This week we share two stories from people who were confronted with their faith.

Part 1: Feeling like a loser after he fails to graduate on time with his degree in materials science, Len Kruger accepts a dinner invitation from a cult.

Len Kruger is a writer and storyteller. He recently retired from the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress, where he was a Specialist in Science and Technology Policy. Len has performed stories on stage with local storytelling groups such as Story District, the Moth, and Better Said Than Done. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including Zoetrope All-Story, The Barcelona Review, and Gargoyle. He has Bachelor of Applied Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland.

Part 2: After young Jehovah's Witness Emmanuel Garcia loses his faith, he finds a new purpose at a neuroscience conference.

Emmanuel (Mani) Garcia is an Indigenous-Black-Latino psychological scientist-practitioner; passionate science communicator; sign language interpreter; group fitness instructor; certified holistic yoga teacher; statistics educator; filmmaker; artist; writer; musician; and cult survivor living in Queens NYC. While completing his PhD in Clinical Psychology at CUNY-John Jay, Mani is focused on developing his recently launched wellness capacity-building movement #Joy4L. His mission with #Joy4L is to increase joy in the lives of all minoritized people by increasing their access to high quality wellness resources. You can follow Mani at: manigarcia.com; Instagram: @bodyweightfun; Twitter: @manigarcianyc.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Len Kruger

So I was at a low point. It was Philadelphia, 1979. It was the summer after my senior year and I hadn’t graduated because I needed more credit so I had to stay and do some bullshit independent study.

I’m living in this rundown sublet with torn window shades and a broken doorbell, but the broken doorbell didn’t matter because all my friends had already left. They had all graduated so nobody would ever come to visit me anyway. I know. I’m painting a picture of despair here.

I spent my evenings sitting in this sweltering sublet listening to Philadelphia Sports Talk Radio on this piece-of-shit, bicentennial transistor radio which had this faded red, white and blue painting on it. Every few days the batteries would get weak and the volume would go down and down and, eventually, I'd have to buy new batteries, which seemed sort of a metaphor for my situation.

Len Kruger shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Bier Baron Tavern in Washington DC in October 2019. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.

Because I hadn’t graduated on time, I kind of felt like a failure. What even made me feel more like a failure was that my degree, the focus of my degree was material science which was my father’s field. He was this world-renowned corrosion scientist. In fact, that spring, I had taken a course in his field in low temperature metallic corrosion.

And we learned about these things called Pourbaix diagrams, which was this diagram which would show you the phase of different metals in various states of equilibrium, and like the x axis was pH and the y axis was voltage potential. What made that especially resonate for me is my father actually knew this guy, Pourbaix, Marcel Pourbaix the guy who invented this thing and I had met the guy several times as a kid.

So here I was, the son of this famous corrosion scientist who had actually met Pourbaix who was like the George Washington of the low temperature metallic corrosion, and I hadn’t graduated on time.

So my independent study was going very poorly because, instead of doing it, I was procrastinating. Basically, what I would do is spend my days sitting on a bench next to Benjamin Franklin in the middle of campus and reading what I felt were really cool and impressive books. I would sort of hold them up like this and I'd hope that people would see me reading these books and think, “Wow, look at that really cool guy reading those cool books.”

And the ultimate fantasy, of course, was that, all of a sudden, I'd hear, “What are you reading?” And I'd lower the book and I'd see some beautiful woman and it would be a start of this summer romance, like in the movie Grease or something.

So that didn’t work, until one day it kind of did. I’m reading this book called Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, this iconic counter-culture novel but 800 pages long. A book that was described by the New York Times as bone-crushingly dense. And all of a sudden I hear this woman’s voice say, “What are you reading?”

I lower the book and there's this Japanese woman about my age with this look of total interest on her face, like she can’t wait to hear what I have to say.

And I say, “Oh, it’s Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.”

And she says, “What’s it about?”

I didn’t know what it was about so I read from the back cover, I’m looking at it and, “Oh, it’s an immense synthesis of modern literature and modern science.”

And she says, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And then she says, “So, have you ever felt lost, like you don’t know where you belong?”

And I say, “Yeah, I guess. I don't know.”

And then she tells me her name is Mashiko and when she was growing up in Japan she felt lost and she even almost thought about killing herself. But then she met these people that changed her life and turned her around and she was reborn.

Now, at this point, I just want to stop and say I may have been an idiot but I wasn’t stupid. And I knew that there was a certain cult trolling the campus harvesting depressed college students. But she seemed kind of nice so we talked for a while.

She told me that she would be out until 9:00 or 10:00 at night talking to people and I say, “You know, it’s kind of dangerous around here in West Philadelphia. Don’t you worry about doing that?”

And she's like, “I don't worry about it at all. God will take care of me.” And what do you say to that?

So before she leaves she asks me two questions. First, she asks me if I'll come to their house for dinner that night, and I say no. And then she asks for my phone number and address. For some reason, I give it to her. And then she goes off.

Then I had this moment of harsh self-realization. I know these people had these built-in loser detectors and they can sense the despair, the self-loathing. They can smell that sweet whiff of failure, and that was me. I was the low-hanging fruit.

So over the next several weeks she calls me just about every day asking me to come to the dinner at their house, and things were just going worse and worse for me. It’s like there's nothing. I’m really lonely. I have very little human contact with anybody.

So one night, it’s 95 degrees outside and I’m sitting in my sweltering sublet and I say, “What the hell. It’s just something to do. I'll go.”

So I start walking to the house, their house, and with each step I’m getting more and more nervous. And you have to remember this is the ‘70s, 1979. In those days, cults were no joke. They were pretty scary. You had Jim Jones. You had Patty Hearst being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. There's actually a book now that called the ‘70s the Golden Age of cults. I was so fortunate to be alive at that time.

So I get to the house. It’s well-lighted. I walk in and it’s kind of great. I mean, everybody is really happy to see me. There are all these people there around my age and they're all interested in what I have to say. They're super friendly.

We sit around in a circle and Mashiko is beaming that I’m there. She's delighted. So I’m sitting next to her and we’re sitting in a circle and each new person, each mark is accompanied by their handler of the opposite sex.

And somebody takes out a guitar and they start singing songs. And they're not weird cult songs. They're songs like if I Had a Hammer and Michael, Row the Boat Ashore. Stuff like that. I was like, “This isn’t so bad.”

So then we go around the circle and we have to introduce ourselves and say what our favorite drink is, only it can’t be alcoholic. So they get to me and I say my name is Len and my favorite drink is, I don't know, tea.

And everybody is like, “Oh, tea, that’s so great. Tea, we love tea.”

Then someone says, “Well, what kind of tea do you like? Oolong or ginseng?”

And I say, “I don't know. Lipton.”

And they're like, “Oh, Lipton, we love Lipton. Lipton’s great.”

So I can smell these wonderful smells coming from the kitchen, this home-cooked meal. I haven't had a home-cooked meal in so long and I’m thinking, “This isn’t a Jim Jones. This isn’t a Jonestown. This isn’t the Symbionese Liberation Army. This isn’t that bad.”

And then the ground shifted. This guy comes out. He's like their minister of the house. He's older than everybody else. He’s in his 40s. And he announces that before we get our physical nourishment we’re going to go upstairs for some spiritual nourishment.

Then he goes around the room and says hello to each new person. He comes to me and he says, “Oh, you're a student at the university.” I say yeah. He says, “What’s your major?”

I said, “Applied science.”

He goes, “Science. Fantastic.” He says, “You know, when we go upstairs I’m going to prove to you empirically and mathematically that our leader of our whole group is the second coming of Jesus Christ.”

So I say, “Okay. I look forward to that.”

So we go upstairs and Mashiko is right by my side and we go into this room festooned with these balloons and streamers. I say to Mashiko, “Oh, is this somebody’s birthday?”

And she goes, “No, it’s a rebirth day.”

So we sit in these seats and this minister guy starts this long lecture about their whole ideology or whatever. It’s really complicated. The blackboard fills up with arrows and charts and all this stuff. It just kind of means nothing.

Then he gets to the part where he's going to prove to us empirically and mathematically that their leader is the second coming of Jesus Christ. So what he does is he draws two timelines on the blackboard. The top timeline goes from the beginning of the world to Jesus and then the bottom timeline is from Jesus to their leader who was born in the ‘30s or something. And then because he can draw a straight perpendicular line from one to the other, that proves that.

And I’m looking at it and I’m thinking, “This looks like some fucked up Pourbaix diagram where the scale on the x axis is completely wrong and it just doesn’t make any sense.”

So I say, “Well, wait, I don't understand because there's billions of years from the beginning of the world to Jesus and maybe 2,000 between Jesus and your leader, so I don't understand why these two lines are the same length.”

And he says, “Well, no, no. We don’t believe the world is billions of years old. We believe the world is 10,000 years old.” So it’s like creationism.

I say, “Well, still it’s 10,000 versus like 2,000.”

And he kept saying, “No, but, see, it’s a straight line. See? See?” He keeps... you know.

At that point, the dinner bell rings and he says, “Okay, most of us are going to go down for dinner, but you, I want you to stay a little longer because you need a little more spiritual nourishment.”

So everybody, all the other new people go down to eat dinner and I say to him, trying to be as smart as I get so I say, “So, are you saying that the top line is on a logarithmic scale?”

And he says, “You know, you can lead a horse to the water but you can’t make them drink. You have to leave immediately.”

Mashiko is looking kind of really nervous, not happy, and a bunch of the other guys they get me up. They're not like physically removing me but they're sort of accompanying me. It’s kind of like they're excising this cancerous cell.

And one of the guys turns to me with this big smile on his face and says, “You must be a minister of Satan. But we like that because it makes us stronger.”

So I go out into the 95-degree night and on the one hand I felt kind of triumphant. I was proud of my little timeline thing and the fact that they gave up on even trying to brainwash me. On the other hand I felt kind of bad about Mashiko and I hope she wasn’t going to get in trouble for bringing me in.

Then it kind of hit me that there was nothing benign about this group at all despite the folk songs and the camaraderie and the dinner and all that stuff. There was something very disturbing about it.

So I went back to my rundown yet deluxe sublet, fit for a minister of Satan, and I turned on my bicentennial transistor radio, but the battery was dead. Thank you.

Part 2: Emmanuel Garcia

It’s 2001 somewhere in Connecticut. I can’t remember where. I was really excited because I was being invited to the home of a young deaf man who’s 17 years old. I was fluent in sign language. I was doing missionary work as a Jehovah’s Witness. I had spent my entire life at that point as a Jehovah’s Witness.

And so I was 28 years old. I was good at what I did. I really believed in it. It was everything to me. I’m one of those people that, as a kid, would bring home the dogs and the cats and the animals and my parents were like, “Oh, my God. Not again.” So I either do something completely or I don’t do it. That’s the way I am.

So I was really excited. I didn’t have to knock on his door and get rejected. He invited me. When I met him, he looked like he had been through some stuff. So he invited me in, we sat down and I got to know him a little bit.

What he told me was, “I've been in recovery for about a year. I've had this serious drug addiction for many years. Actually, my mom who’s walking around behind us looking angry, she got me addicted to drugs. And she's still using and she actually is trying to get me out of recovery. She's jealous.”

“And so I’m trying to rebuild my life. It’s very difficult. I've been through a lot. I've heard a lot of people. And I think I’m to the point now where I would like to be close to God so I invited you here to find out if that was possible.”

Emmanuel (Mani) Garcia shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Tank Theater in Manhattan, NY in December 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

That was my thing. “Okay, yeah. We could do this.”

And I had my bible with me. Right away I was like, “Okay, comfort scriptures. ‘Love covers a multitude of sins.’ That’s a good one, right? ‘God is love’. ‘With God, nothing is impossible.’”

So we started having this really meaningful conversation and I could feel our hearts warming together. We have a real connection forming. You have a connection with a person, with just you and them, and it’s real. The honesty is real, the intent is real, the connection is real, and so I felt very, very good in that moment. I felt like I was doing what I love to do, what I was here for. I was good at it. And I could really make a difference in this person’s life.

Then he said, “I have one more question for you. I’m gay. Can I still be close to God?”

So I had my bible. I didn’t look it up so quickly this time. The bible that Jehovah’s witnesses use has an index in the back where you can look up words. So I’m looking for the word ‘unnatural’ and I find it. It leads me to first Corinthians something.

And then you have a cross reference so that will tell you scriptures that are like the others. Unnatural wasn’t bad enough so I think of something worse. So ‘depraved’, ‘unnatural’, so I proceed to share these scriptures with him about gay people being their lifestyle is unnatural, it’s depraved, blah, blah, blah.

And when you talk to deaf people, you look them in the eye. Unlike hearing people, when you say something to somebody that you know will hurt them, you can’t look away and just say it. With a deaf person, the style of communication is visual so you have to look at the person. And I can swear to this day that when that man looked me in the eye, I could hear his heart breaking. Just crack.

So our beautiful moment that I had just described, it faded quickly. When I left there, I was different. It didn’t feel right, what I had done. I couldn’t make sense of it. I had to search my soul because I believed everything that I was raised to believe. It made sense to me. It was the only truth that I knew. But this breaking someone’s heart over their identity, withholding love from a person, that just didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t feel right.

And I unraveled pretty quickly. About a year later, I got in my car and I drove away. I left.

So I have to explain what it means when you leave as a Jehovah’s Witness. Your entire social world, everything that you do is about being a Jehovah ’s Witness. Those are your friends, your family. You don’t hang out with other people that are called “worldly” people. You have no contact with the outside world other than you go to work and you go to school and you look normal, but you act really strange, right?

So I was leaving everything. This was August 1, 2002. I was 29 years old. I was married. I had been married for six years at that point. All my family was Jehovah’s Witnesses, all my friends, and so I was going into an unknown.

I had no plan. I just left because I couldn’t take it anymore. I still thought that they were right, but something was wrong with me so I figured, I don't know, I'll probably die. They warn you, you know, you become mentally diseased, the devil will get a hold of you, you'll become the worst person imaginable. So I was really afraid.

And I was really, really lonely because, in my phone, the only phone number I had had, I had been a missionary for Jehovah’s Witnesses but they don’t pay you. This is volunteer work. So I worked as a sign language interpreter - freelance - and I just took jobs to support my missionary work. And I had spent my whole life doing this so what are you supposed to do at that point?

I looked in my phone and there was no phone numbers other than the agency that I had been freelancing with for about 10 years. That’s a real moment of truth when you’re sitting there going, “Fuck, I don't know anybody. I literally don’t know anybody.” So I figured, “Yeah, I'll call them.”

I call them up. “Hey, Mary, Kathleen.” So I explain what happened. They knew me when I was a teenager so I think they always kind of felt bad for me.

So, “Okay. Well, that’s good that you left.”

“But you don’t understand. What that means is...” and I explained to them. “So you need to hire me.”

This is a temp kind of agency. “We don’t have full time jobs.”

“Okay, you need to hire me because I feel like if don’t have something stable, I’m going to fall apart. I don't know what to do with myself.”

So they hired me. I was the worst employee ever. Didn’t show up for work, forgot things. I was severely depressed. I would go for days without talking to people. Then I realized, “Oh, my God. I don't really know how to make friends.”

I don't really know how to communicate with “worldly” people. I was kind of afraid of them. I didn’t know. I didn’t have any of those skills.

So I figured, “I know what I'll do. I'll go to a club.”

That’s what worldly people do, right? They go to clubs, right?

Okay, so to contextualize this, I got married when I was 23 as a virgin. She was the only girl I had ever dated. And I had only been alone with this woman. She's the only woman I had ever been alone with other than a relative.

And I’m in the club, right? It’s like lights are glaring. It’s like bodies are moving. I swear it was raining inside because everybody is like flipping their hair and just like...

So when I was listening to Steve I was like, “He's pretty cool compared to how I felt.” I was just like, oh, my God. It was too much. It was really awkward. I ended up hanging out with some older women and we had fun and left and I was like, “This is not... this is too much for me.”

So I started hanging out at the Barnes & Noble. They had a Starbucks. You got to take it slow, right? And I slowly made friends and, eventually, I met someone. We had a daughter together. I started rebuilding my life, but I had lost a purpose.

I liked what I was doing. I liked working with people. I liked listening to people. I’m good at that. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to replace it. So I started to feel like I was going crazy and I got very depressed. I actually started shaking, like I’m probably shaking right now but I’m talking seizure-level shaking anytime I got emotional because the trauma was so bad, the loneliness was so bad, and the lack of purpose.

I remember one of my exes, telling her like I’m going to lose my mind if I don’t do something. I need to do something with this brain of mine, because the brain is just not doing what I want to do.

One day, I was interpreting at a conference and this woman had a slide up, had a picture of a brain on it. And she's talking about trauma in the classroom. And all the behaviors she was talking about with children I was like that’s what I... you know, impulsive, unable to control emotions, all these other things. I’m thinking, wow, that’s me. This explains my behavior.

But then she went on to explain how different parts of the brain, there's a part of the brain that will affect your ability to control your emotions and, with trauma, sometimes that’s interrupted and so you can’t control your emotions anymore. This, for me, was like, ah, like a new understanding of myself and of life.

And I thought to myself, that’s it. That’s what I want to do. That makes a lot of sense to me. I can use this to help myself and I can use this to help others. So, in a couple of years I actually applied and started as an undergrad at 33 years old. I had never gone to college. I look really young so it was good. And I studied neuroscience, learned a lot about the brain. Eventually, in my master’s program, decided I want to do something about everything I learned.

So I’m in a PhD program now for clinical psychology and I work as a trauma therapist. So I spend many, many hours, thousands of hours at this point. in a similar situation where I’m sitting with someone and they're being very vulnerable with me and I’m using the power that they've granted me to manipulate them really, hopefully, for good, right? That’s the goal.

I've struggled a lot with how to end this story and so it really comes home. And I think the problem is I’m really unsettled about how weird life can be sometimes. I have this moment with this person where I've deprived them of love because of who they are. And that completely changed my life.

Eventually, my identity became the problem with the people that were supposed to love me. And so I feel that in a way that I never felt it before so I decided to stop depriving people of that. But that’s not anything special or great. The debt was incurred already. It’s not special but it’s weird. Life can be weird that way. I gained so much from this and I guess the thing... if he was here I would say I’m sorry. I was being sincere. I didn’t know.

But I don’t know what happened with him. I'll never know what happened with him. I can’t apologize. But what I can do is remember that everything I do now where it came from. It started there and it lives with me here and it shaped who I am and so I’m really grateful for that.