Hark! Is it the Sound of Three Hands Clapping?

My spiritual head is still spinning somewhere between my astral plane and my upper mental body after today's class, "Archangels."  I had assumed there would be an intermission at some point during the instruction.  There was not. 

The man who led the class was nice, but his syllabus lacked direction.  He started with a Spiritual Body Meditation his wife had received in a dream from Gordon, her own personal archangel, in which you imagine a set of stairs and seven "mini you"s to mentally place on these stairs.  You tell them to Stay!, which keeps your spiritual bodies aligned.

There was a handout called Activation of Kundalini Energy, which involved opening your crown chakra center (which is purple) "like a camera lens" and mixing Color Energies (they move in a counterclockwise direction) with a sexual partner until the colors ranging from Ultra-Violet to Ultra-Red become gold.  Sherwin-Williams might be wise to post warning labels under their lids.

Naturally, the thoughts that sneaked in to rescue my dehydrating eyeballs used the instructor's pseudo-religious message as a springboard.

My family tree includes serial church-surfers.  Mom wanted the five souls at her breakfast table to have a fighting chance at the Grand Buffet in the Sky, so she interviewed pastors and tried a few congregations on for size.  We tagged along and met some of the strangest people on the planet.

Anyone who has ever spent a week at any Church Camp need read no further.  In fact, we may have church-camped together if you grew up in Texas and migrated to the mountains in Wyoming every July, where it was fun to smear your accent all over the locals.

We had no idea what any of you were saying.

Except once.  The night the ninth-grader Texan girls stopped by the pre-teen cabin to chat about sinful temptations awaiting us in JUNIOR HIGH.  My cabin mates and I pretended to catch their syrupy drift by laughing our fifth-grader laughs, then cried ourselves to sleep the second they left.

My family belonged to a rogue church (not in a national chain) the year I was poised to transition from JUNIOR HIGH to sin's big leagues.  The pastor was a gentle old man whose wife was a dead ringer for Mrs. Claus.  She could simultaneously play the piano, blow her nose into a tissue, and smile at the "crowd" while she sang.

Pastor Santa wanted more members in the Youth Group, so he encouraged all four of us to invite friends into the mountains for a Jesus Festival.  This was in the early 1970s when anything with the name 'Jesus' stuck on it was terribly en vogue.  Just ask the Doobie Brothers.

So I invited Bonnie, one of the freer spirits I knew, and she accepted without hesitation.  She had just embroidered the word 'Jesus' somewhere on her Levi Big Bells, so it seemed like A SIGN.

A few things still stand out about that First and Last Annual Jesus Festival.

Our church didn't have a bus, so the pastor delivered us in a panel van equipped with metal folding chairs.  It was all singing and clapping as we motored up the switchbacks, until the pastor double-clutched on one huge curve and sent Bonnie flying down the "aisle."

Her super-tight Jesus jeans split right up the crotch and she hadn't brought another pair, so she spent the entire week scooting between events with a scratchy army blanket wrapped around her waist.  She tried passing herself off as Native American, but her flaming red hair cancelled out 95% of her introduction.  Everything, in fact, except the word Bonnie.

The National Outdoor Leadership School, a company specializing in survival trips for rich hippie kids from Back East, had recently moved into our tiny town.  The rich hippie kids were deposited at the top of a mountain range in June, shown which berries would kill them, then turned loose to find their way back to the valley before the snow flew.  Like Hansel and Gretel, but with rolling papers instead of breadcrumbs.

A small, ravenous band of rich hippie kids smelled our Jesus Festival hamburgers and staggered to the campfire, aiming to skew their chances of survival just a tad.  They stayed for cocoa and s'mores, singing "Kumbaya" the way domesticated animals do stupid tricks for whatever the humans are eating.  Then they rolled out sleeping bags next to our tents and were up extra early for breakfast.

But when they gave a demonstration on skinny-dipping in freezing water, Jesus, Santa, and Mrs. Claus put every one of their feet down and cast the whole bunch out.  This was probably what JUNIOR HIGH was supposed to have been like.

I'm staying away from Archangel Anything as a post-retirement hobby if these are the memories it evokes.

The Archangel Meditation we received in class has steps that include extending all four of your hands, palm-up (right hand, left hand, right astral hand, left astral hand).  But I needn't have worried about getting that far in the instructions, anyway, as I failed completely at the first line:

1.)  Ground yourself.

(Sponge Brain is taking a break!  November is National Novel Writing Month - 50,000 words in 30 days - and she has plans for an epic, sprawling, inspirational mess of an Old West, coming-of-age story.  Working title?   Go, Girl, Go!  www.nanowrimo.org.)