Transcendent Experiences
The first time I went to Church
It was September 1974. I was 16. My family had just moved from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania to Irvine California.
On the way home from school one day a very attractive young lady in a very flattering outfit sat right next to me. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and I was excited, embarrassed and dumbfounded all at the same time.
Her name was Carolyn, and no, I couldn't have her phone number, but she wanted mine. Fine, no problem.
Saturday night Carolyn calls me up and wants to know if I want to go to a free rock concert. My teeth just about hit the floor. "Sure" I said. "Where is it?"
"C--@#y C---%^." Static.
I asked here to repeat it 3 times. I'm sure she said what it really was, but in almost a stereotypical Hollywood moment where the "target" cannot hear the key words, I simply could not make-out what she was saying. But hey, I didn't care anyway.
So, I put on my pink tie-dyed shirt, my purple bell bottoms, and put 2 doobies (that's marijuana joints for those of you who were not 70s Led Zeppelin flower children like myself...Hey, if you do the math you can gather that I was a member of the Bicentennial Class of '76, just about as 70s as you get) in my pocket, ready to rock & roll with my California babe.
When I picked her up she had a Bible in her hands. "Uh, what's that for?"
"Oh, there's a Bible study afterwards. You don't mind do you?"
Oh, no, of course not. What was happening here? What had I gotten myself into?
Well, the free rock concert was being held at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. The singer with a guitar came out, started to play, and 3,000 people rose to their feet and started singing "Hap-py, Hap-py, Hap-py, Hap-py, Happy are the people who's light is the Lord..."
'Toto, I don't think....'
Well, sure enough there was a rock concert. Pretty nice, actually, though somehow it never inspired me to whip-out a doobie & light-up. In fact, I remember being terrified that one of those beasts would fall out of my pocket; in that crowd, I was sure I'd get arrested!
Then there was an hour long (!) Bible study, the essence of which was that the world was getting ready to end, and you had best give your life to Jesus before it was too late. Complete with an all-the-sinners-go-to-the-front altar-call, during which I sat frozen to my seat, though I could tell Carolyn was aching for me to "Come to Christ".
And that was the first Church service I ever attended in my life.
After the service we went to a Carl's Junior burger place to talk. It's so funny how I can forget what I had for dinner last night, but that night over a quarter-century ago is emblazoned in my memory clearer than video tape. I can still find the restaurant, know what we ordered (I had a shake & french fries), and could even show you the exact booth we sat in.
And I certainly remember our conversation. The essence was that I didn't find the Church or what was said or the idea of Jesus a problem at all. But "I couldn't give my life to someone else's mental philosophy."
And it is so remarkable...Every person's life contains key nexus points, where all of the universe and one's destiny appear to be condensed into a single event or decision. I've had several over the years, where actions as simple as a wrong left-hand turn have life-changing consequences. And that night with Carolyn was certainly one of them. All of the significant elements of my future spiritual life were there:
 | Worship through music - I have, as of this writing, been a Church musician for 25 years. |
| Bible study - I have attended & taught more Bible studies that I could ever count. |
| Fellowship - the discussions about God & the Universe I have had through my life have been essential to keeping me focused, and have often been the seeds for invaluable growth. |
But, and this is most key, "I couldn't give my life to someone else's mental philosophy." I didn't know it at the time, but I was a "born mystic."
Mysticism, as it is commonly understood, has been connected to ouija boards, fortune telling, and a host of other silliness. But according to the classic, philosophical definition of the term, Mysticism is simply the quest, desire, and attainment of direct knowledge of the Divine. Mystics seek to transcend what people say, sing, and believe about God, and know directly the truth for themselves.
Statistically (and this is a trick question I've used for years in my religion classes) +-90% of all people on the earth have exactly the same religion; what is that religion? Not Christianity (+-25%), not Buddhism (+-15%), not Islam (+-20%), not Hinduism (+-20%). Nope.
Give up?
90% of the earth's people wind up unquestioningly accepting whatever mommy, daddy, and the social order around them tells them is true.
My natural mystical tendencies were never hampered, because my family was a modern-secularist-enlightened one. We never went to Church, talked of God, and if there was ever a Bible in the house I sure never saw it or remember it. Christmas had something to do with a baby called Jesus, but the other 99% was Santa Claus & presents & waiting until the adults had their first few "bloody marys" (so odd to specialize in that one drink on Xmas morning) just for "a the hair of the dog that bit you." And Easter was all about egg hunts & ham dinner & candy (we were a very gastronomic family), but I was in my mid teens before I had any actual concept that Easter had anything at all to do with Jesus.
AND I WOULDN'T CHANGE ANY OF IT FOR ALL OF THE MONEY IN AMERICA.
You see, I was spared the indoctrination that happens all too often to children, AND I WILL FOREVER BE GRATEFUL TO VAN & MERNA FOR IT. Yes, I am "all for" religious education, but only if it is done properly from the standpoint of helping the child to find their personal relationship with God & the Universe. All too often religious "training" brings with it such fear of varying from the prescribed doctrines & creeds (understood or not, it does not matter) that the soul of God's Child enters maturity damaged beyond redemption.
So, for me, I was spared that abuse, and as I sat with Carolyn at Carl's Junior my soul was still an untrampled virgin field. And in addition to all of my other incalculable blessings, this is the single greatest gift Mom & Dad gave me.
"I can't give my life to someone else's mental philosophy." I must have said it 4 or 5 times that night. Sure, OK, I understood Jesus' death, resurrection, the need to have a personal relationship and all (it was, as I said, a 1 hour Bible study, and I hung on every word). But these, ultimately, were just ideas. Though I had never had a class in epistemology or linguistics or ontology or anything like it (didn't even know they existed, folks) I intuited that words and ideas, especially in the religious domain, must be connected to an actual, real thing, or they had no more value than Alice's Wonderland.
And that, in and of itself, makes me and everything written here in The Church of Yahweh a statistical rarity. At the top of the Table of Contents I write
"On this Website you will find many documents. They cover all essential aspects of religion. Do not accept or believe any of it, without carefully testing & examining its truth. Believing what someone else tells you, simply because you think they have some authority, is one of the silliest things you can do."
Folks, that's a call to the reader to find their own innate mysticism. It has been said of old that the unexamined life is not worth living. And the unexamined faith is not worth having.
But we can, indeed, move beyond faith, beyond belief. We can see. We can know.
To paraphrase the kid in the movie "The Sixth Sense"...
"I smell God."
What I told Carolyn, and what was true, and what would remain a constant theme through my entire life, that would result in the unspoken essence of each and every word in this Church / website, was that I needed to know, have some direct connection to, and experience of, the (possible) entities (God & Jesus) that were spoken of with words, sung in songs, and believed in other hearts.
I was a born mystic, like I said.
And that night I started, consciously, to find out for myself.
