It was like the biggest rose in the world opening up all of its petals, said the guru,

when all the energy in your body came together and filled you up like that.

Love is slow to lose patience. It looks for a way of being constructive.

                          Paul the Apostle¹

“OK, THE WEDDING EVERYBODY,” mj shouted; even though the other three sat quietly within whispering range and knew that the next part of the story was the wedding. 

And the shout voiced a certain frustration in which Bill and mj were conspiratorially united. They believed that the Blackburn wedding never would have happened without Bill’s manly genius and bravery leading up to it. And yet, the two matrimony-obsessed ladies had proposed ludicrously to hear NONE of that lead up story and just the wedding ceremony. Mj lorenzo, by shouting ‘THE WEDDING’ was protesting that shallowness.

Should Leo Tolstoy – mj asked the gods of literary sense, silently – have left out the first nine-hundred and ninety five pages of war from his thousand-page novel, War and Peace, and told only the last five pages of peace, the last five little darn pages of peace and quiet again, back on the boring farm?

Should Joey’s guru have talked about bliss and nothing else, never bringing up the struggle which almost everyone suffered through in order to find bliss?  

“OK,” the interviewer said to his friend Bill a little less loudly: “Are you ready for my first question about the wedding?”

“Yeh,” said Bill, apparently weary to death of the whole interview approach to telling his story. To his mind, it was a story that was so perfect in its original and natural storyteller version, it could have stood without a supporting frame of questions or props of any kind.

Maybe that was why Joey’s guru rarely did question-and-answer sessions, and preferred to talk without any interruption from the audience. He said you couldn’t find Truth unless someone revealed it to you, someone like a Truth expert, or a master in Truth. If you wanted to learn Biochemistry, you went to a Biochemistry expert or professor, a person credentialed as a master in Biochem. To learn Arrogance you went to an Arrogance master like Fred Waring, the analogy implied. And if you wanted Truth or Perfection, which were both the same thing, as the guru said, you went to a master in Truth and Perfection. And what this master of Truth and Perfection did, he said, was to reveal the Truth and Perfection that was inside you already from the get-go. And it had been right there inside you the whole time, but you hadn’t known it because you had been so busy studying Arrogance from an Arrogance master like Fred, or focused on learning Respect and Self-Discipline from a Respect and Self-Discipline master like Bill Blackburn. But now that you had decided to study Ultimate Truth and Perfection, and had found a master who could help you, suddenly you had discovered that the bliss you had lacked and sought had been right inside you the whole crazy time. All you had lacked was ‘Knowledge’, i.e., knowing how to get at it.²     

“My question is,” said mj, looking at Betty Ann this time, “why did you have your wedding at Fred's house?”

“I didn't wanna have it there,” Betty Ann said super-cutely. “That was Bill's idea.”

She was obviously, as mj saw it, mocking her own tendency to run from problems, her tendency to let others find the way around major impasses, and to blame everybody but herself for any kind of unwanted fallout. And mj thought she was a kick for admitting it in such a cute and very clever way, namely, by concealing a true confession inside a dumb blonde act, and then by laying the whole complex bait right out on the open trail for her manly husband to trip over while on his heroically adventurous and unsuspecting way, just to see if he could catch himself in time, and not fall flat on his big, cocky, Chief-of-the-Ranchito nose.

And Bill fell with a fury, at first. He looked stupid, because he had seen the helpless dumb blonde bait, but not the confession tucked discreetly and yet noticeably inside the bait. She had given him a chance to be a true gentleman and recognize her good side, her ability to admit a fault or two; but instead he chose, now, to act like an ass, even after all the exhaustive Air Force Intelligence training in Korea which had taught him the art of ancient Chinese psychological warfare.

“That's a lie!” he reacted stupidly. “Now you know the real story, it has nothing to do with –.”

But he caught himself in time, dropped the complicated bait and got outathere, addressing mj and Dlune instead of the teenager-y wife: “Betty Ann was on the road with Fred and the Pennsylvanians. And we had planned to get married when she came home. And I called a minister in Delaware Water Gap at this church I'd gone to. And he was the first one that told me –, he says, ‘Well, we certainly can do it on that date, but ah,... when did you say your wife-to-be will be home’?

“And I said, ‘On the 12th of December’, or whatever it was.” Bill looked at Betty Ann: “How long were you home before the wedding?”

“Just a couple days. I came home on a Monday and we got married on a Friday. And Saturday was the concert at the White House.” She was very, very cute the way she threw this unrequested million-dollar tidbit into the taped interview. And she even pushed it further, looking at mj: “That was our honeymoon.”

Betty Ann knew perfectly well that mj and Dlune had always known that the White House Christmas Concert was their honeymoon. Her buddy mj wanted the darn story on tape for that reason, for Pete’s sake. But she decided to throw it in here because it stole Big Huron Chief Storyteller’s thunderous momentum, and made him share the limelight with her for once. She might have been nothing but a darn squaw in Bill’s lordly guy mind, but she was still fifty percent of the draw, at least. Right? More than fifty, many were certain to have thought.

Bill proceeded graciously though. “He said,” – and Bill did the minister in Water Gap with a fatherly tone: "’Well, that doesn't leave much time for us to counsel you’.

"’What do you mean, “counsel” us’?

“He said, ‘Well we, uh –. Our policy is we never marry anyone without first counseling them. And we like to do it two weeks before. Why don't we delay the wedding’?

“I said, ‘I'm not delaying the wedding for –. In the first place, I'm forty-two," I said. ‘My God’.” Bill was indignant: ‘I don't need counseling. I probably know more about sex than you do’!"

Mj laughed. Bill Blackburn was the kind of guy who could look right in the eye of an arrogant bastard who was over-exercising his power, and tell him, in not such a mean way, precisely what a jerk he was, if and when the moment called for it; though normally he avoided direct verbal confrontation, if possible, as all of his mother’s Huron people had done for millennia.

“Is that what they were going to counsel you?” Dlune asked, not knowing much about U.S. American churches.

Mj tried to absorb it too. “Did you say that!?” For mj had lived his life with ministers. Not only was his father a U.S.A. minister, but every one of his seven uncles too. 

Bill answered both questions. “YEH. I was really irritated. I said –.”

“He didn't say he was gonna counsel on sex!” Betty Ann caught up with the crowd at last.

“Yes, he did,” Bill said. “Oh yes he did, Betty Ann.”

“Oh he must've been gonna counsel on a lot more than –,” she tried to believe.

“Sure,” said Bill, “but that's why I interrupted him. He named off the different areas of married life that are important, and all these areas they counsel on.”

“What church is this?” mj asked, still not believing that a church could be so pre-1968, so pre-sexual-revolution, as to insist on counseling on sex, before agreeing to marry you.

“The one that says –.”  Bill looked at Betty Ann. “What's –?”

“'You Are Missing'?” she helped.

“Yeh,” said Bill.

“I love that sign,” she said, referring to a big sign on Route 209 that advertised that church.

“It says –.” Bill let her do it:

“'C, H, Blank, Blank, C, H’,” she said.

“'U. R.'” said mj, getting it.

"’And what's missing? U R’!" Bill said.

Joey’s guru never counseled on sex on his tapes. He mentioned it only rarely and only jokingly, when he referred to the way his followers kept getting together and making babies ‘like bunny rabbits’. He didn’t teach sex or the absence of sex, either one. Sex, like everything else but the thing he was teaching, was fluff. He taught meditation. And he said that to meditate was to concentrate in a perfect way on a perfect thing. When you did that, your soul and God became one. It was perfect communion with God, he said. And it resulted from concentrating your whole mind on the Knowledge he taught, and the Peace he taught, both of which were God. Had he counseled sex, in other words, he would have distracted his followers from what he was trying to get them to see, their purpose in life, which was to discover Ultimate Truth right inside their own body and to learn how to become one with that Truth. So, obviously, a spiritual master who said Holy God was right inside your own human-animal body was not going to fret about your body, or your sex, very much. He would leave it to you to handle your own affairs on that level, including your sexuality. It was intimate knowledge of Ultimate Truth, Beauty and Love he had come to teach. And that was perfect, as mj lorenzo saw it. What healthy-minded man or woman wanted a spiritual guide who made their sexuality his business?³     

“So I called the church that Kenny Matthews used to be the Reverend in,” Bill said. “Same thing: ‘Well, uh, we usually like to have counseling and –‘. Every church!”

“And Shawnee Presbyterian,” said Betty Ann. “Remember that?”

“Yeh, oh yep, that's right. I went to the guy who's a minister –. In Shawnee Presbyterian, he handles all the music. I said, ‘Look –‘. He said, ‘Well, y'know, you're not in my faith. I can't do it’. I said, ‘All I wantcha to do is say, 'Will ya marry 'er’? and I'd say 'Yes'. And, y'know, no way was he about to do it, and he was a legitimate minister.⁴

“And we had troubles with the blood test. You know about that,” Bill said to mj. “We had to come to you to get you to sign –, ‘cause –. And you, you scared the hell out of me.”

Mj chuckled sheepishly. He had forgotten the incident. He had asked Bill if the lab test was ‘forged or legitimate’.

Becky barked loudly in the back yard, distracting Bill, but not enough to save mj: “You said to me,” Bill looked at him, "’Are you sure this paper's all-right’? I said, ‘Sure it's all right, it went to this whaddayacallit?? Laboratory’.

Mj lorenzo was now registered for all time as one of the many great fools in positions of power who had thought they knew better than the marrying 42-year-old man, his own manly earthy injun self, Bill Blackburn, whether he could or should marry Betty Ann McCall or not.

“And so, Betty Ann was coming home, and I was really havin' fits, and when she came home I was really depressed about this thing.”

The guru’s claims were shockingly enormous, it seemed to mj. He could show you how to (1) become one with God; (2) merge with the universe; (3) realize Truth; (4) experience true peace within; and (5) feel like you were in love with all of the people you used to think were nothing but stupid fool assholes. Yet despite his huge claim, the techniques for meditating in order to accomplish it were simple and clear. All you had to do was stop your ‘mind’. And all it required was a flick of the switch, as it were. It was like turning a light on or off, Guru Garland said. The meditation he taught was the switch that turned off the ‘mind’, and just as soon as your ‘mind’ was turned off, you realized God.⁵

“And I didn't have a minister, either,” Bill explained. “So I got hold of Kenny Matthews, who doesn't have a church any more, and he said, ‘Well, if you can find a place to get married, I'd –. But I'd like to talk to you and your wife-to-be first’.

“I thought, 'Here we go with counseling again'. So I came on like Gangbusters with this poor guy.

And he said, ‘I don't wanna counsel you’. He said, ‘I'd just like to sit down and make the plans and make sure that the way you wanna be married –‘. 'Cause I said to 'im that we want to write our own ceremony. And he says, ‘As long as it doesn't go against the Church in any way’.”

Becky was barking in front of the house now. It wasn’t like her, and suddenly Betty Ann’s little lap dog, Docka, was underfoot and shattering eardrums too, especially mj’s. Bill leapt up and went to a window.

“Make sure we don't have any drunks!” Betty Ann told him.

Mj told the lap-dog, Docka, a little rudely, to shut up before she blew out the tape recorder.

“Y'know,” Betty Ann explained to Dlune, “we had five police cars here the other night!”

“You're kidding!”

“It was the most exciting event in the valley for years!”

Bill returned from the window with an unconcerned air that was reassuring. “A guy out there was gonna kill another guy with a gun and I was protecting him,” he explained.

“You're kidding!” Dlune said again.

Since the energetic young guru was a swimmer, his illustrations often involved water. He said that meditating was like being in a very still lake when someone jumped in and created a wave that reached you and carried you along with it. Meditating was like being picked up and carried along by a great big wave. All you had to do was flow with it, while letting yourself float on the water.⁶

“Anyway,” Bill said, “mj asked a question: ‘why Fred’s house’. We'll get this thing finished.

“What happened was, Kenny Matthews says, ‘No, I just want to come over and talk about the ceremony’.

“So, I was going to call the Shawnee Church and see if they'd rent it to us and oh yes, they would rent it to us, but they weren't sure of the date, and they weren't sure of the time, and they weren't sure what they'd allow, and oh my God!

“So I had to call Virginia for something, and she says, ‘How's everything going’?

“And I said, ‘Terrible’.

She said, ‘Well, it's getting an awful late date to find a place’.

And I said, ‘I know, but I've begged and everything, and I can't find a place now I've found a minister’.

“She said, ‘Why don'tcha just do it here’?”

Bill sighed.

All you had to do, said Joey’s guru, was relax into the experience, relax into the holy and fantastic experience, and just let yourself ‘vibrate and vibrate and vibrate’.⁷

“And so I said somethin' to Betty Ann, and Betty Ann agreed to it. So we agreed to do it at...” Bill sighed loudly again, “...their house. And I said, ‘But we have a lot of people to invite’.

“And she said, ‘Limit it to fifty’. And we actually invited what, seventy?"

Mj snickered.

“Eighty,” went Betty Ann.

“Eighty,” said Bill.

Mj snickered again at their cheek: to deceive the sacrosanct American gentry Warings right in their historic landed-gentry mansion, worse yet after they had opened their multi-million dollar private hearth to you and taken you in off the street like a pathetic orphan, like a hopelessly lost Injun with no tribe or reservation.

“But did everybody come?” mj asked.

“No,” said Betty Ann, “'cause it was a snow storm.”

One of the meditation techniques the guru taught was to focus on the light that you could see right within your own body. And he described that light inside your body as a sun inside of yourself that glowed much brighter than the sun in the sky did.⁸

“And,” Bill said, ‘the day before that wedding the weirdest thing that happened –. I think, Dlune, you know this: Betty Ann kept saying, ‘Oh, you know, Bee-ill’, he made Betty Ann sound passionate with romantic longing: ‘I'd love the snow to be falling softly on the ground’...."

Mj enjoyed a big rollicking one.

“I said, ‘You're CRA-zy’. It was like Spring the day before. We hadn’t had any snow. This is a true story! This is scary! I says, ‘Betty Ann, the snow's not gonna fall. And anyway you got people coming –." She says,” he used the same disgustingly longing tone: “‘I don't care if the people can't make it, I want the snow fallin' on the ground’. God's honest truth, ten o'clock that morning, snow started to fall on the ground!”

The experience the guru taught, he said, was as intimate, constant and flowing as the life you were living right now, the main difference being that it was much more enjoyable. That reassured mj. His life wasn’t that bad, really. He loved life. He loved his own life. He didn’t want anything weird going on inside him in addition. There was enough weird stuff already, more than enough.⁹  

“Yeh,” said Betty Ann. “And Virginia was beautiful. She started getting out all the silver and making the tablecloth. It was really beautiful what she did to prepare for that wedding.”

“She got me irritated a little bit,” Bill said. “She was tellin' us how to get married. We should ‘just walk in’. And she was gettin' music and all this stuff and I said, ‘No way’. And we got in a big scene over that. She was beautiful in many ways, but she tried to control what was gonna happen.”

“Yeh,” Betty Ann agreed, “she wanted us to stand at the door and greet the guests as they arrived, and I just wasn't up to that, I just didn't wanna do that! I mean, you're a little nervous at a time like that! You don't feel like standing out there and saying, ‘RAH! RAH! This way folks’!” Betty Ann laughed at herself working as a carnie barker for her own holy and sacred matrimony.

“That's not your style,” said mj. He understood Betty Ann McCall Blackburn quite well by now, he knew.

“Not mine, no,” she said.

“No,” said Dlune. “If Virginia was the hostess, she should've done that.”

“But she wanted us to do that right up until the last minute!” Betty Ann complained. “I was upstairs and I was telling her I just couldn't do that!!”

Joey’s guru loved music, and one of his approaches to stilling the mind was to meditate on the music naturally occurring within your very own body. No matter what kind of music you liked, he said, whether Rock and Roll, Classical or any music you could name, the music occurring within us naturally was God’s music, and it was so ‘far out’, so symmetrical and so beautiful that your mind, immediately upon hearing just one note of it, concentrated on it perfectly.¹⁰  And Joey, a lover of music who knew the opera singer Jessye Norman personally, because she’d gone to Peabody with his mother, said it was true. The instant he meditated on the guru’s music inside himself, Joey said, he was ‘in Heaven’!  

“This was her thing,” Dlune said. “It's usually Fred's thing, but this –.”

“Right,” Betty Ann agreed. “This part is true. This was Virginia’s project.”

Bill agreed: “It irritated Fred. 'Cause when I went up to 'im after the wedding I said, ‘I want to thank you for the use of your home’.

“He said, ‘Don't-thank-me-I-had-nothin'-to-do-with-it-I-didn't-want-it’!”

Fred’s poor crucified jowls rattled, according to Bill.

Mj clucked philosophically. And Dlune laughed until mj laughed with her.

“Very gracious gentleman!” said Bill.

Betty Ann hadn’t expected that sarcastic slice. She looked surprised, then laughed with her guests.

Joey’s guru said your life could be more beautiful and fantastic than you thought. If you practiced the things he taught, you could get to where you opened your eyes and saw only Light. At the same time you would hear nothing but Music, feel nothing but Holy Vibration and drink nothing but Nectar. These were the four kinds of meditation he taught; and when you learned and practiced them, he said, all the energy in your body would come together perfectly and fill you up.¹¹ 

“And Fred was –. All through the wedding,” Bill said, “you saw him. He was beaming. He was in on this and in on that, serving the champagne –.”

Mj was puzzled. “He loved the wedding, didn't he!”

Betty Ann agreed: “In his Koochie Jacket.”

“He loved every minute of it!” said Bill.

“Remember his jacket?” Betty Ann asked Dlune.

“Yeh.”

“They were both beautiful,” said Betty Ann. “She looked every color of the rainbow.”

It was like the biggest rose in the world opening up all of its petals, said the guru, when all the energy in your body came together and filled you up like that. It was like the greatest sunshine in the world, the rays blooming golden, bursting into your life. You experienced Grace filling your life. You could feel Grace happening in your life.¹²

And poor ol’ mixed up mj lorenzo just sat there at the Blackburns’ big oval coffee table in their tiny little living room, trying to ponder this incomprehensible news: that the usual Asshole Number One, Fred Waring, Tyrannical Jerk Exemplified, who had not wanted to have their wedding in his house, had actually enjoyed Bill and Betty Ann’s wedding in his own private, sacrosanct – and celebrated – darn celebrity living room.

¹  Letter from Paul (‘the apostle’) to the fledgling ‘Christ’-ian congregation in Corinth, Greece, first century A.D. (C.E.), I Corinthians Chapter 13 Verse 4, J. B. Phillips translation.

 
²  The Living Master: quotes from Guru Maharaj Ji,  pp. iii; 2; 15; 19.

³  Ibid., p. 50.

⁴  Bill, as usual, was right. Without any ‘counseling’ before they married, he and Betty Ann nevertheless enjoyed a happy and emotionally healthy marriage up until the day Bill died of heart disease in the early 2000s.

⁵  Ibid., p. 53.

⁶  Ibid., p. 56.

⁷  Ibid.

⁸  Ibid., p. 58.

⁹  Ibid., p. 61.

¹⁰  Ibid., p. 58.

¹¹  Ibid., p. 59.

¹²  Ibid., p. 62. Exact words from The Living Master: “The day you receive Knowledge, and by your own effort of doing satsang, service and meditation, you start to have that experience of Knowledge, that experience of Guru Maharaj Ji – it’s just like the world’s biggest, biggest rose opening up all the petals. It’s the world’s greatest sunshine, where all the rays just completely come blooming out golden into your lives. And you see the Grace manifest. You can see, you can feel the Grace happen in your life.” (Words spoken while addressing his followers in Miami Beach, Florida, July 31, 1977.)