“We are here to experience God. This weekend all of us will experience God—you will feel His presence in this basement. God is alive. God is love. And God will make His presence known to us over the next forty-eight hours. God will enter this room and He will enter our lives.”
A middle-aged man was speaking in a Scottish brogue. He had a thick, grey moustache and the dark pupils of his eyes glowed soulfully behind the lens of his glasses. He sat on a couch addressing the group of teenagers sitting on the carpet before him. His wife sat beside him, a woman with glasses like his own over sunken eyes, her greying, permed hair encircling her head like a mushroom crown. She sat holding her husband’s hand, her other hand holding a cigarette that she periodically brought to her lips. The flames from the myriad candles around the darkened room flickered on the lenses of their glasses.
“We are here to experience the love of God, known as Charitas. In the Bible it says, ‘Faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these be charity’—love. The love of God is not the love a mother has for her child nor the love a husband has for his wife, nor even that of a friend for a friend. The love of God is the love God has for all of humanity, simply because of the fact that we are all His children. This is the same love God calls on us to have for each other and for all of humanity—a wide, all-embracing love we experience by knowing we are all God’s children and as such we are all brothers and sisters to each other and deserving of love.”
Tim had gone to Sherrie the day after she’d told him about the retreat and expressed his interest. She seemed quite pleased, and said she’d bring the forms with her to school the next day. To his puzzlement, Tim had been required to supply an array of personal information, and there was a checklist of objects he was expected to bring to the retreat such as a sleeping bag and a formal suit. They were not allowed to bring a watch or any type of timepiece to the retreat. Tim’s mother had also been required to be in touch with the organizers.
“During this weekend, we ask that you call me Father or Dad,” the man with the Scottish brogue was saying. “And we ask that you call my wife Emily Mother or Mom. It isn’t that we are attempting to replace your real mothers and fathers,” the man noted with a slight smile. “Rather, for this weekend, in this basement, we are pleased to be able to fill in those roles for you during what is bound to be a most emotional time. If you like, you can all us Co-Mom and Co-Dad. In addition, there are Charles and Caroline,” the man said, indicating a middle-aged married couple on the other side of the room who raised their hands agreeably upon being named.
“For this weekend, they will be known as Co-co Dad Charles and Co-co Mom Caroline. Please don’t hesitate to rely upon them as well for any needs you may have over the weekend—they will be most pleased to help you. Perhaps you have heard things about Charitas from friends. Perhaps you have heard things at school or in the newspaper. We ask you to disregard all that you have heard and to simply experience it—to experience the love of God as it will be revealed this weekend. We are all here in this basement for a reason—God has brought us together here to experience His love.”
Tim looked around the darkened room at the forms of the other teenagers stretched out on the carpet or seated on cushions. He recognized some of the other kids from the halls at school. There was a banner stretched across the wall that read Charitas. He felt ill at ease and stretched to see around the shoulders of those in front of him, looking for Sherrie. He could see her sitting on the carpet looking up at the man who was speaking. He saw her profile, her upturned nose, her eye gleaming in the candle light that outlined her cheekbones and her chin and glowed along the edges of her hair. To Tim she seemed beatific, like a religious icon.
She was so far away from him, though! Tim had accepted that the goal of the weekend was to share a religious experience with the group, not with one person. It had still been difficult during the sign-in not to sidle over to her, not to have his attention entirely drawn to her in the midst of the crowd, rather than trying to manifest a wide, expansive love for all of humanity the retreat seemed to call for.
After the speech from Co-Dad, the group was taken to the gymnasium to play a game of volleyball. The co-parents got the game started and before long the teenagers were playing the game with abandon. The usual hooting and laughing started up. But Tim didn’t like sports and always failed to engage in their good-natured rapport. He looked around at the smiling faces and the shouting mouths of the other kids and felt outrageously estranged from them, as though they were a different species. Again, he looked over at Sherrie to see her smiling as she volleyed, and as she burst into laughter while sharing a joke with one of the other teenagers.
After volleyball they moved into another room and began a singalong, with several of the teenagers breaking out guitars and strumming Christian songs mixed with vaguely spiritual works by the Beatles and Cat Stevens. Tim looked around at the singing faces, and saw Sherrie clapping her hands and harmonizing. He tried to join in with abandon, especially on those rare occasions when she met his gaze. At those times he would quickly grin and nod his head in time to the music. But the unnatural-feeling music combined with the volleyball game made him feel as though he’d made a terrible mistake in signing up for the weekend. As the voices around him united in an uptempo melody about “reaching out for Jesus,” he felt desolate and hollow inside, adrift on a voyage he now regretted taking, feeling his familiar life receding like a vanishing shoreline.
Co-Dad addressed the group, coming to sit on the couch before them, rumbling in his thick Scottish brogue. “It’s time for an exercise called ‘Minus Plus.’ Charlie, could we have the blackboard brought in?” Charlie wheeled in a large blackboard. “Now for this,” Co-Dad explained as he got to his feet, picking up a piece of chalk from the ledge of the blackboard, “we’re going to make a list of all the reasons your parents drive you nuts. I’ll write minus over here,” said Co-Dad, drawing on the board as a murmur of laughter ran through the teenagers. “Yes, God knows there are enough of them. Parents can be a real drag sometimes. Now,” he said, turning to face the group, “let’s have it. What are the real bummers about your moms and dads?” He looked around at all the faces. “Come on now—no need to be shy. We’re going to use this to learn something about ourselves.”
“Well,” a bushy-haired boy volunteered, “one thing about my mom—she always puts this curfew on me of nine o’clock, and all my friends get to stay out till ten, and that’s kind of a drag.”
“Alright,” Co-Dad said, turning to write on the blackboard. “Curfews.” Another boy raised his hand. “Yes, Gus?” Co-Dad asked.
“Well,” said Gus, “sometimes my mom puts the juice container back in the fridge with only a few drops left in it, and then I go to get some juice and I take it out of the fridge and there’s nothing in it!”
The group burst into laughter as Gus shook his head and looked skyward in exasperation. “It’s like—Mom, when you finish the juice can you at least not put it back in the fridge so that people might think there’s juice in it when there’s not? People like me, maybe?”
“Ah, yes,” remarked Co-Dad, chuckling along with the general laughter. He listed it on the board as one of the minuses: Leaving nearly empty juice container in fridge.
“Yes, Stacey? Do you have a minus about your parents?”
“Sometimes my mom kind of bothers me a lot about marks,” Stacey said.
“Yes! Nagging! Very good!” Co-Dad remarked, writing it down. “That’s a big one.” The exercise continued. Co-Dad wrote down the various parental gripes on the left side of the blackboard, and when he came to the bottom, he moved to the right and wrote the word plus. He then ran through the list of complaints and showed how each minus the teenagers had could be seen as a plus in that the perceived misdeed was actually an expression of love. The parents of the boy who had bemoaned his curfew were guilty of no crime other than a protectiveness motivated by love. The girl whose mother nagged her about her marks was shown that the nagging was an expression of loving concern for her future success. Even Gus’s mother, in returning the near-empty juice container to the fridge, was displaying a thriftiness in which her love for him was easily discerned: by ensuring that the last drops of juice weren’t wasted, she was saving money to buy more juice for him in the future.
“So we see,” explained Co-Dad, gesturing with his piece of chalk, “that many a time when parents do things which upset us or anger us, they do it with the best intentions. Out of love. We see that much of what we perceive to be minuses…” here he pointed to the word on the board, “are in actuality pluses, if we can only stop in our anger and think to see the love behind their actions. Now then, everyone stand up,” Co-Dad commanded.
The teenagers pulled themselves to their feet.
“I hope we all learned something from that exercise. And since we are all learning together, I invite everyone to turn to the people on either side of you and give them a big Charitas hug. Come on now—we are all part of one family here. We are brothers and sisters in God, and it is time to share the Charitas love that we’re feeling,” said Co-Dad.
There were murmurs of embarrassment in the group as the teenagers awkwardly hugged each other. Tim found himself between two boys who were short and thin like himself—he quickly, gingerly encircled his arms around each of them in turn. Over the shoulder of one boy he saw a large jock bending to embrace Sherrie. Why on earth couldn’t he have been seated next to her at this time? The image of the boy hugging Sherrie seared into Tim’s brain.
He knew how irrational it was to be jealous of her when she already had a boyfriend, but somehow that fact made him even more distressed and furious to see her enjoying other people’s company—as though they might win what was forbidden to him. There had been times at school when he had even been jealous of her female friends. He coveted every crumb of attention she bestowed. He was still overcome by his thoughts and emotions, his brow furrowed and his fingernails digging into the palms of his clenched-up hands, when Co-Dad called out, “Alright, then! Time for floor hockey!”
The teenagers were corralled back into the auditorium, and before he was fully conscious of it, without realizing what he was doing, Tim was jogging along the floor with a plastic hockey stick someone had shoved into his hand. He tried to play along with the other teenagers, but the running gave him a cramp in his stomach and attempting to be a good sport when he felt annoyed and furious only made him more annoyed and furious. He realized all at once that he had no idea what time it was: there were no watches allowed and all the clocks were covered. He knew it was night, but he didn’t know how late it was. Tim began feeling disoriented, light-headed, his scalp prickling weirdly as he ran, brushing his stick along the floor.
Through the rush of running, sliding forms, he followed Sherrie’s small body with his eye as it gracefully weaved, as she frequently smiled and laughed, calling out in a communal fashion to the other kids. Tim felt as though he were a ghost, destined only to stand and watch. “What have you led me into?” he asked silently as he hopelessly feigned participation in the game, mournfully peering at her from what seemed an intractable distance. All at once, Sherrie looked at him, eye to eye. Tim’s heart stopped. She smiled and jogged over to him. Had she read his thoughts, had she sensed the desperation that was pounding in his temples? She held his glance as she approached him, smiling with the kindness he loved to see in her. “How’re you doing?” she asked. “Alright?”
“Oh, yeah!” Tim exclaimed, bobbing his head up and down, smiling with enthusiasm.
“Great!” she responded, holding him in her smile for a moment more before turning and rejoining the game.
Tim returned to the game as well, finding he had more energy to devote to the running and darting, heartened by her attention. After the game it was bedtime, and Tim realized how late it must have been—or early in the morning it was—when he crawled into his sleeping bag on a cot in the auditorium. He immediately felt the weight of exhaustion on him and sank into deep, dreamless sleep.
It seemed as though no time had passed at all when loud music awoke him. The adults were moving through the auditorium waking each teenager up individually. The song that was blaring intoned, “This day was created by the Lord!”
“And here I thought the day was created by Johnny Carson,” Tim noted to the boy at the cot beside him.
“What?” the boy asked.
The girls slept in a different area than the boys did, so the first opportunity for Tim to see Sherrie was in the breakfast lineup. When he sighted her sleepily helping herself to some juice, her eyes a bit puffy and hair dishevelled, Tim grew excited. Although many other people were present, it thrilled him that they had slept under the same roof.
After breakfast there was another singing session, then the teenagers were instructed to put on their suits and dresses. They were shepherded out of the basement into a school bus that waited outside. The bus drove them to an old age home several blocks away. The teenagers were separated into groups of three and given room numbers to visit. Tim and his group members were assigned to the small room of an eighty-seven-year-old, short, compact man in a white shirt and grey slacks. His sparse white hair was combed back from his forehead. He was agreeable but not notably excited to have the company of the teenagers. He sat on the edge of his bed and responded to their questions politely but succinctly.
In the long silences between the teenagers’ attempts at conversation, the man sat patiently alert, waiting for the next sentence. When they smiled, he did not smile in return but nodded once with great dignity, in acknowledgement of their good wishes. When their assigned twenty minutes had passed and they rose to leave, the man shook their hands in the same affable diffidence with which he had greeted them. As they left his room he laid down on his bed and stared serenely into space.
“Many of these people we visited have no one to come visit them,” Co-Dad explained when they returned to the church basement. “Many of them are alone, suffering from ill health and fading from life without anyone who cares. The one thing that unites them is the fact they are at the end of life—not the beginning. They are going where our parents must go and where we all must go.”
A screen was set up and a film projector began clicking. The teenagers were shown a film of a middle-aged couple and their son going to visit the elderly, dementia-afflicted patriarch of the family. The film concerned the upcoming transference of the grandfather to an old age home. As the family visited with the old man, flashbacks were shown of the times they enjoyed earlier in life, when the grandfather was still mentally fit and reasonably agile. These memories were starkly contrasted with images of the present, of the old man sitting slack-jawed, feeble and infirm, his family struggling to communicate with him. The family professed their love for him, but his eyes looked through them, staring without recognition. Tim recognized the actors from bit parts on TV shows, and the grandfather in particular he remembered from a hot dog commercial.
The film was over, and some lights came on. The room was still dimly lit as the adults silently made their way about the room, passing out envelopes to the teenagers. Tim watched, puzzled, as teenagers opened their envelopes—many of them being quite moved by the contents. He could see some kids begin to cry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, and he feared he might not be able to. How would that go over with Sherrie? he wondered. Perhaps he could pretend, he thought, by licking his fingers and rubbing them by his eyes. As the envelopes were passed out and more teenagers seemed to be sobbing, he wondered what it was that could make them have such an intense reaction.
Tim took the envelope Co-Mom handed to him. He ripped it open and found several letters. He recognized the writing of his mother:
Dear Tim,
This is your mother speaking.
I am proud of you and I love you…
Next with a jolt, he recognized the overly careful, hard-pressed-down script of his dad on the paper beneath at the same time as he took in the first several lines.
Dear Tim,
You are an excellent writer while I am a terrible one, so please excuse my spelling. I love you and am proud of you…
Tears washed the words from his eyes in a rush as he bent over double. He heard himself utter a wail unlike any he had ever known himself to make. He was crying uncontrollably, in great spasms, liquid flowing from his eyes and nostrils.
Suddenly arms were around him, and through his blurred vision in the dim room he could tell that this time it was Sherrie. He locked his arms around her as he melted further into the frightening sorrow that had overtaken him. He had become unmoored from all that previously governed his emotions, flowing further into the awful cleansing truth. Sherrie held him close in the dimness of the church basement, weeping as well, making quiet exclamations of empathy as he shook, shattered and vibrating in her arms.