together with and not have to talk. Everything would be understood. Almost telepathic. Over the years he has groomed me into that.”
Celibacy and theology, however, could not prevent Danielfrom falling in love. His first crush, alas, was on his straight best friend. “I was a Christian evangelical, a virgin, as naive as a young man can be,” says Nash. “The line between eros and agape was blurred.” But even as both men sensed their friendship was beyond the norm, Daniel could not admit that his attraction was physical, and neither could Damian perceive it.
By the time he graduated, Daniel Shellabarger had won the friendship and admiration of many whose paths he crossed. But as he set out into the world in the summer of 1985 with his degree, he was distraught. His treatise on the feminine nature of God made for scintillating chats in classrooms and Bible study, but the manuscript itself was a mess—the incoherent passions of a college sophomore, on a subject at once too deep in biblical esoterica for secular readers yet downright heretical to most evangelicals. A few years later he burned the thing. He departed the academy wondering how to put his beliefs into practice, less sure about his place in the world than when he started. The predictions of his family’s congregation were proving true: Boulder had rattled his fundamentalism.
. . .
S UELO’S RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATION in college was accompanied by a political awakening. This was the eighties, and contrary to the national conservative trend, in academia leftist professors were successfully challenging the supremacy of the canon produced largely by white men of privilege. The narrative of the West as enlightened protector of freedoms lost ground to a vision of the West as colonial exploiter and oppressor of women and minorities. Departments of African-American, AmericanIndian, and women’s studies cropped up in universities to grant institutional validity to these ideas.
Suelo was particularly influenced by the writings of American Indians like Black Elk, John Lame Deer, and Vine Deloria Jr. These thinkers confirmed the beliefs he’d first contemplated in South America: that the money system was rigged to benefit the wealthy, and the people who had the least were the most willing to share. White Americans, writes Lame Deer in
Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions,
“are also wagging their fingers at us when we have a give-away feast. What they are trying to tell us is that poor people can’t afford to be generous. But we hold onto our outhan, our give-aways, because they help us to remain Indians. All the big events in our lives—birth and death, joy and sadness—can be occasions for give-aways. We don’t believe in a family getting wealthy through inheritance. Better to give away a dead person’s belongings. That way he, or she, will be remembered.” This sort of thinking, combined with the liberation theology he was learning from Dr. Mahan, convinced Suelo that the way to put his beliefs into practice was to work with poor people in the Third World.
In 1987 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Ecuador. He was twenty-six, an innocent with a head full of theology. Of course idealists with liberal-arts degrees were not rare in the Peace Corps, but fundamentalist Christians were. For most of his two years in South America, Daniel kept a daily journal, copies of which he meticulously transcribed by hand on lined paper and sent to his parents in thirty-page installments, rich with detail and tender with introspection. The first letter described crying the entire flight from Grand Junction to Denver, then reaching an epiphany on the way to Miami:
As we passed over the clouds I started thinking about my destination, and for the first time since I started my journey I felt butterflies in my stomach. “Am I doing the right thing?” I thought. And just as those thoughts ran through my head I received my answer—the answer God always seems to give me
Celibacy and theology, however, could not prevent Danielfrom falling in love. His first crush, alas, was on his straight best friend. “I was a Christian evangelical, a virgin, as naive as a young man can be,” says Nash. “The line between eros and agape was blurred.” But even as both men sensed their friendship was beyond the norm, Daniel could not admit that his attraction was physical, and neither could Damian perceive it.
By the time he graduated, Daniel Shellabarger had won the friendship and admiration of many whose paths he crossed. But as he set out into the world in the summer of 1985 with his degree, he was distraught. His treatise on the feminine nature of God made for scintillating chats in classrooms and Bible study, but the manuscript itself was a mess—the incoherent passions of a college sophomore, on a subject at once too deep in biblical esoterica for secular readers yet downright heretical to most evangelicals. A few years later he burned the thing. He departed the academy wondering how to put his beliefs into practice, less sure about his place in the world than when he started. The predictions of his family’s congregation were proving true: Boulder had rattled his fundamentalism.
. . .
S UELO’S RELIGIOUS TRANSFORMATION in college was accompanied by a political awakening. This was the eighties, and contrary to the national conservative trend, in academia leftist professors were successfully challenging the supremacy of the canon produced largely by white men of privilege. The narrative of the West as enlightened protector of freedoms lost ground to a vision of the West as colonial exploiter and oppressor of women and minorities. Departments of African-American, AmericanIndian, and women’s studies cropped up in universities to grant institutional validity to these ideas.
Suelo was particularly influenced by the writings of American Indians like Black Elk, John Lame Deer, and Vine Deloria Jr. These thinkers confirmed the beliefs he’d first contemplated in South America: that the money system was rigged to benefit the wealthy, and the people who had the least were the most willing to share. White Americans, writes Lame Deer in
Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions,
“are also wagging their fingers at us when we have a give-away feast. What they are trying to tell us is that poor people can’t afford to be generous. But we hold onto our outhan, our give-aways, because they help us to remain Indians. All the big events in our lives—birth and death, joy and sadness—can be occasions for give-aways. We don’t believe in a family getting wealthy through inheritance. Better to give away a dead person’s belongings. That way he, or she, will be remembered.” This sort of thinking, combined with the liberation theology he was learning from Dr. Mahan, convinced Suelo that the way to put his beliefs into practice was to work with poor people in the Third World.
In 1987 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Ecuador. He was twenty-six, an innocent with a head full of theology. Of course idealists with liberal-arts degrees were not rare in the Peace Corps, but fundamentalist Christians were. For most of his two years in South America, Daniel kept a daily journal, copies of which he meticulously transcribed by hand on lined paper and sent to his parents in thirty-page installments, rich with detail and tender with introspection. The first letter described crying the entire flight from Grand Junction to Denver, then reaching an epiphany on the way to Miami:
As we passed over the clouds I started thinking about my destination, and for the first time since I started my journey I felt butterflies in my stomach. “Am I doing the right thing?” I thought. And just as those thoughts ran through my head I received my answer—the answer God always seems to give me
Similar Books
