The Price of Authenticity

The man in the picture is the late Br. Jon Bankert, SSF, pictured doing a performance of his story Brother Sun, about St. Francis of Assisi. Jon was a puppeteer before becoming a friar, and continued to use those skills in his work as a Franciscan. His life was cut short by pancreatic cancer in September  2007.

I am going to tell my story in a non-linear way, so I will jump from childhood to a time when I was in my early 50s. I was living in a cabin in Oregon. The four acre setting was achingly beautiful, at the edge of a woods, on the shore of a slough that is part of Coos Bay, bordering a broad wetland. There were beautiful wildflowers -- rhododendron, foxglove, fuchsia, roses, honeysuckle, bleeding hearts, wild ginger, iris, trillium; hundreds of varieties of birds; wild animals like deer and chipmunks and three kinds of squirrels, mountain beaver, otters, raccoons, porcupines, and opossums. Even seals would swim by from time to time. There were five-foot tall sword ferns and huge trees and a tiny creek with a waterfall, the overflow of the natural spring where our water came from. What an incredible gift! I was so touched to be able to live in such a tangibly holy place, I said the dangerous words aloud, "Here I am. Send me."

The phone rang, instantly, as if on cue. It was Br. Jon Bankert calling from New York, inviting me to go on a three week trip to Newfoundland with the Franciscan brothers. They were short on novices that year and decided to take two Third Order Franciscans and a nun along to help out. Among other things, I would be preaching Sunday sermons at three Anglican Parishes. Jon said "You can say anything you want, but whatever you say has to cost you something."

Whatever you say has to cost you something. In other words, you have to say something that exposes you. You have to reveal your wounded self to total strangers. If you are going to be authentic, you must go naked in the world.

Those are words I have never forgotten, and have tried to live into, not only when I spoke in those three parishes, but in all my life. They struck me as a really vital lesson not only for writing an effective sermon, but for living an authentic life. I am also going to use Jon's admonition in writing this blog.

My family was not religious, and in fact my parents were basically atheists. My mother and her sister and their mother and her sister were all telepaths, did some divination with cards, and (the best way I can describe it) they made things happen. My mother would "concentrate".  She had a little curved piece of driftwood which she would hold in her hand and rub with her thumb when she did this, to focus her mind. She called it her "witching wood." And there you have it: I came from a family of many generations of witches.

They weren't Wiccan. Such an organized thing didn't even exist then, and even if it had, they wouldn't have been part of it. They didn't do rituals. They didn't have any connection to gods. What they did, they did themselves, using their own energy and their minds. And it worked.

So I grew up without church or belief system, and yet, by the time I was 7, I had a profound  experience of the numinous that set off a lifetime of searching. As a Facebook friend so eloquently put it about her own searching, I was starving, starving. For God.

And I have been fed many times in my searching, but not at the conventional trough... As one of the friars on that mission trip said to me after I had done my talk during one of our evening parish events in a fishing village, "All of your experience of God has come from outside the church!" And that is pretty much the truth.  I have rarely connected with the presence of deity in a conventional setting at all, though there are some major exceptions: my old parish in San Francisco; the friary chapel at Little Portion, and my synagogue in Nashville.  Except for the synagogue, all of those experiences were not during a religious service.

I have been an Episcopalian, a Catholic, a Jew (I still am Jewish and always will be), I have tried Zen buddhism, Paganism (I am still pagan, and always will be) and I have even gone through periods of profound atheism. God is in all of it. Every single thing, even the atheism. God is in it all because God is the fabric of all of it. Every atom, every quark, is a piece of God.

My lifelong search, then, is not for God at all. It is for connection.



Photo credit: The Storytelling Center NYC

Beresheit

In the beginning...

This is a true story. I was 7 years old. I had no religion. I was coming home from having been out to dinner with my parents, and somewhere between the detached garage and the patio door, I looked up into the night sky, thinking to see the Milky Way. Instead, what I saw was the Cosmos. I saw it all. The size and scope of it. I was stunned, terrified, speechless. I told no one what I had seen and I shivered in fear in my bed that night, thinking I would be crushed by the sheer size of it. How small I was! How tiny the earth was! How insignificant our planet seemed in the vastness of it all. I'm not sure how I slept at all.

The next day I stayed indoors, afraid of the sky, not wanting to be reminded of what waited behind that broad blue curtain. My grandmother finally shooed me outside. I was in the way of her cleaning. A child belonged outside, playing in the sunshine on such a pretty day!

I tiptoed out the door and sat in a spineless heap on the concrete patio, at the edge of the lawn. I settled in beside my grandmother's umbrella clothesline, where I could hang on to the metal support post if I seemed in danger from the Universe. I thought about how tiny we humans were, not even on the scale of ants. Invisible. Smaller even than atoms! Completely insignificant. My grey tomcat kitten came to me and rubbed against me. I picked up a rock, decomposed granite gravel from the driveway, and turned it in my hand, feeling the roughness. I dared not move.

I felt comforted. I felt cradled. I sensed, rather than heard, a voice telling me not to be afraid. The stars, the universe, the earth, my cat, the rocks, the lawn, my grandmother's clothesline, me, all of it, were "pieces of God." All equally important. None insignificant. It was all part of the fabric of God. God was in it all, God's life and essence flowed through it all, so I should never feel scared.

The weight of the entire universe taken off my 7 year old shoulders, I felt incredibly happy. So relieved! The sky would never scare me again. I was not sure what God was, but I knew God was something good. Alive. Warm. Moving. Flowing. Inside everything. Vast beyond comprehension.

My epiphany that sunny summer day in 1945 has informed my life's desire: to discover who/what this God is who permeates all things, including me, yet counts the rocks and a small gray tomcat as equal to the stars, and comforts me when I am a frightened child.  I have searched religions and my own heart, have read and studied, practiced and meditated, and will continue to do so.  This blog is my attempt to put what I have learned and am learning into words. It is a step out into the Cosmic unknown.

I am feeling very blessed.

Yom Kippur 5774

Image: Orion