in search of the spirit format test b 060412

7/31/2019 In Search of the Spirit Format Test b 060412

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In Searchof the Spirit

CARROLL DALE SHORT


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Copyright 2012 Carroll Dale Short

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1477603352

ISBN-13: 978-1477603352


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this book first appeared in Birmingham Weeklyand The Oxford American.

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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 inthe 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 theushers 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 congregationin 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 Iwrote 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

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"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 hiseyes 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 experiencedin 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

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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 iseveryone 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, Jim."

That seems to describe what I've found, on a spring

afternoon on a vestibule floor in a business strip-center 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 happenedway back? We're experiencing the presence of God, and

we're being led by that presence."

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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 invisibleto 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

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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 hadoccasion 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 remarkableresults 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.

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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 handsand 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 youwouldn'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.

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