Reading on, I added strand after strand to the weave of my freedom:
In a cult, the leader holds total control, crushing protest.
In a cult, the follower yields self-rule and self-trust.
In a cult, the follower is always at fault.
In a cult, the follower gives everything, denying herself.
In a cult, the follower receives the leader’s words as sacred and uniquely pure, no matter how garbled they are.
In a cult, members take on the world’s weight, assuming responsibility for human salvation.
In a cult, departure means death—of body, soul, or both.
In a cult, the follower belongs only so long as she serves.
In a cult, love for the leader trumps every other love.
In a cult, the follower must shun outsiders, lest they lure her from the fold.
Cult. Cult. Cult. In those shaky early days, I relied on the word, and the weave it completed, to block the gate to Zendik—a gate I could not yet block on my own.
Years later, I still see “cult” as the noun that best fits the Farm; a group’s not a “commune” if one or two leaders control the money and own the land. But “cult” is a tricky term. Too often, it slices “us” from “them.”
What is a cult? Dictionaries give bloodless definitions, like this one from my 1976 Webster’s New Collegiate: “a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.”
The heart of the word beats elsewhere.
In 1978, in the Guyana jungle, over nine hundred members of the People’s Temple drank a deadly potion of cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, on the last White Night. In 1993, in East Texas, eighty-two Branch Davidians died by fire and gunfire while resisting government intervention. In 1997, in Southern California, thirty-nine seekers of Heaven’s Gate took lethal doses of phenobarbital and fastened plastic bags over their heads, expecting to wake on a spaceship.
In 1988, my sixth-grade class watched a TV special marking the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Jonestown. Did the producers ask who the dead were? How they’d found the People’s Temple? What they’d hoped for when they’d joined? If so, the answers didn’t stick. Nothing stuck but the heaps of corpses in lurid Technicolor—scenes from a horror film, misfiled in real life. No wonder I sealed that story and others like it in a pit marked “evil,” “madness,” “them.”
In 2011, Julia Scheeres—herself a subject of religious violence—published A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown. Drawing on sources such as a trove of recently declassified FBI documents, she showed that many entered the People’s Temple seeking what life outside had so far denied them: comfort, camaraderie, the chance to serve what seemed a worthy cause. She showed how some fought to survive. She returned a throng of “them” to the ring of human understanding.
So what is a cult, again?
An IV of meaning and belonging for those near starving? A plywood platform for players lacking parts on the larger stage? A pack of soft animals lured behind bars by the dream of the warmth of a tribe?
All groups fall along a continuum, from reverence to contempt for self-trust. I find no bright line dividing cult from culture—just stories jointly held, and questions invited or forced by crisis:
How well do our stories nourish us?
What pain do we cause in their service?
How might we revise them—for healing, for kinship, for joy?
[ chapter 15 ]
Reunion
EXACTLY WHY HAD I APPLIED for a job moving cargo by giant trike in the heart of Manhattan?
It was the morning of Friday, September 26, 2008—just one day short of the fourth anniversary of my flight from Zendik—and I was set to meet a prospective employer at his shop by Penn Station in a few hours. I’d all but decided not to show.
Once, in 1999, I’d biked from Park Slope to the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge. At the end of the promenade, I’d stopped, stared at the swarm of hulks I was supposed to share the road with, and turned tail for home.
I’d shrunk from city cycling ever since.
But I needed the money. And operating a vehicle so new to New York that I’d yet to spot one tickled my sense of adventure.
Plus, there was the save-the-world angle. The trikes, rated for loads of more than a quarter ton, could cut pollution and fossil-fuel use by shifting runs away from vans and trucks. Post-Zendik, I favored local action over visions of global renewal. Just a day earlier, I’d cheered the Yes Men as they dropped torn pillows, worn suits, and broken electronics at the rump of the Charging Bull, demanding government payments—commensurate with what the big banks would get, should TARP pass Congress—for their “troubled assets.” Then I joined a mob at the Stock Exchange, chanting, “You broke it, you bought it! The bailout is bullshit!” In the midst of the protest, Gregg, the owner of the trike business, had called to arrange the interview.
I turned on my laptop and pulled up the company’s website, hoping for a nudge toward yes or no.
I clicked from tab to tab, skimming text about pedicab sales and rentals, special-event shuttles, sightseeing tours, ad campaigns. No nudges there. Then, on the freight page, I noticed a small, grainy photograph of a man loading boxes into a cargo bay. I leaned in for a closer look. The man looked familiar. He looked like Jul—a fellow ex-Zendik.
Jul had moved to the Farm a couple years before me. Though he’d already achieved Kore status by the time I arrived, I’d known him to be humble and kind. I remembered how pleased he’d been, on a big demolition job, when my zeal for board sorting had freed him to tend other nodes in the flow from crowbar to truck. And I recalled a plea he’d made in a meeting, for a shift from ripping each other apart to appreciating our many strengths and contributions. (Arol, amused but unmoved, had urged him to go ahead and do all the appreciating he wanted—he could be the Farm’s appreciator in chief.) Our tenures at the Farm had overlapped by about a year and a half; he’d left in 2001.
My eyes dropped to the faint gray caption beneath the image: “Julian Isaza, Director of Operations.”
Yes, I’d keep my appointment. I wished to see Julian.
Within a few hours, we were sitting together, waiting for Gregg, in a nearly empty, dimly lit storefront across from a Lincoln Tunnel approach on West Thirty-First Street. The rickshaw company was moving here, from a space a few blocks away on Ninth Avenue.
Though Julian hadn’t known of my application, he hadn’t been astonished to see me. From my blog, he’d learned of my return to Brooklyn and my story of Zendik as cult—which didn’t mesh with his respect for who he’d become in the Farm’s crucible. He’d trusted our paths would cross at the right time.
He’d told me all this within moments of hugging me hello. Expecting Gregg any minute, we raced to catch up.
As my eyes adjusted to the low light, something tacked to the corkboard behind Julian’s head came into focus and gave me a jolt. Something black, white, and all too familiar—a STOP BITCHING START A REVOLUTION bumper sticker. Nodding toward it, I asked Julian, with a hint of sarcasm, “Did you post that? To bring back the good old days?”
He swiveled to look at the corkboard. “No,” he said. “That’s Gregg’s. He got it from some Zendik he met on the street.” He smiled. “It’s a perfect match, yeah?”
“It sure is.” The business was called Revolution Rickshaws—RR for short. Or Revolution. Gregg had started Revolution.