The Believer, page 6
Khedup’s living quarters are clean and cozy with a spacious adjacent room that he keeps as a temple. To take off your shoes and walk into that sacred space is to pass from a suburban apartment into another dimension. It is perfectly silent and spacious, radiantly colorful. The floor is where Khedup sits on a navy cushion, alone or leading students, in meditation and prayer.
“I can discuss things with him about certain issues,” Annie once explained. “And he says, ‘Pshh, don’t worry about that one, it’s not important.’” I try to imagine how reassuring this would be, to have authoritative spiritual advice on tap from a senior religious official in a deeply felt religion of one’s choosing. I don’t succeed, lacking the requisite respect for authority, but it strikes me that this dynamic sounds very much like the deepest comfort offered by simple friendship.
In six months’ time Khedup will chant the prayers over Annie’s dog Bob, lying wrapped in a blanket on her kitchen table. Now, however, he declines Annie’s suggestion that Lady might enter with us, and she takes the diapered dog back across the small yard to her living room. I chat with Khedup about his childhood in Sikkim, where his parents, Tibetan refugees, worked breaking stones. And about the teachings he has been studying since he entered the monastery in Dharamshala as a boy.
Suffering exists. Suffering has a cause (the unrestrained mind). Suffering has an end. Suffering has a cause to bring about its end (ways of seeing past the conditioned nature of our reactions). Your mind is your greatest teacher, he says, your mind is your best friend, everything is solved in the mind. Just as we all have egos—which are responsible for our drives towards pleasure and away from pain—we also all have the seeds of something else inside us.
“Remove the ‘I’ and all good things are coming,” he continues, flexing his feet inside his cherry-red socks. “Good practice requires you to lose yourself. Lose your pride, your money, your certainty. Only then can the mind training work.”
Khedup enjoys creating mandalas from colored sand, cosmograms representing the world in perfect harmony. Traditionally, monks work together for weeks, moving grains of sand across tiny distances to build the intricate detail of the geometric Sublime, before ceremonially reducing the whole thing back into its constituent parts to demonstrate the relationship between possibility and impermanence.
Khedup stands up, wants to show me something. Reaches towards the ceiling, takes a large framed image from the wall. A beautiful mandala he made. The grains stuck to the paper with glue, sealed behind glass. He points to his name written in the bottom left-hand corner, gestures for me to take a photo.
Annie once told me about the day Khedup’s mom died. How, in relaying this news, he had said to her, with some measure of surprise after a lifetime of training in nonattachment, “I cried.”
“You’re human, you know,” Annie told him. “Welcome.”
I am boarding a plane when Annie texts me photos of the suicide notes from her second attempt twenty years ago. They were written late at night during a period of deep depression, after a day with her mother. Blue pen on unlined white paper. There is one letter each for her mother, her children, her grandchildren and her boyfriend at the time, and one page entitled My Wishes. The fact that we have taken off and I am unable to text Annie back after I realize what they are, dovetails with the fact that I do not yet know what to say about them. And both of those things make me deeply anxious as the plane lifts above the clouds. I am grateful that she shared them with me. Their intimacy reveals much about her state at that time, and makes her deeply vulnerable still.
Beyond that, I do not know what I am feeling. Except that they remind me of a dream I once had. I was on one small planet in space, a rock really, like in The Little Prince. My mother was on another such planet. And that’s all there was in the universe. Longing and distance and the impossibility of bridging it. Such a spare dream. In direct contrast, the panicked grief it made me feel—in the primal sense of frantic psychic pain rather than a more refined cognition of loss—was overwhelming then, and is overwhelming still.
Later, Annie will explain her reaction on rediscovering what she had written. “I went into that black hole, I embraced it, did backstrokes,” she will say. “My gosh, look at that, I thought I had everything under control. Powerful lesson for me.”
The notes do bring to mind a black hole—what is left when a star of certain mass burns through its fuel and there is no remaining force sufficiently strong to resist the inward influence of its own gravity. But gravitational collapse is also the primary means of structure formation in the universe.
Now I can say that the sadness of the notes is not that Annie forgot the lesson of thirty years of study: the fact that everything changes is the knife of the world but also its gift. Our brains, favoring certainty, seem built to forget even that; especially that.
The sadness of the notes is that there was no one there to remind her when she could not remind herself.
11
In the Beginning
Georgia
From her blog on the Answers in Genesis website, I know that Georgia Purdom is thrifty (makes homemade gifts) and a good planner (Christmas shopping done before December). She is a big fan of “fictional Christian romance/mystery/action novels” generally and Deadly Disclosures by Julie Cave specifically. She used to attend a church near Henpeck, Ohio; she and her husband honeymooned in Tennessee; they adopted their daughter, whom Purdom homeschools, from China. She has suffered from progressive hearing loss since high school and now wears a cochlear implant which aids her greatly, though imperfectly. And she describes herself as “inherently impatient,” a good multitasker, a “type-A personality.”
I wait for Purdom in the lobby of the Creation Museum, watching turtles swimming through the water churned by the waterfall, an artificial system sufficiently supported to approximate the real thing. She materializes from a doorway that leads into a rabbit warren of the Answers in Genesis workplace, through which she ushers me to her windowless office.
“It’s definitely put me in a unique position,” she replies to my question about her experience as the only female scientist on staff. “It gives me a way to minister to people that maybe before would have been difficult with a male speaker.” The answer succinctly demonstrates the difference between “scientist” and “creation scientist.”
“There isn’t really a lot out there—or at least in Christendom—that is apologetics specifically focused on women,” she says. “And because most women are mothers, or taking care of children in some capacity, I think it’s really important that they know how to defend their faith so that they can teach that to their children.”
Purdom is the Ministry’s “content administrator” and she sits on its editorial review board. She was the only woman in her graduating class to complete a PhD, and the only female biology professor at the Christian college where she taught. In her blog she has written, I am one of the very few female creation scientists and the only one in the US who I am aware of speaking and researching on creation full-time.
Given this, I ask whether she would describe herself as a feminist.
“No-o-o,” she intones, her voice falling then rising in the way one might warn a dog away from the trash. “If you mean, like, what feminists want, which is usually pro-choice as far as abortion goes.
“In our culture there seems to be a lot of . . .” She pauses for a moment. “People wanting sameness. Not equality—just everybody being the same. And I don’t understand that from a Christian perspective because God made both man and woman in His image and they display that image differently and that’s a good thing. That’s a design thing. I’m for what Scripture says, not for what the feminists say because they’re thinking apart from Scripture.”
Here in the room with Purdom’s coffee machine and her jar of healthy nuts and her daughter’s finger-painting and her framed degree and her map of the Galapagos Islands: “Christendom,” “apologetics,” “defending the faith.” On her blog: the importance of wifely submission, a critique of the ads during the Super Bowl that mocked God’s design by positively portraying homosexuality, bestiality, and alcohol consumption. Out in the lobby, the plaques pitting God’s Word against Human Reason. Burning words. Time machines. Terrifying, to hear them rolled out casually in conversation with cubicles and calendars and coffee mugs all around.
Purdom grew up in a “very strong Christian home” where she knew from a young age that she wanted to be some sort of scientist or doctor. At university she was drawn to microbiology.
“I really liked studying DNA because, to me, DNA is the level where everything happens.” She explains that her goal in getting her doctorate was to go into teaching rather than research, her lab experience being isolating and difficult to balance with her family commitments. So she taught for six years at a small Christian college and it was there that she saw some students trying to reconcile what they had been raised to believe with what they were learning.
“I really saw a lot of Christians struggling with creation versus evolution and what was true. I’d always believed what the Bible said, hadn’t doubted it even though at Ohio State obviously they were gonna teach evolution and all of that. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m a molecular geneticist studying DNA and these amazingly complicated genetic structures and there’s no way this came about by chance. There’s just no way. It had to have been design.’ That was never a question for me.”
The issue that she did struggle with, however, was the age of the earth. Not being an expert in geology, she didn’t know whether to trust “conventional” dating methods, didn’t know how to reply when her students asked her about it. “I didn’t have a strong apologetics, so to speak,” she explains.
“One of my verses is First Peter 3:15, to be ready to give a defense and answer for the hope that is in you. And I didn’t have that as strongly as I wanted it to be, so I started researching, really looking for those answers.”
There were “two big pivotal points” in resolving her struggle. The first was coming to genuinely believe that the six days of creation described in Genesis referred to literal twenty-four-hour days. She explains to me that this was on account of how the Hebrew word for day, yom, was used in a specific context—”with morning, evening and a number.” This put to rest her uncertainty regarding the age of the earth.
“The biggest thing, though, was the death before sin issue,” she says. “If God used evolution over millions of years, then there would be millions of years of death and suffering before Adam and Eve came into existence to sin.”
On this logic, rather than being a punishment for sin, death was around before sin.
“Theologically, that’s totally inconsistent with the Bible. And so that was like a big lightbulb that went on in my head. I thought, ‘I never thought about that before!’ And it’s plain, it’s in Scripture, it’s not rocket science.”
12
Paranormal
Rob
At the Abbotsford Convent it is a morning cold enough for gloves, which I wish I brought as I cross the lawn. One of the oldest Catholic institutional complexes in Victoria, the building has a history dating back to the 1860s of providing food and shelter to those in need. People love the Convent. There are festivals and farmers’ markets here, barista coffee and baked goods to enjoy on the lawn, studio space for rent.
I have never liked it here. Always found it deeply unsettling, even before I learned about the history of its Magdalen Asylum and Laundries: “two hundred penitents . . . rescued from lives of sin by the good sisters.” Young girls laboring in silence, excluded from the education offered to other children on the premises, whom they could hear as they worked too-long hours for no pay, their hands cracked red and raw. Today’s Ghostbusting workshop—led by Rob Tilley (Poltergeist disturbances and hauntings—how to clear the space)—will be held in the Linen Room.
I recognize Lee (of the divining rods), Misha/Amber and two of the women who were on the haunting excursion. After Rob urges us to pull our chairs in a circle, one of the women pulls out a notebook on which is printed, Believe that you can and you’re halfway there.
Recently retired from his day job running a business that repaired nursing-home equipment, Rob has cleared haunted houses for thirty years. On this morning he has an ear infection that has affected his ability to hear but left his attentiveness and good cheer undented.
“Has anyone done a haunted house job before?” he starts off, perched majestically on a plastic chair, looking both crisp and rugged in tan jeans, a chambray shirt over a white T-shirt and shiny brown boots.
“Well, we think we did,” Lee replies tentatively. The client never called back to confirm whether he and his colleague were successful in their use of sage in and around “a portal” found in her home.
“Sage, is it?” Rob says, loudly.
Lee explains that they had asked the light to take the particular spirit away, then suddenly a window made a sound like it was cracking although he could see no evidence that it had. “Maybe it tried to get out,” he shrugs. “But we didn’t have any feedback so I don’t know if we cleared it or not.”
One of the women, a professional psychic, explains how she went to help someone who had seen a shadowy figure in her home. There, she connected with a male spirit in the bathroom whom she understood to be distraught over losing contact with his child. She believed he had died by suicide.
“How did you actually clear that?” Rob inquires, turning towards her with interest. “Did you get the good spooks to come in?”
She replies that in this instance she communicated directly with the spirit, persuading him to go towards the light, but that she occasionally calls on angels “who basically just manhandle the entity,” taking them to “the lower realms” if they can’t be convinced to go upward.
“And it was completely successful?” Rob asks.
“Yeah,” she replies, with the caveat that there was something about the people in that house, how they held their energy, that was attracting the problem so it won’t be a permanent fix. Satisfied, Rob starts his session in earnest.
“If you’re gonna have contact with spooks,” he says, looking around the circle with his sharp blue eyes, “just have contact with good spooks. Be absolutely clear about that in your own mind.
“If you’re gonna clear haunted houses, good spooks won’t work with you unless you’re a good person. Be clear in your mind that you’re in the world to increase the amount of good in it and you have a duty of care obligation to always act in the best interests of anyone who asks you for help.”
He doesn’t know who these good spooks are, their names or their faces. Just recognizes their energy. It feels like a good presence when they arrive. There’s one behind him now, he says, with its hands on his shoulders. “It’s all very subtle, it’s energy, it’s feelings,” he explains. “You feel what’s about to happen next and the emotion contains the message.”
This is what my grandparents told me when I was a child: before Mrs. Peters died she beseeched her son not to sell the house. Then she died, and he did. This was said not to frighten me, but more in the spirit of background information. The tone that was used to tell me about the importance of applying myself at school or the cancer-fighting properties of vegetables was also used to tell me about the time the lights went off in the middle of their Sabbath dinner and how, in that engulfing darkness, the candlesticks were suddenly swept off the table and onto the floor. Or about entering the kitchen one morning to find that all their crockery had inexplicably swapped cupboards. Or about how they sat alone in the kitchen listening to the repeated sounds on the floor above—thud, step, step—which was clearly Mrs. Peters, who had required a cane to walk. Or about peering into the kitchen window from outside to see the gauze-like apparition of Mrs. Peters sitting in the rocking chair, a large Bible open on her lap, as had been her custom each morning. Or about waking up in the middle of the night and feeling the weight of her on the bed in the room in which I sometimes slept.
They told me about the pond on the property everyone still referred to as the ice pond, where slabs of ice had once been cut in winter, hoisted onto carts and stored in the nearby ice house. They told me about a woman who, not so long ago, had taken a stroll to that pond and reported feeling hands tightening around her neck, though no one else was there.
These were not appropriate things to share with a child. But they weren’t trying to frighten me. Had they wanted to do that, they would have been less cautious with how they spoke about the war: the real ghosts all around us.
“There’s memory stored in things,” Rob is saying. The first thing he notices when he walks into a room is an energy in the space that he identifies as place memory. “There’s memory in body tissue, in bricks and mortar, in keys . . .”
It’s cold in the Linen Room. I have not removed my coat. Through the windows, out towards the river, the aspect of gray branches undulates slightly behind the hand-blown glass, largely unchanged since the laundry girls moved in and out of this room, pausing in their work if only for a breath.
Rob did not set out in his life intending to clear houses. He volunteered to give it a go in response to a request for help that had come through the Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research (AIPR), of which he was already a member. To gain the requisite skills, he apprenticed himself to a few older house clearers in the field. He felt that while he had much to learn he was finally on the path revealed to him as a boy when, walking home from school, he was stopped in a park by a spirit who told him that his nascent psychic abilities were extremely important and would be his life’s work. He considers himself chosen in this respect. He has only ever found this work extremely interesting and has never had anything he considers to be a particularly bad experience.
