somebody else's paradise

Soon after i moved into the Washington Street house i found out that all of the housemates at the time – Leta, Kathy, Chris and Fiachra – were somehow connected to the same church called Inner Light ministries. They invited me to come along and i was curious. They insisted on what an open and progressive place it was, and were particularly enthousiastic about the reverend – a black lesbian, as i was immediately told. Then i met Rev. Deborah at the Spiritual Activism conference in Washington two months ago, and she was rather impressive during this first meeting.

This morning i finally went; we got a ride from Cynthia who offered to take everybody in the house with her. She proposed to first have breakfast at a place close to Inner Light where many church members go, the Farm. This turned out to be a rather fancy gourmet bakery where you could sit down to have truly delicious patisserie amidst beautiful expensive objects which you could also buy. Where to start… Cynthia’s arrival at the house in the morning was everything but peaceful: nervous, rushing everybody, waking Mihui up cause it’s part of her “saving Mihui plan” to take her church, excessively apologizing to Giulia and me for having to wait, slighty annoyed that María wouldn’t join that morning… a bad start. But it was nothing compared to the episode in the Farm.

As we were having breakfast, Cynthia got into another monologue, this time she wanted us to know about the pendulum. She got her pendulum out and told stories of how it guided her in making decisions. You have to find “your” pendulum (don’t worry, you’ll recognize it when you see it), you have to fix which movement signifies “yes” and which one “no” for you, and once you’re equiped all you have to do is ask a (yes or no) question and you’ll be surprised how you’ll be guided through the contigency of life to all the right answers and places and people and… i’ll spare you the details of all the stories (of e.g. finding the right bag, on sale, when you don’t have much time), but they clearly boiled down to this: the pendulum as a device par excellance for enhancing your consumerism. As Cynthia was talking, an elaborate image of herself doing groceries, going to the mall, visiting shops and boutiques, finding the right present for friends… with her pendulum in her hand cristallized. In case we would have somehow (but really, how?) missed the point, she gave us a demonstration on the spot. She let her pendulum show what i really wanted or needed – a piece of sophisticated parfumed soap. Now i’m not entirely sure exactely how low that figures on the list of things i would like… My response that i don’t really use soap was met with a nervous laugh. Then she went on a quest for a lotion for a friend. It turned out that the friend really needed pomegranate lotion, also Sprach Der Pendulum. By that time mihui had gone silent, i felt numb and tried to avoid cynthia. Giulia had run out, as she felt a great rage well up in her, struck all of a sudden by the whiteness and well-off character of the Farm, of the whole place. And it didn’t look any better outside on the parking lot with all the big cars, almost as many of them as people inside.

So i was telling you about going to church. We were all pretty quiet in the car as we left the Farm and drove on to Inner Light. A young guy seriously into heavy metal directed us to a parking space. As mihui commented on this look, cynthia cut her short – something about not judging and that there is room for everboby in the church. Not mihui’s freaking point, and it turned out that she was seriously into heavy metal herself as a teenager (how funny to imagine her like that!). But it seemed to me that Cynthia’s response and the emphasis on “there is space for everybody and everything, you should not judge” revealed something about this kind of church. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that i don’t believe in the effort of trying to make spaces more inclusive (although i do reject relativism), and it’s not at all about the heavy metal guy whom i don’t know. It’s something about this kind of knee-jerking liberalism that is so empty, so poor, so dead – nothing more than inclusivity as a style, a brand.

From the very start the church feels cold. Giulia and i squeeze somewhere in the middle of one of the benches. In front of us, where traditionally you would find scriptures and song books in a church, there’s a box of Kleenex, three or four per bench. Giulia desperately needs to get out and we end up sitting in the front on the ground, with the children. But the children leave quite soon after the service starts and we end up squeezing in on the first bench. Nothing moves me in any kind of way. Not the music by a group of young people – “angels” someone calls them – on bare feet, with dreadlocks, with eyes staring into some other invisible realm. Not the “readings” which amount to some pages on evolutionary biology from some kind of novel. Not the “sermon” which is a lecture by a UCSC professor in ethics of ecology (Rev. Debora is on vacation in Hawaii). The lecture is not bad, it comes pretty close to Al Gore’s anti-global-warming manifesto An Inconvenient Truth, including the self-celebrationary tone of the guy who supposedly is only telling us the message. Not the “rituals” which amounted to not much more than reading out the church’s statement of purpose (“Inner Light Ministries is an Omnifaith, outreach ministry dedicated to spiritual transformation. We provide Tools for Living that encourage the practical application of Universal Spiritual Principles to all of life’s circumstances. Our aim is healing through the energy of love and revealing of our own Inner Light. As an Omnifaith ministry, we acknowledge Spiritual Oneness, appreciate individualized expressions, and honor all paths that lead to Truth.”) and some kind of affirmation of adherence. Then there are the things that freak me out: the general emphasis on unity and harmony. The particular emphasis (theme of the month) on creativity. Meanwhile i’m looking around and seeing overwhelmingly white people bonding and feeling good.

The service is followed by drinks and snacks and socializing. For some reason Mihui, Giulia and i first wander through the crowd each on our own. Then Giulia and i find each other in the bookshop. i wanted to get an idea of the theology or ideology of this church – the bookshop reflects the emptiness i had expected after the service. Some touchy-feely small books, some books on “social problems”, some small objects like stones with “wisdom” and “peace” and a big table with Rev. Debora’s book and DVD. There’s no spirit in this place, i say to giulia at some point, nothing spiritual at all. She reminds me that there are different spirits and that some people here seemed touched by something – which is the point when we begin laughing about what one could be touched by. In the central hall we find mihui who carefully asks us what we thought about the whole thing. Boring, says giulia. “Oh you guys…” Mihui starts laughing with relief. And there’s no stopping her anymore, she goes on and on about how she had no idea before she came to Santa Cruz that cynthia – an old friend from high school – was into all of this. About the things cynthia has been telling her that freak mihui out: meeting aliens, talking to fairies, plants screaming at her… (“We have a name for that in Europe,” giulia tells her, “madness.”) And about how she thought we all were into it. She knew leta participated in cynthia’s juicing obsession (we now grow wheat-grass in the kitchen to be juiced in the morning). One of her first days in the house she saw maría reading Starhawk and when she asked what it was maría spoke about witchcraft. She saw me, with my dreads, in a tank top one day and noticed all the hair in my armpits – she was convinced i was a hard core hippy. After a week in the house she phoned her friends in New York and Boston and told them they would not believe what a nuthouse this is… Her friends urged her to get out of the place as soon as possible… We can’t stop laughing. The beginning of a friendship.

Cynthia was clearly pissed. Not that we said anything to her – but the laughing complicity is clearly out of place. Last week Cynthia was crying during the service, it seems that the Kleenex are there for a reason. This week she’s angry, which finds its expression in a monologue as we drive home. The official target of her anger is the UCSC professor. He’s not creative enough, he still translates the problems (of global warming in this case) in the current frameworks and consciousness, he speaks of hope which annoys her because it points to the future and obscures the fact that we can change things here and now. If you have enough will power. She’s very dismissive of how the UCSC guy is stuck in his “small self” and brabbles about hope and some small things you could do, when it’s about getting into a higher consciousness. Like some guy she’s in full admiration for, who works behind the screens, convinces big CEOs (“it’s a win-win situation”) to change their policies. Disgusted by how her vision exhales individualism, conspiracy, the elected few, i phase out, just want to get home. Giulia angrily says: “And what about the war in Iraq?” It fuels Cynthia anger, which obviously wasn’t directed to the UCSC guy alone. She keeps on bringing up the same mantra – we need to look at things with a higher level of consciousness.

When we get home we seek refuge in my room, closing my door that leads to the kitchen, the door which i usually leave open. We lie close to each other on the bed. Giulia is full of anger and hatred, for Cynthia, for Santa Cruz, for California, for America – an inevitable chain reaction. It’s strange, this matter of degree, jerking from paradise to nightmare, no possibility to rest someplace in between. When she arrived just 10 days, she was enchanted by the place, especially the city (San Francisco), and now she’s into homocidal tendencies, triggered off by all this privilege drenched in a discourse of unity and harmony… Giulia, i don’t want to be writing what your anger was all about, will you write it down? For me, the anger in this place has made this very clear: my way of being in the world, of comprehending it and having some kind of grip on it, of acting in it, of transforming it, needs a notion of antagonism. In this America, in this California, antagonism seems to be contineously covered up. Win-win situations, we all want the same thing, we all have opportunities (if we want), we’re all on that train to the bright future (if we want)… Fuck you America, we don’t, we’re not, and remember that empire will be destroyed…

(i’m surprised at how sharing this anger at a political structure and culture that seems to leave so damned little grip on change – while ruining the lives of so many in the whole world – does me good. i didn’t expect it, i was not waiting for it, i was not needing it, but there we were sharing anger and hatred and sadness – which i only managed to shed off at some point in New York, a bit on my own – and it feels better. “This is how it was for me in the first two months in this Santa Cruz”, i tell her. “I didn’t realize it was so bad,” she tells me.)

We jump up at some point to be in time for Deepa Mehta’s latest film, Water. Definately a romanticised version of the ill fate of a child-widow in India in the 1930s, but an impressive account (how she portrayed all the relationships between the women in the ashram…) full of conflict, indignation, resistance (from widows and untouchables, not the elected few…) and movements (not lobbying among CEOs…) for social justice.