Read an Excerpt
Earthy Mysticism
Spirituality for Unspiritual People
By Tex Sample Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2008 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-2243-1
CHAPTER 1
THE DEATH OF A BLUE JAY
"Daddy, look at those blue jays. They are so beautiful!" "Yeah, they are, Son, but they sure are destructive and raise a lot of hell."
Steve was an absolutely adorable child. He won the most beautiful baby award at the Boston University School of Theology Baby Show, where I was in school, and made an appearance, picture and all, in the Boston Herald newspaper. He exuded charisma, and people loved him. He was so vitally alive.
When he was four or five years old, he ran away from home. After a frantic search his mother found him swinging on a fence down at the local grammar school. He kept saying to her, "I want to go to scool; I want to go to scool." It was not a portent of things to come. As bright as Steve was, and he was very bright, he never did well in school. From the beginning he had difficulty with reading, writing, and math. We later came to believe that he had a serious learning disability.
Within a few years he developed a deep hatred of school and everything connected with it. School became a place where he acted out, defied his teachers, and showed off for any of the kids who would pay attention, and no few did. We tried everything we knew to do: counseling, special school, and special classes. We tried gentle love at first and then tough love, but nothing seemed to work. By the time he was fourteen, he was in wholesale revolt against school, cutting class and being disrespectful to his teachers. That same year he and a friend took our car while we were away one evening and rolled it twice at eighty-five miles an hour. Both of them walked away from the wreck without damage to themselves except for a gash on his friend's cheek. This was the first of nine accidents he would have over the remaining fifteen years of his life. He walked away from everyone of them but the last one.
He had, of course, been drinking the night of the first accident, and we became aware slowly that he was also doing other drugs. By the time he was sixteen, he was an active alcoholic. He sneaked out at night and sometimes disappeared for a day or two at a time. By the time he was seventeen, he had moved out of our home. He tried the Marines, but the rupture of a large blood vessel in his leg ended his tenure there after just six weeks of boot camp. His life through his late teens and twenties was one of drug and alcohol abuse. He was in and out of jail on a regular basis. Once while he and his brother, Shawn, were being pursued by a gang, he fired a gun at the ground to slow them down, he said. The bullet ricocheted and hit one of the pursuing teens in his arm, a flesh wound that was not serious; but, when Steve violated his suspended sentence, he spent six months in the state prison in Missouri. That proved to be his last time in jail but not the end of his drug abuse.
He loved motorcycles and apparently was an awfully good rider. He drove a Kawasaki and loved beating the guys on the Harleys. He won the races that demonstrated speed, but he also won the events to determine who could ride the slowest. The latter was done by driving with a woman on the back of the bike whose job it was to take a bite from a peeled banana hanging on a string while the bike went slowly enough for such a feat to be performed. The story is also told that Steve was once being chased by police on the interstate. To escape, Steve took the bike off the road, went down an embankment, up the other side, through a field, and then onto a gravel road a mile away.
Women loved him. This made tough love difficult, because there was always a girl waiting for the chance to "help" him. He went through dozens of relationships and one marriage, but nothing seemed to help his skid into a night without stars.
During those awful fifteen years we remember long nights of lying awake wondering where he was. There were the phone calls in the early morning hours reporting an arrest or another accident. Or there were even more disconcerting calls from strange people looking for Steve that frightened us. I began to hate the middle of the night. Someone once said that there is no courage like courage at three o'clock in the morning. I remember much more cowardice than courage through those dark and difficult years. We despaired of his life changing. We spent sleepless nights and agonizing hours over his fate and his seeming inability to change.
Through those years we saw him in many painful and devastating conditions, injured after car wrecks, motorcycle accidents, and even one severe electroshock that very nearly killed him; we visited him in jails, in hospitals, in drug rehab programs, in a seemingly endless series of cheap apartments; we watched him lose one job after another, break up with at least a dozen women, and dissolve one marriage; we winced at broken noses, lacerations, bruises, and black eyes from fights; we witnessed his "decision" to go on the wagon time and again; and we spent those treadmill nights unable to sleep and gutted by worry and fear. It seemed that nothing worked and nothing seemed to be going on in his life that could pull him out of his drug dependency. I felt he was God forsaken.
When he was twenty-eight years old, he met Nancy, and they were soon engaged. Both were drug users, but that summer Nancy went into a drug rehab program, dried out, and began that long quest for sobriety. At first Steve said that was the end of their relationship, that they could never have a life together with her in a rehab program; but Nancy encouraged Steve to come into the program with her. After a couple of weeks, he did. He went cold turkey, endured the DTs and the terrible withdrawal from fifteen years of drug and alcohol abuse. Miraculously he dried out.
In a conversation with the head of the rehab center, she told him he had to get a new playpen and a new set of playmates. Steve asked where someone like him with his love of motorcycles would find such people. She told him of the Visions Motorcycle Club. This was an AA motorcycle gang that combined their love of bike riding with the struggle to stay dry and work for sobriety. From that point on he never used alcohol or other drugs again, except for copious amounts of caffeine from those endless cups of coffee he drank. These nine months became the best time of his life.
He, Shawn, and I built a solar room on our house. He won a trophy in the Kansas City Motorcycle Show and proudly showed us around to observe what had been done to the different bikes. That Thanksgiving he and Nancy went with us to see his grandparents in Mississippi. Sober, he celebrated Christmas with the family and bought presents for everyone, especially things that "aren't practical" but that "everyone will enjoy." His own hardliving life gave him a special perspective on AA, and he began speaking around the city and working especially with those who had just come out of prison. Through Visions he found a special group of friends and a vital new purpose in his life. Our friend, Sarah Lowry, offered him a new job in a chemical plant that paid enough for him and Nancy to plan to get married that summer. For the first time since he had begun drinking, he talked about his own spirituality in the sense of a Supreme Power at work in his life.
He changed. He became the person we had hoped to see for all those fifteen years. While it was evident that he struggled to take it "one day at a time," the Visions Motorcycle Club became his church and they played and prayed together. It was an amazing group of people. It was, of course, filled with those who had done no little hard living, like Steve; and yet they were all so different except in their desire to stop drinking, to live a life of sobriety, and in their love of bike riding. We found them not only ministering to Steve but to us. This motley crew of about thirty or forty men and women became his extended family and included us. I can remember phone calls from members of the group just checking in to say how well Steve was doing and that they were all working together. They would ask us to pray for them.
I remember this sense of a strange people of God drawn from walks of life very alien to respectable churches I knew. There was this very material mystical feel of a people on the move, finding their way, always trying to make it one more day. They seemed like a mobile church, searching for things to do, reaching out to each other and to others; and, of course, at times there was an almost frenetic activity to keep occupied, to be busy, to stay away from the temptations of drink and drugs. I remember a gratitude I had for them, that this motley crew was such an embodied gift of God, that their celebrations and struggles were incarnate expressions of God's activity. I often wondered how Steve could have made it and what he could possibly have done to stay sober without the Gift of this amazing group of bikers.
On the day he was killed, Steve and Nancy and another Visions couple took off for a ride in those beautiful rolling hills of rural Missouri north of Kansas City. It was an uncharacteristically warm day in February with a sun that filled earth and sky with sixty degrees of temperature and bright, golden illumination. They stopped in Smithville, and Nancy told us later that Steve ate an entire chicken for lunch and drank copious glasses of iced tea. Back on the bike they continued up Highway 169 and took a right on Route 116. This latter highway is a gently bending road up and down over undulating hills through woods and farmland. Even in a car you are mesmerized by the movement and flow of the road. It becomes itself like a chant, an occasion to thank God that highways like this exist and that the blending of machine and self and nature and world can dance in a celebration of the senses.
Nancy and Steve were on his award-winning bike from the motorcycle show two weeks earlier. There was too much paint on an electric circuit, which interrupted the work of the generator and depleted the battery. When the battery gave out, they found themselves right in front of a body shop not far from Lathrop, Missouri. As they went in to ask for help, Steve discovered the owner was a deputy sheriff. Although sober, Steve was still apprehensive about the law, so he asked the other couple to talk with the shop owner. When they approached the man, however, he could not have been more courteous or helpful. They scraped the connection and recharged the battery. The owner told them of his own son's love of motorcycles and how much the two of them loved to work on bikes. He mentioned that his son had been injured in a military-service-related accident and that he was waiting to get a flight to go see him.
Nancy, who was not seriously hurt in the accident, told us later that Steve was touched by the man's help and his sharing with them. As they were about to leave the shop, she said, Steve stopped and looked at the man standing some distance away.
"You see," she said, "Steve had been having some experiences that he simply could no longer deny. He felt that a Supreme Being was working in his life. He couldn't believe how so many things were working out for him. He just knew there was something beyond him, a power helping him straighten out his life. He just wanted things right and to do things right. And it was working."
After the other couple got on their bike and Nancy climbed on the back of theirs, she said that Steve looked at them, looked back at the deputy sheriff, and said, "You know, this shit really works."
Those were the last words anyone ever heard him say. He put on his helmet and drove six miles to the intersection of Highways 116 and 33.
As they approached the intersection, a truck was waiting at the stop sign to their left. What Nancy and Steve did not realize was that the sun, now late in the afternoon, was directly behind them. The driver in the truck simply could not see them. He had stopped twice, and when he finally entered the intersection, he collided with Steve's bike. From the look of the wreckage, it appears that Steve turned the cycle to protect Nancy. It worked. While initially knocked unconscious, Nancy suffered an abrasion on her calf and a broken little finger; but in the collision Steve was swept under the truck, and the momentum carried them across the roadway.
A friend and former student of mine was chaplain to the police in Lathrop. One of the first people on the scene, he gripped Steve's hand and said, "If you can feel this, squeeze my hand." He felt a slight clutch. It was the only response from Steve from that moment on. In all likelihood Steve was brain dead within minutes after the wreck, but his strong constitution and great heart fought another twelve hours with his pulse at 160 beats a minute working desperately to sustain his dropping blood pressure. Finally, when his heart slowed to half that rate, the loss of blood pressure brought an end to his unconscious but valiant effort.
The wake and the funeral were held at the chapel at Saint Paul School of Theology where I taught. We were immediately surrounded by support from the school and from the Platte Woods United Methodist Church we attended. Being part of a highly devoted seminary and an extraordinarily sensitive church and its pastor was a true source of strength and comfort. What I was not prepared for was the outpouring of love and care from the Visions Motorcycle Club. There were, of course, phone calls and visits, but the impact of this came first at the wake. Not only did they show up, but they stayed and asked—almost as if they thought they would be turned down—if they could have a part in the funeral service of worship. They especially wanted to lead the Lord's Prayer and wanted the first three rows of the chapel across from the family reserved for the Visions group. We, of course, were touched and pleased.
During the wake Peggy and I greeted people as they came in through the front door of the chapel. Steve's brother, Shawn, stood like a sentinel down by the open casket and greeted those who came to view the body. Steve's sister and our daughter, Jennifer, talked with people in the congregation. We did not know what a terrible time this was for Jennifer. One week after Steve's death, her husband left, and she found herself with two children less than four years of age. I have so often wondered how she handled her brother's death and the loss of her husband in such a very short time. It is testimony to her strength and courage that she made it through.
I remember that at one point a Reverend Bill (not his real name) came. He was a biker preacher though not a member of Visions. He approached the funeral director and stated: "I'm Reverend Bill, and I have come to see Steve." He was a massive man, weighing at least 300 pounds, and while overweight was also just big! He wore blue jeans, biker boots, and a leather vest with no shirt. His chest was hairier than my head, and the size and expanse of his furry trunk made it difficult to look at anything else about the man. The funeral director came over to me and stated with some hesitation: "This man says he's a Reverend, and he wants to see Steve."
"Well, from the looks of him, I would let him do anything he wants!" was my compliant reply.
There was such an array of people there. Theologians, clergy, staff and administrators of the seminary, people from a variety of churches in the city and its environs, bikers, friends of Steve still strung out on drugs and/or fighting the ravages of alcoholism, family, and a wide circle of other friends. They were affluent and poor, black, brown, white and gold, Ph.D.s and high school dropouts, the religious and the secular, the reputable and the disreputable. The parking lot and the streets around the school looked as if used car and motorcycle lots from every part of town had suddenly come together.
I remember the sustained and pervading sense of support that came from this strange collection of people. A sense of an unbounded Connectedness crossed the chasms of the loss. I thought to myself that with ties like these death had no capacity finally to separate us. The chapel filled with a Reality in which we participated, a Reality made clearer by the strange constellation of people there. I knew that outside that chapel we lived among walls, barriers of difference and otherness; but in the chapel for that moment the walls were broken, the walls were down.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Earthy Mysticism by Tex Sample. Copyright © 2008 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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