8 - Dana

I had only heard two things about Gary Neel:

1. That he was once a dedicated believer, and
2. That he no longer considered himself a believer at all.

And it made me nervous, just to think that I was gong to meet him.

We visited San Francisco during spring break of my junior year. While there, my family met with a few of my parents’ friends, including Gary Neel and his wife, Dana.

We met for dinner at a restaurant. He, an ultra-marathon runner, had a healthy smile and a firm handshake, along with an extremely positive demeanor. And although I didn’t notice it at first, his wife was a wildly free spirit.

I took a seat across from Dana, and Gary began asking me about college aspirations. Since I didn’t have any in specific, I told him about how we’d just visited Stanford University, and how I wouldn’t mind going there (“if I can just get accepted first”).

He looked at me, as he smiled to his memories of college, “Yeah… college is great… I just remember being amazed by how many different ideas there are in the world,” he said.

And it made me curious, but I was scared to ask what exactly he meant, so I just looked at my menu, trying to find out what I wanted to eat.

Soon afterward, Dana and I started talking. When I asked what she did for a living, she said, “Actually, I work in spirituality.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I work in a large corporate office as a spiritual therapist.”

“Only in California,” thought one part of my brain, but the rest of me just sat there, listening.

She leaned into the light of the candle on the table, “I practice a religion called Eckankar,” she said. “It’s an ancient form of spirituality.”

At this point, Gary leaned into the table as well, facing my dad. He started to talk about their old friends, cutting the table into two conversations. To my dad, Gary seemed embarrassed of his wife.

And she continued so speak, with her eyes locked into mine. “It began in the Middle East, thousands of years before Jesus… But when Christianity became the dominant world religion, it was suppressed. But even then there were people who practiced it in hiding, maintaining its traditions.”

“Interesting, I’ve never heard anything about this,” I said.

“Well, it has only resurfaced in the last half-century – in the sixties in the US.”

I nodded slowly, “Ohhh...”

“You probably think I’m crazy,” she said, “but if you really want to understand it for yourself, you just have to try it.”

At this point, Gary tried extra hard to talk to my dad, about anything but Eckankar. And while one part of me remained completely skeptical about Dana, the rest was almost entranced by the passion behind her words. It seemed so familiar.

“You’ll just need to get into a closet, some place where there’s no one around, and then you chant for about twenty minutes: hiew, hiew, hiew, hiew.” She chanted in a high-pitched voice. “Trust me, it works.”

Although I couldn't actually picture myself doing the chant, I felt some connection to the way she described it.

"It's the most amazing thing you'll ever experience," she said, "It floods your entire body with joy; it's overwhelming, and really... really just indescribable. You just have to try it."

"Ok," and I nodded my head, while she kept talking.

"Sometimes tears just stream down my face," she said, "and I can't do anything but just sit there, crying. Sometimes I cry for hours."

"Wow," I said, but I was ready to change the subject, and she could tell. In my battle between skepticism and acceptance, skepticism had won; and I had broken the connection between us.

Still, I had plenty to think about.

By the time we had reached our hotel, I was feeling upset and confused. Something was bothering me. I had touched something profound and horrible and raw and beautiful, and I couldn't get it off my mind. Then, when my parents made fun of her religion, I started to cry.

I could feel myself questioning something I had never questioned before, and even though it felt terrible, I kept asking... and why? Because of a single conversation with a woman I'd never met, starting with, "What sort of work are you in?"

It was silly. It was stupid. Her religion was just stupid. Everyone else could just disregard it. Why did I feel so confused?

From the moment that Dana related her spiritual experience, my mind had been drifting to mine. I thought of a memory that (until then) I had been holding with white-knuckled hands: one of the defining moments of my Christian identity.

In the eighth grade, my entire class at Grace Community took a trip to a camp in Colorado. For a week we did leadership training exercises and intense Bible studies. We went snowshoeing and downhill skiing. It was exhausting and enriching and amazing, and on the last day there, something happened. It's hard to explain what it was, but it was something.

We were all in the chapel and we just started crying, and I don't remember what had sparked it, but once we were crying, it didn't matter. There were about fifty of us there, in that chapel on top of a snow-covered hill, somewhere above Camp Redcloud.

Before that, Patch, the leader from Redcloud, had been talking about the importance of honesty and accountability, and he opened up a time for students to speak.

We shared things that we'd never shared before. I went to school with these friends every day, but I had never known about the things that they shared that night.

And, when we cried, we cried together, all of us, and the Holy Spirit was there. It filled the place. It connected us to each other and to ourselves, and we all experienced it. It was real.

I remember Emily Skipper wiping tears from my eyes, and smiling. I smiled too. There was hugging and crying and hugging and crying, and we all could just feel what was happening.

The whole thing lasted no more than an hour or so, and to be honest, it probably looked as crazy as those services you see on TV, where people are falling or laughing or waving their hands, but when it's you, it's totally different.

It's totally different.

I remember thinking, "We cannot forget about this," and afterward I'd say it to my friends, "We have to remember what happened at Redcloud. You guys, we have to remember it."

And whenever I thought about religions, outside of my own, I thought about how they could never experience anything as real or as powerful as the Holy Spirit, who had been with us that night at Camp Redcloud.

And Dana, the member of some random religion for hippies, convinced me that something had happened to her.

Demons? Maybe hypnosis? Cognitive dissonance?

To her it was real. I didn't know what, but I knew that to her it was real. I could see it in the way that she spoke: she had encountered something real.

So rather than questioning Dana's experience, I questioned my own - and I couldn't find any real answers. I didn't question whether my experiences happened or not, but whether they were more real than hers.

And I just couldn't know for sure. I felt like I couldn't know anything for sure anymore.