I have always been an avid
reader. When I was in third grade, after I was supposed to turn out the light
and go to bed, I would turn on the nightlight that was just a few inches above
the side of my bed, cover myself in a gold comforter, and read into the night
without my light being detected.
On one hot North Carolina
summer night after “lights out”, Mom asked, “What are you doing under there?”
and snatched the cover off of me, exposing me, my night light, and my book. I
thought I might be in trouble, but Mom laughed.
At the end of third grade,
our family moved into a larger house, and I had a more private bedroom, so I
could generally read as late as I wanted to without being detected. I believe
it was in junior high school that I decided to read the whole Bible, but I
didn’t want anyone to know, so again I hid my book under the covers just in
case someone stopped in.
I’m not sure why I was so
secretive. Both of my parents were raised Southern Baptists, and they raised us
in a Southern Baptist church. We went to a progressive church, where we were
more likely to read The Velveteen Rabbit
than the Bible, and from time to time, my dad complained that we knew nothing
about the Bible. He complained about this one morning on the way to church, and
I argued (as I often did). He said, “I’ll bet not even one of you knows the
first Book of the Bible.”
“I do, too,” I said. For some
reason, I had a Bible with me on that day, and I flipped to the beginning.
“Genesis,” I tried to say, but
I’d never heard the word and pronounced it more like the plural of the Irish
beer, Guinnesses.
I didn’t make it far in my
first reading of the whole book, though I tried several times. Each time, I got
to that long list of “begats,” and gave up. I didn’t see where people found
Truth (yes, with a capital T) in this story. The Little House on the Prairie sequence was much more compelling.
I was more interested in
church than either of my younger siblings. It mostly raised questions for me.
Once, in a small service or discussion of some sort in the Poteat Chapel, my
mom and I talked together, as instructed by the leader. We had been told to
tell the person we were talking with something we had never told anyone else. I
follow teacher’s directions, so I told my mom, “I’m not sure I believe that
Jesus was the son of God.”
She whipped back with, “Why
not?” This question I did not expect. I had thought she might say, “Why?” and I
could explain how it seemed to me that we were all children of God, so Jesus
wasn’t really so special.
After that, I kept my truth
to myself, though as an adult I visited my childhood church with my partner Ann
(like I said, it’s a progressive church), and the minister at the time preached
a sermon that was more intellectual and did a lot of interpreting from the
Greek, but basically made the same argument that I had made as a child.
The church, a mainstay of
Southern life, was a foundation for our family.
Both of my parents grew up in
Southern Baptist churches, so some might say I was blessed, and others might
say I was doomed. My church, named for a not-too-distant ancestor, comprised an
eclectic congregation of hippie Southern Baptists, professors from local
colleges and universities, artists, and young parents like mine who wanted to
attend a church more liberal than they were. The church took a stand against
the Vietnam War in the 1960’s, and had a sister church, a storehouse church
with a primarily black congregation when I attended the church in the 1970’s
and 1980’s. Scandalous.
When I was in high school, my
youth group visited this sister church, Bishop Larsen’s storefront church. We
usually wore blue jeans with peace sign patches to our hippie church, but we
had been told to dress up for this church visit as a mark of respect, so we
knew this church would be different than ours. We sat in a row in the church’s
folding chairs, among the thirty or so people, mostly African-Americans but a
few white people, too, all struggling through poverty.
Bishop Larsen was a large
woman, imposing in her purple headdress and billowing purple robe. She
delivered a fiery sermon, and stopped in the middle to point her powerful
finger at a small boy, maybe eight years old, in the front row. “Boy,” she
intoned. “Come here.” He moved tremulously from his front row seat to stand
before Bishop Larsen. She chastised him for laughing, admonishing him to
remember that church is not funny and neither is God.
I suspected that Bishop
Larsen’s God wouldn’t approve of my friend Ande and me going to the park during
the sermons at our church, either. I surmised that this God would have no
compassion for our boredom. I wondered if it was fair that these people, having
a harder life, had a harder God, too. I
wondered how they would answer the question, “Who are you?” and if their answer
would reveal the poverty of their lives or if they saw their poverty as a
circumstance separate from the essence of who they were.
I found much to inspire me in
this church where the minister preached against the Vietnam War and for
integration of blacks and whites. I wanted to understand faith: some people
seemed so moved by it and used code words like “saved” as in “Have you been
saved?” Faith and God just seemed confusing to me, though.
In college, I wanted so much
to be certain about God and such, but the more I learned, the more unsettled I
became. On a walk around the town one night, my roommate Angelique and I
happened on a tiny church that would hold maybe ten people in its pews. We found
the door open, so we let ourselves in. Spontaneously, we began to spoof a
church service and made up readings from the Bible. We shouted from the pulpit
and banged our fists. I remember feeling that this was probably blasphemy but
not caring. I was angry.
I thought of Gerard Manly
Hopkins’ poem, “The Collar,” where a minister slaps the board and cries, “No
more,” ranting and raving about his doubts until “I heard one calling,
‘Child,’” and he replied, “My Lord.” I wanted to hear that voice call to me,
but there was no call, and Angelique and I finished our spoof, finally saying,
“We should leave. We’ve been loud. Someone might come and see us.”
Towards the end of college, I
continued to struggle with who I was, who I might be, and what life I might
lead. One Sunday when I was home for Christmas break, our minister, the good
Reverend Siler, asked me, Sister Jen, and his son Mark to share our stories on
doubt and faith in place of the sermon the Sunday after Christmas. Doubt was
easy for me. Faith was harder, but “Yes,” I told the minister. “I would love to
share my story.”
I often felt faint with all
of the standing and sitting during a church service, so on that Sunday I did
not stand to sing the hymns. I stayed seated on the pew’s golden cushion until
it was my turn to speak. While I waited, I held the pages of my words tight, crinkling
the paper. When I stood to deliver my piece, I saw purple rings in the darkness
and heard the high tone in my ears that usually told me to sit down. I tasted
metal. Right then, however, I was to speak to 400 waiting Baptists. This was
not a convenient time to sit, so I walked up the five steps to the podium.
I took a deep breath, hoping
my head would clear. I knew my mom was in the choir loft, dressed like a
bluebird in that long blue gown under the church’s seven stained glass windows.
(Christ was in the middle, as usual, wearing his crown and looking like a nice
guy with that dove flying around him.) Dad sat in the congregation, in the
third row, behind Ande’s parents, who held hands every week. (Thirty years
later, I hear they still do.)
As
I stepped into the pulpit and up to the microphone, I smoothed the papers in
front of me and began reading the words I had written about doubt. I was a
college senior who had declined marriage to a suitable boy. I was trying to
come to terms with the nuclear arms race and life after college, so doubt was a
familiar companion.
In
my mini-sermon, I wondered about the three wise men after they left the baby
Jesus. Where did they go and what did they do with their experience? I wondered
if, like me, the wise men felt a little lost.
As
I came to the close of this section on doubt and tried to move to the section
on faith, my ears rang shrilly and my vision began to close in, like the
darkness that closes Bugs Bunny cartoons. I saw my friend Heather’s mom, and I
tried to focus on her and to continue my sermon without my notes, since I could
no longer see them.
The
ringing got louder; the sanctuary’s blues and purples swirled, and the darkness
closed in. I don’t remember the rest. Mom says that I sighed deeply and rested
my head on my hand for a moment. Then I fell.
When
I returned to consciousness, I was lying on the floor, and my parents were beside
me. The good reverend Siler was saying to the congregation, “She’s alright.
She’s coming to.”
I
was still pale and a little sick to my stomach, and I had twisted my right
ankle when I fell and kicked my foot against the podium, so it hurt. Mom and
Dad helped me to a seat by the podium, where I sat—a little
embarrassed—throughout the rest of the service, and at the end of the service
well-wishers formed a long line to tell me that they hoped I was okay. Only one
woman said she wanted to hear the rest of the sermon, and I still appreciate
her attentiveness to my struggle beneath my dramatic fall.
Though
I saw a neurologist and had a CAT scan the following week, the tests detected
nothing, so the brain tumor that was partly responsible for my blacking out was
not discovered for another twenty years.
However,
my tumor was not the only cause of that fall: I felt overwhelmed by doubt and
faith and all they meant about who I was and who God was.
When
I moved to Dallas after college, I tried seventeen different churches, but
never found one that seemed right for me. I had not realized that my church was
unusual and did not have the language to look for a church interested in social
justice. Most of the churches seemed more like social gatherings than spiritual
ones to me.
The
church I returned to the most was a Unitarian church that met in a brown room,
with a brown carpet and brown drapes. The lectern, not a pulpit, was brown,
too. Though the thinking in this space was more compatible than in the other
churches I visited, I missed ritual and stained glass windows. This church felt
more like college than church to me, and so I finally gave up on church. I was
no longer a church-goer, though I was still full of wonder about God and spirit
and all that they meant.
During this time, I continued
to follow the news on the church of my youth, which my parents still attended.
The congregation tussled with questions of rightness, and then decided to ask
the minister to perform a gay union ceremony. That was too far. The church was
expelled from the Southern Baptist Convention and is now an American Baptist
Church.
The church’s struggle came
after I was an adult and had moved away from Raleigh, and before I came out as
a lesbian. The congregation’s thoughtful process, its minister’s wise
leadership, and its conclusion that gay people live in God’s love just as
straight people do, later helped me and my parents as we struggled with what it
meant for me to be gay. I still say a prayer of gratitude for those adults of
my youth, an older generation, who have stuck with the church and its vision of
God’s radical love. (When I visited as an adult, my partner Ann and I went to
the church together. The church had two ministers: a straight man whose
intellectual sermons would make many more traditional church-goers cringe and a
lesbian who, just by being both a woman and a gay person, may make many of
those same folks cringe.)
Though I stopped attending
church in Dallas, I continued to explore a spiritual life, and I began reading
Buddhist texts. I did not understand the Baghavad
Gita with its war metaphor, but Western texts influenced by Buddhism gave
me new ways of thinking. I remember learning about the five-fold path to Truth,
and loved the idea that there was more than one way. My favorite book in this
time was Zen and the Art of Archery,
a short book that challenged my thinking and not my reading skills. I also
loved Annie Dillard’s An American
Childhood, and especially her chapter called “The Present,” which
introduced me to the idea of being in the moment rather than in the past or the
future or in my analytical brain. How interesting that such a common sense
notion would seem so radical to me.
I taught a poetry course at
the high school in Dallas, and I learned along with my students to love the
poetry that we read together. In particular, the poets John Donne, Walt
Whitman, and Emily Dickenson took me into new realms of language and
self-discovery.
I
married a man in Dallas. On Sunday mornings, we did not go to church: we
watched “The News Hour with David Brinkley.” We moved to Seattle. Then we divorced,
and I came out, first to myself and then to my world. My world spun.
At
last, my world came to rights: up seemed up, and down seemed down as I came to
know myself as a lesbian. I learned to still myself and to listen to silence in
yoga, stretching into a new life.
When
I felt ready to try church again, my partner Ann joined me in the search, and
we found a small United Methodist Church eager to embrace us a couple.
God
no longer seemed so confusing, and church became a place of healing. A decade
into our membership, the community supported us when I had one brain tumor and
then a few years later a second one. A few years later, Ann and I would
participate in a mass wedding, where gay and lesbian couples who had had
ceremonies married in unions recognized by our state and, not too long
afterward, by our nation.
My
forties were fraught with health issues: two brain tumors, the swine flu, food
allergies that caused me to lose forty pounds, pneumonia, and a car accident
that might have killed me but only bruised my thigh a little.
Before
neurosurgery, I wrote a will and power of attorney. I signed organ donor forms.
I faced the possibility of my own death, which felt especially real to me after
surgery when I started hallucinating and once thought I was in the crematorium.
I
was not afraid of death, though I was sad at the thought of dying just yet. I
felt deep gratitude for my new life even as I mourned the loss of my life as an
athlete, a backroads’ adverturer, and a teacher. I did not swirl, and I thought
that I had found a solid place in my faith where I would always know up from
down.
Then
this fall, I participated in a simulation of loss in death, and in imagining a
story being told that was much like my own, I began to swirl again. If you have
been reading this blog, you know about my months of intense grief.
I
don’t know if I finally settled because of time’s healing salve, a ritual that
my therapist recommended, or some combination of those two things and others
that I cannot name. Right now, I am reading Phillip Levine’s Waking the Tiger, and in it he describes
the body’s experience in trauma and theorizes that, though in surgery we may be
under anesthetic, our bodies still experience trauma and must release the
energy pent up when we were in danger. Perhaps all that whirling was a part of
my healing.
Whatever
the reason, I feel grounded again. I know that my sense of God is not
conventional, just as it was not conventional when I was a child. I believe
that I do not know what God is, just as I do not know what death is. I believe
it was the poet Rumi who said, “Do not confuse the finger pointing at the moon
with the moon.” To me, this means not to confuse the word God with the reality
of God. I believe that there are many names for God and that there have been
men and women throughout history, in different traditions, who were unusually
close to God. I believe that there is some elemental energy in the universe
that Christians may call God or The Holy Spirit, and I believe that in prayer,
in breath, and in meditation I connect with that spirit.
With
the poet Max Ehrmann, I believe that whether or not it is clear to me, the universe
is unfolding as it should: ”With all its drudgery, sham, and broken dreams, it
is still a beautiful world. “
I
am okay with this partial knowing. I sit and breathe, and I am grounded. Like
the lilies of the field, I neither toil nor spin. For now.
This
is my story. It is an ongoing story.
