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
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