SECTION X
Chapter 4. Dan Wakefield

  The writer, Dan Wakefield, represents an individual who had two conversions:
an 'intellectual' conversion of sorts to atheism in his early twenties; and
later a 'spiritual', conversion back to Christianity when he was in his late
forties. I have quoted liberally from Wakefield's book RETURNING, A SPIRITUAL
JOURNEY, as I believe it to be an honest, deep description of one man's
search to find both himself and his God.

Wakefield's Drift Into Atheism

  It was in his Contemporary Civilization class in college that Wakefield had
realized he was an outright atheist. A student had innocently enough asked,
"But I thought Jesus WAS God."  The professor responded, "Oh no. You are
only talking about the belief of one minority of people during ONE brief
period in the history of the human race."

  Looking back over time, Wakefield realized that he had been building up to
this climax. Even prior to this classroom exchange, an old roommate had
frequently quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that the 1920's was the time
when a new generation found "all Gods dead, all wars fought."  Also, Wakefield
remembered old nagging doubts, that had arisen in his mind during his sensitive
teenage years, after unsuccessfully praying to God to cure his severe acne.

  In college, Wakefield studied the history and religions of other
civilizations, ranging from the Buddhists, the Moslems, the Indians,
even the ancient Greeks:

  "I had learned at Columbia that not all atheists were Communists... and
  in fact some of the smartest people in the world no longer believed in
  God, much less [a divine] Jesus. I gathered that most intellectuals
  (including most of my professors) agreed that science, along with Marx
  and Freud, had proved that Nietzsche was right, or at least that God
  was not so much 'dead' as nonexistent (religion having been found to
  be an 'illusion' by Freud, an 'opiate' according to Marx) and certainly
  not a factor in modern life for up-to-date, educated people." (p 86)

  Around this time in his early college years, Wakefield began suffering
bouts of depression.  His concerned parents saw to it that he received the
expensive counseling that he felt he so desperately needed.  Wakefield
(no doubt without quite realizing it) had replaced his faith in God with
a new authority figure--the psychiatrist! In these sessions he hoped
the psychiatrist could help him tap into his creative innermost being,
to "'unblock' whatever was stopping [him] from writing [a great] novel"
and in so doing, "bring [him] the salvation [he] hoped for":

Wakefield's "salvation" during this period was to discover what was preventing
him from being a great writer:

  "The answer would be there hidden in childhood, in some early trauma,
  perhaps even at birth, and by digging down, by going through the muck of
  the years hidden beneath the debris of the unconscious, with pain but
  dedication I would finally--like Galahad reaching the grail--come upon it,
  and in so doing dispel its power, making myself whole and free..."

  Though too proud to directly acknowledge it, Dan Wakefield remembered
several instances where he couldn't quite throw off his religious memories.
The Lord's prayer came to mind so often, he had to replace the words with
'na da na..."  Once after working in the wee hours of the night on writing
a novel, he felt suddenly an overwhelming gratitude for "having just written
at least for once in my life, with a power and ease that made me feel I 'had
it in me'--the ability to create stories, that most mysterious and marvelous
of gifts. Without any other thought I got down on my knees and gave thanks
to God, in prayer." This bothered him because it made him "feel guilty for
not being true to [his] atheism."

  He finally realized after five years of psychological counseling, that
these sessions had NOT brought him any closer to discovering himself.
This both saddened and angered him.  There was a sense of great emptiness
in reading of his life during this period. He directed himself towards
experiencing the life of a writer--a "seeker", and "a person on a quest
to learn [all] about humanity..."

  After struggling to write a good novel, he finally did it-- and it was
successful, even making it to the New York's best seller's list. However,
instead of making him feel fulfilled, he delved even more deeply into
alcohol and drugs.

Wakefield's Journey Back to Religion

  Dan Wakefield's journey back towards God, began after years of addiction
to alcohol and marijuana.  The turning point that was to lead him back,
began around the time of the death of his parents:

 "One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth
  birthday, I woke up screaming.  I got out of bed, went into the next room,
  sat down on a couch, and screamed again.  This was not, in other words, one
  of those waking nightmares left over from sleep that is dispelled by the
  comforting light of day.  It was, rather, a response to the reality that
  another morning had broken in a life I could only deal with sedated by
  wine, loud noise, moving images, and wired to electronic games that further
  distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense of blank, nameless
  pain in the pit of my very being, my most essential half.  It was the
  beginning of a year in which I would have scored in the upper percentile of
  these popular magazine tests that list the greatest stresses of life:  I left
  the house I owned, the city I was living in, the work I was doing, the
  woman I had lived with for seven years and had hoped to remain with the
  rest of my life, ran out of money, discovered I had endangered my health,
  and attended the funeral of my father in May and my mother in November.

  The day I woke up screaming I grabbed from among my books an old Bible
  I hadn't opened for nearly a quarter of a century.  With a desperate
  instinct I turned to the Twenty-third Psalm and read it over, several times,
  the words and the King James cadence bringing a sense of relief and comfort,
  a kind of emotional balm.  In the coming chaotic days and months I sometime
  recited that psalm over in my mind, and it always had that calming
  effect, but it did not give me any sense that I suddenly believed in God
  again.  The psalm simply seemed an isolated source of solace and calm,
  such as any great poem might be."

  Dan Wakefield goes on to describe how his dependence on alcohol (which
had gotten worse after the break up of a seven-year relationship with
a woman friend, followed a week later by the death of his father) had also
given him high blood pressure.  Alone and out of touch with his feelings, he
overheard some neighbors say they wanted to go to mass somewhere on
Christmas Eve. Wakefield then and there decided he'd "like to do that too."

  Although cautiously at first, Dan Wakefield began attending church:

  "Once I began going to church, the age-old religious rituals marking the
  turning of the year deepened and gave a fuller meaning to the cycle of the
  seasons and my own relation to them...Birth and death and resurrection,
  beginnings and endings and renewal, were observed and celebrated in
  ceremonies whose experience made me feel I belonged--not just to a
  neighborhood and a place, but to a larger order of things, a universal
  sequence of life and death and rebirth." (p 17)

  In church, Wakefield discovered old neighbors and friends, which
gave him a sense of communal "relief and refreshment in connecting with
age-old rituals, reciting psalms and singing hymns."  This "connection of
church and neighborhood reinforced one another, gave depth and dimension to
the sense of 'home' that I had felt so cut off from in Hollywood."

  Dan Wakefield's alcohol addiction problem improved over time, but he worried
whether he should give the proper credit to the "church" or to secular
programs he had also attended.  He felt a deep feeling of relief that
these addictions were "lifted" by almost an outside force of "grace."  Yet
he did not wish to feel too "self-righteous" about these changes either.
He read the novel THE POWER AND THE GLORY by Graham Greene and realized
through its story of a (fictional) alcoholic priest who had dedicated his
life to God--that giving up addictions was not necessarily a desirable
"by-product of religious experience."

  He realized one day he believed in God again.  After gazing at some tropical
fish in the New England Aquarium with a girlfriend, he wondered how anyone could
think these amazing creatures could have arisen by a random chain of mutations.
Recognizing his new belief in God, he was still reluctant to use the word
"conversion" because he did not feel any "thunderclap" or "voice" coming
from the sky to melodramatically announce this conversion.  He was relieved
when his minister explained that the word "conversion" does not (when
literally translated from the Hebrew or Greek) mean "rebirth"-- but instead
means "turning".  Wakefield wrote on this,

    "That's what my own experience felt like--as if I'd been walking in
     one direction  and then, in response to some inner pull, I turned--
     not even all the way around, but only at what seemed a slightly
     different angle."

  Still, although he enjoyed better health now,

   "the new path I found myself on seemed often as dangerous and difficult
    as the one I'd been following before.  Sometimes it didn't seem like a
    path at all. Sometimes I felt like a hapless passenger in the sort of
    small airplane they used to show in black and white movies of the 1930's,
    caught in a thunderstorm, bobbing through the night sky over jagged
    mountains without a compass."

  This time he found "strength" from Henri Nouwen's book REACHING OUT, which
says, "...it would be just another illusion to believe that reaching out to
God will free us from pain and suffering.  Often, indeed, it will take us
where we rather would not go.  But we know that without going there we
will not find our life."

  After four years of feeling himself to be "on the right track" in his
journey towards God, he suffered a temporary setback when he was offered
a contract to write a movie script in Hollywood.  He turned it down for
fear he might be sucked back into his old ways.  Then, he panicked at the
thought he had turned down money he sorely needed. His anguish over whether
he was interpreting his prayers appropriately, created a "psychic pain
as unrelenting as a dentist's drill." Twice during this turmoil, he broke
down and returned to his old ways of using drugs--although he never lost
his faith in God.  Then the "storm broke", and he "felt in touch again and
in the light"--but he also knew these storms could return.

   Dan Wakefield reconciled all his feelings this way:

  "belief in God did not depend on how well things were going, that faith
  and prayer and good works did not necessarily have any correlation to
  earthly reward or even tranquility, no matter how much I wished they would
  and thought they should.  I believed in God because the gift of faith
  (if not the gift of understanding) was given me, and I went to church
  and prayed and meditated to try to be closer to His presence and,
  most difficult of all, to discern His will. I knew, as it said in the
  Book of Common Prayer, that His "service is perfect freedom", and my
  greatest frustration was in the constant choices of how best to serve."

  "...I did not come to think that 'everything works out for the best',
  certainly not in the earthly, egocentric terms by which we judge the
  occurrences of our lives, or in the way that the larger events of the
  tumultuous world of wars and earthquakes, murders and plagues, affect us
  personally.  I was fascinated most by the mystery of it, and of how, to
  paraphrase William Faulkner, we so often not only endure but prevail."


    Thankful for the influence of religious Jews who helped steer his towards
the path of believing in God again, Dan Wakefield believes there are many
roads that lead to experiencing God. To him, it is not the religious form
that is important--only belief in a path that leads "towards a greater
power."  Feeling a deeper fullness from his new church family, and his
renewed belief in God, Dan Wakefield's "returning" conveys his feelings
during his ongoing, but progressive spiritual journey.

---------------------------------
(Note:  Today Dan Wakefield is a member of the Unitarian Universalist church. He 
has since written two excellent books: HOW DO WE KNOW WHEN IT'S GOD and 
RELEASING THE CREATIVE SPIRIT! For more information see his website: 
http://www.danwakefield.com/)