CHAPTER TWO

Hitching a Ride to the Kingdom

One of those previous encounters happened to me in 1974, at the age of twenty-two. In those days, my motto was, “If it scares you, do it.” One of the things that scared me most back then was hitchhiking. For some reason, the very thought of being on the open road, completely at the mercy of passing motorists, sent shivers up my spine. So, of course, I had to do it.

An opportunity came when my sister moved to Arizona and needed help with her furniture. We packed up an orange-and-white U-Haul, put the hideaway bed in the back so we could take naps on the road, and headed west. My plan was to hitchhike home to Pennsylvania via California.

After unpacking her stuff in Tucson, I hit the road with nothing but my thumb and my backpack.

When you're hitchhiking, everyone who stops to pick you up knows they'll never see you again. It's amazing how quickly people open up in those circumstances. You can get the fluff out of the way in the first twenty minutes: jobs, in-laws, kids, that sort of thing. In forty-five minutes, they're talking to you about their sex lives. Inside of two hours, they're telling you about their last bank robbery and where they hid the money.

My first ride was with a psychologist who liked me so much that he put me up for the night at his home, gave me dinner, and then breakfast the next morning.

My second ride was with a band ofhippies, driving a broken-down Ford Fairlane with no air-conditioning. Four of us were crammed into the back seat, with all of our belongings. With the windows open all the way in the desert heat, there was a sea of whipping hair—mostly from armpits.

As it turned out, they'd picked me up to see if I had any money for gas or food. In my naiveté, I was expecting a dawning of Aquarius reception from them. Maybe they would offer a garland of flowers as a token of their love for me and the universe.

But soon it became clear that they were expecting me to bankroll the whole excursion. To make matters worse, it wasn't at all clear that they had any interest in sharing my money with me. But before we could finish the one-sided negotiations, the universe intervened and killed their car. It sputtered to a stop on the roadside, and I got away as quickly as possible. The nerve! Wanting a hitchhiker to pay for something!

It was the middle of the desert. My head felt like it would explode from the pressure of the sun's heat. Still, it was far preferable to the company of my last ride.

Standing alongside the baked asphalt, a dusty semi pulled over. The driver was three hundred pounds of redneck stuffed into a sweat-soaked “wife beater” undershirt. Tobacco juice trickled down a greasy, gnarled beard. His belly oozed over his huge metal belt buckle, as he leaned on top of a horizontal steering wheel.

I knew from The Hitchhiker's Handbook that it was illegal for truckers to stop for hitchhikers. So with a manufactured cheerfulness, my first words, as I climbed into the cab, were, “Gee, I didn't know you guys were allowed to pick up riders…”

He looked over at me with steely eyes and a toothless grin. “Don't worry,” he growled. “If we get stopped, I'll just bury you.”

A chill shuddered down my spine. But before I could open the door to get out, he'd ground the transmission into first gear. As the cab lurched forward, the diesel roared. The seat back slapped me so hard, it practically knocked me into the windshield.

In the first twenty minutes, the driver told me about his career as one of the original Hell's Angels. There were stories of Harley choppers, wild women, bar fights, drugs, parties, the riot at the Altamont rock concert. It was all black leather, silver chains, and the wind in your face.

And, eventually, he told me where they hid the money.

As the white lines flashed by, his tales took on the staccato rhythm of the cab seats pounding us hard in the kidneys. When we stopped at a truck stop, he bought me lunch. We laughed, hung out together for a couple of hours, then climbed back into the cab and let it beat on us some more.

By the time he dropped me off at Big Sur, in California, it hurt to say good-bye. The good part about hitchhiking—and the bad—is that you're never going to see these people again. But we were heading in different directions. I was going straight. He wasn't.

As the last echoes of the diesel died away, the quiet rattled around inside me. The only sound was the hiss of tires from an occasional passing automobile. Loneliness settled over me like a fog.

Hours drifted by with no one stopping. It was nearly sundown, and the temperature was falling fast. There was no shelter in sight. The scene was short on romance and long on bad options.

It looked like I'd finally gotten what I had come for: I was scared.

Then the strangest thing happened. It took me by surprise. At a time when everything was fraught with uncertainty, when I was completely at the mercy of forces beyond all my control, when I had no friends or family to come to my aid, when I had no visible means of support—just then, I was surrounded by the deepest sense of security I had ever felt.

It began with the music of wind sifting through redwoods. Light filtered through the green canopy in diagonal shafts of dancing brilliance. The forest took on a sheen of soft radiance, as if I'd stumbled into Eden.

But it was more than what I saw. Something was changing in my body. It was a feeling—like warmth, but much more.

I hesitate to call it a presence, because there was no apparent being. It was larger and more encompassing than that. All at once, the barriers that had always separated me from the world evaporated in a dancing swirl of light and color. Yet, it was subtle—the kind of thing you could walk right past without noticing if your mind was in a muddle.

But, even more, there was a knowing. In the most uncertain of circumstances, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was cared for, deeply and profoundly. I was safe and secure in this most vulnerable of situations.

For just a moment, the world turned out to greet me—to remind me I was anything but alone.

Standing among the redwoods of Big Sur, I heard the voice of creation calling to me, not in words, but in spirit.

What had happened? Why had the world waited for that moment to radiate its glory? Was it necessary to be stripped of all my security before I could be bounced on the breast of Mother Earth? Had all the air-conditioning, vinyl, and elevator music so separated me from her nurturing embrace that I had become dead to her song? Regardless of the reason, I knew that she was alive and that her caring was complete.

A BUSH BURNING IN THE WILDERNESS

Joseph Campbell pointed out that the act of moving away from one's family and heritage is essential to the hero's journey.⁹ Culture is a tool that educates us into a particular way of seeing. We learn to split creation's unity into a thousand distinctions, simply because our parents told us so. Our vision becomes clouded.

In fact, it is not our vision at all, but the vision of countless generations before us. To see on our own, we must move away from all that we once assumed to be true. Only when we are alone in the wilderness can silence speak.

To move into the wilderness is to risk direct contact with the earth. When we're alone with the land, there is no culture to split our vision. Absent are the human voices that tell us who we are. Gone are the obligations that muster us into the line of duty. There is only the naked call of being. When we've been stripped of all, the song of creation springs forth. Only then do we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

This theme of moving away from our familiar surroundings is played out over and over again in the Bible. Abraham was called to leave his own country and family and go to a land that would be shown to him. Joseph was taken by slavery into Egypt. Elijah climbed to the top of the mountain to catch a glimpse of God passing by. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness as a prelude to his ministry.

When Moses stumbled upon a bush that was burning in the wilderness, he heard the voice that would change him and his people. You have to wonder how many times he had taken his little flock of sheep past this very spot without noticing that bush.

But, this time, he saw. This time, he heard. This time, Moses knew he was on holy ground, as the sacred burst into his life. In that red-hot minute, all that he thought he was, all that he was told about the world, all that he knew about the gods vanished in a blaze. His vision penetrated the external to gaze upon the dancing light of essence.

Suddenly Moses was privy to God's view of the world. Where the Hebrews knew only slavery, God saw freedom. In a situation where Pharaoh held all the cards, the Creator offered a different kind of power. While Moses's people were languishing in despair, divine insight saw profound hope.

It seems that a fundamental aspect of the kingdom of heaven is the capacity to fashion unimagined possibilities out of what, at first glance, is apparently worthless. Divine insight is able to perceive an infinite abundance, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Human insight, on the other hand, is hemmed in by assumptions of inadequate resources. Words to the wise ring in our ears:

“There's no such thing as a free lunch.”

“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

“The early bird catches the worm.”

“One good turn…gets most of the blanket.”

Because things are scarce, we all want to get our share of the blanket, and then some. We hoard and save for a rainy day. Our hoarding actually produces the very scarcity we fear.

But hitchhiking into the wilderness puts us on a collision course with scarcity. And, in the wilderness, there are no spectators.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE VERSUS HEARSAY

Years ago, a circus performer named Blondine decided that the ultimate feat was to walk a tightrope across Niagara Falls. Crowds came from all around to watch him traverse the thin line in the swirling mist and wind.

As part of his act, he pushed a wheelbarrow out over the chasm. Inching his way along the narrow strand, he tipped and teetered on the brink of disaster, as the crowd held its breath. When he returned safely at last, the tension gave way to thunderous applause.

Once the cheers died down, Blondine asked the crowd if they thought he could place the weight of a man in the wheelbarrow and safely complete the journey. The crowd egged him on. Placing two eighty-pound bags of grain in the wheelbarrow, he made the dangerous trek high above the thundering waters.

Upon returning safely to the crowd, Blondine asked how many thought he could take a real person over and back. As before, the throng cheered with delight at the prospect.

Then he asked for volunteers. The only one ever to accept the offer was Blondine's manager. No matter how much the crowd respected Blondine's skill, they didn't trust him with their lives.

In the wilderness, we have no choice. When surrounded by nothing but deprivation, like it or not, we've already hitched a ride in a very precarious wheelbarrow.

Ironically, it is that very deprivation that sets the stage for the sacred to break into the world. And with it can come a completely unexpected form of nurture.

But it's not the kind of thing you can understand from the sidelines. That's why not only Moses, but all those who followed him, needed to wander in the wilderness for forty years.

Only then would they cease to be bystanders hawking their “eyewitness” version for the news cameras. It became their story when it was their throats that were parched with thirst. When their stomachs were wracked with starvation, it was no longer a fairy tale. When they realized that these bodies— the only ones they had come into the world with—were about to be wasted, suddenly their attention was riveted.

So when Moses rapped on the rock with his staff, and a stream came gushing forth in the midst of the desert, the mad dash to water's edge became the stuff of legend. And when, on the verge of their starvation, manna came raining down from the heavens, suddenly they knew it in their bones that there was more to this world than meets the eye.

ABUNDANCE

This history formed the backdrop of Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom of heaven. When he proclaimed, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,”¹⁰ he was evoking the heritage of his own people in their wilderness sojourn. But what gave his words such compelling authority was that he had had his own confrontation with scarcity and lived to tell the story. He had seen an inexplicable provision during his own trek into the desert.

So when Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of heaven,” it wasn't abstract theory. For him, the spiritual world was primary, and it contained a hidden abundance that could be relied upon in all circumstances. It wasn't merely a nice, earth-friendly philosophy he was espousing. His words were an exposition of the way the universe was structured. In fact, creation itself was always reflecting this plenty:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of your life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith! Therefore do not worry, saying “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive after all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be yours as well.¹¹

While he spoke, Jesus drew attention to birds circling aloft, or he plucked a lily from the ground and turned it in his hand, as if the whole world were at his disposal for teaching.

Indeed, it was. He had so trained his attention that he could see beyond duality and gaze upon the spiritual dimension permeating this material reality. It was apparent to him, even on this side of death, and had appeared in the midst of extreme vulnerability.

It was this same reality that opened up to me while standing, backpack in hand, beside the pavement of California's State Highway 1. For the first time in my young life, there was nothing to protect me from the outrageous nurture of creation. A deep joy swelled up from within me and spilled out among the redwoods. In return, the harmony of creation's inner song played over me.