The Man Who Quit Money (9 page)

And suddenly it hit him: You’re not supposed to focus on the dominant—the eagle, the snake, the ship, the man. Rather, consider the recessive: the sky, the rock, the seas, the maiden. This is where the truth lies—in the feminine. He had stumbled upon
something borderline heretical: the feminine side of God, a version of Christianity that resembled the archetypal Taoist observation:

“The Tao Te Ching says that it’s the recessive that has the power,” Suelo says. “And if you make it not recessive, it takes its power away. It’s like roots. When they’re underground they have their power. When you expose them to the light, they die. I started thinking about this idea: why do cultures veil the feminine?”

Home for the summer, Daniel presented his theory to his parents, proposing that the third part of the trinity—the Holy Spirit—was female. They found it compelling; after all, one of the reasons they’d left the Plymouth Brethren was its treatment of women, who were literally veiled—required to wear a head scarf during worship. They invited him to share it with their Bible study. But the rest of the congregation wasn’t sure what to make of this wide-eyed college kid raving about
hokmah,
the Hebrew word for “wisdom.” “Most of the time I’d just get silence,” he remembers. “Polite silence. I could point it out in the Scripture right in front of people, and they could see there was something here we were missing. But then when I brought up this stuff that was against our Bible-reading tradition, now what do we do?”

Suelo pulled aside the pastor in the crowded foyer after the morning worship, and chewed his ear about Taoism and the recessive. The pastor shushed him and drew him close. “I don’t
share this with many people,” he said, “but I do believe that the Holy Spirit is the feminine side of God.”

Encouraged and feverish, Daniel dropped out of college and remained with his parents. He began writing a book:
Hokmah: The Feminine Side of God
. He bought an electric typewriter and clattered away. He returned to his hospital job, landing a night shift as a phlebotomist. Like the hero of some Dostoyevsky novel, Suelo shuttled between his vampire job drawing blood in the middle of the night and his parents’ garret, where he toiled away at the manifesto that he was sure would rock Christendom to its foundation. One hundred pages. Two hundred pages. He rarely saw the sun. He slept in irregular intervals. The Truth was at hand, and he was on the verge of revealing it.

By the time Daniel returned to Boulder the next semester, he had finished a draft. He enrolled in a religious studies class with a professor named Brian Mahan, who was popular with spiritual seekers. Mahan was young and single and considered cool by students, one of the few profs so enthusiastic about the material that he’d continue discussions over coffee at the student union or a pie at Pizza Hut. A Catholic with degrees from the Harvard Divinity School and the University of Chicago, Mahan was smitten with liberation theology, the doctrine of social justice popularized in Latin America but condemned by the pope. Mahan’s course was a meditation on the conflict between egoism and altruism, and he assigned an eclectic reading list that included William James, Sigmund Freud, Ayn Rand, and Martin Luther King. He didn’t so much lecture as pose a never-ending series of questions, prodding his students to plumb their own intellects for answers.

Daniel left each class reeling with exhaustion, the ceiling of
religious limitations lifting as the joists beneath his fundamentalism cracked. Emboldened by Mahan’s amiability, Daniel met him privately and outlined his work in progress. Thirty years later, Mahan still remembers it.

“He was doing this huge project on exegesis, reforming the New Testament,” Mahan says. “Very intelligent, very passionate, very sincere. I was impressed with the intensity and the intelligence. In those days in Boulder, you had some kids from the East Coast with a couple of bucks. You weren’t used to kids working with this kind of single-minded intensity.”

Damian Nash, a Christian raised in Boulder, was, like Daniel, also feeling his parochial beliefs explode. The two became best friends, and have remained so ever since. “Both of us spent teenage years as on-fire evangelicals,” Damian says. “But intellectually we could no longer consider ourselves fundamentalist. We prayed together at study groups. We underwent a crisis of faith together, which brought an instant bond.”

Damian was floored by his new friend’s intellect. “One turning point in my life was when Daniel announced to me that the Holy Spirit is female,” he says. “It connected to my Taoism, and made it real in a Christian sense. The elegance and beauty of this interpretation made it seem right.”

The influence went both ways. Damian’s Boulder-inflected Christianity had a different flavor from Daniel’s conservatism. He introduced Daniel, who was now majoring in anthropology, to the writings of the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose life work was an attempt to reconcile the theory of evolution with his faith that mankind existed for some divine purpose.

Teilhard, who had worked as a paleontologist excavating the remains of the prehistoric Peking man in the 1920s, matched
Darwin’s wager and raised him a dollar. Not only had we evolved from cosmic dust to microorganisms to primates to Homo sapiens, but the process was not complete. Having only in the past several thousand years acquired consciousness, humans were now on the brink of another staggering advance. Teilhard suggested that all human thought mingled in a tangible substance around the earth that he called the “noosphere.” To a visiting Martian, he postulated, “The first characteristic of our planet would be, not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phosphorescence of thought.” And just as surely as fish developed gills and monkeys sprouted thumbs, this living organism of soul energy would evolve into something higher. “Are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an aggregation of a still higher order, the birth of some single centre from the convergent beams of millions of elementary centres dispersed over the thinking earth?” he asked. Eventually we would reach what he called “the Omega Point,” and life on this earth would cease—just as all stars and planets die—but mankind would continue as some supremely conscious but as-yet-unfathomable life-form. “The noosphere…. will reach its point of convergence—at the ‘end of the world.’” This universal ascent to the heavens was, in Teilhard’s mind, the return of Christ promised in the Bible.

If it sounds like the premise of a space-alien flick, that’s because Teilhard’s cosmic evolution was devoured and regurgitated by a generation of sci-fi writers. But in his prediction of a new era of evolved existence, Teilhard unknowingly built a bridge between fundamentalism and the New Age. The noosphere rising to the Omega Point wasn’t all that different from John Darby’s Sixth Dispensation, in which Christ returned and led the righteous into the Millennium. It was oddly similar to the promised
New Age, too—specifically the Age of Aquarius that we are said to be entering due to realignment of distant stars, ushering in a two-thousand-year period of enlightenment that presumably improves upon the current Age of Pisces, characterized largely by greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth, envy, and pride.

As he discussed with Damian the possibility that evolution was not the repudiation but the logical outcome of Christ’s teaching, Daniel realized that being a man of science didn’t prevent him from being a man of faith. Damian initiated Daniel into his circle of friends, Boulder natives who were looking for a more intense connection to the sacred than their churches could offer. Inspired by Jesus’s embrace of the downtrodden, these suburban teenagers would befriend homeless people on the Boulder Mall and bring them to coffee hour at their churches. “I believed everybody should be welcome, including gay people, and smelly people,” says Rebecca Mullen, who after high school had volunteered in Mother Teresa’s convent in the South Bronx. When Daniel joined this group, their Christianity was edging toward the mystical.

“I was moving away from fundamentalism, into Buddhism and Sufi,” says Dawn Larson, who was a CU sophomore when she met Daniel. “It was an ideal time to hook up with Dan: the long mystical talks for hours, his idea about the Holy Spirit.”

On a typical Saturday night, this group of seekers might hike to a lake and pass around a bottle of wine. But unlike other undergraduates of their era, instead of breaking out the weed and mushrooms, they would sit in silent meditation and prayer, basking in nature’s beauty, then regrouping for esoteric musing, usually with Daniel at the helm. “He’s a master at understanding philosophical concepts and different paradigms, and being
able to talk to people using their own lens and vocabulary,” Larson says.

“There was an ethereal quality about him, a feeling like he wasn’t completely attached to the earth,” Mullen says. “Probably none of us were. We were all looking for some alternative to the spiritual conventions that were in front of us.”

One of the concepts that Daniel wrestled with was time itself. Vine Deloria Jr., a CU professor and American Indian scholar, writes in
God Is Red,
“Christians see creation as the beginning event of a linear time sequence in which a divine plan is worked out, the conclusion of the sequence being an act of destruction bringing the world to an end.” But the American Indian religions Suelo was studying were organized around space, not time. Deloria cites the Navajo creation myth as an example. “There is no doubt in any Navajo’s mind that these particular mountains are the mountains where it all took place. No one can say when the creation story of the Navajo happened, but everyone is fairly certain
where
the emergence took place.” Suddenly Daniel’s lifelong belief in the impending Rapture seemed not God’s truth but a cultural construct. Eastern religions, with their eternal cycles of reincarnation, echoed the cosmology of American Indian accounts, which suggested that time traveled not in a line but a circle.

Which is not to say that Daniel was drifting far from his roots. He and some friends from Intervarsity started their own Bible study at an off-campus house where Daniel rented a room. One of the core members was Tim Frederick, a shy computer science major whose Lutheran upbringing in Casper, Wyoming—his father managed the Sears outlet—rendered Daniel’s itinerant childhood cosmopolitan by comparison. Tim was more square than
Damian and Dawn and Rebecca, but he was nonetheless drawn to Daniel’s inquiries.

“I was always a geek who thought about the world in terms of science and technology,” Frederick says. “Dan would bring me into the world of religion and philosophy.” Frederick was attracted to the absence of judgment in the impromptu study group. Unlike what he had experienced in his traditional church, this was a group of people with large differences—Catholic, Lutheran, fundamentalist, charismatic—who still respected and listened to one another, and formed strong friendships. The chemistry was good. “While Dan had profound insights, he could also be an amazing listener,” says Frederick, “taking in the comments and finding ways to connect them to what he had discovered.”

When I looked up Tim Frederick three decades later, in the summer of 2010, his conventional life appeared the antithesis of Suelo’s. Tim has held the same job since college, as a systems administrator for a government agency. He and his family live in a clean home in a new subdivision in the suburbs of Boulder. He attends the Lutheran church. He dresses the part of a computer whiz, down to the short-sleeved dress shirt, pleated slacks, and white running shoes. Here, surely, was a man whose real-world challenges—holding a job, supporting a family, paying a mortgage—would have soured him, or at least distanced him, from Suelo’s reckless yearning.

But Tim Frederick remains Suelo’s devoted friend. He chose Suelo as best man at his wedding, and named his son Daniel. He allowed me to download some forty-five handwritten letters that Suelo wrote him over a period of ten years, spanning more than two hundred pages. “I’ve considered it to be an honor and a privilege to be an ‘archivist’ contributor to this book project,”
he wrote. When Suelo and I traveled through Colorado, Tim Frederick received us like royalty. He and his wife, along with a few other old friends, dished up one course of home-cooked food after another, everyone intent on Suelo’s words as we discussed God, the church, suicide, morality. I felt like we were back at Bible study.

(Suelo in his tramp’s getup struck an odd figure in the land of Dockers. As we navigated the impossibly smooth cul-de-sacs, he asked me to pull over so he could pluck some unused candles from a pile of junk on the curb with the trash cans.)

Tim Frederick struck me as about as genuine and decent as a fellow could be. The process of digging up the old letters had triggered a flood of memories, and he wrote Suelo a note that he copied to me: