III.  The deplorably naked sermon to clothed Indians

47.  Rev and the pundits react to the inimitable naked sermon

And now, lastly, as if Jack had been feeling concerned he had not enclosed quite enough in his September bomb of a crazy package to infuriate his parents directly into an ambulance, he tossed in the several pages of Mortimer’s notebooks along with his – Jack’s – own reaction to them which all together, combined, would come to be known famously as Jack’s inimitable ‘Naked Sermon to Clothed Indians’.

Anyway, Rev, here I am at Fort Simpson. I’ve interrupted a few Indians from a riverside card game; and, balanced in my rocking canoe, at the rippling edge of the Mackenzie, breathing flowering fireweed, I think… I think I’ve gone off the deep end. I’ve belabored Wrigley; and this is where my eulogy has brought me. What I can’t answer is…: have the Indians dropped their hearts and clubs to stare because I’ve dropped my sleeping bag on my scars and mosquito blisters; or because I’ve known which of Mortimer’s notebook lines to drop, and when, as I shout them across the beach?

Here I stand, Rev, in the canoe which is tugging at its moorings to tumble me into the river as I scream on oblivious to even being heard. No, I admit my dull Indian audience affects me. But do I speak for them, or for myself; to them, or to me?

I begin by reading aloud certain lines I composed at Wrigley while posturing as my more thoughtful self in muffled anger, i.e., as Mortimer:….

The pundits always liked to interject right here that Mortimer at Wrigley after three years of required Bible and philosophy courses had acquired some skill in employing scripture and rhetoric to make a point. And Mortimer’s points in his notebooks – though he might have tripped over himself limb-twistingly sometimes when trying to make them – were, in the end, about as cogent as any number of Baptist or Methodist preachers’ points might have been on any Sunday in their pulpits.

And as for Jack’s points: they were, as certain ‘theology pundits’ claimed later, at least as ‘right on’ as John Calvin’s or John Wesley’s had been, if truth only were told. And Rev probably would have conceded his favorite son, Mortimer, some credit for his sermonic notebook points, had he seen only the particular preachy notebook piece of Mortimer’s that Jack was using as a springboard for his naked riverside talk. But Rev was not about to concede Jack any credit for any points he might make, even if he quoted Mortimer’s preachy notebooks, and even if he made his points successfully. Because of Jack’s un-preacher-ly STYLE, as Rev said, i.e, the way Jack went about using such quotes from Mortimer’s notebooks. For, as Rev almost preached at Jo, and almost poetically too, in fact:

A rocking stolen motor-canoe is no pulpit

And a couple of rotten hairy genitals are no robe

Psychology is no foundation for admonishing the spirit,

          but scripture alone

And comparing Abbie Hoffman with Jesus Christ,

          the Son of God Himself,

                   can be no fit subject for discussion of any

            kind.

In any case Jack’s ‘sermon to the Indians’ enjoyed no title for years, not even that one; but might have warranted something like, “Faith: Shocking but Useful Psychological Tricks for Making Yourself Believe the Unbelievable.”

And all future commentators without exception agreed that the ‘naked sermon’ was created solely and exclusively to aid not the Northwest Territories Indians of Fort Simpson but its author, mj lorenzo. It was aimed, in fact, said both the ‘theology’ AND the ‘sermon’ pundits, at shaking Mortimer out of his nearly lifelong depression and rut. For Jack ‘sensed’ that Mortimer was ‘listening’.

48.  the naked sermon itself

23 September, 1963 – “The bread which I shall give is my body, and I shall give it for the life of the world,” says Christ. Now, even if we had  been present at the event, there would have been no easy proof that once he had given his life, and been raised from the dead, had we even witnessed it, he had done anything  for the world and us in it. The world is not “saved,” therefore, until it simply  believes what he claimed: “This action of mine is your salvation.”

So the choice is our belief or non-belief. There is no question of proof, of evidence, tangibility, etc. There is an indication, however, judging from alleged signs and wonders and from his alleged life, that he was ‘filled by the will and power of God’; but neither does this PROVE that what Christianity says that he said and did and what it all meant: could have truly been the case.

Whether Jesus gave his life therefore is a problem of history; but whether he did it for any of us, or for the world, can only be a matter of  faith; and  faith is a psychological attitude, a way of looking at things and the universe.         

Jack looked up from reading Mortimer’s old notebook to address his audience directly:

‘Now a lot of you Hare and Chipewyan and Slave Indians out there playing cards will find this argument from a notebook of my big brother’s, Mortimer Lorenzo, pointless because you find God and Christianity pointless. But I’m not discussing the Christian faith as religion, you see, but as psychology, which is about as much to the point for you as anxiety and guilt, say….’

And Jack conversed with Rev about all this, too, in his package to Florence:

How could I talk down to these guys like this, Rev?

And now: from the vantage point of time and maturity, Rev, as my more mature present self again, Jack Lorenzo, standing wide-legged in my rocking motorized canoe tied to the dock, I bring it home to these Indian guys from off the top of my head. My stance is balanced and I’m used to the rocking by now. I can wave my hand against the crystal-clear Western September sky and let suntanned muscles ripple down my back without splashing into the river ass first. And inspired by that September 1963 passage from Mortimer’s notebooks I let ‘em have it now:

‘Let’s suppose that the Christian faith were founded on: not the idea that to save us from suffering, Christ had died and been resurrected; but that to save us from suffering, he had sponsored a Festival of Life for the people like the one Yippie Abbie Hoffman launched in Chicago in ’68;¹ and that he had then rested his case on this alone, screaming, “Do not be anxious, I have done all of this for you; do not feel guilty, I have forgiven you. Don’t you believe me? Well then, as proof I give you this helluva party”.

‘But I don’t think Abbie meant to say anything like this, really. I think he was encouraging the party for the sake of the party, or to demonstrate something, maybe that he was already guilt-free and fearless, and that the non-program he preached would get us somewhere and faster; which once again would be a matter for believing or not. Or I doubt if Abbie thought any of this, really, but just suspected that humans like you and me once reformed socially would feel reformed spiritually as a result; but if that were the case we would all have to wait for social reform to take place, wouldn’t we, in order to have our spirit altered? And I don’t want to wait for that, do you? It could take forever. And anyway, how could you guys be sure you wouldn’t still be anxious after you got socially reformed, especially given the well-known fact that a lot of very socially reformed socialist Swedes still have stomach ulcers right this very minute?

‘If, on the other hand, Abbie was saying social reform should follow on the heels of an altered inner spirit, if and where that alteration has occurred, well, then I’m hip. But which alteration of spirit precisely, and had Abbie undergone it?

‘And I don’t care to debate with you whether Jesus Christ actually died or not, or if he even lived. I just want to say that I think a voluntary sacrificial death would have made Abbie’s point more persuasively and with superior symbolism, whether in Grant Park or Jerusalem or at the Arctic; or right here in famous Fort Simpson. Though I do allow Abbie and his buddies some credit for getting their heads busted and bloodied by the people in power.

’But you know, you guys, regardless of ANY OR ALL of this, in the end it is left to us to believe or not to. It is our decision, our choosing as to whether any longer we should remain anxious; guilt-ridden; depressed; dispirited; culture-shocked and outmaneuvered by the other side; imprisoned in lack of faith OR WHATEVER NEGATIVITY, or whether we should just simply BELIEVE, as this person I was mentioning before Abbie got his bloody nose in it, I mean Jesus, is said to have said, namely, that we simply need not – for no reason other than that he said so SOCKOCRASH – remain anxious and guilt-ridden as of this split second POW any longer, quite at all.

‘Now!

‘PERIOD: (.) ’

WOW, Rev. If only those guys playing cards at the docks could have felt that punctuation. If only they could have been changed men and gotten their spirit back. They never did look very anxious to me, though. Just half dead.

49.  the several Remaking ‘healing cure’ principles ‘borrowed’ (at least partly) from Christ

The Remaking’s ‘sermons’, so-called fondly and facetiously by tradition, received scant attention during the early years of pundit activity, i.e. during the early seventies. Later, though, after the early Remaking pundits had become convinced that mj lorenzo was someone worth regarding, they turned to the ‘sermons’ in The Remaking, and pundit schools of thought and pundit workgroups came into being for the purpose. Eventually several kinds of ‘sermonary schools’ developed. One such ‘school’ did nothing but compare Mortimer’s sermons with Jack’s, for example. And the discussion was lively and interesting, no doubt. For them, at least.

As for this sermon in the Fort Simpson package, the ‘sermonary pundits’ gave it as good a working-over as any of mj’s sermons ever got, partly because it was one of his most notorious and unforgettable ‘sermons’ and was specially named, not by mj in The Remaking, nor even by the pundits, but by tradition, i.e., by Dr. Lorenzo himself, indeed, but years later, during a live conference when he first referred to it as his ‘Naked Sermon to Clothed Indians’, bringing down the house unforgettably.

One of the things to be learned from this sermon, said the Remaking 'sermonary' pundits, was that although mj lorenzo had stopped going to church around 1966 and stopped thinking of himself as a traditional Christian gradually after that, he could not eradicate from his nervous system everything of value learned during those 27 years. And so, during his several years of searching, especially during the climactic year of The Remaking, one of his intentional lines of research had been to find in Christianity, especially in the things which Christ had supposedly taught (as recorded in the gospels), any principles for living that could be ‘useful for achieving and maintaining good mental and emotional health’. Because of this ongoing research of mj’s, the subject had come up during the Remaking year several times. It had been a subject important enough, as the sermonary pundits said, that his year’s findings regarding it were summed up at the end of The Remaking when mj finally got to Hungabee. And the fact that he laboriously wrapped up those findings in writing while ‘clinging naked with one hand’ to the south cliff face of Hungabee, as most pundits of all and any persuasion agreed he had done, meant that mj saw those findings as a critical part of his successful re-making makeover.

In other words, mj lorenzo had been working for years on the project of looking at scripture, church teaching and theology, to see what might be worth preserving in a ‘remade’ world. And he had done so despite the fact he had canned the church and did not wish to try living as a ‘Christian’ in the way so-called ‘Christians’ around him had tried to teach him to live, especially not after having failed so miserably at following the model provided by those people and having ended up convinced that trying it their way had only done him more damage than good. There was plenty of evidence that attempting it their way had harmed him permanently in certain ways, in fact.

Yet in the end he concluded that certain Christ-taught principles remained ‘valid psychologically at the very least’ and should not be thrown out of the SELF-PSYCHOTHERAPY bag of tricks, and these included: (1) loving others and oneself; (2) forgiving others and oneself; (3) treating all humans as brothers and sisters, including oneself; considering absolutely all humans as absolutely equal, as humans, no exceptions allowed, not even one’s self or mother-in-law; and (4) having faith primarily in oneself, while making use of certain other self-healing principles learned partly from Christ and partly from universal and natural common sense.

50.  the naked sermon’s punch line had to do with faith, meaning hope and conviction that one could reform oneself and change

The core lesson of this particular sermon, the ‘Naked Sermon to Clothed Indians’, was this last, ‘faith’, in a ‘positive-thinking’ kind of way. The exact punch line of the sermon, said most sermonary pundits, though crazy Jack had broken up the punch into pieces, weakening it, was this:

‘…we should believe, as… Jesus… is said to have said… for no reason other than that he said so… that we simply need not… remain anxious and guilt-ridden… any longer… POW…’

In other words, even if Christ were no longer to be understood from the traditional ‘Christian’ point of view (as having died and resurrected in atonement for the sin of whoever believed), Christ could still be appreciated as a very good, loving, forgiving and healing therapist, or source of healing psychotherapy. One could have ‘faith in Christ’ at least to that extent, even if you did not buy the Christian religion part, especially since the poor man had gone to the trouble to die, after suffering so badly. Maybe even he had come back from the dead in some rather unscientific way, some way that was far beyond any comprehending by means of ordinary Western-world-type reason. Who knew? And he had done all of it maybe just to get people’s attention, at the very least, so that he could bring home his healing point.

Mj lorenzo – said the Christian theology pundits after decades of scholarship and also knowing Dr. Lorenzo personally, many of them – believed when all was said and done that forgiveness, love, faith, equality and brotherhood, etc., taken together as a group of ‘psychological and moral healing principles’, were part of the direction in which the human race needed to head, as they tried to find a universal set of values to be honored and shared among all mankind. Mj, they said, advocated these values, ‘Christian’ or not, at the same time that he advocated the other values taught in The Remaking.

‘Faith’, for example, as a psychological principle taught by Christ, could be used in conjunction with the kind of ‘psychological faith’ mj would use just after ‘spring Break-Up’² toward the end of his Remaking year. That kind of ‘faith’ involved the useful trick of picking in advance an arbitrary event or date upon which, once it arrived, one would begin a drastic attitude change.

One of the lessons the pundits learned from The Remaking eventually, in other words, was that people with major attitude problems, such as those down and dreary moods Mortimer had suffered for years as part of his treatment-resistant, severe, and maybe-even-at-times-psychotic depression, would need a tremendous amount of help in many different forms to get them turned around and ‘remade’. Thus, for example, just one of many powerful combinations of tricks or tools that might help attain such a goal would be the three faith-related tricks used in unison: (1) having the kind of ‘faith’ or hope mj described in Part III of The Remaking, just after spring Break-Up;³ (2) picking a very meaningful date in the future at which time one would change one’s attitude from negative to positive with all-out commitment and determination; and finally (3) having one’s faith and hope bolstered, also, if one chose, by what Christ or any other avatar or sage might have taught about the value of ‘faith’ and ‘hope’.

And finally there was a fourth part to the ‘faith’-approach treatment regime, as certain pundits came to understand with time, and this was what they loved to refer to as (4) FIREWORKS, such as the yelling and punching (POW!) implied in the naked sermon.

¹ Abbie Hoffman was a prominent political leader of the anti-Vietnam-War movement during the mid and late sixties and early seventies. His most remembered stunt aimed at exploiting media attention was his leadership of the street protest at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The protest was euphemized and advertized beforehand as a 'party' or 'festival' for war protestors in Grant Park, but everyone invited to the 'party' (all of the nation's and world's Vietnam War protestors) knew beforehand that the real aim would be to cause as much havoc as possible in the streets, as a form of protest against the Vietnam War. Havoc indeed ensued. Chicago Police attacked with billy sticks bloodying many heads, and the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg felt called upon to try to calm the crowd in Grant Park by getting them to meditate en masse and aloud on the Buddhist/Hindu meditation syllable of 'OM'.

Abbie was present and vocal and crowd-inciting again a year later when the New Mobilization organized the most massive march (250 to 300,000 protestors) on Washington D.C. in history up to that time (November, 1969), a well-planned and -organized week-long demonstration against the war which included as one of its aspects a demonstration by some 40,000 individual war protestors, each bearing a single lighted candle representing a single specifically named dead American soldier (in Vietnam), carrying it lit from Arlington Cemetery all the many miles through the streets of Washington, single file, crossing at intersections on green lights only, a legal, authorized, very solemn and dignified AND SILENT procession which took several days to complete, so as to place the candle reverently in a coffin on the west steps of the Capitol building. Many, many coffins were sadly filled full with burnt candle butts during those several days. Young Dr. Lorenzo drove down from Philly after work on Friday with his pacifist Quaker friend from Presbyterian Hospital, David Quick, for the end and culmination of this several-day protest, and they narrowly escaped being tear-gassed in Dupont Circle the night before the main march to the Washington Monument.

One of the Dr.'s most vivid memories of the Candlelight Procession and other protest events was late Friday night when he and David were searching for a friend of David's and went into the really big Methodist Church in downtown Washington, D.C., only to find the lights turned off and thousands of sardine-packed sleeping bodies of young moneyless college-student war protestors from all over the country covering every square inch of the church, floor, pews, offices, Sunday School rooms, altar, choir loft, everywhere imaginable in perfect peace and order. They had to tiptoe through and over the thousands of bodies to find the friend.

Abbie was also famous for his having helped to think up the outrageous notion of meditating by the multitude outside the Pentagon until it lifted off the ground and floated away, this having been the desired 'aim' of an earlier peace march in Washington. Twenty years later, in 1989, poor Abbie committed suicide during a bout of severe depression which was part of his Manic-Depressive (Bipolar) Disorder. See Encarta encyclopedia articles "Abbie Hoffman," "Protests in the 1960s," and especially the Los Angeles Times article from November 16, 1969, which Encarta presents with the title, "250,000 Marchers in Biggest Protest: Scattered Clashes With Militants Fail to Ruin Capital Demonstration," which reports on both the tear gas episode in Dupont Circle and the emotionally moving Candlelight Procession which required several days unceasing, all day and all night, to solemnly hearse by hand 40,000 sad lit candles from one end of Washington to the other.

All of these events occurred, it should be noted, during the few years leading up to mj lorenzo's Remaking year, 1970-71, during the formative years of his twenties, and were part of the sad and infuriating world situation which he was looking for a way to 'remake'. Dr. Lorenzo always said that witnessing the Candlelight Procession was one of the most moving and unforgettable experiences of his life. When the single-file marcher finally came to the end of his hours-long pilgrimage and climbed the west Capitol steps he was greeted by uniformed Vietnam veterans who had joined the anti-war movement and now assisted her or him in placing the burnt candle correctly in the right coffin. Everywhere he and David went all weekend they kept running into the Procession, which wound and twisted through the downtown trafiicky streets of Washington. Federal and other workers, anyone in Washington for any purpose that week, could not escape running right up on and being confronted by this moving silent demonstration, since practically anywhere you drove in downtown Washington, all the way from Arlington cemetery past the Monuments and White House to the Capitol, marchers were processing single file and crossing intersections in groups along with regular citizens at green lights, then devotedly taking up their undistracted march again on the other side of the intersection. You would go to work in the morning and they were there, and when you left work in the evening they were still there processing. The next day when you returned to work from the suburbs, they were there again, hour after hour, day after day. The planners of the protest, including Abbie, had looked for a way to impact the nation by hitting it in its gut, and had found it. Everyone was beginning to comprehend just how many 40,000 young lives lost really was, and now they were forced to ask themselves a little more sincerely than before: was it worth it? Was this ugly war over darn old Vietnam the right thing to do? 

² Northern Canada’s spring break-up and mj lorenzo’s own famous Break-Up are both described at the end of Part II and beginning of Part III of The Remaking.

³ Ibid.