Thoughts while Traveling

My God is so revelant.

Last weekend, just before we embarked on our journey to the middle of nowhere, South Carolina, I noticed a book on one of Nicole's bookshelves that looked interesting. I grabbed it and ran out the door. I proceeded to read aloud the first three chapters to Justin on the first leg of the trip, and we just sat there and let it soak in, pondering the thoughts of Kathleen Norris in her book, Amazing Grace- A Vocabulary of Faith. The last chapter struck us both as so utterly relevant to the discussions we have been having with each other, as well as the recent posts from Phil regarding the definition of a covenant.

I desperately want to type out the whole chapter...at least for you to read , Phil. Perhaps only a few excerpts. We'll see. It is entitled -

Inheritance : A Blessing and a Curse

Human inheritance is both a blessing and a curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. For many of us religion is heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up? What can we hold to, as blessing? My inheritance, my story, is of protestant Christianity- Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian- whose roots lie deep in Judaism . And in recent years the Benedictine monastic tradition has given me an expanded sense of my Christian roots. To me, these monastics represent my deep heritage, the ancients, my ammas and abbas in the faith, who reflect a time when Christianity was neither Orthodox nor Protestant, but simply was.

And is. I find it a blessing, now, to be able to invoke the saints who have formed me a beloved grandmother, say, as well as Saint Paul, St. Benedict, St. Therese of Lisieux. I am blessed to be able to enjoy the worshipping assembly of any Christian church as including both those present and absent, both the living and the dead. When I come to the end of the Apostles Creed, they are all there, in the "communion of saints." Those who have helped me to be, and those who have helped to being me to this place of song and story, worship and praise.

But it's far less pleasant - it can feel like a curse- to include in my welcome the difficult ancestors: the insane, the suicides, the alcoholics, the religiously self-righteous who literally scared the bejesus out of me when I was little, or murdered my spirit with words of condemnation. Abel is welcome in my family tree, but I'd just as soon leave Cain out. Yet God has given me both, reminding me of that line in Psalm 16,"welcome indeed the heritage that falls to me," can be a tough one to live with. If, as Paul says, "all things work together for good for those who love God" (Rome 8:28), then in giving me a mixed inheritance, both blessing and curse, God expects me to make something of it. Redeem the bad, and turn it into something good. And if I must start with my roots, with where I have been placed in my family, my marriage, culture, and religious tradition. But the urge for denial is strong. And when something feels like a curse, when it doesn't correspond to who I'd like to be, it is tempting to try to simply toss it out. I might hire someone to channel my personal angels, or purchase and Indian name from a company in California. I might look into my "past lives" and discover that I was, as some now claim to be, an Indian in a former life. The religious marketplace is full of spirtualities that can costume us in fancy dress.

All or any of this may be therapeutic, but therapy is not the purpose of religion. Nor is feeling so special that one is able to boast of a contact with the spiritual world that most people lack. Christians often speak of having a call to a particular form of ministry. But from the days of the earliest churches,it has been brought to our attention that this is mostly a matter of pedestrian inheritance.

When Paul, in his first letter to the members of the church in Corinth, ask them to "consider your own call", he emphasizes that "not many of you were by human standards,not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth." Declaring that this is for the very reason that God chose them, so that "no one might boast in the presence of God (1 Cor. 1:26,29), Paul makes it clear that if we take inordinate pride in the spiritual gifts we have been blessed with, the joke is on us.

Like so many American children of the 1950's, I played Cowboys and Indians. In my grandparents house, the house I now live in, are the early artifacts of the television cowboys that spurred us on: a "Matt Dillon, US Marshal" pin that reads on the back, "CBS 1959." A card from a savings bank, containing Hopalong Cassidy's Secret Code. I have long suspected that our games always had more to do with dreams of riding on horseback through open spaces, free of parental interference, than with race or denomination. And we have also to consider the timelessness of the childhood imagination--a few years ago, when I walked past a group of kids playing in my neighborhood, a little girl pointed to one child who was dragging a big, leafy branch behind him and roaring mightily. She explained to me, "we're playing Cowboys and Indians, and Andy is the dinosaur."

Play is an important part of human development, but some games are meant to be outgrown. We are fortunate, as adults, if we can trace what we hold scared back to our childhoods, to our "original vision," a phrase coined by he English writer Edward Robinson for the title of his thoughtful book on children's religious development.But in order to have adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion. Growing up doesn't necessarily mean rejecting the religion of our ancestors, but it does entail sorting out the good from the bad in order to reclaim what has remained viable.

It's a balancing act: to recognize the blessings, even the ones that come well disguised, in the form of difficult relatives who have given you false images of Jesus with which you must contend. And it means naming ad exorcising the curses- not cursing the people themselves, who may have left you stranded with a boogeyman God, but cleansing oneself of the damage that was done. The temptation to simply reject what we can't handle is always there; but it means becoming stuck in perpetual adolescence, a perpetual seeking for something, anything, that doesn't lead us back to where we came from.

When I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit that I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance. A hapless and mortally embarrassed adolescent lurked behind the sophisticated mask I wore in my twenties: faith was something for little kids and grandma's, not me. I lived for years in a sublimely sophisticated place, the island of Manhattan, and the thought of crossing the door of any of the thousands of churches there did not occur to me. I suspect that it's only because I so blindly and crazily embraced my inheritance- leaving the literary world in New York City for a small town, the house my mom grew up in,the church my grandmother belonged to for sixty years--that I am now glad to identify myself as an ordinary Christian, one of those people who, to the astonishment of pollsters, still totter off to church on Sunday morning. It's been a lively journey. And I am still the same person who departed, so long ago, and not the same at all.

Storytelling is the way I've sorted through all this, and tried to make sense of it. I continue to be amazed at how long it takes me to figure things out, how long to tell it. Other people's stories of religious inheritance have long attracted me, partly because I learn from them how individual experience can be made meaningful to others, so that it does not remain exclusively private or personal. When I think of recent books that have mattered to me, that have conveyed useful messages concerning inheritance and conversion, I think of Nancy Mair's stunning Ordinary Time, which related hMer conversion to both Catholicism and feminism. And I think Roberta Bondi's Memories of God, in which she speaks with great affection od her Baptist aunts, including one who entertained Sunday School children by reciting the names of the books of the Old Testament in one breath. But she also unravels for her adult self exactly what was wrong with the revival -style theology that frightened her as a child, which sums up "only believe that God loves you or he'll send you to Hell forever." Bondi's book also contains the best contemporary reflection that I know of on the image of God the Father. As a feminist who is also a patristics scholar, Bondi realizes that she cannot simply excise the image of the Christian lexicon, as some feminists try to do. Instead, she begins praying to the Father in her personal devotions and to her astonishment finds that the practice leads her to a reconciliation with her own father, with whom she had always had a tense and difficult relationship.

A book that epitomizes what it means to come to terms with religious inheritance as both blessing and curse is Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops. He is best known, of course, as the coach of a basketball team, the Chicago Bulls. But when a friend gave me the book, she suggested that I would find interesting as reflection on religion. And she was right. Jackson was raised in North Dakota, by parents who were Pentecostal preachers. And his story is that of someone who realizes, early on, that he doesn't belong in his religious tradition but must find another way.

The best thing about the book (to me, that is; I didn't understand most of the basketball stuff) is the loving way in which Jackson speaks of his parents, and the respect he conveys for their faith, while acknowledging that he felt placed in a religious tradition in which he was destined to feel displaced, as the gift of tongues never came to him. The pain is there-- he tells of coming home from school one day to find his mother gone, which was so unusual as to put him in a panic. He assumed that what Pentecostals term the Rapture - the sudden appearance of Jesus to herald the end of the world- had occurred, and that he was left behind. The pain is real, but Jackson writes as a grown-up who has come to terms with it, so that love, not fear, prevails. He began using meditation techniques as a high school athlete, which led him to a serious study of Buddhism. Now, it seems, the Buddhist practice has led him to a new understanding and appreciation of his Christian inheritance.

I doubt that Jackson has often been compared to Emily Dickinson- I think she would rather enjoy it- but when I read his book, I was reminded of her painful experience at Holyoke Seminary, when she first began to discern the extent of her difference from her friends. The worship there was a part of what scholars now call the Great Revival, and often had a highly emotional pitch. Girls were asked to stand, or come forward, as a sign that they declared themselves for Jesus. But at one such meeting, Emily Dickinson, age sixteen, was the only one left seated after the altar call. She sums up the experience in a flinty remark: "They thought it queer I didn't stand. I thought a lie would be queerer." Describing the experience to a friend (sadly, I believe, but also with a sharp critical eye), she vividly portrays the alienation that a sensitive, thoughtful person can feel during the enthusiastic worship of the Christian assembly. " What a strange sanctification is this- that brings Christ down, and shows him, and allows him to select his friends!" Her exclusion from the fold of those who had converted to Christ was the first great exclusion of a life that would have many.

In many ways Dickinson epitomizes the range of blessings and curses that it is possible to have in one's religious inheritance. She also evinces what it can mean to take it all and make something of it. Through her poetry she became a Christian contemplative, meditating on the crucifixion as few poets have done. Even though the revivalist Christianity of nineteenth-century Amherst was not large enough to contain her, and she stopped going to church in her thirties, the Bible did have room for her, and she explored it freely. It permeates every poem, every letter that she wrote.

The word "curse: does not appear in Dickinson's poetry, but she often wrote of pain. In her poem, "A great hope fell," she writes:

A not admitting of a wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my life had entered it
And there were troughs beside

A closing of the simple lid
That opened to the sun
Until the tender Carpenter
Perpetual nailed it down

Reading that poem, I think of a friend, a Benedictine monk, who in his early thirties begin to recognize that he had been sexually abused by a priest as a teenager. Previously he had adopted a typically adolescent form of denial and seen the experience as evidence of his own precociousness, and even sophistication. But in working with victims of sexual abuse, he began to understand what happened to him and began to tell his story. First to a psychiatrist, then to his monastic community, and finally to other victims of abuse by priests. Over time, his dreadful pain over the irretrievable loss of innocence began to be converted into a blessing for other people. As someone who had been abused by a priest, and had himself become one, he found that he had something to say, both to victims and to priests who were seeking to understand and avoid the abuse of priestly authority.

Converting a painful inheritance into something good requires all the discernment we can muster, both from what us within us, and what we can glean from mentors. The worst of the curses that that people inflict on us, the real abuse and terror, can't be forgotten or undone, but they can be put to good use in the new life one has taken up. It is a kind of death; the lid closes on what went before. But the past is not denied. And we are still here, with all of our talents, gifts, and failings, our strengths and weaknesses. All the baggage comes along; nothing wasted, nothing lost. Perhaps the greatest blessing that religious inheritance can bestow is an open mind, one that can listen without judging. It is rare enough when we recognize it in another when we encounter it. I often see it in people who have attained what the monastic tradition terms "detachment," an ability to live at peace with the reality of whatever happens. Such people do not have a closed off air, nor a boastful demeanor. In them, it is clear, their wounds have opened the way to compassion for others. And compassion is the strength and soul of a religion.

Man, that was a lot of typing. Worth it, though. I hope that if anyone else reads all the way to the end of this that they will have a lot to chew on, as I did. Food for thought -