In the 1730s in the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon now known as A Divine and Supernatural Light. The doctrine was:“There is such a thing, as a spiritual and divine light, immediately imparted to the soul by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural means.” In this sermon and in other places in his work Edwards used an image of tasting honey for having a direct experience of God. He wrote, “Thus there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man can’t have the latter, unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind.” As a novelist and poet who has lived in Northampton for decades, I experience this recurring image of honey as one of my most direct connections to Edwards and his wife Sarah, who left an account of her own experiences of divine light.

The following is an excerpt from Spider in a Tree, an unpublished novel about Northampton during the years that Edwards preached there. It is set during what Edwards described as a time of great ferment among his people “on account of my principles relating to qualifications for Christian sacraments,” a conflict that led to his dismissal from the pulpit he had held for more than twenty years.

July 1749

At the end of the journey from Boston, his horse came limping down King Street with her head hanging low, so far gone from days of hard travel after months of drought that not even being this close to her own barn could quicken her pace. The sun was out and the Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards was surprised to be struck with love for Northampton, his embattled home.

King Street was empty in the middle of a working day. That could only be because everyone was at a meeting about their efforts to dismiss him from his pulpit. He was sick of the endless, quarrelsome meetings, so he spoke to the town as he returned to it, preaching to the pump, the courthouse, meeting house hill and to all of the absent, contentious people whose various beasts had scattered the road with manure. Tired and dirty, he slipped off his suffering horse, and, walking beside her, said aloud:

“How could I leave you whom I so love? How could I abandon you except in the grip of pure, clean fury? I am right, of course. I have been right. I must be right. You have turned against the clear instructions of the holy word. You take something clean and make it dirty, muddled, shabby, useless. Everything I’ve offered you—all my teaching, striving, and love—you wrench and twist until it drips like rain.” His voice was soft and shook with anger. He stopped speaking, but the voice became louder in his head as he walked in the rutted road, which did not answer him. He broke into wordless vision, which, he knew—always—was rising from the words and mind inside him and was not anything that he was seeing with his bodily eyes.

He remembered moments when the people of Northampton had risen, when he and they rose together, when they had been fainting, weeping, writhing, or lying still on the ground. They had filled with the spirit, the holy spirit, and it had been as if their bodies spoke without words. Maybe it had been their bodies speaking, the natural, the base, not the true heat and light rising in them as it rose in his own Sarah. Her body as much as broke the feeble laws of nature, expressed such great piety that it seemed that she could float over the rough wood floor in their hallway and levitate into the parlor—in a household full of children, servants, and visiting students of theology, mind, a house full of witnesses—rise and float into the formal room of greeting guests.

She had tasted the honey, dripped with honey. She knew the holy spirit, knew sweetness. She hadn’t just read about it, touched the jar. Her whole soul was sticky with it.

Her shoes fell from her feet and dropped to the floor. Her feet were bare and sticky. She was dappled with crumbs which looked like ordinary remnants from a crust of bread, but there was a light from them. She was filled with sweetness, sweating honey, honey dripping from her pores, honey dabbing her forehead and capturing her hair, honey making her simple clothes darken from within. Her eyes were closed, but honey dripped down her cheeks like tears. He looked below her and saw many slow viscous drops falling from her body as she floated waist high above the floor, reclining with the firm dignity of the righteous dead, but she, his wife, his consort, was, of course, alive.

The drops from her body fell slowly toward the floor, but as they fell, they spread and lightened and dissipated until they were no longer gold but took on the color of the air, thinning in slow curls of light so that there was nothing of them left to hit the floor. In vision, he slowly reached out and let his fingers pass beneath her to catch a drop before it was lost. He tested his fingers with his mind’s tongue. The taste was there. Sarah knew honey. He was sure of it.

He was leaning heavily against his horse, but had reached the forted-in house. He took one more step and fumbled with the gate as the horse breathed heavily into the back of his coat. He opened it to Timothy and Eunice chasing chickens while their older sister Esther gave instructions from the kitchen door. They ran to him. Refuge. He hugged both of the little ones at the same time while they blinked in mild surprise, then kissed Esther before he led his desperate beast to drink. A bristled bug dropped from the saddle and lit on the edge of the trough. He saw it rise again before the water spilled by a thrust of the horse’s great-lipped mouth.

Your Phone

When I broke my phone
I took yours, old maybe,
but working, since you almost never used it.
I found your messages inside, all from me
will call soon, hello, hello!
Idiot girl—how could you speak like that to the dead?
Walking, swimming a little.
A cold river on the edge of a marsh.

I can see you, in blue swim trunks,
your hesitant breaststroke
never putting your face below water.
It’s dawn, maybe there are cormorants
voiceless voiceless going down in silence.

Levitation

In spring you remember yourself as you were,
touching the objects in your father’s office—

A breeze, a child reaching for the paperweight,
a prism of leaves in crystal,
a lifting of words on white paper.

Behind the desk
the gifts strangers give you
when you cry in public—the long knife
of a palm leaf folded into a flower,
a rabbit to place on your bed
like a doll—

photographs in a box, places you traveled,
a collection of fountains
flowing down an empty street,
some lindens perhaps, street vendors
thickening the air with salt.

Now, at the window
the sun rises like a slit bubble
the stars sea anemones,
slipping in a touched sky—

Spring, and you remember yourself as you are,
the grass in the field is underwater.
Horses graze, rib cages lifting
like tides of bone.
Their breath is white as a page,
the pages of an autobiography,
in a distance that doesn’t exist—

the quick limits of the child,
vanishing into the light.

This last winter I was in New York City. I had two speaking gigs, but I had arrived a few days early to show my mother and daughter around the city. We did all the things that tourists do, from seeing Wicked and The Lion King to going down to Wall Street, where we watched giggling tourists from around the world take photographs of their loved ones holding the testicles of that huge brass bull. There are cross-cultural patterns, it turns out.

It was her spring break, so my daughter eventually had to go back to school. Mom was not on spring break, and she was not about to leave. She wanted more. And the more she really wanted was Live! with Regis and Kelly. So we took a cab up to freeze our butts off in an early morning line that wound around the studio building. We determined fairly quickly that we never had a chance, a fact which we discerned in a warm coffee shop, holding a piece of paper that said “41” on it, as in “41 on the waiting list.” And so we headed back downtown, to freeze in another line, this time to see Al Roker do his weather gig on NBC’s Today Show.

Mom strikes up a conversation with a police officer. He gives her a productive tip: “Why don’t you go across the street to the NBC Studios, where they are filming an episode of The Dr. Oz Show.” Oz! That was all it took. Mom, like millions of other American women, loves Dr. Oz, a fifty-something Harvard-trained heart surgeon who looks like a movie star and has his own show addressing the health and happiness of its largely-female audience.

With a name like Oz, how can you go wrong? I grew up in a little town in southeastern Nebraska called Hebron, which was wiped out in 1953 by a monster tornado—just leveled the place. Not surprisingly, The Wizard of Oz used to scare the living begeezus out of me, mostly because of the opening tornado scene and those damned flying monkeys. I hated those flying monkeys.

But there was wisdom in the Land of Oz, too. For example, it was its eponymous bumbling Wizard who taught my little psyche, somehow, that some of the most bombastic mysteries of religion, of “the great and powerful Oz,” are really little more than human projections. These fake religious projections were in turn answered by an intensely alive, literally colorful mystical dreamscape of floating orbs, magic wands, and an excess of poppy flowers. I didn’t know then what I know now, namely, that this culturally potent combination of religious critique and surreal cultural expression originated in the story’s creator, Frank Baum, who was a Theosophist, and therefore deeply critical of traditional religion. In addition to writing his Oz series, he held séances in his home, wrote about clairvoyants and nature spirits, and believed in reincarnation. As a child, I didn’t know what a Theosophist was; I just knew I liked the topsy-turvy world that this Theosophist made.

Back in the midtown Arctic, mom and I got to the Rockefeller Tower and spent about an hour winding our way through the elaborate security lines, escalators, elevators, and young NBC pages, who happily shepherded us from this to that initiatory level in what looked increasingly like some great cosmic chain of being. We eventually got to the waiting room for The Dr. Oz Show. Physically speaking, I had absolutely no idea where we finally were. We could have been on the third floor, or the fiftieth, or in an underground alien base.

We sat in a really drab room for about thirty minutes. The actual studio was just on the other side of the wall. We could watch the comedian get the audience ready for the taping on a large television screen. We could also hear him through the wall.

Most of the people around us began complaining. Okay, it was more of a bitching. They had been promised a seat on the show, and this was no seat on the show. It was a seat behind a wall of the show. More pleasant pages entered and left, vaguely promising this or that. The people weren’t having it. They kept bitching. Except for mom. She just smiled and talked about how cool it was to be this close. She also loved it when Dr. Oz appeared at the back of the waiting room, surrounded by make-up artists and what I took to be script supervisors.

Then it happened. Dr. Oz made his grand entry onto the studio floor and introduced the show’s topic: “Psychic Mediums: Are They the New Therapists?” The guest was John Edward, the television medium and author. Edward and this particular topic, it turns out, was why we were in the waiting room in the first place. As Dr. Oz explained in his opening lines, this topic had attracted more audience attention than any in the show’s history.

As any scholar of spirituality can tell you, there is a long history of engagement between the medical sciences and the mystical arts. Furthermore, the appeal of such mediums to a mass audience has an equally long history, including stages and pulpits much different from this drab corner of network headquarters. So, I wasn’t surprised at all that John Edward had solicited such attention for Oz’s viewer audience.

I was surprised by the sophistication of the show’s writers. They were not asking, yet again, the same old question: Is it all real or all fake? Instead, they asked: Do psychic mediums sometimes function in a therapeutic fashion for grieving individuals? (Answer: Absolutely.) In effect, they did an end-run around the question of belief, evading the classic debunking postures that had populated so many of these magic-science encounters. And they covered their bases, too. Dr. Oz and his producers invited a representative from the American Psychology Association to sit in the front row. And Edward himself spoke about his strong feelings that newly grieving parents should not visit a medium and how one should never substitute a visit to a medium for needed psychotherapeutic or psychiatric help. In the contest between faith and science, Dr. Oz and his guests had one clear reply: therapy first.

Within this therapeutic certitude, however, there was some intriguing ambiguity. One might expect from Dr. Oz—or from any doctor, really—an arrogant dismissal of mediumship and its therapies. However, this is not what we got from Oz. Instead, we got a thoughtful, open-minded, even humble heart surgeon who began by confessing that, “I have seen things about life and death that I just cannot explain, and that science can’t study.” Later, he would gently identify himself with the quarter of the American population that does not believe in an afterlife, but he was obviously intrigued and moved by what he witnessed John Edward doing with his audience. Mom was right. Dr. Oz was cool. I immediately liked him.

Edward began by explaining how he gets the messages—like daydreams—and how the message is seldom, if ever, perfect because of its medium, that is, him. He can only interpret what he senses, much like one must interpret a dream. Edward explained that he can only do this through his own terms of reference. In short, he explained that his ability is not a direct line to the beyond. It is something mediated, filtered, and interpreted again by him. Sounded right to me. Edward began with a young woman named Jen. The hits started immediately. He somehow knew that Jen’s mother had died of breast cancer. He asked her if “she got the car.” She had. She had been given her mother’s Lexus, which her mother had purchased right before she passed. He also knew that Jen and her sister had been discussing “sexting” on the way to the studio. What they had actually been doing was obsessing over which bachelor party photos to post to Facebook. Close enough. Meanwhile, as Edward thought through Jen, I was observing pretty much what I am always observing, namely, that the erotic always finds a way to peek through, even when you are talking to the dead.

It looked as if Jen had asked to go first, since she explained that Edward had done a reading for her mother while she was still alive and she herself was a fan. So his reading of Jen was impressive, but not quite spontaneous. Dr. Oz now opened the show up to Edward’s own intuition. He quickly turned to his left and identified a spot in the audience where he sensed something coming through. Something to do with St. Patrick’s Day. Audience members on the other side of the studio tried to get his attention. Hey, they wanted to be on TV too, and, apparently, they had a St. Patrick’s Day story. But he would have none of it. Edward knew exactly where he wanted to go: somewhere around a woman with a red shirt and a black jacket. He described again getting hits around “St. Patrick’s Day” and, now, a sense of being run or rolled over by a tractor or train.

Nope. Nothing. The woman in red and black knew nothing. Then the opposite side of the studio tried to get Edward’s attention again. No way.

Finally, a young woman (to the immediate left of the identified target) sheepishly stood up and told the story of her friend’s roommate, who was struck by a car on St. Patrick’s Day. Close enough.

And so it went.

Just as this segment was ending, one of those happy pages appeared in our waiting room and scooped up two people: mom and me. The room, I now realized, was a kind of testing pen. The pages had shut us all up in that room because they were looking for the right person, the right character (read: the right woman). That would be my mom. They walked her down to the front row, middle seat, and sat her down for the show’s next taped episode, this one on how to prepare turkey meatballs. They took me for one reason: I was with mom. They sat me in the thirty-something row up somewhere where it really didn’t matter if I had three heads.

To my great amazement, within minutes Dr. Oz was hand-feeding turkey meatballs to my mom on national television. All the pages were smiling and clapping. They had hand picked her, after all. Mom was beaming.

Then it was all over. Mom walked out giddy over Dr. Oz. I walked out marveling at what amounted to a new, and very old, theatre of the occult. If the Spiritualists had mixed entertainment and mediumship on stage in the nineteenth century, their present day inheritors were now doing it on national TV. It seemed to me that they did so with more or less the same paradoxical, ambiguous, fantastic results, through that surreal brew of trick and truth, fact and fiction, dream and daylight, constructed stagecraft and inherent gift that has long defined the performance of what we so clumsily call “the spiritual.”

Frank Baum would have loved it.

(Watch the episode here.)

2. Central Park West, New York City, 1963
skipping through mounds of crisp autumn leaves, I experience mortality

3. Brandeis University, Waltham, 1970
rolling down a summer green hill, I experience wonder

4. Jutland, Denmark, 1971
psychedelically altered on Easter morning, I experience at-one-ness

5. Jerusalem, Israel, 1971
watching “The Fixer,” Joel explains the history of blood libel and European anti-Semitism to me, I experience belonging

6. Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1980
sitting in front of “Guernica,” I experience transcendence

7. Greensboro, North Carolina, 1987
attending back-to-back Springsteen concerts, I experience full-ness

8. Princeton, New Jersey, 1992
facing the impossibility of biological parenthood, I experience desolation

9. Princeton, New Jersey, 1995
praying, I hear a soft voice telling me to take care of others. I experience immanence, then rebellion

10a. Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1999
holding my infant daughter, I experience a leap of faith

10b. Ramallah, West Bank, 2010
traveling with students, I hear them intelligently discuss politics and religion, I experience gratitude

Their titles were always momentous: The Next, The Ultimate, The Last. I was a literalist as a child, and I believed that the Whole Earth Catalogs contained the Whole Earth. They didn’t really seem like catalogs though, in the way the L. L. Bean and Johnny’s Selected Seed catalogs were in my parents’ house in rural Maine. The Catalogs were the tallest black spines on the white-painted bookshelf by the window in the living room, the Reference Shelf. My father would occasionally leap up from dinner and snatch the Oxford English Dictionary (condensed) or the Encyclopedia Britannica from this shelf. He would nudge his gold Lennon glasses further down on his nose, and intone triumphantly the wisdom contained there on the tissue-thin pages. These books contained authoritative answers; though they might occasionally be cross-referenced one to the other, the connections among them didn’t expand past the reference shelf.

But the Whole Earth Catalog was different. Though it resided on the same shelf, the sprawling, messy, self-deprecating celebration of accidental discovery was perhaps less related to the condensed Oxford English Dictionary than it was to the inhabitants of my parents’ other bookshelves: Helen and Scott Nearing’s homesteading chronicles, and M. Scott Peck’s nontraditional parenting guides. As in: they were all blueprints my parents had tried to follow, imperfectly. The Whole Earth Catalog represented the adventure and freedom of San Francisco, flowers-in-the-hair hippie-dom to my father, hardscrabble WASP Protestant by birth whose own spiritual sense was closer to New England transcendentalism, with its abstract, cold-weather visions of solitary fortitude. Having chosen to separate themselves, geographically, from family and friends, in favor of living a principled life in eastern Maine, they still hungered for the sunny, chaotic, Merry Prankster-style life.

The Catalog wasn’t the sort of thing you could flip through to find the answer to a specific question. I tried, and always ended up being infinitely side-tracked into an alternative universe of compost-able sleeping bags, houses built of old milk containers, the latest works of R. Crumb. Each entry seemed to be a prophecy of another world, an item that would only be useful in one single situation far removed from my ordinary life. The Catalog made it possible to imagine such situations, which was both exciting and terrifying. Each page looked different, some enclosed in a black border, handwritten and typeset words wandered among line drawings, diagrams, pentagrams, names and addresses to write away to. That was the thing: the Catalogs didn’t really exist, couldn’t really exist, in isolation. Their pages spoke directly to you, implored you to take action, to connect.

Once in his pot-smoking youth, my father was flipping through a Whole Earth Catalog when he had a semi-mystical experience: the book was calling to him. In a note by Ken Kesey, spiritual brethren of the Catalogs’ creator Stewart Brand, my father thought he saw his name “Henry.” This prompted him to find Kesey’s phone number and give him a call. As he and Kesey pored over the Catalog from their two ends of the country in Maine and Oregon, my father realized sheepishly that the word he’d thought said “Henry,” actually said “learn.” Kesey told my father: “Don’t worry, the same thing happened once with me and William Burroughs.” He left Henry with some parting wisdom, passed down to me as “keep on keeping on.” His message might just as well have been “Only connect.” Though you may feel yourself to be a solitary principled person, you are in fact part of a long, messy lineage of spiritual seekers. And that act of reaching out is never a mistake, because it connects you to a wider world; you don’t have to go it alone.

I always thought the most amazing part of this story was that my father could find Kesey’s number and that Kesey took his call—that was back in the seventies, before the Internet. How did you know where to find anybody? The Catalog, much more so than the Yellow Book, had magical powers of connectivity. Maybe that was why we kept them so long the biodegradable pages started to yellow and the glue in their perfect-binding started to erode. Years later, I learned that Stewart Brand had gotten off Ken Kesey’s bus and become one of the early inventors of the Internet; I can’t say I was surprised. I only hope he endowed it with the same impish spirit of merry mayhem that animated the Whole Earth Catalog.

This card—hand-lettered and never-sent—is the earliest document of my family tree: an invitation to a party held a decade before I was born. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen that’s old enough to bear the name our immigrant parents gave us, Watersmeet. It should not seem so old, but it does; this card from 1978 has the weight of a great-grandmother’s lost pearls, and though it hasn’t even yellowed with age, my mind conjures the dusty scent of memory when I hold it between my fingers.

I asked my father about Watersmeet. “I don’t know, son,” he said. “That was all before my time.” He joined the coven in 1983, only five years later; how could things have been forgotten so quickly? But in those five years, we’d lost Carrie and Deryk, those British wanderers who had brought us word of Wicca from the old country, who had left, gone away to Oklahoma and Iraq, to building plans and brain tumors, to fates none of my family seem to know. In just five years, the family had fractured, from one coven between the Mississippi, Missouri, and Meramec—St. Louis, where the waters meet—to covens across the Midwest, in Kansas City, in Des Moines, in Springfield. By the time my parents joined, they called it Sabbatsmeet, the name I’ve known our family by since before I knew what religion meant.

I found the card in a collection of invitations my friend Sarah kept, invitations that told the history of Sabbatsmeet in six-week intervals. Eight festivals a year, each one of them heralded by a letter with a time, a place and a picture. They’re about the only letters I get anymore. Sometimes they feel anachronistic—Why do we keep a mailing list anymore? Hasn’t everyone had email for a decade?—but we send them anyway, to people who already know about it from the Facebook group, to people in Alabama and California who haven’t made it to a sabbat in decades. I looked through this folder, at these pages of Commodore 64 typefaces and hand-drawn directions, hoping that somewhere in there I’d find my own history—whatever that is, whatever that means.

Look at this tree.

I understand the rightmost branch, the St. Louis covens: Pleiades—that’s the coven I was born into—and next to it, Watershade, our sister. (In the decade and a half since this was drawn, there has been another branch, HollyOak, already come and gone.) They grew out of Arcady, which came from Watersmeet. This much I knew, if only from osmosis. But what about the rest? Silver Ankh? Crystal Mountain? Elysium? Why have I never heard of these?

Sarah fills in some of their stories. “Avillion, I think that was Rhiannon’s group,” she says. “And Elysium’s still around. Lane and Cheryl.” The left-most branches are all the Kansas City covens, whom we lost touch with after a hard divorce. It takes a phone call to Don, once the priest of Arcady Coven before he left Missouri for Florida, to learn much of anything about the others. He told me stories of Deryk and Carrie, he with his bushy mustache and his dry wit, her with her bright red hair and poor coordination: “She was our ‘Aunt Clara,’” he says—the clumsy aunt on Bewitched. A week before a Mabon festival, Don and his wife Alene had stopped by Carrie and Deryk’s to find them packing their suitcases. “We have to move to Kansas City for Deryk’s work,” they told him. “Now you’re the priest and priestess.” The next Beltane—the first of May, when we dance with ribbons in hand and twine ourselves around the Maypole—he’d said they should stop calling themselves Watersmeet, since their meetings weren’t about one coven anymore, and how some new girl from Duluth had said they should call it Sabbatsmeet instead…

I smiled when I heard that story. Elaine, Sarah’s mother, is as close to me as any aunt; once, she’d just been some girl from Duluth. She would have been younger then than I am now. Somehow that seems impossible—not that she could have ever been that young, but that she could have been a part of Sabbatsmeet at that age, could have named it. It feels like it should have always belonged to people older and wiser than me. But it didn’t. They were just kids at the time.

In my head, I know that. I still can’t believe it.

A coven is not a church; there are no buildings, no pastors with divinity degrees, no Women’s Group postings on the bulletin board; only my parents’ living room on a Friday night, the coffee table filled with athames (wiccan ceremonial knives) and chalices and candles. Ultimately, there is nothing material to hold the enterprise together—nothing but the will of its members. That’s all fine: when it works, it’s full of intimacy and love, a good place to grow up in.

But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes people disappear—they move away, or they get divorced, or a friendship ends violently—and they take their memories with them. A few things get saved—some records of the early days, some lists of names unspoken for decades—but it seems like so much more has been lost, stolen away by changes of address and wounds that never had a reason to heal.

I’ve learned things I never even knew to ask about by leafing through this folder—a history that I didn’t know existed. Mostly it makes me wonder how much more there is to find, how many more people I owe some of myself to. I want to know my people, my parents, what their lives were like before I was born. Working-class Missourians like my parents were probably not the people Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders would have expected to reach. But somehow their religion did, passing from England, with love from Deryk and Carrie, through Watersmeet, through Sabbatsmeet, through Pleiades, through my parents, to me. It just seems so improbable—but it happened. How?

I heard that Tom, the one who sent the Samhain invitation with the grinning bat, went into the hospital last week. Liver failure. It doesn’t seem right that a man who would remind his friends to bring their “teddy bears & other favorite cuddlies” should be vulnerable to that. But people are fragile, and too easy to lose. Sometimes the invitations outlast the parties.