As a child, I worried about whether or not to believe in God. He was hardly ever mentioned in our family, except in my mother’s exclamations, so I didn’t know if he was real or not, but if he was and I didn’t believe in him, I thought it would hurt his feelings. I decided to try and make contact, by making a place for him where he knew he’d be welcome. It was under a forsythia bush in our backyard, in the cave formed by its hanging branches. Inside that dim chapel, I cleared the ground of leaves and, though I didn’t know what an altar was, I built a fairy table out of twigs and mud, about six inches high. I covered it with a tablecloth I made out of the heads of pansies, blue and purple, laid like overlapping shingles. I sat there in the close-to-dark, pleased with the holy place of mud I’d made. I wanted to talk to God, but I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there.

The next day I crawled back in and saw that the place I had fixed up for God was now alive with big black ants. They drove like tiny cars in a traffic jam across the top of the altar, dragging away with them large pieces of the pansy petals for their larder. They had wrecked it-it was gross, not holy at all. I didn’t think God would ever come there even if he did exist.

When I was a teenager, I went to Quaker meeting and tried to talk to God there, but I only worried about my French homework. What was wrong with me? I found that if I closed my eyes and rolled them up inside my head, and aimed them at the place above my nose where Hindus put a red spot, I felt something new and strange-a vertigo, a lifting, verging on a headache. Could this be God? If so, he didn’t speak to me, nor I to him, and after a while I gave up that method.

When my son was four, he said, “I just found out how you can see God.” He was lying down in the back seat of the car (in the days before car seats), on the way home from nursery school. “You squeeze your eyes shut, as tight as you can, and you see a blue light, and that’s God.” I tried it-later, of course, not while I was driving-but it didn’t work for me.

When I began to practice Zen, it didn’t matter any more whether I could talk to God or he to me-Zen people don’t go in for that. It was a relief to stop worrying about God for awhile, though now I worried that I didn’t know how to meditate. It looked like I was meditating from the outside, but I was just sitting there, thinking random thoughts, and breathing. Nothing was happening. That’s what I still do-just sit, and nothing still happens. By now I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve learned that that’s what Zen practice is: “just sitting.” Still, sometimes it feels lonesome.

I’m getting to the point of my story.

I have no mate; I sleep alone. When I rise, I always drink a cup of green tea, and I watch the day begin. I brew the tea for three minutes in a red iron pot with dragonflies on it, and then I pour it into a white cup with a blue rim.

On Sundays I don’t set the alarm. One Sunday not so long ago I opened my eyes to a foggy morning. The bed was warm and I didn’t have to go to work. I thought with pleasure about how good it was going to be to drink my tea. But the catch was, I didn’t want to get out of bed.

I had no idea I was going to speak, but suddenly, to my surprise, I said out loud, “God, I have a favor to ask you. Would you bring me a cup of green tea?” It seemed a small thing to ask, especially when you consider that I had never really asked God for anything before.

Then God answered me, out loud, and that surprised me, too. His voice came out of my own mouth.

“I’m sorry, Sue,” he said. “I would if I could, but I don’t have the arms and legs the job calls for. But I completely support you in getting yourself a cup of tea. I’m with you all the way!”

I saw that he really wasn’t going to do it. “But God,” I said, “I don’t have anybody to bring me tea in bed.”

God said, “That’s not my fault. The fact that there’s nobody in the bed with you is the result of choices you yourself have made. Anyway, I’m right here. I’ll be glad to go down to the kitchen with you.”

I could tell that he meant it and I was deeply touched. I tossed back the quilt with a burst of zeal, and swung my bare feet to the cold floor.

I heard God say, just under his breath this time, “You go, Sue!”

While the tea brewed, I had three minutes to think of the times when I had had husband or lover in the morning bed, and as far as I could remember, none of them had ever brought me tea on Sunday morning. Maybe I never asked.

I sat on the porch with the blue-rimmed cup in my hands. The tea slaked my thirst, and I just sat there, watching a squirrel who was eating the buds of the passion vine on the roof next door.

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in Killing the Buddha.

Susan Moon is a Buddhist writer and teacher, and author of The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi, among other books. She lives in Berkeley, California.

We were living in Heaven at the time — a small handbuilt cabin in the forests of Montana. I ate of happiness and drank pure spring water every day. My wife radiated wit and truth. I depended upon her for my wholeness. My daughter sparkled with innocence, intelligence and character. I delighted in her.

The cabin measured 12 by 31 feet. Living so close is very difficult without the lubrication of love. Wife, daughter and I had built the cabin of logs and had insulated between them and chinked them well. We cooked and warmed the house with an air-tight woodstove; it would hold a fire all night. The rippling ruddy light through the firebox window would light the kitchen and add another presence to our home.

Christmas snow covered every horizontal or approximately horizontal surface. A big ball of snow twice as large as the diameter of the stack sat atop the chimney of the old woodstove that stood outside beside the firepit. The snow cushioned the earth and silenced the interstate that slithered alongside the river barely a mile away.

Moonlight filtered through the light clouds as the snow continued to fall. The thermometer read maybe 20 degrees — not terribly cold, but fresh enough that the house felt cozy and safe.

We had no electricity, but kerosene enough and candles. We had all the water we wanted; icy water from the mountain spring running to our home by gravity. A winter’s worth of dry wood, mostly split and sized and sorted stood ricked in the woodshed … I always kept a bit to split so when I ached for exercise I could go out and work up a sweat. Staple foods were stored in glass large-mouth jars in counter space made to hold them, and beneath the floor in the root cellar plastic five-gallon pickle buckets full of staples were sealed against the damp. On the shelves down there were jars containing summer — filled with applesauce, plums, and garden — and carrots and potatoes were buried in the loose dirt at one end of the dark earthen space.

For luxury my wife and I had coffee, and for my daughter we made cocoa.

For us, tucked in, cozy, safe and warm, winter evenings felt like Heaven.

I think it was because of our love, simplicity and relative silence that we were accessible to the Spirit.

One evening, as I sat reading and writing, my wife crafted things of leather, and my daughter read and drew and maintained her part of the conversation, a knock came at the door.

Understand that this is a surprise. Our cabin crouched under the trees in the moonlit dark a mile from the county road. Our driveway consisted of snow-choked unimproved country road. Whoever came to see us must have a powerful 4-by-4 with good tires and some weight; either that or our visitors would have to walk in.

These folks had walked in. No casual drop-ins, these folks seriously wanted to visit.

Lawrence and Lynn — we’ll call them — were friends. I was delighted to see them out here but slightly amazed that they would come at night through deep snow while light snow still fell.

That’s crazy people for you.

Both Lawrence and Lynn graduated from Hot Springs, the local funny farm.

I cannot remember why someone had decided that Lynn needed therapy. Maybe she cared too much about things. I remember that Lawrence heard voices. He said he had been infiltrated and these secret agents planned to murder him. He could overhear them plotting and cackling over the eventual success of their dirty schemes. This made him skittish, nervous in society, and his actions appeared insane to some onlookers.

No one considered for a moment that he might be right. Later he died of cancer. I believe he really had heard those wickedly disposed cells plotting against him. What a gift he had. What a loss to all of us.

This night he had come to ask a favor of me.

He said he had conceived of an antigravity machine. He wanted to give the concept to me for safekeeping. He wanted it kept secret because there were agents who wanted the secret for themselves, either to hide it away or to destroy it, or — I believe he was mistaken about this aspect — to capitalize on his idea.

“Will you keep it for me?” he asked. “If you say yes, I will wash your feet. The people of the Bible often sealed a deal with the washing of the feet.”

I thought this a bit peculiar, but I respected Lawrence. For all his strangeness, I could feel the intensity of his intelligence, his belief, and his love.

“I will,” I said, and slipped my bare feet out of my sheepskin slippers.

After a few minutes it seemed no great show of footwashing was forthcoming soon, so I sat back and gave myself up to the conversation once again.

He told me his secret. It seemed no great thing to me; maybe I could be numbered among the unbelievers at that time. I expressed a couple of serious questions about his plan but he would hear absolutely nothing of my objections.

I agreed that a very close tolerance device should be built to test the idea and he suggested that I sell trees off my land to raise the money. He thought a hundred thousands dollars would do. Perhaps I could sell a few acres.

Here I drew the line. I am merely a steward and protecting the trees here is part of my job. I call the place we live Sanctuary Sylvan. I watch over the water and the topsoil, the wildflowers and the wildlife. We strive to kill nothing at Sanctuary, although an occasional necessity will arise.

Selling the land seems to me as odious as electing representatives to safeguard the national treasures and watching them turn around and sell their responsibilities to their friends, calling it privatization.

We laughed at politicians and ourselves as we sat close in the snug little kitchen and talked and drew closer.

The cabin has cold water in. Water must be heated on the woodstove, so there are always cast iron pots and coffee pots and enameled pots sitting on the stove. There is no other plumbing. A certain natural function requires a walk through the woods to the outhouse. Because we are miles from neighbors, the making of water can be done 20 feet from the house — use a different spot each time. My wife and daughter would pluck a wad of toilet paper from the back of the front door, go out under the trees, urinate, dab off, come in and toss the damp paper into the woodstove.

My daughter went out and came back in excited.

“Dad, Molly, come out and see this. Come see this!”

We leaped up and followed her out into the moonlit and snowy night.

She pointed up and through the thin snow-sprinkling clouds we could see the moon, brilliantly circled by a bright and perfect rainbow.

We gazed at the celestial beauty.

Then I looked down at my bare feet in the virgin snow.

Parris has an MFA from the University of Montana and although he has taught on a few occasions, still prefers his earthy life and stewardship of some forested acres in Montana, where he lives in a small hand-built cabin without electricity or phone. He makes his living as a freelance writer, tree pruner, and illustrator.

This is a perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I’ve been roused to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of you—even those of you who don’t believe in the power of prayer.

And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods… the God beyond all Gods… the Girlfriend of God… the Teacher of God… the Goddess who invented God.

Dear Goddess, you who never kill but only change:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.

I pray that you will give them what they don’t even know they need—not just the boons they think they want but everything they’ve always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.

*

Dear Goddess, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:

Many of the divine chameleons out there don’t even know that their souls will live forever. So please use your brash magic to help them see that they are all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own personalities.

Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what they’ve been led to believe about themselves, and more exciting than they can possibly imagine.

Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for them to be in love with anyone or anything that’s no good for them.

*

O Goddess, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:

I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed the wise and sexy virtuosos out there.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung to them, no matter how long they’ve suffered from it, and even if they’ve become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.

Please conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring another hex or plague into their lives in the future.

*

Dear Goddess, sweet Goddess, you sly universal virus with no fucking opinion:

Please help all the personal growth addicts out there to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.

Teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating self-control.

Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.

Arouse the Wild Woman within them—even if they’re men.

*

Dear Goddess, you pregnant slut who scorns all mediocre longing:

I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate rascals communing with this prayer to kick their own asses and wash their own brains.

Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that encourage them to believe that they are better than anyone else.

Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do not have.

Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they never love their own pain more than anyone else’s pain.

*

Oh Goddess, you wildly disciplined, radically curious, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically logical master of rowdy bliss:

I ask you to give your unconventionally unconditional love to all the budding messiahs who read this prayer; love them with all of your ocean and sky and fire and earth.

Cultivate in yourself a fervent yearning for their companionship. Play with them every day. Answer their questions. Listen to their stories.

Inspire them not just to nag you for what they want, but also to thank you for the uncanny gifts you flood them with.

And if there are any pockets of ignorance or hatred these insanely poised creators might be harboring, any inadvertent idiocies that keep them blind to your blessings, please flush them out as soon as possible.

*

Dear Goddess, You psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains:

Bless all the inscrutable creators out there with lucid dreams while they are wide awake, and their very own spin doctors, and solar-powered sex toys that work even in the dark, and vacuum cleaners for their magic carpets, and a knack for avoiding other people’s hells, and a thousand masks that all represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not psychotic stalkers.

Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river, or a boulevard in an exotic vacationland, or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn or Jupiter.

Teach them to push their own buttons and unbreak their own hearts and right their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and save their own lives.

*

Dear Goddess, You fiercely tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm animal bodies:

I pray that you provide all the original sinners out there with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love.

Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from their daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach them that they can have anything they want if they’ll only ask for it in an unselfish way.

*

And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change everyone out there in the exact way they’ve needed to change in order to become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be.

Amen. Awomen.

This is a piece from the Killing the Buddha archives that deserved to be unearthed.

Once, when I was eight, I knelt down at my bed alongside my mother, admitted I was a sinner, and asked Jesus Christ into my heart. Once, when I was eleven, I stood up at a Bible campfire and promised my peers and elders that I would earnestly strive to bring my unsaved friend to church. And once when I was 22, among ten high school boys whose souls had been entrusted to me for a week, I sat down on the carpet and read them, for their edification, Bible porn.

“Judges 19:29-30: When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. Everyone who saw it said, ‘Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!’ ”

These high school boys were members of what I have in the past called “My People,” a term that referred sometimes to those who accepted that a salad was to consist of, and only of, iceberg lettuce, tomato wedges, thousand island dressing, and Bacos. Sometimes the term referred to Midwesterners, sometimes to Swedish American-immigrants, sometimes to evangelicals. But mostly “My People” meant the Evangelical Covenant Church of America.

Created by a pietistic break-off of the Swedish State Lutheran church in the 19th century, the Evangelical Covenant Church is a denomination of about 100,000 members. Although they are now found in almost every state of the nation, My People cluster predominantly around Chicago and Minneapolis. Leaving the dry, empty formalism of state churches in Sweden for something more real, My People are Scandinavians with a heart for Jesus. Born again Swedes. They are evangelical enough to think that a heartfelt conversion experience is necessary to ensure your spot in the Kingdom of Heaven, but Swedish enough to not make a big fuss over it.

Migrating to the US, Covenanteers found greater religious freedom, but greater competition as well. Unable to simply baptize their infants into the state church before the kids even knew what was happening, My People now had to wait until some age of accountability and then let their kids make their own decisions. From every side — from charismatics, to archaeologists, to MTV — forces threatened to take Covenant kids from the faith of their fathers.

Hence the creation of CHIC. Once standing for Covenant HIgh Congress, now like KFC or FedEx,CHIC stands for nothing but itself. Every three or four summers, CHIC calls every 13-17 year-old Covenant Kid from across the country to a big college campus where for a week they are bombarded with so much high-power Christian fun and high-volume Christian rock, and so many high-impact Christian speakers, that they have no choice but to dedicate their lives to Jesus Christ.

I attended CHIC in 1984, but because my mom had gone and gotten me saved seven years before, all I could do was get “recommitted.” And I had already been recommitted 19 times. So during the altar calls, while gospel music played softly and the speaker asked people to cast off their sins, come on down and accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, I sat and felt guilty for feeling nothing at all.

On the one hand it made perfect sense for me to sign up as a counselor for the 1991 CHIC held at Indiana University. Family connections plus regular Covenant camp attendance plus having just graduated from the denomination’s college, North Park, plus coordinating Covenant volunteer groups through my job with Habitat for Humanity, meant that I probably already knew 300 of the 3000 kids and counselors in attendance, and the others were probably only separated by single degree. These were My People, after all. Not to go would have been like ditching a big family reunion. But on another hand, signing up made as much sense as shaving my head and passing out the Bhagavad Gita at airports. Because I didn’t really want anybody to have a conversion experience, I went to be a counselor at CHIC to save the children from being saved.

The CHIC counselor application asked for a statement of belief. I knew that the right answer was something like “Once I felt tempted to go to a party where alcohol was being served” or “Once my friends’ parents got divorced and I was feeling really down and I didn’t know where God was in all of this.” Then I would relate how I turned to a favorite passage of scripture and how it made me realize that Christ indeed was alive and relevant for my life today.

But I had no such simple heartfelt story of Christ’s presence in my life. I stayed away from all the traditional Christian events at my Christian college and instead hid away in the library and struggled through deep thoughts and hard texts trying to make God and Jesus and the world as a whole make some sort of sense to me. From Kierkegaard I knew that “Truth is Subjectivity,” from Nietzsche that Christians were pop-Platonists, and from Rene Girard that the New Testament revealed the scapegoat mechanism secretly present in all other myths. I knew Christianity, like life, was something far more complex and messy and hard and weird than you could explain to teens in a week. And I knew that it was condescending and wrong to make teens feel dysfunctional if they did not have a Jesus experience in just the way CHIC had pre-ordained for them.

I still considered myself a Christian, but I had no statement of belief. I wasn’t even sure if belief itself was very Christlike. So, I wrote down on the application the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, His Only Son…” Look, I said, I just believe what everybody else believes; please don’t make me personalize my belief the way that everybody else personalizes their belief. I knew it wasn’t at all what they were looking for, but I figured if I quoted a central Christian creed they couldn’t keep me out.

So it was that on a warm August afternoon, 1991, I was sitting in a circle on the carpet with the ten high school CHIC boys whom I would “counsel.” The first activity we were to undertake together was a scripture lesson. The official CHIC scripture lesson was from Matthew 14, in which Peter starts to walk toward Jesus on the water, but then the disciple starts to sink. CHIC had provided brightly colored Xeroxed papers with “hip” clip art and with questions for me to give to each of my charges: “Have you ever felt like you were sinking and called out to Jesus?” “What risks might Jesus like you to take this week?”

I put away the sheets and asked my kids to turn to Judges 19. Judges 19 tells a tale less popular in evangelical circles. It tells the story of a Levite man who goes off to Bethlehem to track down his unfaithful concubine. On the way back, the Levite and his retrieved concubine stop to sleep in the town square at Gibeah. A Gibeahan offers to let the two travelers stay at his house instead. But then the men of the town come and ask to have sex with the Levite. So then the Gibeahan host goes out and says, “No, my friends, don’t be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don’t do this disgraceful thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish.” They rape and abuse the two women who then come crawling back to the house at dawn. What happens to the concubine next I mentioned at the start of this story.

After reading the passage to the kids that I was supposed to be turning on to the love of Jesus, I asked them what they thought. One kid from Alaska just got up and walked away. (He got himself assigned to another group and I didn’t talk to him again.) I don’t know what kind of reaction I was hoping for from the kids. Maybe, “Oh my God! This Bible-Christianity thing isn’t as straightforward as I thought! I’m going to run away from my namby-pamby Covenant home, smoke unfiltered cigarettes and read about Kierkegaard and despair in a poorly-lit coffee house!” But instead, they just lounged there in their brightly-colored beach shorts and played with their sunglasses. One said something like, “So that’s in the Bible. Huh.” Then another one asked if they could go to the mall.

Every evening at CHIC, everyone gathered in the gym for the main event of the day. The nights started out with some fun and/or raucous songs, gradually shifting into softer, more meaningful numbers before a speaker came out to talk to us about how Jesus was really hip and how Jesus would help us with sports, parents, dating, and fitting in at our school. I was still trying to balance my roles as responsible leader, cool counselor, caring adult, irreverent gadfly, and evangelical for existentialism. I made all my kids go to the service, but we sat in the very back row of the arena. I encouraged them to mock any and all parts of the service, teaching them alternative lyrics to well-known Christian classics (”And they’ll know we are Christians by our cars, by our cars…” “God is Dead-wo-ho-ho, God is Dead-clap-clap-clap.”) I taught them how to sing like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. I let them start their own mini-waves at inappropriate times. They did not appreciate the full theological meaning of their actions, but they had fun.

Everything was going okay until one of the CHIC authorities, Dale, came up to quiet us down. For most of the year Dale was the Youth Pastor for the Johnson County Covenant Church, and I had worked with him the previous summer when he brought his church youth group to Habitat for Humanity. But this week Dale was the Head of CHIC Security, The Covenant’s Top Cop. It was his job not only to keep the kids away from unsafe and illegal activities, but from sinful ones as well. He came up and asked me to keep my young ones in line. I explained to Dale that everything was okay because these youth were part of an experimental ministry project called “ARMMFART”. ARMMFART stood for “Alternative Role Model Ministry For Apathetic and Reluctant Teens”. My logic, as I explained it to Dale, was that not every kid at CHIC was going to connect with the rah-rah, happy shiny form of evangelicalism. I felt that it was my role to reach out to these kids. And if it took a few shenanigans to win them for Jesus, I thought it was worth it. I don’t really know if I believed any of this. But I had good Covenant credentials and it sounded good, so Dale let it ride.

The week ran by quickly. Others guys came to join our evening ARMMFART gatherings at the back of the arena and we developed a codified set of rules: “You can sing, but not in tune; you can clap, but not in rhythm; you can stand up, but not at the appropriate times.” I drove my kids around in my car until one midnight, on our way to McDonald’s for Happy Meals, I was caught by the CHIC authorities and told that kids weren’t allowed out past curfew even with their counselor and counselors were not allowed to drive kids in their cars. (I got around this one by letting Seth, who had his learner’s permit, drive.) One midweek afternoon, Josh and some of my other kids told me about the plastic Barbie dolls that had come with their Happy Meals and the explosives they were going to use to them blow up. I told them, in a firm and responsible voice, to do it far away from others, in an open area where they would hurt no one but Barbie.

Bible porn continued. In place of the official CHIC lesson every night, I read to my campers about how Lot’s daughters got him drunk and had sex with him, the sexual purity laws from Leviticus, how Noah got drunk and naked and his sons had to cover him up, and the place in Song of Songs where it talks about breasts. Again, the kids were amused, but mostly felt like they were getting to skip homework. The fact that the book the Covenant Church holds up as God’s “only perfect rule for faith, doctrine and conduct” was full of smut made no apparent impression upon them. But, slowly, I believed, my message, whatever that message might be, was sinking in.

The last night of CHIC was the big altar call. Everything that was told to them so far in the week was just softening them up for the final night. The softer meaningful songs went on longer than other nights, and the speaker didn’t make as many wisecracks. No fire, no brimstone, but in a sweet sincere voice, he made it clear that tonight was the night to give yourself to Jesus. Jesus loves you no matter what you’ve done and he wants you to start living for him today. Soft music played, whole rows of people put their arms around each other and swayed.

As emotionally-wrought CHIC kids came up to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, tears began to stream down the eyes of everyone in the arena. Except for ARMMFART. I was nervous about desanctifying this, the most sacred point of CHIC and of many young people’s lives. But ARMMFARTers were mock-sobbing, loudly blowing their noses, hardly able to keep from busting out laughing.

Youth Pastor Cop Dale shot a glance back that let me know in no uncertain terms that THIS BEHAVIOR WAS NOT OKAY. But I only shrugged, helplessly, to tell him know that this was now out of my control. He came up and whisperingly (so as not to disturb the mood) told the kids that they should be ashamed of themselves and to keep it down. Apparently he had given up any hope of their souls being reached.

The kids quieted down eventually, but I was distraught. I was distraught by the emotional manipulation being perpetuated by the CHIC leaders. I was distraught by my kids’ not knowing where to draw the line. I was distraught by my inability to make sense of what I was doing there. The soft music played on, the preacher again asked the kids to make a decision for Jesus tonight. Should I be listening to him? What had my arrogant ways done but created a bunch of teenage hooligans?

That night, back at the dorm, in place of our usual Bible porn lesson, I asked my kids what they thought of the altar call. No one had been paying enough attention to even know what was being said. Disgusted, I went to explain the whole program: just how and why CHIC had been trying to save them, and how I had been trying to save them from that. What I had been trying to teach them that week was that salvation isn’t enough. You aren’t altogether without merit before you accept Jesus and you certainly aren’t altogether good once you do accept him. You can’t judge others based on whether or not they call themselves Christian or if they’ve had some special experience where Jesus entered their life. I don’t know what happens after you die, I told them, but if Jesus is up there separating the sheep from the goats based on whether or not they get all weepy when Amy Grant songs are played soft, I don’t want anything to do with it. There’s a lot of other stuff going on in the world. People get drunk. People have sex. There’s brutality, there’s rape and mayhem, and that’s just in the goddamned Bible. There’s a whole filthy, messy, complicated world out there and nothing you learn at CHIC or Bible camp or at church tells you the first damn thing about how to deal with it. Do you understand?

Josh turned over on his bunk where he had been lying listening and scratched himself. Seth flipped through his motorcycle magazine. Some of the other kids started talking about which CHIC girls they thought were the best looking. I was ready to beat them all senseless for being so oblivious, for paying no attention at all to my theological message or to anyone else’s. Then for a brief flashing moment, I saw them. I saw my kids. I saw the kids I counseled not as saved or unsaved, brainwashed or reflective, good or bad. I saw them as just boys in high school, each having their own lives and thoughts, even if such thoughts were only about how to blow things up, how to get girls, how to drive cars. For a brief and shining moment, I saw them like me, fellow Covenanteers, fellow children of the earth, yet entirely unlike me and entirely unfathomable. It was like watching a pornographic movie and all of a sudden — instead of feeling desire or disgust or even humor — seeing the real people behind the porn actor bodies and wondering who their mothers were, how their houses were decorated, what they had for lunch. I saw my kids, My People, for the first time in my life.

All week at CHIC, like my fellow counselors, I had been trying to convert my children to a program I did not really understand myself. Because it was too much, too much, to just let them lie there without categorization, without direction, without ultimate meaning. But the full reality of nine separate kids with all their own lives, their own thoughts, their own experiences, their own being, lasted only for that moment. The godlike perspective was too overwhelming to bear. So we all packed into my car and Seth drove us to the Steak & Shake and we popped straws and ate fries and talked about girls and cars and exploding Barbies.

This piece originally appeared in Killing the Buddha.