The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History Read online

  Had I been able to talk to my parents right away, the retreat’s momentum might have carried me. But they were still in Europe, and I daily became more convinced that they would forbid me to go to Fellowship—not only this, but they would yell at me, and not only this, but they would force me to hate the group—until I landed in a state of full-bore dread, as if I were the one who’d broken the rules. Before long, I was more afraid of confessing to the group’s collective crime than I’d ever been of anything.

  In Paris, my mother had her hair done at Elizabeth Arden and chatted with the widow of Pie Traynor, the Hall of Fame third baseman. In Madrid, she ate suckling pig at Casa Botín among crowds of Americans whose ugliness depressed her, but then she ran into the married couple who owned the hardware store in Webster Groves and who were also on vacation, and she felt better. The twenty-eighth of October she spent with my father in a first-class train compartment, traveling to Lisbon, and noted in her travel diary: Nice 29th anniversary—being together all day. In Lisbon, she received an airmail letter in which I didn’t say a word about the Fellowship retreat.

  My brother Bob and I were waiting at the airport in St. Louis on Halloween. Coming off the plane, my parents looked amazingly fit and cosmopolitan and lovable. I found myself smiling uncontrollably. This was supposed to have been the evening for my confession, but it seemed potentially awkward to involve Bob in it, and not until he’d returned to his apartment in the city did I understand how much harder it would be to face my parents without him. Since Bob usually came to dinner on Sunday nights, and since Sunday was only four days away, I decided to delay my disclosure until he came back. Hadn’t I already delayed two weeks?

  On Sunday morning, my mother mentioned that Bob had other plans and wasn’t coming to dinner.

  I considered never saying anything at all. But I didn’t see how I could go back and face the group. The anguish in Shannondale had had the mysterious effect of making me feel more intimately committed to Fellowship, rather than less, as if we were all now bound together by shame, the way strangers who’d slept together might wake up feeling compassion for each other’s embarrassment and fall in love on that basis. To my surprise, I found that I, too, like Hellman, loved the group.

  At dinner that afternoon, I sat between my parents and didn’t eat.

  “Do you not feel well?” my mother finally said.

  “I’m supposed to tell you about something that happened at Fellowship,” I said, keeping my eyes on my plate. “On the retreat. Six kids on the retreat—smuiked some duip.”

  “Did what?”

  “‘Duip’? What?”

  “Smuiked marijuana,” I said.

  My mother frowned. “Who was it? Any of your friends?”

  “No, mostly new kids.”

  “Oh, uh-huh.”

  And this was the extent of their response: inattention and approval. I felt too elated to stop and wonder why. It was possible that bad stuff had happened with my brothers and drugs in the sixties, stuff beside which my own secondhand offenses might have seemed ridiculously unworrisome to my parents. But nobody had told me anything. After dinner, buoyant with relief, I floated into Fellowship and learned that I’d been given the lead in the three-act farce Mumbo-Jumbo that was going to be the group’s big winter money-maker. Hellman was playing a demure young woman who turns out to be a strangler; Magner was playing the evil swami Omahandra; and I was the callow, bossy, anxious college student Dick.

  THE MAN WHO trained Mutton as a therapist, George Benson, was Fellowship’s hidden theoretician. In his book Then Joy Breaks Through (Seabury Press, 1972), Benson ridiculed the notion that spiritual rebirth was “simply a beautiful miracle for righteous people.” He insisted that “personal growth” was the “only frame of reference from which Christian faith makes sense in our modern world.” To survive in an age of anxiety and skepticism, Christianity had to reclaim the radicalism of Jesus’ ministry, and the central message of the Gospels, in Benson’s reading of them, was the importance of honesty and confrontation and struggle. Jesus’ relationship with Peter in particular looked a lot like the psychoanalytic relationship:

  Insight is not good enough. The assurances of others are not good enough. Acceptance within a continuing relationship which denies reassurance (it’s usually false anyway) and thereby brings the sufferer to an awareness of his need to evaluate and accept himself—this brings change.

  Benson recounted his treatment of a young woman with severe symptoms of hippiedom—drug abuse, promiscuity, sensationally bad personal hygiene (at one point, roaches come swarming out of her purse)—and he compared her progress to that of Peter, who initially resisted Jesus, then monstrously idealized him, then fell into despair at the prospect of termination, and was finally saved by internalizing the relationship.

  Mutton had first gone to Benson soon after he became an associate minister. He suddenly had so much influence over the teenagers in his charge that he was afraid he might start acting out, and Benson had told him he was right to be afraid. He made Mutton name aloud the things he was tempted to do, so as to make himself less likely to do them. It was a kind of psychic homeopathy, and Mutton brought the method back to his Fellowship leadership supervisions, where, every week, behind closed doors, in the church parlor, he and the advisors took turns making each other uncomfortable, inoculating themselves against temptations to misuse their power, airing their personal issues so as not to inflict them on the kids. Photocopies of Then Joy Breaks Through began to circulate among Fellowship advisors. The Authentic Relationship, as exemplified by Jesus and Peter, became the group’s Grail—its alternative to the passive complicity of drug-using communities, its rebuke to traditional pastoral notions of “comforting” and “enabling.”

  As soon as Mutton entered training with Benson, following MacDonald’s suicide, the spirit of Fellowship began to change. Part of the change was cultural, the waning of a hippie moment; part of it was Mutton’s own growing up, his diminishing need for seventeen-year-old buddies, his increasing involvement with his outside clients. But after the Shannondale debacle there were no more wholesale rule violations, and Fellowship became less of a one-man show, less of an improvised happening, more of a well-oiled machine. By the time I started tenth grade, the senior-high group was paying small monthly salaries to half a dozen young advisors. Their presence made it all the easier for me to steer clear of Mutton, whose habit of calling me “Franzone!” (it rhymed with “trombone”) somehow confirmed that he and I had no real relationship. It no sooner would have occurred to me to go to him with my troubles than to confide in my parents.

  The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who’d been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony’s tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He liked to walk into Burger King and loudly order two Whoppers with no meat. If he was losing a Spades game, he would take a card out of his hand, tell the other players, “Play this suit!” and then lick the card and stick it to his forehead facing out. In discussions, he liked to lean into other people’s space and bark at them. He said, “You better deal with that!” He said, “Sounds to me like you’ve got a problem that you’re not talking about!” He said, “You know what? I don’t think you believe one word of what you just said to me!” He said, “Any resistance will be met with an aggressive response!” If you hesitated when he moved to hug you, he backed away and spread his arms wide and goggled at you with raised eyebrows, as if to say, “Hello? Are you going to hug me, or what?” If he wasn’t playing guitar he was reading Jung, and if he wasn’t reading Jung he was birdwatching, and if he wasn’t birdwatching he was practicing tai chi, and if you came up to him during his practice and asked him how he would defend himself if you tried to mug him with
a gun, he would demonstrate, in dreamy Eastern motion, how to remove a wallet from a back pocket and hand it over. Listening to the radio in his VW Bug, he might suddenly cry out, “I want to hear…‘La Grange’ by ZZ Top!” and slap the dashboard. The radio would then play “La Grange.”

  One weekend in 1975, Mutton and Symes and the other advisors attended a pastoral retreat sponsored by the United Church of Christ. The Fellowship gang rode in like Apaches of confrontation, intending to shock and educate the old-fashioned hand-holders and enablers. They performed a mock supervision, sitting in a tight circle while seventy or eighty ministers sat around them and observed. Inside this fishbowl, Mutton turned to Symes and asked him, “When are you going to cut your hair?”

  Symes had known in advance that he was going to be the “volunteer.” But his ponytail was very important to him, and the subject was explosive.

  Mutton asked him again, “When are you going to cut your hair?”

  “Why should I cut my hair?”

  “When are you going to grow up and be a leader?”

  While the other advisors kept their heads low and the enabling and comforting older clergy looked on, Mutton began to beat up on Symes. “You’re committed to social justice and personal growth,” he said. “Those are your values.”

  Symes made a stupid-face. “Duh! Your values, too.”

  “Well, and who are the people who most need to hear your voice? People who look like you, or people who don’t look like you?”

  “Both. Everyone.”

  “But what if your attachment to your style is becoming a barrier to doing what’s most important to you? What’s the problem with cutting your hair?”

  “I don’t want to cut my hair!” Symes said, his voice breaking.

  “That is such bullshit,” Mutton said. “Where do you want to fight your battles? Do you want to be fighting about your tie-dye T-shirt and your painter’s pants? Or do you want to be fighting over civil rights? Immigrant workers’ rights? Women’s rights? Compassion for the disenfranchised? If these are the battles that matter to you, when are you going to grow up and cut your hair?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “When are you going to grow up and accept your authority?”

  “I don’t know! Bob. I don’t know!”

  Mutton could have been asking himself the same questions. Fellowship had been meeting in a Christian church for nearly a decade, whole years had gone by in which no Bible had been seen, “Jesus Christ” was the thing you said when somebody spilled soup on your sunburn, and George Benson, in his supervision of Mutton, wanted to know what the story was. Was this a Christian group or not? Was Mutton willing to stick his neck out and own up to his belief in God and Christ? Was he willing to claim his ministry? Mutton was getting similar questions from some of the advisors. They wanted to know on whose authority honesty and confrontation had become the central values of the group. On Mutton’s authority? Why Mutton’s? Who he? If the group wanted to be about more than Mutton and the group’s adoration of him, then where did the authority reside?

  To Mutton the answer was clear. If you took away Christ’s divinity, you were left with “Kum Ba Ya.” You were left with “Let’s hold hands and be nice to each other.” Jesus’ authority as a teacher—and whatever authority Mutton and company had as followers of his teachings—rested on His having had the balls to say, “I am the fulfillment of the prophecies, I am the Jews’ gift to mankind, I am the son of Man,” and to let Himself be nailed to a cross to back it up. If you couldn’t take that step in your own mind, if you couldn’t refer to the Bible and celebrate Communion, how could you call yourself a Christian?

  The question, which Mutton raised in supervision, pissed off Symes extravagantly. The group already had its own rituals and liturgies and holy days, its candles, its Joni Mitchell songs, its retreats and spring trips. Symes was amazed that Mutton, with his training in Freud and Jung, wasn’t repelled by the childishness and regression of Christian ceremony. “‘How can we call ourselves Christians?’” he echoed, goggling at Mutton. “Uh, how about by…trying to live like Christ and follow his teachings? What do we need to eat somebody’s blood and body for? That is so unbelievably primitive. When I want to feel close to God, I don’t read Corinthians. I go out and work with poor people. I put myself in loving relationships. Including my relationship with you, Bob.”

  This was the classic position of liberal religion, and Symes could afford to take it because he didn’t need to humble himself, because he didn’t have to be the Jesus of Fellowship. Mutton was the bearded young machinist’s son who preached radical stuff to the young and the marginalized, hung out with characters of dubious morality, attracted a cadre of devoted disciples, wrestled with the temptations of ego, and had become, by local standards, wildly popular. Now he was nearing his thirty-second birthday. He would be leaving soon, and he wanted to complete the shift in the group’s focus away from himself and toward religion.

  With Symes acting less like a tractable Peter than an obstreperous Jung, it fell to another seminarian, a red-haired former bad boy named Chip Jahn, to stand up at the end of a Sunday-night meeting in 1975 and make a confession. Jahn had been nineteen when Mutton put him in charge of a work camp in Missouri’s southeastern Bootheel. He’d spent a month with kids just two and three years younger than he was, making do with a food budget that was cut in half at the last minute, begging bushels of field corn from local farmers, trying to cook it into casseroles seasoned with strips of bologna from pirated government-issue school lunches. Since then, he’d decided to enter the ministry, but he still had the manner of a pugnacious sailor, leaning against walls with his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up tightly over his biceps; usually, when he addressed the group, he had trouble keeping his face straight, as if it never ceased to amuse him that he was working in a church. But now, when he stood up to make his confession, he looked weirdly serious.

  “I want to talk about something that’s important to me,” he said. He was holding up a book that flopped over like a raw steak. When the group realized that the book was a Bible, an uneasy silence settled on the room. I wouldn’t have been a lot more surprised if he’d been holding up a copy of Penthouse. “This is important to me,” Jahn said.

  MY DREAM AS a tenth-grader was to be elected to the Advisory Council, which was the in-crowd of sixteen kids who adjudicated rule violations and helped the advisors run senior-high Fellowship. Twice a year, in what were unabashedly popularity contests, the group elected eight kids to one-year council terms, and it seemed to me that I had some chance of winning in the spring. Somewhat mysteriously—it might simply have been that my face was becoming familiar around church—I no longer felt like potential Social Death. I tried out for the group’s fall play, Any Number Can Die, and was one of only two sophomores to get a part. On Sunday nights, when the big group broke into dyads for certain exercises, Advisory Council members came bounding across the room to partner up with me. They said, “Franzen! I want to get to know you better, because you seem like a really interesting person!” They said, “Franzen, I’m so happy you’re in this group!” They said, “Franzen! I’ve been wanting to be your partner in something for weeks, but man, you’re just too popular!”

  It went to my head to feel noticed like this. On the year’s last retreat, I nominated myself for Advisory Council. The full group gathered on Saturday night, after the ballots had been secretly tabulated, and we sat around a single candle. One by one, current members of the Advisory Council took new candles, lit them on the central candle, and moved into the crowd to present them to newly elected members. It was like watching fireworks; the crowd said “Ohhh!” as each winner was revealed. I pasted a smile on my face and pretended to be happy for the winners. But as candles approached me and passed me by and descended—“Ohhh!”—on other lucky souls, it was painfully clear how much more popular and mature than I the winners were. The ones getting the candles were the people who lounged around in semi-reclinin
g, toboggan-style embraces or lay supine and propped their stockinged feet on nearby backs and shoulders, and who spoke as if they were doing genuine work on their relationships. The people who, if a newcomer was looking lost on a Sunday night, would race each other to be the first to introduce themselves. The people who knew how to look a friend in the eye and say, “I love you,” the people who could break down and cry in front of the entire group, the people whom Mutton came up to from behind and put his arms around and nuzzled like a father lion, the people whom Mutton would have to have been Christlike not to favor. It might have struck me as odd that a group offering refuge from the cliquishness of high school, a group devoted to service to the marginalized, made such a huge deal of a ceremony in which precisely the smartest and most confident kids were anointed as leaders; but there were still two candles unaccounted for, and one of them was coming my way now, and this candle, instead of passing me by, was placed in my hands, and as I walked to the front of the room to join the new council in facing out to smile at the Fellowship that had elected us, all I could think of was how happy I was.

  CENTRALLY LOCATED