I SPENT MOST OF my childhood in McLean, Virginia, and from second through ninth grade went to an exceptionally upscale institution called the Potomac School.
Potomac is an Episcopal school, and it was at Potomac that God, or at least a certain version of God, and I were first formally introduced. This was a God of weekly church services, a God who was the subject of quiet, but generally not too passionate belief, and a God who got along well with science because He simply stayed quiet and opted not to pick a fight.
In the fifth-grade Christmas play, I was assigned the role of Augustus Caesar. The curtain opened, and I strode onstage, eyeing the audience of parents, teachers, and hapless visiting relatives dragged to the school gym with a cold and merciless scorn. Identifying myself (“My name, Augustus Caesar is!”),
I bragged for a bit about my unassailable power and influence over the world in all directions, and then proclaimed that I would be demanding a tax (“Each man shall one penny pay!” etc.). I then strode offstage, only appearing again at the play’s end, when—in a neat and tidy, if unhistorical, wrap-up to the action—I gave the newborn savior my blessings.
During my years at Potomac, my own relationship with God—or with the being who seemed to stand behind the clues about Him given us at school—was a fairly chilly one. For there was no getting around the fact that the Episcopalian version of God being foisted on us at Potomac was exceedingly dull. So dull that, in the last analysis, the question of whether or not He actually existed didn’t really seem to matter. After all, what was this bloodless, watery abstraction, this vague, somewhat benevolent spook hovering off behind the scenes somewhere, compared to dinosaurs, or horror comics, or sharks, or, some time later on, girls?
Not that, most of the time, this lack of interest on my part presented much of a problem. God was boring, but that was okay because—Christmas play aside—He just didn’t come up that much.
But there were exceptions to this, the chief among them being the Lord’s Prayer.
From second grade through ninth, I, along with the rest of Potomac’s students, recited this prayer each day at morning assembly. This was always mildly tedious. But at some point—I have no memory exactly when—it became more than tedious. When the Lord’s Prayer was said, I quietly mumbled a sort of alternative, protest edition of it. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something along these lines:
Our Father, who doesn’t exist
I don’t care if I’m supposed to believe in you.
I don’t, you are a phony,
and no one can make me say different
Because I know better.
Why this animosity on my part? Why, given what a small imposition on my time and attention this prayer made, did I go to the trouble of quietly reciting this alternative to it?
Because, it gradually emerged, I did care about God after all. I cared about Him enormously, in fact. My problem with this Lord’s Prayer business was—though I wouldn’t have used this word at the time—its lack of any kind of organic feel. There was just nothing real about it. If there was something big at work in life, some genuine director lurking far back there, out of sight but in charge all the same, this nameless entity was clearly not the dull and bloodless abstraction to which we Potomac students were forced to pay daily allegiance.
God—my God—was something different altogether. He was an entity having to do, chiefly, with nature: with sharks, with wolves, with the ocean, with that funny charged feeling that the air took on just before a big thunderstorm arrived, and, most important, with a certain strange and nameless feeling of mystery and vastness that would come over me, and had been coming over me, now and then, for as long as I could remember.
What was the specific nature of this feeling, and how did it fit in with what I knew of the world? Well, that was just it. I didn’t know. All I knew was that this feeling, which would stop me in my tracks at odd moments and overwhelm me with a feeling of distance and mystery and possibilities unknown—possessed precisely what the God of those morning school assemblies so completely lacked:
Reality.
When I hit adolescence, my obsession with the natural world intensified. I would look for hours on end through my animal books, studying the shape of a shark’s fin, or the slick, strangely hypnotic gloss on the fur of an otter.
This feeling for the strange, indefinable rightness of the natural world only intensified when I put my books down and entered the natural world myself. I found there a sparkle and pulse—an indefinable feeling of life that was more than simply life. Whatever this thing I sensed was, it struck a strange note not just of admiration or appreciation but of . . . recognition. Something in nature at its most beautiful and big made me desperately and wonderfully homesick for something. Yet what and where this Something was, I didn’t know.
In short, though I wouldn’t have described it this way at the time, the older I got the more I saw nature through a spiritual lens.
At the same time, I was becoming more unhappy with the way the natural world was presented to me in the Science classes I was taking at school, and in the books I found in the Nature section of bookstores. When I opened a book on animals that was too dense with scientific facts (the gestation period of marsupials versus that of more modern mammals; the migration patterns of this or that species of waterfowl), I’d feel like I’d been subjected to a kind of bait and switch. I had opened the book to learn something about animals or birds or fish. The problem was that I didn’t know what, exactly, I wanted to learn. All I did know was that it had nothing to do with breeding seasons or population densities, or even (though this was slightly more interesting) with animal behavior. It had, in short, nothing to do with data of any sort. It had to do with something else: a something else that I became ever more drawn to as my teenage years passed, even as I remained ignorant of its true nature.
Meanwhile, I continued my reading. And as I did so, I began to run into a different kind of nature book. These books, written by people like Henry Beston, Loren Eiseley, and Farley Mowat, did more than simply describe the natural world. They also sought to describe that sense of mystery and wonder that emanated from it. Henry Beston seemed to sum up this vision of nature as well as anyone.
“We need,” wrote Beston in his book The Outermost House, “another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. . . . They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
It wasn’t long after I discovered these kinds of writers that I discovered poetry: not the vaguely pious and annoying poems I would occasionally be forced to read at school, but a more direct, potent, and (often) mystically inclined variety. One which seemed to focus directly on the spiritual component at work in nature, and what that component might mean. “We dance round in a ring and suppose,” wrote Robert Frost, a “nature” poet who was also clearly a poet of the mystery that hid within and behind nature, “but the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
Growing up, I spent a lot of summers and holidays on the South Fork of Long Island. The water off Long Island is cold all year. It warms up a bit in summer, but only a bit. The waves, on the best days, were big and rude and rough, and marching through them to get to deeper water took effort and persistence. When I would go to the beach with my father and stepmother and whatever other adults were around, they would enter the water swiftly and briefly. They’d tiptoe out, sink down to their necks, then rush back to the sand, ready for more sunbathing, more reading of the New York Times, more boring, adult-style talk.
I wanted none of this. When we got to the beach, I would immediately throw my towel to the sand and march off into the surf. The colder and rougher it was, the better.
The cold was unpleasant at first, but that was part of the process. Step after deliberate step, I’d march out through the incoming army of waves until the water was deep enough for me to plunge beneath the next one that rolled in.
This initial plunge always delivered a shock to my system, but the next one would be easier. Finally, I’d make it out to the precise point where the waves began to break. Now, instead of having to plunge and duck beneath the next incoming wave, I could keep my head out of the water and jump over it.
By this time, my body was so immune to the cold that the frigid, churning water around me lost all its sting and became warm as a relaxing bath. Big waves usually came intermittently, in sets of three or so. When I saw a big one forming out in the water beyond, I’d wait till the wave was almost upon me and the water level suddenly dropped. For a moment, my feet would brush the sandy bottom. I’d push hard, and as the wall of water swept toward me I would rise, up and up and up, till the peak hit, and I had a sudden, brief, glorious view of everything around me.
Sometimes, when a big wave came in and swept me up like that, I’d turn as I rose so that, at the moment when the wave was at its highest, I was looking back toward land. When that happened I’d sometimes get a quick, satisfying glimpse of the adults back on shore. There they’d be, those poor, distant schlubs, sitting there with their New York Times and their sun lotion and their apples and cheese, while I was out where it mattered, where things were going on. Where the energy was.
The more sophisticated my reading got, the more voices I found who knew, and described, just what I would feel out there in the waves on days like that.
“What is this that frees me so in storms?” asked Walt Whitman. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his famous essay “Nature,” described how sometimes just being in the woods alone could transform his thinking: “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. . . . Standing on the bare ground . . . all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
Except, as both Whitman and Emerson of course knew, it wasn’t nature these poets and writers were entering, or at least not just nature. There was something else out there in the waves and woods as well. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, yet knew, all the same, was real. Nature, for writers like Emerson or Whitman, was clearly a place where something more was to be found—a “something” I found described not just by Americans, but with equally stunning clarity in lines like these by the nineteenth-century British poet William Wordsworth:
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
In addition to Long Island, I was lucky enough to be able to spend some time, most summers, on an island off the coast of Maine called Islesboro.
On the south end of Islesboro there is a small community called Dark Harbor. Dark Harbor is what’s called a summer colony—in other words, a collection of big, fancy houses that wealthy folk come up to and inhabit for a month or two, before they disappear back to New York, or Boston, or whatever similar place they came from. I’d been coming to Dark Harbor with my father and mother since I was a baby, and consequently felt an even stronger sense of identity with the place than I did with Long Island (which I’d only started visiting in the seventies, when my stepmother came along).
In the short but intense summer season, status—who you were, who you were related to, how much money you had—counted for a lot on Islesboro, and the adults made little secret of just how important all this stuff was to them. During my late teens, when I’d go up there with a little more insight into the whys and wherefores of adult behavior, I’d always be amazed at how miserable most of the people there were. They seemed to ignore the beauty of the place and spend all their time jockeying for social position.
The land and the water in Dark Harbor had a strange, unnamable intensity—one that some places just have more of than others. I’d take long walks by myself, past all the giant summer houses, down to the southern tip of the island to watch the sun set, or just sit on an empty rocky shore staring out at the other islands set in the cold, black current of Penobscot Bay. I’d get that same feeling I’d get in the water when I was down on Long Island. I have the secret, I’d think to myself. I don’t know what that secret is, but I know that I have it, and I know that if I am careful, and hold on to it, nothing will ever be able to take it away from me.
Again, the new writers I was regularly discovering, and most especially the poets, only intensified this feeling.
“Whose woods these are I think I know,” Robert Frost wrote in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and I knew exactly what Frost was getting at with those lines. The woods, the ocean—these wild, weird, necessary, supremely energizing places—were most often owned by wealthy people. People who had no clue what was really going on in them. But there were other people who did know, who felt the strong, unquestionable magic at work in them, and knew that that magic meant something.
But the older I got, the harder it became for me to get this feeling—at least without help. For all my twenties and the first part of my thirties, I drank quite a bit. For most of this time, my absolute favorite thing to do was to get really drunk and then throw myself—literally—into nature. One day down in Florida, in a small beach town just south of Fort Lauderdale called Dania, I drank an entire bottle of rum while floating around in the waves. When I finished it, I ran up onto the beach, responsibly deposited the empty bottle in a trashcan, then ran back into the water.
“I think I’m going to go out for a bit,” I said to my girlfriend Sarah, who’d been floating around with me. “I might be a while but I’ll be back.”
With that, I swam, and swam, and swam, heading directly away from the coast.
Behind me as I swam, the sun moved slowly toward the western horizon. Before I knew it, the last little bit of it had vanished out of sight, and the formerly blue sky above me had turned a deep, vaguely melancholy shade of purple. The first stars started to appear, and the next time I turned my head toward shore a friendly little string of lights had snapped on in the darkness, seemingly in answer to the stars in the sky above.
Admiring the beauty of the scene, I couldn’t help noticing that the friendly little line of lights twinkling at me from shore was considerably far away. Well, I’d wanted to get away from things, out into the wild, and it was looking like I’d succeeded.
Swimming back to shore would have been the prudent move at this point. But it was also the easy one, and as I was still quite drunk, I decided to linger a little longer out there in the dark and the space.
But I didn’t just float there. Instead, I repeatedly took big lungfuls of air, ducked my head under the water, and swam hard straight down. When I got as deep as I could, I stopped and floated there, upside down in the blackness, holding as still as I could. I was a good half mile from land, it was dark, and it was not impossible that there might be a shark or three in the area, especially as sharks typically moved in from deeper water at dusk to hunt along the shore. But suspended there in the dark, far from the ordinary, humdrum world, I felt no fear at all. Instead, a strange but familiar joy shot through me. I was, once again, close to that thing-that-was-not-a-thing, that realm of mystery and strangeness that was, paradoxically, not strange and distant but close. It was so close, and so obvious and intimate, that every time I once again brushed up against it, I’d marvel that I could ever have lost it. Being eaten by a shark was, I thought, a small price to pay for such a feeling.
Sooner or later, with the rum beginning to wear off, I determined that it was time to head back to shore.
Managing this, however, proved tougher than I’d thought. Not only was the land considerably farther away than I’d thought, but I was also having a hard time figuring out just which cluster of lights to aim for.
At around nine o’clock, I finally staggered out of the water onto the same beach I’d left some three hours earlier. Sarah, greatly relieved to see me, ran a little way up the beach to a payphone and made a call to the Coast Guard.
“They were on their way,” she said, “because I was starting to think you weren’t coming back.”
But I always came back. Still, as the years progressed and my drinking increased, it began to seem less certain that I really wanted to. One Fourth of July out in San Diego, where I moved with Sarah, I decided on a daytime ocean excursion from the beach in Coronado, which lay just over a causeway from San Diego proper.
After about an hour’s leisurely swimming, I stopped to look back at the coast, and saw, off in the distance, something surprising. A swimmer was cutting through the water directly toward me.
As the swimmer got closer, I could see he was towing one of those small, red, bullet-shaped flotation devices such as one saw on Baywatch. A lifeguard.
Uh-oh, I thought. I’ve done it now.
In what seemed to me like an extraordinarily short time, the lifeguard, towing that red bullet behind him, made it out to where I was.
“How you doing?” he asked cheerfully, and not in the least out of breath.
“Fine,” I said.
“You’re out pretty far. You sure you’re all right?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, hoping that he was sufficiently far away that he couldn’t smell the alcohol on my breath. “Am I in trouble or something?”
“Heck no,” the lifeguard said, then laughed. “This is America. Land of the free. Especially,” he added, “on the Fourth of July.”
And with that, he turned and resumed his powerful, steady crawl, cutting back to shore with the same marvelous speed and sureness with which he’d gotten out to me.
He’s right, I thought, alone again out there in the blue, my country spread out before me like some vast Fourth of July beach blanket. I can do anything I want. I wonder . . . just what it is I want to do.
Though I’d just finished my first book, on Mesoamerican religion, and it had been published by a good publisher, I was barely scraping by in life, teaching English at a third-rate San Diego language school and getting helped with my meager monthly expenses by two hundred dollars sent every month by my sister and brother-in-law. I may have felt free out there in the ocean that Fourth of July. But back on land, life was plainly getting the better of me. And, sad to admit, free as it could still make me feel at times, close as it could still get me to that source of mystery and strangeness I so longed and lived for, most of the time my drinking wasn’t really helping matters either.
It was shortly after that Fourth of July encounter out in the ocean that I happened to read a short book by C. S. Lewis called Surprised by Joy. The book—a memoir of Lewis’s early days—is also a wonderfully roundabout yet at the same time curiously direct story of how Lewis came to accept the Christian faith.
Early on in the book, I came across a sequence that stopped me in my tracks as few passages have before or since. In the passage, Lewis is talking about the imaginary world he lived in as a child—one which struck me as deeply and instantly familiar, for it was the same world I myself had inhabited back then.
The passage caused me to remember when, at around eight years old, I felt the easy, comforting bath of imagination that I’d been immersed in for the first years of my life suddenly begin to drain away. This moment, when the plug is pulled on the womb-like safety of one’s childhood imaginary world, is instantly familiar to many people—and many parents. It’s the moment when children stop talking to their toys—when, while they’re alone in the bath or their room, you no longer hear them having animated conversations. It’s the moment when a kind of curtain comes down between the child and a world that he or she had never imagined would disappear . . . but now does.
When this happened to me, I remember vowing, sometime around age eight, never to forget that this world was real, and always would be. Though I could no longer see it clearly, I told myself to remember that it was always present, always right there, whether I could feel it or not.
The memory of that feeling of sureness about the existence of a spiritual world that I’d experienced so strongly up to the age of eight was, of course, one reason why I’d eventually found myself unable to say the Lord’s Prayer at Potomac. Yet even as I’d grown into an adult appreciation of the spiritual dimension as it manifested in other cultures, I’d kept my distance from Christianity.
Until Lewis, a devout Anglican, began to bring me back toward it. It was Lewis who succeeded in making, for me, the supremely unlikely connection between that realm of mystery I had so long been familiar with and the religion into which I had been born.
His key to doing so was also about as unlikely as one could imagine. Lewis brought me face-to-face with Christianity through Beatrix Potter’s children’s book The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.
“Though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “the rest of them were merely entertaining; it [The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin] administered the shock, it was a trouble. It troubled me with what I can only describe as the idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamored of a season, but that is something like what happened. . . . The experience was one of intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify the desire . . . but to reawake it.”
In looking at the book, Lewis experienced “surprise” and a “sense of incalculable importance. It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would say now, ‘in another dimension.’ ”
In a few lines, Lewis had gone to the very heart of a childhood experience that I’d thought was altogether beyond the reach of words. But not only that: He had connected that experience (for as the book developed, it became clear that this was the true source of the sense of “incalculable importance” he had brushed up against) with the seemingly exterior story of a man who had lived and died two thousand years ago. A story that, up to then, I’d thought had nothing to do with me.
The barrier to Christianity that had stood since those long-ago days on the assembly-room floor of my elementary school broke down. And in the ensuing years, I came more and more to see that the mystery at the heart of Christianity was that same mystery I’d felt as a child and a teenager, and that I’d vowed never to lose.
Further revelations—usually packaged, craftily, in the form of disasters—followed. In 1995, when my drinking finally came to a head and I found myself in rehab, I was presented with a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, otherwise known as the Big Book.
At first, I had no interest in reading the thing. But, lacking any other fare to help pass the hours, I finally broke down and started in on it.
It was Chapter Three, “We Agnostics,” that held what was, for me, the revelatory passage.
“Lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be A Power Greater Than Ourselves. Obviously. But where and how were we to find this Power? . . . We looked askance at many individuals who claimed to be godly. How could a Supreme Being have anything to do with it all? And who could comprehend a Supreme Being anyhow? Yet, in other moments, we found ourselves thinking, when enchanted by a starlit night, ‘Who, then, made all this?’ There was a feeling of awe and wonder, but it was fleeting and soon lost. Yes, we of agnostic temperament have had these thoughts and experiences. Let us make haste to reassure you. We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God.”
Sure, the language was a little goofy, a little dated. And yet I knew immediately what this passage was getting at. That strange sense of atmosphere and mystery, that feeling of getting to the secret at the heart of the world. A secret that, in childhood, nature had handed over without question, and that back in the good old early days of my drinking, had still been in reach. Here, in a book that I’d expected to be full of tiresome do-good admonishments, was that same feeling, that same instinct for something larger. And far from being scorned or denied, it was being celebrated.
That one passage made all the difference for me. Apparently going along with this not-drinking thing would not mean I had to give up my belief in that larger, secret thing I’d been so taken up with all my life. Not only that, but this new perspective made it clear to me, for perhaps the first time, that my entire drinking career had, in fact, been devoted to pursuing it.
Up to this point I’d had little interest in stopping drinking, or in absorbing any of the directives that my supervisors at rehab were so anxious to shove down my throat. But this passage, and what it so easily and honestly suggested, changed my thinking. It was so simple. Alcoholics like me were all, when you got down to it, after the same thing: that thing was God.
Of course, the AA literature was quick to point out that the “higher power” one needed to focus on in order to move beyond the compulsion to drink didn’t have to be God, and there was plenty of assurance in the meetings I attended, both in rehab and afterward, that if one felt dicey about the God business, one only needed to select a “higher power” of some other sort, and focus one’s recovery on that.
But I didn’t need any of that. I knew full well what my “higher power” was. It was that same presence that had been hovering just behind the scenes my whole life. You could call it what you wanted, perhaps, but I knew its name was God.
When I got out of rehab, I did some more reading around in the history of AA, and discovered something very interesting. Bill Wilson, the cofounder of AA, had received key inspirations for AA from two authors I admired, but that I’d had no idea had played a part in AA’s birth.
These two men were William James, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher and author of the classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
Alcoholics, I learned from Wilson via Jung, were on what Jung called a “low-level” religious quest. They drank not because there was something innately wrong or weak in their natures, but because they sought God. The desire to drink, Jung wrote to Wilson, was, in Jung’s opinion, “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
Jung quoted the first line from Psalm 42:
“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” These were astonishingly simple, straightforward words, but they were also the first thing anyone had ever told me about my own drinking that made real sense of it. They were the first things that explained to me that what I’d really been seeking with alcohol, and at stray moments brushing up against, were those same feelings that had come to me so easily as a child, less easily as a teenager, and finally all but impossibly as an adult.
Throughout all of these experiences, and these sudden, stunning passages from books, certain words were appearing again and again. “Freedom.” “Wholeness.” And another, one that I would not see the full implications of until I met Bernie: