Today is Easter, the one Sunday every spring when most Christians worldwide celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after he was crucified, as told in the epic that is the New Testament. Lately, I have been reading the Bible, particularly the Gospels, for the first time in my life with a spiritual focus. And somewhat to my pleasant surprise, I am experiencing the Bible as a great resource for life lessons and spiritual growth. The stories about overcoming hardship, of allowing faith in a higher power to guide your heart, of the power of love for one another, bleeds through so many of the chapters and the characters in them. I have even had fun reading the books by the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to compare their accounts of Jesus. I will never be a biblical scholar, but my reading has deepened my understanding of one of the world’s most significant historical figures.
While reading the other day, I stumbled upon a verse that stands out for my searching self in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” The quote stopped me, and I reread it many times, aloud to myself. Historically, faith has been my barrier to believing in any one religion’s version of God. To me, faith has always meant suspending disbelief in order to have a belief. That is, faith is, according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” My problem is why would God give me a mind so capable and inclined to question everything unless there is compelling evidence, but then require me to turn off my God-given cerebral instinct in order to believe in Him? That simply doesn’t seem logical! But as I read that chapter in Hebrews, about how faith in God has helped people throughout history avoid temptations, helped them endure persecutions, and allowed them to achieve a grace in the face of enormous terrors, dangers, and injustices, I realize that it’s not just about “having faith” but rather about “having faith in the idea of faith.” Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as being about having the confidence to get your ego brain out of the way in order to allow a power greater than we can see into our lives. Under this definition, the foundation of the Christian notion of faith is not too unlike that of Buddhism, Hinduism, and even the yoga practices associated with them in which turning off the self is what ultimately allows one to find their true self. I found a beauty to the message that I had never quite grasped.
And on this Easter Sunday, I find myself grappling with whether I can take that leap with Christianity—or any religion, for that matter. So while today is considered the high point of the Christian worship calendar, I don’t feel as if, personally, I’m at my spiritual high point. I’m definitely not at my low; I’m closer to believing in…something.
In my quest to believe in something, I’ve been making the hour-long drive to Kris Jenner’s church most every Sunday to be inspired by Pastor Brad Johnson’s always-relatable sermons. I spot Kris and her boyfriend, Corey, seated in the front row when I walk into the sanctuary of the California Community Church a few minutes late for the 9:30 a.m. service. Kris is wearing a black-and-white pantsuit, her famously cut-short black hair perfectly sculpted. The band has already begun playing, so I shake Corey’s hand and give Kris a quick hug before settling into the chair to Kris’s left.
I notice that all the chairs in the front row have Reserved placards on them. This isn’t normal. Usually all the chairs are open to anyone, though Kris usually likes to sit in the front row right below Brad’s lectern.
“Who are these seats reserved for?” I whisper to Kris.
“Supposedly, the rest of the family,” she says with a shake of her head, checking the time on her iPhone. “If they ever freakin’ show up.”
Moments later, Khloe Kardashian, looking Kentucky Derby–ready in an all-white pantsuit and topped with a matching white hat, scurries self-consciously into a seat a few down to my left. I glance behind her and can see through the front window an armada of paparazzi flashing their cameras in the parking lot. Then, behind Khloe I see a very tall black man in a gray hooded sweatshirt and brown-tinted sunglasses clutching a Starbucks cup. He squeezes between the narrow aisle leading to the front row. It’s her husband, Lamar Odom.
I crane my neck back at the packed church and notice pretty much all eyes are on Lamar. Not just because he is nearly seven feet tall. Not just because he is a former L.A. Laker. Not just because he hasn’t been to this church in over two years. The biggest reason why the congregation is focused on Lamar is because it is one of his first public appearances since he almost died several months ago after overdosing.
I watch as he plops his bony frame into the seat beside Khloe. She has nursed him to health ever since he lay in a coma in that Vegas hospital, outside which I stood for days reporting on his overdose, and where I prayed for him at the request of a family member and where, much to my surprise, he woke up as if prayers had been answered.
That moment was the catalyst that spurred my desire to reconnect with my spirituality, to get to know this God from whom I asked for help and used to speak to regularly. It led me to attend Bible study, to talk to spiritually minded people I’ve met through work, to start meditating, to pray again, to start coming to this church with Kris Jenner, and to appreciate the Bible for the first time as an adult.
As the band jams its folk rock, I stand up and, crouching down, step over to Khloe and give her a hug and an air-kiss. I lean over and shake Lamar’s hand.
“Happy Easter, my friend,” I say.
“Thank you, Ken,” he replies in a mumble. “Good to see you, my man.”
This moment easily could never have happened. By all accounts, Lamar not only could have never come out of that coma, but he could have been permanently brain damaged and unable to walk again. At the time I remember hearing a report that he would be in diapers the rest of his life. Tabloids claimed if he lived he would be “a vegetable.”
But months later, here he is in a church with me, fully functional, both of us here to acknowledge that there is a force greater than us that just might be capable of performing miracles.
As the band stops and Pastor Brad steps up to the pulpit, Kourtney Kardashian, carrying her infant son, rushes to the front with her blue-jean-clad supermodel sister, Kendall, who sits to my immediate left and rubs my shoulder with a friendly hello. I remember when Kendall was eleven and I would see her run up the stairs when I showed up to the family house, a shy kid. Now she is nineteen and one of the most famous models in the world. Kendall fiddles on her phone and checks her Instagram as Pastor Brad broadcasts his welcoming smile to the congregation.
But sitting here with members of arguably the most famous family in the world, I am reminded that at the end of the day we are all human and, no matter how famous or rich or gorgeous, there is a humility to being human that is revealed when we all sit and worship a God we hope is listening. In the old days, not everyone owned a Bible, or had the Internet, so gathering with others in a church to get preached to was practical. These days, it is a choice to congregate in a group and proclaim your faith…or, in my case, seek to know it. There is a beauty in it that transcends Kendall’s physical beauty. A church service honoring a figure who is believed to have died for our sins reveals a beauty of human truth—not a skin-deep beauty of falsity. As unsure as I am about the validity of the historical Jesus’s significance, I am glad I came, because I feel as if I have purpose.
Brad begins his energetic Easter sermon, reminding us that today is the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, reading from John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die.”
Brad says, “Resurrection is when something has died and come back to life,” sharing that he has gone through times he had failed and felt spiritually dead but his faith brought him back to life. The preacher, disgraced and suicidal just a few years ago, is a compelling messenger.
Brad continues, “There are people in the room who are addicts.” Brad doesn’t glance at Lamar, but I sense that he has specifically mentioned addicts to get his attention. I sneak a peek at Lamar, who stares up at Brad with full attention as Brad adds, “And you know there was a time when people wrote you off, hopeless. And now you’re sober. God specializes in resurrection.”
Brad goes on to tell the story of Lazarus, whom Jesus brought back from the dead, after his sister asked for Jesus’s help. “God will give you whatever you ask,” Brad reads from John 11:22, before closing his Bible and addressing the congregation. “This Easter Sunday could be your moment. Your faith could rise and you can believe that with God all things are possible….Some of you feel like there is a boulder sitting on your chest and you don’t have the strength to roll the stone away….On Easter, I want you to remember that God rolls stones away. He did it for Lazarus, he did it for himself, and he will do it for you.”
At the heart of Christianity is this very uplifting, hopeful message. Yet so much of that inspiration seems to be lost in the politics of faith these days. Some Christians, certainly not all, are still waving their Bibles in judgment at gays, nonbelievers, people they deem to be godless or heathen for not following their God. But when you strip that all away, and read the words in the Bible, the foundational message is an inspiring, uplifting, and hopeful one: We can have eternal spiritual life with faith in Jesus Christ. It’s that message of hope that has kept me coming back to this church.
I glance over at Lamar, who sits expressionless as he soaks in Brad’s closing prayer.
“It is a personal decision to become a follower of Jesus,” Brad says as the keyboard player chimes in softly in the background. “I am not talking about understanding it intellectually; I am talking about personalizing it in your heart. Jesus went to the cross for you, for your sins, and he rose from the dead so you can be forgiven. The same voice that called Lazarus from the grave calls you out of your sins today….He loves you and forgives you and he makes you brand-new. You can’t do that for yourself.”
Brad then asks everyone who wants to know Jesus in their heart to pray with him: “Heavenly Father, forgive me of my sins and make me brand-new. I believe you died for me and you rose so that I could be forgiven. Fill me with your spirit so that I can follow you for the rest of my life.”
I close my eyes and listen, but I don’t recite the prayer with Brad. I love the message, but I don’t know whether I believe Jesus is the only way, and especially don’t think I agree with Brad that I cannot make myself brand-new, that only Jesus can do that. But I am not sure. That’s why, as I hug the Kardashian clan and make plans to see them soon, I still have a lot to figure out about what I believe and don’t believe.
One thing I do believe is that whether Lamar showing up to church with me today was an act of God or just a coincidence, his very existence gives me hope that no matter how low or how lost I may feel, I still believe in the values of hope, faith, and love.
I step toward Lamar to say goodbye and notice a tattoo on his inner left hand. It’s the cursive initials “KO” for Khloe Odom, his long-suffering wife who has just nursed him back to health from his stroke.
Then I have a revelation: I may not be ready to commit my soul to Jesus Christ, but I am prepared to commit my body to three values I hold dear.
A few days later, it’s my forty-sixth birthday. I wake at six o’clock, pour coffee into a to-go mug, and begin my hour-long commute from Hermosa Beach by crawling up La Brea Avenue into the E! studios in Hollywood, where I start my fast-paced typical morning—a quick stop in the makeup room to get made pretty by Liz, head to wardrobe and put on the shirt and tie and skinny jeans my stylist has hung up for me, hustle upstairs to the newsroom for the morning meeting with our executive producer, and then walk up to our third-floor studio and get in place at the table for our daily web show Live from E! On the air, we talk about how it’s Kourtney Kardashian’s birthday and discuss her most recent Instagram post. I don’t mention that Kourtney and I share the same birthday—April 18—but after we wrap I do text Kourtney, a friend, as I have for many years on this date.
happy bday, kourt! Hope you have a great one!
u too ken. Make it special!
I plan to.
After recording some voice-over promos for tonight’s E! News, I head to my office and probe the web, researching different designs that symbolize faith, hope, and love. One site features an image and describes its meaning as such:
Love is a supreme motivator. Faith in God can cause miracles. And hope is what keeps us going even in difficult situations. Sometimes just seeing a faith hope love tattoo on a passerby can bring about a positive change in the viewer. These three words are not mere spellings. They are deep concepts that can change the world. They bring about a positive feeling in a person. This positivity will then manifest into an inner strength that makes life easier. Problems don’t seem insurmountable anymore. Faith, love and hope are the pillars on which a good and peaceful life rests.
Now I know what will be my birthday present to myself. I print out the image and when we wrap the show shortly before five, I drive north a few miles to Kat Von D’s tattoo parlor in Hollywood.
“Make yourself comfortable,” my tattoo artist, Mikey, tells me, patting the table. He points at it as if I’m a dog and he is my master. “Don’t be shy, now.”
I strain a smile and hop up on the bench, gently easing onto my back.
My stomach grinds like a cement mixer as I lick my dry lips and fold my hands across my chest. A pocket of air sits locked in my tight lungs, and pressing my palms down on my breastbone, I grunt it out, the exhale sounding like a hockey puck scraping through a cheese grater.
For much of the past year, especially before I began praying and meditating, this basic biological function—breathing—has not been an easy thing for me to do. And Mikey’s not at all helping me relax when he looks down and asks with a snaggletooth grin, “So this really is your first time?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “Definitely.”
“Well, you’re in good hands.”
I stare at the ceiling in a corpse pose. This position reminds me of when I get my annual MRI checkup, when my nearly six-foot-long body is inserted into a white tube and injected with a dark-colored dye that spreads through my arteries to bring contrast to the image of my brain. For close to an hour, with my head rendered all but immovable in a cage, my skull is scanned to find whether the tumor near the base of my brain, first discovered nearly twenty years ago and (mostly) removed by a surgeon, has grown back. Obviously, these exams aren’t exactly a chill vibe. In fact, they freak me out. My anxiety was made worse a few years ago when the MRI report came back with this finding: The tumor, which had been dormant since the late 1990s, had spread, requiring me to up my medication and hope it didn’t spread throughout my brain…and kill me.
This probably explains why most any lie-down-with-my-face-up procedures—be it a dental exam, a massage, donating blood—can bring on the Monster. Who’s that? He’s the flood of anxiety, breathless panic, the sense of dread that breaks into my skull and hijacks my brain, holding me prisoner until the “anxiety attack” subsides. Over the years, I have tried to manage the Monster. I’ve done hypnotherapy, gone into $200-an-hour talk therapy where I was diagnosed with PTSD, and I even tried a controversial treatment used on war-torn soldiers. It is called EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, in which I recall my traumatic events while the psychiatrist gets me to focus on a moving light that gets my gaze moving laterally. It was supposed to detach pain from the memory. It didn’t work. I resorted to taking the occasional Xanax to make it stop, though it’s like putting a Band-Aid on an ax wound.
Unlike an MRI exam, the session I have scheduled with Mikey isn’t necessarily something I must do to stay alive. In fact, a Google search I conducted earlier today at my desk in the E! News room uncovered a host of reasons—from infections to hepatitis to nasty allergic reactions—that is evidence that what Mikey is about to do to me is perhaps not only unhealthy but potentially lethal (albeit small risk of that). The inherent risks didn’t stop me, however, from leaving work and driving straight to this building just off Hollywood Boulevard.
Here I lie
Not to die
But to seek some grace
I want to escape my inner rat race
Mikey slides his fingers into black latex gloves, takes hold of my left arm, and extends it straight out to the side like an arm of Jesus on the cross.
“Don’t move,” he says. “Got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
Some of my unease may come from the fact that I just met Mikey for the first time about an hour ago and know nothing about him other than what I read on the web, which, quite frankly, wasn’t very reassuring. OK, fine. His page actually had no bio on it whatsoever; instead, just a photo of Mikey in a black T-shirt with “666” printed on the front in demonic lettering. In the pic, I could see a sleeve of tattoos coating his right arm, which was cocked at the elbow so he could flash the satanic devil-horn sign with his pinky and forefinger. A metal ring dangled from between his nostrils. Yet, still, I came here. I am that desperate.
Now I am beneath that very same dark-haired man in this box of mirrors and rock music blaring, with lots of nervousness, excitement, and an intention to make this the kind of spiritual experience that I could really use on this day, my forty-sixth birthday.
“Shouldn’t you strap me down or something?” I ask him with an unconvincing half smile. “You know, like, just in case I move?”
He looks away and laughs with a machine-gun patter, his thick black earrings dancing with his overstretched earlobes.
“Nah.” He picks up the needle. “You can do it. I have faith in you.”
Faith: That’s what I’ve been seeking, yearning for, needing, but have not yet found. The spiritual equivalent of glasses—something, anything—to help me see my true self.
I’ve been thinking more about death all the time. In the car on the freeway. In bed with my kids. Sitting in front of the camera at work. Actually, I think about death so much it makes it hard to focus on life. I often think about how short life is, how the kids are growing up so fast and how my body aches more often and in more places. And twice a week, when I must swallow the Tic Tac–shaped pills to keep the tumor from growing in my head, I think about death.
No longer having any defined spiritual belief system framing the Big Picture for me makes the specter of death the most anxiety-inducing thought I have these days.
So, at forty-six, this is where I stand: Half a lifetime ago, I thought I pretty much knew everything. Now that I realize I don’t know what I believe, it’s as if I know nothing.
Lost (adj.)—not knowing where you are or how to get to where you want to go
“How long will this take?” I ask Mikey.
Mikey rubs an antiseptic wipe on the veiny spot just below the crease of my inner arm. It’s the same place from which blood has been drawn, where drugs have been injected, and, now, the place where I can look for the comfort I seek with a permanent stamp defining me.
“Like a half an hour—tops,” he answers. “Why? You in a hurry or something?”
“Not at all,” I say. “Just curious.”
I shut up. I don’t want to rush him. A micro-slip of his hand would scar my body for life.
I’ve already acquired plenty of physical and emotional scars—totems to a lifetime of sweet victories and profound disappointments, successes and failures, great beauty and distressing ugliness, of enjoying my health and battling disease, of falling in love and, also, of having my heart shattered in pieces that I still haven’t put back together.
Oh, how I wish to feel whole
To escape this hole
I look above
I want love
In the past year or so, my physical pains have become more acute:
• The flare-ups of arthritis in my right hip, from an old hockey injury, cause me to limp and hobble after sitting for long stretches.
• The omnipresent stomachaches; my gut wrings itself into a twist near constantly, from the moment I wake up until I crash into bed, every day for so many months I’ve stopped counting.
• The sore muscles radiating across my chest and my armpits.
• The pinching pain in my lower neck, the result of my constant staring down at my phone coupled with the poor posture of my two hours on the freeway each day to take me to the E! Studios in Hollywood, where the increasing visits from the Monster have made it harder to focus on my on-camera job that demands a lot of my attention.
I am too young to feel this way. I have too much life ahead of me to have angst and worry and spiritual hollowness cramping my physical self. I keep wondering, Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of it all?
I’ve hurt enough in this life to know I don’t like pain, thus I’ve expended a lot of energy avoiding it. I’ve been burned and I don’t want to touch that stove, don’t want to tell my wife, Brooke, my true feelings about how at times I feel trapped in this so-called Perfect Life as the clock ticks down to death. So I avoid the pain of an argument (Just be grateful…Stop making yourself crazy with worry), maybe pop a Xanax to numb myself to the accumulated pain that has come from ignoring the chorus of voices that torture me with songs of warning that I’ve been disconnected from my true self, from my soul. But how do I find it?
As I watch Mikey towel my arm dry, I remember something I once heard Deepak Chopra say: In order to heal pain, we must first experience pain.
With this logic, I suppose I am healing. But I don’t like that pain has become my new normal: My guts aching with every step into the unknown through my search for faith, hope, and love in Hollywood.
I’ve been struggling to find meaning amid the demanding chaos of juggling my role as dad, husband, son, friend, author, and journalist, while also trying to keep a sense of my unlabeled self—that is, my true self, the inner self, the soul that gradually has been obscured in the fog of my life chasing celebrities, wheezing in freeway smog, hustling kids to hockey practices and games across the country…popping pills to keep the Monster at bay.
Something’s gotta change today
I say
Or I will feel more sorrow
I need a better tomorrow
If I’m going to get from Mikey what I want tonight, it’ll take sacrifice. That’s usually how it works. Though I was one class short of being a religion minor in college, I’m not a religious scholar by any stretch of the definition. But as a seeker I have read at least enough to have passing knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, Allah—most of the great spiritual messengers of the world’s religions. I’ve found that they share, among many other similarities, this common message: You’ve got to give up something in order to get something bigger.
And that’s been a theme of my life. Move away from home as a teen to live my college hockey dreams. Go into oodles of graduate school debt to get ahead in journalism. Quit my job as a newspaper reporter in Virginia and drive across the country, with no guarantee of work, to set up shop in Los Angeles to try to make it in the global epicenter of entertainment media.
My move west occurred twenty years ago, back when my celebrity crush was Jennifer Aniston (still is, by the way) and I knew one person in all of Los Angeles (my buddy Glenn). Although I wish I could say the time has flown, it really hasn’t. Some periods dragged on as I struggled to keep my career alive and my marriage intact as my life evolved from a private one to that of a marginally famous pseudo-celebrity—that is, I became micro-famous for covering actually famous people. But the Miami Beach magazine parties, the exclusive interviews, the nationwide book tours, tropical vacations with the kids, and their hockey trips across North America did fly by, because this is when I was indeed having fun, connected to my true self. And those moments flew way too fast. In fact, my life has seemed to be moving so quickly I feel as though I can’t catch my breath.
Maybe the pain this guy with a tattoo on his forehead and the bottom pierced lip is about to inflict on me will somehow focus my search for meaning, perhaps even bring me closer to God. Maybe the symbol he’s about to ink into my arm will be a permanent reminder of what matters most. And maybe this ritual will mark the start of me taking back control of my body, mind, and lost spirit.
Bzzzz.
The instant his needle pierces the soft skin of my inner forearm, I cringe.
Heart racing. Chest tightening. Sweating. Oh, shit. The Monster!
I grunt a spray of spit across my lips and look away, catching the pathetic image of myself in the mirror across the room. What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?
Soon, I will learn that losing my mind is the very thing I must do before I will find what I’m looking for.
Here I lie
Not to die
But to seek some grace
I want to escape my inner rat race
I lie on the padded bench, frozen in position as Mikey’s buzzing needle injects black ink into the pale skin of my left forearm. It’s my first tattoo, and also the first time I have ever felt so strongly about something that I would mark it on my body with the symbols of a cross for faith, an anchor for hope, and a heart for love.
Enduring the pain of a dye-injecting needle in order to enjoy this meaningful symbol is a metaphor for all the hardship and struggle I’ve experienced that has led me to this spiritual journey, that has made me the seeker I am today.
And for the first time since I began my quest late last year in that Vegas hotel room, I feel a renewed sense of spiritual focus, peace, and purpose. Happy birthday, to me.