My Childhood Spiritual Journey

In movies, when an event is going to be too long to fit the length of a film, the director will often employ a “montage sequence” to bring the viewer along with snippets of key moments. At the end of the montage, the viewer is to have intuited a whole and feel like they’ve experienced more than they literally have been shown. For the sake of “running time” here, I have opted to do something similar.

1. I remember a moment when I was about five – a day near the death of the man I thought of as my grandfather. We were in the kitchen, my mother and I, and she asked me what I thought happened to a person after they died. “Nothing,” I said. She asked me if I believed in Heaven. I was surprised by the question because I thought Heaven was like Santa Claus: something we talked about as if it were real, but which everyone knew was imaginary. I said, “No, we just stop.” She seemed surprised by this and asked me to clarify a little further, but she didn’t try to persuade me of anything else. I described my sense of death, and she nodded and said “Hmm” respectfully, still looking a bit unresolved.

I often regard that moment as the beginning of my “spiritual journey” because my reaction to her apparent surprise was to be intrigued. No other possibilities had ever occurred to me – in my five full years – but here was my very smart mommy looking like she didn’t agree. This opened up questions for me: What other ideas were out there? What else was there to consider that might change my mind?

I feel lucky – blessed, even – to have been a child in a family environment that encouraged personal seeking. Who would I be today if my parents had been more didactic? In my earliest years, my father was a Unitarian Universalist minister in Massachusetts, and my mother was a Religious Education director at the same church. “Church” was where my parents worked and where I saw friends that I didn’t see during the week. The UU Sunday School was intentionally designed to help children find their own way, and I’m grateful for having had such an upbringing.

2. My parents divorced not long after that conversation, and my mother began studying to become a UU minister, herself. I knew that other people found it unusual (in the 1970s) that a woman would be a minister, but for me it was just more of the same; religion was simply one of those things that my mom liked. Instead of seeking to be installed in a church, however, she took a position in Boston with an organization of UU ministers who all had projects in the city “at large.” She founded a shelter for women who had suffered domestic violence, and that would be her ministerial work – along with guest-preaching around the area, sharing stories about the women of the shelter and the trials of being poor in the city. My definition of “minister” broadened because of her work. While I did my homework in one room, I heard my mother writing and practicing her sermons about the connections between God and justice in the next, and nothing could have been more normal.

3. When I was in junior high, my mother re-married another minister. He had dual fellowship with both the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, and he was a Black man who had grown up in Baltimore. The religious, cultural, and political perspectives he brought into my family life couldn’t help but influence my development as a person, to say the least. He and my mother started an intentionally interracial “storefront” church, and although I chose to spend Sundays with peers in a UU youth group, my home life was full of “liberation theology.” I remember coming home from Drama Club activities one day and finding a note from my mother saying that, if she and my step-father both got arrested at that day’s protests, there was spaghetti in the pantry and frozen spinach in the freezer. In our house – in our somewhat crooked third-floor walk-up apartment, I should say – there was no separation between God and Action, between believing and doing, between righteousness and “doing the right thing.” I didn’t identify as Christian, but with the definition of Christianity that I saw in my mother and step-father, I couldn’t comfortably say that I wasn’t Christian, either. To me it seemed that names of things sometimes confused things that had no names.

4. At one point in high school, my mother was particularly interested in the Gnostic gospels; this meant there were books about it lying around, dog-eared and scribbled in. One day, I cracked open a book and read a little of the gospel of Thomas. A particular line struck me hard. I read it over and over. Then, on my mother’s electric typewriter, I typed it out so that I could put it up on the wall near my pillow. Jesus says,

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

The idea of being “saved” or “destroyed” resonated with me, in part, because I was experiencing my first prolonged bout of serious depression, and I had felt those two possible outcomes pulling at me from their opposite corners. My destruction felt all too possible, even while I was at a loss to explain or understand it. Some days it seemed inevitable because I couldn’t fathom any other way to stop the hurting in my heart but to succumb. But here in these words seemed a solution, of sorts: a possible road to relief. I sensed that what was alluded to was not a small thing, and didn’t apply to a person’s simple actions at any singular moment. What it referred to was a way of being – and one that I could choose for myself or not. The words carried an implication of wisdom yet to be revealed, something that couldn’t be spoken without constraining and disempowering it. What was within me?

5. After high school, I worked in a deli for six months, and then I went to the “coal fields” of West Virginia to volunteer at a work-camp until it came time to start college in September. In a remote area among the hills, my job was to clean dorms, run the 16mm film projector, and otherwise be helpful to the school and church groups that would come and stay for a week to learn about the area and do a local service project. There was group of kids from George School at one point, with whom I immediately hit it off. They told me about Quakerism, and invited me to join them in worship one day, but I declined because it was too unfamiliar (no minister?). I liked them all a lot, but after they were gone, I didn’t think about Quakerism again. I wasn’t even sure at that point if I believed in “God.”

Often, between groups, I was alone at the Center, and on one such day, I watched the evening news in an otherwise empty common area. The lead story was about President Reagan having said something especially inflammatory to the USSR. Worried pundits spoke with more urgency than usual, and the threat of nuclear war, they said, which was never absent in those days, had risen in intensity. I walked back across the open field towards the small dormitory where I stayed, imagining the bombs decimating my beloved home city, and wondering how long it would take for radiation to reach me. When I got to the dorm and went inside, the hallway echoed and I felt the emptiness around me like the weight of water. As soon as I had stepped into my bedroom and clicked the door closed behind me, I started to cry with fear.

I tried to stop, to tell myself it would be okay. I went into the bathroom to rinse my face. But I couldn’t stop crying. I thought of all the lives that would never be lived out; I thought of all the animals dying in agony, I remembered the nervous tone in a reporter’s voice, and I sobbed harder and harder. My sorrow expanded and took over my body. I slumped down onto the bathroom floor, weak in the knees, terrified for my life and the life of my planet. The tears and snot were pouring out of me, and my chest ached with grief – I had never cried like this before. Instinctively, I scooted away from the open air of the bathroom, and curled up between the toilet and the bathtub, where I was more protected. My head began to spin, the panic began to rise – it was almost as if I could hear the whine of the bombs in the air. My heart began to race. And then out loud I said, “Please.”

I didn’t know what I was asking for, exactly; I didn’t know who could be listening. But the word released something. “Please,” I said again, and again, and again until I was crying and begging with all my might. And then suddenly I felt it: like being a lost and frightened child whose beloved parent appears. It was like someone brushed the hair out of my face and said “Shhhh.” My heart slowed down and my crying subsided to sniffles.

Once calmer, I felt something (in my mind, it has always been a giant hand) scoop underneath me and lift me to my feet. Wrapping around me, it pushed me gently to my bed and lay me down. Everything would be okay. I stopped crying. My fear drained away. No bombs tonight – don’t worry. Shhhh. Everything will be okay.

6. Away at college in NYC, I met another freshman who had grown up as a UU. We both felt the lack of religious community at our very intellectual school, and wanted to pursue an adult relationship with some congregation now that we had aged out of youth group range. We found the local UU church in the Yellow Pages and went together to try it out. Afterward, we found that we were similarly disappointed. It had felt stodgy and patriarchal and cold. We knew that we might simply have caught them on a bad day, but we hadn’t liked the theology of the minister’s sermon, which was a problem that didn’t seem likely to be overcome. What’s more, we had to acknowledge that it was different to be an adult, sitting in a pew, receiving a service that was planned by others, than it had been to be in a youth group that was all about listening to each other and exploring ideas together. We admitted that we didn’t want to go back, and shily we confessed to each other that we just hadn’t felt enough spirituality there. She said, “My grandmother’s a Quaker. I went with her a couple of times and liked it. Do you want to try that?” I remembered how much I had liked the George School kids. Sure, I said, why not?

At the start of the meeting, there was silence for a long time. I looked around at the 75 or so faces and saw a sincerity of purpose that impressed me. I saw the individuality of each person, and the choice that each had made to be there in that body with all the others, to come and sit in a room full of people and not speak. I loved the silence and all the possibilities that it held. I remembered what one of the George School kids had said about Quakerism -- how the central belief was the existence of “that of God in everyone,” and that worship was about listening to that part of oneself or to that part of someone else who spoke. After a while, someone stood and gave a message that I’ve long forgotten, but I remember being pleasantly surprised by the way it connected God and social justice, and noticing happily that several people nodded in recognition and appreciation. Then the room went silent again, but somehow the silence seemed thicker. By the end of the meeting, I felt a warmth in my chest and a strangely familiar connection with everyone in the room.

I never, as they say, looked back.

Except, um, like here.