Light From Light: My Friendship with Kurt Hanson
The first night I slept at 417 Howard street there was a thunderstorm of enormous power. I remember my friends Chris and Alexis were nearly hit by lightning, and the calming effect of the rain was offset by unsettling thunderclaps and electrical flashes of disconcerting intensity. I wrote in my journal that night, in the summer of 1993, feeling that I had found my place: a community where I fit in, as a questioning, moody and more than a little nerdy college senior at that most singular of institutions, Wheaton College.
It was not until the next year that I moved into The House, as it was known to the more rebellious circles of students who came to frequent the place, and it was then and there that I first met my dear friend and spiritual fellow-traveler, Kurt Hanson.
Kurt walked in one night and informed me that he needed a place to stay for a few hours, because he was supposed to be working at the White Hen, a local convenience chain store where the experience of selling cigarettes and other knickknacks made him anxious. "I don't want my parents to know I quit," he said.
I soon realized that Kurt was kindred spirit, a mind with no prefabricated place to go, and a wit without a preselected audience. Where I talked in paragraphs, Kurt talked in pages. Like myself, I knew he had challenges to face that others need never contemplate. And like myself he could be by turns amusing, insightful, and exasperating.
I say that I identify with Kurt because it is important to lay out the role he had in my life, which is complex and spiritual as well as mundane. He played Joe Frank for me the first time there in Wheaton, at 417 Howard street, and I thought it was pointless and dull. But that was then, before I discovered the brilliance concealed therein.
It was Kurt who became my confidant after my hospitalizations and my suicidal phase in 1995. We had the same psychiatrist and many of the same reservations, frustrations, and resentments with the Christian faith in which we had been reared. In fact he and I had both been in the nursery at Glen Ellyn Covenant Church many years before, an example of the small world syndrome so often found in the Wheaton world. His renunciation was total while mine foundered; but both of us had looked to philosophy and eastern religions for answers.
I remember a well-known resident of The House, well-respected as a philosophy student, telling me that he had not washed his hair in six months. "After a while," he said, "it starts to clean itself." He was an odd duck, Ryan Jansen, but Kurt topped him when he explained that he hadn't changed his jeans in six months. "After a while," he said, "they start to clean themselves."
When my friends intervened to stop me from jumping onto the train tracks that year, I feel they reached a point of collective exhaustion. My own anguish had itself burned the bridges to many friends who could not handle what I was going through, at least not on a serious level. But Kurt was not fazed by any of this. In that time we became true friends. Or as I sometimes put it he became a member of my Cult.
The Cult began with my friend Nate remarking, I thought seriously, that I had matched Ryan in philosophical insight. Because we had a poster in the house for the band The Cult, I suggested that we start a Cult. Since then I have humorously inducted many people into this Cult, and it is only recently that I have realized that the people I ask to join it are the meaningful friends who I consider to be my teachers.
It was Kurt who took me to my plane flight out of Wheaton and back to California; it was he who finally drove my precious sculpture of a collapsing man to Orange County from its temporary home in Andrew Chignell's garage. And it was he who turned me on to what Joe Frank was doing in the memorable radio play "Tomorrow," and that is what got me into radio in the first place. For one and a half years, I broadcast my show, "The Truthmakers," out of KUCI in Irvine, in direct and admiring imitation of Joe Frank's deadpan, first-person narrative style. I owe that to Kurt, and much more as well.
Kurt never let me get away with half-baked faith or with the baloney my occasional insanity produced. Yet at the same time, he would never walk away from me, and never ceased to be a vital connection to the family of Wheaton grads I felt I had estranged. As time went by he sometimes seemed physically to degenerate, and yet on a spiritual level he often appeared to grow stronger.
Kurt was an individual of many ironies. He resisted the creedal Christianity on which he had been nurtured, but never released an interest in the spiritual often found only in monks and professional clergy. He gravitated toward the alternative, and wittily described himself as a deprogrammer. It was not a bad description.
At the same time, he had his own metaphorical passion to endure. He came to drink more and more, and during his last visit to me, which was in Florida some years ago, I discovered that he had been secretly drinking heavily, without showing any outward sign of drunkenness. As a drinking buddy and occasional heavy drinker myself, I had to be concerned. But it was also that time when he played for me the tape of The Four Agreements, the best new age infusion I have ever received.
My contact with Kurt over the last few years has come through his occasional phone calls, which would involve me for hours at a time, through computer-based messages, and through the reports of our mutual friend Jim Cooper.
The reports were not easy to take. His substance abuse (for what else can an honest person call it?) took a turn for the worse and in this phase, receiving some of his more desperate messages, I felt powerless to help. He had begun to improve, I heard, when took his life in the same place and manner I had intended thirteen years before.
I know now that his final exit had nothing to do with me, or at least I can say that it is probably coincidence that made his choice of egress the same as my own. However coincidence has always had special meaning for me, a personal dimension of meaning that might be called the spirituality of The Cult.
For me, the feeling was inevitable that Kurt had become as Christ. It was interesting that he took his life at thirty-three, but the more important aspect of this was that he had in fact helped rescue me from a death he endured himself--even if it was a welcome release for him in a desperate time.
Kurt transferred so much light and life to me that I felt, at first, a kind of survivors' guilt. However, it came to me eventually that the pain I felt in losing him was the pain I would have caused if I had not been rescued by the same dear friends whose frustration and exasperation I had taken so personally so many years earlier.
In his last prophetic act, Kurt taught me an unassailable lesson: the value of my life, and of every life I know. Perhaps I can say that I underwent a spiritual experience in the loss of my friend, and when afterward I dreamed that he hugged me and left me forever, I almost had the sense that his spirit was really contacting me from another life. But I imagine it was actually from deep in my own subconcious where the selves of those we know and love are so painstakingly duplicated, scrupulously modeled on years of interactive data.
In any case, I know I will never be the same, never see my own life in the melancholic tones that used to seem so tempting. The idea that Christ gave himself for us, that he died to bring us all life seems to be commodified and cheapened in its dramatic intensity by so much repetition. But the pain I felt in realizing what Kurt had taught me--both intentionally and indirectly--has added new meaning to that narrative for me.
Kurt would resist the inclusion of a creed in any description of himself, I think; he definitely eschewed any form of Christianity tied to the mainstream. But for irony's sake, an Irony I think he might appreciate, I will quote the Nicene Creed. I will however, serve his memory by twisting its meaning and noting that by almost any evangelical standard, I am truly apostate and grateful to Kurt for his role in that.
The council of Nicaea, a culpable body if ever there was, forged a creed to describe the nature of Christ. Among other things, they described him as "Light from Light." I do not say this of Christ or of Kurt as such but I do say it of my relationship with all of my spiritual teachers, especially Kurt. I have drawn Light from his Light, and I think of the tragic words: physician, heal thyself. But in the end, perhaps it is this movement of Light form one person to another that is the real Christ.
Perhaps it is an emergent property of seekers, that we enlighten one another, and perhaps this enlightenment is itself the vehicle of our redemption.
Thank you Kurt. You are Missed.
Your friend,
Nathan