Excerpt from No Place by Margie Haack
From No Place: A Desert Pilgrimage by Margie Haack
Context:
We had sold all our belongings, gave away the money, and joined a traveling evangelistic team. It was our last ditch effort to test Christianity. Did it have anything relevant to offer real life? Could Jesus heal our doubts, failures, and broken relationships, or was he merely an eccentric teacher who lived 2,000 years ago? Our pilgrimage through the high deserts of the Southwest was both amusing, and, at times, absurd as it wound its way through doubts, failures, and broken relationships. With our conservative Minnesota roots in the rearview mirror, we joined a Christian commune and learned that, indeed, Christianity had profound relevance for real life. (Following is an excerpt from the chapter titled “The Land of Enchantment.”)
The Land of Enchantment
Hot wind blew hair into my mouth and eyes as we stepped from the van onto a baked landscape of sand, boulders, and distant mountains hovering over the far curve of the earth. The air smelled like iron filings and copper rings. The sky burned turquoise. Watery mirages wavered far ahead on the highway. Grit clung to my lips. We rinsed our mouths and drank tepid water from the jug.
The only moving thing as far as the eye could see was tumble weeds hissing across Route 66. An abandoned motel and a rusty gas station pocked the road beside us. Broken barbed wire wrapped around weathered gray posts along miles of mesquite and prickly pear, hinting of ghostly peoples who years ago failed to survive the land. Nothing grew in the sun-torched mesas and arroyos. Green was absent. The earth in shades of sand and dust was the floor of a brilliant sky.
We were passing through this incomprehensible landscape on our way from Phoenix to Albuquerque with the Team. Nothing called stay and thrive to one who grew up in verdant forests of pine and aspen, lush swamps, fields of wheat and thousands of blue lakes in northern Minnesota. In travel guides, New Mexico, The Land of Enchantment was described as a place of spectacular natural wonders from majestic 13,000 foot snow-covered mountains to beautiful desert vistas that defies imagination. Truly, they defied my imagination. Robert Sekuler writes, In some instances the optical information reaching your eyes is too impoverished for context to be of help. You find yourself in a paradoxical situation, able to see but unable to tell what you’re seeing.
The Team had been invited to spend three weeks at the Garfield Gospel Chapel, a small Plymouth Brethren Assembly near the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They hoped our door-to-door evangelism would infuse new life into their small congregation. We arrived on a warm afternoon that didn’t feel at all like November. Denis and I carried our boxes into a Sunday School room, pushed aside metal folding chairs, and unrolled our sleeping bags. After staying in a real home for three weeks in Phoenix, the cold tile floor, the fluorescent lighting and asbestos ceiling made us feel chilled and homeless. I arranged our cardboard boxes, covered one with a scarf, perched a candle on top as Denis echoed my thoughts exactly, “Why is asceticism killing us?”
I wandered through the rooms of the chapel trying to imagine a meaningful existence anywhere here in the high desert of New Mexico. The geography mirrored our lives. Barren. We had been married exactly one year and five months and this desert was no place I wanted to be. We were still looking for answers but finding few. I longed for Home, but didn’t know where it was.
Percolating on the back roads of our life was a book by Francis Schaeffer, a strange little man who wore knickers, a theologian and philosopher who taught that historic Christianity rightly understood and applied could answer the questions raised by modern culture and give us a rich and dynamic hope for living life as God intended. We had included it among the few books we brought along with us. It wouldn’t be long before The God Who is There was destined to change our thinking and living. It would provide a theological structure for us to understand culture and reality and give us a worldview that would begin to shape our life, thinking, and work. Back at university, someone had given us a copy. It was a difficult book to understand. I eventually read it three times, in an effort to fully grasp his meaning. It would take time for us to wrestle with his intriguing ideas about the relevance of Christianity.
Meantime, our days at the chapel in Albuquerque began to take on a rhythm. Again, I stayed back at the chapel and cooked for the Team as they doggedly continued door-to-door canvassing with little success. The days were long and boring. Evenings were spent in Bible reading and prayer that failed to move me. I felt guilty. Physically, I was feeling better as my pregnancy progressed and nausea lessened, but at night we both felt discouraged and anxious. Denis and I talked about his dread of walking the streets, of ringing doorbells and trying to get people to listen to a canned speech. There was irony in inviting someone to read the Finding Peace with God booklet when we had so little peace ourselves. If someone had expressed interest, it probably would have been so shocking we wouldn’t have known how to respond. We hoped and prayed that the literature left inside screen doors might be picked up and read and taken seriously. In reality, it felt like we spoke a religious language no one understood. The pivotal question we asked if we could ever get that far was still, “Where would you go if you were to die today?” That often prompted a slammed door or an answer that was unprintable.
We whispered questions to one another. What was going to happen to us? I couldn’t keep traveling from place to place or we’d end up like Joseph and Mary looking for a hotel in which to deliver a baby. Perhaps we needed to leave the Team. But to where? And for what? We had no money. No plan. No place to live. We had sold everything we owned, joined Team Outreach as a last ditch effort to see whether Christianity had anything to offer life. This life we chose seemed to be a dead end.
The questions that prompted us to join the Team remained unanswered. We agreed there was some security in sticking it out where we were, but at what cost to our souls? Didn’t pundits say “better the problems you know than the ones you don’t?” We were utterly disillusioned with evangelism and ascetism. From our sleeping bags on the floor, as we stared at the tile ceiling, our future looked bleak and uncertain.
Then, as if blown in by the desert wind, tiny seedlings of hope began to poke through the barren sand. A mystery began unfolding little by little around us.
The neighborhood around the chapel was full of rentals for university students, college dropouts, cohabiting couples, druggies, and a mix of working class Latinos and poor whites, along with a smattering of young people just out of high school looking for work. Hitchhikers and runaways moved through the city in droves that autumn, sleeping in parks, gathering in groups, buying a little marijuana, a hit of acid, looking for safe places to sleep and hoping to find a little something to eat.
The Vietnam war was at its peak in 1969 and blowing up the fabric of our nation. Across the country young people were holding mass protests over the bombing of Cambodia. The police and the National Guard turned out armed with tear gas, guns, and clubs. That year a tragedy unfolded at Kent State in Ohio when the National Guard fired on unarmed protesting students, killing four and wounding nine. Among the dead and wounded were students merely observing the demonstration from a distance. Following their deaths, four million students went on strike, forcing the temporary closing of hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the country.
Interstate highways were swollen with young people on the move, making their way from the East Coast to Haight-Ashbury in the West. Every person under the age of twenty-five knew the hit song California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and the Papas. At every interstate highway entrance and exit, young people gathered singly or in ragged groups, carrying back packs, leading dogs, holding cardboard signs Need a ride to L.A. During the summer of 1967, one hundred thousand young people had converged on California, hoping, searching for a new life, a new way to live.
Albuquerque was a stopover on the southern route and hundreds walked or rode into town in sandals or bare feet. Young men with beards and long hair, wearing patched blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts, girls in long skirts and peasant blouses, hair tied back in bandanas and smelling of patchouli oil—all dreamt of a life that promised to be trouble-free, full of beautiful people making love not war while tripping out on acid. At first these people were as foreign to us as the native peoples of Irian Jaya.
As Denis and his partner Paul went door to door near the University, they began hearing a refrain from a few who were willing to talk for a minute on their front doorstep.
You sound like Richard and Terry.
Richard and Terry talk like that.
You should meet Terry and Richard.
Terry and Richard are really high on Jesus
Richard and Terry are Jesus Freaks.
They’re pretty famous because they were Albuquerque’s first dealers of psychedelics.
Denis stopped asking, “Where would you go after you die?” and replaced it with, “Where can I meet Richard and Terry?” A young man gave the address of a dilapidated rental house a few blocks from the chapel. Apparently, every night these two kept an open door where anyone was welcome to drop in. No reason was needed. You were offered a cup of coffee and invited to join or listen in on conversations and argue about whether or not Jesus existed or whether getting high on Jesus was better than any blotter of Yellow Sunshine, and if the Bible might be true after all. Whether or not there was a spiritual dimension, where good and evil existed, was debated. Anyone who expressed more interest might be anointed with oil and prayed over. It sounded exotic and slightly dangerous.
Our Team leader knew we were going to visit them and that night Denis and I walked through the dirt of their front yard and onto a porch hung with macramé planters and knocked on the door. There were old lawn chairs leaning against the house, coke cans scattered on the porch floor and ashtrays full of cigarette butts. Lamps glowed through the paisley curtained window and loud rock music pulsed through the walls. We knocked and someone opened the door. It was Terry. “Yes?” she asked.
We introduced ourselves as people who had heard about them from their neighbors, and Terry welcomed us into the foggy living room where we collided with a wall of sandalwood incense and cigarette smoke. The room was packed with young people sitting on the floor, some with guitars were singing, others in small groups were reading the Bible and intensely discussing it. Others looked like they were praying with their eyes closed as they held hands and rocked back and forth. Later, Denis learned that everyone who saw him enter the room dressed as he was in a neat button-down shirt and close-cut hair became extremely nervous. Some left the house. Denis was a dead ringer for a narcotics agent, come to spy on people like them.
Terry invited us into the kitchen and that began a series of startling conversations. In the few days following, Denis and I made our way back and heard more of their story. As we listened, the air around us seemed to crackle with the presence of God. Here was a demonstration of faith that seemed more authentic than anything we’d experienced. Nothing had prepared us for this.
We were prepared in a sense. All the doubts and questions that surfaced in our lives had brought us to this point. We had stumbled across this strange group of Christians that seemed to exhibit the very reality we were looking for. As they prayed together, that night we realized we had never experienced prayer like this—filled with joy and passion. We had slogged door-to-door hour after hour without any response, and yet here was a group of people so excited to talk about their faith that their non-Christian friends couldn’t stop asking questions and wanting to know more about Jesus. We had a mysterious feeling we were standing before a vast ocean and being told to step in. Urged to Swim.
We had already concluded we needed to decide soon whether to stay with the Team or leave. Could these new connections offer some possibilities? We speculated and tried to be objective. This subculture of hippies where people had dropped out of mainstream life seemed incredibly foreign and yet attractive. And hadn’t we already defied the conventions we knew by selling our possessions, quitting university and leaving our jobs in order to follow what we thought was Jesus’ call? That was already a pretty profound form of dropping out.
We thought about Luke’s account of the disciples who were making their way to Emmaus after Jesus was crucified. Everyone thought he was still dead, when suddenly Jesus, freshly risen, joined them and began walking and talking with them, explaining all the prophesies about himself. At first they had no idea who this man was, but later after they learned, they said of their encounter, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us?” That’s how it felt for us. As we heard Terry and Richard’s story, our hearts burned. Like moths attracted to fire, we flew straight into the flame.
Terry’s background of growing up in Albuquerque was polar opposite to where she was at the time we met her. Her father was a colonel in the Air Force, her mother, a pueblo Indian converted to the Baptist church. In high school, Terry had a talent for art that bordered on genius. It became her entry into an artistic subculture where experimenting with new ideas and freedom of expression were encouraged. She was introduced to marijuana and became a pothead.
Psychedelic drug use soon followed. At sixteen she became pregnant after an affair with her art teacher. Horrified, her mother told her, “Either that thing goes or you do.” Her parents put her into the car, drove to Mexico, and forced her to have an abortion. As soon as she could pull herself together, she ran away to California with a terrible wound in her heart. There she met Richard. They fell in love, married, and decided to move back to Albuquerque. There, they become the first dealers of psychedelic drugs which were fast becoming more popular across the United States. With their connections in California, they brought drugs back with them and soon became well-known on the street as sellers and users.
On one of their trips to California to resupply, they ran into an evangelist named Arthur Blessitt. When they met him, he was on the street preaching to the hippies on Sunset Strip.
Blessitt was a Baptist pastor who saw what was happening to the culture of young people in the late 60s and his heart ached for them. Established churches were distancing themselves from these threatening freaks. Churches, religious institutions, and Christian groups rejected, not just the drugs, but the rock music, the dress, the long hair and sandals, the free love; they vigorously rejected the hippies themselves. Hippies were people to hate. God forbid should one of your children be seduced to join this crazy movement destroying the nation. And yet everywhere, even young people from churches were listening to the music of bands like the Beatles and Led Zepplin and heading to Los Angeles and San Francisco with the hope of finding something they could barely name. It was the longing for some deeper meaning, something more demanding and beautiful than the predictable nine-to-five life of their parents, whose goals of personal peace and affluence hid an unbearable emptiness. It was a search for love.
Blessitt built a large wooden cross, believing that in all its brown, splintered earthiness, it stood as a powerful symbol of Jesus and his love. The fact that Christ had suffered rejection, torture, and death was a way of connecting with an alienated generation searching for a life that held deeper meaning than that of their parents. Blessitt dragged this cross with him wherever he went. Sensing that hippies were looking for spiritual reasons to live, Blessitt also opened a space above a night club on Sunset Strip and called it His Place. He went onto the streets and invited runaways, stoners, drug dealers, anyone lost or hungry to come in off the street where he would tell them about Jesus and pray for them. People listened to him because his authenticity shattered all the American religious stereotypes they had known. Love radiated from his whole being. When trippers stoned on acid saw and heard him preaching in his blue jeans with his long hair and beard, they associated him with Jesus himself. When Blessitt was evicted from His Place, he chained himself to his giant cross down on the street and fasted for twenty-eight days until another place opened up for him. Many listened; many were converted; and out of this the “Jesus People” movement was born. Among them were Richard and Terry. They stayed with Blessitt for several months to be taught and to grow in their new faith and commitment to Jesus.
When they returned to Albuquerque this time, they were changed. No longer using or selling drugs, they began reaching out to friends—opening their home and telling them about what had changed their lives. Sharing that real love, forgiveness, and meaning were found in knowing God and his son, Jesus. It was not to be found in all the places they had previously sought it. The influence of their lives reached deep into a throng of young people who had known them before their conversion.
Each evening, as Denis and I stepped through their door, it was into a world so foreign, so other, it made us gasp for air and not just because of the incense and smoke. It was almost impossible to make sense of what we were seeing. What was being reported in the news all over the country and what was happening everywhere in the dark underground belly of our culture was happening right here a few blocks from the chapel where we slept at night. But that was only half the story. What wasn’t being told was that here among the dropouts of society, in the most unlikely places one could imagine, we were discovering a faith so vibrantly alive that simply being near them set off indescribable longing in our hearts. Here were dozens, perhaps hundreds who wanted to know who Jesus was and what difference he could make to life. Groping through the fog, we were falling in love with the strangest people we’d ever met.
It was disquieting. If this spiritual reality was what we had hoped for in Christianity but hadn’t found, the Holy Spirit had certainly revealed himself in a very surprising place. We hardly knew what to make of these strange phenomena so far outside our experience. What we were discovering was going to require some difficult choices.
Meanwhile, the Team continued going door to door, inviting people to Bible studies and church meetings. No one ever showed up. When we were alone, Denis and I tried to imagine what our future might look like. We prayed, we begged God to help us know what to do. Where to go.
Then, one day Denis and Paul met two young men who expressed an interest in discussing spiritual matters. They had questions about who God was. They didn’t know much about the Bible or about church so Denis invited them to the Chapel’s Sunday service. We were over the moon to at last meet someone with this much interest. It was unprecedented for our time with Team Outreach.
The Plymouth Brethren Assemblies typically have two morning services—the first is called “The Breaking of Bread,” and is a simple communion service of prayer, singing, scripture readings, and short exhortations. Non-Christians are welcome to observe, but are asked to sit in the back and not partake. The second hour is a teaching service open to anyone. That was the one Denis invited these two young men to attend. They were nervous, wondering how they should dress. “We don’t have fancy clothes,” they said. “We’ve never been to church.” Denis promised, “How you dress doesn’t matter, just come as you are and you’ll be welcome.”
On Sunday morning, we anxiously kept an eye on the door, hoping and praying that the two young men would show up. The second hour began and they still hadn’t arrived. Then in the middle of a hymn, the door opened and two long-haired, disheveled, hung-over looking guys walked in and quietly sat down in the back row. One of them was barefoot. We could barely contain our joy and wanted to jump up and hug them. We didn’t notice the consternation that rippled through the small congregation, a sucking of air as members stared or furtively glanced back at this invasion. Then, without ceremony, two of the elders rose, walked to the back, took each by an arm, and escorted them out the door, firmly closing it behind them.
We sat stunned, unable to control the emotions that coursed through us. Heartbroken. Disappointed. Angry. Terribly angry.
This was the only church we had known since childhood. The one all our family and friends belonged to. Now all we wanted was to get away. Away from the narrow legalism, the lack of love, the dead orthodoxy. We were done. We were ready to drop out.
Drop out, tune in, and turn on. The last referred to drug use, but when co-opted by the Jesus People movement, it suddenly sounded attractive. Dropping out of society and joining this movement of vibrant faith suddenly represented everything we wanted to do and be. Never mind that our anger made us seem uncharitable and unforgiving. Never mind that we had no plan, no money and no place to go. We were just out. Period. Denis and I were dropping out and turning on to Jesus.
Could we be described as utopian? Immature? Romantic? Hungry? Heart-broken? Rebellious? Probably all those things. But in Albuquerque, at that moment, we had no doubt God had led us to this point and bizarre as it was, we were ready for a massive change.
I don’t remember all the details that flooded our lives in the following days as we made the monumental decision to leave both Team Outreach and Garfield Gospel Chapel. Richard and Terry, for some reason, during the short time we had known them had grown to love us. We were filled with love for them, too. They were moving into a big old house in the middle of a city park. There would be plenty of space for everyone and an enormous living room large enough to hold the crowds that swarmed in for an evening of coffee and conversation. Terry and Richard wanted us to join them in this uncharted adventure. We didn’t have a history of drug use like they did. Nor had we previously been exposed to the counter culture. What we did have was extensive Bible knowledge that gave us a presence and some authority among the young converts. From the time we were little children our knowledge had accrued through twenty years of Sunday School, sermons, Bible camp, and devotions.
I think back to this time and try to fathom why these young people were so eager to share their lives with us when we knew so little about their world and hadn’t known each other very long. I’m not certain. Perhaps more than our Bible knowledge, it was because we loved them. We wanted to hear their stories, give them hope, heal their wounds, and carry them to Jesus. It didn’t matter what they were high on, or what they believed, or how they looked; they became our obsession, our mission, our calling in life.
No longer homeless for the moment, we found our place among the hippies and the stoners, the Jesus freaks and the drop-outs, and all who believed we should make love not war. We shared everything we owned. His House. We were a Christian commune. A part of the Jesus People Movement.
This, at last, was ours: joy unspeakable and full of glory. We never expected to find it, least of all in such a place.