ABRAXAS TO JESUS

 

By Eric John Sawyer

 

 

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born first must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God’s name is Abraxas”   (Hermann Hesse)

 

A grayish green fungus covers the fireplace and the chairs and tables in this room. Santana’s “Borboletta”, is turning beneath the stylus as three men share a reefer and talk softly to each other in unknown tongues.

 

It is 1974, I think.

 

“Have you listened to this album ?” the older man says as he holds up the cover.

 

Peering through the mist of that moment, I can see the name Richard Strauss. The complex musical structures stimulated our minds bringing out a rich flow of thoughts.

 

Brutal honesty is my Achilles heel and hallucinogenic absorption reduces the options for deceit. I could flash the entire tale of my youth in a flow of seemingly irrelevant, unconnected events, but when I would smoke the herb, the point of existence became very precise and the moment became intensely relevant to the point of panic.

 

The brotherhood of man may be a fallacy, but it also may be the truth. Lived within the shell of my own experience, there is a commonality that is hard to ignore. Disciples of one another, the false one is not easily noticeable, for we are of one blood and we all share in this image of God.

 

I blew upon the cover of a book called “Demian” by Hermann Hesse.

 

“Do you want to borrow it ?” asked the older man.

“Yes” I said bobbing my head softly up and down.

“He is good story teller” he added.

 

I am not sure whether it is synchronicity or the cosmic mind or the Great Spirit that hands us rays of perception to lead us another step closer to the bright light of eventual completeness and knowledge of the divine within or without. It is as if a river or stream of consciousness connects us to each other and to the experiences we share.

 

With my new read nestled in my fist and the visit drawn to a close, the curtain opens on another room.

 

The early morning sun pierces the shadows of my room. The slatted wooden floors are a good place to sit and read, propped against the bumpy white wall in my lounge. The story is easy to read and thoughts tie me to each word. The words weave in and out of my questions about life and the meaning of my own existence.

 

How it is that I came to share my flat with others is sort of tied in with my communal ethic. Tied together on a journey we all are, pressed upon the decks of a voyager to the shores of enlightenment or knowledge.

 

My mother’s kindness and my father’s solitude were my christening or my curse.

 

Briefly, from birth to where I sat in the sun that morning, pain had been the measure of identifying each and every memory that buffeted me to my solitary search for a pathway to fulfillment.

 

Birth itself is agony and panic and suffocation and eventually breath and life and love or worse. I was born in 1958, and baptized a Presbyterian a few months later. My circumcision was in the flesh, and certainly not because I was Jewish. The gulf between my mother’s sweet mind and my father’s remote consciousness was as wide as the chasm between Hades and Abraham’s bosom and my sister and I derived very little benefit from their union.

 

My journey forward would be mostly alone, with very little parental guidance from the age of 11 onwards. Divorce has this effect. It tests and divides the love, in ways that stretch a child’s heart to the point of bursting.

 

Two, rooms. Two separate worlds, ever extending into a maze of isolation from the one room, where light and love and pain and something that cannot be named once held four lives together, lies in ruin, like the Seafarer upon the rocks at Three Anchor Bay.

 

The rising tide of the new life covers the wreck for a time but only until the tide subsides and the ugly wreck is once again visible and tears of regret flow down in an effort to bring Lazarus out of his tomb of slumber, until Jesus says, ‘He is dead’

 

My sister lived with my mother and obviously I was meant to live with my father and for a time it seemed that this would be the bandage of promise and hope of a possible reconciliation. In a child’s mind, it is so simple. Kiss and make up, shake hands and be friends. Instead the harsh reality is that when the pounding waves of change begin to address the wreckage, it breaks up and eventually resembles nothing that offers any hope. So one buries the pain and occasionally the tears trickle down like rain upon the pages of the family album, but we must move on or remain in this turbulent sea of eventualities.

 

Light streamed into the darkness of my new room. My father who was too busy at work and searching for a companion to help disseminate his loneliness, decided that it would be better for me to be placed in an orphanage for a time. His reasons still do no make any sense to me.

 

However, the journey my heart would take here would forever open up a crack into a dimension of possibility of something about the unknowable other.

 

There was a quaint stone chapel in the grounds and it was not long before my sweet soprano voice was included in the choir. The songs were rich and deep and whereas my education of music had been pop and the occasional opera, this new breath brought with it the hope of a new morning.

 

I was tucked into bed and as I gazed up at my new parents who stood arm in arm at the doorway, I clearly saw two halo’s around their heads. This was a house where Jesus lived.

 

Pace quickened and my father who had been considering my education, decided that it would be best for both of us if I went to Boarding School at South African College Schools in Newlands. It was not far from home, and I would be able to visit every Sunday.

 

Now my development as an individual really began. I was exposed to the best in teachers that the land had to offer. My peers were some like myself, a product of a broken home. Though the light of education began to open my mind to knowledge of things, the inner light was to be darkened progressively because of the absence of an intimate role model and the emergence of myself into the fullness of rebellion. My disregard for authority was allowed to grow and fester to the point of hatred and disdain. The punishments for rebellion were harsh and unpleasant and did nothing to change my will, which seemed set to overthrow the whole world if I might, with hatred.

 

Into this endless sea of bombarding waves I found momentary relief in playing rugby and participating in school plays. My art became the vehicle whereby I might express the hurt. For I was hurt and might I say that the hurt only uncovered something I could not really understand but a destructive something that seemed to possess me, and control me, and many other kindred spirits.

 

Eventually, this isolation within myself led to and incident that separated me from the trickle of dispassionate love that my father had manifested by promising to eventually free me from the prison of boarding school life into the full light of being a day scholar. One particular teacher had take a great delight in attacking my impoverished self esteem with insulting comments as to my academic achievements.

 

So one day I just took my rucksack and my cheese cutter and headed out the door of the English class never to return. I had stepped out of class, the institution of learning into a new world where I was the master of my own destiny, the controller of my own events, and where I could choose who to accept and who to reject. My father attempt to get me to return, but finally I was expelled and coerced into joining a co-ed C-model school. I was an instant hero. With my long hair and my sports abilities I was never short of friends. After school I caught a train to Rosebank and walked a few miles to Teencentre. One of my fathers old war connections ran a boys home and because of my rebellious nature it was decided that I needed a little disciplining. Instead the home proved to be a hot bed of passions and lusts and within a day of arriving I had been introduced to the common herb of the tribe.

 

One might say that I was swallowed by a cloud of smoke. My imagination became fruitful and I seemed to have a world to explore that was cushioned by good feelings, good vibes and lots of new friends who liked to break the rules and bend the rules to explore the realm of rebellion against everyone and everything except the bond of friendship. It was to be my prison until I was finally expelled from school and sent to the Navy where I ended up getting the flat. The flat where I now sat propped against the wall reading Herman Hesse’s book in the warm morning sun.

 

My new friends would probably be termed as hippies or flower children, or by some drug addicts. Whatever term is given to them, they were my friends, and I have always treasured and cherished my friends. Initially, I had signed a contract with two other sailors but they were drafted to Durban and the lot of coming up with the full rental fell to me. My free spirit and rebellious nature attracted me to others in the same journey. It seemed for me that the gutter held more fascination than the street and soon I was surrounded by a community of travelers. We smoked we chatted and eventually some stayed behind and became my new flat mates.

 

They were mostly poor and worked to get enough money to afford LSD. The trip was everything in those times. Though I had wanted to take the trip, fear and many warning as to the dangers that might be incurred for a creative mind kept me on the outside. Certainly by accident one day I did drink some in a bowl of punch. The experience was mild compared to my own naturally induced dementia. My psychological profile was definitely something that needed treatment. I was however medicating the issue with drugs and philosophy in the hopes of discovering a path to freedom.

 

I hovered between basically two worlds. The Navy and the Hippy dream. As in the symbol of the snake eating the snake, the two were consuming each other and darkness was looming on the horizon. As I read a passage seemed to literally attach itself to me. It read, “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born first must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas”  

 

Hermann Hesse had arrived at the idea from some writing by Carl Gustav Jung who had assembled it from the writing of St. Iranaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippoclytus of Rome and probably Victorinus of Pettau’s treatise attached to Tertullian’s Praescriptinuibus concerning the heresy of Basilides of Alexandria who claimed to have received his esoteric doctrines from Claucias, an apostle of Peter. The Gnostic sect founded by Basilides recognized Abraxas as the Supreme Being whom they worshipped. Their system had three grades: material, intellectual, and spiritual which the initiates progressed through. Also it possessed two allegorical statues, male and female. Many points of their doctrine shared resemblances to those of the Ophites and the Jewish Kabbala. Suffice to say I had been fed some pretty poisonous truth by Hermann Hesse in the guise of a story.

 

I was unaware of any such deception at the time and the course of events that follow testify to the devastation that this type of thing can wreak on a young and impressionable sponge like mind.

 

There are those who do not believe that we are under a curse that has come down to us from our ancestors Adam and Eve. I never even considered such things, but lived out my life as close to the bone as I might and eventually discovered that I was trapped and needed to somehow find a way to break out of the shell of the invisible something that kept me trapped. So it was that the words in Demian began to convince me that if I could destroy a world I could somehow do this.

 

I began reading Klingsors Last Summer. During my time at S.A.C.S my creative abilities earned me the respect of my fellows. This creative ability is something that was as natural as breathing, so when I read Klingsors Last Summer, I lived in the role of the lead character to the point of total association, and this book set the seal on what unwound like a coiling snake.

 

In the Navy as any of the armed forces of a country being absent without leave and disobeying lawful instructions are frowned upon and ultimately punished by detention, the equivalent to prison in civilian life.

 

My life outside the Navy had begun to be more significant than the petty rules and regulations, as I ploughed ahead in search of the freedom that my whole being screamed for.

 

One weekend I was so absorbed in my search that I just didn’t bother to come to work, first on the Monday and then the Tuesday. When I finally arrived at SAN Barracks I was immediately taken into custody by the Naval Police and taken to appear before my Officer in Command, for an ‘off-caps’ (Trial).

 

As I entered the sterile little room the O.C. was at his desk and two others non-commissioned officers were also present. I was in big trouble.

 

First, he announced:

“You are charged with being absent without leave, and disobeying a lawful instruction, and are sentenced to 7 days imprisonment at Detention Quarters at Simonsberg.’

 

Then he looked up at me, asking slowly, “Do you have anything to say”

 

I had been briefed not to say anything. However, my cheeky tongue got the better of me, and I asked, “Is that all ?”

 

“What!” he thundered. Just for that you are sentenced to another 7 days, being now a total of 14 days. Have you anything to say to that ?”

 

I got the point and remained silent.

 

“On caps” said my Petty Officer, and marched me out of the room and up to the Quartermaster’s Lobby, where I would wait for transport to ‘The House of Many Chimneys’, the name for the Naval Detention Quarters.

 

It was not my first time I had been punished. A prior absence, after stealing twenty litres of petrol to enable myself and my hallucinogenic dabbling friends the opportunity to party the whole weekend to the exclusion of my Saturday duty, and thereby affording me 30 days confined to barracks. ( I missed four weekend passes, agony for a young person)

 

I was driven down to Simonstown and taken to the Naval Detention Quarters where I was booked in and taken to an upstairs cell. The door was closed and suddenly the impact of what had just happened caught me.

 

My bed was a mattress on the floor, and my toilet a brass pot in the corner, I had a stone table and seat, unmovable and cold. This was to be my bedroom for fourteen days, from which I would emerge to go to the courtyard to run round and round in a circle with the other inmates, to cut wood, and polish floors in silence.  Showers were ice cold and green carbolic soap was used. It was if anything the ideal way to lose weight and get really fit. Activity for the crimes I had committed was meant to be my punishment. Instead I relished it. It brought back book like ‘Dry Guillotine’ to my mind. However, I pined for my friends at my flat. I missed they deeply and was convinced that if I meditated hard enough I could make myself be there with them.

 

After many wood cutting sessions, and floor polishing mindless activities, I received a visitor.  It was my boss from Training Aid Production Centre.

 

I must explain a little bit here. Though I was a weed head, my father had contacts in the Navy and had managed to get me on the Communications course after my Basic Training in Saldahna Bay had ended. My concentration span was limited for most of my nights were spent either getting drunk or high or a combination of both etcetra. I loved to party. Say no more. Ultimately, I failed to qualify for the final segment and one would then do semaphore. I did not want to do the course for it would mean that I would have been the only white person on the course. (That is how I thought back then. I was a living contradiction. One side I would be with people of all races, engaging in all the delights of the flesh. One the other I was this swearing, evil racist fool.)

 

Suffice to say, I ended up being sent to SAN Barracks to do quarter masters duties. Once there my drug activities were both up at the Barracks, at lunch times, at home, everywhere. I was doing drugs all the time. Even while I had been at Youngsfield Airforce base I had spent most of my days, ‘stoned out of my head’, even working in the Chippy shop with friends who got stoned at lunchtime and would be giggling all through the rest of work time.

 

So finally, when I was apprehended for my slack behaviour my punishment had certainly been due me. There was not injustice. I was punished fair and square.

 

My father who attempted to rescue me from my steady downhill crash had negotiated with the Admiral Johnson. (A friend of his) so that I could get a job working at the Training Aid Production Centre, where I met Lieutenant Commander Colin Chambers, who also happened to be a Naval Chaplain and a member of the Assemblies of God in Harfield Road, one of the first churches to open her doors to the hippies who were coming to Jesus in their droves.

 

I worked on elementary tasks. Drawing things for the camera to shoot, I was basically and apprentice artist. Having only a Standard Eight did not really grant me much of an opportunity for more. I ended up writing scripts as well. On one occasion, Lt.Cdr Chambers, or Colin as we all addressed him, asked me to come and talk to him in his office. He asked me many questions about my life, and as I was a salty seadog with no respect or even awareness of my language, I would swear in a form that was literally a language. It spew forth in rhyme and intonation, with the skill of a true poet. It was just the creature I had become by the course of the spirit of this world that had me fiercely in it’s grip. I was conscious of a Holy Spirit chasing me from my early days.

 

During my last year at school, I had been invited by a friend at Teencentre, to go with him to church. He had had a miraculous change of life right before my eyes and I was curious as to how this had infact happened. He went from being a pain in the butt self righteous straight snob, to a cool, mellow, friendly and Gospel preaching, commentary buying, born again, spiritual man in a matter of a few weeks. So I accompanied him to his church, called the Upper Room, where everyone was worshipping this Jesus, with full voice and being very happy and enthusiastic. There was some force and I understood this to be the Holy Spirit. After the service I went with him to another friend’s house from the band and was left sitting in the corridor while they went into a study to pray. I did not really know much about what was happening, though I had done my fair share of praying and singing choruses and hymns at Teencentre, but it was done in a mocking and sarcastic way. There was not reality, I could not understand the force I felt coming from the room where they prayed. 

 

On another occasion I was invited to a tent campaign in the area and a cool blonde haired girl by the name of Kim sang and her cool friends played the instruments. It was all amazing. I was being invited by different people, to meeting almost all the time.

 

On another occasion I was invited to stay with some folks called the Daguiars in Camps Bay an their sons were all ‘born again’ and the folks, we went motor biking and I met another girl called Carol whose father was an elder at the Harfield Road Assembly of God. We sat playing guitars and jamming to the piano which she played well. Finally, I was invited to go along to church with them all. There was this short man preaching and it the end I was prodded to go forward. I had tried to do the sinners prayer routine many times and it all just crumbled to dust, I made resolves and the next moment was off pursuing my habits and lifestyle with all my resolutions out the window. It wasn’t that I lacked the desire to, I just had not power to.

 

So there I was sitting at the front and the minister came up to me, and started praying for me to pray in tongues. I had heard the practice so inventively I mumbled away to divert the scenario. When I walked out the church I was no more saved than I had walked in. It was more a fascination than anything else.

 

I remember being taken on the Saturday to Cape Town Hippie Market to meet Brian O’Donnell to get some counseling for my drug problems. I am sure he prayed, but there was nothing in me that could co-operate with any prayers.

 

Colin, who was a member of the Assemblies of God, as I said, was also a Bible Teacher and many times went to the youth prayer meeting which consisted of many young people who had come out of their broken lives to serve Jesus. He at some point mentioned my name, telling them all about the terrible mess my life was and how worried he was that I would destroy myself because of it. He obviously encouraged them to pray. This loving bunch needed very little encouragement and went into prayer and intercession for my life. I became aware of this many years later.

 

So in the ‘spirit’ of this event, Colin had come to visit me in my cell. He asked me.

 

“So Eric, how are you?”

 

I began to unwind the coils of my life and the decision that I had decided to make. This is what I told him.

 

“Well Colin, the way I understand it is this. My life is like a shell, and in order for me to escape all I need to do is to destroy this shell and I can be free to fly to Abraxas, so I have decided to buy a gun when I leave and destroy my body….’(there was more) but almost as if captured for a moment by a higher consideration, I suddenly had the liberty and the intent to completely hand over my life to Jesus.  I looked up at Colin and asked him.

 

“Excuse me Sir, I need to do something”

 

I slipped down to my knees and lifted my arms upwards and prayed, ‘Jesus please come into my heart.’  I stood up and sat down again. Looked at Colin, and said. “Thank you”

 

I am not sure what raced through his mind at that point, but I know if it had been me, I would have been jumping for joy with joy. He handled it well and said.

 

“Eric, I will bring you a bible tomorrow” rose rather swiftly and left.

 

A white soft cover Living Bible, which eventually fell apart from use and a copy of ‘Prison to Praise’ by Merlin Carothers was given to me the following day. Being a book worm already, I began exploring both eagerly. I eventually read through the thin green book “Prison to Praise” very quickly and inside I learned that not only was faith given to one to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, but also to receive the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, so I did just like I did the day before and went down on my knees and asked Jesus to baptize me in the Holy Spirit, and said, “Thank you” to Him. Got back up, and sat down in my cell. Nothing startling happened and neither did I expect it.

 

Whereas so many associated immediate transformation, or a whole list of good works that one must do. I just kept on being the same old person I was. I was just a lot happier for I had been saved from death. I was at peace. No more desire to end my life, just living a new life in Jesus.

 

The day for my release came and I was driven up to SAN Barracks in a Mini. I asked the driver if he had matches, and I lit up one of my long Dumont cigarettes and puffed out a stream of relieving smoke. I was not just free from the pinprick of detention, but I was free and now a Christian. As we drove closer and closer to SAN Barracks the impact of how this would be responded to by my prior drug connections was far from my mind. I was free. Free as a bird.

 

The following day, Colin came to see me and invited me to a retreat at a place called ‘Apostles Battery’ near Llundudno. I rolled out my sleeping back, placed my backpack down and went outside. Colin asked me if I would like to go an pray up in the mountain. We went walking up the side of the mountain and eventually at a nice place with a clear view of the sea we knelt down and began to pray.

 

Colin prayed first, and finally my turn came. I prayed with my hands clasped like a child, “Lord Jesus, I pray for all the people living in Llundudno, that they would come to know you….” – something happened…I ran out of words to pray…I had not further ability, as if a wind blew from outside me to somewhere inside my body I began to pray the most beautiful words of praise and thanks to Jesus, it was as if every word in my soul poured out to Him in a long stream that would not end.

 

Jesus said to the woman at the well, ‘Out of you innermost being shall flow streams of living water…’ I had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and was praising the Lord in a language and a spirit so sublime and so wonderful that there was not point in stopping. I was in the Spirit and I walked swiftly with Colin.

 

He said, “We are having a time of ministry in the hall now, would you like to join me ?”

 

I agreed and we entered the room, which was full already. Colin wisked off to the front and began talking to the smaller man.

 

Just so you get a clear understanding of the depth of the moment. I want to share a little of the darkness of my life. I am neither proud nor glorying in this. I took so many drugs in my life, that my mind had become darkened and foolish and numb. Consistently I had lived out the full depth of my passions and harmed my conscience until I felt no guilt at my sinfulness. I was a man lost in a very dark place. So as I sat there listening to this little man, begin to talk, the awesome power, of God descended on me in a way that is indescribable in human terms. Suffice to say I was stunned, astonished, and completely speechless. So when he asked me to share a little of what had happened in my life, I was completely unable to comply with his wishes.  I felt as if I were in a gigantic bubble that just kept getting bigger an bigger and bigger. I could rationalize the experience away as purely emotional, but it was more than emotion. Energy that is so powerful had begun to be present in my life and I was being educated by the Holy Spirit and the Word of God.

 

After the meeting, I was introduced to the man who had preached, and he said, “Hello, Eric. My name is Noel, Noel Cromhout”, he seemed to have a perennial smile.

 

My perception of the Christian life had just received a bolt of light energy and the love that Jesus had for me was almost visible. Such things lose there value when explained. I just found myself able to express my gratitude to Jesus and could not really understand why anyone would not want to be filled with gratitude. I was saved.

 

Early one morning looking over the bay I was startled by the beauty of the sunrise. The sun was a gigantic celebration of this new life in Jesus Christ.

 

Thirty years have passed since all these events, and my life has been full of all the usual trial and tribulations that we all have to endure, along with many, many blessing that the Lord has dropped straight into my life.

 

Sometimes I go walking with my dog out along the pathway near our house and then just sit in the early morning light waiting quietly for an audience with my King. 

 

While sitting quietly under a tree waiting in silence, He came to me and spoke clearly and with a faithfulness in the sound of His voice that I have not heard any human being utter, and said, “I love you” 

 

I found a verse the other day that I have sung many times, that brought the power of the moment rushing back to me. I hope you come to know Lord and the surety in his love and kindness and mercy.

 

“Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever”