To Walk On Water

The doctor slapped my rump and handed me to my mother. “Why am I here?” I demanded. Who am I? What is the purpose of life? And do I really have to be a housewife when I grow up like those silly women at the shower?”

“Maybe,” my mother suggested, “she’s hungry.”

“Oh,” I squalled, “I forgot I can’t talk yet. But I want you to teach me, Mother, right now.”

I learned to talk long before I could walk.

My mother had a son, divorced our father, and gave her kids to her parents. Two years later, she came back with Lucky, her new husband. They settled a court battle for custody with my grandparents by kidnapping us and taking us to Panama. I kept asking questions.

“Stop it!” Mother finally yelled. “I should never have taught you to talk. You’re born, you die, that’s all. In between, you do the best you can. There is no purpose to life. Now go out and play with your girlfriends.”

“I can’t. They’re all in school.”

“School? How old are they? How old are you?”

“Six.”

“Oh my God, you’re supposed to be in school. Put a school dress on. You’re late.”

School was good. Lucky had beaten Jerry and me every day since we met him, and he continued to do so, but I was safe while I was in school. I had imagined that I would learn the answers to all my questions when I got there, but the teachers really didn’t know much. They only taught the little stuff, things you had to learn to buy groceries and get a job, nothing really important.

Lucky got pressured to have us baptized in the Catholic church. To make us look good for the occasion, he gave us each a Bible. It was a book, so I read it cover to cover six times. I threw out all the unimportant stuff as I read, how to behave and what would happen to you if you didn’t, and who begat whom. What was left were God, Jesus, and miracles.

I wasn’t sure I understood God; that old guy with a beard who rained frogs on people seemed pretty capricious—like my stepfather. But Jesus had been my best friend since I met him in Sunday School when I was three. After reading the Bible and doing a great deal of thinking, I decided what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to help people with their spirits, to heal them, to help them to find out how to be happy.

Jesus had said that absolutely anybody could do the things He did and greater things besides. I thought it would require miracles to get people to figure out how to be happy, especially if they were like the few adults I knew. I set out to learn how to do miracles.

Walking on water was probably not that useful, and I wouldn’t want to do it in public, but I imagined that, as with everything else I had learned, one had to start with the basics. I loved water and felt that walking on it would be my best place to start. I could work up from there to healing people, helping them with their spirits, and helping them learn to be happy. At six years old, this seemed to me to be an entirely reasonable and unexceptionable goal.

I finished first grade in three different schools in Panama and started second. We moved, and I finished second grade in Albuquerque. New Mexico. In Santa Monica, California, I got bumped into fourth grade, which I continued in Moses Lake, Washington, and finished in the tiny community of Grand Canyon, Arizona. Lucky continued to beat Jerry and me almost every day he was home, but he was gone sometimes for months. We never knew where. Mother worked and supported us. Lucky mostly stayed home all day when he was in town.

In Grand Canyon, I started going to church. I’d been lobbying Mother for two years. She relented conditionally because the church was in the community hall, a short walk away through the woods. I could take myself so long as I got up, ironed a dress, made my own breakfast, and got out of the house without waking her. I went to learn miracles and the meaning of life. They taught me sin and suffering and guilt and damnation.

We moved to Lakewood and Lakeside and Downey and three other places whose names I’ve forgotten and Hollydale, all in California. I finished fifth grade and sixth, got beaten every day Lucky was home, and went to every church I could walk to or get a girlfriend’s parents to drive me to, looking for miracles. Lucky gave me some pornographic books to read. I detested him so much that I thought that even his books must be false. No one would do those things! In Hollydale, the police staked out our house and took Lucky away for a year.

We moved to Hermosa Beach, and I did junior high school, all two years, and we still lived in the same place! My stepfather tried to “make love” to me twice, and I somehow talked him out of it. Mother never believed me but divorced him anyway because, she said, she couldn’t afford him anymore. I tried the Congregational Church and three varieties of Baptist Churches, and then I gave up. The churches I’d been to all seemed to miss the point.

I entered high school and decided that if I couldn’t do anything really important, like helping people with their spirits (I couldn’t be a minister; there were no women ministers those years, and anyway, I could never preach the things I had learned in any of those churches) I might as well be a doctor. I had excellent hand/eye coordination, so I should become a surgeon and put it to good use. I studied everything they said I’d need before I could study medicine: Latin, biology, chemistry, physics, physiology, and math on the side for fun. I pulled a lot of A’s, and after my junior year, I was rewarded with a summer class at UCLA’s medical center, reputed then to be the best around. I was starting my real life at last. I’d never found a teacher of miracles, so I’d never be able to heal people’s spirits, but now, for sure, I was going to meet a teacher of medicine and learn how to heal people’s bodies.

For our last four-hour class, they brought in their head doctor, the best in the school, maybe even in the state, I thought, to talk with us. He answered every question we had, told us what it was like to be a doctor and how much schooling we had ahead of us. One boy asked a question I’d never thought of, “Is medicine really a science?”

“Absolutely not,” the exalted one replied. “Oh, we’re pretty good at setting bones and stitching up cuts, but beyond that, it’s mostly guesswork. The drugs we use have side effects we can’t control, and we don’t know their long-term effects. In truth, our work is trial and error at worst and art at best.”

I was undone. Adults couldn’t teach me how to do miracles; they couldn’t even teach me how to do medicine. I was about to become an adult myself, and for all, I’d studied, I’d learned nothing.

I barely passed my senior year. Mother forced me into college, and my grades got me into UCSB. The classes were a boring repeat of what I’d learned in accelerated high school classes but given no credit for at university, so I stayed home and read Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austin, and Thomas Hardy. They kicked me out after one year. I got a job at Autonetics and learned to program computers in binary. I was 18 years old and felt there was no purpose left to my life. If I could never contribute to the world, at least I could try to be happy and normal. Maybe I could marry and help a husband succeed.

My high school sweetheart proposed, and we married. My daughter was born when I was 19. Ralph insisted I stay home and be a housewife, a crushing blow. I read Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and tried to be a Christian Scientist like my mother-in-law. Three years later, I had a son, and we moved to Mulegé in Baja California. Ralph managed construction and maintenance at Serenidad Motel. After our office manager died in a Jeep accident, the owners persuaded Ralph to let me manage the office. A year later, the Federales came and aimed their guns at us and ordered us out of the country. Our employer had lied about having obtained work permits for us.

We moved to San Diego and divorced. A wet-back live-in housekeeper took care of the kids and me while I taught ballroom dancing, then managed a figure salon and learned to sell. I studied self-help books and pop psychology. We moved to Seattle, Washington, where I had a better job offer at a dance studio, and I got into Scientology. Their books made better sense to me than most. I worked for them, then another figure salon. I sold soap in a pyramid scheme.
We moved back to Anaheim, where I sold encyclopedias door to door. Then I went back to work for Scientology and moved to Los Angeles. I did drills that taught me to stay in the present moment for hours at a time. I learned to still the chatter in my mind. I remembered my past lives, thousands of them. I became able to pop in and out of my body—to check on the weather in Toronto as I packed to go there, to see if the layout artist in the next building had finished the paste-up on the flier for New York. I learned to communicate telepathically. “Bring me the Denver file when you come upstairs to see Susan,” I thought. At dinner, midst twenty chattering people, “Pass the salt, please.”

My mother-in-law came and took photos of the childcare facilities and gave me an ultimatum. Either get out of Scientology and care for my children properly or give up custody to my ex. What would I have if I left? My ex never had paid his child support regularly. My mother and grandmother were disgusted with me for a long, long list of reasons, including getting a divorce and getting into Scientology. They had washed their hands of me.

I had no savings, no way to pay the first and last month’s rent, no way to earn an income while paying a live-in childcare person, and no backup of any kind to help me get on my feet. And I deeply believed I was making the world a better place while I worked for Scientology. It promised the Bridge to Total Freedom, becoming cause over Matter, Energy, Space, and Time, getting off the endless wheel of life and death, nirvana. I meant to get everyone in the world into Scientology, and then there would be no more war, no more hunger, and no more disease; people could be happy. I decided my children would ultimately be happier in such a world than living in poverty with me. It broke my heart, but I let them go.

I knew I was immortal, knew it in my bones and in my soul. So why was everyone else in the organization all focused on the rules and the punishments for violations? Couldn’t they see what was important? I figured I’d just get promoted high enough to straighten them all out. I got a lot of special training and eventually got promoted to a high position in management for all of the U.S. and Canada. And it turned out they didn’t want to be straightened out. Despite my division’s higher-than-anyone-else’s production, I was falsely accused of some infraction or other and removed from the post, kicked down to the bottom of the organization chart. Sigh. Reluctantly l began to admit that perhaps no church lives up to its own philosophy.

It was 1977, and I was lonely. I hadn’t found a man who could really keep up with me, but maybe it would be nice for a change to have one around to take care of. I married a Scientologist, and we both got transferred to Clearwater, Florida. Then the Scientology leaders began to censor reading materials. They dared to tell us how to vote. We quit and moved back to Anaheim.

I needed a job, but what to do for work? Scientology was denigrated by the press and considered a dangerous cult. I couldn’t write a résumé of twelve years of Scientology credits and say, “I was President of a church with 150 staff members and, in two years, took their income from $40,000 to $60,000 a week. I’m trained and experienced in legal, public relations, personnel, financial and organizational management, espionage, and exorcising ghosts.” Even if I had dared mention my background, the moment I quit, I had been excommunicated from Scientology. No one there would give me a reference or even admit to having known me.

Another ex-Scientologist hired me as managing editor for a magazine that never published and never paid. Then I sold Mary Kay Cosmetics for a while. For something important to do, I studied the relationship between thought and reality.

A real estate license gave me the means to gain more income. I took a course in self-hypnosis, and l practiced becoming consciously aware of what I was doing unconsciously. What I had been taught about duty and self-sacrifice was getting in my way. It was time to start loving myself and taking care of me. In 1982, I got a divorce.

I studied the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, and the Tao, and I began to understand that all dichotomies are illusions. To see beyond them to the reality of things, I had to stop judging—a tough habit to break.

I quit real estate and got a job marketing and managing an interior design studio for a woman friend who owned it. Then I thought, “What the heck?” and studied crystals and runes, numerology, and astrology. I meditated under a pyramid, took a class in bending spoons with my mind, went to a friend’s church, and chanted in Sanskrit. I was able to suspend my disbelief long enough to make each of those things work. Still, I found them too limiting—externals and rationalizations of the real world—not the important stuff.

I met Joe and went to work and live with him in Half Moon Bay, California. He designed sales offices for home builders, and I did his marketing and everything else. I paid off my debts and saved some money. When Joe, the workaholic, couldn’t get around to buying a boat and doing the playing he had promised, I bought my own boat and moved aboard in San Diego in 1990.

I spent two years there, journaling, praying, and working hard to get over being angry with the entire male population of the world. Then I starting working on the damage to my soul I’d received in Scientology. I kept journaling and searching for four more years on my boat. I’d run out of potential teachers of the important stuff, so I began to teach myself. I called my current belief Today’s Truth and hoped to know more the next day. I wouldn’t give up. Jesus had said I could do miracles, to heal, to help people with their spirits. I believed him.

I had been praying to Jesus all my life. Now when I prayed others showed up with him, a man in a turban, a woman in some Indian looking garb, and others. I didn’t know who they were, but they seemed to be on my side.

I took Nature for my classroom and kept a daily appointment with the sunset. At night I walked in the fog to feel the gratitude of the trees and each blade of thirsty grass in a desert land. To be embraced completely by living, breathable water was to be blessed indeed.

And when the stars shone, and the full moon gilded a path to me across the ocean, I studied the water. “It’s just particles, like everything else,” I thought. “It might as well be solid, at least for a little while, just under my feet. Someday…”