Take Me to Church

Losing and then finding my religion, over and over again.

When I was 11, I told my mom I thought we should go to church. We both remember it clearly, though the thing I can’t recall is what motivated me. Had I watched an episode of G.I. Joe where Cobra Commander talks to Destro about the Jesus Prayer? Was it one of those playground conversations with another kid where they mentioned the availability of cookies and other treats following the service? I don’t think so. Though my memory’s fuzzy, I’m pretty sure the thing that attracted me was whatever promise religion makes to both the curious and the desperate, that it might speak to one’s deeper questions, assuage one’s more profound concerns. I’m not saying I could have articulated this as a kid, I just know it wasn’t the free cake that piqued my interest.

Lucky for me, my mom had dabbled in church-going years before I was born, at what I imagine was one of the most progressive fellowships in all of Orange County, an unassuming church called Fairview, located on a small corner block in Costa Mesa, across from the OC fairgrounds. And so when I submitted my request, she took me there. It was, er, a blessing that Fairview ended up being my first exposure to organized religion. Orange County was already becoming infamous for its megachurches, with folks like Rick Warren and Robert Schuller preaching in arenalike settings under stage lighting. In fact, just a few blocks away from Fairview was the headquarters of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, plunked right across the 405 freeway from South Coast Plaza, which bills itself as “the largest luxury shopping destination on the West Coast.” These two buildings’ proximity to one another conveniently symbolized the region’s mostly transactional relationship with Christianity.

Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral, one of the country’s first megachurches. Photo Credit: Carol M. Highsmith

But Fairview was different, both in its modest ambitions and progressive politics. The pastor, this guy Gary, who baptized me at my request—his adult daughter was gay, and he’d eventually perform the ceremony when she and her partner wed, a fact I mention because this was the mid-'90s and that sorta thing was nowhere near common. Compare that with the relative glut of evangelical megachurches, which combined homophobia and other strains of intolerance with the ascendent MMA/gated community vibes of Orange County’s '90’s growth spurt, thereby laying the intellectual roots of the OC’s materialist-evangelical conservative bloom for years to come. But I digress…

Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, what I took away from my exposure to Gary and his flock was that spirituality need not be constrained by doctrine, that Christianity was just one of many contexts in which to explore ideas of faith, morality, and what in Buddhism is called loving-kindness, aka goodwill toward people. But my interest in these things, like that of most kids, turned out to be passing. I attended services with my mom for six months maybe, then started making excuses, then wandered in other directions that somehow included both musical theater and professional wrestling (the '90s were weird, man).

The next time I’d find myself in a religious setting was years later, when I briefly became a congregant of a teen bible study group called “J-Team,” the influence of which swept through our high school like a bad flu. As with any virus, it was spread by the most social among us, our school’s coolest and best-looking kids. Once they were infected, those of us who merely aspired to popularity followed them like supplicants to the weekly meetings. These took place in the posh tract homes of welcoming parents, moms and dads who were no doubt pleased to see such a wholesome group of teenagers packed into their living room for singalongs of pop-inflected Jesus music, our eyes closed, our hands raised, belting surprisingly catchy tunes that are still stuck in my head to this day.

If there was a lesson I got from this experience, it’s that nothing is ever as wholesome as it seems, because it wasn’t long before it came out that the group leader—this suspiciously charming, early-twenties surfer-dude—was secretly dating one of my freshman classmates, the prettiest and most ostentatiously chaste girl in the group, the one so many of us pined for, imagining a world where we’d gladly wait for marriage, as the surfer-dude had so stridently drilled into us during his sermons. Whether this situation qualified as legitimately criminal or just wreaked of hypocrisy and moral compromise, I can’t say, but in any event it was around the time this news broke that I decoupled myself from the J-Team in order to heed the siren’s call of amplified guitars, following it to house parties, basement shows, and before long the various experiments with drugs and alcohol that go hand in hand with such things.

Said experiments are our next step on my spiritual guided tour. Because although they are technically a mile marker on the longer journey that was my descent into addiction, the drug adventures of my late teens and early twenties cracked a door that would remain open for the first of my life, as in:

• The time me and some friends smoked so much pot we communicated telepathically;

• The time me and some friends took so much psilocybin we communicated telepathically;

• The time me and a friend took MDMA during an all-night rave in a Manhattan loft, then watched the sun rise over the East River as the city’s garbage barges made their way to some faraway landfill, which wasn’t so much a religious experience as it was one of the most satisfyingly poetic moments of my life;

• Additional psilocybin trips of varying profundity, at least a few of which allowed me to glimpse the extent that our day-to-day reality is but one instantiation of time and space, born of a certain evolutionary necessity, but that other more malleable concepts of this dyad are possible, that natural phenomenon—plants, animals, rocks maybe—exist across varying dimensions of it, but that despite or because of that we are all part of the same basic interrelated continuum. Or, to put it another way: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

It's at this point in my life—roughly my mid-twenties—that my spiritual seeking goes on an indefinite hiatus, partly because it’s then that booze goes from being a supporting actor in this show to a scene-stealing freak, and also because I unwittingly found myself being sucked into that most predominant and ubiquitous form of American quasi-spiritual fulfillment, careerism. Which is to say: For the next 15 years I’d seek security and meaning through work, chasing money, status, and whatever sense of power and mastery work conferred, ever cognizant that there was a hole in that particular bucket, ever persistent regardless. 

More luck, then: sobriety, cancer, the whole confluence of events last year…one silver lining is that they’ve led me here, exploring whatever this latest phase of my personal spiritual adventure we’re in. One thing I’ve learned from AA is you can always go back out and get drunk, but you can never forget what you learned in the rooms, and maybe spirituality is like this, too—a ladder we climb one rung at a time, at different points in our lives, the experience and knowledge accruing in ways we’re mostly not aware of, at least not until we reflect back on them later. 

So why am I telling you all this? Well, when I was growing up it seemed to me like religion and spirituality were a straight line, that you were assigned these things at some point in childhood, and if you accepted that assignment then off you went as a Catholic or whatever your whole life, and I think for a lot of people that’s still the case. It’s notably not the case for most of my friends, and if I can make some assumptions about the kind of person who might find themselves reading a Substack newsletter at this point in time, I’m guessing it’s not the case for many of you either. Apologies for generalizing, but it seems to me that among my hypersecularized cohort, “religion” tends to be best left to the flyover states and “spirituality” is a diffuse concept that leaks its way into things like a pilates routine or eating vegan before 7pm.

But what I’m trying to suggest is that each of us does have our own version of religious experience, if you take the time to connect various dots across the span of your life. What you may discover, as I’m starting to discover, is that there’s a consistency to your perspective, what in certain Buddhist schools would be referred to as your intention—that inclination that lives way deep down beneath layers of stories, experiences, prejudices, assumptions. I’ll hand the mic to Ram Dass to explain: 

In each of us
There once was a fire
And for some of us
There seem as if there are only ashes now
But when we dig in the ashes
We find one ember

And very gently we fan that ember
Blow on it, it gets brighter
And from that ember we rebuild the fire
The only thing that's important is that ember

That's what you and I are here to celebrate
That though we've lived our life totally involved in the world
We know
We know that we're of the spirit

The ember gets stronger
The flame starts to flicker a bit
And pretty soon you realize that all we're going to do for eternity
Is sit around the fire

Bonus: One of my favorite musicians, Jon Hopkins, set this to music. It’s not as catchy as the songs we used to sing in J-Team, but it’s not nearly as creepy either. 

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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

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