A Week of Journeying: Asking Why (2)

Duccio, "The Wedding at Cana," from the Maesta altarpiece, Siena, 1308.

I stayed in that choir for two years, loving the music and fellowship, and still struggling with the same doubts. The rector at the time was a New York intellectual and former composer who had had a critical midlife health crisis and subsequently become a priest. I felt at home in his sermons for the first time; his mind ranged over the whole of human endeavor, challenging us to look at theology in a new way. The assistant was only a little older than I was; a young man with a great pastoral gift and a deep spirituality.  I had long conversations with both of those men, neither of whom rejected me for my doubts and both of whom were willing to engage about religion on a level that was new to me.

What wasn't working for me was the church community outside the small choir. I was a young single woman; this was a parish of families, most of whom were wealthy doctors or professors or local businesspeople. And it was New England, not the friendly, outgoing upstate New York I'd grown up in. On Sunday, all the parishioners were "a family." But time and time again, if I ran into someone from church in the grocery store or on the street and said hello, they'd look through me like they had never see me before. First of all I've never gotten used to the New England attitude of not saying hello to someone who's greeted you, even if they're a stranger. But this was over the top -- without my choir robe on, had I become invisible, or unrecognizable? In actuality, I was just as wasp-y and Ivy League-pedigreed as they were, but they didn't know that and I had no intention of bringing it up. I suspected they were simply too stuck up to speak to someone not in their social or professional circle. Was this their interpretation of Christianity? Looking around I saw I wasn't alone in this; other people who didn't fit a certain mold were also less than fully embraced by that church community.

The final blow came when I decided to marry. My boyfriend was Jewish and divorced. When I approached my rector, he apologized and said he couldn't perform the wedding. I was shocked and disappointed. Another Episcopal priest, not associated with the church, married us in a secular venue, and my choir and clergy friends attended. Somehow it never felt like a real marriage to me, from the moment we spoke our vows, but not for that reason. I did feel utterly unsupported by the church through the rocky months that followed. The marriage lasted only a year and a half. I met J. and left the church without looking back; we attended Sunday services occasionally in a nearby town where my father-in-law-to-be was the Unitarian minister, and two years later, he married us on a Vermont hilltop in a ceremony we wrote ourselves that felt sacred and binding, and still does to this day.

--

For the next decade and a half, I lived outside of the church. I went back to calling myself an agnostic, as I had in my teenage years. Life was full and busy as we established ourselves in our work, our artistic lives, and the home and garden we were working on together. But in my mid-thirties, I began to experience a personal crisis. Something was missing, and I felt it first in my paintings and drawings which seemed to be reaching a dead end. I'd evolved a high level of technical skill, and the paintings sold and were praised by people who saw them, but I knew something about them was incomplete, and became depressed, discouraged, and confused. My life felt like it was lacking a center, and that everything I had thought might provide it -- love, satisfying work, friends, a home, sufficient income -- had come up lacking. I decided to learn to meditate to try to gain some control over my emotions and the fears of mortality that were beginning to affect me, and got in touch with two friends, students of Chogyam Trungpa, who taught me the Tibetan Buddhist method of meditation. I also began reading a lot of books by Zen and Tibetan teachers. It was becoming clearer to me that the problem was very much within myself, and that I needed to undergo a transformation not only in how I was making art, but why. The why began to show me what was going on with my ego, and this began a period of painful discovery, unraveling, and change during which I was committed to a daily meditation practice. I laid aside my brushes entirely, deciding that I wouldn't continue until I felt the work was coming from a fresh place, and although I didn't know it then, this self-imposed exile would continue for five years.

The rest of my life went on as it had, but at the innermost level I felt alone, often frightened, and yet determined to continue. The Buddhist teachers whose words I was reading became my companions -- Shunryu Suzuki, Chogyam Trungpa, Philip Kapleau, Joko Beck, Taisen Deshimaru. What they said appealed to my intellectual mind, but they were right: without the non-intellectual learning gained slowly from the daily practice, the books would not have helped me. As it was, insights slowly arrived, and I gradually became more peaceful. In Shunryu Suzuki's words, change was happening "like getting wet in a fog."

Comments

[Natalie]

Beth, I'm so glad you've started on this autobiographical journey. It adds beautifully made jigsaw pieces to the rest of your writing and I'm fascinated to see the picture developing. For instance, to know that it was J.'s father who performed your home-made marriage ceremony on a Vermont hilltop is such a wonderful image to put alongside those you've verbally painted about your father-in-law. Speaking of painting: could you post some photos of the work you were doing when you were a painter?
I also love the Duccio you've chosen here - in fact that whole period (pre-perspective and pre-Renaissance) is my favourite in all of Italian art history

[Pat]

My experience with the Church is very parallel to your own: childhood doubts and diligent choir attendance, leaving after inspiring sermons given by gifted clergy, a congregation full of homophobia. Still, last night as I lay in bed listening to Handel’s Messiah the thought occurred, “How can you reject that which inspired such music?”

I thought of your odyssey, which suddenly seemed another version of what Barack Obama had just addressed in his speech on racism. He cannot completely repudiate his former pastor anymore than he can deny his grandmother.

These issues – what we can and cannot deny in our selves and others - go much deeper than words and thoughts and even deeds. Seems to me, we are being invited, if not pushed, into discovering our deepest Love and our basic Unity.

Writing to a friend earlier today I typed out, “We are so lucky to have Obama. I hope we do not kill him.” Before I saw it coming the revelation had slipped out and shocked me.
“WE kill him?” I would never be a part of that!
But then, I understood that that was exactly Obama’s point: We are in this together.
It’s not “we and them.” It’s “us” … and this lesson is being offered now in many venues. Because we really have to learn it, learn it quickly.

[Anna]

I agree with Natalie in that these posts add texture to the incomplete fabric of your life-blog and are really interesting. I often wondered, given the type of person you seem to be, why you were involved with the church and the last post sheds light on this. This post is interesting as I feel as if I'm going through an extended 'lost' period trying to create a meaningful path for myself now in my early fifties. Thanks for your candour.
Anna

[dale]

(o)

[Theriomorph]

I see even more through these two posts how much we have in common, Beth - my relationship to the Episcopal Church and the life of spirit has been much the same. In the music, I found what I could not in the Nicene Creed; the rector of my church let me question and argue that all the way through, supportive of my pagan-Jewish-intellectual version of being Episcopalian; I turned to various incarnations of Buddhist meditation along the way; studied comparative religion and Classics lifelong; finally left my determination to remain part of the Episcopal tradition when the Church started behaving like The Inquisitor re: insurance paranoia and big business, harming good people badly along the way and posturing in ways I could not support; spent some time in UU contexts; let go of the practice of spirituality in community an just went back to the woods where it was always uncomplicated for me.

I haven't gone back, and my suspicion of People In Groups remains stiff, but there are things I miss that church provided as nothing else does - ritual, rites of passage in community, and oh, the music.

Even not longing for a successful relationship to a faith community anymore (at this stage, anyway), I love reading what you write about this lifelong relationship to questing and sacred story, the life of the spirit and mind both. You speak about it with deep sanity and compassion both. Thank you.