Crying in Church

As an adult I find myself crying in church and I never have a handkerchief. Neither does my husband. (I confess I have a weakness for men who can easily tie things on the tops of cars and hand me a clean handkerchief when I need one -- maybe I will marry one of those guys in my next life).

Other than church I hardly ever cry, but crying got me started going back to church (Faith Journal: First Entry) and it has followed me into my pew.

At first I though it was just the stress of being mother to a growing family. When I came to church in those early years I would sit in a grateful daze. It was just so peaceful -- just sitting -- with the two little lala's in the back somewhere playing with the other baby Unitarians. The words and songs would just wash over me.

If I shut my eyes I got the same feeling I had when I was a child and we used to drive to Mt. Hood to go skiing. The car would be packed with gear and family, with parents, sibs and me there were eight. If I was lucky I would get a seat near a window and lean against my puffy ski jacket wadded up against the door as a pillow. I would be in and out of sleep, listening to the conversations in the car while the Oregon woods flashed by on either side. Every once in a while a vine maple would fill the window with a green, clean light as it fluttered in unselfconscious beauty. Those vine maples gave me a shiver; on a sunny day they glowed in among the dark woods.

The crying would come because I would relax into the space of church and then something would reach me like those vine maples. A story of pain would make it to my heart, and as open as I was, I would cry.

It still happens all the time. Now it is often a story about someone in my church community who I've known for a long time. Or maybe the choir sings a song that reminds me of something. There are a million different triggers but they reach me because of a certain receptivity that I have when I am there. The same story or song doesn't have the same power anywhere else.

It happened at 12

What is it about twelve years old that brings such insights. At twelve, your brain must grow like a son-of-a-gun. You look like a kid. All the nobs and bumps on your face grow at different rates. Maybe you have braces and you don't make easy eye contact with adults. Adults still talk around you as if you don't understand them but now you suddenly do.

Twelve was when I stopped believing in God. I used to remember the moment but I don't anymore. Just that it happened at twelve and it was a reverse of Saul on the road to Damascus, one minute I believed and the next I did not. I doubt there was a blinding light just a feeling of emptiness and the click of the world making more sense.

I remember a year later spending the night with my best friend Sidney. Her Dad was on a date so we were alone in a house out in the woods. We were in bed telling stories when someone started walking around the house shining a flashlight in. We were terrified. The light from the flashlight swung wildly around the living room. We were in a loft bed-room looking down.

Sidney clutched my hand and started praying wildly out-loud. "Oh Jesus, Jesus, save us." Even in my terror, maybe because of my terror, I thought how wonderful it would be to cry out to the Lord with that sincerity. If we were murdered she would be praying to God while I would be looking directly into the eyes of my murderer. I had God envy and decided to start believing again.

For about two weeks I held belief in my mind while my heart really saw Sidney clutching my hand and praying. It was her faith that had touched me and gave me the strength to hold off my own reality for that length of time. I couldn't do it for longer than two weeks though -- hard as I tried.

Fantasy read

One of my guilty pleasures is Science Fiction and Fantasy--

If I want to sound intellectual I can call it speculative fiction. It started when I was a kid and my brother introduced me to the books of Robert Heinlein. I read all the Robert Heinlein in the Youth fiction area of the Library.

I love Ursula LeGuin, The Tolkien Ring Series, the Phillip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials, Garth Nix who wrote a wonderful trilogy called the Abhorsen Trilogy.

That out-of-body sensation you get when reading is even more intense with good speculative fiction. You are not just out-of-body you are out of the universe!

The trouble with Speculative fiction is that the bar isn't set very high for publishing, and there are a lot of so-so books out there. I don't even find a good one once a year, while good fiction, biography, and history is everywhere.

So I loved discovering The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Its beautifully written with a world that makes sense even if its not verifiable.

Laura is the heroine of the story. Stationed in Antarctica on a corporate sponsored science trip when a plague hits the earth, she lives but everyone else around her dies. The book follows her as she tries to find her way out of Antarctica. Brockmeier also keeps giving scenes from a city in flux, but it isn't a city that any of us know, it's the City of Remembered Dead.

You may have had the almost logical thought that someone isn't dead until all the people who remember them have died. This book imagines such a world actually exists. Its based on an African belief that there are three states of being: living, dead but remembered by the living, and no longer remembered.

People arrive in the City of Remembered Dead in some confusion but settle down into a different life. No one seems to need to work there although some do anyway. There's a lot of cafe sitting and coffee drinking. Life is real, with relationships sometimes extending from the old life, and sometimes with new relationships starting up.

But the plague is also throwing this world into confusion. The City is filling up with the new dead and long time residents are disappearing.

And then it begins to empty out and we realize that Laura is the last person left on earth.

The still remembered dead start to figure things out but there is nothing they can do. They even figure out that it is Laura that is holding them in place and that Laura is in trouble.

I don't want to give to much away -- but it doesn't exactly have a happy ending.

Its a book that makes you think in a humanistic spiritual way. Its really about what is lost when a person dies.

We tend to think of the world moving on after we die and we get some comfort from that. This story turns that on its head and points out, not that the world goes on without us, but that in some ways it doesn't. Its dizzying the way it makes you aware of the multiple connections we each carry around inside our memories.

When I finished this novel I didn't feel like crying but I had to sit and be quiet for a while. I let the story rumble around in my head and thought about it for days.

The Ragged Old Flag

Veterans Day makes me think of these two old guys, Ray and Gus, who used to go to all the Eagle scout ceremony's that I was ever at. They would give out a flag to all the new Eagle scouts and recite The Ragged Old Flag. I knew better then to smile ironically at anything at a Eagle ceremony, but it was pretty cornball.

It grew on me though. They never missed a ceremony! When my own son went to design his Eagle ceremony he said "yeah, I'm not sure what I want but I want those two old dudes doing the flag poem".

Ray and Gus kept getting older and more feeble. Ray was the extrovert and he would get up and make little jokes and recite the poem and Gus would stand there holding the flag. They did a wonderful handshake and always wore suits. Finally Gus started showing up alone. He gave reports about Ray who had had a stroke, but we never saw him again. Gus didn't have Ray's glibness and when Gus recited the poem it had a seriousness and sadness it hadn't had before. Gus wanted those boys to know that patriotism was a serious business.

And somehow it was.

Faith Journal: First entry

A friend asked me to tell the story of my beliefs and how I became a UU. It might make a nice counterpoint to my more polemic pieces.

Here is a start:

Michael and I were living in Arizona in the 80's. We had met in Oregon but wooed and married in the hot desert away from both of our families. Not being part of a church was fine with us. Our wedding was officiated by a judge. I was a former Catholic and Michael grew up without going to church.

I got pregnant and had a baby boy. Motherhood was a surprise because it was so darned emotional. I fell in love with my son and used to wonder why they didn't write top forty songs about mothers and their children. Why all these songs about romantic love when maternal love was equally as strong and true? I was gaga. I was also working full time and was often tired, stressed and lonely for my Oregon family.

One day we went to a Catholic wedding that included a Catholic Mass. I hadn't been to a mass in 5 to 10 years but I knew when to sit, stand and kneel. The prayers and responses came out of my mouth without thinking. I beat my breast in time while I said " through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault". My eyes began to fill with tears for here were the ritual words and movements of my childhood all in celebration of this lovely young couple. She wore a long white dress and was attended by five pink-cheeked flower girls. He was tall, handsome and gazed worshipfully at his new wife. Both families beamed at them from their respective pews.

When we got out to our car to drive to the reception, I burst into tears. Michael was aghast of course and wanted to know what was wrong. I told him about my strong feelings during the mass, about its familiarity and how it connected me with something I hadn't known I was missing. He listened and finally said "Well, if you feel so strongly about it. I guess we had better find ourselves a Catholic church."

That just made me cry harder, I lifted my face to him and choked out "But Michael, I don't BELIEVE a word of it."

It was only a few weeks later that we packed up our son, went exploring and discovered the UU church in Mesa Arizona.

Little Cat Feet

"THE fog comes on little cat feet. " is a fragment from a Carl Sandburg poem I half remember from childhood. It's a textbook perfect image with the staying power of an advertising jingle.

I think of quiet cat feet when I think of global warming.

Now Iraq, Iraq's a big noisy deal, especially if you have a son or daughter over there. It's the loudest deal in town, dragging your heart and attention toward it's exploding center.

The warming is a quiet crisis that comes to us in the pale blue shades of ice dripping and changing into water.

Iraq is the red, beating heart of human suffering. Children are crying. Women raped. Every day men are found on the street with drill holes in their bodies. These horrors are punctuated by daily car bombs. How can we look anywhere but there?

When will we feel the water seeping into our shoes?

Working Class II

A friend of mine from Eastrose read my last post and e-mailed me. I thought I would share what she wrote.

Good old class differences! They divide us in ways personal and profound.

"I too read the article on the working class in the UU World, as well as your comments on your blog. I didn't see the mechanism to post a response on your blog, but this has always been a deeply personal issue for me. I wrote something to respond to both the article and your blog that I wanted to share with you. It's too long for the UU World, but I would value your thoughts and comments. Maybe we can start a dialogue in our congregation!

Here it is:

As the daughter of a working class family, I have so often wanted to loudly tell my UU friends to WAKE UP! I’ve found over and over that UU’s are unaware of the real life situations of the majority of Americans who are “working class.”

My father, who did not finish 6^th grade, was a logger and later a truck driver (and a Teamster). My mother was a bookkeeper. Higher education was not valued in my family; my father considered it elitist and was convinced that people who went to college did not want to dirty their hands with real work. My mother, like so many in my family, was a fundamentalist, born-again Christian, and allowed her independent thinking capacity to be subsumed into the rigidity of that faith.

While I did not go to college, I did succeed in a “professional” career, and eventually found my way to a UU church in Maryland where I felt somewhat comfortable. But even there, one UU woman told me that she (of course) did not expect our church to reach out to people without college degrees. When I told a friend that I had not gone to college, his jaw dropped open and he eventually said, “Jean, I won’t hold that against you.” I referenced the fact that one-half of American high school youth did not go on to college in a conversation with a PhD physicist. He refused to believe me, even though I had a valid citation. So often I felt excluded when it was assumed that everyone had advanced degrees, had traveled extensively, and had children who were accomplished both in education and careers.

One of the reasons I moved back to Oregon from the Washington, D.C. area was that I was tired of upper middle class pretensions. From my childhood in Portland, I remembered positive values, such as the integrity of a full day’s hard work, personal sacrifice for the needs of your family, relying on yourself, commitment to your extended family no matter how much conflict there might be, keeping your children safe, taking care of aged parents, and returning your library books on time. I never heard about such things as personal choice, fulfillment, and career rewards. And there was certainly no assumption that parents would pay for college for their children -- their goals were paying the bills on time and saving a penny for a rainy day.

After he died, I learned that my father was brilliant in his own way, with a patent for a mechanical device he had designed. I think he would have been comfortable with UU religious principles, but would never have been comfortable in a UU congregation. There are others like my father and myself out there who could benefit, and could contribute, to Unitarian Universalism.

If you’re wondering how to provide a safe religious home for working class individuals, I suggest that you begin by learning more about the working class, realize that you already have working class members, and reflect this knowledge in the language that is used in worship services and sermons."