ARTICLES

Does the Pope Speak to Raves?

WRITER WORKS THE CROWD LOOKING FOR CHRISTIANS

Look at the rave scene from the outside: it looks like a most unlikely mission territory, a noisome marsh, swamped with a drug called Ecstasy and hedged all around with spiky electronic music. But look at this twilight zone, even briefly, from the inside: it looks like a culture zone in the light of its peace-and-love ethos. Then look at this culture zone through Christ's eyes: "Well, I tell you, look around you, look at the fields, already they are white, ready for the harvest!"

"You look so cute," said the girl with the bunny-rabbit backpack to the girl with the silver hair at a rave last month. Indicating her furry butterfly backpack, the first girl asked, "Did you make that?" Silver-hair nodded, pleased. A black man with orange hair is wearing a Tigger outfit like he wandered into the UCSD's outdoor quad out of A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh. Young ladies carry handbags; these too are Winnie the Pooh. An Asian young man has giant beads, like you'd give a toddler learning to grasp things. A young woman sucks on a pacifier. It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

They're at the rave ... being children.

"The explanation of the pacifier is when you're on X [Ecstasy] your teeth grind," explained Joe Eckert, 19, who agreed to be my guide into little-known party precincts where people are stark raving sober. Then why are you wearing a pacifier? I ask. Without missing a beat, Joe replies, "It's a return to childhood. Hey, Benj-E, don't dare steal my backpack!"

"We were all deprived of our childhood," Benj-E, 18, tells me.* "A lot of us are at an age where we're supposed to be growing up," says Andrea -- "Dray" -- 20, "and I'm not ready for this."

"Benj-E," Joe orders, "go find my girlfriend. Fifteen-inch glow sticks. You can't miss her." Joe's girlfriend is 16. I ask Sean how old he is. "Twenty-two," he replies, then hurriedly adds: "go ahead and say 23; I turn 23 next week." Adrian is 21; Johnius is the elder raveman at 29. Joe has brought his friends to me, having sought me out at the party, as living proof of what he said in an earlier interview: "It's never necessary to experiment with drugs. I've met and continue to meet the best kids who have been clean and sober their whole lives. They're the kind of people who won't swear -- but the love is still there."

The role of drugs, especially Ecstasy, in the rave scene received a lot of media attention after five young people, high on Ecstasy and amphetamines, drove off a cliff coming home from a party in Angeles National Forest last August. Said Dray: "I think it's the biggest shame that people die going to or from a party. And their poor parents....

"I don't do drugs at all," she went on, "but I know how tired I am when I come home from a rave.... I've never done a drug in my life, not even pot." That's rare nowadays; how many friends do you have who can say the same? "I have one ," Dray replies. If not drugs, what attracted her to raves?

"I met all these people," says Dray with eager sincerity. "I never knew any of them before I met them." Though he has just joined the conversation, it doesn't take Brent McGarth, 17, long to see that's a self-evident statement, and he bursts out laughing at it. Yet when Brent, 17, is finished teasing Dray for her logic, he thoroughly agrees with her sentiment. "(A), the music," Brent lists the reasons that keep him coming, "(B) the dancing, (C) it's just known through the scene that you can find good people in the rave scene. That's 100 percent why I'm here."

Good people? I watched them for a couple hours. The look just like average people to me, except for the "style infantile." I lay down a challenge: let's work our way through the crowd, and you can show me how there's more good people here than usual, how there's more love.

They love the idea. The next thing I know, they're going up to people in the crowd. Dray especially gives girls hugs and tries to draw them out, but people, while not suspicious, seem about as reticient as you would expect. Joe gives a 17-year-old guy named Kipper a bear hug ... and Kipper cops a quick feel off Joe's rear.

But then Dray leads Christina to me by the hand, and I can't help it, I hug Christina ... something about her elicits hugs, I suppose. And Christina, duly encouraged, tells me her story.

"When I was 12, I was doing crystal and dating a drug dealer," she began. "I used to be a drug addict a long time ago."* How old are you now?

"Seventeen," Christina replies, then hurriedly adds, "go ahead and say 18; I turn 18 in a week.... There isn't much for underage kids to do in San Diego," she says angrily; in fact, Christina even took a job in a movie theater so that she could watch free movies. The upshot? "You get really tired of movies," she sighs.

"I come from a happy home," Christina continues, "and my parents have always been there for me ... It's so easy to fall in with the wrong crowd." She feels like with the ravers she's finally found the right crowd. "I thought I would be pressured to do E[cstasy] or something," Christina says. "People will approach me and I say no." And they still love her just the way she is. "I go to Pacific Church of Religious Science. They taught me about unconditional love ... And everyone I've ever met at a rave is like, 'I love you.'"

Christina shows me a bracelet she's wearing made of plastic beads, four of which have the letters "P-L-U-R". It is the treasured gift from a life-long friend Christina made at one of her first raves. "She told me I was a PLUR kid all the way: Peace, Love, Unity and Respect," Christina recites it like a creed.

And with that we have stepped into a culture zone.

In 1990, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical called Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer). The point of it was that the Church still has to fulfill Christ's charge to "Go, preach the Gospel to every creature." The Holy Father makes much of St. Paul's preaching at the Areopagus in Athens in Acts 17. "At that time the Areopagus represented the cultural center of the learned people of Athens," the pope explains, "and today it can be taken as a symbol of the new sectors in which the Gospel must be proclaimed." In a word, culture zones are the modern-day equivalents of the Areopagus.

When he got there, the Athenians at first welcomed Paul, saying "'Can we know what this new doctrine is that you are teaching? Some of the things you say seemed startling to us and we would like to find out what they mean.' The one amusement," scripture comments, "of the Athenians and the foreigners living there seem to have is to discuss and listen to the latest ideas."

Paul began my mentioning seeing a monument to "An Unknown God." "In fact," he said, "the unknown God you revere is the one I proclaim to you." He then quoted a third century pagan philosopher: "We are all his children."

"This is by no means accidental," John Paul II comments in Fides et Ratio , his 1998 encyclical on faith and reason. "If pagans were to understand them, the first Christians could not refer only to 'Moses and the prophets' when they spoke. They had to point as well to natural knowledge of God and the voice of conscience in every human being.... Since in pagan religion this natural knowledge had lapsed into idolatry ... the Apostle judged it wiser in his speech to make the link with the thinking of the philosophers, who had always set in opposition to the myths and mystery cults notions more respectful of divine transcendence."

In one way, the rave scene is a modern-day mystery cult; in a talk which Cardinal Ratzinger gave on rock music in 1985 he said that some rock and pop music aims at a "sacred delirium induced through frenzied instrumental rhythmns. Such music lowers the barriers of individuality and personality, and in it man liberates himself from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy, liberation from the ego, amalgamation with the universe."

Rock and pop music -- and certainly rave would fit that category -- can become "an anti-cult ..." the head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith charged. This modern-day dionysian cult of "the wild ecstasy of a tumultuous crowd ... is the complete antithesis of Christian faith in the Redemption."

But Paul's preaching at the Areopagus is the model for Church's missionary activity in seven culture zones, Pope John Paul II says; and he ignored the false idols while focusing on the true philosophy. In Redemptoris Missio he lists seven modern-day Areopagi; one is the "commitment to peace, development and liberation of peoples." So if Catholics in this culture zone can hone their focus until the blur of ecstasy becomes a clear philosphy of PLUR ... maybe they will find a field ripe for evangelization.

So filled with the weight of serious thought about life's most important questions was Joe's head already that it was nodding like an ear of corn white for the harvest. "I'm a Christian myself," he confessed towards the end of our one-on-one interview.. "If anything, I feel that partying -- admittedly there's drug use, admittedly there's evils -- but that sense of community is as close to that sense of community that we read about in the Bible. That warmth for our fellow man."

He doesn't find that at church?

"Yeah, I found it at church," Joe replied, "but the church I grew up in wasn't really age-oriented [i.e., teenage-oriented]." Joe now goes to church at St. Andrew's Lutheran, off Lake Murray, but ... "I don't go as much as I should. I'm trying to fix that."

Has he considered Catholicism?

"No, I haven't looked into Catholicism. I was brought up very Protestant...."

Can a Christian leaven the rave scene without wavering?

"It's definitely not something I can force on people," Joe said. "But like I said, by being Christ-like we can encouage others towards Christ. I'll be the first to say that I'm definitely not the perfect Christian; definitely you would not call me a strong Christian. I've wavered a couple times -- more than a couple times -- definitely strong, strong wavers [not just moral but intellectual questioning] -- but I believe one of the strongest messages we were left with is that of love for thy neighbor. I'll tell you, not everyone on the scene is Christian."

Not everyone on the Areopagus was either -- until St. Paul preached Christ's resurrection. "At this mention of the rising from the dead, some of them burst out laughing," says Acts 17:32, "others said, 'we would like to hear you talk about this another time'.... But there were some who attached themselves to [Paul] and became believers, among them Dionysius the Areopagite...."

But can the Gospel even get a hearing nowadays, when the culture's secular humanism tolerates anything -- except the Christian faith? Isn't it peculiarly shut out of the rave zone as well?

Joe smiles knowlingly: he knows from experience what I mean. "God, that's a rough one," he replies. "No place is ever perfect. But I will say I find more of an acceptance there than anywhere else I've ever been."