An Unorthodox Trip

Samuel A. Autman

The first thing I saw when I woke up were red dots dancing around my apartment. They resembled vanishing and reappearing balloons that wouldn’t commit to physicality. Every place my eyes fell, the living room, bathroom, they appeared. For hours, my head hurt and heart thumped with fret as I paced. What is this? The uncertainty was relentless. I wanted it to stop but it wouldn’t. That was late winter 1998, months before Google or WebMD appeared and allowed easy false self-diagnosing. I was thirty-one, in relatively good health, and living in the Central West End in St. Louis, a few miles from where I grew up. With a history of diabetes, strokes, and glaucoma in my family, the latter of which caused a maternal great-grandmother to go blind, I was terrified. I went to the ER.

After an MRI, spinal tap, eyeball examinations, and extensive blood work, an ophthalmologist scratched his forehead before giving me the diagnosis.

“Mr. Autman, you have something called Central Serous Chorioretinopathy,” the doctor said. “It’s a detached retina. Are you under a lot of stress right now?”

“Yes, I’m a journalist and it’s pretty stressful on my job,” I responded.

“Any other stresses?”

“My father died not long ago. I didn’t know him well but it kind of freaked me out.”

Donning a white lab coat and looking perplexed, the doctor explained the prognosis.  Central Serous Chorioretinopathy, also known as CSCR, had caused fluid to leak from my retina and collect under the central macula in my left eye. That’s what created the blurred vision, hence the bouncing red balloons. At the time I was an education reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the newspaper I had thrown on porches as a child. Previously I had worked as a newspaper writer in Tulsa and Salt Lake City.

Turns out that covering the St. Louis Public Schools, an ailing district from which I had graduated the decade before, was not merely depressing but stressful. Not only was I responsible for the school board meetings, but shootings, including gang violence, were heartbreaking. It didn’t help that my mother, a lifelong educator, was a district employee. More than one administrator asked, “How’s your mother?” They didn’t mean it as a threat, but I sure took it that way. As a Black graduate of a mostly Black school district, I had hoped to bring more nuance and context to my coverage. While I wrote about Teacher of the Year and other happy stories, those wouldn’t land on the front page like a calamity of school board members bickering or a school shooting. A school board member routinely called me at home to reveal what the board discussed in closed sessions. My body was keeping score in stress points.

“You need to go on vacation, relax, and hope your retina reattaches,” the doctor said. “Sometimes they do.”

A vacation and prayer were my best hopes.

* * *

My earliest vacation memories had Mama and Daddy scooping up four-year-old me and Chung, my two-year-old sister, for road trips. We’d peel off from our tiny suburban St. Louis house in daddy’s blue 1968 Camaro bound for relatives in Chicago or Rayville, Louisiana or Grady, Arkansas.

After our parents split, Mama kept us traveling. Since she was an elementary school teacher with the St. Louis Public Schools, we’d accompany the eighth graders to Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York City on bus trips. By the time I got to junior high, our teachers took the same trip, but I remember ordering a hamburger and fries for lunch at Windows to the World, a restaurant in the north tower of the World Trade Center. I always thought I’d get back there in adulthood. I never did. Traveling then expanded my mind to know there were other US cities bigger and more interesting than St. Louis. The bulk of our traveling meant being crammed in a car for road trips to Arkansas. In my working-class neighborhood, the fancy people flew to Disney World. Family trips and camping with my Boy Scout troop in rural Missouri opened my world in ways I could only appreciate in adulthood.

* * *

A few weeks after the detached retina diagnosis, I hopped on a plane bound for London to visit friends Stephen and Thomas, two Americans living in a flat in the central part of the city. Because they were either working or in school during the day hours, I figured out how to use the Tube, which is so different from New York City’s subway system. London was everything I loved about Manhattan but with a twist. I got lost in the dazzling British Museum and strolled around Trafalgar Square. Tourists swarmed outside Buckingham Palace. Thousands of floral arrangements rested against the gates commemorating Princess Diana’s life. She hadn’t been dead but six months.

During the evenings, Stephen, Thomas, and I dined out and went to theater productions. Thomas, who had an interest in all forms of dance, got tickets for us to see an ancient Hindu dance performance. We had dinner at a French restaurant and went to the Royal Festival Hall to see Alarmel Valli, a world-renowned Indian dancer in a tradition called Bharatanatyam. That’s a two-thousand-year-old dance originating as a form of worship in Hindu temples in southeast India. Her hips and torso gyrated in such a way that the line between sexual and spiritual evaporated. The performance was technical, masterful, physical movement perfection.

Early into her performance I began to feel lightheaded, as if I was starting to slip in and out of consciousness. I swayed from side to side as if drunk. A single glass of red wine didn’t cause what was about to happen. I looked at the ceiling and around the room to ground myself. Anchored in a dark theater, seated between my friends as flute music soothed the audience, it felt as if my inner self soared above my body enveloped in a thick liquid love; oil or joy was being poured on me, or maybe it was within. If my stomach had a face, it was smiling. Reservoirs of love exploded within. An intoxicating and inexplicable peace from realms I had never experienced flooded me. Never before, nor since, have I felt that expansive feeling of joy. Waves of it rolled. Unable to express what I was sensing, I smiled and nodded at Stephen and Thomas to see if I looked weird. During the intermission, my friends and I stood in the lobby commenting on Alarmel’s transcendent performance. They didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary with me. For the rest of the show, I marinated in a magical sensation that I linked to the Bharatanatyam performance.

* * *

For most of my life I had been a not-so-closeted spiritual seeker. Being gay complicated my spiritual quest. The excitable Protestantism, both the Missionary Baptists and various forms of Pentecostalism, repudiated, even had scriptures to suggest God hated what I was. I dug in, memorized thousands of scriptures, went to prayer meetings, tent revivals, even got the equivalent of an associate degree in youth ministry that I don’t have on my resume.

Over the years the spiritual quest became Buddhism, New Age channelers, and things that seemed irrational. None of those experiences felt like what I felt that day in London.

Mystics would call it an episode of unified consciousness. Pentecostals might say drunk in the spirit. Years later, I concluded it was akin to what the great Spanish poet Lorca called a moment of “duende” — loosely, a heightened state of emotion or expression in response to art. This tracked. Watching the dance on the stage had been the spark. I’ve struggled to summarize it with words. Well-being. Goodness. Bliss. Joy. Presence. Expansive Consciousness. Largely framed by the language of the Bible, the best language I can find to describe it, except it was a real Presence like I had read in the Bible. The oil of gladness. Nectar from heaven. A wellspring of life. Living Water. A cloak of corporeality enveloped my inside parts. Such pure bliss and joy. I thought if this is how the next life tastes, I’m ready to go now. Ultimate Reality kissed my soul that night and the imprint allowed me to taste a stillness that I wish would never vanish. Call it what you wish, but somewhere between that experience, laughing and dining with my friends in London, I relaxed, and as the doctor had said could happen, my retina reattached, which felt miraculous.

I return to the memory of that experience as altering my perspective on God. It makes me lean more into questions than answers. What if God or Christ is a pure force of unconditional love lying dormant in us, and eagerly waits to be acknowledged before arising and being enthroned? What if orthodoxy, locked inside temples, ashrams, churches, and synagogues is the scourge of the true spiritual journey, which is within? Someone said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” All these years later, after studying something called centering prayer—which is simply sitting in silence for a certain amount of time daily—I am relaxing into the comfort of not knowing. And practices like Lectio Divina, which is sitting with the Bible open and meditating on a verse as a form of communion with the divine, links the mystical side of Catholicism I had not understood. That this duende experience happened in another country and not in a church was not a coincidence. I had a similar experience in Germany several years ago.

The experts tell us traveling gives us renewed creativity, rest, and perspective, and essentially opens our souls that are so often closed. When I travel, my consciousness often shifts to another place. Twenty-five years later I returned to London for the European premiere of a friend’s film. I looked at the walls and ceiling, recognizing I was back at the Royal Festival Hall where I had seen Alarmel’s dance performance. This time in London, my airfare and the most expensive meals were covered. The entourage I was with included a security guard, access to a limousine, and entry to VIP events. The sensation felt more like an evolution of the same journey than a spooky déjà vu.

The rhythms of my new life in academia allowed nonstop travel, the perfect antidote to sitting still. Almost thirty countries later, the pandemic landlocked me in the middle of the country and drew me into a contemplative life. Books by such authors as Cynthia Bourgeault, Richard Rohr, and Thomas Keating appeared almost out of nowhere.

My fear was that contemplative life called me out of the world and into a kind of twisted introspection. As I began practicing centering prayer, I could feel how inner resources spilled over into my writing and teaching life. Social justice and peace activists Thích Nhất Hạnh, Gandhi, and Howard Thurman, also famed contemplatives, perfectly embodied that. A good friend calls it “Crypto-Christianity,” a phrase that resonates.

In an interview with Krista Tippett’s program On Being, Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, described Howard Thurman’s vision for merging the outer with the inner:

“The inward sea. In the inward sea there is an island that everyone has, in their spirit; that on that island is an altar. And next to that altar is an angel with a flaming sword. And in order to put what is most important on the altar, you first have to find the sea, you’ve got to get to the island, and you gotta get past the angel, so that you can find what is truly genuine in you and what is most important. He said, once you find that, then you come alive. Then you discover what you have been purposed for. And then you begin to work outward. So you work inward to work outward.”

Samuel A. Autman wrote for newspapers in Oklahoma, Utah, Missouri, and California. He was the first Black reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune. He left journalism and earned an MFA in narrative nonfiction at Columbia University. His essays have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies such as It Came From The Closet, The Best of Brevity, The Kept Secret, The Chalk Circle, The St. Louis Anthology, and Sweeter Voices Still. His work was adapted into the award-winning short film, A Long Walk. It can be seen at www.samuelautman.com. His memoir-in-progress, Our Eyes Were Watching Marcia, derives its title from his essay featured in the Bellevue Literary Review, and explores family, faith, mental health, and identity through TV shows. He teaches at DePauw University.