In Search of Grace: A Journey Across America's Landscape of Faith

Introduction

I once braved a ride at a state fair, a ride that was shaped like a giant angel food cake pan. I and other scrawny youngsters just tall enough to make the cut were strapped to its curved walls by a bearded carny. Having secured us to his satisfaction, the man sauntered over to a control panel and with the casual flip of a switch set the cake pan spinning, centrifugal force throwing each of us off our feet and pinning us against its cold steel sides. Then the ride began to buck wildly like a mechanical bull. Our collective howls of thrill soon turned to terror, our pleas to stop drowned out by bass-heavy Top 40 hits reverberating from blown-out speakers. Traumatized by this hunk of metal, I vowed in midwhirl that if I survived this version of fun, I would never again choose—and especially not pay—to repeat it.

Some twenty years later, my self-preserving vow began to haunt me when I realized my adult life in Los Angeles had begun to simulate that ride. What had indeed been fun at the start was changing, Hollywood’s grind of performance and pretense pressing and stretching me out of my natural shape, as if the town’s switch were being manned by a dozing carny. I knew it was time to get off.

At the age of twenty-nine, I’d spent ten years working long hours in television, theater, and film. During that time I perfected the art of distraction, doing all the multitasking things we do that keep us from seeing clearly what is right in front of us, or confronting what lurks just below the surface of ourselves. Parts of me that I had ignored and neglected were shouting to be heard—internal howls overwhelmed by my own bass-heavy busyness. Like many Los Angelenos—and countless other overstimulated, overworked, but adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered Americans—I had developed a host of remedies to quiet my acutely preoccupied mind, soothe my exhaustion and anxiety, and submerge the inconvenient feelings I didn’t have time for. I had my aura, chart, palm, and coffee grounds read; I was acupunctured, acupressured, and hypnotically regressed; I was depolarized, magnetized, and analyzed; I regrouped by way of the occasional spiritual workshop, and was always reassured by New Age bestsellers that my life was happening this way for a reason.

But I grew tired of hiring people to make me feel better. I aspired to thrive, not simply survive on the laurels of others’ experiences and insights, many of which eased my symptoms, though with an effectiveness that tended to last about as long as the time-release of an over-the-counter cold tablet. It was becoming increasingly apparent how easily secondhand clarity or comfort can be misplaced or forgotten. I longed for something more enduring, more tangible and direct, something I could do to instigate perspective, stability, generosity, and peace when my head started to buck and spin like that state fair ride.

Instinctively drawn to ritual, I turned my attention to the myriad ways others find and sustain the balance I longed for. The realms of traditional devotion were almost completely unknown to me as the offspring of an irreligious family. I wanted to learn more about how Americans’ religious and spiritual practices satisfy our shared human needs: to belong, feel whole and part of a people; to succeed and earn second chances; to equalize anger, fear, self-doubt, guilt, love, and forgiveness; to celebrate life’s passages and mourn its losses; to sense the sacred and feel renewed; to create purpose and meaning; to be guided; to assure justice and equity; to temper excessiveness; to earn a legacy; and, for some, to secure immortality.

So in a torrential downpour, I left Los Angeles. For the next few years, I settled here and there, seeking out people of faith everywhere I went. My desire wasn’t to try on each religion in the hope of finding myself a good fit; rather, I was compelled to understand—firsthand—how and why people practice what they preach. For this informal investigation, I focused on those for whom religion is not merely an affiliation—an identity worn like a name tag at a convention—but a daily effort, an integrated way of life. I witnessed—and sometimes participated in—the intentional and disciplined gestures that people make in observance of their beliefs. I wanted to illuminate the impact, real or perceived, those acts of devotion had on the questions that preoccupied me: how we develop and maintain our character, overcome our personal struggles, experience life more completely and fully, and enhance the quality of other people’s lives.

Born at the end of the 1960s—part of an age group generically termed generation X—my peers and I have at our disposal a staggering number of options, whether in the market for underarm deodorant or inner solace. No longer must one travel the world to find and explore diversity. We live in the Noah’s Ark of countries, where a sampling of the globe’s multitudes, including religious peoples, have come to call a single vessel of land home. Since its founding, America has been one nation under many notions of God—a place where differing ideas about creation and the Creator coexist. Having so many religions concentrated in my own country both contained my mission and complicated it.

In organizing my intentionally unscientific journey into America’s world of faith, I divided the topic categorically. I began where our country began, with a sampling of this land’s oldest known practice, as embodied in one indigenous medicine man. I devoted the most time and energy to Christianity, as the faith statistically embraced by about 80 percent of our nation’s population. I also allotted chapters to other world religions generally acknowledged as primary: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In addition, I dedicated time to examples of practices that originated in America, such as Scientology and one that evolved from the book-driven pop-guru movement, as well as three modern outgrowths of ancient traditions: Spiritualism, 3HO Sikhism, and Neopaganism. Unfortunately, because of limitations imposed by page counts and publishing deadlines, and by the inherent difficulties of breaching people’s sacred time and space, dozens of sects, schools of thought, and entire faiths fell from my itinerary.

A lifetime or more could undoubtedly be spent probing the subtleties of any one of the traditions treated in these pages. What I’ve compiled is not a comprehensive resource of comparative religion, but an account of a very personal journey—an up-close chronicle of Americans caught in the act of faith. Many strangers granted me permission to participate in their private rituals, and shared with me their most intimate thoughts about their beliefs and daily practices. The thrust of each chapter is shaped by both my own impressions and the words and deeds of those willing accomplices.

I did not set out to validate or invalidate any one religion or individual. Rather, my aim was to attempt to understand the highest intentions that inform people of faith in their search for truth, ideals, inspiration, comfort, quietude, and—ultimately—happiness. Along the way, with different faiths lined up side by side, I came to see not only what is unique to each, but also what is common among them.

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross—a self-inducted expert on faith and the first person I spoke to after embarking on this journey—provided useful orientation for what follows. In her heavy Swiss accent, she insisted that I distinguish between the concepts of the religious and the spiritual. The seventy-something psychiatrist chided me for thoughtlessly interchanging the two words during our conversation at her ranch home in the Arizona desert.

Being religious, she argued, entails belief in doctrine too often driven by fear of eternal consequences. There is another approach—one she would consider spiritual—that emphasizes direct experience over doctrine. The feisty Kübler-Ross was adamant that I adopt her distinction between the passive compliance of religious belief and the unimpeded engagement of spiritual experience. So much so, in fact, that she threatened to karate-chop me with her good arm if I failed to do so, even as she lay in bed convalescing from a stroke. I hastily clarified to the agitated doctor, as I more casually do for you now, that my plan was indeed to focus on the doing, seeking out what Kübler-Ross would consider the spiritual element underlying each of the traditions I explore.

For the sake of continuity, I refer to the doing as a practice. This I loosely define as acts of holy reverence or worship, exercises that lessen afflictive emotion and the tyranny of ego, rituals that evoke a sense of the sacred, and experiences that connect an individual to something regarded as divine. I’ve tried to convey a little bit of the doctrine of each belief system simply to show how it motivates the practice. For this purpose, each chapter begins with a brief overview of that faith’s genesis and its intersection with the American continent, as well as the most current available estimates of constituency.

It is my hope that the following pages will pass along to you at least some of what has been given to me: a greater knowledge of, and appreciation for, the religious and spiritual tools available to anyone in search of a practice, and a deeper self-understanding by way of intimate exposure to people who use them. But perhaps even more significant is the bigger picture the words in this book point to: the layer upon layer of contributions that are each day made by so many different traditions to ignite one nation’s vibrant declaration of faith.

Native American Beliefs

Chapter One

There are more than five hundred Native American tribes officially recognized by the U.S. government, and hundreds more lost in the annals of American history. The religious practices belonging to the multitude of tribes were, until recently, actively and forcefully subverted by Christian churches and the U.S. government. It was not until 1978 that native practices were officially recognized as worthy of protection under the Native American Religious Freedom Act. This act of Congress, coming after centuries of repression, has not, however, been a panacea for Native Americans struggling to protect and revitalize their spiritual heritage. In 1988 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that sacred land central to Native American religious practices—land whose pristine quality is so essential that the practice becomes extinct without it—is not protected against federal development and desecration. In this opinion, the Court rendered the 1978 act a toothless expression of political goodwill.

Meanwhile, tribes and individual American Indians continue efforts to resuscitate their spiritual traditions and preserve sacred sites. Among the most active on this front are what many Native Americans refer to as medicine people. As a leader within the community, a medicine person’s role ranges from treating physical ailments, to overseeing rites of passage such as birth, marriage, and death, to guiding people, if only by example, along a spiritual path rooted in centuries of oral tradition. To these ends, medicine people call upon the supernatural assistance of spirits who work in concert with the Creator—an omniscient, omnipresent entity also addressed as Spirit and God.

Though each tribe and reservation is unique, of the twenty-eight hundred Ojibwe Native Americans populating the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in Hayward, Wisconsin, only about one-fourth incorporate traditional spiritual practices into their lives. Even fewer would be considered strict practitioners who are fully knowledgeable about the spiritual and historical meaning behind practices that are quickly disappearing.¹

Communing with a Medicine Man

One fall day in the eighth year of my life, my mother came into my bedroom and announced that she and I would be moving from our house in Omaha, Nebraska. Our new city would be a place whose name I could not spell, in the faraway southwestern state of New Mexico. My mother rested her forehead against mine as if to brace us both and confided that we would leave in a matter of days. Pulling a piece of paper from her pocket, she unfolded a Realtor’s listing, which described in shrunken print and abbreviated terms the dimensions of our new life: its square footage, its conditions and features, and how many miles it stood from the school I would attend. Hovering in a corner was a miniature black-and-white, overly xeroxed photograph of the home my mother promised we would love, bordering the yards of new friends I would make, sheltering under its roof the fun she and I would have. In the worn creases of this one-page portrait of our future was her need for this all to be true.

People tell me I’m adaptable. Perhaps my high tolerance for change is a genetic inheritance. Or maybe it was an added feature—along with the new appliances and view of the Sandia Mountains—that came with that first of many desert homes. Whatever the case, I promptly accepted my new New Mexican identity, memorizing the correct, staccato spelling of Albuquerque. While my mother unpacked, I ceremoniously sheared off my long hair to mark into my own invisible calendar yet another beginning.

Little by little, our modest shell of a home was transformed into an Anglo’s vision of a hacienda—Spanish décor accented by Native American tchotchkes, ornamental leather goods, patterned rugs and blankets, portraits of Indian women in long skirts, and our own small tribe of Hopi kachina dolls. Along with our accessorizing came an awareness that we shared our desert paradise with the Apaches, the Navajos, and the Hopis, among other pueblos and tribes—that the place we now called home had once been their own exclusive land of enchantment.

Whether motivated by intrigue, guilt, homage, or an unspoken yearning for something deeper and more authentic than anything her own past could offer her, my mother crowded our lives with emblems of our Native American neighbors. I was most drawn, out of both fear and wonder, to the vibrantly colored and mysteriously masked kachina dolls. Each foot-high wooden carving of a Hopi man in full regalia contorted its body toward the ground or sky, one knee raised in midstomp, mouth rounded in silent song. To the Hopis, the figures, however necessary they’ve become for tourist revenue, first and foremost represent their most sacred practice of communing with nature, guardian spirits, and the Creator. To my mother—perhaps unconsciously—these unmistakably indigenous objects provided reflections of something culturally rich, something with history and tradition, something spiritual. Things we did not, on our own, possess. Like many Americans, purchasing had become our religion, a practice of accumulation we believed could make us feel whole.

In my compact, mixed family of mostly European descent, no one spoke much of homelands, cultural identity, tradition, or religion, as if somehow such things had been washed away by the tides our ancestors crossed to reach the new land of opportunity. So, instead of crosses hung on our walls, or Testaments resting on our shelves, I came of age surrounded by an earlier, distinctly Native America. It required little of us in return, for unlike some non-Indians who experiment with and, in some cases, adopt Native American spiritual practices, my mother kept a reverential distance from the nativism she exposed us to. Perhaps in her mind, trying on rituals that didn’t belong to her was the equivalent of shoplifting the totems and baskets and turquoise necklaces she had always paid, or traded something, for.

In time, my mother’s attraction to Native America extended beyond the interior of our home, as we ventured out on weekends to attend public powwows—occasional tribal enactments of prayers that are otherwise private. Holding hands, we’d eat Indian fry bread while watching an unabashed communion between a people and their Creator. In this way pueblos and tribes offered non-Indians an education in their traditional ways, hoping to dispel the prejudice that their practices were nothing more than primitive idolatry.

Eventually, a deeper desire burgeoned in me. I wanted to understand what was behind the wood, weavings, and sandstone that had decorated the walls and mantels of my childhood home. So while exploring the Great Lakes at the age of twenty-nine, I approached Gene Begay, a medicine man from one of several Ojibwe tribes in northern Wisconsin. Gene and I spent days together talking about his religious practices and the challenges he faced as one of his people’s last living vestiges of its tradition.

My uncle Pipe Mustache always told me, said Gene, as we sat in the lobby of his reservation’s casino, "that to be a medicine man, to be a spiritual chief—an oh-get-che-dah, as my people say—is an unfortunate thing to have happen to you. ‘I’m really sorry I had to pick you,’ my uncle often said to me. Gene laughed gutturally; he has understood only in hindsight the complexities inherent in his uncle’s apology. Gene’s uncle Pipe was an elder" medicine man who entrusted his trove of secret medicine teachings and sacred songs to the nephew he selected as his successor. In accepting his appointment, Gene inherited a huge responsibility: the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of his people.

I struggled to reconcile this traditional, ancient-looking man with our noisy, neon surroundings. He spoke of the medicine, the Creator, and the spirits over the shrill sound of machines gulping coins emblazoned with the busts of presidents who had expanded the new America until little remained of its original inhabitants. Gene was unfazed by the paradox, and as our time together unfolded, I came to see how his life as a Native medicine man in a postmodern America had prepared him for such scenes of incongruity.

Most of my people are Christian converts, he stated matter-of-factly. Though there is a growing movement today among certain denominations to respect and even support Native spirituality, the consequences of centuries of aggressive missionary work is as evident on the reservation as the aftermath of a pileup.

When the Christian church showed up and taught us how to talk to Jesus, my people said, ‘Great!—another way to commune with the Creator—thanks.’ Gene shrugged. But it wasn’t that simple in the minds of the missionaries, he continued, less jovially. My people were forced to choose between Christianity and the ways of their own people, our traditional practices labeled ‘the work of the devil.’ Spiritual artifacts and traditional garb were burned at the persuasion of priests and nuns as many of my people finally gave up what had been a long struggle for cultural and physical survival. His words and the silence that followed them left behind a residue of sadness. "Linguists say that if your children don’t use the language, it and its social structures are as good as dead. Today, my people know they are Ojibwe, but they do not know what that means."

Gene offered an example of the widespread ignorance of ancient spiritual practices. Historically, the Ojibwes had their own New Year’s Eve. A month before spring equinox, men had a ‘period’—just like women do, only symbolically, Gene recalled. "We’d spend a month going within, being introspective. We’d fast and do special prayers in anticipation of the new life that was coming. And then we’d have a big ceremony for the day of the new year, when the birds’ song was heard again.

Today, my people don’t even know this existed, he said, shaking his head. They think the new year is the turning of midnight on December thirty-first, when there is snow on the ground and champagne in their hand. Tiny puffs of ironic laughter escaped from his rounded belly.

The epidemic of cultural amnesia among Gene’s people has forced him to redefine what it means to be a practicing spiritual leader when so few are interested in being led. One of my greatest competitors is television, Gene lamented, the revolving door behind him revealing rows of blinking poker screens. I asked Gene whether he’d considered trying to preserve his tradition in print or on video for those who one day might want to unearth their obscured ancestry. He reminded me that his beliefs and practices—and the complex stories that encompass them—are strictly oral teachings. The act of verbal initiation and mentorship is itself an integral and dynamic aspect of the practice. Passing the songs and stories down requires intensive commitment, time, and sacrifice, said Gene, adding with what seemed like hard-won acceptance: Even my own kids—they live modern lives—aren’t interested in learning them.

Why do you keep doing it, I asked, when this fire you’re stoking will likely die with you?

I keep doing it, Gene bellowed back, "because I trust God with certainty, not happenstance. I keep going because it is my responsibility, and because no one promised me this way of life would be easy.

Plus, he added, as a more hopeful aside, I believe there’s going to be a revival of Ojibwe spirituality. Everything that has happened was foretold in our ancient prophecy, including the coming of the white race to this continent. Our way of life and our customs have changed as a result of that arrival, but our ability to change has also been one of our sources of strength. Gene said he’d recently witnessed young people from his tribe indoctrinating themselves in a kind of pan-Indian ritual practice. He’s relieved to see the interest, regardless of its tribal origin or orthodoxy of practice. It is like the new sunrise which I face every morning…. One way or another, Gene pronounced, people come full circle, they go home.

Gene spoke from experience, having made his own circular journey back to his literal home. Born to a Navajo father and an Ojibwe mother, Gene followed the matriarchal custom of identifying with his mother’s tribe, and was raised in his grandmother’s home. A medicine woman, his grandmother often took Gene with her as she—guided by Spirit—gathered medicinal resources from her reservation’s trees, plants, lakes, and soil. But as a teenager, Gene shrugged off his grandmother’s legacy. When I moved off the reservation, I lived a typical American life, Gene said, remembering the relocation that he and his wife, Bernice, made from their families’ homes in Wisconsin to the suburbs of New Jersey. I was just a regular guy, working, trying to raise my family and be a good husband. And along with the typical American life, Gene admits, came a fair share of partying and distraction, and an absence of all things spiritual.

But Gene’s life took a turn when, at the age of forty-five, he had a dream—a haunting vision of an owl—that remained as vivid in his waking hours as it had been in the dark of night. The owl attacked me in the dream, and the interpretation given to me was it was time to come home, Gene recounted. Though he couldn’t recognize it at the time, the owl eventually afforded Gene a bird’s-eye view of the contradiction in which his people seemed caught: the competing pulls of individualism and community, the secular and the spiritual, the manufactured and the handmade.

A few years after Gene’s return to the reservation, a visit from a tribal elder he hardly knew gave him direction. I was sitting on my front porch with my wife when an old car pulled into the driveway, Gene recalled. It was just getting dark, but I could make out the figure of a man, Jim Funmaker, who comes from the Winnebago tribe (also Ojibwe) about a hundred and thirty-five miles south of here. Jim Funmaker has been around awhile—he’s about a hundred now—but at the time, I didn’t even know him, except for seeing him at powwows. I used to go up to him and shake his hand because he’s a big-time spiritual leader, this guy, a healer. But he certainly had no reason to know who I was.

The unexpected visitor sat down on the porch next to Gene and Bernice. He took a can from his pocket and opened it up, holding it out to Gene. This is real Indian tobacco, not store-bought, he said. Gene asked him why it was being offered to him. Because I’ve come to say something to you, something sacred, something important, Funmaker declared.

Among Ojibwes, the practice of offering tobacco has long and varied meanings. When one comes to speak of sacred things, or seek spiritual assistance, the gesture of presenting tobacco is made out of respect and gratitude for all that is unseen and for that which will come to pass. There are conflicting legends about when the custom began, and why tobacco, in particular, is assigned such import. But among most tribes today, the gifting of raw tobacco remains partially to appease, and partially to acknowledge a presence.² "Real Indian tobacco," as Jim Funmaker had called his, is consecrated, having been blessed by Spirit through tribal elders in ceremony.

So I accepted his offering and we talked all night long, continued Gene. And I was fascinated by his visit, honored that he would come and see me. During their starry meeting, Funmaker explained the impetus for his visit—a dream he’d had about Gene, the details of which Gene would not divulge to me. All he’d say was that the dream and the encounter resulted in the promise of a gift: a medicine pipe.

To craft a medicine pipe for someone is more than a sacrifice of time; it is an act of midwifery for another’s spiritual birth. In contemporary American culture, if someone decides to become a religious leader or a healer, whether conventional or alternative, it is a decision commonly arrived at independently. The custom among many Indian tribes, however, has always been a ritual of unsolicited recognition by one’s community or a credentialed elder, a system under which individual preference is secondary to collective need.

As Gene continued peeling back the layered story of how his pipe—the central ritual object of his practice—came to be, I marveled at the attention to signs and dreams he and Jim Funmaker had demonstrated. I thought of the many times I had dreamed of an acquaintance, and how it never occurred to me to decipher meaning from these nocturnal visits, much less travel a hundred and thirty miles to announce the coming of a dream-inspired gift. But in the view of many American Indians, an individual’s personal spiritual progress is a matter of public interest, one you’re expected to go out of your way to facilitate.

Gene’s circuitous route to spiritual awakening made me consider my own newly christened quest. I knew I would have to come to terms with the possibility that what I was seeking might, in one sense, have to find its way to me. And yet, from our first encounter, I had also learned from Gene’s example that receptivity is as active as it is passive; one must cultivate preparedness for whatever lies ahead.

After Jim Funmaker had followed the signs to Gene’s door, Gene began a process of self-purification. A year later, the two met again. In a private six-hour ceremony, Funmaker presented the pipe he had made for Gene. This pipe came from the Creator, Funmaker said, holding its two pieces in his hands. "The pipe is not yours; it belongs to all the Ojibwe people. You are its caretaker, a keeper of the pipe," he instructed. A medicine pipe is intended to crystallize a holy bond between an individual and his or her Creator. In Gene’s case, the transfer of the carved instrument was an anointment to diagnose and heal people, to become a medicine man.

It was shortly after his induction with Jim Funmaker that Gene’s uncle Pipe Mustache approached him, commencing a fifteen-year apprenticeship that would fill his pipe with potent medicine. Along with sacred songs, prayers, and stories, Pipe Mustache introduced his chosen successor to the four totem spirits—buffalo, turtle, bear, and wolf—who have appeared in both physical and spirit form among the Ojibwe people for thousands of years.

Considered agents of protection, guidance, and change, as well as guardians of the outer doors of human perception, totem spirits are revered by Native traditionalists. They are a pipeline to the Creator in the way saints, angels, and prophets are for people of other faiths. Most of us experience life with the five senses, Gene said. "Some can use the sixth and beyond. Jesus was an example of this kind of person, as are medicine people. I actually see the spirits. They talk to me, literally talk to me. When someone comes to me for a healing, I know right away if I can help them, because the spirits tell me."

Gene does not know how his healings work, nor does he seek to, reflecting a respect for life’s inherent mystery. It’s not necessary that we understand the mechanics. As medicine people, we just need to show up and let the spirits work through us, Gene said. Humility is as vital to his practice as the pipe he carries. Even though people around me might assume that being a doctor of Indian medicine, a spiritual person, means that I have some special dispensation of the Creator—that I’m unique in some way—I don’t and I’m not, Gene said emphatically, pulling a Marlboro from his pack and groping in his shirt pocket for a light. While Gene’s commitment to physical purification has, since his visit from Jim Funmaker, included abstention from all substances that alter perception, such as alcohol and drugs, he allows himself two indulgences: greasy, over-processed food and store-bought cigarettes.

But Gene’s humanness—even his own need to be healed—does not, in his eyes or in those of the people he helps, diminish his competence as a spiritual teacher and healer. In fact, most medicine people speak of having endured a serious illness—even a self-inflicted one—before being endowed with healing power, as if the empathy resulting from suffering prepared them for their role. Though Gene has had plenty of physical challenges, he’s more concerned with the kind of psychological maladies that strike the mind and heart. I’m a human being, and as such, susceptible to faults and mistakes during any given day, he said, inhaling deeply from his cigarette. So when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I deal with is myself. Sometimes I wake up with resentments, anger, confusion, conflict in my life—like everybody else does. But when I roll out of bed, I don’t drop down on my knees and fold my hands and ask the Creator for forgiveness. Ojibwe people don’t practice shame or guilt, he said, drawing a distinction between his faith and traditional Christianity.

I take a shower and get out bare naked, and before I put on my clothes, I sing songs, and I burn sage, and I smudge my whole body with that medicine to purify. In that act I’m getting rid of anger, resentment, conflict, confusion—emotional distractions that can undermine my ability to diagnose and heal. Relaying an ancient Ojibwe saying that has distinctly modern echoes, Gene says: You cannot truly love anyone or anything else until you first love and accept yourself.

My uncle Pipe warned me that the gift of healing is something that is given by Spirit and can just as easily be taken away, Gene said. So, being human is a hazard to Native American doctors. But what’s most important in everything we do, believe, and practice as spiritual people, he said, raising his voice to overpower the heckling of a bustling casino, "is to live namajeen—the good life."

It would be months before Gene would elaborate. But given the patience by which his faith is framed, it seemed fitting that I