There are periods in our lives, at least there have been in my life, when time ceases its measured march across the surfaces of the earth, flesh and shadow are equally stilled, and moments, certain moments, may be drawn out into minutes, hours, days, months, years, or even, in my case, forty years. Such a moment for me, a moment when time slowed to an eternal pause, happened in the first months of the year Nineteen Hundred Sixty-Seven.
You would have to see the Mojave River, as it was then, to know how much certain places along its course resemble the River Jordan as it flows between Manasseh, Ephraim and Gad. There are places on Earth that seem to exist as two places at once, here as an original and again there, as a copy. These places seem to exist apart from the rock, sand and soil of the Earth, places that might be portals between distance and time, as where a door was left unlatched and barely swung open, a sliver of a crack; places where when standing near we might feel a draft blowing along our neck, a faint breeze whispering across our ear.
We reflexively turn our head toward that murmur; we feel a cool faint draft, and hurriedly turn up our sweater’s collar, pulling it up our neck, flinching slightly, trying to shrug off the cold air’s shiverous touch, but to no effect. The sweater’s bulky wool weaving’s hang caught on bristling hair, and taunt goose knuckles rise out of our tensing flesh.
We glimpse a burst of light; catch a darkening shadow crossing the corner of our eye, seemingly skirting the edges of ours and perhaps another dimension. Suddenly turning, what we saw is gone; what is left is the after-light, the certainty of vision, of indelible memory, written in the air, etched in streaks upon our eye’s lenses’, knotted, bound in our rising, pimpled flesh . The flashed memory compares itself with a primordial scene twisted tightly to a primeval gene.
Where were we? Were we there? And where is there?
“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” GEN 3:24.
There is a gate to Eden, G-d tells us of it in the Book of Genesis. A gate guarding the Tree of Life, that second tree so easily ignored in the infamy of Eve’s consuming of the other tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’s fruit. Can there exist somewhere another version of the Creation Myth, told to eternally innocent faces as fact? Can there be a second family of man, a second he and she who, unlike Adam and Eve, refused to eat the fruit; a man and woman so perfect that the Father to this day dwells with them? Is this paradise just beyond the limits of our dimension, just outside our range of perception; is it just a stolen glance, just a shimmering glimmer of after-light away? It is a fair question to pose, but one that begs an answer.
We know for a fact that man fell from G-d’s Grace, to beg the question, for the Bible tells us so. The Bible is the Word of G-d. G-d exists; otherwise the Bible would not exist. What others call a “fallacy,” and “myth,” we call Faith. Is our Faith false? Did you see that light? Did you feel that draft? Do you see the River before you? Is it not the River Jordan?
There once was, and remains still, for G-d tells us of it, such a place as the Garden of Eden, and the gate thereof, and there are tales told by others about that Gate as well as by this once and ever Postulant. Man and woman may come upon it suddenly by accident or after years of quest. Seeking it is the penultimate Biblical quest, as true in fact as the quest for the Sacred Ark of the Covenant, as real as the search of Mount Ararat for the timbers of Noah’s Ark. And yet, the Arks are the work of man, the garden of Eden is the work of G-d. It must exist, or why would G-d have had Moses, in The Book of Genesis, write about it? Consider this, why would G-d record in the First Book of His Revelation to mankind His need to leave Cherubims and a Flaming Sword to guard a gate that did not exist?
The Gate to the Garden of Eden, Fearsome Angels and a Flaming Sword turning every way, the passage that leads deep into the Garden, to the Tree, the fruit thereof, which when eaten, conveys fleshly immortality. I have seen that Gate, and what lies before it; and I live in fear and awe of Angels. Above all, I live in fear of He who made us all. I know that beyond the blinding light and searing heat of the Sword, beyond the fierce visage of the winged Cherubim, beyond the wrought gold pickets and rails of that Great Gate, there, deep in the Garden of Eden, is the Tree of Life; the Tree of Immortality of the Flesh, the fruit of which was eaten freely by Adam and Eve, before their fall from grace.
Is it possible that God was twice betrayed? How is it so? The Almighty twice created beings, angels and humans that chose rebellion against their Creator, each time in disobedience to His will, and each time in peril to their very existence. Pride and vanity, the spirit and the flesh, the image and likeness of the Father; one fighting to be an equal, the other hiding in shame, each cast out of the immanent presence of God.
I know that the place of which I speak, the Forks of the Mojave, was sacred, hallowed and a womb of life, revered by holy men for thousands of years. Two rippling flows became one rivery stream astride banks of verdant Cottonwoods, which shaded the waxing sand bars and stippled soil lush with thousands of broad-leafed mullein plants and with verdant ragged leaves of stinging nettle. Men have made medicine here since man first walked this beside the river bed, and holy Datura Stamonium’s trumpets hailed the start of many dream trances and vision quests. And on the soft loamy banks of the river’s forks life spawned from the loins of wizened hoary headed men and into the wombs of the nubile, fertile virgins who danced entranced among the Cottonwood thickets.
I came to this River as a spurned lover, a Postulant come to cleanse my tormented heart, now denied my chance at Roman Holy Orders, denied my unholy union with Torquemada’s seed. My purity had earlier been taken, as a child, by a reverend torturer’s phallus; in my innocence, I sought forgiveness from my seminary’s confessor for my complicit submission to the collar debauchery. Betrayed once again by a sacred broken vow, the words of my confession reached a mighty Cardinal’s ear. He told my confessor he deemed I could not be trusted to remain a submissive victim, and he feared worse that I was a weak and languorous temptation, too easily held and too easily had. When I was called back to the confessional, seeking my penance, seeking a return to the hope of grace, my confessor, a Monsignor, told me of the looming impediments that would surely bar me from sacramental Priesthood quoting verbatim the Cardinal’s thoughts. I begged his forbearance, his mercy, his absolution. I want only to serve God, I cried, as he turned to me and blessed me. My penance, he suggested, was that I should seek ordination as a deacon, remaining in seminary, perhaps to become a brother in a teaching order. It seemed to me as if he was saying I was complicit, as if had I brought abuse upon myself. The stresses of the priesthood, the weakness of flesh, the desire for affection, a pathology which yielded these encounters, in which both man and boy were willing, were equally sinful. He blessed himself, he removed and kissed his alb, and he beckoned me to sit in a high-backed parlor chair, and sat down across from me…
Why would a child have such visions of the Beatific Beauty, and later been so easily taken? Laying still, fighting off my heart’s infection, seven towering angels astride my bed, my soul lifted from my body to look down upon my death, then spared by warmth and love, by a light that suffused an absolute knowledge of G-d, a sureness of His person and His place. White, golden, blinding, binding in the light, I became a child whose eyes were opened to everything flesh and spirit, the stories of a thousand souls became my story. The light unlocked my mind, and nothing, good or evil, was denied me, or permitted me, or allowed to confound or confuse me, for I understood that everything, every object, very action, every outcome is an expression of the Will of G-d.
There is no good and evil to G-d, there is only our choice of either within his Will. For man, there is only our obedience to his Will, or denial of it, but all of it, all life, all creation, expresses His Will. A child seeking love, seeking comfort and affection, seeking that enveloping beatific warmth, that child would know when another’s actions violated G-d’s Law, but would also know the acts of perversion themselves had no moral value. That child would know that what we call “sins of the flesh” do not offend G-d, but that when those who willingly perpetrate them deny the Laws of G-d; their body, their very disobedient being, becomes sin itself. Sin works only on the willing; when it acts against the innocent, its effect is natural, within the given order of nature; it is merely destructive of the flesh of victims. Sin does not obtain to its victim’s souls. Perversion obtains to the sinner, their very being becomes the sin; the damage sin does to the innocent is worldly; it is flesh torn even to death, but there is never caused a transferal of sin from perpetrator to victim. What this meant for me is that I was physically defiled by unnatural acts, a loss of virginity, but spiritually untouched and innocent.
What was in my trusting sweet smile that beckoned Hell for cassocked men, and polluted virgin wounds? The Monsignor asked, “Why did you give the priests what they demanded, why did you allow your abuse? Why do you now tell us these things: you can not be called by G-d to serve: to be forgiven you must admit you are sent from Lucifer, fallen and corrupt, your gentle voice and kind heart a trap for weaker men. You did not forgive, you forgot and walked away, you did not confront or condemn, you admitted flesh, traded it for His Blood. Now you want our Collar?”
How weak had I been? Why had I trusted so? Why did a child deserve such attention, was it I that sought it? What type of sinful creature was I, that I could be used in that depredation, what was my purpose, why did I not hate those who tortured me with pleasure?
I was sobbing as the Chancellery door slammed closed behind me. I was owed Holy Orders, was I not? I heard His Voice calling, I was commanded to worship G-d and find His way in the World. Why did what they had done to me as a child hurt so little compared to the closing of that door?
The sidewalk was crowded with other Romans, Catholics living constrained by Pope Paul VI, after the Holy Madness of Pope John XXIII. Devout Catholics marching in holy contempt of a papal red-robin, the Archbishop of Los Angles, James Cardinal McIntyre. Catholic Christians chaffing under the repressive yoke of the Old Latin Church…The European Episcopacy of Apostolic Succession… centered in the Imperial Capital, in the Vatican, in Rome itself!
The few who knew me gathered around me, and they prayed, and consoled me. I spoke, I do not recall all or most of my words, but I did speak of re-birth, of a new Baptism, of being born again in Christ. These words were a novelty if not heresy for many there, but several echoed my sentiment. “We must be immersed in water to drown the old man and give birth to the new man, just as John baptized in the River Jordan. We must find a river…” There are few rivers in Los Angeles, and those that do flow, course through concrete channels leading to the sea. Someone mentioned the Mojave River, and another, an “out of habit” nun, said it looks like the Holy Land up there. Another said, there is a sacred place up there, the Forks of the Mojave.
There was our River, our Jordan. We made plans to meet in a revival at the Forks of the Mojave.
“Then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness before the face of such as have afflicted him, and made no account of his labours. When they see it, they shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the strangeness of his salvation, so far beyond all that they looked for. And they repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit shall say within themselves, This was he, whom we had sometimes in derision, and a proverb of reproach: We fools accounted his life madness, and his end to be without honour: How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!” WIS 5:1-5
It was circulated, in the rebellious camps of Roman Catholics, and curious klatches of reformed protestants, a good number were Lutherans, and such a conclave as we planned appeared seemly among Episcopalians, that a gathering would occur on such and such a day in the life of our nearly apoptotic movement and that rebirth would spring forth from death, we would Baptize in the River, in the Mojave, in the New Jordan, by full immersion.
The season was late winter, or early spring, in Southern California the equinoxes are hardly distinct. Chilled winds still blew down the back of the transverse ranges of the San Bernardino Mountains, but the sun shone bright and warm. I walked from the highway bridge east along the river’s south bank, among cottonwood stubs and scattered clumps of green weeds, until a garden blossomed before me, and thick stands of cottonwoods budded and opened into choruses of rustling leaves billowing before me, pools of cold clear water sprang forth from the river bed, and green budded and silken leafed plants laced around the ponds’ edges. And I knew I was at Eden’s Gate, and the River was the Jordan, the Water was Life.
I dropped to my knees, and drew from my britches, my pocket Bible, with its tiny text and a few colored map plates; it was the King James Version, the version of my maternal ancestors. I had chosen it not only because of my familiarity with “my” families Protestant King James Bible, but because the Roman Catholic Church offered no complete Doury Rheims version of the Bible available in a pocket-size. Missals, New Testaments, prayer books, devotionals and catechisms yes, the sixty-six Books of the Holy Scriptures, no.
I began to read, and though I read a book, it seemed a little time had passed before another pilgrim came, and then came another and more following them; though the forecast of cold winds and the remote location no doubt deterred others. As those who arrived congregated on the river bank hesitant to brave the cold waters of the deep pond, I waded in, and asked, “Who will baptize me, so that I might be born again?” A young man called “I will,” and joined me in the river’s rippling font, and immersing my whole body, baptized me in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. I then baptized him. It was a very natural thing to do, to join him to Christ, as he had joined me. Flushed first with the excitement of the moment, we suddenly became aware of our pale shivering selves, and waded to the shallow water and rose up the river bank. We joined the joyous congregants, clamoring about us to warm us, grasping, hugging us in prayers of thanksgiving and praise. Still, in this moment of conversion and communion, no one else of the orthodox faithful was moved by The Holy Spirit to join us in our sacramental immersion.
The blazing bonfire, started earlier, was fed fallen logs and limbs. I, heated by the fire and the passion of the prayers, soon felt dry and warm. As I sat beside the fire, we all sang hymns and said aloud the rosary, and a benediction was given, and the saints began to leave the fireside and walk toward the highway and their cars. We two Baptists embraced, blessed each other, and he, well wrapped and warmed, turned up the river side and left. I and others, after finishing a thermos of coffee, remained; we, several young men, a woman and an older man shared our praise and thanks, and talked about the Christian Church instant, the struggle for spirituality and sanctification in such a modern world as was California in the 1960’s. The tone was confessional, and our sadness was palpable. As the fire died, others determined to leave, but I and the older man remained, speaking of the spiritual world, my torments and his recent tragedy, the loss of a son. We spoke mainly of Eden, and the Fall, and in a curious way, we both felt that such a place as we were, was in fact a new Jordan, and that now, in this very moment, we were at the very gate of Eden, and both of us could hear the voices of the Cherubim calling out to us in tongues. The late afternoon somehow became brighter as the sun receded behind the ridges to the southwest, and sword light flicked among the tree branches. Our lips confessed sins, our mouths admitted guilt and shame, our hearts grieved in sadness, our souls bared our losses and we were both filled with grace. The older man asked me what it was I most wanted: why had I come there, to be baptized in the pool of this river.
Do you believe in visions, I asked? I am a sinner now, yet when I was a child, God spoke to me. When I was six, I laid very ill in bed, sick to death with Rheumatic Fever, my small body racked with fever and sweat. I felt myself drifting away from my bed, away from my body, but suddenly, I was lying healed on my bed, and beside it stood seven tall men, angels all, eight hundred feet high each, praying beside my bed. And I was lifted up toward their head, toward a warm comforting glow, borne on their hands until I was equal to the crowns of their heads, seven hundred ninety feet high, and my body and spirit were suffused with the most wonderful light, and my eyes filled with a golden glow, and I knew then that God was with me, that God is as real as His creation and that I was to serve Him forever. You see, I know God for a fact. I know each of us is his perfect work, and each of us is the perfect reflection of Him, perfect in creation. No other creature is like unto us, for we are created in His image and likeness from Clay, from the very dirt he made, and yet above all, we have a soul, which is the mirror of His eye, for we have free will, and unlike anything else, any other creature on this His creation, the world, we can choose to disobey God Almighty, we can choose to sin. This is God’s greatest gift to man, that we may obey or not obey, and thus we are able to bend the Will of God, nature, to our will. I knew all of this when I awoke, healed. My senses were then, and are now, pens that write man’s truths on God’s parchment. Our truth is Good or Evil, we are sinners or saints, and most often, we are both. I wish only to guard and guide His Children; I want to be His Priest.
He rose, stood before me, and was for a while in prayer. Then his eyes fixed on mine, and suddenly then the most remarkable and glorious words poured from his mouth, and he said, I am Christ’s Priest, and His Bishop in Apostolic Succession and I will ordain you, I believe you ready to be called to His service. Lay face down here, before me, and pray silently as I pray aloud. When I ask you, answer the questions I ask as each answer is an oath, and what we do is a sacred covenant. And he asked questions and I answered, and he prayed aloud a litany, and then he laid his hands upon me and raised me up a Priest. He said: You are Christ’s Priest. And I said “Who are you? What Church have I, what Church am I to worship in…? He answered “I am an Episcopal Bishop, my name is James Pike, and you are very irregularly ordained.” It was now dark, the embers of the bonfire were fading red-gray, and for a good while he spoke to me and questioned me, and finally he advised me. “You must finish your degree, and then I will welcome you in my Church, wherever that may be, and we will preach the Gospel, the good news, together. Let us pray.” And there we knelt, and prayed together for some time. We rose together and he said, “Gregory, God has used me to ordain you into the priesthood, you are his Priest. Pray to do good, to do His will. I am your Bishop, I instruct you to learn and grow in His Grace, and when the time is right, we will tell the world of this…this moment on the Mojave.” We spoke a few personal words and walked to the cars, and gave me his Blessing and drove away.
I took a blanket and bag from the car, and walked back to Christ’s Church on the bank of the Forks of The Mojave. I spent the night there, in a peace that passeth all understanding, sleeping for the first time in memory without dreams or nightmares, at peace. I never saw my Bishop, my Ordinate again. We spoke several times by phone, but his circumstances prevented our meeting, we awaited the moment. Then given the opportunity, he sought God in the Negev, and gave up the ghost in September 1969. He would have appreciated that phrase, “Giving up the Ghost.”
In the End, God’s Will is always done.