Happening

This week I cleaned out my closet for the first time in several years, and found a lot of crappy old toys, as well as roughly a dozen notebooks from college and high school, many of them three quarters empty. Among the broken supersoakers and the notes on integral calculus I found a box dating back to my senior year of high school, when I attended Happening #34.

Before l went to Happening I always thought it was this exclusive club, where members went away for periodic secret weekends and initiated new members and had lots of fun, doing what I wasn't sure, but maybe bonfires were involved, or possibly large scale battles with waterguns.
Well there are no bonfires, and no watergun battles, because Happening is a cult for teenagers-- a long-established, well-respected, open-minded cult. Run by hippies. The point of the whole thing is to make the "happened" feel "God's love." Everyone sits around and talks about life, and morality, and what they think life means, and God of course, and a load of other crap, and then at the end everyone feels really close to each other and really happy and everyone is sure to go to church for the rest of their lives and donate lots of money so that their churches can build new fellowship halls and host bigger and better pig-roasts.

I won't go into all of what takes place over a Happening weekend, in part so as not to ruin these people's fun secrets and in part because most of it is rather dull, but I will discuss one part of the weekend called "Caritas." This is when the people running the show surprise the people being "happened" by throwing a bunch of balloons and confetti, and giving each participant their own individual giftbag full of little trinkets, incense, toys, candy, cards and letters. It's supposed to be about making you feel loved, and while I'll admit now that its kind of a nice idea, back in high school it really creeped me out. I re-lived that feeling this week when I found the contents of my Caritas giftbag in a box in my closet.
Among the dried flowers and notes from total strangers I found a few items of particular note--

A sponge with the inscription "Soak up GOD's LOVE!"
A pair of extra large sunglasses with the words "Don't be blinded by God's Love!"
A picture of a VW Bug from a girl named "Muffin" with the words "Honk if you Jesus!" (Muffin forgot the verb, and it's fun to try filling in the blank with creative alternatives to "love." "Honk if you walked Jesus!")
A pack of 10 Kleenex with the inscription "Tears are for soul-washing!"
And, inexplicably, a can of Hannaford brand cat food (sliced chicken in gravy).

And then there were the notes. There were a lot of notes, telling me that I was a "special child of God," and that I should "spread my wings and fly" and, a conflicting request, "Bloom where you are planted!"
Several different people sent me a "Letter from Jesus," which I will excerpt for you now:
"I saw you fall asleep last night and I longed to touch your brow. So, I spilled moonlight on your pillow and your face. Again I waited, wanting to rush down so that we could talk. I have so many gifts for you. But, you awakened late the next day and rushed off. My tears were in the rain."
I know that some people somewhere must find that moving (I did receive 3 copies of it), but I thought it made Jesus sound like a bit of a pervert.
Almost as strange as this letter and the catfood were four mixed tapes, all sampling essentially the same musicians, often the same songs. All four tapes start with the Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine," and the Indigo Girls featured prominently throughout each of these tapes, as did James Taylor and John Denver. And for some reason Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" was on three out of four.
I know I am not alone in thinking of mixed tapes as a personal thing. In my experience it's the sort of gift given to someone you know well, a gift that says a lot about yourself and how well you understand your friend. A good mixed tape should be specifically for the person you are giving it to and full of things you think that specific person will enjoy. If you've read High Fidelity, Nick Hornby goes on about this for pages.
Now I am fairly narrow-minded musically, and was even more so at seventeen. People who know me at all know that I lean heavily toward classical, and that for better or worse I am a pretentious snob. So there probably wasn't a better way for these people to show that they had no idea who I was than to give me mixed tapes full of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Phish, and Aaron Neville singing "Amazing Grace." Unless it was to sign their names, names that could have been picked at random from the phonebook for all I knew.
"Who are Kim Tilford and Ben Maas?" I asked, as confetti and balloons rained down on me and my neighbors exchanged hugs. As I looked through more of the letters that were in my package I became more bewildered and more put off that a couple dozen people I had never met claimed to love me. Of what value is the love of someone who doesn't know you? I'm sure Muffin was probably a nice girl, but its entirely likely she would have hated my guts if we'd ever spoken. I'd probably have said something like, "Honk if you moisturize Jesus!" or "I fucking hate the Indigo Girls, Muffin," and where could we have gone from there?