The forbidden "promised land"

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Our street might as well have been the River Jordan.

In my small town growing up our church anchored one corner, and another church the corner opposite, both large, dominant brick structures. Nothing about this arrangement seemed strange to me since it was all I knew.

Our house was the parsonage for the Baptist church, with a porch the size of a ship’s stateroom. When rainstorms battered the neighborhood and filled the air with the scent of wet dust and worms, preventing us from riding bikes, swirling hula hoops or roller skating, we sat on the porch furniture inherited from Grandma Olive and happily witnessed the deluge. We felt the spray on our skin as if we were skimming the surface of the Atlantic from the deck of a vessel cutting through the waves.

Rain flooded the street’s gutters between our house and church and the house and church across the street: the Methodist church and parsonage. Occasionally true to our Baptist belief that immersion is better than sprinkling, and that our feet needed washing, we jumped in and splashed in the rushing water.

But never did we venture into the Methodist church. I played Combat with the neighborhood kids all around its periphery, hiding in the alcoves, which were perfectly suited for our play as American soldiers against German Nazis. This was a couple of decades after the end of WWII, but we had a TV show that all of us loved called “Combat” with Vic Morrow as Sgt. Saunders and Rick Jason as Lt. Hanley. In my memory these soldiers are calm and peaceful purveyors of the gospel of goodness and light.

Besides being the setting for the enemy we searched and shot to peaces in combat play, the Methodist church was where they conducted dances in the basement. Now dancing was forbidden in our Baptist circles as sinful (in spite of scriptures about David dancing before the Lord). After football games I stood in the high school gym under the sparkling ball and watched my friends dance. I never went to the junior-senior prom, though my football player boyfriend asked me. I didn’t even consider consulting my parents, though I longed to go. We must be separate, holy.

Surely the God of the Methodists was more understanding and fun-loving than the God of the Baptists. Dances in a church basement must be safe, wholesome and bright, not tawdry like the close body-pressing in dark, smoky jazz clubs of my mother’s pre-Christian past. There must be a world where dancing (and card playing and saxophones and sex) was a natural and delicious response to the human urge to move, to feel the body’s presence in the air, like the fragrance a rose emits naturally, with no effort, and without any particular end. I had no way to understand the possible harmony of God and dance.

After my parents died my sister and I crossed the Atlantic for two weeks in Paris in 1997. One night we wound down a stair into a subterranean jazz club near the Luxembourg, drank gin and tonics, and listened to an American singer croon standards with a soft jazz ensemble. We were adults now with no parents to protect us from unholy endeavors. Among the tables and chairs with barely enough room for bodies there was no room for a dance floor, but I assure you, we were dancing, in paradise. God was everywhere.

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Poem: Church

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I haven't said much here about my journey away from religion. I'd rather not get into it much on the blog, as it's a conversation best done in person, where the back and forth of body language, facial expressions and words are fuller and quicker. But for whatever reason, today I feel the urge to share a poem I wrote in 1995 at the nadir of my journey away from church. Of course by posting it, I am opening a window for conversation, and I'm OK with that, albeit somewhat tentatively. (I find it interesting how rules about not embarking in conversation on topics like religion and politics seem to have slipped aside to some degree in our blogs.) Maybe time will tell if I am courageous, or merely foolish, to post this.

It's important that you know that I hold nothing against church going in general. I know that there are many good reasons for it, including spiritual bliss, which I've experienced. But I like you knowing something of my own lifelong process of looking for spirituality beneath religion. This is a quest I have felt since my earliest memories, even when my own father preached sermons from a Baptist pulpit. My father and mother were some of the most beautiful Christians I have known, with deep felt and earnest beliefs, often taking them in directions starkly contradicting the convictions of people in their own parish. I admire them for this strength, sincerity and zeal. That I was wounded somewhat in the unfolding of their lives is perhaps ultimately more about me than them. I understand also that some of the very symbols that cause me distress, are deeply and joyfully meaningful to others. I hope my poem doesn't hurt or offend anyone, as that is the last thing I want.

Lest you worry when reading the poem that there was any abuse toward me personally or from my parents toward anyone, there was none. While the poem is very personal in a spiritual sense of woundedness, it is more general in the literal.

Anyway, here is one expression of my spiritual journey. I wonder what it will mean, to you. While I love some churches and cathedrals — sitting in them, wandering in them, looking at icons, smelling burning candles, feeling the cool quiet when it is hot and boisterous outside, praying, listening to silence or to music — Church — for me — is another thing altogether.

I welcome your responses, to the poem, or to my opening remarks.

Church

I saw a red window.

Through it the sun in swords.
When light attacks
the skin of pews,
dissolves the frames of fifty strong
sets of arms
and wrought iron lights puncture
and nail supplications
along ceiling beams,

then I know that there are secrets
that wait like wine in cups,
undergarments stained,
wads of bandages under the altar,
some plotting of ambushes
in the marbled veins of windows,
boxes of medals and strategies hidden
in baptistry dust,
the old anticipation of hymns
lined up in battalions,
of the coming,
the coming of a great army,
a mighty platoon dragging all the prohibitions
like sediment, bottles, broken machinery,
parachutes, collapsed
benevolences.

I shoulder this window,
jagged, perforating my skin,
a thorny cross,
a house with wounded furnishings,
a drape of walls hanging
like rags from a carcass,
a make-shift hospital vacated
after the troops have lost
their legs, their arms.

It is only a window,
a sanctuary,
a sifter of days.

1995

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the oak book case

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If a person could be represented by an inanimate object, my father would be this oak book case. These stacked barristers that encase sets of Hemingway, George MacDonald, the Brontës, Miss Austen, Alcott, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and British mysteries, among others, in the corner of our family room, once held Bible concordances the size of shoe boxes and theology books on every Christian theme known to the Church, in my father's upstairs library: Gray & Adams' commentaries, Encyclopedias of Religious Knowledge and missionary histories, as well as his impressive hymnbook collection. The house was long and narrow, the upstairs hall reaching from front to back. Besides four ceiling-high stacks of barristers in two studies that book-ended the long hall, one in the front end's huge bay window where one of his two roll-top desks (without the roll-tops) window-faced Lincoln Street, and the other in the small bedroom at the back end of the long hall with a tiny balcony escape adjacent to the other desk without its roll-top, he had also built neat shelves lining one wall of the entire hallway floor to ceiling. Every hair's breadth of space on these shelves was perfectly fitted with books by theme, in various states of wear, each spine religiously aligned with the shelf's edge.

It wasn't only the books he loved with their millions of characters in thousands of pages that made up the tools of his trade communicating the word of God. He loved their shelves and book cases, too. He loved wood. He loved boards. My dad was gone before we moved to this farm, but we lived on another small farm for a short while twenty years ago, and my brother Bennett caught him on video walking into the soft filtered afternoon light of the tall barn as if into a sanctuary, then with his beautiful carpenter's hand (yes, like Jesus), stroking the 100-year-old boards as wide as the tree they were rough sawn from, a look of ecstasy on his face and a deep moan from his chest, while rays of light through the boards wrapped him in a celestial aura. Really. Just like that.

My mother came from fine mahogany stock, but Dad was of oak. Simple, steady, slow growing, common in those days (he told us he paid just $4 per oak barrister section in the 1940s), and strong. He lived an inner life with the windowed door closed six days a week, and on the 7th, the door opened, and he spoke. I remember him strolling the long hall on Saturday nights, rehearsing his Sunday sermon in quiet whispers, while I was downstairs watching a movie on television, occasionally hearing the floor creak under his pacing feet. He gathered inspiration from his forest of oak shelves and leaves of bookish testimony and carved an unaffected piece of clear prose.

At my family's cottage we have a large black and white etching Dad bought somewhere, some time of a teenage Jesus standing in his father Joseph's carpenter studio. There is light flooding in from the window, sawdust and pale curled shavings like fallen leaves on the floor, a plane, chisel and mallet covered in wood pollen, left hurriedly on the work table as if Joseph had just run to help his neighbor pry a sheep loose from stones. This young boyish Jesus contemplates the work of his earthly father, and the heavenly light from another Father pours in the window, melding in a marquetry of dark and light, air and wood, sun and earth. Infusion of the divine in the human and humble was my father's joy.

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Today is my mom's birthday

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. . . and Father's Day was Sunday, so let me remember them with a photo of the three of us. I think it was the year I turned three, making it 1959. I am the youngest of their eight children. Being forty when I was born they were old enough to be my grandparents. In 8th grade that embarrassed me when my classmates' parents seemed half their age at our school open house. Then again, when I was in 8th grade nearly everything embarrassed me.

One thing that strikes me about the photo is our three distinct facial expressions.

My father's smile seems stagy - the pastor, the preacher, the performer who had to please everyone and was ever diplomatic. He is the only one looking away from the camera. Maybe a parishioner caught his eye, one of the poor he cared for so well. Or maybe one of my brothers was acting up. He had just preached his weekly sermon and was no doubt exhausted. (I recall him practicing his sermons Saturday nights pacing the long upstairs hall.) He slept Sunday afternoons, preached again Sunday night and rested on Mondays. You can't tell of course, but his hair was red, and his voice Virginian - soft, lilting Southern with grace. I love the way he said, Mrs. Culpepper: "Mrs. Culpeppah."

Believe it or not, I remember feeling grumpy on this Sunday, after church. No doubt I needed a nap after playing hard in the nursery. I was normally a happy child, but I distinctly remember willfully not smiling for the camera even though I was being urged to. And I've remembered it because it got embedded in my Christian-guilt-ridden brain's memory. Nowadays I joke that I felt grumpy because I had to go to church at all - let alone three times a week. I wonder if my photographer brother Bennett shot this with a Kodak Instamatic when he was about 11. Or it might have been shot by a church member. I do know that ivy was growing on the side of our brick church in Grand Ledge, and this seems like a special occasion - maybe Easter? But where are my siblings?

My mother's smile is a moonbeam -- look how beautiful she is in her goofy '50s perm and nerdy glasses. I saw a family movie of her when she was 12 - called "Bobbie" then, and she flashed this same triumphant smile under a straight shiny bob - as she bounced like a puppy around her staid parents. She leaped into being Best Athlete in all her schools, including college - playing field hockey, tennis, swimming and basketball. In this image of her I see a woman who is spent after playing piano for the church service, leading the choir, being the perfect pastor's wife and mother of eight, on her way home to put dinner for ten on the table. I remember having either roast beef or roast leg of lamb on Sundays, and peppermint candy ice cream with real chunks of hard candy for dessert with every place set perfectly (by us kids) with the fork, knife, spoon and napkin in their proper positions. But that was only until I spilt my milk - invariably - and everyone grabbed their tableware and placemats out of the white river, letting it drip between the table leaves. Then I ran from the table bawling with embarrassment and humiliation. Is it any wonder I am only now becoming a confident person? (Thank you, friends and family.)

My father died in 1995 at age 78, Mom died in 1997 when she was almost 80. Bennett the photographer died the year in between at age 47. Today Mom would be 93, and Sunday Bennett would be 61. I feel them acutely, as if birthday balloons are bobbing inside, urging me to smile.

Easter

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In the Christian tradition, Easter Sunday is a happy celebration, when life triumphs over death. Winter gives way to spring. Baby animals are born. Christ rises from the dead. Yet as the calendar brings Easter around, I mostly remember the death part from church days, based on Christ’s words, Take up your cross and follow me.

A couple weeks ago my friend Gayla showed me a book she is reading titled Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire “offering a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, from its first centuries to the present day, asking how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, and what changes in society and theology marked that evolution.” What? In the first centuries Christianity focused on beauty? One part of the book explains that before a certain century (can't recall which) there is no art to be found depicting the crucifixion.

Thankfully I didn't grow up during the Inquisition or anything remotely close to it, but there was the cross before us every day. Daily choices between this and that gave opportunity to sacrifice desires and find instead a chance to serve God, people or a greater cause. In other words: death to self. Or: What I feel doesn't matter as much as what God wants. Understandably the result was that feelings and desires became the enemy.

As a person who scored 50 to zero in the feelings vs. thinking section of the Myers Briggs personality profile - that's 50 on the feelings end of the spectrum and -0- on the thinking end (no comments from the peanut gallery, please) - this teaching that my feelings didn't count for much was painful. I never quite got the hang of it. For instance, I couldn't run on the track team when the coach invited me, because track practice was on Wednesday nights, and we had prayer meeting at church that night. As a preacher's kid, you have to be in church whenever the doors are open, as an example to the congregation. Eventually, questions about the whole ball of wax led me away from church, back to what I had always felt down deep, even as a child: that I wanted the roots of spirituality, the cosmic “laws” undergirding all of Nature, not the human rules interpreted from sacred texts in any one religion, and often used to control people's behavior.

As beautiful as religious celebrations can be, when you stop following, it’s tempting to throw them out because they no longer bear the same weight of meaning, or because they have been co-opted by commercial enterprise to sell the next stack of goods in grocery store aisles. This Easter, I am trying to tune out old mental tapes and mantras and re-discover the essence at the heart of this holiday that reflects the cycles and laws of Nature. Some symbols remain - eggs, a sunrise, a baby chick - because they are Nature's markers for release from the dark of winter and death. Do I sound Pagan and goddess-y? Well maybe you do too if you color Easter eggs or fill baskets with chocolate eggs for your kids, or even use the word “Easter” since that word came from the Pagan goddess of birth and renewal “Oester” (or the Babylonian “Ishtar”). Check out this site about Easter, eggs and bunnies and their Pagan roots.

The point of Easter is: It's a new day. Live it fresh, live it alive, live it in harmony. No enemies allowed.

Paradise, and Hell: lost

With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

. . . Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

John Milton was born 400 years ago today. When Milton began writing Paradise Lost in 1658 at age 50, he had been blind four years. Then for the next five years he recited the entire work to a series of assistants who wrote it down for 40 minutes every morning. Apparently he became quite annoyed if they were late. "Milton was said to have grumbled around the house, 'I want to be milked. I want to be milked.'" (Read or hear more surprising facts about Milton in National Public Radio's little piece played Sunday.)

I never read Paradise Lost, or any other Milton, but as a kid I looked through my dad's oversized 1865 copy of the book again and again, at the illustrations of Gustave Doré shown here. (Another book I got, lucky me.) Embedded in my brain are pen drawings of Lucifer - Prince of Heaven - falling from grace (example above), and of Adam and Eve being cast out of Paradise (example below). I remember feeling awed by the beauty and depth of the drawings while at the same time being stumped that God would - or could - be threatened by anyone and have to cast them out. Yet the power of the drawings pointed at the power of God, and somewhere in those batlike wings of Lucifer and in the soft vulnerability of Eve, the story did its job. I was a very obedient girl.

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon.

Hell lost

If you are interested and have time, there was a related (in my mind) story that was also on NPR earlier, on Ira Glass's "This American Life," about Carlton Pearson, pentecostal pastor of 5,000 who fell from grace when he declared that God told him there is no Hell. When he began preaching that new theology, he was of course declared a heretic by the likes of Oral Roberts, Billy Graham and the whole evangelical community, and his congregation dwindled to 200. Makes me wonder which is more costly: Loss of Paradise, or loss of Hell?

That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

x o x o x o x o x o x
Today's ornaments:

Peter just arrived back from his band's cruise ship gig in the Caribbean, bringing these stunning etched gourd ornaments - a pair of owls for me, a hummingbird for Don - crafted by an artisan in Bonaire, a Dutch island colony still quite untouched. They reminded Pete of the gourds his dad grows on the farm. It's time to do some etching!

welcome the wild

This is me. Not very wild looking am I. But it's not just my fault. I'm sure it's partly my environment that helped make me this way. There are certain restraints on preacher's kids. And well, such kids either comply or break free. Example: I never went to high school prom, or any other dances for that matter, much to the consternation of my football player boyfriend one year: "What! No prom??" I offered that he should take one of his friends who happened to be female, which he did. Magnanimous of me, no? To be perfectly truthful, I went to dances in the high school cafeteria a few times after football games, but I stood in the darkness at the back, away from the rotating disco ball above the dance floor and watched, smelling the weed on my friend Jeff's breath as we talked. Jeff didn't dance because, I don't know, maybe because he was high, too shy or too cool. We in my family weren't supposed to dance as it was too worldly. So, I've got Baptist feet. (The Methodists, in their church across the street from ours, danced right in their basement!) Happily, dancing commenced when my nieces and nephews started getting married. We Baptist-footed siblings have tried our best to move and not embarrass our children too badly at those weddings. I don't think we've succeeded at that, but we sure have a good time. (Sadly, this came after my parents had left the earth. I think they would have enjoyed watching us, and maybe dancing themselves too, in another life/world.)

I've been learning to put my arms around chaos for a while now (yay Beato! yay chaotic oscilations! yay Bishop!), to be more uninhibited, reckless. Since moving to the farm, I feel myself aligning more with the cycles of Nature. But outwardly, I don't seem to veer much from disciplined order and self-control. What's up with that? It's time to start some Druidic jumping over bonfires!

looking back

You can click on some of these photos to enlarge them. I don't know why they all don't enlarge.

Forgive me, this is a long post. It’s mostly for me, a sort of documentation of some childhood memories, so if you skip around, I won’t feel bad.

Yesterday I drove 40 minutes to the small town (pop. 7,813) where I lived from the day I was born until I left for college, except for 5th grade when we moved up north and lived in a depressed and depressing town.

This first shot is of the Baptist church my father pastored for 13 years. The long low annex wing at the right was built on the spot where the first house I lived in stood before being torn down for the building. Years before it was torn down, we had moved into the tan house at the left, which was white back then. We needed more room for the ten of us, and the church bought the house from the rich attorney’s family who lived there.

Do you see how our life even visually was dominated by church?

These are pictures of that second house, where I lived from age 4, I believe, until I was 10.

These steps are the same as in this old photo of me and my siblings (c. 1960?), below. The little one in front is me - yes, the one with the bad perm. But despite the sorry hair, I’d like to bring your attention to the stylin’ matching dress and sweater ensemble. And oh yes, those were velvet shoes. I don’t recall if these are the ones I cut the straps off to make them more stylin as “slip-ons.” Behind me are my three brothers, John, Jim and Bennett, then my three sisters Nancy, Ginnie and Susan, then the oldest bro Nelson. Nelson is 14 years older than I. He left for college when I was 4.

This porch was the center of many family memories. I remember the thrill of watching and listening to many thunderstorms sitting on this porch.

Ours wasn’t the only church within a stone’s throw. Across the street was the Methodist church where they had all the fun. They had dances in the basement. I couldn’t dance. I was a Baptist. Oh, I think they drank alcohol too.

When we moved back to Grand Ledge from the depressing town up north just before my 12th birthday, we moved into the house across the street, photo below. Yes, almost my whole life from age 0-18 I lived in three houses within one small town’s block.

I had spent age 6-10 playing with the boy who lived in this house, Jimmy, who was two years older than me. We used to peer through the French doors into the beautiful living room that had flowered carpet where we couldn’t play. We watched TV in his den, mostly I remember Mighty Mouse, The Lone Ranger and The Three Stooges. When my father bought the house, it was the best day of my life. Did I say it was my 12th birthday? I painted a paint-by-number birthday gift on the floor of my father’s study before any furniture was moved in. Later, in high school, I lived on the 3rd floor with my Thai sister DeeDee. Oh, and besides the eight of us kids, we had a couple dozen foreign students live with us over the years.

These next photos are the landmarks of my little circuit growing up. All these landmarks were within 5 blocks of my house.

1. Fortino’s Party Store (for candy); oh, and see the SUN Theater? We Baptists couldn’t go to movies either. I never stepped foot ONCE in this theater, within one and a half blocks of my house.

2. The dime store (for candy and Barbie doll clothes, the latter looking mostly); it’s now a flower shop.

3. The ice cream store across the bridge (Lickety Split now, used to be Tastee Freez). (There’s a story about this picture, hold on.)

4. The Public Library; I adored sitting here with books, and also checking them out.

5. The US Post Office; my parents were always asking me to mail letters and bills. I never minded the errands that took me to the appealing, cool lobby of the Post Office where the old letter boxes still line the wall, and the 1940 painting by James Calder graces one end.

Ok, the story about the ice cream store and that bridge railing:

My mom sent me to the Post Office to mail two letters she’d spent hours writing. You know, back before computers. She had beautiful, consistent handwriting, it could have been its own font. Anyway, she sent me on this errand to mail her important letters, and I decided to take a detour to the ice cream store first. Now I don’t remember if it was before or after I had my ice cream cone, but I set those important letters down on the bridge railing there (it used to be cement) for some unremembered reason. Please imagine a lovely little breath of wind kissing those letters and tipping them, in slow motion, over the edge, and I, horrified, watching them float down the wind current into the Grand River below, then drift away.

Yes, I told her. And I didn’t die.

Two more stops. Are you still with me?

This is my elementary school. I was a good student and a good girl, a little too good if you ask me. (Like, why did I tell my mother about the letters?) But my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Smith did slap my mouth once for mouthing off. I guess I learned after that. Oh, I saw her yesterday in the café where I ate lunch, my camera around my neck. I decided not to say “hi” again, since I’ve talked with her several times as an adult seeing her around town. I don’t want to keep making her feel bad that she’s old enough to have a student talking to her that she had 46 years ago (I don't know if she'd remember the slap). She looks pretty good, I’ll tell you. She must be at least 70 but she looks 60.

One last stop, the cemetery, everyone’s last stop I guess.

My parents are buried under this stone. And, another short circuit, see our family doctor who delivered me, Fred Garlock is buried just behind them. He was a chain smoker. My dad drew the original pen and ink “hart” (another name for a deer; our name was Hart) for his personal book plate, and then the drawing was used for the headstone design. Dad died in 1995, Mom in 1997.

Oh, and that sweet third brother standing on the steps, Bennett? He died suddenly of arterosclerosis in 1996, the year between their deaths, the day we were all cleaning out our mom's house (she was living in an Alzheimer's home). His high school graduating class of 1968 planted this ornamental tree in his memory by the Opera House over by the river. We planted his ashes under some pine trees at our family cottage.

Thanks if you read this whole thing. It was the first time I’ve done this, gone back and retraced my childhood steps intentionally, probably because I live so close now and take it for granted.

A native of my home town is featured in the new hit movie “Juno” (review at Rotten Tomatoes here ). Paul Baribeau’s name is mentioned, he inspired a verse in Kimya Dawson’s song “Tire Swing” and he even sings a line in the song, which plays after the movie’s beginning credits.

Say “good-bye” to Grand Ledge, looking south across the bridge.