There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.
Corrie ten Boom
Six thousand miles from Newport Beach, California, the flower children’s pollen wafted into the Kuala Lumpur home of a twelve-year-old girl named Cathe Martin. Cathe’s dad, Dick, was a marketing analysis manager with Esso, the oil company that eventually became Exxon. The Martins enjoyed a comfortable life with servants, nannies, and a chauffeur in their expat neighborhood within the capital of Malaysia.
Cathe’s mother, Pilar, was Spanish. She was deeply and passionately Catholic, while Cathe’s father was fairly reserved about expressing anything personal, from his feelings to his religious views.
Cathe was a sensitive girl with a mystical bent. As a six-year-old, she saw the then-famous movie Spartacus with actor Kirk Douglas in the title role. She had nightmares for years about the crucifixion scene. She was fascinated by the stories of saints, and loved to look at brightly colored prayer cards depicting the life of Saint Teresa of the Little Flower, or Saint Bernadette’s mystical vision of the Blessed Virgin at a grotto in Lourdes.
Cathe loved the long, lace veils that her mother and other ladies wore to mass. She loved the candles and the smell of incense; it all seemed so beautiful and holy. The nuns had told her that seven years old was the age of accountability; at six, Cathe thought, Good, I’ve got one more year until I’m held responsible for my sins.
Shortly after reaching that point, she went to the priest to make her confession. She slipped into the little confessional booth and sat down. Her feet barely touched the ground. On the other side of the wooden divider in the cubicle, the priest waited.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Cathe began.
“Yes, my child?” said the priest.
But the sin on Cathe’s seven-year-old heart was too gross, too dark, and too terrible to tell. She couldn’t do it. So she quickly made something else up, something she actually could confess to the unseen priest on the other side of the divide.
“I, uh . . . I kicked my maid!”
From these and other experiences, Cathe took away two main impressions from the faith of her childhood. First, God was Other. He was far away, remote, mysterious, and inapproachable. And second, she carried a dark, vague burden of guilt.
Cathe’s two older sisters, Mary and Dodie, had been in school in the Philippines and in Switzerland during the previous school year, but they both came home for the summer of 1967. Dodie was fifteen and Mary was eighteen.
Cathe was a sensitive younger sister, and all she could see was that her sisters didn’t hang out at the dinner table; they didn’t want to go out and ride bikes or go bowling or have fun. They just wanted to sit in their rooms, listening to Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Beatles. They no longer wore cute little cotton dresses with perky accessories. Their hair wasn’t perfect anymore. Instead, it was long skirts, torn jeans, flowing shirts, and wild, long hair that didn’t even look brushed. They constantly talked back to their parents, slammed doors, and yelled.
Cathe would creep into their bedrooms at night. “What’s going on?” she’d ask. “What happened to you guys at school last semester?”
They told her how their friends had started smoking dope and how they’d gotten into it too. Cathe had never heard of marijuana. But, as she was soon to find out, it was easy to get in Kuala Lumpur. Mary was dating a guy who was a little bit older, and he had shown her where to go in the city to buy packets of really good ganja.
“It’s so cool,” Mary told Cathe. “I can’t explain. It’s like you listen to music and you really get it, or you rub your fingers over the surface of the car and it’s soooooooooo smooth. Or food! It just tastes so good. Everything’s more colorful, more mellow, you feel the texture, you just feel more!”
Drug use wasn’t new in Kuala Lumpur. Opium abuse had been a reality among older Chinese men in Malaysia for a century. In the mid-1960s, authorities tolerated it, as they assumed that the deaths of this older generation would mean the end of Malaysia’s drug problems. But with the growing hippie culture and drug habits of American soldiers on leave for R & R in Malaysia, marijuana, heroin, and psychedelic drug use skyrocketed, and the authorities would soon crack down.
As that Malaysian summer rolled on, Cathe got more and more into the new world her sisters were telling her about. Some of it seemed sketchy; she didn’t think much of her sister playing strip poker with the guys who lived next door. But Cathe had always been artistic and reflective, and this artsy new world sounded so much more interesting than the squared-off corners of Catholic school and a lifetime of rules.
Cathe’s parents were not quite as fascinated by Mary and Dodie’s new preoccupations. They got more and more worried, as Mary not only smoked lots of dope but also moved on to uppers, downers, and other pills.
One night the teenaged guy next door, who’d been smoking opium, slipped Mary some barbiturates. Next thing Cathe knew, her family was sitting at the dinner table and Mary was acting strangely. She’d start a sentence and then leave it hanging in midair. Food was falling off her fork. The tension between Mary and her father started to escalate. They began to shout at each other. Dodie, age fifteen, was trying to intervene. “Come on, guys,” she kept saying. “Just chill out!”
They weren’t going to chill out. Mary stood up, spewing profanities and knocking her chair backwards. Dick stood up, furious. He slapped Mary across the face.
“Go ahead, do it again!” she shrieked. He did.
Cathe had never, ever seen her dad lose control in such a way.
Mary ran upstairs to her room, slammed the door, and took even more pills. Peacekeeper Dodie ran out the front door, crying. Dick and Pilar ran out after her.
They brought Dodie back in, but by now Mary had fled out the back door.
The Martins lived in a nice subdivision, but it was surrounded by thick jungle full of snakes, animals, and who knows what. Especially in her altered state, Mary wasn’t safe out there. Cathe’s parents went back out in the night. They were gone for hours. Cathe cowered in her bed, and finally her mom and dad came home, holding on to Mary. They brewed a big pot of strong black coffee and walked their daughter up and down the halls of the house.
In spite of the drama, Cathe had bought in to the hippie vibe by the end of the summer. There was something about the rebellion that was intoxicating. And on a far more superficial level—after all, she was twelve—she loved the clothes. She loved the idea of wearing a vintage tuxedo jacket with a long, flowing skirt. And she loved the fact that perfectly straight, precisely parted hair was no longer the thing. Cathe had always had curly, rebellious tresses; now her hair was just right. In the same way, her slim figure was cool too. She didn’t have to be a Barbie doll; part of being a hippie was just being yourself. Natural, not plastic.
Like parents of wandering teenagers everywhere, Cathe’s parents were beside themselves with concern. Pilar responded verbally. First, she talked and talked and talked to her girls, cautioning them about the dangers of the choices they were making. “You’re hurting your father,” she would say. “You’re going to end up in an alley with a needle in your arm!”
The girls loved their parents, but they were just not in a place where dire warnings made sense. They wanted to live free, maybe move to a commune and share organic food, getting high and strumming guitars; everything was mellow. The only problems in their lives, really, were adults who tried to make them feel guilty.
Cathe’s mom also enlisted spiritual help from the big guns. Pilar went to the Carmelite nuns and told them her troubles. They prayed for Cathe and her sisters but also told Pilar, “Don’t worry! Worry is a sin! Just pray!”
Easy for them to say, Pilar thought. They’re not mothers! But she did her best to follow their advice, and she constantly went to church, lighting candles and praying for her wandering daughters.
Cathe’s dad didn’t consult the nuns. He looked for a geographical cure and decided to make a dramatic change. Esso had a new job for him back in the US, in New Jersey. But Pilar hated cold weather. So Dick opted to leave Esso altogether and to start up a new business as a financial planner. Together, the Martins decided to get their family out of Southeast Asia to a safer environment, one that was far from the allure of the hippie lifestyle.
Ironically, they settled in Southern California. Not exactly a hippie-free zone.