Now
I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And
if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.
“I haven’t seen Aunt Bobbi for years”, Grandma
Ruth enthused, clasping her hands together and rocking her round bulk back and
forth. In her red and black polka-dot
dress she reminded me of a lady-bug. I had just been mentally reciting “…your
house is on fire and your children might burn…” when Grandma interrupted my
train of thought.
“You’ve
never met her, have you?” asked Grandma Ruth. She bent down to our level with
her open smile, her rows of perfect teeth marred only by one silver tooth, then
reached out to wrap both my older brother James and I in her bountiful, squishy
hug.
We
shook our heads, and when I started fidgeting with my white straw hat Grandma
reached out and held it firmly on my head scrunching down the unnatural chocolate-brown
curls I hated, and which Mother had painstakingly permed into my hair. I was
glad for Grandma’s attention and leaned into her hug.
I
was five when my parents and Grandmother dressed us kids in our Sunday-best to
take us to meet my Great-Aunt Bobbi at a revival.
“Ah,
Mom, I don’t want to do that,” Daddy whined.
He never whined to my mother but he did whine to his mother. It was just like he was a little kid when he
was around her.
“When
did you last see your Aunt Bobbi?” Grandma asked. She needed Daddy to drive her to the service;
and if Daddy went where he didn’t want to go, then Mother and all us kids had
to be dragged along as well.
Revival
was not a word we understood. Charismatic revivals spread like a “second
Pentecost”, a descending of the Holy
Spirit, across the country in the early 1900’s, but had winded down by the second
half of the century into an onerous set of conventions and consumerism
mimicking a sense of stability. I may
not have been excited for a revival,
but I was pleased we were getting out of our claustrophobic house where Mother
was dead-set on nagging us all into cleanliness and order and a whole lot of don’t touch that, and go get the paddle.
“Don’t
play with your hat. It’s so pretty. God likes pretty girls” Grandma said.
Even
when chiding her voice had a rhythm like play and never failed to sooth me. She’d
never make me go grab the paddle.
I
had a sense of God, having prayed every night the Lord’s prayer I learned at
the Lutheran Sunday School. It was clear that God was going to zap me to heaven
should I die, wherever, whatever heaven was.
I never considered being pretty, nor why god would care about that. Mother
had always made sure we were presentable
before she dropped us off at church; and by presentable she meant bathed and
with neatly mended clothes, socks pulled up even if the elastic had broken, and
hands covered in white, cloth gloves, a small white vinyl clutch to hold our
weekly dime offering. A little lady, certainly, who didn’t scrape her knees or
get mud on her clothes like little ragamuffin, poor kids; god forbid we look poor, but pretty? If I wasn’t pretty would God throw me in the
lake of fire? Was God as fickle as Daddy?
Seven
of us crammed into the Desoto and tried not to squirm as Daddy drove across
Seattle swearing every now and then when he took a wrong turn or got stuck
behind a slow moving car. Sometimes I
tried forming his for-adult-men-only words, jack-ass,
shit, goddamn, but after a couple of tongue washes with soap knew better than
to ever let them explode out of my little-lady mouth.
We
finally arrived; not at a church which is the only place I’d seen grown-ups
pray, but at a fairground with a sprawling, parking lot. The service was held in a canvas tent, erected
on the broken concrete parking lot. Hay
was strewn on the floor, and I bent down to pull it out of my socks where it
had caught and stung like small bees.
“Stop
that” Grandma reprimanded me. “Good
girls don’t primp in public.”
I
wanted to be a good girl in Grandma’s eyes, so I left the hay in my socks until
I could wheedle them out without her seeing. Being good meant having red, raw
ankles hidden underneath their socks.
Benches and folding chairs were placed in
pew-like rows with large aisles which I later found out was for new believers
to be called upon to walk to the front. When
we arrived mid-service it was such a cacophony of overwhelming noise. I held onto the side seam of Daddy’s trousers,
trying to keep up with him as he hustled us into a bench close to the front.
“Let
go of me!” Daddy exclaimed, swatting at my hand. “Jesus Christ!”
I
was always in the way, or at least that is what he’d told me. I felt small as an
ugly potato bug and was glad when Grandma let out a small gasp and a tsk, then pulled
me back to her side until we got to a bench empty enough for all of us to
squeeze in.
I
looked around, astonished that people weren’t sitting, kneeling, then standing
in unison while reading from a church book.
Even though the crowd of people more or less stayed in one place, they
were swaying, arms thrown up, hopping up and down on their feet like they were
dancing in place, just like the jumping beans Daddy had shown us, holding a
small box next to the lightbulb and saying there,
there, see them jump as the larvae inside the beans went into paroxysm and
danced until they died.
The
people uttered strange words loudly. It sounded like a made-up language, or
maybe they had come here from another country. Could that be true? People
making up a language? They spoke, but
not to each other. There was no
give-and-take of conversation in this crowd. I looked up at Daddy for an
explanation.
“That’s
speaking in tongues” Daddy said, bending down to fill me in. “People only did that in Jesus’s day. They are just pretending to be godly. Bunch of losers.”
After
another moment he muttered, “Hypocrites.”
I
looked behind me to see if any of the people could hear Daddy’s whispers. No one in front of us flinched quite the way
I did, and no one in the row behind seemed to staring at us. Even if Daddy’s
pronouncements were right, they were also mean.
There
was a band playing at the far side of a stage, and a row of women singing
back-up for front men. Punctuating
songs, from the make-shift center stage one man yelled “Jesus” and called for
people to “Come to Jesus.” Come to Jesus was like a golden ticket
and when people scurried to the stage another man placed his hand on their
forehead and they fell backwards into the arms of yet other men. The fallee was enveloped in an embrace of
men who held on with one hand, the other lifted up in the air as if it were
catching rain, some with closed eyes, and all of them speaking at once.
I
tugged on Daddy’s pants to ask him what was going on. If he felt me, he pretended that I wasn’t
there. I looked down the row at my
mother. She wore a grim, tight
expression and was busy schussing my baby sister, Laura who Mother held in her
arms. Quiet, well-behaved children, especially when other people were around,
was important to my mother. She looked at me and gave me her don’t-you-dare glare.
A
couple of people who had gone to the stage on crutches threw down the crutches
and walked off the stage without them.
Someone stood up and abandoned their wheel chair on the stage. The tent space was getting hot. I tried to hold Daddy’s hand; it was covered
in sweat so he shook me off and pulled his shirt collar away from his neck,
easing out another swear word.
When
the speaker yelled again, “Come on up all you sinners and find forgiveness. Come to sweet, sweet Jesus”, Grandma nudged Daddy’s
shoulder.
“Knock
it off, Ma. I already got Jesus.” Daddy said.
I
didn’t know if I had or needed Jesus, but it was loud and I was little and I
didn’t think that walking to the front was meant for me. I pulled on Daddy’s arm, “Daddy, what’s a
sinner?”
He
ssshhed me, then said “Sinners are bad people.”
Wow,
I thought. Who would want to walk in
front of everyone and admit to being a bad person? It was probably just more bad information,
until I heard the speaker yell out that we were all sinners. All of us?
I
asked him, finally, why the people were falling backwards.
He
whispered, “Those people are paid to pretend they are being healed, and then
poor dupes give the preacher money hoping for a real miracle. There’s a new sucker born every minute.”
I
looked closer at the performers, but there was, of course, no context for me to
understand what was happening, even with my father’s guidance. The songs were unfamiliar and even more so
the enthusiastic worship. If I’d made
that much noise at home, I’d be whipped with Daddy’s belt. People continued walking to the front, tears
streaming down their face, and yet they seemed so relieved after being touched.
If Grandma went to the stage, I would be afraid to go with her. I wanted to be
touched, but would I need to pretend to be healed from something? I didn’t know the game rules. I looked up at Grandma,
at her dry eyes and calm face for all her singing and felt sure she wouldn’t
push her way to the aisle.
Eventually
a plate loaded with money was passed down our row. When Daddy passed it on without adding to it,
Grandma exclaimed “Jack!”
“Yeah,
well if being poor is a sin, I’d better hold on to my money”, Daddy said.
Grandma
let out one of big sighs, like all the air in the room was being pressed out of
her belly, her eyes popping, then closing down to a sad nod. She looked over to
me, and then to James and finally to Laura sleeping in Mother’s lap.
“Jack,
you need to raise these kids in Jesus and start going to church.”
When
Grandma said that I thought about how every Sunday Mother dropped us off at
church then went back home where Daddy was reading the newspaper when we’d
left.
“How
come you don’t go to church with us, Daddy?”
I asked. Mother went sometimes,
especially when Laura was a baby, but now she didn’t go either.
“I
don’t need to go” Daddy said. “I was
already saved.”
“What
do you mean?” I asked.
“When
I was in college the Holy Spirit came upon me and I was born again.”
“In
class?” I asked. I was trying to picture
what it looked like when the Holy Spirit came upon someone. Did they go into a trance? Did they jerk around like the people around us?
Daddy
said, “It was a religious school. That
kind of stuff happens all the time in religious schools.”
“But
how come you don’t come to church?” I asked, still confused. I thought it was the saved people who
attended these services.
“Goddamn
it,” he said, “I already told you. I got
saved. Once you’re saved you’re already
set for heaven. You don’t have to do
anything about it after that.”
Now
that did not make sense to me. If you’re
saved you should do good things and be nice to people, not keep on yelling
after drinking beer and saying mean things all the time. Grandma told us she was saved, and she never
threatened us with a belt or swore at us.
Asking again would not get me any more clarity on the subject.
Daddy
scanned the room impatiently and then asked Grandma, “So where’s Aunt Bobbi? I
bet she’s not even here. I thought I was
going to see my cousins!”
After
another quick scan and a head shake Daddy said, “Just like them, to rope us
into coming to this circus show and then not even being here. What a waste.”
Grandma
looked like she might cry, and she pressed me tighter against her soft side. Grandma turned back to the stage, and sang
louder than anyone else. She seemed to know all the words, whereas my parents
didn’t sing at all. Someday I thought,
I’d know the words to every song and I’d sing just like Grandma did, and no
matter where I was I’d find something of comfort to keep myself from crying.
In
the future when I will recall this revival, for some reason I will remember a
monkey. For the life of me I can’t
imagine why there would be a monkey in the service, but that image won’t go
away.
The
monkey, a chimpanzee, was in a cage on the side of the stage opposite the
band. It swung back and forth, from side
to side in its cage until it was brought out and two men walked it to the front
where the preacher used it to make some point that was beyond me, even more
than every other thing said was beyond me.
It
was a quarter of a century since the Scopes trial, although maybe parts of the
church still needed to make a point that we didn’t evolve from apes, but were
created out of mud and dust, breathed in to by a silver-haired, white-robed
god. For me, the revival was all Barnum
and Bailey.
The
service seemed to go on forever. Laura
was asleep, her bright red-haired head on Mother’s lap.
“Is
this ever going to end?” Daddy hissed at Grandma.
“I
guess we can go,” she finally said. “I
don’t see Bobbi anywhere. Maybe she didn’t come after all” Grandma said with a twinge
of sadness.
Crammed
in the Desoto for the long ride home, Daddy swearing again, and Mother, who’d
been mostly silent the entire evening, was swearing at Daddy for his swearing. I
practiced some of their naughty words in my head, and almost let one pop out. I
didn’t, because Grandma had put in my mind that maybe I was pretty enough for
God to love. I leaned into Grandma and
soon enough her soft, nearly whispered singing lulled me to sleep.
Well,
someday I would never know the lyrics to every song, however someday there
would be other revivals. Other pauses of re-birth and refresh. It seemed to me like the whole world wanted
to shed their skins like snakes and emerge with warm, wet faces, singing and
sighing in ecstasy, to be new, but new all together.
After
the end of the Vietnam war, after a series of assassinations, and a
presidential impeachment; after both the 60s counterculture and the rampant
post-war materialism played out as spiritually empty, so many American youths
hungered for something that felt like it had spiritual sustenance. The awakening in the 70s was different then
that earlier one my Grandmother and her siblings experienced. It had a special place for rebellious youth. Although,
I didn’t think of myself as rebellious so much as dissatisfied with my parents
and their rules about who to marry, with whom to disassociate, the importance
of appliances, their isolation from anyone who wasn’t family, and at their
obsessive collecting of rubber-bands, bread bag clips, and fine china that was
never used. I found myself being one of the Jesus People, the Now People, until
the mid-eighties when everything shifted again and I started to become
something of the Christian Right.
I
knew I was good as any man, I wanted the world to acknowledge that all women
were good as men. I wanted peace, infinite love and a clean heart, not just a
clean presentation. I wasn’t ready for gay-rights, women’s rights, and I knew
nothing whatsoever about civil rights, but I had the foundation for it all
buried within me. Rampant consumerism
grated me as I also tried to become what I saw as normal and attempt to embrace
becoming someone’s wife and living with white picket fences, baking bread. What I most wanted was to shed my family and
be a part of something important. I was also desperate for someone to love me,
but in a mutually reciprocal way that I would never find in the church.
In
1980, years after I’d been re-born, re-born and re-born again, I left both my
drug-addled and abusive boyfriend and the hostile familiarity of my parent’s
home and moved to Pasadena to study the bible with a missionary group called
Youth with a Mission, or YWAM for short.
My internal life was shattered and relatively unformed, and my Church
counselor had suggested that a year of service to mankind and focus on God would
re-order my thinking and help me find the self-worth I needed to give up my melancholy
sinning and tears. My counselor told me, “It isn’t enough to know God; one must
also share that knowledge with everyone.”
What
attracted me was the idea of communal living.
As a child I wanted to grow up and be a hippie. I wanted the freedom to share housing, food, to
touch the universe in a profound and loving way. By the time I grew up the hippies were gone,
I thought, re-assimilating themselves into the wider culture. By the time I
grew up, it was apathy, Disco Dancing, shiny clothes, and the tech industry and
Brokerage house. Joining YWAM might be
the closest thing to being a hippie, minus the drugs, which hardly appealed to
me, and minus the sex, which did; a need that gnawed at me the more I tried to
shut it down. I was attracted to being
part of a group of people working together in common for a shared value, of
unconditional love, with the goal of changing the world.
YWAM
was started by a Presbyterian minister who believed that Christian youth should
gather for a year or two to immerse themselves in the word of God, and then
bring that word to every nation, thereafter cloning themselves into other small
groups. YWAM took seriously and founded
itself on The Great Commission as stated in Matthew 28: 19.
Therefore, go and
make disciples in all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and then teach these new disciples to
obey all the commands I have given you….
One
Outreach night we got into our bus and motored to the Trinity Broadcasting
Network (TBN). TBN was housed in a new,
spacious and beautiful office building situated on a manicured, sprawling
campus. My favorite room was a coffee
room stocked with coffee, good, rich coffee and real cream. This wasn’t the instant coffee and powdered
cream, (or rat poison as I referred
to it because it looked exactly like the white powder in the box Mother pulled
out every summer), which I started drinking on the YWAM base when I discovered
how bitter the water tasted in the Los Angeles area. There was an assortment of herbal and black tea
and a soda machine like the kind in mini-marts with an ice-maker along with trays
of Danishes and fruit for us volunteers to partake of when on break. No texturized vegetable protein here! God
clearly loved sugar, or at least engineered us to love it.
At
TBN, we answered the prayer lines on the Paul and Jan Crouch show. The format
was simple; we answered the phones, asked what people wanted to pray about with
us, and prayed. Should the caller be
suicidal, we were to hand the phone over to one of the leaders. Twenty of us, all under the age of
twenty-three, none of us really had the experience or skills to deal with
that. Most phone calls were simple
enough to get through though.
We
had been given small envelopes and slips of paper for writing down donation
amounts and pledges; we were supposed to ask for donations, but I wouldn’t do that. If we asked for money, I thought, we were
like the tax collectors of bible days stationed outside the temple. We didn’t pay for our salvation. It was free! No one had the right to make
money off God. I swear, every church sermon in the eighties was about material
affluence, and while I was as self-indulgent as any other believer, despite my miss-understood
vow of poverty, the contradictions left me with an ambivalence I was afraid I’d
never transcend.
“Trinity
Broadcasting Network. God bless you. How
may I serve you?” I asked when I picked up the phone.
“My
daughter. I am calling about my daughter” came the disembodied voice. It was a woman and by the bitter tone I
picked up in her voice I filled in the gaps of her appearance until she looked
exactly like one of my mother’s sisters; hair neatly coifed in manufactured curls,
her face a spiteful rock, and wearing a home-sewn, sateen dress that was too shiny
for her.
“My
daughter married an unbeliever. She is
unequally yoked.” I could hear the righteousness in the Mother’s voice. I pictured her sitting upright, the glasses I’d
given her hanging precariously on the tip of her nose.
“I
told her she must get a divorce immediately, and she refuses. She is not respectful of me, her mother at
all. Why won’t she live a biblical life?” The woman clearly wanted assurance
that she was in the right, her daughter was doomed to hell by disobedience.
Only her Mother could save her now.
I desired to be married more than almost anything,
and had come to Pasadena partly in a gambit to find my own holy man to marry. I
found them all to be a strange breed. It felt like there were one spiritual man
for every twenty women, so they got the pick.
I was forever working on myself to be that pick, but was not the one any
of them wanted. It didn’t matter how diligently I pursued my studies, how many
books I read, nor that instead of cleaning toilets on campus I was chosen to
serve as a secretary because I could type 85 words-a-minute and understood, or
at least spell, the leader’s large vocabulary. I was congratulated for how
quickly I picked up writing sermons and plays, but still not a pick. It didn’t even matter that I mastered
domestic skills like sewing, embroidery, and my dorm room was creatively
decorated on a zero-dollar budget. There
was always something about me that was too sensual, or too willful that got in
the way.
Plus,
when it got down to it, the Christian men I met were boring and gave too many
mixed signals, one minute trying to touch me, and the next blaming me for their
sinful thoughts. It was as though they
believed in a continuum where a good woman was like a sexless, sweet angel, and
yet they wanted to climb all over, then debase, any woman who let them have sex.
What were they thinking? They were all too interested in doing the good
work, or rather, being the a highly visible, prestigious and admired leader
doing the good work, and not sharing that glory or acknowledging any support.
So
here, this daughter had found a man to marry her rather than fornicating with
her like a heathen, and maybe she had even found a man who loved her. Perhaps he even valued her for whoever she
was. Who was this mother to break it apart?
“What
God has joined, let no man put asunder” I said, thinking How dare she! How dare she
not understand that God is love and love not limited by arcane rules that
seemed to shift through time and church affiliation.
“If
a wife divorces her husband to remarry, she commits adultery.” I said, asking
“Do you want your daughter to be an adulterous?” I couldn’t count on both hands
the number of times Daddy had cheated on Mother, and was pretty disgusted that Mother
put up with it. Daddy stayed late at the clubs where he played top forty
standards on his trombone while Mother stayed home, settled into her velveteen
chair, sucking down one Jack Daniel on ice after another until her head fell
back, her mouth open, and snored until around three a.m. or so when she dragged
herself to her still empty bed.
“A
wife must not leave her husband.” I added, without waiting for that offensive woman
to respond to my question. Although in
truth, I always felt Mother should have left Daddy. I would never stay with a
cheating man. I would never marry him in
the first place. But nothing the mother
said indicated this man was cheating. I
couldn’t yet imagine any other quality that couldn’t be endured for the sake of
love.
“If
a Christian has a husband who is not a Christian, but he wants to stay with her
anyway, he must not leave her or divorce him. For perhaps he’ll become a
Christian.” That is what I was hoping for, an interesting, intelligent and
artistic non-Christian man I could convert.
One who wouldn’t bore me into one form of adultery or another; I knew I was
my fathers-daughter, after all, and harbored fear that I was cursed to become a
cheater like him.
I
felt the power of God welling up inside me.
Perhaps, in hindsight it was merely my own indignation at that mother
trying to break up what now represented everything I dreamed of. In either case I was just as moved to speak.
“Shall
we pray?” I asked, moving on not wanting to spend one more minute talking to
this despicable woman. I pictured her
gravely accepting her reprimand, much the same I fantasized about my own mother
accepting the reprimands I only gave her from inside my head.
The
mother assented and so I began, “Oh Holy Jesus, our Father in Heaven, I ask
that the Spirit move in this woman so that she sees she needs to quit meddling
in her daughter’s life. Oh Jesus, help
this woman’s daughter to live the kind of god-filled life that will convert her
husband…” and so on I prayed, pushing what may have been nothing more than my
twenty-year old agenda.
“Keep
this daughter safe from the path of adultery.
Don’t let her use her free will to step outside the will of god.” I
continued. Free will or
predetermination, it was another issue of dogma raging between the schisms of
the church, but I had a point to make.
“Hoshanna
mo gimbo, do doh, mowandi shaw …” I was glad I had finally started praying in
tongues the summer before, and now broke into spirit-filled tongue, which had
once sounded like nothing but gibberish to me. One hand holding the phone intimately
against my face and the other hand floating in the air to call down the Spirit. It was so much easier to carry one’s emotions
forward when God moved you to pray in tongues than to try and follow a more
linguistic path, one which I was clearly unable to articulate.
The
first time I spoke it tongues it was like it was wrestled out of me, and if I’d
had any inkling of what an orgasm was, I would have said it felt similar. Two summers earlier at a Pentecostal bible
camp where I’d agreed to serve as a youth leader, two of the other leaders
doubting my faith, pinned me to the floor with their bodies. And I was on my knees, their arms wrapped
around me, mouths pressed to my ear, commanding me, insisting in the name of
Jesus, that I speak in tongues. Then, after
nearly an hour, and all of us covered in sweat and spit, there was a pressure
in the lower half of my belly that moved like a thick snake undulating up my
spine until I felt my head swelling, throbbing like the onset of a headache, and
at long last the unintelligible, and emotionally pressing words poured forth,
uncontrollable and freeing.
One
of the great aspects about working the prayer lines, besides the gratitude
people usually expressed after the prayer, was that I did not have to watch the
program. About sixteen of us at a time
sat in a room with windows open to the stage so that cameras could pan us in
all our fervent praying and flash a small toll-free number and a written
reminder to donate. To donate so that
the word of God could be more widely tele-evangelized.
Jan
and Paul were, perhaps in their sixties if not older. I am not good with ages anyway, but with them
it was especially difficult to tell. He was a very distinguished looking silver-hair,
dressed in impeccable Italian wool hand-tailored suits with spit-shined
shoes. She wore wigs that were wispy
like cotton-candy and which often were pink, or lavender. Her eyelashes looked like they had to be
hoisted and super-glued to get in place, and her make-up was so thick not a
single wrinkle or skin tag or spot was visible.
She wore the most garrulously girly dresses in chiffons, satins, laces,
all covered with ruffles and bejeweled as well. Her wedding ring alone must
have weighed several pounds.
During
commercial breaks Jan kicked off her 4-inch heels and traipsed around like a six-year-old
girl, flouncing her skirt and tittering madly.
It was like she had taken a drag-queen’s stereotype of feminine and
blown it up with ten sticks of dynamite, and thrown it back on. My first thought was that Jan was the most
fake Christian I’d ever seen. Her
condescending attitude when she came into the booth didn’t help her
either.
“This
is Los Angeles,” our base director patiently explained to me when I pointed out
I was appalled by both her attitude and her lavish appearance.
“We
find her a bit ridiculous,” he said, we speaking for all of us, the way a
parent speaks for the whole family when trying to instill whatever values they
hold, “but LA is the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, and her over-the-top
theatrics work well for LA and on television.” He shrugged.
At
my horrified expression he said, “God works in mysterious ways.”
I
guess that was the point of the Eighties. We were working through our vows of
poverty and communal sharing, while Jan and Paul raised millions and tele-evangelized
spreading their message of Jesus and affluence. One way or another and the
world would be impressed. In theory at least.
Jan
set an example of femininity that chaffed me. A squeaky little girl voice, as
though puberty still hadn’t hit, a near-constant stream of tears and mascara
rivulets down her face, forever grabbing Paul’s hand and asking for affirmation
every time she spoke. Frankly, she scared me.
She
must have been the model of Christian womanhood most churches preferred,
because soon thereafter a few of us attended a neighboring church for a lecture
on Godly-Femininity. I wanted to hear
about how to be a prayer warrior, like the German congregation who prayed with Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and moved God to end World War II.
I wanted to learn about how to give a rousing sermon. Weren’t women going to eventually be allowed
to minister? I wanted to learn about
compassion, healing, and getting closer to God.
Instead the advice was targeted to ensure submissive wives, not prayer-warrior-women-of-god.
Put
God first, but husbands a close second, seeking God only to find out how to
best submit to and serve one’s husband; that’s what I heard. Most of us looked
forward with great anticipation to being wives, in my case mostly so I could
legitimately start having sex again. This guidance went against my grain. Weren’t we all equal in Christ? What happened
to equality?
The
seminar was delivered by a petite, upper middle-class woman dressed in a pink
Chanel suit, with a string of pearls around her neck and dainty matching posts,
and the sweetest little heels I’ve ever seen. I could wear those shoes, I thought, but was otherwise frustrated. Being a woman-of-god became more and more
about dressing like a lady, being a true help-mate by going along with a
husband’s decisions, stretching the shopping dollar, preparing good food, and
above all, keeping a pleasant demeanor and a happy home. I was so tired of hearing Be Pretty, Be Proper, Be Quiet. Being a woman-of-god was trivial, immature,
insignificant.
I
felt fairly confident that the guys weren’t hearing about how to dress in pressed
trousers and button-down shirts, about honoring wives’ intuition and
intelligence. No, they were being told to pray hard and often, always
beseeching god for wisdom. Women weren’t
included in their package except to provide physical comfort and emotional solace,
and housekeeping. I wanted recipes for
changing the world, not for casseroles and roasts. I surmised that it would be
quite a ground-shift before I’d ever be re-born a submissive housewife. Although
even that mantle I took up for a time with the fervor to be the most submissive
housewife that ever lived, until I found the role soul-crushing.
Other
Outreach Nights we provided a sermon, skits, and songs at an LA Rescue Center. Rescue
centers are places where homeless men receive a meal and a space on the floor
to sit. In exchange they are required to
attend a service.
I was sitting on the deck getting in some last
minute sun before driving to the Center. Bonita, one of the few married base
leaders, as mousey-looking a woman as they come, approached me. I thought she could be pretty if she made an
effort to stand tall, straightening out the crooked C of her back, and to wear
nicer clothes.
“You
need to put a bra on” she said, staring at my A-cups, as though her gaze was
made of incriminating, pointing fingers.
“What?”
I defensively grabbed my chest in my hands, and looked down at the one part of
my body that never developed.
After
reading a couple of feminist books in the 1970s I’d learned that bras were a
social convention of oppression, a fact easy for me to swallow since I was not
endowed with anything requiring support.
Bras represented a lingering of the old mores, mores I was slowly
starting to readopt. In 1974 I had throne
my bras on the barbeque grill for the symbolic burning. Mother caught me and started yelling about how
she had paid good money for them. I simply
quit wearing bras altogether. At my
small size I was quite confident that nothing was going to bounce around.
Bonita,
raising herself up for once, went on to explain, “Wearing a brassiere is a
woman’s responsibility. Without one your
nipples will harden and be visible which excites men. A good, modest woman does not influence men
to sin. Do you want to cause men to
sin?”
Of
course I didn’t. Or perhaps some part of me wished I did; at least one worth
marrying. But my ambivalence aside, I
wasn’t clear on why men couldn’t control their own thoughts and actions. Shouldn’t their eyes be at face level anyway?
Only lechers were obvious when they looked
down a woman’s body. As hard as it was
for me to do so I at least knew my own thoughts and actions were my own
responsibility.
Bonita
didn’t stop though. Pointing, she said, “And
your nail polish, you’ll need to take that off.”
Handing
me a tissue and indicating it was to wipe off my lip glass, Bonita said, “And wash
the make-up off your face.”
Was
she kidding? I needed that make-up. How was I supposed to act like a vain woman in
tonight’s skit if I had to strip myself clean of all social indicators of
vanity? I had learned to do what I was
told, and after washing my face even changed out of my red shirt and black skirt
into brown-colored garments. One cannot
get much duller looking than by wearing brown.
All
the preparation was pointless in the end.
We sang our songs, and we did our skit.
Usually Duff or Jeff or Greg, any one of the six men leaders
sermonized. This time instead it was
Vicki who took the podium and gave a rousing cry to come to Christ; her immense
voice booming out repentance and firestorms. There was nothing pretty about Vicki. Stocky and tall, she put all her time into
studying scripture and never seemed to worry about material things. She was
worth listening too. You knew she had conviction. She was impressive.
I
had been working hard all week to compose a rousing sermon I imagined would
send droves of men to the alter seeking God’s salvation. I gave it.
It was about forgiveness and turning back. Especially about turning back to God and
living right. The sermon came out as
little more than pleading that the men give up alcohol and imbibe on Christ’s
blood instead. Metaphorically
speaking. My father’s alcoholism and
adultery came in handy as reference material even though he hadn’t had a drink
in five years. Could the love of God be powerful enough to cure
alcoholism? I don’t know, but I
certainly thought it could.
Afterwards
the Center Director pulled us into the kitchen and they really hit the
wall.
“Women
don’t have the biblical right to instruct men on how to live a godly-life.”
said one man, the other two nodding furiously.
I
waited for our leader to banter back.
Like Acts. Couldn’t he quote from
Acts?
Yes, the Holy
Spirit shall come upon all my servants, men and women alike, and they shall
prophesy.
But
he didn’t. That one verse of parity is
why I joined the church, why I thought I might fit. It
was my foundation for right-living.
“If
you ever bring women to preach again, you will be immediately ushered out.” the
first man spoke again, the other still nodding furiously; even the women
cleaning dishes in the kitchen nodding.
Later
that night our leaders let us know that it was more important that we be
allowed to witness to the homeless men than to make a stand for women’s place
in the ministry. That declaration stung. I was still allowed to look as
vain-filled as our skit called for each and every week and to sing back-up in
the choir. One of the things that had drawn me to the church was the thought
that in Christ we are neither male nor female, slave nor master. Equality was being turned into statements
like, Equal but Different, which part
of me understood as subjugation, yet it was becoming easier and easier to slip
into believing, though that believing felt more like coercion and less like a
natural state.
Before
I was born-again this last time, slowly swallowing the fundamentalism of the
Christian Right, I tried to be a part of the Jesus Movement, one of the Now
People. That was back when Jesus was
both human and God, when he was living love itself, the perfect friend and the
true guide for a complete, authentic life. Back when loving Jesus was
admittance to a relational and experiential world of hip, indie-guitar playing,
long-haired men and women in hand-embroidered peasant tops; a world of Christians
who found the spirit several years before they found the scripture and practiced
compassion, not adherence to a literal rule book.
That 1972 summer when I turned thirteen I was
bumped up from the grade-school age camp sponsored by the Free Methodist Church
into an older group I wasn’t necessarily mature enough to socialize with. I was expecting pony rides, swimming, and
crafting bracelets and key chains, and while I got all that, it came packaged
differently, almost sophisticated as though the church knew we young people
faced worldly temptation but were mature enough to know the difference between
right and wrong actions and to be accountable for our actions.
In the evenings in
a large barn that had been finished into a cafeteria and a meeting hall, and
after the preacher’s rousing sermon, most of us were crying and rocking forward
and back with the internal pain of discovering we were sinners, young sinners,
and while relatively new at it, had already liven regretfully sin-filled lives
that could only be washed clean by the blood of Jesus.
The preacher gave
the call for testimonies. By this point
in the week we’d all been saved, some of us multiple times, and a full
repentance called for confession, and a demonstration of glory given to Jesus
for the changes he’d wrought in our hearts. One by one the most popular kids,
heaving with tears, slowly made their way to the stage as though they
understood that to be the hero in their own life they had to be vulnerable,
their superficial façade broken and room made inside for Jesus to move in. Give me,
we had sung, more of Jesus, less of me.
Cigarettes. Really?
One kid confessed to sneaking behind the horse barn and getting addicted
to cigarettes. I had smoked cigarettes in the fourth grade, and that one given
to me by Daddy to illustrate how awful smoking would be. I certainly didn’t become a smoker; at least
not for another decade and a half. Bad?
Yes, but not bad enough. I wanted to
make that walk, but I couldn’t name anything about me that had changed.
Richard and Brad
both had felt girls up. Julie and Lori
both let guys feel them up. Every day
since we’d arrived I had been sitting at the edge of the pool intently staring
at this groping and the tongue kissing.
Even though it was a sin, I wanted nothing else but to have a boy want
me that much, that he would risk eternal damnation in hell just to touch my
boobs. Did wishing make me a
sinner? Yes, I am sure it did, but intention
and desire were not worthy of confession; only tangible sins were confessed in
front of the group.
One boy confessed
to screwing the minister’s daughter. He looked smug and self-satisfied more so than
weepy and sad. The point of confession was to clean the soul and to be filled
with sorrow. I wasn’t exactly sure what
screwing entailed, beyond removing pristine panties and low slung jeans and
doing something down there. Down
there was a forbidden world, and because forbidden was probably
pleasurable. He didn’t look the least bit sorry.
“He rode me like a
dog” Dolly yelled from the back of the room, making sure everyone knew which minister’s daughter.
Dolly was a wild
child; a loud and angry child who pushed her knee highs down into little rough fists
around her ankles even though the socks were new and had perfectly good
elastic. I would never say that Dolly
was a friend, but during the times my best friend had patrol duty, on those
days I walked to school with Dolly. She was always saying something shocking, profanity
popping out of her mouth like a pop-gun aimed at everyone; or announcing she’d
been kidnapped by gypsies, and then stolen back by her old parents. How she missed those gypsies! Even though I
was sure the gypsies were imagined, even I started to miss them.
On occasion I went
to her quiet, immaculate house where the furniture was all covered in plastic
and her bedroom was tucked at the end of the hall. But whenever it was time for me to leave, she
would become enraged, using for-adult-men-only swear words and suddenly turn
into a tornado of fists, pummeling me for abandoning her. I am not sure what of myself I recognized in
her, but I took her punches with something that felt like grace to me, and just
made sure I didn’t go over very often to play Spit and eat Ding Dongs. Dolly, like me, she didn’t seem to know where
she belonged, however she seemed to be more enthusiastic than I in experimenting
to find her place of belonging.
Here at camp, we
all knew she’d taken a wrong path. Good girls waited until marriage. Good girls did not have their own
desires. I was not secretly a little
jealous of her boldness. Around the nightly campfire boys had been kissing
girls, rubbing on their chests and I had sat alone, trying to stare one boy or
another into at least holding my hand.
At Dolly’s exuberant
confession the organic collective crying stopped for a moment, I felt, in horror. A couple of camp counselors pulled Dolly out
of the meeting barn and the testimony started again. Although each participant was an individual
with an authentic and unique spiritual life, and although we each had a right
and freedom to share our truth with others, Dolly’s story of free-love colored
with drug use at the tender age of thirteen did not represent a choice the
leaders wanted us to consider. She, and only she, was bad enough to warrant
God’s saving.
God’s
opinion of me frequently took forefront, and while I knew I was a sinner,
certainly, I was a mediocre one. Nothing
bad I did was quite bad enough, yet I would never be good enough to be truly
considered good. I was nice in a boring,
non-descript way. There was nothing
about me anyone would ever call remarkable, or beautiful. I felt unformed and
blurry. Those thoughts made me cry, but I couldn’t tell anyone living and
breathing. I was too embarrassed to openly
admit my self-pity at being so lukewarm of a person. Didn’t the bible say something about throwing
out the lukewarm believer? Was I a
lukewarm believer? I wouldn’t blame god if
he didn’t want me around.
There was a time,
I remembered, and I have clung to that memory furiously, a time when God did want
me around. When I was a child, a little
child, and when it got too confusing in my chaotic and angry home, I ran outside
and I would swing on the swing set, just me and God. At least, God is what I called my invisible
companion, my projected Other. I suppose now that I could have used any
name, but when Grandma prayed aloud it was to God, and because I loved and
believed her, that’s what I’d say too.
Creak, crick, the
metal chains and the rotting wood seat, creaked back and forth, and I sang in
rhythm with my motion, and my song was a prayer, a shield, an expression of who
I was, who I had been and might still become, all of me at once. It didn’t matter if the sky was sunny or
overcast or even if the rain had started. I threw my head back and looked at
the ground upside down, coming toward me, away from me, as though I was both
connected to the earth, therefore a part of it, and in fear of it, the way my
unusual, upside down perspective of it presented a dizzying and exuberant
danger. As my feet were kicking clouds,
then clods of dirt, my voice boomed out songs as loud as being outdoors
allowed. And it was good. I was good.
Summer camp was a
time of conviction, and belief, of soul refreshment. And returning to the daily reminders of my
low-life-status, to the temptations of desires so normal they may truly have
been opportunities more so than temptations, by Thanksgiving all my convictions
and faith would be gone. But then, that is what life is about, isn’t it? A near constant self-evaluation, re-births
into new perspectives, informed by the changing culture, and adaptation.
Someday I would
find nothing in the church to hold me; my beliefs in the trinity, the bible,
the infuriating entitlement of men, it would all fade away until one day I
awoke believing none of it, much the same I had quit believing the malformed
authority of my parents. I would be
chagrined, as though I bought into a pyramid scheme of oppression, and for years
was afraid to believe in anything ever again except my own tendency to make
poor decisions.
Eventually, spiritual
longing would move me to other ideas, and then to realize that other ideas were
simply other ideas; we contain ideas,
they should not contain us. Whatever Love, or God, or even the human psychology
that connects us, it may not be limitless, but even with all our searching and
our tenacity to settle for certainty, we will never fully know it. I gave
myself over to the wrong things, and I tasted the right things, and sometimes held
no things at all.
All my desires for Capital-L love, sacred unions, and
for comfort, truth and sex, they are all messy values that shift and clash.
While some rise and others fall, like water pouring over itself, while definitions
might stick for a time, my heart does not permanently fit inside one desire or
another. At last, no matter how much I still yearn for an egalitarian love, I
suspect the century may not yet be ripe for it, and if it is, maybe still, even
while not searching, it could find me.
No comments:
Post a Comment