IN SEARCH OF THE SPIRIT: Setting out on a quest for a meaningful life

By Dale Short Whatever scene I envisioned for my first "laying on of hands," this small storefront church on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, is clearly not it. I hoped for some privacy, at least, and this place has too many strangers and way too much noise. The people milling in and out of the building as I approach from the parking lot are not your typical church crowd. From elders in wheelchairs to toddlers in arms, they're nearly all casually dressedmore reminiscent of an outdoor festival or a family reunion than some somber religious observance. They come and go in small groups, talking and laughing, enjoying snacks and soft drinks and styrofoam cups of coffee: teenagers in faded blue jeans and hiking shorts, middle-aged people wearing jogging suits, coveralls or long flowered skirts. There's an East Indian woman in traditional head-wrap, a young Asian couple pushing twin infants in a stroller, a tall Native American man with a buckskin jacket and a feather in the headband of his sleek black hair. The small sign at the curb says "All Nations Church," and the name seems fitting. The day is a sparkling blue Saturday in mid-April, sunshine so bright it makes you wince. From inside the building come the sounds of music and clapping and laughter. As I enter the vestibule, young ushers in snappy business suits welcome me and shake my hand. I give one of the ushers my business card; the minister is expecting me and said I should ask for him at the front. The young man explains that Brother Mahesh Chavda will be free in about 15 minutes, and then shows me to a seat in the crowded sanctuary to wait. I'm justifying this experience to myself as journalistic research. One of my interview subjects at the time was a lawyer in Montgomery who helped to found a faith-healing church, and I've started attending occasional services there with him. That's where I met Mahesh, and I felt strangely at ease with him. Also, I was still in awe of Dennis Covington's transcendently beautiful and disturbing nonfiction book "Salvation on Sand Mountain," about the altered mental states he experienced with a tiny Pentecostal congregation in the hills of north Alabama. But in truth, if anybody had told me 30 years earlier, when I bolted from the rigid, fundamentalist rural church of my childhood, that I would someday drive hundreds of miles in search of the Holy Spirit, I would have been horrified. As I wrote once in an essay about growing up in a hellfire-and-brimstone congregation, "When I was old enough to escape this painfully constricting world I ran straight toward the open arms of science and reason and behaviorism with all my strength, like a hostage greeting his rescuers." Still, here I am rationalism, skepticism, scientific method, and all waiting in a church for a faithhealer. The usher taps my shoulder and motions for me to follow him toward the back of the sanctuary. Suddenly Mahesh stands facing me. Wearing a coat and tie, he's much shorter than he appeared onstage earlier. A Hindu by birth, he greets me in excellent English with an almost imperceptible drawl that sounds like the American Southwest, which is where he attended Christian seminary. With the serious, questioning mien

of a physician, he waits for me to tell him what my needs are. For some reason I haven't prepared a request. How do I boil it all down, for a man with so many supplicants gathered in one place, jockeying for his time and attention? "I have really bad arthritis," I hear myself say. Technically, I've inherited the early onset of severe osteoarthritis which forced my mother to retire on disability from her office job when she was almost the same age that I am now. Mahesh reaches for both my hands and squeezes them gently. "Worst in the hands," he says confidently, nodding. "Yes?" "Yes," I tell him. "Much." "And other?" Other. Where to start? At the time, I'm less than two years off a debilitating bout of clinical depression my second, but the first to require hospitalization. That was shortly followed by a surprising, and devastating, divorce. Throw in some financial reversals, several trashed dreams, and so many minor slings and arrows that the afflictions all begin to blur. "Depression," I tell Mahesh. He nods. "And..." I go on, "just emotional healing in general, I guess." He nods very seriously, places his palms against my forehead, shuts his eyes tightly, and begins a soft, inward mumbling. By instinct I close my eyes as well. At a rational level, I'm prepared for one of two things to happen: nothing at all, or a jolt of almost electrical force from Mahesh's hands propelling me backwards, as I had seen happen to so many people throughout the years in Pentecostal services. What I receive is neither. The only metaphor that comes to mind, however imperfect, is feeling like someone whose hands are grasping the end of a rope, suspended from some great height, afraid to look down and see the actual depth of the abyss into which I must eventually weaken and fall. But when I gather my courage and look below in this sort-of dream, I see with unthinkable relief that I am not suspended over an abyss at all, but rather am only a few feet above a warm, inviting crystal-clear lake on a cloudless day. I let go. I fall. The water is exactly the warmth of my skin, and the floating is more effortless than I've ever experienced in real life. There is no gravity, and no pain. This "lake," I realize, with my eyes still closed, is the worn orange carpet of the sunny foyer onto which I've just been lowered, the catchers' hands so seamless in operation that I had felt independent of them, could not distinguish between their motion and my own. But I'm not dreaming. I'm fully conscious...hyper-conscious, even...and fully aware of the same music and commotion around me. It's just that I have no desire at all to open my eyes, to let anything intrude on this warm, floating sense of peace.

The late poet, James Dickey, used to say that one of the greatest experiences in his life was a recurring dream he had, one that he referred to as "The Swimming Hole Dream." In it, he's walking through an unfamiliar stretch of woods, fearing he's lost, when he hears from a distance the sounds of splashing and laughter. Continuing towards the sound, he comes into a clearing and sees a beautiful, sun-splashed swimming hole. Moreover, playing in the pool of water is everyone he's ever loved. They see him and call out to him invitingly, "Come on in, Jim! We've been waiting for you. We love you, lim." That seems to describe what I've found, on a spring afternoon on a vestibule floor in a business stripcenter three blocks from a railroad track on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina. *** Whether I've been "in the Spirit," or whatever place this is, for 10 minutes or an hour I can't discern. I do know that the song has ended, and that at one point the vibration of its notes seemed to be rippling the warm surface I'm floating on. And I hear, with unnatural clarity, a visiting preacher named Brother Mickey continuing his sermon, this time with what seems like a new tenderness in his voice: "Understand, we're not talking about some theory of God," he's saying. "We're talking about people on the earth presently encountering the living God. See the difference, as opposed to believing in some historical thing that happened way back? We're experiencing the presence of God, and we're being led by that presence." I gradually open my eyes; it takes a few seconds for the diagonal, ochre-colored strips of sunlight on the ceiling to come into focus. I roll onto my stomach, rise to my elbows, take deep breaths and glance around. People in the audience continue to come and go, stopping in the aisles to hug or visit with one another, stepping carefully around the space where bodies are stretched out on the floor. From the direction of the glass doors I see a flash of color: a toddler is running past with a bright yellow helium balloon, her head thrown back in exhilaration. I stand up, initially a little dizzy as if getting my land legs back. For some reason I'm drawn to wander outside. My sense of peace follows me. My perceptions seem oddly heightened, as if the world around me is an enhanced 3-D movie with digital surround-sound. The monotonous truck traffic on nearby Interstate 40 now seems to have a pre-ordained flow, like a dance or a symphony, that was invisible to me before. Likewise, the familiar movements of two young boys tossing a football on the wide lawn seem fascinating and touched by a supernatural grace, as if their actions are illuminated from within their shapes by some overarching continuity, an infinitely large pattern as continuous as a physics concept that propelled not only my own childhood but also those of generations long dead. I lie down in the middle of the brilliant, clipped green lawn and clasp my hands behind my head, the sun warm on my face in the cool, sparkling air. Directly above me, a mile or more, a single shred of white cloud in the formless blue undergoes a slow-motion metamorphosis, obedient to the changing atmospheric winds. It's not until sometime later, as I stand up and dust my clothes free of grass clippings in preparation for going back inside the church, that I realize I am, and have been since I was lowered to the carpet, absolutely free of any pain in my bones or joints for the first time in almost 20 years. That inexplicable relief continues during my drive back to Birmingham, and is unabated the next day and a portion of the third day, before the pain gradually reinstates itself into my life. And on that first evening

back home, I sleep more deeply, and with sweeter dreams, than any other night in my memory. In more than 30 years of working as a journalist, I've had occasion to interview and spend time with a number of charismatic evangelists from around the country. I came away from those experiences knowing only two things for certain. First, the field (as does every field) has its share of charlatans and opportunists. And second, I have friends whose sincerity I would stake my life on who have had encounters with the "Holy Spirit" that are inexplicable to scientific and rational thought. Still, I have no idea what happened to me that day in North Carolina more than six years ago. With no offense to Brother Mickey, I would never claim that I had momentarily entered the presence of the living God. And though I'm sure that Mahesh sincerely believes himself a humble conduit for supernatural healing, and has clearly seen some remarkable results over the years, I would never insist that my own experience was a supernatural one. Everything I've learned in a lifetime of reading about science and medicine and religion leads me to conclude that those inner visions, overwhelming sensations of peace, heightened sensory input, and temporary remission of pain were psychological in nature and self-induced. And yet. Why, of all the meditation sessions and prayer circles I've taken part in, of all the hands that have touched my forehead in a half-century of living, did only Mahesh's hands and Mahesh's indecipherably soft prayer set in motion this particular chain of events? Why, despite my strong distrust of organized religion, do I continue to feel occasionally, in some Pentecostal services but not others, an eerie premonition that an invisible breach has opened in the physical world and some pure, other entity is on the verge of pouring through if I let it, if only I will stop pulling back at some subconscious level from the act's completion? So near. To what? The gospels of the New Testament compare the first Pentecost to a rushing wind and to "tongues like fire," but lesser-known verses say the apostles were so gleeful and uninhibited that onlookers were convinced the men were drunk. Which helps explain why an elderly black pastor I interviewed, at the time, warned me about "gifts of the Holy Spirit." "You can't just concentrate on the good parts," he said. "You got to do the work of Jesus first, and let the gifts be the icing on the cake. If you get it backwards and just go straight for the Holy Ghost, being filled with the spirit is so satisfying you wouldn't want to do anything else. That's the danger." Addictions, I know something about. But in the past few months it's become increasingly clear to me that it's a danger I'll just have to deal with. Because I've finally run out of excuses for not continuing the search. ###