The dilemma of my life has been how to live in two worlds, balancing heaven and earth. After my accident I chose, or perhaps was chosen, to remain in this earthly world. But I could never forget the Golden World, and this led to immense suffering, despair, and loneliness, as nothing else ever compared with the heavenly realm. The accomplishment of my life has been to find some synthesis, to learn that heaven (and hell) is not some other time or place but right here, right now; but it would take decades of struggle for me to understand this.
I came into this world on May 26, 1921, an only child born to Alexius Johnson and Gladys Williamson. It is still amazing to me that I ever made it to adulthood. In thinking back on my adolescence, I am in awe that my life held together at all, given the nature of my inner experiences and the lack of understanding within my own family.
My father was a weak man and a tyrant. One of my earliest memories, probably at about the age of four or five, is of him announcing in a big display that he could take no more and was leaving us forever. The first time he did this it was terrifying. By the ninth or tenth time it had become a weary joke. In the middle of one of these performances I ran upstairs to my room to hide. He followed me up and demanded that I come out so he could say goodbye “for the last time.” He dragged me out from under my bed, only to hand me a dollar bill and insist that was his gift to me marking our final farewell. My lifelong disdain for money began at precisely that moment.
Of course, he returned within a few days, and one night at dinner I couldn’t help but blurt out, “I thought you were gone forever. Why do you keep coming back?”
He had no answer, and I was quickly dispatched by my mother to my bedroom to learn some manners.
My mother eventually could no longer tolerate my father, so when he started receiving a government pension for war injuries, he moved to a boardinghouse three miles away. Everyone was greatly relieved.
ALEXIUS JOHNSON WAS BORN IN SWEDEN and immigrated with his parents to America just before World War I. He was twenty-one at the time and quickly gained his citizenship in the new world by enlisting in the U.S. Army. Apparently there was a shortage of officers at the time, because despite minimal education, he was made an officer and shipped back across the Atlantic Ocean to fight. He was never physically injured, but soon after his release from the service he came down with a severe case of arthritis that eventually turned him into an invalid. His personality was devastated by something I never understood. I don’t think it was the war, because he would spin stories about it and pull out his uniform to show me; being in the army may have been the only time he felt really alive. I don’t know if he was a hypochondriac before the war, but after he returned to America his arthritis gave him an ideal excuse to hide from life. His fear must have grown out of something from his own childhood. It was a physical fact, however, that the bones of his spine were gradually dissolving and fusing into one another, an extremely painful condition.
Curiously, my father obliterated all ties to his heritage in the old world. As a boy, I never heard a word about his childhood or life back in Sweden. Although he spoke Swedish up to the age of twenty-one, he managed to remove any trace of an accent from his voice. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I heard him speak in his native tongue. We were dining together in a restaurant where we came across a waitress from Sweden who somehow charmed him, and suddenly he began speaking fluent Swedish, which startled me out of my wits, as I had no idea he could speak a foreign language.
The manner in which he cut off all his roots led me to believe that there might have been some painful tragedy in his past. Years later, after his death, I found among his scanty possessions a portrait of his parents. My paternal grandfather appeared to be an unyielding, stern, granitelike figure, with some of my own facial characteristics. I inherited both the Johnson profile and my father’s arthritis.
Soon after he was released from the U.S. Army in 1920, my father met my mother, and following a whirlwind courtship they married. Apparently they had a rough time of it from the very beginning, and a little more than a year into the marriage I was born. My father had insisted on an abortion when I was conceived, but my mother would not hear of it. She had difficulty delivering me, but still she managed to pull herself out of bed the next day to apply for a job. As my maternal grandmother told the story, my mother lied to the job interviewer, saying that she could type, secured the job, and began working two days after I was born.
My parents continued to try to make a go of it for some years after my birth, even moving to San Francisco for a year hoping that would improve things, but eventually they divorced.
My father went on to live a miserable, failed life. He sustained himself from a government pension and lived a solitary existence in a dreary upstairs room of a boardinghouse for the remaining twenty years of his life. By his own admission, his life consisted of “killing time,” and he insisted on seeing me on Saturdays. After walking the three miles from my mother’s household to his boardinghouse, I would ascend the creaky old wooden stairs and invariably find my father in bed staring at the ceiling. The room was dingy, disorderly, gray. He would use my visit as a motivation to get up out of bed, meticulously lacing up his back brace and pulling on some wrinkled clothes. Once he was dressed, we chatted for a few minutes, and then I would leave. It is ironic that my auto accident occurred just halfway between the two houses of my parents as I was returning from a visit with my father. He was hardly an inspiring figure for a young boy, but if I missed more than one visit in a row he would send me a sad, pathetic letter. All of them said essentially the same thing:
Dear Robert,
I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I’m so-so.
Please come visit or write soon.
Your Father
There was nothing to write to him, so eventually I began taking sections out of letters to other people and sending them to him. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to my father, he was so miserable. During his final years his time was filled with listening to news broadcasts on the radio, going for short walks around the neighborhood, and puttering around making changes on his back brace.
Later, as an adult, I became aware that I carried two lives on my shoulders, mine and my father’s, because he lived out so little of his own potential. To be fair, I must also say that, despite his selfishness, every now and again he would do something exceedingly kind. Before his illness became too debilitating, there were times when he took me down to the harbor in Portland where I could look at the ships, which I loved. He financed my first music lessons and, later, gave me my first car. Although he gave me money and a few material things, he never gave me what I most wanted and needed: a father.
I was in Europe years later in 1949 when word came that my father had died; he was buried by the time I received the telegram. I remember sitting in the street outside the telegraph office trying to comprehend that my father was truly dead. He had been dead to me for such a long time.
AN ONLY CHILD, I was raised by my mother and grandmother. They made sure that I was provided with solid Christian values, a work ethic, and a sound education. What I most wanted, however—feeling and relatedness—they, too, could not provide.
My mother, whose maiden name was Gladys Williamson, was born on a farm in Ontario, Canada, the child of Clara Bell and Robert Williamson. Both the Bell and Williamson families were originally from Scotland, but they had farmed in Canada for several generations. My grandfather, whom I was named after, was a wheelwright who followed his work from Ontario to British Columbia and then on to Spokane, Washington. That is where my parents met and were married. Later, most of the Williamson clan moved to Portland, and that is where I was born.
As thin and sickly as my father was, my mother was just the opposite: strong, sturdy, broad in the shoulders; she had unlimited energy, and she loved to work. She often lamented that there were only eighteen work hours in the day, because the more you worked the faster you would get ahead in life. After teaching herself to type for her first job in Portland, my mother went on to learn accounting, and eventually she climbed the ranks to become the head bookkeeper for a newspaper, the Oregonian. She was the breadwinner in our family and the disciplinarian, so in a sense she served as my father.
In many ways my mother was ahead of her time, an extroverted, sensation type, a driven woman with a head for business. She was oriented to the material world and did her best to provide me with material possessions, so I never lacked for food or nice clothes. My mother was always kind to me in terms of what she understood and valued—the physical things of the world—but she had very little feeling sense. As I grew and became more interested in my heritage, I would ask my mother about her life before my birth, and she would reply that the subject was too painful to discuss. My father certainly would have been a trial for anyone, but my mother’s solution was to put over her feelings a twenty-foot-thick slab of concrete that no one could penetrate.
One day I asked my mother why I had no brothers or sisters, and she said that she took one look at me and couldn’t bear another. The humor of this joke was lost on me, and it wasn’t long before I realized that neither of my parents wanted to hear a word about my feelings. And so the only relationship I developed with them was one of courtesy and duty. You can live on a thin diet of courtesy, but it doesn’t provide the nourishment that a child requires. My mother’s hope was to turn me into a replica of herself, but I refused, so over the years an awkward silence would emerge as soon as we had finished talking about the events of the day. As a result, I was mothered by my maternal grandmother.
After my parents divorced, we went to live in the house of my widowed grandmother, and for me she was the most important figure in our family. An uneducated farm woman, Granny did the cooking and took care of the house while my mother was out working. She was the real feminine presence in our household. She was a strict Baptist, the hellfire-and-damnation variety, so she was quick to punish me if I stepped out of line. I recall a frequent refrain, “You will be sorry. We are near the last days, so you had better shape up now!” Granny didn’t like any of the new translations of the Bible, and once said that she “wanted it just the way King James wrote it.”
But Granny also was kind, loving, and very protective of me. Within my biological family it was she who was the closest to me temperamentally. Granny taught me to garden and introduced me to music, and she was wonderful at inventing stories. I could always get a story out of her in the evening, but only after my homework and household chores were completed.
Granny had strong opinions about most things, including the proper regimen for maintaining a strong mind and a strong body. Every spring she would roll up a sheet of typing paper and insert a heaping tablespoon of sulfur into the end of it. She then put one end in my mouth and blew in the other end to administer my spring tonic. I would choke and cough from the cloud of sulfur in my nose and throat, which smelled like rotten eggs and tasted like poison. In ancient alchemy sulfur was associated with the devil, and apparently this tonic was designed to blow the devil away with a taste of his own medicine. I tolerated this unwelcome experience for years, but by the time I reached the age of twelve, I was growing pretty tired of it. That year when she prepared to administer her bitter health aid, I surprised her by blowing into the paper first. That was the end of my spring tonic.
The house I grew up in was an old, aristocratic, three-story Victorian structure on a quiet street in Portland. It was a scramble to survive the Depression years, and my mother often juggled two jobs at once. In addition to her work as a bookkeeper, she began redecorating houses. She would collect pictures of show-homes from popular magazines and put them together into incredible hodgepodges that seemed to appeal to people.
When I was eight years of age, my mother decided to remarry. She selected another Swede, a big man named Clifford Lindskoug. Clifford was a foreman in the Del Monte cannery, a hardworking man with solid values. In some ways he was the opposite of my father, but he was not a very clever or inventive person, and I often wondered if my mother chose him because he was so easily dominated. She certainly never gave him any respect. Although he always worked full-time at the cannery, it was she who managed the household finances and doled out allowances both to Clifford and me. I think that after their experience with my father, both my mother and grandmother wanted a man they could rule, and my stepfather filled the bill. He lived like a servant in our house. He was a good man, but docile and very concrete in his thinking.
There was never a quarrel or a raised voice in our household. We were all polite and civil to one another. My stepfather wanted to get to know me and more than once tried to forge a bond by taking me fishing or to a ball game, but I would have very little to do with him. Over time my stepfather and I settled into a truce, and from the time of their marriage until my mother’s death twenty-eight years later, we tolerated each other but seldom spoke.
One day many years later when I lived in California, I had an intuition that my mother would die soon. To prepare for her death, I took the matter into my fantasy life and rehearsed what it would be like to have the phone call telling me she had passed away. I spent many days at this and experienced in advance and in a subtle way what it would be like. I imagined the airplane trip to Portland, the funeral, the worry that they might play some foolish music that would destroy my interior quiet, and on and on. But what would I do with my stepfather? How would we meet when my mother was no longer intermediary between us? Would he usher me out of the house after the funeral and tell me never to bother him again? I did not know and could not even imagine!
When the fantasy became fact some weeks later, I still did not know what reception I would have from my stepfather when I stepped off the airplane in Portland. He was there waiting at the gate, and he took me in his arms, burst into tears, and sought comfort from me. I learned only then that my mother had stood between us and had prevented relatedness between us. She could not stand any feeling quality in the house that she dominated. She was not yet in her grave when I discovered my stepfather for the first time and made friends with him. We had lived in the same house for all those years without any feeling connection between us. We visited occasionally after that, and I was a guest in his home when he later remarried. We corresponded often. I don’t remember one letter between us before my mother’s death.
So in this odd household in which my mother played the father, my grandmother the mother, and my stepfather the servant, we lived a tolerable existence, but one that never felt like home to me.
The whole meaning of my life at this time was my Golden World experience, that incredible dawn in the hills outside Portland. But I had no way of explaining this or even understanding it myself. Hundreds of times I went hiking in solitude, hoping for a glimpse of heaven again. But I didn’t see a scrap of it, which made me more and more lonely and miserable. It was as if for a few brief moments I had viewed the world in color and then had to go back to a black-and-white existence. Maybe once a year or so I would go around a corner and see a bed of flowers or a slant of sunshine, and for just the smallest instant I would recall the Golden World experience, but it was not enough to nurture me. One can die of alienation and meaninglessness, and I very nearly did.
Following the accident, I was out of school for a year, hobbling around the house on crutches. The public school system sent a special tutor to our home to help me complete the second half of seventh grade. She came by streetcar for an hour twice a week, and she was so good at teaching me how to learn that I not only caught up, I soon surpassed my classmates. Prior to the accident I had skidded by in school without much real interest, but after the accident I never received anything less than top grades.
My parents were good to me, but they didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I was talking about or what I needed. My mother was such a dominant person that we either had to do things her way or back off and not talk at all. I tried doing what was expected of me, getting good grades in school, but I also rebelled against what didn’t belong to me. It was difficult because I couldn’t say what did belong to me; it was just a vacancy and an emptiness. If an angel or magic fairy had come along and asked for three wishes, I wouldn’t even have known what to ask for to fill that loneliness; I only felt a lack.
PORTLAND WAS A ROUGH AND TUMBLE TOWN of sailors and lumberjacks when I was a youngster, with little talk of spiritual experiences and even less tolerance for sensitive young men lost in their inner world. I took refuge in my pets, which included an aquarium of fish and several homing pigeons, but, most important, I became exceedingly interested in music.
Although my visionary experience had set off all my senses simultaneously (an experience that I later learned has a scientific name—synesthesia), it was the music of the morning stars that seemed to leave an indelible memory in my being. Music was ethereal enough to partake of the nature of heaven yet earthy enough to be demonstrable on the face of this world. Music is curiously free and of the spirit, and it became my link to the Golden World during these teenage years. My grandmother taught me the rudiments of playing the piano, but it was the pipe organ that seemed to echo the immense energy and power of heaven.
My family attended the First Presbyterian Church of Portland, and each Sunday I became enthralled by the beauty of the choir’s singing and the grandeur of the church organ. I joined the young people’s choir and began practicing with them each week. Eventually I got up the nerve to approach the church organist to inquire about the possibility of organ lessons. I explained to him the difficulty with my artificial leg, but still I wondered if it would ever be possible for me to learn to play the organ.
“No, young man, I regret that with your disability you would be better off pursuing something else,” he said flatly.
I moped around for weeks, though I continued to participate in the church choir. Then one week the church organist was out sick and an assistant took his place. Her name was Ethel Rand. We had never met before, and I approached this stranger with my usual awkward shyness, finally sputtering out that I was interested in learning to play the organ and did she think it was possible?
“Well, I don’t know why not; at least we could try,” she replied.
I began taking lessons with her the following week.
Miss Rand was a spinster who taught piano and organ lessons as well as served as the assistant musical director at the church. She was in her early sixties when we met and still lived with her aging mother. Of English ancestry, she maintained a charming accent that added to her intrigue. She was theatrical and showy. She wore bright colors and dramatic clothing, and when Ethel spoke, she made sweeping, dramatic gestures with her hands; she would come into a room and take control of it. This was just what I needed at that time, and though I did not know any terminology for her type, she was a perfect hetaira woman. This little-known Greek word is the only term I know for that rare woman who can be companion to a man; never a sexual partner, not a wife, but one who provides a grace and charm that men value highly. In the literature of ancient Greece one hears descriptions of a famous hetaira woman in Athens who had the respect and delight of the highest society of that noble city. We have no word for this quality now—indeed, we hardly recognize that capacity in a woman—so I have had to look to the ancient world to describe Ethel Rand.
In the beginning Miss Rand secured permission for me to practice by coming to church early on weekday mornings before school. It was a cold winter and the church was not heated during the week, so I had to wear gloves with the fingers cut off in order to keep from freezing my hands. I appeared each morning at 6 A.M. to practice, my teeth chattering but my soul warmed by the rich sounds of the pipe organ. One day Miss Rand gave me a composition by Bach, and I loved it so much that the next week I came back with it entirely memorized. Bach quickly became gospel to me, with his wonderful weaving of abstraction and feeling. I acquired 78 rpm phonograph records of Albert Schweitzer playing Bach’s masterpieces and did my best to imitate his performances.
From my current perspective, I can see that Miss Rand may have needed me as much as I needed her. She seemed to want a young man to adopt, and each week after my lesson, we would launch into discussions about music, art, and philosophy. She loaned me my first books on India, mysticism, and religion.
Miss Rand quickly became the mother I always wished that I had been born to, the one person who seemed to understand my Golden World experience and who validated my inner world. What I related to her about my visions somewhat frightened her, but she was willing to listen and even seemed to understand something of what I described. It was she who first introduced me to a book by Richard Morris Bucke called Cosmic Consciousness. While reading it I realized for the first time that other people, too, had contact with the Golden World. It gave me the first bit of a handhold on what had happened to me.
Lessons were at Miss Rand’s home in the late afternoon, and I often stayed for dinner. We would go on talking until 9 P.M., when her dog would courteously insist that it was time for me to go home. In my own home I was accustomed to retiring to my room immediately after dinner, as there was never anything of interest to say to anyone. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had a great hunger to be parented by someone who understood my inner world.
During this period I didn’t know what I wanted or needed, I only felt a great hole in my life. In an unconscious way I began seeking out my true family, not the family into which I was born but the family where I belonged emotionally, the family where I felt at home, the family that could speak my language, nurture me, and bring out the best in me. This is how I discovered the beauty and the necessity of godparents.
Miss Rand was my first godparent, and soon she would introduce me to another one. After a few months, I was told that I was using too much of the church’s electrical power, so I lost access to my wonderful pipe organ. My teacher then made arrangements for me to practice at a funeral home, where I could play for a dollar an hour, but my enthusiasm proved to be too much for that venue as well.
It was at this time that Miss Rand heard about an old theater that had an organ dating from the 1920s that hadn’t been used in years. Once, the organ had accompanied silent films, and it could produce drum sounds, train whistles, and even the noise of barking dogs. It also had a dozen legitimate stops on it, but they were in terrible repair. Miss Rand had an idea, however. She had heard about an old man who built and maintained organs, and since she could charm anyone, she phoned him up and talked him into repairing the theater organ as a community service. In exchange for repairing the organ, the theater agreed to let Miss Rand’s students practice on it.
The organ builder’s name was Owen Thomas, and he soon became my first godfather. Mr. Thomas also was in his sixties, and he was overweight and sick much of the time, so I was drafted to assist him. I would meet him at the theater after school and do whatever he told me to do—hold keys, fetch tools, climb into the organ chambers. I was passionately interested in pipe organs and I have good mechanical sensibilities, so I quickly became his apprentice. We got the theater organ working reasonably well, and I was allowed to use it for practice from that point on.
I learned that Mr. Thomas was in charge of maintaining the largest organ in Portland, a four-keyboard instrument in the Municipal Auditorium. This pipe organ was a wonder, with more than 5,000 pipes ranging from three-eighths of an inch for the highest pitch to a pipe that was thirty-two feet long for the deepest resonance. As Owen’s new assistant, part of my job was to help tune this organ.
To tune a pipe organ you must transfer the temperament from one chamber of pipes to another. On the flute pipes this is accomplished by tapping a collar up or down to adjust the pitch. Reed pipes, similar to an oboe or bassoon, make their sound with a reed controlled by a wire. It would take as much as twenty hours just to tune this grand organ, and when we were finished Mr. Thomas would fill the huge auditorium with music. At times, while playing, he would become lost in reverie and his mind would drift to other times and other places. I gradually learned that in his glory days he had been the principal organist at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. His fortunes had shifted, however, and he had immigrated to America and drifted into Portland. Many years later when I was in London I inquired and found the name of Owen Thomas as the cathedral organist for 1920 and 1921. I was profoundly touched by the fate of this miserable old man who had drifted from so fine a position to eke out a bare subsistence in a land so foreign to him. I owe him much, as I feel that he gave me the best of his heritage to carry on as I could. Such is a true godfather.
Mr. Thomas didn’t earn enough to live on in America, and his life had dwindled down to very little. He and I grew attached to each other. He saw the glitter in my young eyes, and as his life was fading out, I think he decided to pass along what he had left to me. We took care of each other. I tended to his health and provided physical labor and companionship; he taught me everything he knew about the construction and repair of organs. It was from him that I began to learn the art of building and maintaining keyboard instruments, a skill that would serve me well.
On Sunday afternoons when nothing was scheduled in the Municipal Auditorium, Mr. Thomas would often hand me the keys and tell me to “go down and exercise that musical instrument.” As the organist at the First Presbyterian Church had bluntly told me, anyone with an artificial leg is not a good candidate to become a master organist, as this is one instrument that requires the feet as much as the hands. In the organ world there are jokes about a one-legged organist, which were painfully applicable to me. But I developed my own technique and had skill and ability enough to enjoy this touch with the Golden World.
Eventually my dedication to practice got us into trouble, as an official heard about my unscheduled concerts and accused Mr. Thomas of making illegitimate use of the city’s organ. They threatened to cancel his maintenance contract, and that was the end of my practicing at the auditorium and working with him. However, it was during my apprenticeship in organ construction and maintenance that I met my third godparent.
While I was still working with him, Mr. Thomas won a contract to move an expensive organ from the home of one of the city’s wealthiest families. The organ had been donated to an Episcopal girls’ school called Saint Helen’s Hall. I helped him reassemble the organ after school and on weekends, earning extra money and learning everything I could in the bargain. We were assisted in the process by the caretaker and handyman at the school, a man named Ambrose Seliger.
Fifteen years my senior, Ambrose became even more of a godfather and mentor to me than Mr. Thomas had been. Ambrose was a tragic figure, an artist who never knew how to make a living in the practical world. He was naturally skilled at many things, including landscape and portrait painting, sculpture, carving, and the art of delicate inlays for musical instruments, but he did not have one practical bone in his body. All his life Ambrose was a ne’er-do-well artist with only a small market for his art in the Pacific Northwest. I don’t think he was ever interested in the production of anything; what he liked was to explore.
I soon became attached to this bohemian character, whom I called Andy. He lived with his parents in a barnlike house on a farm they had homesteaded outside Portland. Andy was small, slight, and inordinately sensitive. I wasn’t accustomed to the language or sensitivity of a true artist, and I once asked him, “Andy, what would be the worst three colors to put together?”
“Well, let me see, I guess chartreuse, mustard, and…” He paused, turned away, and then he threw up. I was shocked, embarrassed, and remorseful all at once. I quickly changed the subject, but I have always wondered what the third color was that so turned his stomach.
A short time after we became friends, Andy was injured in a fall from a ladder at Saint Helen’s school. His injury seemed slight at first, a bruise on the shin and knee, but it was a bruise that refused to go away. Over time it became some kind of cancer, eventually requiring that his leg be amputated. The amputation was high above the knee, so an artificial leg never worked for him, and the surgery itself never seemed to heal. The nerve at the point of amputation developed a knot and required several surgeries for repair. From this time on, the poor man was writhing in agony much of the time.
The fact that we both had lost a leg gave us something in common. I spent countless hours talking with Andy about art, travel, and philosophy. He was always kind and patient with me. I’m sure I was a tiresome teenager; things were churning inside me that I didn’t know how to express. I brought up my visionary experiences with him one time, and he listened and reassured me that he understood that sublime language. He was the perfect mentor for my experiences that my family understood so little.
Later, after Andy became ill, I tried to return his kindness by spending time with him and taking care of him as best I could. I remember once going out to his old barn/house on a Saturday morning, where I unexpectedly found that he was still in bed. I could see that he had chewed holes in the sheet because the pain in his leg was so great. I’ve never since seen such physical suffering as that man went through, not even on the many trips to the poorest parts of India that I have taken as an adult.
It was with Andy that I learned the profound art of godparenting, which once was known to the Catholic world but has fallen into disuse as the modern world turns its attention to outer things. A godparent is designated as the teacher of the inner world for a young person while his or her natural parents are the caretakers of the physical and practical aspects of life. Andy knew how to do this to perfection, and he taught me how to relate to the inner world, including the courage and safeguards that are required for this inner journey if one is strongly touched by the Golden World. How fortunate I was to find in Portland, Oregon, a man who could comprehend the splendor of the Golden World and save me from the dangers of it as well!
Andy served as a mediator between myself and my interior world. I saw, by projection (though he also embodied those qualities in his life), my own capacities long before I could live them out myself. My debt to Andy is very great, one I can repay by being godfather to others later in my life. A godson also carries a serious and important role for his godparent. When one is in the later part of life there is a profound need for a younger person to take up the characteristics of one’s life, as old age reduces the capacity for work in the world. A godson or goddaughter can stand as a reminder of one’s immortality.
OWEN THOMAS, ETHEL RAND, ANDY SELIGER—these three became my godparents, the individuals who somehow were my true family. Ever since, I have believed fervently that we all need mentors to help initiate us and guide us into fulfilling our destinies. We need godparents to finish our emotional and spiritual education. No two parents, however skilled or developed, can do all of that for a young person. Even with the best of intentions, such as my mother had, too often a parent is simply not capable of giving a youngster what is needed for his or her inner development.
I have been a godparent to many young people since I became an adult. If it is a conscious relationship, it is a wonderful thing. For earlier generations there were large extended families, and a child could gravitate to an aunt or an uncle for help. In rural, traditional India, children growing up in village life may be taken in by an artist, a craftsperson, a mystic, or someone who can teach them what they need to learn. It’s harder for us now because most of us live in small, nuclear families. Often, to find true mentors, people now do what I was forced to do—search out and find someone to serve as a godparent.
In a Christian tradition that has been practiced for centuries, people were appointed godparents at baptism, but like so many customs this for the most part has become an empty ritual. In most Christian households someone stands at a child’s baptism and agrees to be the godfather or godmother, but most people don’t know what that means anymore. Being the materialists that we are in Western society, godparenting now means taking over the economic needs of the child in case the parents die. But the true meaning goes much deeper. A true godparent should educate a child in the nonphysical realm. Godparents are essential for our initiation into adulthood, for finding our true place in the world. I often have people come to my consulting room looking for a godparent. In some ways, therapy provides this function for many modern people; it creates a setting in which you can discover your true personality instead of what everyone expects of you, and you can gain encouragement and positive mirroring. One almost always makes a godparent out of one’s analyst or therapist.
It also is true that people who have been wounded or dislocated in some serious way, such as I, have special needs that may be beyond the reach of most parents. People who have a great sensitivity to the archetypal world too often are pathologized by modern society and by psychology in particular. These are people who don’t have the option of being “normal.” In fact, normality may be a great danger to a gifted person, for it is a character structure built upon averages.
Instead of pathologizing people who have a different experience in childhood, it is possible to help them individuate into their own particular genius. I found it interesting to learn that the word idiot has nothing to do with level of intelligence; it comes down to us from the Greek and means “outside the canons of one’s time.” Certainly many people would have looked at my childhood and declared that I was an idiot. My entire life has been unconventional, and as a teenager I was most certainly outside the usual cultural standards. I own to being an idiot in the sense that I was not ordinary. I had to find a path in life that was right for me based upon my particular experiences and needs, and I think that there are many people who simply cannot lead a conventional life.
Some people have asked me how one finds the people who will qualify as godparents, and I have no simple answer. Fate brings us what is important in our lives. I can only suggest that you watch and respect how your energy flows; observe how your natural inclinations gravitate to certain people.
I was a hardworking student in high school, and upon graduation I was accepted to attend Stanford University, leaving my godparents behind in Portland. At the urging of my mother, I tried the traditional path at Stanford and found that it would never work for me. My freshman year was one of the most difficult times of my life. I did well in my classes, but the professors there were teaching a world I didn’t want. They were trying to socialize me into a secular world that had nothing to do with my experience of the Golden World. After a year I dropped out.
When I returned to Portland, I tried a semester at Oregon State University, but I soon discovered that bored me, too. I decided to try to make a career out of my passion for music, so I went to Boston to study for the summer under Francis Snow, a renowned organist at Trinity Episcopal Church. An organist with an artificial leg is somewhat ridiculous, but Dr. Snow was astonished at what I was capable of doing, and he cheered me on. After a couple of months I put together a recital and returned to Portland. Immediately I found a job as musical director, choirmaster, and organist at the First Christian Church; they are the second largest congregation in Portland. I thought perhaps I could follow in the footsteps of my godmother. What a disaster!
I had just turned twenty-one, and I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to manage a choir so as to keep people happy and motivated. I had no managerial skills and inadvertently offended people through lack of tact and political savvy. I was naive and inept. As church organist I was equally a failure; I selected music that was not entirely appropriate for the congregation, mostly my favorite pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, and soon the complaints began.
Eventually I found out that the job was 10 percent music and 90 percent public relations, and I was a terrible PR man. At the end of my one-year contract, it was decided by mutual agreement that I would not return. I did manage to fulfill my commitment, but it was one of the most painful failures of my life—my inability to marry a passion for music with the practicalities of the world. I decided that with regard to music I would remain always an amateur, a word that in its original sense means “lover.” I happily retreated into amateur status, performing music only because I love it, and I vowed never to be a professional again. I never worked so hard or disciplined myself so much as on music, but I could not will myself to become a professional musician. Music nourished my soul, but trying to make a profession out of it was like butting my head against a rock wall. I was just starting to learn when it is necessary to let go of my will and follow the slender threads. The attitude of “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” simply did not work for me. I can now see I was not in the right place. I’ve never tried since to will my way through something as I did with music; I have learned that I don’t have to batter myself to exhaustion and fall into defeat.
About this same time my godmother, Ethel Rand, died, and I was inconsolable. I never suffered so much from a death before or since, not even from the deaths of my own parents. And so the most depressing period of my life was about to began. Going to college didn’t work, I couldn’t make a living with music, one of my guiding lights was gone. I was falling down into a dark abyss, a dangerous, lost, and lonely time.