A Week of Journeying: Asking Why

Doubting Thomas touches the wound in Christ's side, from the Maesta in Sienna, by Duccio

This period of dryness offered an opportunity - as is usually the case - to ask myself some pointed questions. The most basic was why I had gotten so involved in the church to begin with.

I had grown up in the Episcopal church. Already a skeptic at age six, I dropped out of Sunday School but kept singing in the children's choir, became confirmed at age 12, and continued to sing in the adult choir until I graduated from high school though I had already rejected much of the dogma. (The story is told in detail in the introduction to my book.) None of my questions had been successfully answered by confirmation classes, my parents (who were also less than convinced), or other "elders" I talked to. I was completely unable to believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, saw most of the miracles (like the loaves and fishes story) as metaphor, and found it impossible to say the Creed. When I probed beneath the surface of what others believed, I found similar doubts but an accommodation on the basis of social norms: the Episcopal Church, even in our small rural town, was where the better-off, better-educated Protestants went to church. This hypocrisy bothered me a lot, and as soon as I was on my own, in college, I stopped attending.

But it wasn't quite that simple. Also from an early age, I had been very interested in religion in general and curious about what other people believed, what their practices were, and how different cultures gave rise to their particular faiths. Maybe it was a result of being so fascinated with the Greek myths as a child - I learned all the gods and goddesses and what they controlled and why. The world of passionate interaction between Mt. Olympus and humanity was very real to me. A little later, I read everything I could get my hands on about King Arthur; the Grail quest held a mystical interest for me that I still don't fully understand, but I know that it touched something very deep in me. These legends, along with the Iliad, set a tone for the search for human meaning that has occupied my as an adult. Spirituality, morality, ethics, aesthetics; the conflict between human love and divine love; the struggle to live with integrity and maintain nobility in the face of mortality: all those themes were interwoven in the epics of the Greeks and in the Arthurian legends that had their own roots as paganism gave way to early Christianity in the British Isles, the home of my own ancestors. And it was not coincidental, I think, that strong women figured as central characters in both the Greek and Arthurian legends - whether they were Athena, Aphrodite and Hera; the Trojan women from Hecuba to Cassandra; or Guinevere and Morgan le Fey. What I didn't grasp at that age was how the Gospel narrative I had heard and absorbed from the texts read each Sunday, and the liturgical music we sang, had also become interwoven with these other stories in my subconscious mind. On the surface, it somehow embarrassed me, and I rejected it.

Choosing to major in classical art and culture in college was a way of going deeper into these subjects, which I saw being played out all around me as contemporary society struggled with Vietnam, feminism, and civil rights, but the base of my interest (which I still didn't see clearly) was neither purely political nor academic: it had to do with the inter-penetration of the spiritual search for authenticity and meaning, and the demands of individual human lives lived out in the real world.  University life had opened up a much wider world for me, and I wanted more of it: I had friends who were Jewish, black, urban, foreign; on the same floor of my residential hall were several Persian kids whose fathers had been associates of the Shah; I became friends with professors who had lived all over the world. But although I loved the intellectual life and was successful at it, the insularity of the ivory tower seemed too precious for me, and too removed from the vibrant and often violent world of those times.

Eventually I decided against academia as a career, and became a self-employed graphic designer and artist. I was 26, and had just moved to Vermont; knowing very few people other than my then-boyfriend, and searching to find my own place in a new community, I went back to church, and once again joined a choir. Soon I'd leave it again.

Comments

[faa]

I'm wow-ed by this article. You do include interesting facts about the subconscious mind and how it works. Hmm, do check out http://www.subconscious-mind.org, they have a whole host of interesting and helpful articles. Also,maybe you can use some tips here.

[dale]

(o)