Through the past brightly
Silence is the language of God, all else is a poor translation.
— Jalal ad-din Muhammad Rumi
When we left off last week, Ray, Bach and I were on our way to the Abbey of Our
Lady of Gethsemani monastery in Bardstown, Kentucky, to spend a contemplative week among the Trappists. I described my friend Ray, the cosmic teen-aged guitar- slinger, last week but he looms so large in my life that we need to hear a little more.
I don’t recall ever meeting Ray’s mom so maybe he took after her. Ray’s dad, his brother and his sister were all of average height and stocky with thick brown hair. Ray was a willowy blonde, 6-foot-2 and around 150 pounds. Ray’s brother, who was my age, played high school football and never got into the ‘60s culture that Ray and l were into neckdeep. The only competition Ray and I ever embraced was which of us could collect the most record albums or LPS as they were called in those halcyon days.
(Author’s note: Young people have since rediscovered the joys of vinyl records, both for the warm sound quality and for the art on the 12-inch jacket. Vinyl outsold CDS this year for the first time since 1980)
Ray’s brother’s room was upstairs in their modest ranch home but Ray’s was in a corner of the basement. It had a doorway of string beads and the walls were covered in concert posters and colored lights. The furnishings consisted of a mattress and box springs, a nightstand, an inexpensive stereo record-player and several hundred records.
What follows is probably my favorite ‘60s- era anecdote.
I was sitting with Ray in his room one afternoon, listening to the newestmoody Blues album. “On the Threshold of a Dream,” when Ray’s father, a sergeant on the Lansing Police Force shouted down to us, “Ray! What are you smoking down there?” “It’s just incense, Dad.” It was.
“Are you smoking incense?”
Stunned silence. Much eyerolling.
“You’re turning into a (expletive- deleted) hippie, Ray, a (expletive- deleted) hippy!”
Ray grinned at me and whispered, “Turning?”
Ray wasn’t an academic super star in high school and didn’t start college right away like the rest of us. We figured he’d probably be a hippy housepainter forever. We was wrong.
First, a friend turned Ray on to Kirpal Singh, a spiritual master in the tradition of Surat Shabd Yoga. The teaching of the Surat Shabd is a path of personal spiritual attainment under the guidance of a living spiritual master. The basic teachings consist of opening the inner eye or third eye, to develop vision of inner light and sound . Kirpal Singh taught that the practice of meditation on the Divine Word, or the Yoga of the Sound Current (Surat Shabd Yoga) was at the spiritual base of all religions.
It touched something in Ray. Kirpal Sing was a legitimate spiritual teacher, not a con-man like Sun Myung Moon, Bhagwan Shri Rasjneesh, Prem Rawat and a host of other humbug gurus that crawled out of the swamp of pseudo-mysticism in the ‘60s and ‘ 70s. Singh was the President of the World Fellowship of Religions, an organization recognized by UNESCO, which had representatives from all the main religions of the world.
Next, Ray went to India. Then, he came back to the States and began nurses’ training. He turned out to be a natural.
But that all came after our monastery trip.
Lodged in the driver’s seat was the unperturbable Bach. Bach was the last half of Bach’s last name and couldn’t have been more apropos. He was the first kid I befriended in 9th grade when I arrived in Michigan from New York.
Bach was also the first selfproclaimed atheist I ever met. Oddly enough, several years down the road, he became a raging Fundamentalist Christian and would have nothing to do with any us infidels. I’m pretty sure a woman was involved. Ten years later, he came out of it and today, he’s perfectly normal again. Or normal for Bach.
Me? I escaped Catholicism and turned into the same dyslexic, agnostic insomniac I am today. I still lie awake at night, contemplating the existence of a dog.
Next week, the Monastery and I mean it.
And so it went.