Introduction to a Spiritual Boot Camp

By Suzanna Leigh

James and I landed in Honolulu in late February of 1974. No one to meet me, of course. Culture shock; people in shorts, brightly colored shirts, long muumuus, fragrant plumeria leis around their necks. The very air smelled different.

I knew no one.

I sat on the edge of a fountain with a panic headache for three hours, gathering my courage to call my friend Hoagie’s brother Karl, while James played around my feet.

Karl and his partner Marilyn graciously gave me a place to stay in their Honolulu house for a week while I got my bearings. I visited the University of Hawaii where my sophomore year had been interrupted six years before. I went to the beautiful Japanese garden at the East West Center on campus, where the koi were still swimming in the pond. I ate papaya at the student union, remembering how the taste of that sweet orange slice of papaya settled my stomach the day I learned I was pregnant.

I visited the Crossroads Church where Bill and I had planned to marry, before I learned I couldn’t marry in Hawaii without my parent’s permission until I was 20. I was 19, and my dad did not give permission. Although we did eventually marry, I still carried the emotional scars six years later.

At last, I was ready to move us on to Hilo, on the Big Island, where I planned to continue my interrupted college education at the community college. Also, my friend Ananda lived somewhere on the Big Island.

How can I describe the big Banyan tree that greeted us at the hotel where we stayed that first night in Hilo? It was as big around as the living room in Lindy’s house on Vashon, and its many trunks were like a close-knit family of trees.

It was time for me to find my community. I called the chamber of commerce and asked about Christian communities. They gave me the address of the “Pilgrims,” and James and I hitchhiked to the stone mansion on Hilo Bay where the Pilgrims lived. When we arrived, women were hanging a quilt on the line and singing the same songs I learned when I worshipped with a Pentecostal group on Vashon. I fit right in. James and I moved in with about 20 other sisters and brothers, mostly about my age, with a few children.

It was communal living. The brothers went out to work, while the sisters stayed home, kept the house, cooked the meals, and read the Bible. I enrolled James in kindergarten. Most of my housemates were hippies from the mainland, hungry for … something. For a spiritual experience.

Many were living in the jungles or on the beaches when Ken found them. Ken told them of Jesus and worked minor miracles. They fed him hashish brownies and he didn’t get high! He brought back to life a child who had ridden his trike off the stone bulkhead into the bay and drowned. He led us in joyful singing and worship. He cast out demons. Ken gathered us together like a shepherd gathering his sheep and became head of a community of young evangelist fundamentalist Christians living in a donated mansion.

I felt cared for, and safe. I learned the truth of “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven … and all these things will be given unto you.” Here I was in a tropical paradise, with almost no money, living in a mansion on Hilo Bay!

There were times when I was homesick, of course. I gathered shells and coral bits and put them in a baby food jar on the window sill by my bunk. Whenever I missed Vashon I would pick it up and look at it, and its beauty would comfort me.

Eventually, Ken moved us to Kona, the side of the island where Ananda lived and where Lindy settled when she came to the Big Island. I would hitchhike up to Captain Cook to visit them whenever I felt spiritually claustrophobic in the restrictive community of the Pilgrims.

I learned many spiritual lessons that year, which I would later test.