out to me after the divorce; I had never returned their phone calls. Susan had continued to try and keep in touch, but I had habitually made excuses not to meet her for lunch. The good Christians in my life had not abandoned me as much as I had abandoned them.

  At that moment the great mystery that hides behind our tears, behind our exhausted, browbeaten days, seemed to shine through the clouds and let me know that grace had always been there, watching over me, watching over my children. I cried over my own bitterness—the anger that I’d clung to like a tattered blanket for years. It was time to let it go. It was time to separate the concept of spirituality from the aberration of Fundamentalism.

  Sixteen

  The Absence of Dogma

  THE PIGEONS SCATTERED as I walked onto the University of Washington campus, crossing the snow skifted plaza of Red Square with an important document tucked under my arm. The magnificent Suzzallo Library loomed before me. Built in 1926 and not much disturbed by renovation, its sandstone walls rose six stories into the silent, overcast sky. A platoon of terra-cotta heroes jutted out from its facade a hundred feet over my head, peering down from their niches: Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, Sir Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, and Darwin, symbolizing—and protecting—the pursuit of truth.

  Stepping into the warm entryway, I was greeted with the pleasant smell of old books. I wound up the staircase into the library’s sixty-foot-high Gothic reading room, a space set apart from the commonplace elements of this world. Sandstone rafters meet at a pitched angle above the floor-to-ceiling windows that line both sides of the grand hall. Immense brass chandeliers cast a buttery glow onto the frescoed ceiling, ornamented with rich colors and gilded stenciling, the closest thing the Pacific Northwest can compare to the Sistine Chapel. Panels along the far wall bear the names of explorers: Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Vasco da Gama in the south; and in the north, Juan Ponce de Leon, Hernando Cortés, Vasco Balboa, and Hernando de Soto. Oak bookcases topped with intricate hand carvings, ribbed wood paneling, and Gothic ironwork fill the room with ornamentation and the sort of symbolic messages that one might expect to find in the great hall of a secret society.

  As if oblivious of the grandeur surrounding them, a scattering of people sat at the wooden desks, engrossed in their irregular French verbs and integral theorems—or fast asleep, dreaming of spring break in Florida. I picked out a cozy alcove under a beam of warm light, nestled in, and opened the book I had carried in with me. I could feel my heart quicken as I started my fascinating journey into the gnostic gospels, the translation of a two-thousand-year-old codex that had been discovered in 1945. That year, near the town of Nag Hammadi, on an Egyptian mountainside honeycombed with ancient gravesites, an Arab peasant named Mohammad Ali al-Samman was digging for sahakh, a soft soil used to fertilize crops, when his mattock clunked against something. It proved to be an earthenware jar. Although he was reluctant to break it, fearing that he might release a spirit that lived inside, he also hoped it might contain gold, so he raised his shovel and smashed the jar. Thirteen leatherbound papyri fell out. Mohammad Ali had stumbled upon the Secret Books of Jesus—the gnostic gospels. All but fragments of them had disappeared in the fourth century when the Roman Catholic Church banned them as heretical; merely possessing them had been decreed a criminal offense. While the church’s minions marauded the countryside, finding the manuscripts and burning them, someone, possibly a monk from the nearby St. Pachomius monastery, had saved these copies from destruction by rolling them up and sealing them in
the terra-cotta jar, where they remained for almost sixteen hundred years. There was little debate about the date of their origin. Scholars placed the writings between AD 350 and 400. They were copies of earlier documents written in the second half of the first century AD—as early as, or even earlier than, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

  From earlier reading I already knew that the gnostics had been a mystical sect of Christians, who afforded women equality with men and refused to create a priesthood, casting lots at each service to determine a new leader. They believed that God was both male and female and viewed the Scripture as metaphor and not law. I had read about the gnostic gospels but never actually studied the writings; now I felt light-headed as I began to explore the ancient texts.

  In the silence of the reading room, the words of the secret gospels filled my head, summoning up a world of vineyards and fig trees flanking dusty, winding roads into rock-walled cities. Out of the pages I saw Mary Magdalene walking in leather sandals worn thin by the rocky hillside. She stopped to take refuge from the searing heat in an olive grove outside Judea. In the next moment, the gnostic Jesus appeared beside her. He had the same calm eyes I remembered in paintings from my childhood, but his face was stronger and more intelligent, with chiseled Semitic features and dark skin. Standing before Mary, he spoke quietly about the road to enlightenment. He told her she must let her soul peer through the mind, past the bonds of this material world; only then would it be free to dwell in the eternal gnosis, the knowledge of spiritual truth. Her illuminated spirit would see the interconnectedness of all things: “All natures, all formations, all creatures exist as one … Go then and preach the gospel … Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appoint … do not give a law like the lawgiver.” Next, Jesus kissed her on the mouth, as, according to the text, he did often.