2021.06.27 The Mantilla

It’s June—month of wedding joy and blooming fleurs. I find it annoying that the parables Jesus of Nazareth doled out are never, ever pure. Okay, he calms a storm and exorcizes demons, and raises the apparent dead. Yes, BUT, there are still raging storms and death-dealing illnesses, physical and mental. Sometimes I curse this God who loves us all enough not to override the freedom Nature, including human nature, enjoys, a freedom bestowed on the best and the worst of us all. And you never know what kind of freedom you have, or you need, or will need.  

It's still June, therefore:

Dear Coherent Mercy,

Yes, I wore a mantilla at my first wedding. At the urging of my mother, I bought it in Spain where I lived with two families, one in Madrid and another in Santander (now my bank!) over six weeks in the summer of 1960 after my college graduation.  

I loved Spain, fell madly in sophomoric love of course with a young man named Pepe, and cried all the way home on the plane. I truly had no idea who I was or what I wanted, but I had at least been obedient enough to follow my mother’s plans and buy the mantilla in Spain. Spain was Roman Catholicism on steroids, and I knew the mantilla veil had all kinds of religious associations—paternalistic, patriarchal, puristic and prurient, but I was following my mother. Within two years I donned my mantilla and married the boy named Bill back home, walking unsteadily on my father’s steady arm, down, a long church aisle to marry.  I loved Bill,  just not enough to compensate for or extinguish my self-uncertainty.    

After the wedding my mother whisked my dress and the mantilla off to her good friend who had moved to California, so this friend’s daughter could wear it in her wedding. All this happened unbeknownst to me, or at least in a communication so veiled I didn’t get it; or by then I had stopped listening to my mother with both ears. Anyway, mom told me she had sent my dress and mantilla off to the local cleaners to be “preserved” in a sealed “coffin”—cardboard box all its own. It would keep “forever, darling” she told me. Unlike my marriage but who knew that then?

Anyway, years later when I remarried and we were moving from Connecticut to Massachusetts, I retrieved from our attic the box in which my dress was buried and opened it. I screamed. My husband came running. The dress inside the box was eaten alive, the fabric torn, yellowed, shredded as if mice or moths had eaten away at it. On closer examination, I saw that this dress was NOT my dress. AND there was no mantilla at all. Either it got entirely eaten, or God knows. It’s a Miss Havisham kind of story really. I do adore Dickens!

There’s more if you can believe it. Just this year I got a Facebook post from the young woman, still living in California, who wore my dress and mantilla in her own wedding. She sent me pictures of herself in my dress. The mantilla was beautiful on her, more beautiful than I remember it being on me. I’ll have to check. This young woman was a good friend of my youngest sister who died young at aged 34, so we shared memories, and she assured me that her mother, my mother’s friend, had snatched up the dress and mantilla and mailed them back to my mother right after the wedding at which it had made its second appearance. My mother I assumed whisked it off to the cleaner to be “boxed.”

All this is true to my dying day, and I have no idea where my original dress and mantilla are. Luckily, I’m not attached to it and my mother is dead by 22 years—not by my hand. She had self-uncertainty problems too. She had loved me too much to let me be.

Sorry to unload all this on you, my love, but you triggered more story. Is it not stories that keep the world spinning and grinning and alive in this existence of mixed blessings?  The Bible tells us so. And you, Coherent Mercy, manage to cohere all our stories into one and keep us free.  

So, thanks.

2021.06.20 Dad

I loved my father through thick and thin, and he is, in fact, one reason I never call God Father.

Everyone thinks my aversion to God as Father is just my feminist politics, or my distaste for traditional theological language that confines divinity within the corset of excessive almightiness, ultra-distancing transcendence, exclusive masculinity, and fatherhood forever and ever amen.

Yes, I know the earthly Jesus is remembered as using the term Abba for God, but why wouldn’t he do that?  He was a Jewish son of the covenant. Also, Abba was natural and intimate, suitable for just what he wanted to convey about God’s loving presence—and not enough.

Some people think I would eliminate “Father” for God, because I was abused by my earthly father and therefore Father is negative, frightening. That may be true for some, but not for me. I loved my dad, and I always knew for certain that he was not divine—not God, only godly.   

Dad gave me my name. I was, in my mother’s dreams, supposed to be Michael McDonald, named after my dad: McDonald Gillespie—such a handsome name. He was very handsome in fact, with thick dark hair, a solemn yet dignified air, a crisp sense of humor, and a ski-jump nose. I look like him—nose and all. I have a better picture in the "somewhere" category, but here is Dad when I was about three and earned him an exemption from WWII.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He died with his dappled-gray but still thick mane in tact, and, so far, mine remains thus. The name they liked was Linda with a middle name Hall, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. My father wanted to call me Lin, but the spelling didn’t work, so he changed the spelling to LYnda to call me Lyn or Lynnie. Between natural looks and naming, in addition to my own personality—shy, taciturn and, let’s just say, not extroverted but boldly introverted—I was “baptized” by my father. 

Dad drank and smoked to help his personality along. I did the same. He died at 71 of smoking-induced esophageal cancer. He smoked right up to his end, claiming in his sardonic way that he had to smoke Lucky Strikes, because the advertising company in which he rose to the executive level advertised this brand. I knew and he knew that was blarney, but we knew little about addictions back then.  “Everyone’s doing it” is probably the worst reason in the world to do anything. Still, human beings, like all other animals, instinctively continue to think that copy-catting is a worthy rationale for most behavior.

Until it’s not quite right.

My father was brave. I saw this in two particular ways.  We summered at a farm in upstate New York and once Dad, city boy through and through, was invited to help Farmer Kurt to prod an angry bull onto a truck—nasty business. The stud bull had done his sperm-work with cows, and now he had to return to his own farm. This bull was enraged, snorting, bellowing, and tossing his well-horned and bulky head before he charged with all his bullish might, at several men, including Dad, protected by a mere pitchfork, pale imitatio of bullness. Kurtie had named this bull Donny after my dad. I was miniscule at eight and stood way back to watch. Terrified. 

The bull veered left right toward my dad. “Jump back fast, Donny,” Kurt yelled. “He’s headed for you.” Daddy jumped away just in time.

The men and their forks won. They finally got the rampaging bull onto the truck and off. Daddy returned to get me and take me home. On the way home I jabbered about how scared I was. My father listened and, I noted, failed to brag. I asked, “Were you afraid, Daddy?”  “You bet I was, Lynnie!”  

It was in that moment of modest truth that I knew my father had true courage—not God but godly.

One other moment I saw his courage was at our family Christmas dinner—his last—in 1982. He was at home recuperating from surgery to excise a large cancerous tumor from his esophagus, but he wasn’t normal at all. He couldn’t swallow, so he had, not only tubes for breathing, but a a tube that went into a bag to drain saliva from the side of his throat, not to mention the feeding tube in his gut. He was still handsome. He sang “Oh Holy Night” in his rich bass voice the night before to the nurse, and on Christmas day we all gathered as usual at the family table. Dad in his wheelchair took his place at the head—unable to taste or chew a single morsel of food or even imbibe a sip of any liquid. He asked the nurse to bring him a cup of coffee. We watched it dribble out and into the waiting catch bowl. “Boy, that hit the spot,” he said as he raised his coffee cup. “Merry Christmas everyone. Merry Christmas.”

Holidays have souls.

Within a week Dad was dead. He just went to bed to groan away his last hours—minute by precious minute. He was not in physical pain, although it sounded as if he were. His job was dying, and he did not “go gentle into that dark night”, as the poet words it. He did go decisively. My sister, my mother, and I kept vigil. I counted his periodic groans by the quarter-hour bong of the old grandfather clock. I went home and actually slept till Mom called at about 6 a.m. Dad was dead.

I don’t know if he had any last words to my mother, but his last words to me were: “What’s the point?”  It was a phrase he often used as he wondered, as most of us do, about the tragic exigencies of life and death. His youngest daughter had predeceased him by just a couple of years. I had no idea what the “point” was, but I promised to let him know if I found out—one of my dumbest and most holy of promises, and one I knew I couldn’t keep.  

The last time I saw my father was as a limp body in the strong sinewy arms of the funeral home director. I noticed how paper thin his dangling legs were and wondered how they had the strength to play so much golf in his last years. You think weird things at such times.

The dying do not care much about the living when they are dying. They have a job to do, a sacred and holy task, and most people do it in their own way— not God but godly.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you to tears. 

2021.06.13 Time Passes—And Passes

The passage of time is neutral. How it may feel, what it can mean, and what one does with one’s time is what matters.

On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love
by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.

But they didn’t fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.

They’re not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

Yet we must not
diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.


Jennifer Michael Hecht, “On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love” from The Next Ancient World. Copyright © 2001 by Jennifer Michael. From The Writers’Almanac, 6/6/21.


The title of this poem alone is enough to make me reflect once more on the holiness of trying. Jesus of Nazareth was idealized at birth, then as he grew was accused of being possessed, crazy, heretical, criminal, and last but not least, suicidally critical of all religious and political authority of his times. For this he was worshiped and executed—all within a short 30 years. He made the most of his time.

In July,1998, I was driving too fast along the Massachusetts Turnpike, racing down to Connecticut, my eyes wet with tears as I munched on a hastily prepared, soggy tunafish sandwich. I’d received a call from the nursing home where my mom had lived for the last four years. The nurse apologized for the first call in which she had informed me that, although Mom was fading toward death, there was no rush. Now there was a rush. She was nearing death as I drove. Would I make it? Please God, let me make it?

My sister was on vacation and not coming home. I’d asked my oldest daughter who lived close by to go to her grandmother’s bedside. She told me later that Gahmy, as she called my mother, had ordered a peanut butter sandwich for her “last meal.” The nurse wondered if that was such a good idea, and Mom replied, “Can you think of a better one?” She then told my daughter that she saw an angel and said of her dying: “This won’t take long, darling.”

But I was speeding. Why? One more goodbye? To say what exactly? I wasn’t sure but, as I checked traffic in my rear-view mirror before I moved into the passing lane to increase my speed, I saw a clear lane. I also say my mother’s face. The image was clear, its message even clearer: “She tried.” I knew suddenly, after a lifetime of struggle with my mom’s zeal over me which I experienced as overbearing “sMOTHERation”, that she had tried. She tried to make everything nice and good for me and my family. Yes, it felt controlling to me, and yes it was her way of trying, the only way she knew. She had tried.

She was dead when I arrived at her bedside, but not by much. My daughter and a chaplain friend were there. What exactly does one do in such moments? You follow your own instincts—not Hollywood’s. I sat beside her and looked at her pale face. Her mouth was agape but not yet stiff, so I closed it, noting that on her lips there was a crooked line of fresh lipstick she’d painted on—by body memory. It was exactly how she would want to look to meet her “Maker”—possibly her own beloved father who had died and left her heartbroken at the tender age of twelve.  

Silently I prayed, Oh God, if you do this sort of thing somewhere in the universe of all our projected heavens, tell my mother our whole story and wipe away her tears—and mine. Oh, and tell her I’m trying, too.   
        
            *  *  *  *

Time passed, and in time, many who knew Jesus well recognized Divinity in his gospel and in his behavior. They wrote it all down, and now, centuries later, many still compete over the correct definitions for goodness/Godness in the world.  And just as many, and more, keep trying, for that is the way of it.

Simply so.

2021.06.06 My "Racism"—Brief Anecdote, Part Eighteen. How Holy Is Holy?

Scene LIV. Divine Identity

Rudolph Otto defined the power of the Holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans a perfectly contradictory wonderment—and true. You can be afraid of something or someone, repelled, and at the same time fascinated and attracted. I used to feel that way about Ether, the large black woman who worked for my mother and lived with my parents for a time. She was strong, always kind and loving, yet a mysterious and separate presence—holy.

Is God black? I wasn’t sure, but I saw that God was obviously not white or male, because I was female, and Jesus was semitic. I went on to explore the Holy in many guises: Jewish? Christian? Episcopalian? Gay? Womb? Tomb? Male? Female? Father? Mother? Transcendent? Immanent? Almighty? Angry? Judge? Lover? Sexual? Asexual? Socialist? Capitalist? Communist?

My writing was honest, vulnerable, and honestly all mixed up about the ways God could be experienced, dare I say incarnated, and still be God. Whatever the Holy was it was driving me nuts. I had written in my journal for a course in experiential theology about being sexually molested at age eight in a theater by an old man who looked like every image I’d ever seen of God. I wrote: “Terror is breathless. I am paralyzed. Then I feel a hot dimly pleasurable sensation as his finger probes. Why don’t I move? I can’t. I am trapped in a net, caught between the repulsion of molestation and the attraction of clitoral sensation. …I never tell. I think something is wrong with me. It’s my fault.” Tremendum et fascinans?

But what of God and sex? Is sex Holy? I wrote: “A sexual relationship is of God and flies free like the Gospel. Or it is sexual behavior out of duty, mechanical, rigid, conforming, conscripting. One message says: you are beautiful, and sexually responsive, and a woman. The other says: you are a dutiful and sexually performing wife. Ghosting these two is: you are a sexless mother.”  

I would say that, for me, there was nothing more holy than birthing and rearing a child. The exertion of birthing felt like God creating in the flesh. Holy. Nursing a child from the milk of my own breasts was also holy—exhausting and miraculous at once. Mothering is also holy, like balancing on a tightrope—how much to let go, how much to let be, have a net of support for falls and failures, and how much and when to intervene—for their own good you always claim. What is fascinating is how maternal love never abates, never leaves, and always keeps growing. What is tremendously mysterious is how much forgiving goes on—self-forgiving, forgiving between mother and child, and the gift of divine forgivingness for countless blunders, yours and theirs. Holy.

My search for God-in-me continued and burst the bounds of everything I thought was Holy—or was taught should be Holy. It was breakdown and breakout time when all kinds of immoral behavior felt holy to me—affairs, masturbation, divorce, sin— all of it viable in my search for sacred power. My New Testament professor  commented in my journal’s margins that my search reminded him of D.H Lawrence in Lady Chatterly’s Lover wherein “sexual energy so long blocked and finally released was seen as sacred power.”  Holy.

Scene LV. Anger

After the Episcopal Church turned me down in the ordination process, I felt the pain of shame and, strangely, the liberating energy of fury. Tremendum et fascinans.

Most of what I’d learned about anger was that it was “bad”, made trouble, and was unbecoming for women—as in hell hath no fury like it. Anger is damn hard to express without hurting or being hurt, and doubly damned hard to feel without a target to blame, self or other.  Nothing calming about it. But boy, does it release piled up energy, like a bull confined in a rodeo stall just before the door swings open. Free. Holy?

I began to empathize with the rage of others who felt trapped in patriarchal biases, unjust abuses, and those excluded from resources made unavailable to them by official policy and deliberate prejudice. Poverty is a death-dealing social disease, and worse, it is racialized and genderized.

I took courses at the UConn School of Social Work, mostly because they offered a joint degree program with Yale Divinity School, and I thought the Church might never ordain me. I encountered the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). He was a Marxist philosopher who developed a theory of cultural hegemony whereby the ruling class (moneyed) used established cultural institutions to reinforce norms and values that maintained their hegemony, and therefore capitalism. Tremendum.  BUT, Gramsci, a neo-Marxist, critiqued materialism and advocated a humanistic understanding of Marxism. He even helped to organize the working classes. Fascinans.  (His looks alone are tremendum et fascinans, no?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I took from this class was the idea that Gramsci was in favor of a capitalist economy and a socialist society. This idea fueled my ongoing arguments with my Republican father, and would influence my choice to change my political affiliation from Republican to Democrat. I didn’t like Communism or Socialism much, but thought socialist values had a better chance at empowering true Democracy and protecting the right of every citizen of age to vote. My change of party was also deeply influenced by my religious values. I thought Jesus would certainly be a socialist. Surely he despised wealth-ism, and was clearly against any kind of social or economic injustice, inequity—any and all -isms. He, and the God he proclaimed, were obviously not in favor of taxing the poor while the rich, by all means of unholy practices, got richer. But, he did not live in poverty, for if he had he would never have had the energy to travel the land, teach, preach, heal, weep, and pray.

I told myself: keep praying like crazy, continue chaplaincy work, love my children honestly and imperfectly, get a therapist, get a spiritual director, read radical stuff, and get political. The Episcopal Church votes, and will soon elect a new bishop in Connecticut. He might look with favor on this well-fueled aspirant.

He did. I was ordained deacon in 1987 and priest in 1988. Again, tremendum et fascinans—both.

And so…………My personal anger, my political choices, my sexual experiences, my religion, and my spirituality sealed me as firmly anti-racist—and yet.  Did I need any more training?