I did not know.
What I craved was carnal knowledge. Why could not I breach the confines of this theological hill, find my way to The Hungry Eye, listen to Bye Bye, Blackbird, and quiver to the tapping of the cymbals, the hollow echoes of the base, and the weeping of the saxophone? Who sat at those tables? Was there a counter? Was there dancing, a crooner? Would I be shown to a seat, and would I cast a long shadow? How much would it cost? Let Sin and Death, now as Lust and its reverberations of Wrath, prowl. The mind was crazy with imagination and desire. I would taste of the salt winds of freedom. I would comb the waterfront for all the dark vacant corners where women and men came to watch the sea.
If there was a Golden Gate Bridge between the two levels, it was Martin Buber, who knew the power of the Bay Area undercurrents over an empty vessel. And I knew in turn that any theology presenting itself for my assent must first pass the muster of I and Thou. The Buddhist theologian Takeuchi Yoshinori calls the similar bridge between the hither shore and the yonder shore the bridge of transcendence. One can cross over in either direction both on the Takeuchi Bridge and on the Golden Gate Bridge between intellect and existence.
My first summer in America was spent working for the Curry Company in Yosemite Valley and helping out with the National Parks Ministry. The seminary had arranged for this, and I had the chance to work with young adults from all over the country. One young woman from Mississippi had a relationship with a Lebanese cook. I looked at that heavyweight man with the chef’s white uniform and hat with a wave of jealousy. I was well aware of being drawn to her myself. Aside from her classical face, there was something withdrawn and unreachable about her. This was something inherent in her, I suspected, not a front she put on to keep others at arm’s length.
I assisted with Sunday morning worship services held outdoors next to Yosemite Falls close to the Lodge. The Reverend Glass was park chaplain and pastor of the small wooden church where evening services were held. The real inspiration for all who came to Yosemite, however, were the monumental vertical cliffs and the waterfalls that made us lift up our eyes, Half Dome and El Capitan too, the Merced River winding through the valley, the flowers in the meadow, the fresh smell of the pines, the deer and the bear, the singing of Apple Blossom Time at the campfires and singalongs, the back country hiking, the serendipity of meeting people from all over the world, the pitch blackness of the night.
The new theology book I had bought was George S. Hendry’s The Gospel of the Incarnation. Between the afternoon and the evening shifts I would go to the river and sit among the tall grasses to read. Page by page I devoured the wisdom of this theologian, trusting him more and more as I read. All year long I had studied and written papers on the history of Christian dogma and how the theologians are at pains to make it come alive today. But except perhaps for Oscar Cullman’s thesis that cyclical time was a Greek concept and linear time was what was avowed by the early Christian texts, their pages were arduous and dull, still freighted with medieval metaphysics. They had not disabused me of the fundamentalist doctrines and the pictures on the wall of my formative years in India. I was a passionate but norm-less young man at one of the most important crossroads of my spiritual life, and I was floundering on what exactly to be passionate about. Here came Hendry with guidance as fresh as this river from the high country snows.
Hendry’s approach was similar to Buber’s. Having disentangled itself from traditional doctrines and systems, it appealed now to relational existence as the final arbiter of Truth in the big theological sense. Do not think of the atonement as transfixed in one moment of time. Do not view the traditional Christian doctrines through windows stained with manufactured philosophies and theologies you cannot understand. Imagine them, rather, in the contours and colors of the natural world unfolding in the table fellowship and the healing and reconciling ministry of Jesus, which for Hendry was the true meaning of the incarnation and the key to the meaning of Christian faith itself.
Sitting by the Merced River that summer I was thus encouraged to rethink my religion in an organic, relational language. I began to understand Jesus in terms of his I and Thou encounter with other persons, his being fully present for them in a way that Buber himself had not been for the German factory workers, and in terms of his solidarity with the blind, the deaf, the lame, the mentally ill, the unloved. A person for other persons, said Hendry, is what the scripture means when it says that Jesus took upon himself the sin and sickness of others. The suffering servant passage was quoted by Matthew in Chapter 8 not in connection with a single moment in time, Jesus’ death, but to apply to his healing ministry. It was this latter that was said to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah, namely that the suffering servant took our infirmities and bore our diseases.
Hendry’s explanations came like a flash of lightning. They illuminated the spiritual landscape and showed me the foothold I needed in my early rummaging for meaning and truth. The different theories I had studied of the atonement had only clouded my mind and left me with questions. Hendry’s incarnational theology not only anticipated what has only recently come into fairly wide acceptance, but it made eminent human sense when I sorely needed my religion to make sense. That sense now became as luminous as the color of wild flowers blowing in the summer wind, and as immediate as looking up to see tourists float down the river on their rafts.
6 | Tioga Pass
My Barth volumes went missing on the way to Tuolumne Meadows
All my belongings fit into two cardboard boxes, which I checked on to the bus as I headed for Yosemite the next summer. The Agape Fellowship was a two-year scholarship for Asian students, and the seminary directed me to go and finish my BA degree before going on to my senior year. I had applied to various colleges but they would not accept my credits from India. What was I to do? I had nowhere to go that fall. I trusted that a door would open somehow, but the seriousness of my quandary would sink deeper and deeper as the summer progressed.
Furthermore, it was probably in Merced, where I think I changed buses, that my heavier box containing my theology books, including several volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, went missing. I had spent my precious little scholarship money to buy them. I filled out the paperwork when I got to Yosemite, but nothing came of it.
At Yosemite the Curry Company assigned me to work not down in the valley this time but in the back country, up at Tuolumne Meadows at around 8,000 feet. I hitchhiked up to Tioga Pass from the valley in the back of a pick-up truck. My boss was Mike Adams, who I learned later was the son of the famous Yosemite photographer Ansel Adams. He was a breezy, fun kind of person to work for. A jet pilot in the Air Force Reserve, he promised he would buzz our camp while on a practice mission. I was in the kitchen washing dishes when he flew right over. I had missed it.
Again young women and men from all over were my colleagues at Tuolumne Lodge, the blond, blue-eyed beaming Sweetheart of Sigma Chi at the University of California at Berkeley, two young women from Vassar, a dark-haired brother and sister pair from La Jolla, and many others. Many of these names and terms were new to me then. We did kitchen work, cleaned tents, changed bed sheets, served meals. An uncouth, swashbuckling young man with glasses and cigarettes had a pick-up truck, and he and I took the garbage to the dump early every morning. The bears would be waiting, some up in the trees, and we were both anxious to be done.
The care of the horses and the dusty stables was left to the cowboys and cowgirls, seasoned permanent employees. I stole looks at one of them, a tall attractive taciturn woman with boots and hat and sculpted features, as if she was out of a Zane Grey novel or a Gary Cooper movie. She may well have been already attached with another man; I never came to know. She looked stately on a horse, staunch against the mountain sky.
To help with the Sunday morning services and the campfire singalongs I went from tent to tent distributing fliers in the public campgrounds close to the Lodge. The Reverend Woodruff, who had replaced the Reverend Glass as park chaplain, supervised my volunteer work. Who had I to turn to but to him about my quandary regarding what I should or could do in the
