A Tale of Loving, Belonging, & Purpose

How even a Christian Comedian Couldn't Save Me

Photo by Evan Clark on Unsplash

It was 1982. I walked into my college dorm room for the first time and met my roommate, Bruce. His look was more 1972 than 1982, the very image I’d always wished for myself: caramel skin, long brown hair tucked into a leather headband, fringed vest over an untucked button-down shirt. Bell bottoms. Alas, my father would never have allowed it, at least not the long hair. Either Bruce’s parents were more laid-back thank mine, or he was just more rebellious than I.

Bruce was such a nice guy. He asked questions and listened carefully while you answered. He smiled and laughed a lot, and was game for any adventure; a hike around the lake, a canoe trek, hitchhiking into town. He bubbled over at the beauty of our picturesque new environs (Paul Smith’s College lay nestled in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains). “Praise Jesus,” Bruce would say as we hiked the evergreen-shadowed lakeside trails in that first week, a breathy “Hallelujah,” escaping his lips as we rounded a bend and encountered a half-dozen students basking on a sunny peninsula, and a few more, in cutoff jeans, leaping, yelping, into the cold leafy water.

Photo by Mirto Time on Unsplash

Within weeks Bruce had collected a circle of friends from all over campus. They would meet up in our room to study the bible, or listen to Christian rock albums. Bruce’s friends were as sweet as he, so I didn’t complain. “Just don’t try to convert me and we’ll be fine,” I said.

Of course, he smiled. Those eyes. So wide and loving.

One of Bruce’s records was Mike Warnke: Alive!, a hilarious and emotive recording of a popular Christian comic who “found Jesus” with the help of his Navy bootcamp roommate. I couldn’t help but listen to this mesmerizing storyteller, despite my resistance to its message, and I can still recite lines from that album verbatim. For me, it rivaled Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy and Bill Cosby’s Revenge.

In the Alive! album, Warnke—a self-proclaimed former Satanist, drug dealer, and “foul-mouthed nasty little brat”—tells of how, after months of proselytizing messages of unconditional love, his relentless roommate finally earned himself a punch in the nose. Lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, the young recruit, still not giving up, reaches a bloody hand toward his attacker and says, “Mike, Jesus shed his blood for you, and if you’re good enough for him, you’re good enough for me.” (I know; eye roll.) And then Warnke finds his way into a broom closet, falls to his knees, and asks God to “make me like him.”*

Photo by Eva Darron on Unsplash

I think most humans desire three things: to be loved, to feel a sense of belonging, and to embody some kind of purpose in their lives. These desires motivate much of our behavior. But are these values something we lack to begin with? Are they hidden from us, something we must seek out in this chaotic, confusing world—and hopefully, if we’re lucky, obtain in order to thrive? (While those not so lucky fail and wither?)

We humans are as natural as birds, as a granite ledge, as a river; how could we be lacking such essential elements, without which life is fragmented and incomplete? Could it be that these crucial ingredients are not missing after all? Could love, belonging, and purpose be right here under our noses, a part of who we are? Could it merely be our own thinking, conditioned and otherwise, that is obstructing our view of our own truth?

I may not have been interested in joining Bruce’s faith, in being “born again,” but I was as hungry for love and belonging as he likely was. I was just not capable of believing it would come from some bearded white father/protector in the sky. I was still recovering from obligatory attendance at Catholic Mass every Sunday of my entire childhood, where I never felt a hint of God’s presence.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

My family never had much money, as Mom and Dad somehow managed to produce eight hungry kids. So, I never expected my parents to pay for my education. I had saved up every penny of my first semester’s tuition working at my cousin’s gas station. The second semester would be paid for with a student loan. In the meantime, a work-study job cleaning the bathrooms in my dorm building would provide some spending money.

Unfortunately, the bullies who’d been motivated to cruelty by my quiet demeanor in grade school seemed to have followed me to college. After complaining to the dean about the revolting state of the bathrooms one weekend—a professional cleaning company would have recoiled in disgust, and I was only a freshman making three dollars an hour—I found my utility closet ransacked, broom handles snapped in half, cleaning products dumped on the floor.

In addition, I was homesick, and the one non-Christian-radical friend I’d made had dropped out and gone back to his family in New Jersey. Oh, and I was failing my requisite algebra class. So, what began as an exciting new period in my life was gradually becoming a demoralizing letdown.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

On one particularly lonely winter day I walked the cold wooded path to the college chapel, a historic wooden structure nestled in a spruce grove. The door was unlocked and the chapel was empty. I knelt in a pew close to the altar and prayed. I was crying. I wanted so badly what Bruce had; the ability to believe, to have the faith, or ignorance—whatever it took—to find comfort in something or someone greater than myself. Someone who would talk to me and tell me everything was going to be all right. At one point I actually thought I heard a voice—God’s?— say, “My dear son, I love you,” and that caused me to catch my breath and then sob with relief.

The next day I asked myself, Am I born again now? I didn’t really feel any different.

And nothing changed. I was the same lonely boy, out of his element, out of money, out of ideas. I wasn’t sure what I was doing in this isolated institution. I was enrolled in the forest-recreation program because I loved nature and I loved trees. But I was also falling into debt for it, and not even sure how the degree was going to translate into a meaningful career. I decided to go home, get a job, and think it over. That loving voice I thought I heard was just in my head, I decided, a product of emotional distress, the desperate need for love, and the power of suggestion.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

My spiritual quest continued throughout my life, though I never came to trust any religion, never got comfortable believing in things that couldn’t be proven or that didn’t make sense, that didn’t work. I would refer to any sort of higher power as simply nature, or the universe.

And that’s not too far off from the tenets of my current Buddhism-informed meditation and mindfulness practice. The Substack writer

Andrei Atanasov

recently asked his followers to define love in their own way. I posted, “I think real love, true love, is a deep understanding, at the core of our being, that all human beings are one family, one entity. When we know this completely, then we desire the same peace and happiness for others as we do for ourselves.” Understanding this definition of love and of self means I don’t feel lonely anymore, because I belong to Life, and it means I don’t crave a sense of purpose anymore, because my purpose is to understand who I am.

It is indeed true that those three essential elements—love, belonging, and purpose—were right under my nose the whole time. It was just a matter of clearly seeing our irrefutable and inseverable connection to nature, to life, and to the entire universe, and to stop looking for love in concepts and abstractions.

I lost touch with Bruce, though I will never forget those doe-like eyes. I hope his faith in God was never disillusioned because I believe God for him was just another name for pure love, something that already existed at the core of his being. As far as Mike Warnke goes... well, read the footnote, and let’s hope he eventually finds his truth as well.

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Footnote: An internet search reveals that, ten years after my college friends and I lay around our dorm room enjoying Mike Warnke’s charismatic story-telling, a Christian magazine exposed him as a fraud; almost every fascinating biographical detail Warnke relayed in his series of best-selling records and books was either false or grossly exaggerated. His career essentially came to an end.

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