On Traveling Mercies

This excerpt of a longer piece was written a few months ago, coming back from a conference, stuck in an airport for several hours, when I took refuge in the airport chapel and found a strange, lonely solace there.  Today I share this little essay in all its unfinished glory because it manages to say something more gracefully than I can manage at the moment, in the middle of congregational challenge.

If you can give yourself to something, then you should. For me, I try to give myself unselfishly to the duty of finding the scattered bits of grace and meaning in a world where they can be rarities.  I ran across this bit from a poem that Sharon Olds wrote, that I have loved for a very long time, and it made me remember what I do, and why:

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
--Sharon Olds

Here I am in an airport chapel in Tulsa, 221 miles from home, sitting by a fake tree and and a plug-in air freshener that smells just awful.  Planes are taking off and landing, a carousel in my line of vision rounds endlessly, and people come and go like clockwork.  The carpet is stained and the exit signs glow garishly.  This place is so far from holy, but it’s better than nothing.  

Someone has taken the time to bring in holy books from several of the world’s religions, and there are two beautiful, worn prayer rugs.  And the decal on the door, of a person on his or her knees, praying, is a little surreal, in a good way.  I don’t remember seeing that on a mass-produced decal before. So this place is what it is, an airport chapel in Tulsa, a sacred space carved out of the modern madness for those between point A and point B who need a place to pray or just rest, any hour of the day or night.  It’s the one place I’ve been in an airport where the loudspeaker voices-- warning of heightened risk levels and the extreme importance of minding your bags lest ill-doers do ill to them in an unattended state—don’t reach.  The respite from the repetitive dire edicts is enough to make it sacred to me, but the books and the rugs and the dim lights are a traveling mercy beyond that, me stuck in negative space, waiting for a ride home.  

The chapel seems to exist in its own shadow, dimmer than the spaces around it. It’s an anachronism, a vestigial organ, a ghost, fading into the million things around it that fit better in this airport, this algorithm, this age.   Mostly, I don’t think folks see it, or know what to do with it in their minds when their eyes roll across that strange word, chapel, amidst all the chrome and noise.  Except when, like me, they need a traveling mercy.

Like a good DRE, I took the time to put all these books together on one shelf, so they could talk.

I’ve been at a kind of continuing education seminar for the past three days, in Glen Rose, Texas.  Folks from Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships in the Southwestern district of UUs do a Fall Conference there every year, and it was my fourth time to attend.  If you work in religious education, as I do, it won’t surprise you to learn that it is a grueling kind of job, requiring you to bring your best self to the table every single day, even— especially—when there is conflict between or among members of the congregation, staff, or clergy.  Even when there is political drama in leadership. Even in transition and during times of great change.  Even when you aren’t being paid for the hours you work, which is most of the time, and even— especially—when you wonder why you are there, amidst all that anxiety and struggle and doubt.   

Bringing love and compassion and delight and reverence to children’s lives is easy.  Showing up for all the rest of it can be daunting.  Scarce resources (time, talent, and treasure seem to always be in short supply in a cooperative religious education program), competing interests and priorities, and difficult relationships seem to be in the very DNA of church work, though we might think it shouldn’t be that way.  And when your minister is also your boss, and there’s no objective person to whom you can turn to vent, or ask for help in untangling all the threads, you can add a deep sense of isolation, and sometimes outright despair, to that 

mix.  

That’s what makes these trips I take to little Glen Rose Texas so important.  I go to get healed.  They are like an old-fashioned revival, if you are willing to accept that they save my soul from damnation on a regular basis, which in religious education programming work seems to be required about once a year.   This time, I almost waited too long.  Far enough away from the challenges of the very real community of my church, I can see the patterns emerge, the big picture coalesces, and I remember that human communities do the same things over and over again, in our attempts to make meaning. It is like I am in a plane, high enough to lose detail but gain perspective on the landscape. I see a story, not just a headache.  A story, I can manage.  A little space and time and distance, and serendipity shows up...a traveling mercy.

On Getting Religion

I spent my life looking sideways at religious people.  Feeling superior, condescending, and flat out cooler than them.  I walked out of my childhood church, a Free Will Baptist one (pause for laugh line--yes, I did perceive the irony, even then) when I was 13 years old, and didn't step back in to one for about 30 years.  I started to write "save for the occasional wedding", but then, racking my brain to think when this caveat applied, I'm coming up blank. I don't even know anyone who got married in a church.  That's how disconnected my life was from religion. Huston Smith or Joseph Campbell was the closest thing to a religious teacher I had for many, many years. The closest I got, truthfully, to a community of faith may have been leading La Leche League meetings for a decade in various liberal churches on weekdays.  Or the B'hai kids I spent time with at some Rainbow Gatherings?  I'm reaching here.  I got shed of religion as soon as my mom and dad stopped taking me to church, is the truth of it.  I eventually went on to get a degree in sociology, the field (along with art history) noted by researchers as the one most likely to be tenanted by extremely liberal people, and the least religious.

The children's "altar" at UUFF

I was part of a tight knit friend group of hard core humanists and atheists from college on.  We stayed close, and formed a kind of diaspora, moving individually or by family, from Central Arkansas to Northwest Arkansas in our late 20s.  When one of our smarty-pants tribe returned to his religious faith, long rejected, we were aghast.  Was he crazy?  Scared? Self-destructive?  Depressed?  Any hypothesis re: his broken-ness was easier to swallow than the one in front of our decidedly upward-turned noses:  he wanted religion in his life again.  We were disoriented.  We were clueless.  We could not compute.  What in the world was he thinking?

And then I had my second child.  She actually believed me when I told her she was named after the most potent and powerful tree for Pagans, and asked me why they believed in a tree.  And why they believed the first woman was made from "her tree".   She asked me about the goddess.  She wanted to go to a pagan ceremony. She wanted to pray to the huge blacksnake in our garden.  She wanted to give it offerings in hopes that my upcoming homebirth would be a good one.  She talked her doctor's ear off at her physical exam needed to enter kindergarten, going on and on about how maybe he didn't KNOW it, but the world's religions used to be matriarchal, focused on mother earth, and that men actually took those religions over and convinced people that a male sky god was the true giver of life.  "Imagine that!" she fiercely told him.  "That's unpossible!  A man can't nurse a baby!"  I was relieved when he told he that he too struggled with a belief in god, but overwhelmed with the dawning realization that *my little girl was religious*.  She had heard my anthropologically-based feminist-focused talk with my friends and with her, and in her it had grown, unbidden, from a political message to a spiritual one. 

A Winter Solstice ceremony at our church

Huh.  Didn't see that one coming.  Now what? 

I checked out the website of the local UU church.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my town had a religious offering that could meet her needs to talk about her burgeoning, "volunteer" faith development, without alienating her (as her peers at our local country public school were).  "Mama", she said, as she got off the bus one day, "they said I'm going to hell for not being a Christian.  What is sin?"  I was able to tell her that people believe lots of different things, and that we were going to seek out some folks who had different views about diversity of belief.  

Then I found out about OWL (Our Whole Lives), offered at the UU Fellowship.  I wanted desperately for my teen to get comprehensive, fact-based, sexuality education that highlighted both the sacred aspects of sex and the trust, responsibility, and respect that are core components of healthy sexuality.

And then I found myself in a pew.  My baby was in a sling, my older kids were in class, and I was just killing time, giving the sermon a chance, but holding my non-seeking nature as close as a lover.  On that day, the reading was from Wendell Berry, my favorite poet.  The hymn was about how UUs were a gentle, angry people--a combination I found surprising, poetic and stirring.  And while I have forgotten the message, I know that I was shocked to find tears welling up during the sermon.  I looked over at my partner and saw he was having the same experience.  A religious experience?  We walked out that September day into a kind of Spring.  Something had come together--the right combination of words and silence and teaching and listening and poetry and virtue and hope--and it felt like I was simmering, germinating, stirred up.

Inside the 2nd-6th grade class on Sunday morning--so much to learn

That was three and a half years ago.  Soon after that first Sunday, I saw a classified listing for a director of religious education in the local newspaper, and noted it was for "my" new church.  That seemed almost fated.  My background was in the direction of an education program at a children's museum, with lots of volunteer work with mothers and babies and teaching college kids how to write (and understand statistics) thrown in for good measure.  I thought, if I can be honest about my hubris here for a moment, that they would be lucky to hire me.

I had no idea how I would be changed.  How lucky I would feel to be engaged deeply in the work of religious community.  How the expansion of my spirit that began that day wouldn't change my belief in the existence of God (still a radical agnostic: I don't believe humans have the capacity to know) or the nature of our human imperative (I still think it is up to us to make the world better), but would change my experience of my own humanity, and the responsibility I have to constantly reach deeper, work harder, tread more carefully, love more.

Teaching Religious Education classes brings out your best

There is something about showing up every Sunday and making nice, even with the folks you disagree bitterly with over some facet of church leadership, that makes the forest visible, when our egos try to drag us back to examining one square inch of moldy bark on one tree.  Something about willingly diving into the "deep end of the pool", as my previous minister/boss called it, and submerging our individual egos and desires in the waters of religious community.  Something about being willing, as a human, to reflect consistently on whether one's actions and behaviors--even one's thoughts--are in line with the clear principles of one's faith.  And allowing others to have expectations of us--that we will live in accordance with our shared values.  That we covenant together to do just that.

I see the expressions on my non-religious friends' faces when I go off like this.   They are either wondering if I am crazy or sick, and if the latter, whether they can catch it by standing too close.  And though it pains me somewhat to say it, I do have the zealotry of the recently converted.  But we live in a culture that doesn't ask much of us.  Live and let live, you say tomato, I say to-mahto, to each his own.  I believe, however, that humans have a deep nascent need to be loved, to be called upon to serve, and to be needed.  I think the more we put ourselves in situations where that occurs, the better we will become.  The more fulfilled we will feel.  The more good we will do.

God speaks, in the Passover Play.  I can believe in God if it's a child.

I read that lung capacity increases the more you work at it.  That holding your breath, deep breathing, and sustained "breath work" can build one's ability to harness the power of oxygen in a way that can fuel an athletic or aerobic pursuit, like playing an instrument, or swimming.  I think faith works the same way.  We are all born with a religious perspective on the world--asking big questions, seekers of belief, trusting something larger than ourselves.  That diminishes as we grow, unless we work at it.  If we seek communities of faith, if we make acting in line with our shared, unifying values a sacred, daily practice, if we allow ourselves to be called into the service of a greater good, we are getting religion.  And, surprise,we are giving it, too.