Falling in Love: Part Twenty Five: Marc Gafni

The Grateful Dead and Getting Grounded

The Grateful Dead’s music was possibly the modern muse that most invited us to spin out of our narrow lives and sense the world of ecstasy. I remember that after Jerry Garcia died, there was a stinging critique of the Dead by conservative columnist George Will. He was decidedly unimpressed with ecstasy and told the story of a mother who left her child on a friend’s door step because she “had to follow the Band.” It seemed at the time like a unfair critique and I was both surprised and disappointed in George Will.

At around the same time, though, I invited an acquaintance of mine who needed a place to stay to live with me for a bit. He viewed Garcia and the Dead as his spiritual teachers. During the time he was with me, minor theft, dishonesty, unpaid bills and radical boundary violations were the norm. All of it was fully forgivable —— the problem was that he didn’t think there was anything wrong. I was mystified. Moreover he would regularly accuse me of being stuck in an unenlightened head space which couldn’t let go. I didn’t get it.

Gradually I began to understand that ecstatic experience had been the defining feature of much of my friend’s life. And that was beautiful. However it had seriously undermined his elemental grasp of the notion that God is in the details, that limits and boundaries have a critical role to play even if in the end we move beyond them. The sense of human response-ability that comes from a grounded reality is all too easily effaced by ecstasy.

marc gafni
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