Part Forty Nine

The house, in Beverly Hills, was not all that large. Not really, not like you would think if all you knew about movie stars came from, well, movies about movie stars. It was a beautiful Arts-and-Crafts house with a swimming pool and a high fence and tall hedges all around it but the house itself was, if anything, a hair smaller than your typical suburban McMansion. It was probably considered big when it was built, though.

A few years back, the new owner of the house – a man named Dylan Finch – returned from a meeting during which he made a deal with a major studio so that his production company could make a movie out of a book called Glory Road, which had everything necessary to be a big hit: sword fights, space ships, the Vietnam War, and topless beaches. And Dylan Finch was going to be the star. He had already picked out a director nobody ever heard of, and was going to cast a Filipina actress nobody (outside of the Philippines) had heard of to be the Queen of the Universe. Finch, on that day, hoped that the film would be his “Dances with Wolves,” his “Braveheart” -- one that would be big enough that ever after he could do whatever he wanted. Of course, in the back of his mind was the fear that it could be his “Heaven’s Gate.”

But whatever was in the front or the back of his mind on the way back to his home vanished when he pulled up to the gate that kept the riffraff and stalkers out, and saw Preacher Haywood sitting there on the curb. Haywood was reaching through the closed gate and petting a Rottweiler, who was nestled up against the steel bars to get closer to the man.

“Holy shit,” Finch breathed softly, and stopped his car. His very safe, well-maintained, new car. With GPS. And a survival kit i the trunk. Finch didn’t get out, just looked up at Preacher, the afternoon sun in his face.

“You need better security,” he said to Finch. “Some drifter camps in front of your house and nobody calls the cops?”

“The dogs are my security,” Dylan replied.

“This dog?” Preacher said, rubbing the dog’s stomach. The dog twitched his stump of a tail and one leg shook in the air.

“Yeah,” Finch said, absently, still looking at Haywood. He pushed the button that made the gates open. At the sound the dog jumped up. “Hop in,” he said to Haywood. Haywood got in the car and the dog trotted beside them as they drove up the short drive into the little garage next to the house.

“Nice house,” Haywood observed.

“It’s really great to see you, man,” Finch said. “Cass told me you left there a few days ago, heading south. You should have told me when you were coming! I wouldn’t have left you sitting on the curb.”

Haywood laughed. “I didn’t know when I would make it here,” he said. “Got a ride with some migrant workers heading south. Made good time.”

Finch shook his head in disbelief. “It’s great to see you,” he repeated.

“Good to see you, too, Dylan,” Haywood told him. “You’ve been doing really well.”

“Ehh,” Finch said, noncommittally.

Since the last time the two had been face-to-face there had been a movie called Ravens which had made a lot of money. Finch’s little desert adventure (as he referred to it) helped with the publicity. Funny thing, though – even while pushing the movie, Finch had backed away from it. Saying things like, it’s formulaic, but good formula can be good entertainment. There were a fair number of people who were surprised that Finch even knew the word “formulaic,” let alone would apply it to his latest film. He told Premiere that Ravens was “the end of the beginning” of his film career. Since then he had played a dark, intense role as a villain in a psychological thriller – his agent warned him against playing a villain but he did it, and did it very well. And now Glory Road. About which Haywood knew a little, since Finch and Cass Harding -- until recently Haywood’s landlady (among other things) -- kept in regular contact.

They went into Finch’s house and opened beers and sat beside the pool and Dylan told Preacher all about his ideas for the new movie. And Haywood started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Finch demanded.

“If I tell you, you’ll get pissed off,” Preacher replied.

Finch raised an eyebrow expectantly.

“This film is an act of worship for you, isn’t it?” Haywood said, the traces of a smile still playing about his lips.

Finch swallowed a grin. “I’ll never confess to that, you bastard,” he said, a little laughter in his own voice.

They both laughed at that point, both happy people, both delighting in being alive. Finch savored another swallow of beer.

“So how long are you going to stay?” he said.

Preacher shrugged. “Until you throw me out, or it’s otherwise time,” he told the actor. “In fact, I can stay somewhere else. I just wanted to see you, say hi, you don’t have to put me up. I haven’t been in LA for a long while.”

“Oh, shit, no, you’re staying here,” Finch said. “You’re going to show me how to make those tortillas you made in the desert. We’re going to hit the nightspots. I’m going to show you off to my friends. We’re going to pick up girls. No, you’re not going anywhere now that I’ve finally got you here.”

“About that...” Haywood said, and paused.

“The girls? I know about you and Cass. Believe me, I’ll be discreet.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s about the desert stuff. Did you tell anyone my name or anything like that? Cass showed me the stories in Time and People and my name wasn’t in either of them. But then again it wasn’t an important detail, really, so --”

“No, it was an important detail, but I didn’t tell anyone,” Finch interrupted. “I figured the last thing you wanted was some People photographer tracking you down. You said you wanted some time to readjust, and being sucked into celebrity gossip pseudo-journalistic bullshit was probably not what you had in mind.”

“A few people in San Francisco know,” Haywood told him. “Friends I made there. Eventually they learned how Cass and I met, and Cass’s name was out there for having been stranded with you, so...”

Finch shrugged. “‘S’all the same to me, man,” he said. “In San Francisco they try to pretend they don’t care about Hollywood celebrity. Down here, it’s all about celebrity. New York is about proximity to money, Washington is about proximity to power, and here it’s about proximity to fame. At the moment, I have a fair amount of celebrity. I’m somewhere between Tom Cruise and Maury Amsterdam on the spectrum of celebrity fame right now. As a result, things that you think are trivial and silly are nonetheless going to be intensely interesting to some people. Just so you know.”

“Too bad that people don’t go to movies just because they enjoy the work of the people involved,” Preacher said. "And that's a hell of a wide range you just described."

“They do,” Finch said, “but I’m going to spend $140 million on this next film, so I need to sell tickets to people who like movie stars, not just people who like actors. Otherwise this won’t be Braveheart, it will be Heaven’s Gate.”

“You know I never saw Heaven’s Gate?” Preacher said.

“Nobody did. That’s the problem,” Finch countered. “But you know what I’ve figured out? On my own? That living right, living in the moment, living as a part of the Whole – that’s its own reward. I feel great. My work has improved. My attitude has improved. My outlook has improved. Yes, I still get drunk and fall down, but it’s an act of worship when I do it now. So I want this project to be a big commercial success, but at the same time, if I’m happy with the process of making it, if I can go to sleep at night knowing we all did the best we could, I will be perfectly content.”

“And if it also makes back its costs in the first weekend?”

“Then everyone in Hollywood will want you as a guru,” Dylan laughed.

“They’ll want you as their guru,” Preacher countered. They were both partially right, as it turned out.

Within a few weeks – same as in San Francisco – there was a group of regulars who started hanging out at Finch’s house. Richard Halethorpe, right before he was Sir Richard Halethorpe, who was too gay and far too elegant to be Rufus so Finch cast him as the villain. Brent Deale, who – at that time – primarily earned a living as a prop master, although he was going to be one of the lead production designers on Glory Road. Sarah Nottingham, who is one of those actresses whose name you don’t remember but every time you see her you think, yeah, I remember her. (She used to always play the slutty little sister, but recently she's started playing the bitter single mom). Mandy Denton, who was an assistant director on Ravens and ended up directing some second unit work on Glory Road. Mark Clinton, a screenwriter who was mostly responsible for the adaptation of Heinlein’s novel. All of them friends of Finch’s before, all of them now involved in Glory Road, and all of absorbing Haywood while the project was getting underway.

And it was a typical day when Mandy showed up after having spent most of the day directing some TV commercial, and Brent was there because he was showing sketches to Dylan, and Mark was there because he and Finch had been working on the script with Steve Streett, the director, all day... and Dickie was there because, well, actually, nobody knew what guided Dickie Halethorpe but he always seemed to be there, and Sarah was there because she wasn’t working and mostly because she wanted to jump Preacher’s bones.

Mandy was there because it was fun. Despite the fact that everyone worked in the industry. It was fun, and there was good food. Free booze.

The kitchen was spacious and tilted towards the afternoon sun and Preacher was standing at that big stainless steel stove and Dickie, Brent, and Sarah were sitting around the room drinking margaritas. The pitcher sat on the counter. Finch made great margaritas.

“Ms. Denton,” Dickie said as she came into the kitchen.

“You’re just in time,” Sarah said, gesturing to the counter. “Finch just made the pitcher.”

“What are we cooking?” Maggie said to Preacher, peering over at the range.

“I’m not sure yet,” Preacher said, “but it will involve chicken.” He was cutting chicken meat into smallish pieces. In front of him a frying pan snapped and popped as hot oil worked its magic on some garlic. He peered at it for a moment and then dumped in some chopped onions.

“Preacher was telling us the secrets of the universe,” Brent said. “It has something to do with chocolate meringue pie.”

“The secret of the universe,” Preacher said, “is absolute simplicity, which Dickie, as our Oxford scholar in residence, should know from having read his David Hume like a good student.” He put the chicken into the hot oil with the garlic and onions, and stirred it around a bit. The snapping and popping flared up for a moment, then subsided.

“You’re barking up the wrong Brit,” Dickie said. “I was always more of a Spinoza man, myself.”

“They were both accused of atheism,” Preacher said.

“Didn’t he say ‘nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few’?” Sarah piped up.

“Goddamn,” Brent said. “Where did you learn that?”

“He did say that,” Preacher said. “But he also tried to refute some of the more philosophical arguments about the nature of God by pointing out that the idea of some unmoving, incomprehensible, irreducible God was tantamount to atheism because such a God had nothing whatsoever to do with the world we inhabit.”

“So how is absolute simplicity the secret of the universe?” Brent asked.

Preacher ground some pepper over the chicken, threw in a little salt, and stirred the chicken around with a spatula.

“Well, it’s a question of perspective,” he said. He put the spatula down and took a sip of his drink. “The universe does not seem simple from our perspective. Lots of moving parts. Lots of chaos. Lots of stuff we don’t understand. But from another perspective, it’s quite simple. It’s one. It’s one universe, one singular reality. One existence. One is a very simple number to understand. Hume also said, one is the greatest number.”

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” Maggie added helpfully, sitting next to Sarah.

“I’ve always felt that Three Dog Nights’ contribution to theology has been sorely overlooked,” Preacher said, smiling at them. Maggie smiled back. Couldn’t help it. She thought she heard Sarah’s heart skip a beat.

“Three Dog Night I don’t know. But when I was like 13 and saw Apollonia on stage, I knew there was a God,” Brent said.

“Another form of spiritual awakening,” Preacher acknowledged.

“Three Dog Night? Apollonia? How is it you Philistines have come to rule the world?” Dickie said, shaking his head. Preacher grinned at him, too, and began peeling and de-veining shrimp. "You Philistines" was Halethorpe's generic term for Americans.

“Wait a second,” Mark said, speaking up for the first time. “So what does that other stuff have to do with the secret of the universe?”

“Oh,” Preacher said, “well, look, some people have this concept of a singular, indivisible, Divine. And if you think of reality, the universe, as a single, indivisible thing, then you have...”

“Then you’re back to Spinoza,” Dickie said. “God is Nature.”

“Right,” Preacher said, “but what are the implications if you think of that as a single indivisible whole?”

“It means that Margaret Thatcher is God,” Dickie said, rolling his eyes. “Dear Lord. Or should I say, Dear Margaret.”

Preacher took the chicken out and put it on a plate to drain. He dumped the shrimp into the cloudy, garlicky oil. “That’s precisely what it means. It means God made you a pitcher of margaritas a few minutes ago.”

“Thousands of people all over the world pay good money to go into a special darkened room and gaze silently at a 20-foot image of me,” Finch said, entering the room. He gave Maggie a kiss on the cheek. “That sort of makes me a god.” The others jeered and guffawed loudly as he poured himself a drink. “We’re running low on these already? Preacher, your friends are lushes.”

“Having lushes for friends is entertaining. Having lushes for employees is a problem,” Preacher retorted, flipping the shrimp.

“That smells really good,” Sarah commented.

“Well, they’re being cooked by God,” Mark noted.

“More to the point, they’re God, too,” Preacher said. “The difference between us and shrimp is that we’re capable of figuring that out. Or at least of being amazed by it.” He rummaged around in the refrigerator and came out with a lump of pepperjack cheese. “You cheese purists will hate me for saying this, but I love pepperjack cheese,” he said.

“Like I said, Philistines,” Dickie sniffed.

“Excuse me? Kidney pie?” Finch asked. “I don’t ever want to hear one of you people snickering at someone else’s cuisine.”

“You just lack adequate refinement to... oh, who am I kidding?” Dickie said. “I fled the country just to get a decent meal.”

“So how is worshiping shrimp the secret to the universe?” Brent asked.

Preacher grated the cheese into a bowl. “It makes it harder to overcook them,” he said, stopping to take them out of the pan. They were just turning pink. “It’s one thing if you think of shrimp, and the people you’re feeding, as just a few more randomly careening bits of the chaotic Brownian movement of the universe. But if they’re both the indivisible Divine... it sharpens one’s focus.”

“Easy for you to say,” Sarah said. “You’re one of those people who does everything well naturally. For those of us who can’t make toast without involving the fire department, regarding a slice of bread as an aspect of God is just frustrating.”

“It’s OK if you burn the toast,” Preacher said. “The important part is that you recognize that everything you do is, in a way, an act of worship. Whether you know it or not.”

“You mean all you have to do to have firemen over for breakfast is burn toast?” Maggie asked, arching an eyebrow lasciviously.

“I think I’ll jot that down,” Dickie said.

Preacher poured a little vegetable oil in the pan and put a corn tortilla in the hot oil. “All I know,” he said, “is that it works for me.”

“Works for me, too,” Finch said. He shrugged. “Maybe it’s just having something to think about outside yourself. I mean it could be a lot worse. It could be Kabbalah or Scientology or, I don’t know, what’s that thing Mel Gibson does? Opus Dei. This doesn’t have a name, doesn’t cost any money, and doesn’t ask that I go to church on Sundays. And it works for me. What else could I ask for?”

Preacher put some cheese on the tortilla, then a handful of onion-garlic-shrimp-chicken mix, then some more cheese. “This is hard to do without music,” he said, “I don’t know how long to cook anything.” He folded the tortilla over the filling and flipped it over. “If the cheese doesn’t glue the tortilla shut, you get a hell of a mess.”

Brent picked up the stereo remote. “Never let it be said I didn’t contribute to dinner,” he said. Siousxie and the Banshees came on. “Does that have the sort of beat you can cook to?” he asked.

“It’ll do,” Preacher said, putting the first finished tortilla on a plate.

“What are these called, again?” Sarah said.

“Half-assed quesadillas,” Preacher said.

This was the second Circle. The second group of converts.

Sarah didn’t go home that night.

There was a party about midway through his stay. This was when Kabbalah was just starting to get some buzz, before it had really been picked up by the media but the really good trendspotters had picked it up. And at the party Preacher was accosted by a formerly famous singer who started talking about Kabbalah and Finch – who was bored and thinking about leaving for the Viper Lounge – stayed just to hear what followed. But Preacher was polite. “A path is a path,” he said.

Then one day Preacher left, with little in the way of ceremony. He asked Finch if he could take the bike to San Diego to tie up some loose end. Finch had no qualms about that. He was immersed in rewrites for the Glory Road script anyhow. And a few weeks later a truck pulled up in front of the house and a man who had already been paid unloaded the motorcycle.

Finch threw away the note that was taped to it, but remembered the gist of it: “Thanks, heading to Maryland, it’s a nice day, I think I’ll walk.”

It was not exactly a surprise to Dylan. He wished Preacher had stayed – he was good to have around, never got in trouble, defused tense situations, cooked, kept his mouth shut, fit in everywhere, and – rarest of all – Dylan trusted him completely in everything. But at the same time he understood the departure.

He left, Finch reasoned, because his message was catching on a little too facilely. Because there was this nice easy path laid out for him to create the next Est, the next Scientology, the next Kabbalah.

The two ran into one another a few more times, and of course there was the sort of famous time when Finch sort of came out of the Worship closet. But during their one prolonged stay together Finch was distracted putting together Glory Road. Haywood turned a few key players in to Worshipers(although they didn’t realize it at the time). They all admitted – some more cautiously than others – that it helped them work together.

Part Forty Eight

After I was finished and putting all this shit together and trying to figure out what it all MEANT even while telling my cynical post-modern self that it didn’t MEAN anything, there was one person I had trouble explaining away, and that was Graeme Wagner.

Graeme was the editor of a hipper-than-thou Oakland alt-weekly called There There, which I have to admit is a pretty good name for a hipper-than-thou Oakland weekly. Graeme’s partner was a high school English teacher named Michael Rutledge. That’s how he met Preacher – Preacher was a substitute history teacher for two weeks at Rutledge’s school.

I interviewed Graeme when I interviewed everyone else in San Francisco. Telephone pre-interview and then an in-person interview and all of that is catalogued and taped. But when I was thinking about the San Francisco stuff I kept getting stuck on Graeme’s example, and so – because the Worshipers foolishly gave me an open-ended expense account – I flew back out there to speak with him again.

He let me into his office. It was messy by Worshiper standards, which is to say, it was immaculate by newspaper standards. He didn’t have to move any stacks of anything for me to sit down. And we sat there and stared at one another across the desk for a moment.

“You flew out here to remember what I looked like?” Graeme said bemusedly.

“Here’s the thing,” I said to him. “You and I have something in common, and that is a sense of irony that has been tempered and honed into our primary defense mechanism. People like us, we don’t join things. We stand on the outside and criticize. It’s what we’re here for. It’s an important job. It’s what we do. If you think about it, in fact, our careers are based on our ability to stay detached.”

“Your point being...?”

“So how did you become a Worshiper? I mean it doesn’t fit. Joining, like that. If you told me that after you met Preacher you wrote a long feature about him spending five years in the desert, that I would understand. If you told me that you had a good time at a dinner party at Harding’s condo, that I would get completely. But to tell me that you signed on to all this, that... that doesn’t match anything else I know about you.”

He looked at me with little in the way of expression for a few seconds, and then said “you don’t really know me that well.”

“Well enough. I mean enough to get a sense that this isn’t like you.”

He took a deep, ruminative breath, held it, let it out.

“I guess the first thing is,” he said, musingly, “that there was no such thing as Worship then. I mean if one of my staff came in here with Notes on Worship – which has happened – and I started seeing college kids with circles tattooed on their biceps I would probably assign someone to do a story on the cultural phenomenon of Worship. Which, in fact, has also happened. But I probably wouldn’t have become interested in it if I was just exposed to it now after it’s already a, a, movement. A phenomenon. The thing is, though, there was nothing to join back then. There was no sense of joining anything, of creeds and jingoism and group-think. Because you’re right, I wouldn’t have touched that.

“Here’s what it was, though,” he continued. “It was going to this place in Nob Hill where this incredibly interesting, fun, warm, laid-back couple made great food and told funny stories and there were all these other really interesting people around. I mean I’m a big fan of unbridled cynicism but they made it really hard. The first time... Michael had gone on and on about how cool Haywood was, and we ride all the way into the city, and Cass answers the door, laughing, and there was another straight couple there, and Preacher is in the kitchen chopping porcini mushrooms and telling some anecdote that had everyone laughing, and it was just so... it was always warm and smelled of good food and there was music and just this sense of ease.

"And on the way back home that night Michael and I talked about how good a time we’d had in a low-key sort of way. We sat on the train and it was late and we were tired and a little drunk and I kept hearing Violent Femmes in my head because that had been on the stereo before we left. We sort of slouched against one another and the train was rocking along the tracks...” he trailed off, not really looking at me, and I could almost feel it, not quite, but almost, that feeling when you were on your way back home after Christmas dinner at your grandparents and you were tired and full and warm in the back of the car and there wasn’t much sound but the whir of the tires. I tried to imagine feeling that way as an adult. But I couldn’t.

“The conclusion we reached,” Graeme said, after a pause, “was that Preacher had his shit so together that he radiated this sort of aura of competence. Like, stand next to Preacher long enough and you began to think that you, too, could do everything and anything without seeming remotely stressed.

“It was just so... comfortable to be there. There was no sense that Preacher was proselytizing. He was just being Preacher. And Cass, Cass was perfectly matched with him – pretty, funny, relaxed but not lethargic. Warm. It was just so great being around them. Being in their place. It was like... I can’t describe it. Well, I mean I could say it was like being embraced but that makes it sound way too saccharine. It was just like being... home for Thanksgiving, without the co-dependency and homophobia and neuroses that I generally associate with going home for Thanksgiving.

“He even played cool music.

“So after awhile it was only natural that some of it rubbed off. You just... you just wanted to be more like that, wanted to keep that feeling even after you left. After awhile Michael’s lesson plans were edgier and more personal like Preacher’s had been. After awhile I found myself walking right past the frozen food aisle and standing in the produce section buying red, yellow, and green bell peppers. It kind of crept up on you. And with some prying Preacher would talk a little about spiritual issues. Not much. Not really. But drop hints here and there. And we came to understand that his centeredness had a spiritual component. Cass, really, was the one to talk about doctrine. Such as it was. I mean there was no such thing as Worship, we didn’t have that word. We didn’t label anything. But I remember after we’d known them for awhile, having this late-night, beery conversation with Cass where she talked about the concept of the Divine and how it related to the way she and Preacher lived. And by that time I was already a convert without knowing it. I mean...”

“But how can that be?” I interrupted. “What were you converting to if you didn’t know about all that One Indivisible Divine business? You were converting to home cooking and smart conversation? That’s what I don’t understand.”

He pursed his lips for a second. “The thing is,” he said, “the problem with joining a church or a self-help group or anyone else who promises you the keys to the universe is that you have to take on faith that they can back up that promise. In Preacher’s case he didn’t ask us to join anything. He pulled up driving the universe , let us in, burned rubber around the parking lot a few times, then slid over so we could drive. We didn’t need faith in him, or his, his method. He showed us what the promise was. I know, that metaphor sucks. But we were already convinced he had the keys to the universe long before there was any understanding that we could have them, too, by listening to what he had to say. We sort of subconsciously started picking up on Preacherisms – the focus, the grace, the fearlessness – and that started opening up doors to secret places and so when we learned that there actually was a system behind it we were only too ready to sign on.”

“You told me you’re not a ritual Worshiper,” I said.

“Yeah, I think that stuff’s a lot of hippie bullshit. The whole contrived ceremony thing. I mean if I wanted to celebrate the solstices I would live in San Francisco. I live in Oakland. June 21 is just another day to us.”

“He didn’t talk about that when he was here?”

“Oh, hell no. In fact I couldn’t believe it when I saw that stuff about the different rituals, the solstices, the naming ceremony... the food circles, that I understood completely, but none of that other bullshit. Then I read his comments on it and I understood a little better. He is making fun of those people. I mean he says it. Not in so many words. But he says, basically, for those of you who are so dependent on form and ritual and outward display, here is a bunch of silly crap we just made up so that you would feel satisfied.”

I thought about this some more.

“Was this contagious?” I asked. “I mean after you joined the Worshipers did you go out and join a bowling league or work on some political cause or anything like that?”

He laughed. “Not even close,” he said. “Look, Worship doesn’t really change who you are. I mean a little around the edges, I guess, but mostly you’re the same person. I had a friend who went to law school and he said that going to law school doesn’t change your opinions but it changes the way you justify them. Worship is sort of the same way. I’m the same detached cynical asshole now I was then. Just that now I’m a better cook.”

He saw the skepticism in my eyes.

“Look,” he said, “you’re right – we’re a lot alike in that regard. Our reliance on ironic detachment. Believe me, I understand that. And if I was in your position I would be highly skeptical about all this. Finding flaws from the outside. It sounds like we all lost our --”

“Being happy all the time is not normal,” I interrupted. “It sounds unspeakably dull and tedious, frankly. If you’re never upset, if you never do anything stupid, if your shit is ALWAYS together, then you have no way to distinguish good times from bad. Life becomes a constant immersion in a warm, thick, flavorless, goo. And I still don’t get you jumping into the tank.”

He looked at me without saying a word. Not really offended. Just sort of... thoughtful.

“How long have you been working on this project?” he said to me.

“Almost a year.”

“Did you think of yourself as a Worshiper before you started?”

“Hell, no.”

Another thoughtful look. “Before when I stubbed my toe I said fuck. Now when I stub my toe I say fuck, and laugh. It still hurts. But I can laugh, too. That’s not flavorless goo. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not flavorless goo. Worship doesn’t mean sanding down the sharp edges. It doesn’t mean avoiding the sharp edges. It means accepting the cuts that you’re going to get once in awhile.”

I tried to be expressionless – this was getting nowhere – but my inability to suspend disbelief in the horseshit must have shown through.

“Why are you really here?” he said. “You didn’t fly out here just to tell me you didn’t understand me. What’s really going on?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

Part Forty Seven

From "Preacher Haywood: Library to Desert," in the Journal of Religion and Society, Spring 2004

[...]
Thus it seems evident that Haywood's experience, and all of Worship, is revelatory, not scholastic. What he is and what he is trying to communicate comes from the desert, not the library; it was the direct experience of Oneness and not anything he learned from a book that made him who and what he is. For better and for worse. And so Haywood is praised and criticized for the wrong things.

Too often his supporters credit him for religious scholarship -- credit he himself, characteristically, has not welcomed. He is not a religious scholar. His knowledge is broader than the average lay person's but not particularly deep, and it bears the tell-tale marks of an autodidact -- there are unexpected gaps in his knowledge, and unorthodox, often shaky readings of some of the classic works. Often in reviewing his writings and lectures one sees him struggle with concepts well-covered by others, and miss allusions and references which might seem obvious to the more classically trained religious historian.

But at the same time the charge of syncretism is levelled at Worship and that, too, is unfair. All religious movements historicize themselves, present themselves as a return to the "true" and "original" faith. A fair amount of classical philosophy also presents itself as merely an outgrowth or reimagining of some older tradition. Haywood is, perhaps, more transparent about this than other budding religious leaders -- that sense of ironic detachment, which ordinarily is anathema to faith, is in a way central to Worship, and therefore Worshippers could not do other than recognize its parallels and similarities to other traditions -- but admitting that others have had similar insights does not make one a syncretist.

Yes, Haywood demonstrates a knowledge of philosophy and religious history superior to that of the average (Western) layperson when he speaks at length about the teachings of al-Suhrawardi, but that does not make him a theologian. He himself scoffed at such suggestions, referring to himself simply as "an avid reader," and that is probably more accurate.

(In fact comparison to al-Suhrawardi is apt in many ways. Suhrawardi, too, created an inclusive religious and philosophical system rooted in the language and folkways of his native country. Suhrawardi underwent a mystical experience of the Divine and then brought prodigious intellectual and scholarly intellect to bear upon the phenomenon. However, Suhrawardi is one of the greatest thinkers the world has yet produced, and so it is perhaps unfair to Haywood to point out Worship's shortcomings compared to al-Ishraqi. Suhrawardi's system was immensely more complex and, historically, more significant to the world than anything Worship has yet produced. There can be no comparison between The Wisdom of Light and Notes on Worship; it is akin to comparing Hamlet to a half-hour sitcom script. This is not to belittle Worship but rather to praise the magnitude of Suhrawardi's accomplishment.)

When Haywood uses a metaphor of divine light in Notes, he invokes Suhrawardi, and St. Symeon, and George Fox, and Mulla Sadra -- he acknowledges that they have trod this path before him and, indeed, all used the metaphor of a Light of Lights. But each of them fit their message firmly within a specific faith tradition. In Fox's case, while he was founding a new sect -- the Quakers -- he was still firmly in an established Protestant Christian tradition, rooted entirely in the text of the Bible and not looking elsewhere for guidance. Worship quite deliberately eschews that single-mindedness. In fact at times Haywood seems to go out of his way to cite examples from a wide array of faiths, underscoring the deliberately non-sectarian nature of his message. "He does not," as one critic sniffed, "even call God, God."

[...]
Interestingly, Haywood's reflexive habit of appealing to authority from various faith traditions has caused various traditional faith groups to claim him as their own. "I have been told," Haywood claimed in an interview once, "that I am a Roman Catholic; a Shi'a Moslem; a Baptist; a Buddhist; a Bahai missionary; a Wiccan; and once, most interestingly, a Jew. Reformed, one supposes..." That so many different and diverse religious traditions can claim Worship for their own most likely means that Worship will in short order atomize and disappear. There is a chance, however -- slight though it may be -- that in the process of co-opting Worship, these other groups may well legitimize it and allow it to endure indefinitely.

Part Forty Six

I have to say that it was on the West Coast that my patience for Worshipers was most sorely tested. Even though I compiled the archive (and wrote most of this memoir) from their headquarters in St. Michael's, they were more annoying out there. Because here I ignore them, and vice-versa, whereas in California I had to track them down and talk to them. And for the most part they're just so... so... so fucking typical. I don't know how to put it any better than that. Every stereotype you ever had about the Worshipers is reinforced every damn second you spent with people like Cass Harding.

She lives in this breathtaking, beautifully restored Victorian in Pacific Heights. Her husband is some sort of architect; she told me the details, they're in the archive, I didn't give a shit. Two point three children -- she was pregnant when I talked to her. Pictures of the other two. Cute. Probably all going to graduate from Harvard at age 12 and do all sorts of wonderful gifted things. Probably all going to be little Preacher Haywoods, God save us all.

Harding still runs her business, too; she owns the converted warehouse that houses it, just minutes from her home. They're richer than I can contemplate and -- of course -- she looks great. I'm quite certain she manages to easily juggle her demanding career with her home life such that neither her business nor her family is ever slighted, I'm quite certain she can cook like a gourmet chef, I'm quite certain she sees to it that Mr. Architect has nightly orgasms that temporarily erase part of his frontal lobes.

You get the picture.

At any rate, here's what happened after the whole desert episode: Preacher Haywood went off and did his construction worker thing, she went back to work, and in fairly short order life resumed what passed for normal for a beautiful young dot-com millionaire in the late '90s. Haywood emailed her a couple of times from Internet cafes he encountered on the road. And she stayed in touch -- to her surprise, and to his -- with Dylan Finch. Telephone calls every couple of days. They went out on the town -- purely platonically, she assured me -- when she was in LA on business. And both of them were living like Worshippers, even though that term hadn't been invented yet.

But they were doing it anyhow. Every act an act of worship, awareness of the ubiquity of the Divine, blah blah blah. It was difficult, she said. It had seemed effortless in the desert around Preacher but in the real world where there was so much stuff and so many things going on it was hard to remember "the simple truths" -- which I took to mean the mystical bullshit that Haywood had fed them in the desert. Fidelity of thought was, in part, why she stayed in touch with Finch -- they kept one another on track in this endeavor. They (she and Finch) both learned how to cook. She said something that virtually every Worshiper said to me, in different ways -- making a meal out of a raw ingredients, making it and sharing it with people you love, became an intensely religious experience for her, every single time. Which was a two-edged sword, she acknowledged, laughing, because it meant that no matter how tired she was, she was almost congenitally incapable of just 'waving a frozen burrito as she would have done before.

Beyond that she basically bided her time until Haywood arrived. She knew he would because he said he would. Of course I know now what she didn't know then, which was Haywood's promises to be somewhere were based upon a sense of time not shared by those of us with real lives and real jobs. How many years did it take him to make the trip from Chicago to San Diego? But Haywood assured her that after his summer job -- his "acclimatization," his "repressurization," he wrote in his emails -- he would be showing up in San Francisco.

And damn if he didn't. She swears up and down, even when confronted with my most cynical eyebrow raise, that she dreamt of his arrival the night before it happened and so wasn't surprised at all when, one September morning, her office manager buzzed her and said that a man named Haywood was out front.

She said thank you calmly, hung up the phone calmly, then catapulted herself out of her office, yelling out his name. He stood there with that soft grin on his face, and she hadn't even made up her mind to kiss him inappropriately before she did it. And he didn't pull back a bit.

He looked, she recalled, good. A little heavier, buff where he had seemed a bit scrawny in the desert. Clean-shaven, his hair cropped short. She stood there with her arms around his neck and his hands holding the small of her back and stared at him after their lips parted. Assured herself that he was actually there.

After a long silence the office manager said "Do you have an appointment, sir?"

(The office manager was a drily funny, very practical woman named Elizabeth Oshrine. She wasn't the office manager by the time I arrived to interview Haywood's San Francisco contacts. Harding's profit-sharing program had allowed her to retire and move to Washburn, Texas, to be closer to her daughter and grandkids. I talked to her by telephone. When I asked her if she was a Worshiper she said she was too old for such foolishness. I liked her. Until she said that Haywood was a priest in the order of Melchizedek. Damn.)

So began Haywood' six months in San Fran. In the real world Cass didn't find Preacher the spooky, somewhat intimidating, spiritual figure she'd known in the desert. Instead she found a smart, good-looking, charming, gentle man. She still insists that the fact that she almost literally worshiped him as a holy man had nothing to do with her attraction to him, that if he hadn't had a spiritual bone in his body she still would have fallen for him, that his (as she saw it) position as a tour-guide of the Divine was, if anything, an obstacle to their relationship, not the impetus for it.

Haywood was an unemployed construction laborer and she ran one of the most successful and profitable small software companies in San Francisco. He was a recovering heroin addict and she was revolutionizing the way humans interacted with their computers. But she insists that the fact that she fell for him had nothing to do with the pseudo-intellectual pseudo-theology with which he'd brainwashed her when she stumbled, exhausted, dehydrated, and sun-addled, into his little desert lair. No, it was all purely on his merits as a human being.

Right.

Anyhow, she took him home and took him to bed and Preacher Haywood got laid for, as far as I can tell, the first time in almost four years. Which was the longest he'd gone since junior high, I suppose. And I won't repeat all of the crap that Cass Harding told me about it. It's in the archive if you're curious. Take the writings of Denys the Areopagite, the Whole Earth Catalog, and a few issues of Penthouse Forum, throw them into a blender, and you'll get a sense of what she has to say about it. Here's the condensed version: they lit some candles, undressed, and did it for hours.

She talked about the candle thing, which I heard others use, but since she was sort of at ground zero for all this I will assume this was the first demonstration. After they managed to survive that first night and she was basking in her post-orgasmic, post-epiphanic reverie, she wondered idly about the nature of what she felt had been a transcendent experience and Haywood took one candle and snuffed it out, then took another candle and tipped it toward the smoking wick of the darkened taper. The flame jumped from one candle to the next. I think I learned that trick in the third grade, but it was, to Cassandra Harding, the equivalent of the Sermon of the Flower. Haywood didn't say anything, but she understood what he meant. The Divine, she said, is a flame within us, but sometimes we can't see it or feel its warmth, and then another flame is brought near and our sense of the Divine jumps back into being. This sentence was followed by several lengthy paragraphs about how that metaphor is as inaccurate as all other attempts at describing the Divine in human language, because the flame never goes out, we just don't see it, and the Divine isn't a flame inside us, but really we're nothing but flame.

Whatever.

She went on to tell me that subsequent sexual experiences with Preacher -- I got the impression that there were at least two a day, every day -- were not all realizations of the Divine but sometimes just plain old sex. Which was fine in its own right. What a relief. She told me that Haywood refused her offer of a job, saying that he would feel like a kept man. Which, of course, he was. He worked as a substitute teacher -- in San Francisco, at least back then, substitute teachers just needed college degrees, not teaching certificates. I don't know what the rule is on that now.

At any rate, they formed what, in retrospect, was the first Worship circle, too. Not that they called it Worship. It was just some friends who started coming over for informal dinner parties once a week. Lured by Preacher's cooking, they apparently stayed for his philosophizing. I spoke with them. They universally remember having to drag it out of Haywood, that he was the most reluctant proselytizer ever. That's the way they remember it... but funny how somehow he managed to convert all of them anyhow.

I'm being hard on them. Even allowing for the rose-colored haze they all had when they remembered Preacher in those days, it does seem that Haywood's chief tactic was to be a missionary by example. It worked when we were at St. John's and all he was converting anyone to in those days was ars memoria. So I'm not surprised that it worked in San Francisco when he was converting people to great sex and fantastic cooking. The fact that he was living the life of a rich man didn't hurt. It's easy to want to emulate the guy with the beautiful home (it was a condo in Nob Hill in those days, the house in Pacific Heights didn't come along until after she got married) and the beautiful girlfriend and all the expensive stuff around him. It would have been different, I think, if he'd been living in a trailer park outside Oakland. Notwithstanding the fact that his first two converts had found him in a shotgun shack in the middle of the desert.

Anyhow, after awhile the others started taking turns with the Moveable Feast, as they called their weekly supper. (Funny how quick Worshipers are to co-opt the terminology of other faiths.) And when they were all good and converted he gave Cass a variation on the speech he gave Sarah back in Seattle, years earlier. The whole "this is not my future" business. Cass claims she knew this all along, too, knew it was just temporary with him, was OK with that.

He left in March, six months to the day from his arrival.