Cursed
We are on our summer vacation, an eleven thousand mile road trip across America. We’ve been driving this blue Ford van for weeks by now and all of us, especially the long-suffering parents, are ready to be home. We are heading west through Wyoming, where we have been urged by a writer friend to pay homage to the Medicine Wheel, a sacred place for several North American tribes. Stopping here will take some time—the site is located high on the brow of a mountain, and the road is rutted dirt—but we promised her we would try to find it.
We do. But by the time we park on the high ridge and get out, the sun is beginning to sink and the temperature is already dropping. “Okay, guys,” Mike says to the kids, who are just regaining consciousness after a long summer’s nap. “We can only give this half an hour. Look around, be respectful.”
We wander on our own. I’m aiming the camera at a bundle of feathers and sticks tied to a branch when Mike calls out, “No pictures,” and points to a small wooden sign. I shrug and duck into a grove of dwarfish trees. More signs of worship: ashes, feathers, bits of cloth and herbs. I listen. The mountain looms high over a great dry valley, and from where I am standing, you can almost see the invisible thermals plunging down the slopes to the floor. The trees sigh, though I can’t feel any wind. Otherwise, the silence is profound.
I look around. The kids are off somewhere—I can just hear the light bird call of their voices—and Mike has disappeared too. Defiantly, I lift the camera and take a shot, then another. Everywhere I turn I see more evidence of ritual, much of it recent. It’s intriguing. Why would people pick a nearly inaccessible mountain top for their religious ceremonies? I snap a photo of a fire ring, then a feather bundle. Then I hear Mike calling the troops back to the van, and I stuff the camera into the case and head back to the family. Was I respectful? Yes, I decide. I was interested, so I took some respectful pictures.
Finally, everyone is rounded up. By the time we’re ready to go, the light is almost gone. Mike, I can see, is not happy about this. The road is narrow, the grade is steep, and we’ve got a long way down to the valley. “Okay,” he says, and turns the key. Silence.
The kids give each other uneasy glances. I stare menacingly at the camera—this better not be your fault, I’m thinking—and Mike turns the key again, then again. We aren’t going anywhere, this is clear, and it is now becoming seriously cold.
I give Mike a co-parental look, the one that expresses all the weight of dread responsibility that is suffered by people on a long road trip with their four teenaged kids. The kids themselves are shifting around in their seats and peering nervously out the side windows. “Are we going to have to spend the night here?” asks Andrea. I can hear the slight quaver behind that sentence.
“No,” says Mike shortly. “We’re going to get this thing going.” While I am wondering how, he says, “We’re going to push it up there”—he points—“till we can get it rolling down there.” We all turn and gaze at the valley below.
I think about the winding dirt road with its many interesting ruts. “We are?”
He nods somberly. “Everybody out. Leave the sliding door open. When we’ve got it in the right spot, I’ll let you know, okay?”
There is a scramble and a flurry, then a puffing and a straining. We’re laughing—this is too funny, right?—but also filled with foreboding. We do not want to sleep here tonight. No way. But pushing this van is like shoving a full-scale rhino uphill. Mike yells encouragement from the driver’s seat. We shriek and groan and slip backward, but finally we’ve got it. The van teeters at the brink of the long road down.
We jump in, Johnny drags the heavy sliding door closed, and we all get quiet for a moment. It’s now seriously dark down there. What if the lights won’t come on? What if we get halfway and hit an uphill slope? What if…?
“Here goes nothing,” Mike says, and takes his foot off the brake. The van tilts forward and begins to crunch along the dirt road, at first so slowly that we’re hardly moving.
And then she starts to roll, faster and faster, silently, with no lights. Mike has one foot on the clutch, the other hovering over the brake. Then he is shoving it into gear and popping the clutch and she is suddenly running on her own. I glance back over my shoulder; behind us, the Medicine Wheel has vanished as though we never invaded.
I am in Kathmandu visiting Andrea, who is in college now, studying abroad for a semester. This morning we have come to Pashupatinath, the most important Hindu temple in Nepal. We presented ourselves at the gates, but as non-Hindus, we were not allowed inside. So instead we are climbing the steps toward the Gorakhnath complex, a stone forest of sculptures, Shiva tridents, lingams, and chaityas, or small square mini-temples with bell-shaped roofs. From the stairs we can look down on the Bagmati River and its famous burning ghats.
Burly monkeys hunch atop stupas or lounge in the gloom beneath the trees, and my daughter tells me they are a bad lot, churlish and prone to take offense. “Be careful not to stare at them,” she says. And, knowing her mother well: ”Don’t take their pictures either.” But I wait until she is ahead of me, then crouch to photograph a mild-looking female, who immediately lunges forward, baring wicked teeth. When, breathless, I catch up with Andrea, she laughs and says, “See?”
Sprawled in the shade of the chaityas are loin-clothed, dreadlocked, painted saddhus, holy men skeletal from years of being hammered by the elements. “Especially don’t take their pictures,” my daughter warns, and chastened, I promise I won’t. “They live on alms, and some of them can get pushy. That one”— she points toward a small hut to the left, a dim figure inside— “is unique. He only drinks milk.” I catch a glimpse of him, stunned-looking in the filtered light. Is he praying? Brooding? Dead?
We are so focused on getting through this morass of monkeys and men that we fail to notice the blind beggar in the center of the path ahead. He is keening, his hand is out, and it is clear what we are expected to do. But suddenly I’m feeling stubborn—I have already given so much to beggars on this trip, and this one can’t even see us—and when I catch Andrea’s eye, I can see that after months in Nepal, she is weary of them too. Noiselessly, we slip on by, but as we do, he stops his eerie wail and sniffs the air. “Hurry,” I whisper so urgently that she stumbles, recovers, and starts to shake with silent laughter. The beggar, who now has a lock on us, hurls a lengthy, hissing curse that makes my neck hairs bristle.
We are tired, it is too late to call anyone, and the front door of what we’ve been told is the oldest church on the northern California coast is inexplicably locked. As a perk for my agreeing to come at all, we’d been invited to stay in the rectory tonight. But like the rest of this strange visit, something’s gone wrong.
The moon over the Pacific is like a cat’s eye, impersonal yet full of warning, above the galloping dark sea. The cliffs that mark the boundary of the churchyard are precipitous and slippery with wet shale; I hang onto Mike’s forearm as we pick our way through unmown grass to the backside of the nineteenth century building where we climb the stairs, lift the doormat, and pat around in the grit for the absent key. Not there either: the final indignity in a day marked by baleful unwelcome.
We head back to the camper, which we have driven for two days to get to this stunning but godforsaken stretch of Highway 1. Nearby, and not too long ago, a man was bludgeoned to death and left crumpled on a dirt road, the penalty for cutting in on the marijuana trade that drives the local economy. Up in those dark mountains, we’ve been told, are fortresses you’d never want to stumble on.
We peer down the road to where the twisting highway vanishes into the night. A few lights shine through the murk, but after what we’ve heard today, we’re not prone to venture onto private land. “What about that campground we passed on the way in?” Mike asks. We turn and gaze to the north. Enroute to the place he’s talking about lies a graveyard with a tilted sign, greenish with age and pitted by years of drifting fog and sea-tossed spray: the Druid Cemetery. I think about having to pass that mournful abode of the dead on the way to a dripping redwood grove.
“No thanks,” I say. “Let just sleep here in the camper.”
Which we do, opening the vent so we can see the moon and the cold, brilliant stars, so we can listen to the crash and slide of the Pacific against the cliffs. I am glad to be beside this church, even though it is locked against us. I am glad for the wooden cross. I think about the woman who begged me to come speak here, the posters she put up on telephone poles for fifty miles along the highway. I think about whoever tore them down and put their footprints on my face.
Finally, I sleep. And then, at the same moment, Mike and I jolt upright. Something is chattering into the open vent, a multitude of robotic sounding voices, like a gang of agitated moon-men. We cast each other mystified looks, and Mike puts his finger to his lips. As the eerie gibberish becomes increasingly loud and furious, the back of my neck ices up and I begin to tremble.
But then Mike mouths “Druids,” and instead I am overcome by hysterical giggling. Even after the moon men finally shut up and I manage to calm down, he continues to hold me close, neither of us going fully back to sleep, and the coming of morning feels like the end of a ridiculously long horror movie.
I must admit that I was inadequately prepared for the experience of being cursed. Not necessarily my fault: Western culture has pretty well abandoned its ancient knowledge about how to aim or deflect concentrated malevolence. One might go so far as to say we’ve lost the art of cursing entirely. This is not to say that we do not curse at all—of course we do—but instead that we do it capriciously and without thinking, more like loose cannons than seasoned professionals.
Despite our amateur status, the language of contempt, more often than not couched in sexual terms, is ubiquitous among us, and every imprecation carries a spiritual charge we are both dimly aware of and quick to deny. It’s only words, we protest as we consign someone to hell or paint a vivid verbal picture of him indulging in unspeakable acts. For us, thoughtless cursing has become much more a psychological release, a way to let off steam, than a focused attempt to do someone else premeditated harm. Because, we protest, in the long run, what harm can we possibly do?
This cultural blank face in regard to the question of cursing has contributed mightily to my bafflement about being cursed. How am I supposed to think about these experiences? How can I even be sure they actually happened? And if they did, then what am I supposed to do about them?
Philosopher Charles Taylor believes that without first “disenchanting the universe,” we would have never achieved modernity. As independent, individual selves, rational beings who have learned to control the natural world through scientific means, we experience ourselves as permanently and completely liberated from superstition and taboo. And there is no going back to the time when we could blame a bad day on a curmudgeonly troll or a malicious fairy. We are done with all that, and good riddance.
Not only because of science, however. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart asserts that Christ’s conquering of the powers and principalities was so thorough that he wiped out the entire slate of divine candidates, should we ever go in search of an alternate deity. As he puts it, it is Christ or nothing; we are long since over our ancient love affair with polytheism.
Yet I have been cursed, and nowhere in the contemporary Western worldview is there a slot for that experience. Not even, I’m sad to say, in most churches, which to a large degree have come to equate the realm of spirit with unhealthy and outmoded superstition. As priest and psychologist Morton Kelsey puts it, “Ever since the Middle Ages, in the Christian outlook a split has been growing between man’s soul and his being and life here and now. Gradually, the church has come to accept the idea that reality in the immediate world is all derived from the physical— from matter, which acts according to rational functions.”
The result? Even in the church, people find it almost impossible to accept a consoling or enlightening spiritual experience as real, much less the experience of being targeted by concentrated malevolence. As Fr. Ronald Rolheiser says, “There is more than a little unbelief among us believers.” Or as another man, an attorney and professed Christian, once announced to me after a lecture, “I’m too logical to swallow all that stuff”—“that stuff” being my own account of a profound spiritual experience I’d never before shared in public.
Yet in the midst of all this self-assured skepticism, I find that I have been cursed. And not randomly or accidentally either, but with malice aforethought. In the case of the Medicine Wheel, for violating sacred space. At Pashnupatinath, for breaking the ancient law that says the indigent must not be disregarded. On the northern California coast, for daring to preach Christ in a community united only by their hatred of all things Christian. One of these curses was like a stinging slap on the back of the hand, immediate, unmistakable, and effective; never again will I be tempted to ignore religious boundaries, whether or not I understand or care what has prompted them. The third, the curse of the chattering moon-men, was meant to scare me off, and it did. No more will I be that naive, nor will I forget that, under the right circumstances, the word of God has the power to trigger deadly opposition. The effects of both these curses, which were meant to be shocking but temporary, dissipated as soon as we vacated the areas.
It is the curse of the blind beggar I have never forgotten, for he clearly knew what he was doing. What terrible fate did he call down upon us? When will his hissing imprecation finally detonate in our lives? A mark of my culturally induced unbelief is that it took me three or four years after the experience to finally pray for protection against its effects, in spite of its bothering me all that time. Even more remarkably, given how many times I have thought of it, I have yet to share my concern with a priest. What if he, too, has succumbed to the contemporary zeitgeist? What if he raises a supercilious eyebrow and tells me to get real?
Yet despite the trouble they have caused me, particularly in the case of the blind beggar, I am thankful to have been so unmistakably cursed. My three curses have curiously enough become my steppingstones back into another era, back before empiricism and its methods became our foundational cultural belief, back before psychology took over the role of spirituality in our lives. Nobody can accuse me of wish fulfillment—what sane person, after all, would wish to be cursed? —and neither can they characterize my curses as a crutch or as an opiate designed to cushion me from reality.
More, even, than giving me bedrock evidence that the contemporary Western view is woefully deficient—after all, it cannot explain my curses, can it? —these experiences have put me in closer touch with the world of the Gospels. And what an eerie world that is, its skies alight with spiraling clouds of manna, its trees aglow with angels. I think of Jesus cursing the fig for its stubborn recalcitrance and shiver at my own. Who did I think I was, strutting so self-confidently down the road to nowheresville?
No, my three curses, regardless of how they rocked my worldview, have strangely enough become three indisputable blessings. Like Job struck dumb with marvel, I finally know without a doubt that my Redeemer liveth.