Beyond Belief (13 page)

Swan Sister

Yolande Elise Brener

M
y elder brother, Adam, was the most constant person in my life. In our earliest years, we changed homes often, and our father left when I was three and Adam was five. But Adam was always there. I could always lean on him or hold his hand, and I loved him fiercely.

I held tight to Adam for comfort and because I longed to find out what he meant when he teased me, saying “I know something you don’t know.” Adam knew how to make people happy just by smiling and letting the world roll over him. I have always been more serious than he, even as a little girl. I wanted to do something great, to sacrifice my life for something bigger than myself—like Joan of Arc did, or like the sister in the Six Swans fairy tale, who spent six years silently sewing stinging nettle suits to turn her swan brothers back into men. In morning sermons at my Church of England
school I learned about Jesus and wished I could love unconditionally with such passion that I could heal the sick and raise the dead. My greatest childhood desire was to meet Jesus someday.

By the time I was sixteen I got accepted to art school and moved to London to live on my own. As Jesus had not turned up yet, I continued to follow my eighteen-year-old brother in his search for the truth, which had turned serious by this time. I accompanied Adam when he ate vegan food with Hare Krishnas and took wafers and wine with Catholics; I stopped short of following him only when he began fasting with Franciscans. Finding no religion adequate, and aided by hallucinogenic drugs, Adam concluded that he was Christ himself.

Shortly after Adam realized his divine mission, he turned up in my London flat and announced there was a global conspiracy against him. Even as he stood at my door I noticed there was something different about him. His clothes hung loosely off his bony limbs and his eyes searched above my head as if he were being hunted. “Listen to the radio,” he said. “It’s talking to us. They’re in the television too. Nothing is an accident.”

I turned the radio off while Adam looked suspiciously at my window.

“They’re in the walls,” he said. “They know where we are.”

By his shaking, nicotine-stained fingers, the small scratches on his arms and face, and his unsettled eyes, I could see that Adam was in trouble. I had never seen mental illness before and it shocked me. He was the same person on the outside but so changed inside that I was frightened for him.

As befitted the self-proclaimed Son of God, Adam took up residence at our local Church of England chapel. He curled up in the wooden apse, the stained-glass windows casting blue shadows
of saints across his face. The vicar, switch-thin and pale in his dog collar, spoke with my mother about exorcism but decided on eviction instead. Several pink-cheeked police officers removed Adam to Heatherwood, a shrubbery-bound hospital in Ascot, twenty-five miles outside of London. But soon, Adam was discharged back to my mother’s house only to begin his cycle again. Sometimes he would disappear for months at a time and then reappear with mysterious bruises and cuts. Several times he turned up in jail or in hospital, and I was always relieved when he finally came home.

Not long after one of his releases, I took the forty-minute ride to visit Adam at our mother’s house. We went for an afternoon stroll into the nearby Runnymede Forest, and by twilight we had walked deep into the woods. We didn’t talk much but occasionally stopped to look at an interesting plant or to identify what kind of animal or bird was scurrying away. We both loved nature and I savored this time together, relaxing and sharing, listening to the soft voices of the leaves in the breeze and the slowly settling earth under our feet. As children we had often wandered together along the Thames or across the fields beside our mother’s house. I never felt more at ease than when I was in nature, and being with Adam right then was as comfortable as it had ever been.

When we reached a point where I was sure we were lost, Adam suggested we build a fire. It made no difference to him whether we knew where we were going or how long we would be there. The air was taking on a chill, and if it weren’t for the moon lighting our way through the ancient foliage, we would have been in total darkness.

Adam expertly built a fire in the shape of a pyramid and filled it with dry leaves and twigs. The flames rose quickly and cast a flickering orange light across his somber face. I reflected on how, as a child, Adam had been so carefree. He would run around the
bonfires we built in our garden in the autumn, waving sparklers and climbing a nearby oak to get a better look at the world. Now as I watched him, I wondered where all his exuberance had gone and felt sad that I could do nothing to help him retrieve his former self.

Out of the silence, Adam sighed and looked toward me. “Sometimes I think I can only get better with you,” he said.

His words seared like burning black embers in the pit of my stomach, while the cold night air began to bite at my fingers and nose. I knew he was sick, but Adam’s faith in my ability to help him scared me. How could I stay here with Adam and take care of him? I yearned to give my brother the stinging nettle suit that could set him free to live a life like other men. I imagined him with a wife, laughing and playing with children of his own. But as much as I wished for this, I didn’t know how to weave that fairy-tale ending. And besides, I had my own life to attend to: My new boyfriend, Richard, needed all of my attention to overcome his ambivalence about our relationship, and then there were my studies. I wanted to make a go of my own life, too.

“How long do you want us to stay here?” I asked, wondering if we would find our way out through the night-darkened trees.

“Forever,” he said.

“I have to go back to London tonight, Adam,” I said, fearing that if I didn’t return, Richard would end up spending the night with someone else. I couldn’t let that happen.

Resigned, Adam extinguished the fire with a layer of damp leaves. His six-foot frame bent and stretched with the gentleness of an oak. As the last flicker of fire glinted in his moss-colored eyes, I turned and walked back out of the woods and down the hill.

Later that night, as my bus pulled away, I watched Adam’s lanky form shrink into the distance, the moon still glowing above
him. I didn’t know when I would see him again. My hunger for the nobility of the swan sister was matched only by my desire for the intimacy I was building with Richard. Between brief moments of satiation was an almost constant yearning. I felt as brittle and disposable as a doll.

F
OR YEARS
A
DAM CONTINUED
the cycle of hospitalization or incarceration, followed by escape. When he was free, he sometimes grew his hair and beard long like Jesus. At other times, he shaved his head and wore white robes like a Buddhist monk. Occasionally I encountered him on London’s street corners meditating, dancing, or begging—and, each time, the sight of him so vulnerable made my heart ache. During this period, I worked hard at my life. I graduated from East London University and attended a postgraduate film course at Saint Martin’s. I cowrote and made a film with Richard, then made two more films with other friends.

One of these films would indirectly change my life. It was a documentary called
Soul Searching
and was about what the human soul might look like if we could see it. An interviewee we spoke with for the film was a German man named Roderich, a teacher at the Principle Life Study Centre in London. I had no idea what the Centre was or what its members believed. I only knew that when we arrived to interview Roderich, an international group of wholesome-looking young people invited us to stay around after our conversation and discover the true meaning of life. My friends were suspicious, so we left right away. But I was curious. Something about Roderich and the young people at the Centre tugged at me, and I promised myself I’d return.

A week after we finished editing
Soul Searching,
I saw Roderich
passing out business cards in front of a minimart on Charing Cross Road where I had often encountered Adam meditating in his robes late at night. Roderich stood under the same streetlight where I had last seen my brother just a few days earlier. And although Roderich looked nothing like Adam, and wore a beige trench coat and a secret agent hat instead of Adam’s signature white flowing robes, to me he represented something I was missing—or someone. With his prominent brow, jutting cheekbones, and chapped lips, Roderich looked determined, as if his mission was so important that he had not stopped to even drink water for days. (I later learned he had been fasting for a week.) His dedication impressed me, and I felt amused at God’s sense of humor leading Roderich here to the last spot where I had seen Adam. Despite my friends’ derision of Roderich, I could not help but feel drawn to him. My stomach tingled at the sight of him there, a spiritual teacher who potentially held answers to my deepest questions. I had to speak to him. Excitement and fear sparred in my chest as I felt something profound was about to happen.

“What a coincidence to see you here,” I said as I approached. “We’ve just finished editing
Soul Searching
and we ended the film with one of your comments—the part where you said the soul wasn’t something hovering around in space, but what exists within the love we share with each other right here and now.”

Roderich moved more directly into the beam of the streetlight and gazed at me.

“You must come to study,” he said in his carefully measured English. “I have many more things to say to you. This is a sign from God that you meet me here now.”

“I’ll come soon,” I laughed nervously, actually not intending to do so. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone with him in his mysterious study center. Still, something about this man, his German accent,
his tattered devotion to his post in front of the market, and the way he looked at me, drew me in.

“Come tomorrow,” said Roderich. “Tell me what time and I will meet you at the Centre.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I turned up at the Study Centre at 1:00
PM
. Roderich led me to a room where I watched a short video that basically introduced me to the idea that following my own desires wouldn’t make me happy because, as the Bible says in Galatians 5:17, “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

The words in the video resonated with me. As I thought about it more, it struck me that my own desire for my boyfriend had interfered with my more spiritual desire to help my brother. I longed for the strength to make more selfless choices in my life.

After the video finished, Roderich invited me to discuss it with him. We walked up a spiral staircase to a pink-and-white room with tête-à-tête round tables and bright windows. As we started talking, Roderich expressed such interest in me that I found myself pouring my heart out. Among the many things I told him, I shared that I didn’t know what love was, and that I did not understand why people lost their minds.

“My brother said that he could only get better with me,” I said, searching Roderich’s face for an answer to the question that haunted me: Could I help Adam?

“When your brother says you can make him better, he is right,” said Roderich. “If you dedicate your life to God, He will heal your brother.”

My heart thudded against my ribs so hard that I felt the vibrations right up to my throat. Could I take back the selfishness of the night when I had walked away from Adam in the forest? My decision that night ate at me constantly. Could I fulfill my dream of seeing my brother happy and free the way I remembered him as a child? My eyes clouded over as I struggled not to cry, but Roderich didn’t look away.

The mysterious German’s gray eyes bore through to the back of my head. I had never experienced such intense focus from a man who clearly was more interested in my soul than my body. When Roderich spoke to me, he looked only at my face and seemed to have all the time in the world to listen to me. I began to feel that the Study Centre was home to a different and purer kind of love than what I had known.

For the next ten days I returned to the study center. I watched videos about the purpose of Creation, the fall of man, and the parallels of history. From these videos—which were based on a philosophy called the Divine Principle—I learned the Study Centre’s answers to the big questions posed on the ivory business cards the members handed out in the street. Is there a spiritual world? Does true love exist? Why do the innocent suffer? Will Christ come again? I loved the Divine Principle theory, which says we are all destined to live for the sake of others and create perfect, everlasting families. I felt I had been leading a selfish life, and I longed to turn that around. The possibility that I could actually do so filled me with new hope.

By only my second visit to the Principle Life Study Centre I started to feel an infusion of bliss while watching the videos. When I put on the headphones and listened to the lectures, I felt like angels were holding their hands above my heart and hugging me with
pure loving energy. After years of yearning for intimacy, I started to imagine that I could experience ecstasy even without touch.