My family and I left Texas and came back to live in Northern California for a couple of years. I don't remember anything particularly spiritual about that period. What I remember about sixth grade is that I developed an excellent feel for the San Francisco bus system, participated in a bunch of spelling bees, and bought a bunch of doo-dads from the Sanrio shop down the street from my school. What I remember about seventh grade is that we moved to San Rafael, and in San Rafael, I repeatedly professed my hatred for Duran Duran simply because everyone else thought they were amazing, and I felt like being a contrarian. I gave in just as they all moved onto someone else—Depeche Mode or Tears for Fears, I believe.
Then it was eighth grade, and we were in Seattle. I participated in one of those bussing programs designed to integrate schools more fully, which means that I caught the bus at 6:51 am and had a long ride to school. I didn't know anyone, and the cute boy who liked Iron Maiden was too busy with his Burner-in-Training program to pay me much heed. ("Did you hear about that kid who put his mouth over the vacuum cleaner hose? His lungs collapsed," I told him one day. "Shit, I'll never do that again," he returned.) There were two other girls who rode the bus with me, and they caught my interest because they were funny in a slightly obnoxious way, which earned them the hatred of our bus driver, who either was edgy by nature or just pissed off about having to drive a bunch of junior high kids around all the time. Now that I think about it, it must have felt a touch purgatorial. Still, Wendy and Sara seemed like fun sorts to me, and it was obvious that they hung out in some sort of club outside of school. When I asked what it was, they invited me to join.
And that's how I became a member of the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls, Northlake Assembly #139.
If you haven't heard of Rainbow before, the basic lowdown is that it's a service organization for girls that's sponsored by the Freemasons—yup, those Masons—and that it claims not to be a Christian organization, but it really is. I think they say they aren't a religious organization because they don't want people to think they're trying to take the place of its members' churches, but they require initiates to profess an "abiding faith in God" and say an awful lot of prayers. When we set up the room in the lodge where our meetings were held, we had to place a huge bible on a stand in the middle of the room. There was a light in the ceiling that shone on the bible while we went about our business.
As you probably know, the Masons have a long, controversial, freaky history. For all I know, they're still controversial and freaky. To me, they seemed like a bunch of crusty old Elks Club types who liked hanging out with other crusty old Elks Club types and seeming mysterious to outsiders. All I can really say is that if their meetings were anything like ours, they were terribly boring, though boring in a specific way defined by the official Ritual Book. Everyone in the room had to be introduced according to a predefined procedure, and when there were more than twenty or so people present, the introductions could take an hour or longer. We learned secret signs that we made at designated times during the Ritual. We wore floor-length white dresses at initiation ceremonies. (I once wore a toga, which made all the Eastern Star women amusingly uncomfortable.) It seems strange, no doubt, and it was strange, but it really wasn't any weirder than Texan Methodism, and at least the Rainbow people took me water skiing.
Over the first couple years of high school, I had begun to develop an interest in some New Age teachings, which, of course, fit nowhere into the Masonic scheme of things. I can only explain it by saying that, since my faith had been phased out, I felt no compunction about professing a belief in God and meaning something quite other than what the Masons assumed I meant. I suppose my spirituality had grown considerably more diffuse by this point; it wasn't that I didn't believe in anything higher, but that I didn't believe in the Christian version of it. My mother had come across materials that interested me, as had my friend Selby—who, ironically, I had met through Rainbow. Selby had a car, and we used to go buy ourselves crystals and incense while we talked about reincarnation.
One of the topics that interested us in particular was the phenomenon of channelers. In particular, we listened to some of the tapes from Ramtha and Mafu. J.Z. Knight claimed to channel Ramtha, a 35,000 year-old Lemurian who lived in a port city of Atlantis as a boy. Mafu, supposedly a leper from first-century Pompeii, spoke through Penny Torres. When I look for information on them now, I find numerous articles referenced with keywords like, "cults," "manipulation," and "sects." It might sound a little frightening, but really, one might categorize any religious group under such headings, and we were hardly stockpiling arms and holing ourselves up in the compound, if there even were compounds. The hardcore devotees might have formed something that looked a little like a spiritually-themed Amway, but I will say that Ramtha and Mafu were much more pleasant than the Methodists and the Masons, and they didn't make me sing "Nearer My God to Thee." And anyway, I was dabbling.
I went to hear Penny/Mafu speak once in Seattle. I was only able to attend the second day of a two-day booking, and afterward, a young man came up and introduced himself to me. He said he had seen Mafu in Los Angeles, and he had asked where he could find his soulmate. He was told that his soulmate would attend the meeting in Seattle, so he got into his car with a friend and drove up. On the first day—the day I wasn't able to go—he stood up and asked Mafu where his soulmate was. "She will come tomorrow," was the response. As I was the only person who was there the second day but not the first, it seemed clear to him that Mafu must have been talking about me.
He was sixteen, and I was fourteen. This whole soulmate business caught me off guard; I toyed with the idea, but just couldn't bring myself to believe it was actually true. It certainly didn't feel true. I don't think he believed it either, but the stakes were higher for him—had had come all the way from LA, after all—and he wasn't ready to abandon an idea he had pursued so actively. He seemed nice enough, and I let him drive me home. We exchanged a letter or two in the following months, but he was one of the worst spellers I've ever come across, and I couldn't bear to read letters from someone who misspelled words like "street." I was fresh from spelling bee victories, after all, and I admit that I was snobbish about them at the time. His name was Jason.
It seems clear that Penny Torres had a list of people who would be attending the Seattle engagement, and that she picked my name off the list because I was one of the only attendees anywhere near Jason's age. It seemed clear to me then, too. What I thought of it, when I stepped back a little, was that no amount of talk about the deity within could detract from the fact that telling a sixteen year-old kid to follow you to Seattle to find a soulmate you've picked off a roster is a really fucking cold-hearted way to mess with someone's head. I wonder how long it took him to get over it.
Me, I walked away. I decided that religion doesn't become me, and I walked away. But still, sometimes, when the time and the place is right—I felt it when I was hiking in Zion National Park, and I felt it when I sat on the edge of cliffs in the Sierra Nevadas—there is a sense of connection. I catch a glimpse of mystery, a touch of what seems like something higher.
And I'm perfectly happy not giving it a name.
