In this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld

At Brigadude there was a path that went down from the Dining Hall towards the lake.  There were really only two reasons to take the path: going to Campfire or Church.  Any other destination on the lake had a faster route.  As soon as you saw the lake, you had to make a choice.  Going straight ahead would take you towards the Campfire Circle.  A right hand turn would take you over a little bridge and on to Church.    We were supposed to be quiet once we had crossed.  For me, crossing that bridge was sort of like entering a sacred space.

The only people who would go that way during the week were fishermen, because the dock dedicated to fishing was out that direction too.  I did not fish.  Not because I was a vegetarian then, but because I had tried fishing and I sucked at it.  Fishing was something you had to do in the morning or the evening, when the water cooled off and the fish came up to feed.  Or something like that.  Whatever the reason, there was nobody on the dock in the afternoon.  On summer afternoons in 1986, I would take my Walkman (or someone’s Walkman; I had a way of appropriating such things) down to the fishing dock to listen to the Purple Rain soundtrack and look out over the water.

Now it has to be said that I was something of a moody kid, and I can still get moody given the opportunity.  I’m sure that there was no small part of me that enjoyed wallowing in the melancholy produced by a combination of “When Doves Cry” and windswept waters.  But that was also a summer of upheaval in my family.  At 13, there was no way I could have understood the difficulty of the decision my sibling had needed to make; however, I sensed that it was brave and that my sibling could somehow be hurt for having made it.  It was also my first sense that the religion I had more or less assumed up to that point was not capable of encompassing the complexities of life.

Religion, no.  But God — and Prince — yes.  The tensions of living that The Purple One gave voice to were answered at least in part by the messages of simplicity and brotherhood that Brigadude espoused.  The simple beauty of a summer rain that fell on the righteous and the unrighteous alike spoke louder than the voices in my hometown which issued judgement and condemnation.  The same God that created river hikes created my family’s dysfunction and to damn one would be to damn both.  Sitting on the fishing dock, following the current of the water over the spillway, it seemed to me that loving everyone involved was more important than figuring out who was right.

It doesn’t make sense that street preachers spewing judgement at a summer street festival would not have gone through a period like mine.  Everybody has baggage.  I’m not sure why they find it necessary to make their baggage seem acceptable by labeling other people as unacceptable.  Their religion is my religion but what we do with it is very different.  Maybe this is because we have had very different experiences.  Maybe they have not sufficiently studied the work of His Royal Badness.  Maybe next Bele Chere I’ll wear more purple.