I don’t believe in God, was the statement I made, in a casual tone, as we lay watching television in our bedroom at our home in South-central Los Angeles. “What!" my older brother replied. How could there be a God when black folks are subject to so much apathy, injustice, and flat out evil? Of course I was not able to articulate my sentiments in such a fashion at the time. I was barely fifteen but I felt confident that my stance had been validated within my statement as such. He looked at me, rolled his eyes and said, "Whatever," as if I was just going through a phase.
By the Spring of 1986, I would put my atheistic beliefs into practice by indulging in the un-godly crack-cocaine epidemic that plagued our community at the time. After spending six to seven months in one-room apartments and motels, both selling and using the illicit drug, I would spend another six months in many of the various juvenile facilities throughout the county of Los Angeles. In June of '87, after being released back to the custody of my mother, we relocated to Sacramento. I made an earnest effort to reform upon arrival but it did not last very long. One year later, the day after graduating high school, Mamma said that I 'gradually-waited' for them to give me a diploma, since I barely graduated receiving a D grade in the majority of my classes. I went to the local Carl’s Jr. and got a job. The very next day I went into Der Wienersnitzel right down the street and took a second job. While my classmates were enjoying their summer and preparing to enter college, I was working sixteen to twenty hours a day cooking corndogs and double-cheeseburgers. This endeavor may have been honorable if it were not for my intentions.
After working all summer I went into the bank and withdrew every dime that I had spent the summer earning, $2,500, hopped on a Greyhound bus headed for LA and proceeded to purchase two ounces of crack for the return trip to Sacramento. It did not take my mother long to find out what I was up too. One morning as I left to pick up some money from a fellow drug dealer I returned home to find that 'the authorities' (Mamma) had raided my room. I had the drugs hidden in the box spring of my twin bed, but the way my mother tossed the room proved she was bound and determined to find them. Mamma flushed the crack down the toilet, but I was able to convince her to hand over the cash that she found with it. She only did so because she knew that I worked two jobs over the summer. I left home, checked in a motel room and within two hours had my hands on a ¼ pound of marijuana. Within forty-eight hours, before I was able to sell one gram of the weed, I was arrested for grand theft auto and possession of marijuana for sale. After being on the run, without actually running, I would eventually serve four of a six month sentence in the Sacramento County Jail.
Two months later I would be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and strong armed robbery. Although I was not 'innocent' in the genuine sense of the word, I was far from guilty of the charges I was facing. The case went to trial, and after the prosecution finished presenting its case it was evident to everyone (including the prosecution) that the charges were a complete farce, and before my attorney began our rebuttal, the prosecution offered to drop the charges from strong armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon to misdemeanor battery. Anyone familiar with the legal system knows that the two charges don’t even belong in the same court room. In effect, this drama was the end of my career as a criminal. I simply felt if they could send me to prison for a long time for something I did not do, imagine what they would do if they actually did catch me. I completely turned from the criminal lifestyle, although I was still a devout, self-proclaimed atheist. When I was in juvenile facilities and adult jail I would read just to break up the monotony of incarceration. I also found that when you read it takes you to the places about which you read.
Although I found that I actually enjoyed reading, just like all compulsion, it did not stick once I left jail. Two and a half years after my last arrest, my first son was born. By that time what I had read, combined with my memory and my big mouth, made me a self-proclaimed expert on black culture. One evening while several friends and I filled the air of the parking lot of a low-income apartment complex with the aroma of marijuana smoke and cheap gin, the conversation turned to the plight of the black race. I received accolades from the group of my peers for my knowledge of the subject and thereby, in what is the custom of young black men, was told that there was a man who lived just right across the parking lot who would “tear me up” with his superior knowledge on the subject. Of course I accepted the challenge and being a brash twenty-two year old, I proceeded to walk right over to this man’s apartment and knock on his door. The fact that he even answered his door was a matter of Providence because he was known to blatantly ignore an unexpected knock at his door.
When he answered the door I was immediately somewhat intimidated by his physical presence, and not in the way one might think. He had a striking resemblance to Marcus Garvey, yet more handsome, with a more pleasant countenance. After I introduced myself and explained to him how this stranger came to knock on his door we spent the next three or more hours in discussion. One of the first things that he expressed was that he was a Christian and that his love and his knowledge for his people was founded and based in Christian doctrine/theology. I replied that I did not believe in any religion or God, and he just looked at me and smiled. Toward the end of our discussion I felt the need to iterate to my new found friend that I was a devout atheist and did not believe in God. This time he just looked at me with the same warm smile and a twinkle in his eye and said, “Yes you do, you just don’t know it.” Later he would elaborate on his statement by telling me that all the men I revered such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (whom my eldest son is named after) were men of God and the reason why I admired them had spiritual significance that I was unaware of because of denial. The above statement was as far as he would go in regard to expressing my lack of faith. Throughout the early encounters of our relationship he would make no attempt to lead me to God, yet he would speak freely when he had no choice other than to speak from a spiritual perspective.
Inevitably I would turn to my mentor for guidance in regard to my willingness to accept God in my life and even then he let me find my way. Because of my love and reverence for Malcolm X, not only did he accept my preference for my hero's religion, he suggested that I join the nation of Islam because God is God and if my endeavor was to live good according to truth than I could find that within any religion as long as I acknowledged God. It did not take the Lord long to let me know that the Black Muslims were not for me and prior to completing the necessary documents to become a member I decided to go in a different direction—the Bible. So I began to study Scripture without any guidance from my mentor, as he has always done, even to this very day. He leaves me in my freedom only to be guided within my endeavor and the Lord’s Providence.
Our introduction to one another appeared (at the time) to be due to are mutual love for the black race and it continued as such even as I began to enter the spiritual realm, with the difference being that I would be eager to share my new found faith. In the beginning, my endeavor within Scripture was to confirm a religious doctrine based on Black Nationalism. In a word, it was my intent to prove through Scripture that the black race, both in the states and abroad, was spiritually superior to other ethnic groups, especially Europeans. I say this in retrospect as I did not see it that way at the time; I simply believed that I was searching for truth. When I would share my understanding and interpretation of Scripture, he would agree with much if not all of what I perceived, yet he would constantly express to me that the Word in itself was a spiritual book and that I should make an attempt to read it as such. I was reading and studying the Word in a secular way and my study had no interior substance.
One particular day as my mentor and I were having one of our typical discussion about black people he stressed the fact that, "This little white man,” as he pointed to his collection of Swedenborg's literature, "means more to my path to become a good man than any man I know of (with the exception of the Lord himself)." When he made the comment without hesitation all I could think about was the great love and reverence he, himself, had for Dr. King. Who was this "white man” anyway? I thought to myself. He told me that if I wanted to see the Word of God in its genuine sense, that I was welcome to take one of those green books home with me. I asked him which one he recommended as there were at least thirty in the book case. He told me to look through them and choose one that I thought might appeal to me, so I scanned through and finally decided upon Apocalypse Revealed, simply because, well, it sounded apocalyptic. I had no idea what the term meant and even less knowledge about the Book of Revelation. As a matter of fact, I had no idea that the book I had chosen was an unfolding of the spiritual sense of the biblical text. It is all a moot point now simply because it took one simple, yet extremely profound truth to confirm that what I was reading was from a source like no other and that it was Divine Truth, although I would not come to acknowledge or even know there was such a thing as Divine truth until much later in my study.
I read one sentence and my mind came to an immediate halt. I was totally mesmerized by what I had read: the love of self and the love of the world are indeed the devil and hell. The reason why I did not use a direct quote is because I do not remember where exactly I read this in Apocalypse Revealed. In fact I do not remember how far I had gotten in that particular book and until this day, twenty years later, I have not read Apocalypse Revealed in its entirety. What I do know is that what I read made so much sense to me and had such a profound effect on the miniscule amount of truth that I believed that I knew, that I was able to easily accept whatever I read thence forth. I simply believed that any book that had this type of truth within it had to be true in its entirety, and this even allowed me to believe all of what Swedenborg revealed about his spiritual experiences and interaction with the Lord, angels, and spirits, both good and evil. After that first truth was acknowledged I needed no further convincing. Although I had found much of what I read quite incredible, I still believed it to be true. The consistency and repetition in which Swedenborg dictated these truths was a valuable means of confirmation.
I asked my mentor for another book as I found it hard to follow Apocalypse Revealed, being a novice and all, and of course it was only natural for one to have doubts about such things in their entirety. He suggested Heaven and Hell, so I took it with me and read it, and from there I was off and running. True Christian Religion, Universal Human and Soul-body Interaction, Divine Love and Wisdom, Four Doctrines, Journal of Dreams, Debates with devils, Divine Providence, and Helen Keller’s Light in My Darkness. I believed that I had arrived and that it was just a matter of time before my sword was sharp enough so that the Lord would sweep me off of my feet and allow me to accomplish my dreams, which were ultimately to use the truth to become great, through good use of course. Around 1998, I purchased volume one of Arcana Coelestia and would eventually purchase and read volumes two and three before actually ordering the vast majority of Swedenborg's theological works from the Swedenborg Foundation.
By this time I had put all forms of my criminal past behind me, I was a father of two, I basically kept employment, although I would consistently change employers, and I was well read on diverse subjects due to my thirst for history and spiritual/theological matters. So it appeared that the worse was all behind me and that it was just a matter of time before I came into my own and was able to put all my life experience and knowledge to use. There was a hitch in my giddy-up. All I did was work, drink beer, smoke marijuana, and socialize. Although I was a hard worker, my work ethic was not based on the principles of charity, so I was externally productive but still void of fruit. Even still, I believed that pure influx would lead me to a life of genuine good use and the most egregious part of my life was long behind me. Boy did I get a wrong number! What was to come was purely a manifestation of where my spirit was and it manifested itself in every particular of my life.