rem – text2cloud

Life Lessons: A Remembrance

I’ve never been one for birthdays. I understand, of course, why adults make a commotion over marking the passage of time when children are involved. But I’m less clear on why all the bother continues into your twenties and beyond. Congratulations bub, you’re still here!

You and seven billion others.

Even so, when I woke the other day on the morning of what would’ve been my mother’s eighty-first birthday, I found myself thinking of the last time I saw her. It was nine years ago. My youngest and I had flown down to Florida for a short visit just after the New Year. We’d had a pleasant time and were getting in the rental car to drive back to the hotel before flying out early the next morning. Mom was standing in the driveway, the orange glow of the winter sunset stretching out behind her. And she was weeping and waving, as she always did, until we were around the corner and out of sight. It was a ritual she performed whenever any of her four children left.

We’ll be back soon, I’d said.

Two weeks later, she suffered a massive coronary, was taken to the hospital in an ambulance and, protected by her Living Will, was allowed to slip this mortal coil.

She wasn’t sentimental about the end. She didn’t want to be a burden and she certainly didn’t want to spend the final years of her life with tubes up her nose–a sign, she knew from decades of watching As the World Turns, that you were about to be written out of the story.

So, she went on her own terms, her final words: God’s will be done.

In her room, her open prayer book, her check for the Sunday offering, her ashtray. It appeared that she got in one final smoke before she left for good. I certainly hope so. She had no patience for the pleas of her censorious children, the more gentle encouragement of her friends, or the stern admonitions of her doctors. Her body. Her life. Back off.

And there, on her desk, waiting for her executor, a folder labelled, “Dead Mother File.” Within, instructions for the funeral, the music, account numbers, addresses of people to contact. She didn’t fear death; I think the only thing she ever really feared is that some harm would come to her children. So, the folder was meant, I think, as a final reassurance to us. It was a way of saying: What’s the big deal? Everybody dies.

ESM earns her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with four kids under the age of eight.

I try to explain to my kids how different the world was when I was growing up. My mom put four kids through college and supported my dad’s decades’ long efforts to make it as a writer. She bought a home. She created a study abroad program that made it possible for her to spend six weeks in France each summer for nearly a decade and another one that allowed her to spend three weeks each winter in Martinique. All on the salary of a French professor at a small liberal arts college in the south. No inheritance. No outside help. All on her own.

It doesn’t even seem believable to me.

Because there was not enough room to go around, Mom’s home office was in the kitchen. She’d type up her quizzes and exams in there after we’d gone to bed, happy to be long gone from the bitter winters in Northern Illinois and our single year in Denver, when there had been an earthquake and helicopters hung out over our house, spotlights sweeping the neighborhood for days after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Happy, cramped in her kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking into the early morning hours.

She hustled. She had her dreams and those included getting her kids overseas as often as possible. In those days, if you bought enough plane tickets at one time, you’d get one for free, so she hustled that much harder to get her program to grow. I’d spend the fall typing addresses out of the Modern Language Association’s membership guide, sending an announcement about the program to anyone who worked in a Romance Languages department. (She paid me by the piece.) One summer the program had grown enough so she could take my sister; then it was big enough to take me and my sister; and one crazed summer, it was big enough to take the whole tribe.

Everything was on a shoestring. Mom prided herself on being indifferent to luxuries. The point was not to travel in first class; the point was to have made it to Venice, so you could visit the cathedral. For her kids, the traveling tended to be enjoyed more than the museums. This was fine with her: she wanted us nearby is all; she had faith that, over time, the experience of traveling would transform us. In the meantime, if she only got ten minutes before her favorite Vermeer, that was ten minutes more than none.

Allegory of Painting

When my younger brother was entering his senior year of high school, Mom made a life-changing decision: she changed jobs, assuming the position of Head of the Humanities at a small college in southern Maryland. Pretty much everything went straight to hell after that: selling the house in Florida was a nightmare–the timing couldn’t have been worse, really, with interest rates at their highest point ever.

How do you sell a house when the prime rate is at 20%?

The move to Maryland took place in stages, with Dad spending a year cleaning the house for buyers who were nowhere to be found and Mom living alone in temporary quarters. There was snow; there was some crazy scandal in the uppermost ranks of the administration; the floor in the new house, a two-piece pre-fab, felt spongy.

Eventually, Mom found another job: there was another promotion, another move. And then she was collateral damage when the guy who hired her imploded.

One more move brought her back to Florida, sixty miles east of the college she’d left less than a decade before. Head of the Humanities again, this time at a university for pilots, surrounded by students who wanted to fly and colleagues who were ex-military and not exactly accustomed to taking orders from a woman.

Somehow, Mom kept her head up through all of this, adjusting to each change in circumstance, finding common ground with guys who underestimated her intelligence, who dismissed her liberal commitments, who joked about feminism as a dead cause. How did she do this?

I still don’t really know.

When, improbably, I ended up being elected chair of the department I’m in, I’d talk to Mom every weekend, tell her about the challenges I was facing, the surprises that had walked through the door, the things that had blown up in my face. It was fun: she was a sounding board and a wise advisor, even when she was encouraging me to pursue solutions that were beyond me. It usually veered to raucous irreverence; we were off-the-record and were reminding each other that there are worse things in the world than having people mad at you. It comes with the job, if you’re doing the job of leading.

Invariably, each phone call ended the same way. Mom would remind me to tell my wife and my daughters that I love them and then she’d say:

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Mom loved a good prank. Indeed, as my siblings and I spent an afternoon in Mom’s living room collaboratively composing her obituary, we kept putting a joke in and then taking it out, laughing till we wept.

She is survived by her four children, her four grandchildren (now five), her three cats, and her beloved pony.

Years before, I was at work when I received an email from Mom, cc:ed to all my siblings. She’d gone to a favorite outdoor eatery on the intercoastal waterway, where she’d fallen in love with a rescued greyhound racer. She couldn’t help herself; she was never a dog person, but she’d just fallen for the poor guy. She’d hoped we’d all understand; she just had to bring him home.

Mom and her Boy

The kids went into high alert mode. What was she thinking? The dog would terrify and/or eat her beloved cats. He’d knock her down, pull her down the street. Full-on catastrophizing was the order of the day.

I tried to be diplomatic.

Was she sure this was really a good idea? After all, she’d raised us on Robert Maynard Hutchins’ mantra: Every time I feel like exercising, I lie down and wait for it to go away. Wasn’t the dog a de facto exercise machine?

My sister tried her hand.

Mom calmly met our concerns: he was great company; the cats loved him; the walking would be good for her.

When she’d wound us up to the point of exasperation, I called her.

She giggled.

Beau, it’s a joke.

I think it was her way of reassuring us that she was happy, enjoying life, and there was no reason to worry.

What are our lives for?

Mom believed fervently that we are here to serve others.

This seems a better response to me than the old saw that says we philosophize in order to learn how to die. Better to spend one’s time learning how to live.

Montaigne, my guide, captures the difference between living with one eye on the clock and living in the moment in his response to Cicero’s valorization of philosophy. No, Montaigne decides after following his own thoughts hither and yon. Rather than devoting his thoughts to how it will all end, he concludes:

Happy is the death that leaves no time for ceremonial preparations.

The Gal in Full — Click image to enlarge.

The Great Wall: A Remembrance

At some point during the aging process, it is said, each individual death becomes every death. You grow older, a relative dies, a friend dies, someone you work with dies, somebody somewhere dies. One way or another, Death is brought to your attention and then, by some alchemical process, confronting that specific instance of mortality triggers memories of every other death: your parents’, their parents’, your aunts’ and uncles’, the girl behind you in French class whose car slid out of control, the staff member who was found days after she’d collapsed in her kitchen, the retired colleague who lay down for a nap and never got back up. The specific gets swallowed up by the universal. Waves of grief rise and fall, ebb and flow, and before you know it, you’re in the Valley of Darkness, slogging along, alone.

For most of us, the grief eventually gives way and, without really noticing it, we find ourselves back in the daily grind, experiencing the everlasting indifference the living have for the dead.

Life does, indeed, go on, though at times it may seem nothing more than a roach-like life, one that skitters off and then takes flight into the darkness.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is upon us. The memorial at Ground Zero has been furiously rushed to completion in time for today’s inaugural, surviving-family-members-only, ceremony. The goal, ostensibly, is to preserve the names of the thousands who died on what is surely the most consequential day in the history of the United States and to enshrine, as heros, those who were in the wrong place when the planes went in and the buildings came down.

I felt at the time and continue to feel ten years later that it was the day the nation, as such, chose to embrace fear, death, and grief as a way of life.

Other responses were possible, but the living called out for revenge on behalf of the dead–an eye for an eye; a formal policy of pre-emptive retaliation; battle plans named Shock and Awe and Infinite Justice; kill’em all and let God sort it out.

To be sure, I was as terrified as the next person in the immediate aftermath of the attacks–perhaps more so. I advised a colleague to drive home on back roads, in case planes fell out of the sky on the New Jersey Turnpike. I swore I’d never fly again. I stood in the central hallway of my office building and told the few students straggling in to go back to their dorms and wait for news. I walked home under that astonishingly blue sky, in a new world of silence: no honking, no hiss of traffic, no air traffic, save for the sudden screeching sound of the Air Force making its presence known. I sat my young girls on the steps and, with my wife, told them that something terrible had happened, but that we’d be OK.

The protective incuriosity of the youth shielded them from the initial experience. They disappeared and their parents watched the buildings collapse and collapse and collapse, never quite able to believe what their eyes kept telling them.

Within weeks, I was on a plane to a conference on the future of teaching. I spoke extemporaneously about a New Yorker cartoon where a man approached a ticket counter, saying, “I want to go back to September 10th.” My wife and I considered changing our plans to live overseas starting in the summer of 2002. We had the concerns of the privileged: we worried about getting to Europe, about travel after we were abroad, about anti-American sentiment, about putting our kids in danger.

Reason loosened terror’s grip. A determination to be optimistic about the future counter-balanced the round-the-clock news reports, which have continued uninterrupted up to this very instant, about the immanence of the next major attack, the next sleeper cell, the next conspiracy. We boarded the plane in Newark. The plane arced over where the Twin Towers had once been. And life went on.

Everyone knows The Great Wall of China. One of the seven wonders of the world. Building on a scale never since repeated. Look at how that ribbon of sweat and stone slices through the forested terrain, denying passage.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Well, sort of knows it.

It turns out the Monument to Chinese Isolationism isn’t actually visible from outer space. It isn’t now, nor was it ever, continuous. But these minor details hardly distract from the ongoing, living impossibility of the Wall. Nearly four thousand miles of rammed earth, brick, and chiseled stone, piled into a guardable mass, protecting the tribes within for millennia, keeping fear at bay.

When I started teaching more than twenty years ago, I was assigned, and assigned to my students in turn, Walker Percy’s “Loss of the Creature,” where he insists, in a lastingly aggravating way, that it is virtually impossible to see the Grand Canyon. Percy’s argument is that, after you’ve driven across the country and stepped out of your car thinking you’re about to have an amazing experience, what you see is not the Grand Canyon, but your preconceptions:

It is almost impossible [to see the Grand Canyon] because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex, head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard [Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, credited with its discovery in 1540]; it is rather that which has already been formulated by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon.

Percy has a surprising power to haunt his readers. He makes you doubt your own experiences. He makes you question your motives. Why am I dropping a quarter in this telescope? Is it to see the colors of the canyon? Or is it to go through the motions of looking at the canyon?

Smile. This is me having a life-changing encounter with the natural world.

Or. Smile. This is a picture of me seconds before I get back in the car and drive to the hotel, where I plop down on the bed and dial through the cable channels until I drift off to sleep.

It’s the same picture.

As it happens, through the kind offices of a number of remarkable people, I had the opportunity to travel to Beijing in the summer of 2006. The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continued, of course, as mere inconveniences to all Americans, save those directly involved in the conflicts. For your average American, the only evidence that a war was going on was the shoe-and-belt removing ritual at the airport. So, I took my shoes off in Newark, flew to L.A., and joined an extraordinary group of teachers heading to China for a conference on literacy.

Despite the day-long orientation in L.A., I wasn’t prepared for the sensory overload that came with actually being in Beijing.

When I was a sophomore in college, we read St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God: God is that which nothing greater can be conceived. You get to God by exhausting your own sense of scale: the biggest thing you can think is smaller than God. This recursive mental activity produces, over time, a sense of awe. Not “awesome,” which is now used indifferently to describe everything from going to class to getting out of bed to unleashing a carpet bombing campaign on the cradle of civilization, but awe–an encounter with the very limits of human understanding, a scaling out to the unscalable realms of the eternal, the infinite, the unknown.

I don’t mean to suggest that I felt, at any time, that just by being in Beijing I had been placed in the presence of something divine. To the contrary, to the extent that I’ve ever had a glimpse of something in this realm, it has always manifested as being at the furthest extreme from the giganticness Anselm invokes–in the evanescent and the ephemeral, in the narrow compass of human community, as when a band of strangers embarks on an adventure together.

In essence, I’ve gone the long way round the barn to say that, from the moment we landed in the Shanghai airport to change planes and found ourselves in a building that seemed to have no outer limits, I felt I couldn’t begin to comprehend the scale of what architects call “the built environment.”

I should have prefaced all of this by saying I have travelled a fair amount, but the scale. The scale! Everywhere. The traffic. The smog. The masses of people. The number of bicycles. The restaurants. (Party of two hundred? Right this way!) The populated distances. The campus, where the library was, as measured in square feet, larger than the entire United States and you needed an airplane to get from one section of the card catalogue to the next.

“Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”

Pascal’s fear is not mine; I’m not turning to his most cited phrase now because it captures what it was like to sit on our tour bus and move slowly along the packed highways of Beijing. Rather, it’s the productive tension between the economy of Pascal’s eight word statement and the lasting significance of the destabilizing encounter with space on an unthinkable scale he describes that gets at the experience I’m trying to point to. As everything gets bigger; you get smaller and smaller. And yet, as you try to re-map yourself into this new cartography, the disorientation of shrinking to the vanishing point produces thoughts and feelings that grow and become disproportionately intense, vivid, electric.

There was one gal who hadn’t travelled with the forty or so of us to Beijing. Met us there, having taken some other route. Spent time in the country. I didn’t quite follow it all: I was only just getting to know the others in the group, so she was another unfamiliar face, among many.

The Tour Leader who was responsible for chartering the whole trip had never dealt with educators before and she didn’t know what to make of the group’s general desire to explore without being chaperoned, to have unstructured, unscheduled time. With each passing day, she grew increasingly aggravated with us, lecturing us on the necessity of obedience and insisting upon following her lead. I can’t speak for all of the folks on the trip, but I know that a number of us ended up feeling pulled back to a model of human understanding more appropriate for high school, where everyone was simultaneously colluding to avoid being chastised by the angry authority figure at the front of the room and trying to find ways to sneak out of class without a hall pass and have some fun. While there was good reason to keep on a tight leash during the conference, this reasoning made less sense as we settled into the cultural immersion part of the trip.

Jen had even less patience for the Tour Leader than (we) Elders did. So, as the tour was coming to an end and it was time for the grand finale excursion to The Great Wall, she made plans to go to a different part of The Wall and to get there using public transportation.

How can the sightseer recover the Grand Canyon?

. . . It may be recovered by leaving the beaten track. The tourist leaves the tour, camps in the back country.

I’ll confess to being honored to being invited to join Jen and two other young men her age who were getting to The Wall by other means. Jen had done all the research for how to get off the beaten track: she knew which part of The Wall we should head out for; where the subway was; which line to take to get all the way across the city to the massive bus depot; which bus to take to the next depot; how to barter for the next link to our target destination.

With three guys in tow, Jen was the alpha-dog, enjoying the adventure, confident that everything would work out, even though we didn’t have a syllable of functional Chinese to share between the four of us.

And, sure enough, after traveling for hours, after having been seemingly left in the middle of nowhere, we got a cab, which drove for another hour and dropped us at the entryway to what was billed as the most spectacular section of The Great Wall within a day’s drive of Beijing.

What Percy terms “the creature”–i.e., a direct, unmediated, unprepackaged encounter with experience–was within reach.

We cut through the corn, climbed past the pine, edged up next to The Wall, pulled ourselves through an opening, headed towards the “best spot.”

Of course, there’s a paradox in following directions to go off the beaten path to see what has been recommended as the best spot off the beaten path, but this is part of Percy’s larger point about how elusive “the creature” is now that the world has been so thoroughly mapped, photographed, travelled, and documented. If you’re going to get at the creature at all, you’ve got to move through paths defined by paradox and contradiction.

A sign greeted us at the entranceway: the “best spot” was reserved for filming for that day and on into the distant future. It was perfect, in its own way: access to reality denied by order of the movie industry!

The creature high-tailed it over the furthest crest, cackling.

Getting off the beaten path isn’t the only way to see the Grand Canyon, though. Percy includes the possibility presented by disappointed expectations:

It may be recovered as a consequence of a breakdown of the symbolic machinery by which the experts present the experience to the consumer. A family visits the canyon in the usual way. But shortly after their arrival, the park is closed by an outbreak of typhus in the south. They have the canyon to themselves. What do they mean when they tell the home folks of their good luck: “We had the whole place to ourselves”?

We head in the other direction. It may not be the best spot, but how bad could it be?

What is the point of The Wall, really?

We walk and walk, each step made possible by labors unimaginable.

Who mourns the nameless millions who made The Wall?

Not us.

We marvel at The Wall’s existence. At the vistas. At the very fact that we are doing this, together. We offer praises to Roy Fox and Martha Townsend for making the trip possible. We talk to the desperate people who yammer next to us, every step of the way. We buy their water, their post cards, their good will, our peace of mind.

The Great Wall: once you’re on it, how do you get off?

It goes on forever, a ribbon to eternity.

No two steps are alike.

There’s no rhythm. No settling in.

Each moment is a bone-jarring introduction into the startling reality of the next moment.

Forever.

For as far as the eye can see.

Forever.

I have no idea how far we’ve walked or for how long. The Mongolian woman who had been walking with me for the first hour or so, telling me a story of unimaginable suffering, is long gone. When we crest and pass through one of the abandoned guard houses, sometimes there is someone to sell us water, sometimes not.

We walk.

I’m the oldest and I think, one foot in front of the other, forcing up, slowing down, that this is not such a bad place or time to die. In the prime of life. On one of the world’s wonders. Why not?

But I am just tired and I don’t want the day to end. There will never be another like this one for me and I know it.

Ahead, there’s a spur on the other side of a footbridge.

It doesn’t seem like much. Just get down to the bridge. Get off The Wall. Scoot down the mountainside. Find a cab. To the mini-bus. To the bus. To the subway. To the hotel.

It is, literally, all down hill. To the bridge and down, down, down, to the camp where there are cabs for hire.

But I’m really feeling my age, which by this point I figure is at least equal to the age of the universe, if not older. We’re all sun-baked and wobbly, feeling the bridge sway beneath us.

And then, suddenly giddy, discovering that there’s a zip cord down to the car park.

I’m ready to leave the ground, hang above the water, weightless and free.

I am ready to fly.

I land on the dock below and prepare to take pictures as the rest of the team zips down.

We return to the hotel and trade stories of our adventures with the rest of the group. Forty-eight hours after that, we all have been dropped back into our respective lives.

And then six years later, last week, the news that Jen had died. Violently. In her own home. At the hands of another.

Jennifer L. Wilson was committed to elementary education, was a teacher of teachers, was a spark. I knew her for less than two weeks, spent one memorable day walking with her on The Great Wall, and feel this profound loss, even though I had no expectation of our paths ever crossing again. I can only imagine what her passing means for her community, her students, her friends. She had that rarest of human talents–she made things happen.

On 9/11, which might best be termed the National Day of Reaction, I think again of our walk along The Great Wall, breached and broken by the inexorable passage of time, the one-time impregnable line of defense in steep decline, now nothing but a tourist site.

Time does not heal all wounds; it simply outlives them and then doesn’t even take note when the wounds are gone. When did we stop feeling the raw pain of December 7th? When did those who survived the bombings on August 6th and August 9th let go the memories of those days? When will those targeted by drones, those driving the wrong mountain road, those attending the wrong wedding, those shopping in the wrong crowded bazaar, the nameless ones congregating at places without names: when will they forget being present at the very moment the business of the everyday turned to tallying the day’s casualties?

The first step down the path towards peace comes by way of trying to see the world through the eyes of another. Ten years ago, the nation’s leaders, democrat and republican, liberal and hawk, united in committing us to a future of fear, with the blind and unrealizable goal of exacting revenge on the unnamed, uniformless forces arrayed against modernity.

Can we step off this path and start anew?

I’d like to think so.

The Good News Cult

I had just recently come back from what I was telling people was “the best experience of my life.” Over my winter break at Rutgers University, I decided to try something different and embarked on ten-day trip sponsored by a Korean organization called the Good News Corps that eventually brought me to Monterrey, Mexico, where I participated in the IYF (International Youth Fellowship) English Camp. The camp aimed to teach English to Mexican students of all ages over the course of three days. The whole trip only cost $300. The memories were still fresh in my mind: the laughing, the dancing, the singing, the half-dozen girls holding me crying, thanking me for coming. Except now all these warm fuzzy feelings were being replaced with something else, something much more unsettling. I was having trouble processing what I was reading on my computer screen. It was an article about the trip that made the front page of nytimes.com, titled “Traveling to Teach English; Getting Sermons Instead,” sent to me by another student who went on the trip. The article details the account of two students who went home early in the trip while we were still in Dallas, Texas for four days of “training” in preparation for teaching in Mexico. They felt they were victims of a scam, and were unhappy with how much of the camp centered on religion and the “Mind Lectures” of the program’s leader, Ock Soo Park. This wasn’t surprising, as I had met plenty of kids there who were upset for the same reasons, myself included, but most of us toughed it out for the sake of being able to go to Mexico. It was the comments section that was causing my state of disbelief.

“Evil. Creepy and Evil.” “Sounds an awful lot like the bad parts of Jonestown.” “While editorial concerns must have precluded Mr. Dwyer from calling a duck a duck, we all know these unwitting students got trapped in a recruitment session for a cult.” “Typical cult strategies.” “This sounds like the Moonie cult from years ago.” “This organization essentially considered a cult in South Korea, known as “Saviorists” (구원파)…”

And they went on. “This can’t be right,” was all I could think. Different flashes of my trip started replaying in my head. The mass baptisms in the hotel pool. The two-hour mind lectures. The lack of sleep. My moment of revelation. Could it be true? Did I willingly drink the Kool-aid? Did I become part of a cult recruitment session for ten days?

: Members of the Jonestown Cult

Jonestown. The Moonies. The Manson Family. Mass Suicide. Cults. Only crazy people are involved with those things, right? They’re supposed to be groups of mentally ill people doing bizarre things, far away from the rational world of everyday life. Right? At least that’s what I thought. And so began my research. According to statistics from the Cult Hotline & Clinic (an organization dedicate to helping victims of cults and educating the public about them located in New York City), 5 to 7 million Americans have been involved in cults or cult-like groups. If we took the lower estimate of 5 million, and created a separate country consisting of only Americans that have been or are involved with cults, it would have a larger population than about half of the countries in the world. The next country on the list would be Ireland, with a population of 4.5 million. There are anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 cults active in America, and approximately 180,000 more people are recruited every year. So what makes an organization a cult? It’s one of those words with many definitions due to the various ways we use it, such as something have a “cult following” or when we describe a dictatorship based around a “cult of personality”, such as in the case of North Korea’s fanatical devotion to its glorious leader. According to Rutgers Professor of Sociology Benjamin Zablacki, a cult in terms of a formal organization is defined as “an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and the demand of total commitment.” But when do we decide that a group should be considered a cult instead of some other less sinister classification? The general consensus among sociologists is that some form of coercive persuasion or “mind control” must be involved. This doesn’t mean you are strapped down in some Kubrickian theatre with clamps on your eye-lids while you are forced to watch propaganda. The process of “brainwashing” can be extremely subtle, and most of the victims of mind control are willing participants every step of the way. One man who knows this first hand is Allen Tate Wood, a self proclaimed “author, educator, and consultant on thought reform and the psychology of the cult phenomenon.” While in his twenties, Wood spent five years of his life as part of the Unification Church, more commonly known as “The Moonies,” the organization that many of the comments in the nytimes.com article drew allusions to.

: A “Blessing Ceremony,” or mass wedding of the Unification Church (click for article)

The Unification Church is classified as a “new religious movement.” Founded in South Korea by Sun Myung Moon in 1954, it now has anywhere from 5 to 7 million members in countries all across the world. Much controversy has surrounded the organization due to a variety of reasons including its practice of mass weddings, the claim that Sun Myung Moon was personally asked to save humanity by Jesus Christ himself, and numerous accusations by ex-members and academics that the organization is a cult. This hasn’t deterred the Moonies much however, as today, the scope of the organization remains absolutely massive. For example, if you have ever eaten sushi in the United States, there is a good chance you ate a restaurant owned or supplied by the Unification Church as it is the largest owner of sushi restaurants in the country. Sun Myung Moon and his Moonies have funded, founded, or supported an extremely large amount of organizations in a numerous different industries. (Full list here.) Allen Tate Wood’s experience with the Moonies (recounted here in a personal essay) began in 1969 when he found himself broke and homeless on the steps of the student union on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. He was approached by a young man and offered a place to stay at the “Unified Family” commune. Within a week, he had received five lectures from the communes leader about the religions philosophy, been informed that Sun Myung Moon was the “Messiah,” and was fully on board with Unification Church and its doctrine. In the coming years, Wood would be groomed to be a future leader of the group, becoming president of one of their American political organizations, flying around the world to various countries, and even appearing on the CBS evening news while in Cambodia, asking for more military aid for the country in its fight against “Communist aggression.” (His trip had been paid for by the South-Vietnamese government under the agreement that any information gained would be used to garner support for the Vietnam War on U.S. campuses.) Wood would eventually gain a private audience with Moon himself. During the audience, Wood quotes Moon as such:

Moon said to me,” You have a great responsibility. It is your job to initiate the work of winning the academic community in America to my side.” Further he said, ” The allegiance of the scholarly community is a vital key in my plan to restore the world. Since universities hold the reigns of certification for all the major professions and since universities are the crucible in which young Americans form their basic attitudes and life directions, we must forge a path toward influencing and ultimately controlling American campuses.”

Soon afterwards in 1971, Moon came to U.S. to take direct control of the American Unification Church, and forced all members to dedicate themselves to the cause full-time in exchange for room and board. Wood would continue to aid Moon in expanding the organization, which included helping him fund raise $294,000 (strictly through selling candy and flowers on the street) for a down payment on an $800,000 estate in Tarrytown, N.Y. named “Belvedere.” Belvedere would be used as Moon’s residence and as a training ground for the organization where certain followers would be “reprogrammed”.

: Allen Wood lecturing on Divine Principle, the Unification Church’s religious doctrine.

Eventually, Wood would be raised to the “exalted position of imperial taster for the royal consort,” which meant he switched all of his servings of food with Mrs. Moon’s and sat at her left-hand side. Shortly after this however, Wood lost faith in the group and broke away from Moon and the Unification Church with several others. While in the organization, Wood was considered the highest member of the political arm of the American Unification Church. After separating from the church and coming to terms with his experience, Wood began working on helping cult victims and their families. This eventually lead him to work with alcoholics and drug-addicts, as he claims there are parallels between the way the brain is affected by both. My experience with the Good News Corps did not take me on such an expansive journey, but I found that there are disturbing similarities between the teachings of the Moonies described by Wood and the content of the “Mind Lectures” I received during my time with the organization from the program’s leader, Ock Soo Park.

Ock Soo Park (right) giving a Mind Lecture with his interpreter Joe Park (left, no relation) at a 2011 IYF World Camp

The content of the “Mind Lectures” I received during my trip was frightening to me at first. Ock Soo would start by instructing us to follow along as he read a passage from the Old Testament of the Bible. Over the next two hours he would use the passages as a loose base for his stories of how he has personally helped wayward souls who were struggling with depression, suicide, and other issues that arise from having a “closed heart.” He asserted that the human heart and mind were weak and full of sin, and that the only way to reach salvation was to stop exercising your own will and opinions and to open your heart to allow Christ to work through you. All sin and suffering are a result of trusting your own thoughts and instincts and acting upon them, which closes your heart to Jesus. This metaphor of a closed heart versus an open heart would be hammered into us repeatedly over the course of the trip. Anyone who was having problems or any kind of negativity in their life (or as I would find out later, broke any of the rules of the trip or voiced any displeasure) was said to have them because they had a closed heart and followed their own thoughts instead of Christ’s, and the remedy always came in the form of opening your heart to the messages in the lectures to allow Jesus to work through you. For comparison, here’s an excerpt from Wood’s account of how members were “reprogrammed” at Moon’s Belvedere estate:

“The training program at Belvedere was aimed at breaking down the individual’s identity by subjecting him or her to an emotionally and physically exhausting schedule of repetitive lectures…The restructuring of the trainee’s ego was based on Moon’s theology that projects absolute faith in Moon as the essential building block of a “restored” personality. It attacks the validity of the individual conscience. It explicitly denies the individual’s capacity to make morally responsible existential decisions. Somewhere along the line in the theology, love of God is translated into blind obedience to Moon and his representatives in the hierarchical chain. One is finally left with submission to Moon as the only answer to fallen man’s condition of moral paralysis.”

We received two of these two-hour Mind Lectures every day for the four days we were in Dallas; one in the afternoon and one in the evening, interspersed among an exhaustive schedule that had us awake at 5:30 in the morning and going to bed at 12 ‘o clock at night. After every Mind Lecture, we were lead to a smaller room and given another, more personal lecture that lasted about an hour from Ock Soo Park’s interpreter, Joe Park. We were served three meals a day, but they were of small portions and with minimal protein. We were not allowed to leave the hotel for any reason.This was especially frustrating as there was no place to get food in the hotel aside from a small Starbucks that sold a very limited number of sandwiches and pastries, which meant we only ate what they provided us at the scheduled meals, as we were not allowed to order room service. After the first day, we were given meal tickets before most meals to assure that we could not get a second helping of food.I learned to perpetually exist in a state of exhaustion and hunger. I really didn’t mind too much at the time. Now I have to mention a particular comment from the nytimes.com article that struck me particularly hard:

“This sounds very much like a cult and the practices are quite similar to those employed by the Moonies (Unification Church), The Way . Often they claim they are hosting something innocuous like a “non-denominational Christian retreat”; they never indicate the real name of their organization. Often the venue is in a remote location which makes opting out difficult. The subsequent controlled environment resembles a lot of corporate retreats with a few differences. If possible, subjects are provided with minimal calories – especially protein – and at the same time, constant group activities using peer pressure to minimize sleeping time. On the 3rd or 4th day when most subjects are physically and mentally exhausted, they may be invited to “relax” and meditate; around this point, the cult’s true philosophies may come out in the form of a hypnotic recorded lecture. Not everyone gets “hooked” but many do – and indicate later (if they get de-programmed) that it was the start of the “brainwashing”.”

Not only did it manage to capture the experience extremely well, but in particular, the part about the third or fourth day hit me like a ton of bricks. On the morning of the fourth day, I’d say I was at the peak of my exhaustion. I almost fell asleep in the morning English lecture. However, later on as I sat listening to the Gracias Choir (the Good News Corps’ official, world-class choir that played before every Mind Lecture), something peculiar happened. After noting how exhausted I was only moments before, all of a sudden I was wide-awake. The music started to sound fuller, like it was coming from inside my head. Everything seemed brighter, like it had a faint glow to it. I sat upright in my chair, my eyelids peeled back.

: The Gracias Choir

When Ock Soo Park came on stage, I wasn’t really following what he was saying, but a stream of thoughts ran through my head about how religion seemed to be motivating all these people around me to do such great things. I questioned what I was doing with my life, and somehow got the idea that I should study religion, that maybe I should try to educate people about all the great things religion can do for a person. Even though I didn’t believe in the Bible, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the great lessons it taught people if it was taken metaphorically. I figured that I could change my major from journalism to some kind of religious study, and then maybe I could travel with the IYF to another country, like Japan, to learn more about the bible while experiencing a different culture. Throughout the trip, the group leaders always stressed that if we had any kind of spiritual trouble or had a desire to get further involved with organization, that we should tell them, and that they would arrange a meeting with a pastor to help us. I asked my group leader for one of these meetings during this lecture, intent on discussing my plans with someone. My group leader was extremely excited when I told her, as earlier we had a discussion about my lack of faith in Jesus, where she promised she would get me to see the light over the course of the trip. I told the other members in my group about my moment later in the day, and they all seemed excited for me. None of them questioned the logic behind my choice. Luckily, logistical problems resulted in me never having a meeting that day, and later on (in a much more regular mind-state) I told my group leader that it wasn’t urgent and I just wanted to speak with someone about getting more involved after the trip. In retrospect, it was one of the most irrational thoughts I have ever had in my life. I was thinking about changing majors, taking a year off of my studies, and going with this organization to a foreign country for an extended period of time to learn about a religious text I didn’t believe in. The experience of the moment this thought came to me was very distinct; I had never felt anything like that before in my life, and I was left wondering if other people had a similar moment with a different outcome. This excerpt from Wood’s article “Five Elements of Cult Counseling” seems to confirm my suspicions:

The net effect of the cult indoctrination is to produce a shift in consciousness, a shift in affect. Often this shift is accompanied by a “snapping moment”; a moment in which the cult’s manipulative techniques bear fruit in the production of a “spiritual experience”. This experience (the outcome of a tried and proven system) becomes, for the unwary initiate, existential proof of the existence of God, the supernatural confirmation of the truth of the teachings and an affidavit guaranteeing the character and motives of the leaders of the group.

Luckily for me, my “spiritual experience” did not result in me finding proof of the existence of God. This is probably due to the fact that I was quite set in my religious beliefs before coming into the camp. I was raised in a Catholic family, and grew up going to church every week. My mother was even my CCD teacher. However, when it came time for me to be confirmed when I was 13, I told my family that I didn’t feel comfortable going through with the ceremony because I wasn’t sure I believed in God. This caused a huge controversy in my family, and they all rallied together to try get me to regain my faith. I ended up getting confirmed due to the pressure, but the event set off an early journey of spiritual exploration that caused me to research various religions and forms of spirituality like Buddhism in my teen years before settling into an agnostic belief set; something I had to explain and defend several times on the trip. I believe having gone through this spiritual crisis early in my life caused me to frame my “spiritual experience” in a different light than most would. My “spiritual experience” aside, another odd thing about the fourth day is that the schedule differed from the others, as the last Mind Lecture was replaced by a traditional Korean wedding between two members of the organization that we were all required to attend in the large auditorium. We were all excited for this for multiple reasons, as we got to eat much better food that day, the wedding would end early and leave us some free time, and we didn’t have to sit through another Mind Lecture.

: A picture of the wedding we witnessed during the fourth day.

We should have realized that this sounded too good to be true, as after the wedding we were told to go to the smaller auditorium because Pastor Ock Soo Park wanted to have a personal talk with us. The talk consisted of him repeating bits of his previous lectures verbatim (literally word-for-word replicas of various parts of his previous sermons) as he walked around and interacted with the audience by doing things like pulling students from their chairs and wrapping his arm around them, or intensely staring into the eyes of an unlucky audience member from just a few inches away as he preached. That day they baptized at least over 100 people in the hotel pool in assembly line fashion, 3 at a time. As I sat by the side of the pool, watching two of my group members wait in line to get baptized, I couldn’t help but think that this seemed like a rather odd time and place to declare your faith. Shouldn’t they be doing this with their own church and their families?

: Members of Ock Soo Park’s “Bible Crusade” who promote the IYF and Good News Corps.

In addition, the long-time members of the Good News Corps had striking similarities to how Wood described himself and his fellow Moonies while they were involved with the Unification Church. After the first day of the training camp, we found out that a fifth person we were unaware of would be staying with us in our hotel rooms, which made five people to a room with two beds. The fifth person in my room was a Good News Corps volunteer from Korea who introduced himself as Jeremy instead of his Korean name, and he told us he had been in the United States for eight months, travelling from city to city promoting the Gracias Choir. He enthusiastically talked our ears off about his experience and was eager to know what we thought of the Mind Lectures and Ock Soo Park. He had been to many countries around the world. When we talked about sleeping arrangements, he told us that he was expected to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag. Every night, after the conversation dried up, he would begin reading a book by Ock Soo Park and would continue to do so until he fell asleep. There is a suspicious lack of information about the International Youth Fellowship and the Good News Corps on the web. It is hard to find any website with information about them that didn’t come straight from the organizations themselves. After some digging, I did manage to find a statement about how the organization is perceived overseas in the form of an article from the Nagaland Post, an English newspaper published in India, titled “NBCC Cautions On ‘Good News Mission'” that states:

Warning India of the dangers of Ock Soo Park’s Good News Mission, the secretary of Korean Presbyterian Church Council, the Synod of South Atlantic, P.C.U.S.A, Rev. Won Tae Cho said “all of the orthodox denominations in Korea have officially stated that Ock Soo Park’s Good News Mission is clearly heretical and have issued warnings regarding this cult.” Rev. Cho in a statement informed that Organizations affiliated with this cult included International Youth Fellowship (IYF) and Mahanaim Bible College. Rev. Dr. Cho also said that the members of the cult, besides their practice of tempting Christians of third world countries using aggressive tactics funded by their abundant capital, had recently infiltrated healthy Korean churches in America.

So in regards to that, it’s finally time to confront the issue and call a duck a duck. While I have no idea what happens when someone gets further involved with the organization, and have no evidence that anyone has ever come to harm as a result of it, it is my opinion that the Good News Corps, at the very least, functions in the same manner as a cult. And they almost got me. I consider myself a pretty rational person. I’m not religious. I’m not an alcoholic and I’m not addicted to drugs. I have a family that loves and supports me. I simply decided to go on a trip to teach Mexican students English, and ten days later I was ready to go to a foreign country with a cult. How does this happen to a person? What do Allen Tate Wood and I have in common? Well, it turns out there’s only a single criterion necessary for someone to be vulnerable to this type of psychological manipulation: being human. The tactics of cults haven’t changed much over time. The New York Times ran an article in 1982 titled “The Psychology of the Cult Experience” that outlined the findings of several researchers regarding how cults manage to recruit people from all walks of life with surprising efficiency. I’ve saved you some time and presented you with the relevant parts of the article:

Dr. Singer said that the 700 cult members she had studied presented a wide range of personality types. ”You don’t have to be a certain kind of person to succumb to the cults,” she said. A typical manipulated conversion, Dr. Clark said, involves a vulnerable person – a student leaving home, or at exam time, or someone who has lost a friend or lover – who is enticed by some reward: companionship, peace of mind, a place to stay or an implied sexual offering. ”Cult recruiters frequent bus stations, airports, campuses, libraries, rallies, anywhere that unattached persons are likely to be passing through,” he said. ”Then they narrow the attention of the recruit, in controlled social situations,” Dr. Clark said. ”He or she is invited to attend a special function, or series of classes. Cult members are assigned to attend the prospect constantly. Eventually they keep the mark involved in group-ecstatic activities, or use meditation, obsessive praying, constant lecturing or preaching or lack of sleep to maintain the mind in a constantly debilitated state.” Several of the researchers believe that the studies of cult members may revise current theories about the workings of the brain. Dr. Cath and Dr. Clark, working independently, have been intrigued that the experiences described by cult members resemble personality changes regularly associated with disorders of the temporal lobe of the brain. ”The symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy,” said Dr. Clark, ”are similar to those seen or reported as resulting from cult conversions: increased irritability, loss of libido or altered sexual interest; ritualism, compulsive attention to detail, mystical states, humorlessness and sobriety, heightened paranoia.” Dr. Cath said: ”Keeping devotees constantly fatigued, deprived of sensory input and suffering protein deprivation, working extremely long hours in street solicitation or in cult-owned businesses, engaging in monotonous chanting and rhythmical singing, may induce psychophysiological changes in the brain. The rhythmical movement of the body can lead to altered states of consciousness, and changes in the pressure or vibration pattern of the brain may affect the temporal lobe.” Dr. Clark hypothesized that what he calls the ”cult-conversion syndrome” represents an overload of the brain’s ability to process information. He said: ”The unending personalized attention given to recruits during the conversion experience works to overload the prospect’s information-processing capacity. This has another important function: the induction of trancelike states. Cult proselytizers then exploit the recruit’s suggestibility.”

To put it simply, cults use a variety of psychological techniques that take advantage of the way the human brain works to manipulate people into subscribing to their doctrine. The art lies in the subtle application of these techniques. So how did the Good News Corps use these techniques to brainwash me? First, they targeted me when I was in a vulnerable state. I was approached outside of a university dining hall during the period when my final exams were taking place. I was looking for a different way to spend my winter break, and they offered a cheap trip to an exotic location for a good cause. Once I was out in Dallas, they used a controlled social environment to deprive me of sleep and nutrition, putting me in a highly suggestible state. I was subjected to an exhaustive schedule that included over six hours of “Mind Lecture material” in the form of the sermons from Ock Soo Park, supplemented by more personal sermons conducted by his translator Joe Park immediately after. Before every Mind Lecture we were subjected to a dance performance, followed by the performance of a play, followed by a performance of the “Gracias Choir” in order to induce a state of trance to heighten our level of susceptibility to the material contained in the lectures. The students we taught in Mexico were given a similar treatment, as they were also given Mind Lectures at the end of every day. Even though we spent over 8 hours at the camp every day, only two meals were served, consisting of a single burger from Burger King, followed by either a single slice of pizza from Cost-Co or a small portion of protein in the form of tacos. We spent a minimal amount of time teaching them English, devoting most of the schedule to group activities such as learning over a half-dozen choreographed dances, participating in massive group sing-alongs, or competing in group competitions, multiple times a day. http://youtu.be/a8dp4fCW42c IYF English Camp Montage shown on the final day. The purpose of these exercises was to induce psycho-physiological changes that lead to an altered state of consciousness which made everyone involved more open to the suggestions of subscribing to the doctrine they presented in the subsequent Mind Lectures. The camp ended with the showing of a montage video of footage they had gathered over the course of the camp (seen above), directly followed by everyone filling out a form with personal information that included a section that required us to list our exact intentions regarding how much further we planned to get involved with the organization. I wrote down that I wanted to go to Japan. The purpose of the English Camp wasn’t to teach English. We didn’t receive training in Dallas. We were conditioned and then used to recruit members for the Good News Corps who would hopefully go with the organization to foreign countries as part of their various programs. Once there, completely isolated from their previous lives, the Good News Corps can then manipulate them in any way they please under the guise of religious missionary work. I did not figure this out during the camp. At no point did I question anything that was happening. Hardly anyone did. It was only weeks after returning home, and being clued in the by the nytimes.com article, that I pursued this line of research and pieced together what happened. Cults are all around us. They operate on an international scale. They have massive funds and talented lawyers. They run your favorite sushi restaurant. They stalk college campuses, malls, and groceries stores, preying on vulnerable people. The Unification Church and The Good News Corps are not unique phenomena. Earlier that year I was approached by two men my age outside of a dorm who asked me if I knew about the “Heavenly Mother.” They gave me a card that identified them as the World Mission Society Church of God, another Korean religious organization. They believe their founder is the second coming of Christ. They have almost one-and-a-half million members. Korea has issued a statement that says:

“The Church has been accused of breaking up families when women followers have left home and settled in Church of God buildings to wait for the “coming of Christ.”

I didn’t realize I had a cult’s card in my wallet until after my research on the Good News Corps. My sister told me she had been approached by the same group at the grocery store by our house back in my home-town. Several of my friends showed me identical cards to the one I had in my wallet. Do you know what cults are active in your area? Do you even care? What would you do if you lost someone you love to a cult? Would you even know? The Unification Church, World Mission Society Church of God, and Good News Corps are all actively recruiting on Rutgers campuses. ——————————————————————————————————— List of Sources and Further Reading via Diigo.

To read the 31 comments readers from around the world posted on the original site for “The Good News Cult,” click here.

Author: rem

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