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give up drugs, sex, and music, and soon I felt I was on the path to dedication—a higher ideal. Why I was such an idealist, I will never know.
    Returning to Lancaster before summer was over, and before Sonny came back, I called Mick, my only friend left over from the Spruce Street gang. Mick had started hanging out with the Jesus People, a traveling group of ex-hippies who preached about Christ. Following their lead, Mick had destroyed all his “worldly” albums and listened only to Christian music.
    When Sonny returned to Lancaster, I related the story of the Christian boy and the Jesus People. He was not impressed, but he respected my decision to start living a more “godly” lifestyle of no drugs or sex.
    We didn’t sleep together after that.
    A few weeks later, Sonny dropped me off at the Penn State campus in Schuylkill Haven where I would spend my freshman year. In a few days, he would be leaving for Europe, where he planned to stay for an extended period of time, while I was feeling safe at a small campus, with a renewed faith and two parttime jobs. We made no promises about the future, and it was an uneventful parting.
    Dorm life was terrible. The girls who lived there were frivolous and uninteresting, and I did not make friends until I met Daisy. Living off campus, she supported herself by singing folk songs at a local coffeehouse and took classes at the college. She was a short, quiet girl who hid her bright blue eyes and rounded face behind long blond hair.
    Her whispery voice never held a hint of aggression. And her independent spirit was in complete contrast to her seemingly submissive attitude.
    Daisy and I became good friends. I told her about my renewed belief in Jesus, and she confided that as a Catholic, she had always believed in God. Since she had such fantastic memories of a visit to the Greenwich Village hippie scene, we decided to go to New York during our winter break.
    A little while before the semester ended, I saw a sign on a church saying that a film about a Christian commune would be playing that night. I rode over on my bike to watch it.
    The documentary film, called The Ultimate Trip, was an episode from the weekly television news program First Tuesday. It documented the lifestyle of a group of Christians in Texas called the Children of God.
    I watched in awe as ex-hippies gave their testimonies about being lost and finding peace with God and one another in this commune. They sang songs and danced. They read their ever-present Bibles and quoted scriptures by memory. They ate together, watched each other’s children, cooked, cleaned, worked, and farmed collectively. They said that no one had need of anything because everyone shared all they had—and it was enough. Here was pure communism, but these people were happy, not severe, like that boy at the Moratorium in Washington.
    These people were Christians, yet they looked like hippies in long skirts and flowing hair. And they had a vision—to change the world!
    Leaving the church as soon as the film was over, I tried to hide the tears in my eyes. I felt I had just seen the living purity of Jesus’ words. I wanted to be like these people—to love everyone, to give my life for others, to be part of a true community. Maybe, during the summer break, Daisy and I could go out to Texas. The thought of meeting the Children of God gave me a new vision. Life had always seemed so strange to me and somehow I had become addicted to the unusual, the extraordinary, the mysterious. I felt like I was searching for meaning constantly, and for the first time, I thought the search would soon be over.
     

Through the Looking Glass
    Daisy and I took the bus to my house in Lancaster on the way up to New York. We hitchhiked the rest of the way with about twenty dollars between us in our pockets. I had a change of clothes in my backpack, and Daisy carried a guitar and an old army bag with a few things in it.
    After spending the first day looking for fellow