by Dan Wakefield, 1984, 1985, 1988
Learned about this book from the New York Times Morning Report (I think) talking about Dan Wakefield and his books on the day he died in March 2024 at age 91. He was born in Indianapolis in 1932 and grew up an only child, to unhappily married parents. His mother often cried. But, they took him to church and he grew up a Protestant and a boy scout and he had a very beautiful experience of Jesus as a child. He loved his Sunday School teacher and loved praying and saying the 23rd Psalm in his mind. He was close to God.
At the age of 48, he wakes up screaming in pain in Hollywood.
Here is the first paragraph of the book: “One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again. This was not, in other words, one of those waking nightmares left over from sleep that is dispelled by the comforting light of day. It was, rather, a response to the reality that another morning had broken in a life I could only deal with sedated by wine, loud noise, moving images, and wired to electronic games that further distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being, my most essential self…
“The day I woke up screaming I grabbed from among my books an old Bible I hadn’t opened for nearly a quarter of a century. With a desperate instinct I turned to the Twenty-third Psalm and read it over, several times, the words and the King James cadence bringing a sense of relief and comfort, a kind of emotional balm…” With that beginning, he tells the story of his life, coming to a deep faith in God and Jesus as a child, leaving the faith as a young adult, reaping the consequences of trying to fill the hole that was left after denying the God who loves him, and how he returned to the faith after the agony of living that hollow, empty life finally exploded inside of him and he had to change or die.
When he became an adolescent, he had very bad acne. He prayed and prayed for God to cure it but God didn’t. Then, he went to Columbia in NYC and learned it wasn’t cool to believe in God. He replaced God with Freud. He was still often unhappy. He was in a horrible car accident, broke his neck, and was in a cast for months, after the cast came off, his acne was cured. He was always a good writer, and wrote for the high school and college papers. He became a journalist. Went to Israel early on, still trying to deny any faith in God but pretending to be a religious pilgrim. He fell in love and was impotent. He went through years of psychotherapy, which was a total waste of his life. Through it all, he drank, a lot. When he finally hits rock bottom, in California, divorced, a drunk, and extremely unhappy, he moves back to Boston, to Beacon Hill, and attends King’s Chapel and renews his love for God. It’s a Unitarian church but it sure seems Christian to me.
The beginning of the book is really, really good – when he’s talking about his childhood. The end of the book, the time where he has returned to the faith of his childhood, it’s not as good – not as focused.
Page 22, he talks about his various addictions being lifted from him, and him at first trying to attribute the cures to either God or to secular programs, “as if it were possible to compartmentalize and isolate the influence of God, like some kind of vitamin.” But, it just became easier not to do them any more. He attributes that to “amazing grace.”
Page 39, he describes the feeling he had of Jesus when he was very young, just starting Sunday School: “On an ordinary school night I went to bed, turned out the light, said the Lord’s Prayer, as I always did and prepared to go to sleep. I lay there only a few moments, not long enough to go to sleep (I was clearly and vividly awake during this whole experience) when I had the sensation that my whole body was filled with light. It was a white light of such brightness and intensity that it seemed almost silver. It was neither hot nor cold, neither burning nor soothing, it was simply there, filling every part of my body from my head to my feet. I did not hear any voice, or any sound at all for that matter, but with the light came the understanding that it was Christ. The light was the presence of Christ, and I was not simply in his presence, his presence was in me. The experience lasted for several minutes, long enough for me to be fully aware of what was happening, to know it was “real” and not an illusion or trick of imagination or anything else except what it was–the light that was the presence of Christ infusing my whole being.
“The experience was not frightening but reassuring, like a blessing, a gift, and a confirmation all at once…” This stayed with him the rest of his life and even when he started to act like he didn’t believe in God, he never felt the same about Jesus – he was very protective of, and respecting of Jesus.
Page 40 and 41, he begins to feel closer to God when he’s out in nature rather than in Sunday School: “…from the sweet taste of foxtail grass I chewed as I strolled, to the quick flash of a perch below the surface of a brook, all were revelations and messages of some great creating force, which of course was God.”
Page 44, he talks about his family going to see his Sunday School teacher, Amy, for counseling. She was a welcoming, loving, accepting person to each of them, and loved them as individuals “but also for what we were to one another–husband, wife, father, mother, son. Amy somehow enabled us to become those things in one another’s presence. She helped us accept who we were and who we might better be for each other…I believe she was a real healer, not only with her tea and benevolent presence but with prayer. Amy got us to do something that each of us did individually but weren’t able to do as a family — pray.”
Page 49, he talks about the real disappointment he felt in his baptism – the song, “Have thine own way, Lord,” and a cardboard Jesus on the other side of the tank. He began to step back from his faith and take control of his own fate.
He had trouble as an adolescent with masturbation. The religious folks made him feel very guilty about it. He felt that his acne was a result, and he become very confused about God, punishment, sin, etc. God would not answer his prayers to take away his acne.
When he was in college in Columbia, it was uncool to be a Christian and he realized he had stopped being a Christian, but he “somehow kept Jesus out of it. After my childhood experience of the light that I understood as Christ, to directly deny Jesus would have been to deny some basic sense of my inner self, the one that people couldn’t see, the one that still existed despite the outer scourge of the skin. Jesus had not been an abstraction to me but the inner light, the life force itself, the heart of the matter.”
Page 89, he talks about the type of Christianity that was prevalent in those days: The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale in 1953, epitomized it. The idea that there were magic words, simple steps, etc., to a successful life, upset him greatly.
When he worked at writing, it was really difficult, described on page 120: “I struggled at it with all my might, feeling most of the time like a sculptor hacking at a huge slab of stone with a rusty old Boy Scout knife. Every so often I got a phrase or sentence just right, and sometimes whole paragraphs, and the hope from those small triumphs (if they even were, for sometimes my instructor didn’t think so) kept me going, but most of the time it felt like salt-mines work, or slogging through mud in an endless foot soldiers’ war of dogged attrition. Then one night in the dorm, as I worked away after dinner with the usual grinding application, something seemed to take over without my even being aware of it at first. Words and sentences began to move forward in more of a flow, and it seemed I could perceive the next thought and situation before I got to it, as if the story were laying itself out in front of me and all I had to do was keep writing to catch up with it. The two or three pages I started with grew to eight, ten, eleven pages (usually my longest stories were five or six pages ) and came to a natural conclusion, an ending that seemed to tie everything together and come from the very movement of the story. When I looked up from my desk it was dawn.” He got down on his knees and thanked God spontaneously but that caused him trouble – he was supposed to be an intellectual, not believing in God any longer. “But now that I had eliminated God, there was a void.”
After 5 years of analysis, he had a nightmare: “In the dream the face of one of my best friends was disfigured, blighted leper like, in an even more disgusting mask than I had worn with the worst of the acne.” His analyst could not help him and the nightmares continued for 6 weeks. He had been through 5 years of analysis and it had brought him to this hell, and the analysis could only say it was part of the process – the scientific process. He called him a liar and never changed that opinion. The only thing that helped him through the nightmares was drinking cold, clear water form the tap and reciting the 23rd Psalm.
The analysis kept him so focused on himself, he found comfort helping the addicts at a shelter in the city, and finally realizing the truth of Jesus, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.”
After he has all the trappings of success – a novel published, best-seller lists, movie rights, etc., “…success and achievement and reward are all fine, but they do not transform you, do not bring about a state of built-in contentment or inner peace or security, much less salvation (and in fact sometimes increase anxiety, raising the stakes, as in my worry about the other best-seller lists and the other foreign rights). I was still the same person. The novel was not The Answer to all of life’s problems. I had another drink.
“I was drinking to numb myself, to blank out the psychic or existential pain or whatever is the name we give to a feeling of emptiness of soul and the resulting anxiety and lurking terror of it. I added drugs to the booze…”
One day he was walking around a friend’s house, hungover, and saw this quote that spoke to him, by Albert Schweitzer: “I don’t know what your destiny will be but one thing I know, the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”
His church became his family, in every sense of the word. He found life and meaning in this church – serving and being served, loving and being loved, growing together. “Pam explained, “Yes, as separate women and men we are making our own journey and God speaks in our souls to each of us. If we ignore this voice we are lost. But we are also lost if we forget that we are parts of the whole, that together we form the body of Christ. For it is by coming together for worship and work that we see God–in and between and among each other.””
He began to practice meditation. He tried to do it for 20 minutes a day. At first it was hard, until he focused on a blade of grass: “One day as I sat staring at the grass I became aware of its connection to the rest of the Garden and to the world. I saw the grass, and myself, in relation to the pigeons, squirrels, bugs, pond flies, and people moving all around me. I had a brief sense of them all being part of the same thing I was, all of us being manifestations of the same source of aliveness. I felt it in my deepest self, like hearing a perfect chord in a symphony, and then it faded away.” He kept it as an idea, although he couldn’t recapture the actual experience of it.
He learned about Judaism and: “I learned that the laws God issued after the Ten Commandments–the many laws that as Christians we sometimes skipped over and skimmed as “trivial”–were held especially sacred by the Jews because, as one of them in our study group put it, “Those provide the context in which one is able to follow the Ten Commandments. Those laws with their intricate details make holy the actions of everyday life.””
On the second to the last page, he writes: “For me the light is Christ, and it is not just a light as in “sweetness and light” but an illumination of pain as well, as a force for understanding and bearing it.”