Moving to Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio in September of 1967 was the beginning of a new life. I was thrown into a society in which I was a nobody. No one knew I was president of my senior class. No one knew I was on the Central Jersey Group III State Champ football team. No one knew my girlfriend was secretary of the student body and cheerleader. No one knew my best friend was president of the student body. No one knew what or who I was. Identity crisis was in full gear.
It was some time in that first year, that my former girlfriend came and told me she had another boyfriend. I was destroyed. Here I had been trying to keep all the church rules against pre-marital sex and the thing that I loved the most, my girlfriend, "God" took from me and gave to another. I fell into a deep depression. I was mad at "God." I stopped believing in Him and threw away my "religious" faith and threw myself into atheism, evolution and political anarchy. I had been taking a geology course that first year that fed me evolution and billions of years. I swallowed it all in like the dumb sheep I was. I began attacking the faith of Christian girls I would date. I tried to convert others to my new found beliefs proving through science that the Bible was wrong.
But with time my furry subsided and while smoking hash with a close friend a few years later, I had my "God" experience.(I want to make it clear here I am not advocating taking drugs to find God, but God used this experience on my path to Him). A ball of light touched me and I was enveloped in an energy of love, a spiritual orgasm, a spiritual epiphany. My whole being had been transformed in an instance. My first thought was "Is this what Jesus is all about?" But from that moment I knew Love was the power and the force of the universe. On that day, I went home and apologized to my parents for the way I had acted as a rebellious teen, even having fought with my father. All I wanted to do was love others. But now I had to consolidate my experience and find out where this power of love came from.
I started searching through different religious philosophies for truth. Buddhism was one of the first to catch my interest. I studied the eight fold path of Siddhartha. I read Herman Hesse´s books which contained Buddhist philosophy. I became an organic vegetarian. I also dabbled in Judaism as I had a Jewish girlfriend for a time. I read heavily on transcendental meditation and used as my Bibles the books Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, and Erich Fromm´s The Art of Loving among others. I steered clear of Christian Evangelicals and Christianity and Catholicism which I had assumed to be false because of the hypocritical actions of their followers and my previous experiences in childhood.
However, the question of war and my involvement in it, as I was due to be drafted after my four year deferment during college, led me to start reading heavily on the subject of conscientious objection to war, and draft resistance. I came across Leo Tolstoy's "Letter to a Non-Commissioned Officer," [1] and The Kingdom of God is Within You.[2] As Tolstoy mentions the teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, I started to read and study Jesus´ words found in those chapters specifically Matthew 5-7 in the New Testament.
But by October of 1971 I had been refused conscientious objector status by the military and after refusing to take the various examinations had been ordered to appear for induction into the US military or face the consequences. My mother, God bless her soul, telephoned me at the end of October telling me the FBI had been around to arrest me as I had not appeared for induction. I was working as a low salaried teacher of retarded children in Marietta, Ohio at the time. However, when I put down the phone from speaking to my mom, I dropped to my knees and with tears falling called out with all my heart to "God" if He indeed existed to save me. I was not asking Him to save my soul, but to save me from the problem of having to go into the military and having to kill and be killed in Vietnam. But after having prayed, I rose from my knees and spit on the floor and said, "There´s no God, so why am I praying?"
But I was soon to find out that God does answer prayer when we call upon Him with all our heart even if our mind sometimes gets in the way.
[1] http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/tolstoy/officer.html
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