I get home from my visit to Scientology and, after changing my shirt because I had sweated so much during my visit, I tell Brooke and the kids about the unnerving experience that happened to me from simply trying to take a class. Jackson and Chloe can’t believe how much they pressured me and harassed me to sign a contract.
“Not gonna lie, guys,” I regale them at the dinner table. “I was more nervous sitting in that office than I am sitting in front of a camera with millions of people watching.”
“Are they mad at you?” Chloe asks with worry.
“I don’t think so,” I reply. “But they would probably have been happier if I signed up.”
“I am scared,” she says. “They might come after you.”
I assure Chloe that she doesn’t need to worry about anyone coming after me or her. But my eleven-year-old girl’s concern is clearly feeding off the anxiety I am emitting about my experience.
Then Jackson asks, “What religion are we?”
“I was raised Catholic, but I don’t have one I can say I belong to,” I reply. “Do you believe in one?”
“I don’t know,” Jackson says with a shrug. “Not Scientology.”
Neither of my kids knows what religion they are, because they haven’t been taught by me or Brooke to follow any particular tradition. Neither of us wanted to push any religious agenda on them and early on agreed to expose them to different religions. They’ve attended Jewish services, gone to a few Easter and Christmas church services, meditated at yoga classes and chanted in Sanskrit, and they have heard their grandfather preach about the Bible on occasion.
“Well, I am sort of in the same boat as you,” I reveal to Jackson. “That’s why I am on my search to find answers, because I want to know what I believe. You can do the same, you know. You can explore other faiths and research them. You’ll start figuring it out for yourself.”
Four months later in August, Jackson and I are on a trip alone to Iowa. He has been invited to attend a weeklong hockey camp in the city of Waterloo, an old mill town in the northeastern part of the state near the Minnesota border.
Thinking it would be neat to watch a movie that took place in Iowa, I download Field of Dreams on my iPad and on our first night in the hotel room Jackson and I watch the 1989 movie starring Kevin Costner. In addition to capturing the rural beauty of Iowa in the summer, Field of Dreams, about a financially strapped farmer (Costner) who hears voices telling him to build a baseball diamond in his backyard, is also a tear-jerking father/son story. After building the diamond amid a field of corn, ghosts dressed as baseball players come and play. In a very touching closing scene, Costner realizes that one of the players—spoiler alert!—is his late father, who died brokenhearted from never realizing his dream of playing pro baseball. The scene, poignantly showing that sometimes we are led to do things by a higher power though we may not know why, has me in tears, which I try to conceal from Jackson with a sly wipe of my cheek with my sleeve as Costner’s dad looks around the field and asks, “Is this heaven?” To which he replies, “It’s Iowa.”
The next day after Jackson’s morning practice, I meet him beside our rental car outside the ice arena.
“How was practice, buddy?”
“Good.”
“I have an idea for something fun to do,” I say.
“I don’t want to go bowling,” Jackson moans. I had earlier suggested a bowling trip for us since we saw an alley nearby. “I hate bowling.”
“My idea is way better than that,” I say. “Let’s go to the real Field of Dreams.”
His eyes light up. “The one in the movie?”
“Yeah! I looked it up and the real place—the baseball field, the farm, the house, everything—is still there. And it’s only an hour’s drive from here.”
“Cool,” he says. “Are you sure it’s open?”
“Yep,” I say, smugly. “I checked, and it is open today. And it’s free. You can go on the field and play and just soak it all in.”
And an hour later, we get off Highway 20 and snake our way through a narrow rural road up a hill and around a bend. At the top, I turn my Honda rental car right, and a few hundred yards ahead we can see the white farmhouse up the road, surrounded by a picket fence, with the baseball field to the left.
I hang a left onto the gravel driveway and park in the lot right behind home plate. There are no other cars in the parking lot, except for one next to the gift shop that is probably the shop worker’s sedan. It is a Monday afternoon in early August in eastern Iowa. My Google map says we are 204 miles from Chicago, 190 miles from Des Moines and 237 miles from Minneapolis. But taking in the vast blue sky dotted with clouds scraped above a lush green vista of cornfields it looks to me like we are, as observed by the ball player in the movie, in heaven.
Jackson runs from the car toward the baseball field. When he gets to the bench next to the fence backstop he finds a pile of bats and balls and gloves.
“Are you sure this is free?” he asks me excitedly.
“Totally,” I say. “Let’s play.”
For the next half hour we run the bases, play catch, and I pitch him balls that he hits into the outfield, rounding the bases for home runs. Jackson is a hockey player, and only played one season of tee-ball, but you’d think he was Major League.
When he tires out, we leave the equipment near home plate and walk to the edge of the cornfield that rings the outfield. I take some video of Jackson walking into the cornfield, disappearing just as the ghosts did in the movie.
“Oh, my God!” he yells from inside the dense thicket of corn.
I run into the field and find Jackson, an L.A. kid with little experience in nature, bent over staring at the ground.
“I found a frog!” he says.
“Have you ever seen a frog?” I ask.
“Not in real life,” he confesses. “This is cool.”
We fight our way through the tall corn and lie down in the outfield grass, staring up at the sky.
I sigh. “Remember the time you asked me what religion I believe?”
“Uh-huh,” he replies.
“And you told me that you didn’t know what you believed in, and I said to research it and you may find some answers. So, have you done that?”
“Yeah,” Jackson says. “I have.”
“And…?”
“OK, dad. Here’s the thing.” Jackson sits up. “I seventy percent believe there’s a God. But I think there are just some things in life that are unexplainable. There is a lot of complicated stuff that we can’t answer.”
All those YouTube videos he watches constantly must be educating my towheaded teen more than I thought.
Jackson goes on. “Here’s what I believe is reality. There are many universes, not just one. It’s string theory. Universes can split apart and connect. The Big Bang was, like, the connecting of universes, not just the creation of one. You know what I am saying?”
“I think so, yeah. But go on.”
“So, yeah,” he says. “I think that the whole question of the universe and how it came about is very complicated and we’ll never be able to explain it.”
“OK, but who do you think created these universes?” I ask.
“Or maybe it’s more like what created it,” he answers. “We don’t know what created everything, which is why I don’t think I am a Christian or Jewish or anything like that. Because if God is real, then I don’t think it could just be one. That seems very close-minded to me.”
“So you can’t believe in any one religion.”
“Right. Everyone needs to stop worrying about who created all this and just accept that it’s unexplainable and we are meant just to live. You know what I think? I think these ancient people came up with the idea of a higher power to explain it, but, really, it is just a theory that hasn’t been proved and there are many other theories out there to investigate as we learn more information about science.” He pauses, then adds, “And stuff like that.”
I laugh. Not at all because what he is saying is funny, but because it is so brilliant and insightful, especially for a kid who just became a teenager five months ago.
“I saw this video,” Jackson continues, “and they said in it that Elon Musk thinks that there is an eighty percent chance we are in a computer simulation. It’s infinite.”
I sit up and we face each other on the grass. The breeze is warm and gentle. The air is clean and, for the first time since I began my spiritual quest, I feel totally at peace, as if I am one with nature or God or the universe or…whatever it is that Jackson is so eloquently describing is our physical reality. I don’t feel like just asking questions and listening to Jackson is bringing me closer to that elusive God I so badly want to know. I’m realizing that just the simple process of asking and listening is the most direct path to a higher power, that having an open mind and open heart is what’s been allowing answers to come to me, just as the voice of God told Kevin Costner, “If you build it, he will come.”
Since Jackson seems to have given these deep, spiritual questions a lot of careful consideration in between playing video games and stopping pucks, I throw another doozy at him.
“Jackson, you know how Field of Dreams is so much about following your dreams, and about listening to that voice inside of you? I’m wondering what your dream is.”
Jackson stares off toward the green vista. After a good ten seconds, he goes, “I don’t know, but it’s definitely to do something cool with my life.”
Amen to that.