Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

Benson recounted his treatment of a young woman with severe symptoms of hippiedom — drug abuse, promiscuity, sensationally bad personal hygiene (at one point, roaches come swarming out of her purse) — and he compared her progress to that of Peter, who initially resisted Jesus, then monstrously idealized him, then fell into despair at the prospect of termination, and was finally saved by internalizing the relationship.

Mutton had first gone to Benson soon after he became an associate minister. He suddenly had so much influence over the teenagers in his charge that he was afraid he might start acting out, and Benson had told him he was right to be afraid. He made Mutton name aloud the things he was tempted to do, so as to make himself less likely to do them. It was a kind of psychic homeopathy, and Mutton brought the method back to his Fellowship leadership supervisions, where, every week, behind closed doors, in the church parlor, he and the advisors took turns making each other uncomfortable, inoculating themselves against temptations to misuse their power, airing their personal issues so as not to inflict them on the kids. Photocopies of Then Joy Breaks Through began to circulate among Fellowship advisors. The Authentic Relationship, as exemplified by Jesus and Peter, became the group’s Grail — its alternative to the passive complicity of drug-using communities, its rebuke to traditional pastoral notions of “comforting” and “enabling.”

As soon as Mutton entered training with Benson, following MacDonald’s suicide, the spirit of Fellowship began to change. Part of the change was cultural, the waning of a hippie moment; part of it was Mutton’s own growing up, his diminishing need for seventeen-year-old buddies, his increasing involvement with his outside clients. But after the Shannondale debacle there were no more wholesale rule violations, and Fellowship became less of a one-man show, less of an improvised happening, more of a well-oiled machine. By the time I started tenth grade, the senior-high group was paying small monthly salaries to half a dozen young advisors. Their presence made it all the easier for me to steer clear of Mutton, whose habit of calling me “Franzone!” (it rhymed with “trombone”) somehow confirmed that he and I had no real relationship. It no sooner would have occurred to me to go to him with my troubles than to confide in my parents.

The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who’d been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony’s tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He liked to walk into Burger King and loudly order two Whoppers with no meat. If he was losing a Spades game, he would take a card out of his hand, tell the other players, “Play this suit!” and then lick the card and stick it to his forehead facing out. In discussions, he liked to lean into other people’s space and bark at them. He said, “You better deal with that!” He said, “Sounds to me like you’ve got a problem that you’re not talking about!” He said, “You know what? I don’t think you believe one word of what you just said to me!” He said, “Any resistance will be met with an aggressive response!” If you hesitated when he moved to hug you, he backed away and spread his arms wide and goggled at you with raised eyebrows, as if to say, “Hello? Are you going to hug me, or what?” If he wasn’t playing guitar he was reading Jung, and if he wasn’t reading Jung he was birdwatching, and if he wasn’t birdwatching he was practicing tai chi, and if you came up to him during his practice and asked him how he would defend himself if you tried to mug him with a gun, he would demonstrate, in dreamy Eastern motion, how to remove a wallet from a back pocket and hand it over. Listening to the radio in his VW Bug, he might suddenly cry out, “I want to hear…‘La Grange’ by ZZ Top!” and slap the dashboard. The radio would then play “La Grange.”

One weekend in 1975, Mutton and Symes and the other advisors attended a pastoral retreat sponsored by the United Church of Christ. The Fellowship gang rode in like Apaches of confrontation, intending to shock and educate the old-fashioned hand-holders and enablers. They performed a mock supervision, sitting in a tight circle while seventy or eighty ministers sat around them and observed. Inside this fishbowl, Mutton turned to Symes and asked him, “When are you going to cut your hair?”

Symes had known in advance that he was going to be the “volunteer.” But his ponytail was very important to him, and the subject was explosive.

Mutton asked him again, “When are you going to cut your hair?”

“Why should I cut my hair?”

“When are you going to grow up and be a leader?”

While the other advisors kept their heads low and the enabling and comforting older clergy looked on, Mutton began to beat up on Symes. “You’re committed to social justice and personal growth,” he said. “Those are your values.”

Symes made a stupid-face. “Duh! Your values, too.”

“Well, and who are the people who most need to hear your voice? People who look like you, or people who don’t look like you?”

“Both. Everyone.”

“But what if your attachment to your style is becoming a barrier to doing what’s most important to you? What’s the problem with cutting your hair?”

“I don’t want to cut my hair!” Symes said, his voice breaking.

“That is such bullshit ,” Mutton said. “Where do you want to fight your battles? Do you want to be fighting about your tie-dye T-shirt and your painter’s pants? Or do you want to be fighting over civil rights? Immigrant workers’ rights? Women’s rights? Compassion for the disenfranchised? If these are the battles that matter to you, when are you going to grow up and cut your hair?”

“I don’t know—”

“When are you going to grow up and accept your authority?”

“I don’t know! Bob. I don’t know!”

Mutton could have been asking himself the same questions. Fellowship had been meeting in a Christian church for nearly a decade, whole years had gone by in which no Bible had been seen, “Jesus Christ” was the thing you said when somebody spilled soup on your sunburn, and George Benson, in his supervision of Mutton, wanted to know what the story was. Was this a Christian group or not? Was Mutton willing to stick his neck out and own up to his belief in God and Christ? Was he willing to claim his ministry? Mutton was getting similar questions from some of the advisors. They wanted to know on whose authority honesty and confrontation had become the central values of the group. On Mutton’s authority? Why Mutton’s? Who he? If the group wanted to be about more than Mutton and the group’s adoration of him, then where did the authority reside?

To Mutton the answer was clear. If you took away Christ’s divinity, you were left with “Kum Ba Ya.” You were left with “Let’s hold hands and be nice to each other.” Jesus’ authority as a teacher — and whatever authority Mutton and company had as followers of his teachings — rested on His having had the balls to say, “I am the fulfillment of the prophecies, I am the Jews’ gift to mankind, I am the son of Man,” and to let Himself be nailed to a cross to back it up. If you couldn’t take that step in your own mind, if you couldn’t refer to the Bible and celebrate Communion, how could you call yourself a Christian?

The question, which Mutton raised in supervision, pissed off Symes extravagantly. The group already had its own rituals and liturgies and holy days, its candles, its Joni Mitchell songs, its retreats and spring trips. Symes was amazed that Mutton, with his training in Freud and Jung, wasn’t repelled by the childishness and regression of Christian ceremony. “‘How can we call ourselves Christians?’” he echoed, goggling at Mutton. “Uh, how about by… trying to live like Christ and follow his teachings ? What do we need to eat somebody’s blood and body for? That is so unbelievably primitive. When I want to feel close to God, I don’t read Corinthians. I go out and work with poor people. I put myself in loving relationships. Including my relationship with you , Bob.”