2017.08.20 You Won’t like It Here—But You Will Love This Book and This Boy

Why would a book review bear a title that directly contradicts the book’s own title: You’ll Like It Here?

Because when six-year-old Donald Vitkus, an abandoned orphan and rejected foster child, arrived at Belchertown State School, in 1949 he was told a lie: “You’ll like it here.”

Young Donald recognized this deceit because of the rough way he was treated, his desire to “puke”, and because this putative school had bars at the windows and padlocked doors. “School” was a misnomer for Belchertown.

You’ll Like It Here. The Story of Donald Vitkus Belchertown Patient #3394 is Vitkus's biography, written by Ed Orzechowski, a writer and retired high school English teacher in Northampton, Massachusetts. The memoir exposes the painful irony of its title by telling the whole truth: a story of tragedy and triumph.

The tragedy is that Belchertown existed for containment only—not care, not education. It stayed in business under state auspices for seventy years (1922-1992)—even after a 1973 Federal class action lawsuit against the institution’s leadership for cruelty and dehumanization. Children and adults, commonly diagnosed as “idiots”, “imbeciles” or “morons”, lived under inhumane, unstintingly cruel conditions.

The triumph is that some of Belchertown’s designated “retards” proved smart enough to make friends, humor, pranks, and plots. They knew damn well what was happening to them and what terrorism felt like. Vitkus was one such kid. He felt increasingly sure he was not a moron and secretly determined that one day he would prove it. His inner determination eventually taught him the right balance between risk-taking and compliance so that in time he was free from institutional control—
but not before some runaway attempts.

Belchertown took regular photos of all the patients and distributed them to the local police so runaways would always be apprehended and returned. Vitkus’s first runaway attempt happened on August 7, 1953, when he was ten. He had no place to go and no family in sight. Written recurrently on every entry of Vitkus’s case files was this painful sentence:“Does not receive mail or visitors and does not go on vacation.”

One could call runaway behavior desperate, foolhardy or just plain natural chutzpah. Vitkus always was caught of course, yet he never gave up. Once a compassionate policeman took this child for ice cream before he returned him to Belchertown. One ice cream is heaven when you’re in hell.


Life after Belchertown, though less breathtaking, had rough patches but just as many graces for Vitkus, not the least of which was his meeting Ed Orzechowski in 2005 at an event to publicize a book called Crimes Against Humanity and asking Orzechowski if he would be interested in writing his story. Orzechowski agreed to a  conversation. That conversation would turn into eight years and some forty hours of taped interviews, not to mention patience, courage and yes, affection. The men collected official records and documents to prove their book was not a work of fiction. This book is uniquely the product of a relationship of trust between author and subject, a relationship that gives this book its integrity and intimate worth.

Orzechowski listened very closely in order to write the story in Vitkus’s voice. At times he felt as if he were “channeling” Donald. The process wasn’t easy, Orzechowski told me when I contacted him. “I first had to learn to write a book,” he said. “But Donald pushed ahead, because he never wanted ‘to go back to those days.’”  It’s not easy to write someone else’s memoir and make it vibrate with a voice not your own. Orzechowski writes with exceptional craft, skill, and clear-heartedness.

Sometimes a memoir helps a person, not to forget or resolve every painful memory, but to give a lived experience shape, form, and right words outside one’s own mind—contained, shelved and ready for others to read and find empathy and hope. A memoir can be a kind of miracle this way. Vitkus had first to entrust his whole story to a stranger. He wanted others not to feel alone in their truth, and most of all, he wanted to prove he was no moron. Donald Vitkus as an adult in his late sixties is pictured here.

Vitkus lurched clumsily toward happiness as he grew in body, mind, and spirit in spite of having grown up deprived of affection, adequate health care, and most all of life’s most urgent basic lessons from table manners, to language, to pubescent impulses, to the meaning of love—save the inner longing that signals love’s absence. We are not left with the impression that Donald is free of all his scars. He still has a strong aversion to authority. In his efforts to manage life outside he flounders. And he still sleeps with the covers over his head.

What saves this book from being mere reportage of atrocities for the sake of news:   
    -tight structure including compelling chapter titles, often quotes from Donald or his case records;
    -the redemptive quality of the biography-as-memoir genre itself— characters, dialogue, plot—supported by documented facts and photos;
    - a protagonist with exceptional chutzpah who also managed a gentle, respectful touch when he stripped and washed the younger boys for their weekly shower night;
    -a simple pencil posing as a godsend—just one pencil given to each first grade student. Donald had never experienced the thrill of ownership: “mine.” He took excellent care of his pencil;
     -some kind teachers who cared about patients as much as Vitkus did about his very own pencil;
    -transformation of a life nearly sunk by trauma;
    -a writer who never allowed his own emotions, which would have to have been painful, overwhelm the plot or the truth of his subject.

Orzechowski may just have discovered his retirement vocation. He is beginning interviews with another former Belchertown patient who sought him out. Hopefully, some women will come forward as well.  Orzechowski told me: “Since I know the ropes much better now, I expect the process to be considerably shorter this time.”

Today, as Ed Orzechowski promotes his book in readings and presentations, Donald Vitkus attends every single reading. Vitkus, for his part, travels and speaks publicly about his experience. He is Vice-President of Advocacy Network which evolved from Friends of Belchertown.  When he  introduces himself he begins his talks this way: “I’m a human services worker, and a Vietnam vet who can’t own a gun. I am an ex-husband, a husband, father, and grandfather. And a former moron of Belchertown State School.”

Here is Donald Vitkus with his present wife Pat at his graduation from Holyoke Community College in 2005.

Readers of this book will find faith, hope, love, and grace. Darkness and light co-exist, neither overwhelming the other. You’ll Like It Here is ministry—restoring dignity to the innocent and exposing larger social justice issues with universal implications.

Ed Orzechowski, by the way, has also proved he does know how to write a book.

2016.04.24 The Ultimate Value of Memory

When an old shipwrecked memory emerges to shove its prow into my mind without warning, my heart leaps in recognition. A rush of thoughts and feelings follow.

I’ve wondered if this process was the same for biblical writers. The Bible is one of the most complex, diverse, and complicated memoirs I’ve ever read. All the authors of the New Testament must each have experienced strong and insistent memories—over and over— of being in Jesus’s presence. Then they had collective experiences that swept them off their feet. I’m sure they compared and debated and shared. It took them over 20 years of talking and remembering, and talking some more, selecting, and praying to get Jesus Christ written into gospel form.

My memoir over all took about that long to compile and write and revise and edit—over and over. The structuring process itself was transformative, especially deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, and why, or why not. Written or not written, the memories keep on coming.

Like today, I was sewing a button on my winter coat and my maternal grandmother surfaced. I saw her clearly, her mouth filled with straight pins clinging to her lips for dear life. (The sharp end faced in!) Both her hands were occupied fussing to smooth the fabric, readying it for her straight pins.When she had it plumb and flattened to her satisfaction, she held it down with one hand and with the other plucked a pin from between her lips and inserted it into the fabric to hold her seam in place. She repeated this action many times over—swiftly.

I watched in awe, fearful that one day she would surely swallow a pin. Mesmerized and held in the grip of this dangerous drama, I didn’t move a muscle, though I was itching to ask how she did this? Terrified to interrupt her for fear she would swallow a pin, or several pins, or all the pins, and then we’d have to rush off to the hospital. She might even die—and somehow it would be my foolish fault, or it might be so adjudged.

And how in the world did she manage always to have just the right number of pins in her mouth By the time she decided to use the Singer, invented in 1850 by Isaac Singer, and mass-produced by 1863 so it could be sold to housewives for $10. My grandmother was already an accomplished seamstress. The Singer was the first machine able to sew continuously and also around curves, revolutionizing the art of sewing—but not real stitching, my grandmother said. When she stitched by hand she looked to my young admiring eye to be faster than the machine.

This grandmother, whom I'd named Ga when I was a child, was very close to my mother, her youngest and fourth child, and our family. Ga grew up Marguerite Gordon Hall in Medford, Massachusetts. She eloped at eighteen with her beloved, Avon Franklin Adams, a Jewish impresario, whom she married in New York City in 1891. The Halls of Medford did not approve of this marriage. Nevertheless, the couple settled in Manhattan and had a family.

I can’t say I was fond of Ga, although I coveted her attention. When my younger sister Laurie was born Ga made it a project to make sure Laurie got enough attention, fearing that my mother would favor me. Result: Ga favored Laurie and I was the one who felt slighted. Ah, dynamics!

Ga gave me two miraculous gifts:
     1) She created an entire wardrobe for my doll Lucille, must of it meticulously hand-stitched, including a Queen of Hearts costume, just like the one she made for me to wear to a costume party. The costume exactly replicated the playing card. I was small and shy and far from queenly, but the costume pulled it off for me that day. I won first prize for the most original costume.
    2) Watching Ga, I learned to sew and conquer my fears of being pricked or crunching a fabric beyond recognition.  She was not patient with my mistakes, like sewing a zipper perfectly—into the hemline of a skirt. But I learned, and in time I had as many pins in my mouth as she did. I made the bridesmaids dresses for my sister Jeanie’s wedding.  They were white velvet. Believe me, velvet is a fabric that shows no mercy to a seamstress.

Writing memoir is like piecework, as Ga called intricate stitching and piecing odd patterns of fabric together. That’s how I imagine the Bible was put together. There is only one purpose: to faithfully and honestly reveal the relationship between God and Godde’s creation, including the annoyingly persistent relational pattern of connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting, particularly endemic to humanity.  Some people call it sin and redemption. I call it the work of the Holy Spirit, whose energy works the between spaces in relationships pulling for healing.

The Mystery of this process is the re-connection. And with Godde it never fails.

2014.07.24 BOOK REVIEW: This Is How It Feels, Craig MIller

This is a book of truth, It is not pretty; the whole truth about human life rarely is. It is beautiful;  beauty can change the world.

I have just finished this terrorizing yet redemptive read. It’s a memoir written by Craig Miller, a man who suffered from OCD and depression, made a suicide attempt at 20, spent three days in a coma, and experienced an amazing inner shift of perspective—while technically dead. Life won, he says.

This memoir is so emotionally authentic it’s hard to read. Miller writes as if his soul spills out onto the page. Yes, he spares no details about the horrors of what happened to him and of his mental illness, but he does so with no remove. We are in it with him.

At first I thought: This can’t be true! and So how come I believe every word? Then I realized that I had heard such horror stories from clients and in the addictions treatment center where I worked as a chaplain/counselor.  But when you are functioning as the therapist, or the spiritual companion, you can’t plunge into the emotional murk yourself or you won’t be helpful. In fact, you’ll drown. But reading alone in my room allowed me to dive right in with Miller and swim with him. My heart beat for this boy, this teen, this young man. It ached, broke, wept, no sobbed. He prayed, and I did too.
 
Miller writes graphically about his suicide attempt and his courageous jihad against his mental illness. No one along the way of treatments asked him about what happened!!  His family and friends did not know how to help him. Social attitudes twenty years ago toward bullying, especially for males, were: Get out there and defend yourself, wimp! Rape, suicide, mental illness?—forget it!  Miller’s loneliness was profound, palpable, yet he pursues his search for kindness relentlessly. He is  a fighter. 
 
I knew that he survived and that he is now married with kids, but I had to find out exactly how he got there. This is a suspense-filled story fueled by hope, grit, and grace.

The book is structured around the three days Miller spent in a coma. During those days every single repressed memory reeled by. He came out just enough to know he was in a hospital, but sank back again into a comatose state.
 
This is not a traditional near-death experience. Although Miller’s brain is dead, he doesn’t experience heavenly peace; nor does he travel anywhere— except backwards into his past. Something functions without his brain. This kind of healing from trauma and mental illness would take years and years of good therapy, plus medications and a community of recovery. For him it takes three days to begin the process toward full healing. All I could think of was the New Testament phrase, predicting resurrection: “. . . and after three days he will rise . . .” God’s time is not our time.

It's true: God makes us whole as we rise, whether before or after biological death.

I will not reveal more about the transformation that happens. I will only say that this is the most profoundly spiritual book I’ve read in some time—uniquely so.

Craig Miller writes and speaks his whole truth, and nothing but, about depression, OCD, suicide, addiction, violence and abuse. His work is indispensable to treatment professionals and those with mental illness, but even more so it contributes to the mending of the world, tikum olam, according to Jewish tradition. We need more broken hearts. And we need to eliminate the fear and shame that go with stigmatization, religious and secular, attached to mental illness and suicide. Start by calling survival accomplishment.

Miller has his own saving mantra.  

I leave you with mine: The glory of God is the human person fully alive.  Irenaeus of Lyons.

2013.01.30 God Is Paradox

Karen Armstrong, noted scholar, former nun, and religious historian and theologian, once said in a talk, something like: “Where there is paradox, there is always God."  I thought that seemed true, because my experience is that when two things that don’t easily go together come together to awaken and surprise, it startles me alive. But I wondered why God couldn’t just be straightforward. 

I have found out, by hard experience and plain accident, that whenever I let go of trying to possess God, I find God. For example, I prayed frantically to be ordained, and that God would work on bishops. I was so importunate that I finally heard God say, in sweet exasperation, “Lyn, I don’t care if you’re ordained.” Set me right, and set me free.

Now I am praying with some importunity that I will finish and order my memoir, first, and then that it will get published. One blear day it occurred to my overly conscientious mind that this memoir might be simply another one in a long life-line of achievements I’ve amassed to feed my ambition and esteem.  The thought was so upsetting that I took it to prayer, worrying that I'd turned my spiritual journey, maybe God too, into a notch in my ego's belt. 

And God, when I confessed, said: “So?”

So what, indeed!  God's power is in humility—not control. Sister Wendy Beckett, artist and theologian, says” “Some Gods are worth letting go of.”  The omnipotent God is worth letting go of.  Anglican theologian John MacQuarrie’s metaphor for Divinity is Letting-Be. I love that.

In the beginning of Genesis, God’s choice to create humankind is a self-limiting and paradoxical choice. The Creator God lets go of being God in any traditional sense of that word.  Why?  For the sake of letting-be. God want to be in relationship, more than to control destinies.

I pray for it all anyway, of course, just to keep in touch, as I would with anyone I loved. And always I am strengthened for whatever may come.

We pray for a rescuer and we get a lover.

2012.07.18 A Gift That Gave

 I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish, was a spontaneous gift from a stranger on an airplane flight from Tel Aviv to London. We struck up a conversation across the aisle when lunch or breakfast or whatever meal it was (on airplanes they blend together like time zones) arrived.
   
I asked her about the book she was reading so intently. She showed it to me and said she’d give it to me when she finished it. I was reading Jesus Freak (Sara Miles) and she was reading I Shall Not Hate. How do such connections happen!! Nimisha is Hindu, a clinical psychologist living in London who  travels to Gaza five times a year for two weeks to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder among Palestinians.  “I hear horror stories. That’s why I watch dumb movies on airplanes,” she said. “Well, after I finish this book.”
  
“This book is for everyone,” she said when she, in a short time, passed it across to me.
                      
                                                                 *******
I thanked her and began to read. The first thing I noticed was that the author was a Palestinian who had grown up in a refugee camp in Gaza and that there was a praise-filled Foreword by a Jewish  Israeli physician, Dr. Marek Glezerman, chairman of the Hospital for Women and deputy director of Rabin Medical Center, Israel.  Glezerman expressed surprise that Abuelaish, though chronically humiliated by Israeli military border procedures (harrasments really) while traveling for his work, was not “the very angry man I expected to greet.”
  
On our pilgrimage we visited a refugee camp in Efrata North, south of Jerusalem, established  in 1949. We heard a young Arab Muslim, 24,  speak of his life there and his dream of returning home to West Jerusalem. He wasn’t angry either but spoke with a kind of derailed depression freckled with hope and good humor. He had 30 hours to go in the university in the camp where, tellingly,  he studied psychology and social work. “I’m afraid to graduate,” he told us. “What then?  My friend applied for a job in Nablus with 11,000 applicants!”  I asked him about his faith in Allah. His answer was simple: “When I choose the good way and pray first.” 
  
As a feisty Christian feminist westerner I felt humbled. How come neither this man nor Abuelaish haven’t given up on God?  I thought that until I remembered that I hadn’t either, although my trials have been minor.

Abuelaish is an ObGyn doctor who specializes in infertility medicine. He has a heart for families, mothers and newborns, loss.  He was born in a refugee camp in Gaza where life was harsh. But his mother was a “lioness” mother who never let up on him about study, study study. He obeyed and eventually received a scholarship award and went to study medicine. Life in Gaza remained restrictive, and travel back and forth to work required him to cultivate teeth-gritting patience.

Through unimaginable suffering and tragic loss Abuelaish persisted. I Shall Not Hate is his memoir. It’s his testament to his religious faith and to the friendships of many Israeli colleagues who helped him and value his work and person. I’m reminded of the New Testament  story of the friends who removed roof tiles to lower their paralyzed buddy on his stretcher down through a roof  so he could bypass crowds to get to Jesus for healing. And Jesus told him faith had made him well—his own and that of his friends.  
                                                               ********
Chapter One, titled “Sand and Sky” begins: “It was as close to heaven and as far from hell as I could get that day, an isolated stretch of beach just two and a half miles from the misery of Gaza City, where waves roll up on the shore as if to wash away yesterday and leave a fresh start for tomorrow. We probably looked like any other family at the beach—...”  I was hooked.

Abuelaish had brought his two sons and six daughters plus cousins, aunts and uncles to the beach to find peace in the midst of grief at the premature death of his wife Nadia  from leukemia just two weeks after diagnosis.  Little did Abuelaish know that in a short time his home would be the target, mistaken but never apologized for, of a fatal shelling during the 23-day siege of Gaza (Dec., 2009 into 2010) in which more family members would die. The sustained attack was designed to intimidate Hamas, retaliation for their suicide bombings.  But instead it murdered innocent people. Under a photo of himself in a graveyard Abuelaish wrote: “No caption can express a father’s loss.”
  
Feelings of agony, rage, terror, love, patience, and hope course side by side through this book but never overwhelm the story, nor the author’s peace and friendship platform.  The prose is clear and direct—accessible. No facts, no matter how painful, are sentimentalized, minimalized,  or sensationalized. This is the work of an ordered mind that manages to stay sane in the midst of insanity. He never blames Israelis for their government’s actions.

Medicine is his practice, healing physical illness and souls as it creates a level playing field of need and compassionate care.  Strong Muslim faith is his stronghold. “For the three weeks during the war, we lost our belief in humanity, so God and each other were all we had left.”    AND.......  friends on the other side.  “The tank pointing its guns at my house ...  looked like the angel of death.  I called Shlomi Eldar.” Eldar, his friend on the putative other side, managed to engineer a military inquiry into the matter and also set up  an interview on Israeli radio. The story went viral and that crisis was averted—until the next one.

At one point Abuelaish ran for public office in Gaza as an independent, thinking it might be a way to work for change.  His campaign platform stressed the same issues (poverty, health, education) as the Hamas platform. But Abuelaish’s campaign included raising the status of women. Abuelaish lost.
 
 In 2009 he won the Niarchos Prize for Survivorship. How ironic there is such a prize. It is given by the Survivor Corps an organization that works to break cycles of victimization and violence. Nomika Zion, an Israeli woman, shared the prize with Abuelaish. She and other neighboring Israelis, act and lobby in solidarity with Gazans.
  
Zion (I love the irony of the name!) accepted the award and spoke against the glorification of war. “I am frightened that we are losing the human ability to see the other side, to feel, to be horrified and to show empathy. It’s our obligation to make our leaders talk, to compel them to tell us, for a change, a different story.” Abuelaish in his acceptance speech  encouraged action and to think forward together. “The dignity of Palestinians equals the dignity of Israelis . . .” Does that sound familiar?
                                                                *******
Having finally to make the hard decision to leave Gaza,  Abuelaish got a job and moved his family to Toronto where his children could experience safety and hope for a future.  But he plans to return to his native land and continue his healing mission to encourage an internal shift from hate to respect, on both sides at grassroots levels. He isn’t the first to have such a dream.

The very first activity his younger children performed at their new home in Toronto was to take down a section of the fence between their house and the neighbors so the kids could run back and forth.  “How prophetic that I witnessed what I had been dreaming about for years for our two neighbors, Israel and Palestine,” Abuelaish wrote. 
                                                               *******
DAUGHTERS FOR LIFE  is the foundation Abuelaish has started. It is dedicated to change the status and role of women through the provision of scholarships for high school and university education.  Ultimately he hopes his foundation will create a credible voice for female values throughout the Middle East.  I just made a small gift online. 

2012.05.02 Blogoir: Gift, Miracle, Table

Miraculousness, my status at birth according to my mother,  made me too precious for Mom to hug much but not too precious to fuss over.  She defined miracle as something God does for you without you. I’d seen the picture of me inside of her and obviously she was a partner in the making of this miracle. I became suspicious. Either God or Mom was lying but what little child can choose between these two deities?

Being “a gift from God” had more promise for me as an identity than miracle. I preferred being a gift because a gift required intention and thoughtfulness, even love, while a miracle seemed like a flash-in-the-pan quick fix.  Also, no one in their right mind, even my theologically addled mother, would turn down a present as adorable as she said I was.

Preferences aside however, both spiritual ideas imparted to my young and curious mind a fascination with God. Who was this divine guy and how did He choose me for His gift?

At first I confused the whole masculine divinity idea with my father because Mom always called him  “my divine guy.”  It seemed she confused us both with God. It was easy to tell Dad wasn’t that heavenly. Someone as big as God who created the whole world and all that was therein (words I heard from a book)  probably didn’t drink martinis and nightly neglect the daughter who was a gift from God to him also. Wasn’t she?

My father held the magic glass. He twirled the stem between his thumb and forefinger. My mother had a different glass, tall with ice and dark fizzy liquid in it. Still, Daddy’s glass drew worship from both of them. What was wrong with my mother?  She had told me this was supposed to be the “children’s hour” like the poem said. Their elitist nightly ritual disgusted me.  It hurt, too.

I stomped away from the sanctuary of the parental Cocktail Hour leaving my parents to gaze at the long-stemmed triangle-shaped glass filled with clear liquid and three enormous green cross-eyed olives. Too big to float they nestled near the stem, their red eyes staring out at me in a menacing way—the evil olive eye.

I found refuge under our large dining room table with the cloth to the floor. I took off my slippers and left them outside the tablecloth—token good girlism.  Then I crawled in under the table,  sat cross-legged on the worn maroon carpet, and hiked my yellow nightie with the tiny flowers all over it up over my knees.

For company I took my three imaginary friends; for food I took some Ritz crackers I’d snitched from the cocktail tray. I lined the crackers up on one of the cross beams  and started my “sermon”— a lively one-way conversation with God who joined the group and, unlike my distracted friends,  was the only one who listened attentively and unflinchingly—and listened and listened at a time when no one else did. 

After I’d turned myself inside out chattering I was hungry and it was time for our meal. I ate my Ritz cracker and left the other four lined up on the cross beam. I felt sure my communicants would come for them after I went off to bed, but of course my mother would have retrieved them, knowing that my faith in my three imaginary friends depended on it. She never asked about the fourth. 

That was how I got my image of God, how I first knew for sure that I mattered no matter what, and how I invented a eucharist.  I felt this experience could be the greatest story ever told.

Some days I still wonder.

2011.12.11 Fleeting Frail Memory

It occurred to me as I write my memoir that even the facts I know I don’t remember long or well, often doubt altogether. It’s why fragile memory can’t be proven, only explored and experienced with loving care. Then gone.

Here is a quote on memory from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.  I love it.

"My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing but the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time. "  

I do envy that prose. We'd be blackballed today probably for such a lengthy sentence but it is eloquent.  We who write are all honey-voiced don't you think? 

My favorite Christmas memory of my childhood is my father reading aloud "Twas the Night Before Christmas" as we small three daughters listened in awe and wonder. The story itself held all the enchantment of the Nativity story. It's the story that converts and transforms, not its veracity.

My second favorite or clear memory of Christmas is of my father singing carols in his rich bass voice in church. It was enough just to listen and watch the candles flicker for me to know Love lives no matter what else dies.

The Eucharist is like Waugh's memory pigeons, a glimpse of remembered life, sharply present, beckoning, the past possessed, then, suddenly, swallowed and gone—not forgotten just gone. The Greeks call this phenomenon anamnesis (no amnesia.)

All you can do is say thanks for the memory.

2011.08.17 Habit & HIgher Level Spirituality

Vacation time is so gloriously sluicy it skitters by almost unnoticed or marked, a bit like retreat time. (That’s why this post is longer than my usual posts.)

Vacation is un-timed time. I love it in limited hunks. At the end of two weeks of vacation I feel both sad to leave and also glad to be getting back home to my routines.

I find comfort in my habits and quickly wonder if I’m therefore deficient spiritually. It’s like judging rosaries as rote and therefore spiritually immature. Still, I’m routinized more than I like to admit, and I need it.

In a wonderful book I’m reading by Judith Shulevitz called Sabbath World she researched human habits and discovered that we humans are wired for habits. Habituated behavior can change the shape of the brain enabling automatic responses to stimuli. That sound like instinct, like animals not of the human kind. Shouldn’t the human brain be beyond that?

The power of habit according to William James is the “flywheel of society, a conservative agent.” Oh yuk. Now I feel defensive and repelled. Conservative?

Shulevitz writes about the value of keeping the Sabbath. A a Christian priest I ascribe the same value to participating in the Eucharist. You gotta do something holy with your body, not just talk about it. And you gotta do it over and over again.

Shulevitz points out that we would rather be masters of our fate than creatures of habit but that, according to James, habit is necessary and efficient because it “reduces unnecessary expenditures of physical and intellectual energy AND FACILITATES HIGHER LEVEL THINKING.”

Imagine!

Thinking leads to doing and back to more thinking. So I see what it is that habits conserves, more energy to stretch yourself, and life itself. One value in keeping “sabbath” is that it becomes a habituated sanctuary of time and place to cultivate leisure, silence, love found in relationships with loved ones. Such habits are not dependent on the force of will but create AUTOMATIC core values on which to build a civil society—PEACE.

Once a toddler grandchild had mastered walking to proficiency, made it a habit ie. few falls and faster paces, he then developed higher level thinking which consisted in his case of a new activity: piling up a box, a hassock and a couple of blocks to get up to the counter to reach his heart’s desire: the missing box car to the train he was assembling.

I remember hearing a nine year old concert pianist execute prodigious musical wonders. The conductor asked him how he got his small hands to extend over the octaves required for the compositions he so skillfully played. The child thought for a minute and said simply, “Practice.”

I’ve practiced prayer, just talking to Godde and sometimes shutting up to listen in the silence, since I was a small child. Originally I did it to assuage loneliness and exercise my curiously religious imagination. Now it’s a habit. I just do it, like walking.

Prayer as habituated spiritual practice gave me the context in which self, Godde, church, Jesus, eucharist, priesthood, soul, and the occasional mystical experience thrive.

Ritual/habitual prayer and sacrament facilitate HIGHER LEVEL SPIRITUALITY—closer to Godde or the missing toy box car.

On vacation I take time off from good habits even organized prayer. Wherever I am is sabbath, is church, is prayer. I let myself float about in un-timed time, maybe eating lunch at five and dinner at 9, taking 3-4 walks a day, gazing at the sea or kids in the sand, indulging in random reading and writing like this. I pray with no pattern and make gratuitous assumptions about Godde’s presence.

But after a couple of weeks I need my habits back, those practices that make me both pharisee and monastic—until the next spate of un-timed time.

* * *
It just occurred to me that memoir and its current popularity may relate to the human need for habituated spirituality because it provides, for reader and writer alike, an anchor in time and space, some stability amidst time that is more fluid than fixed. Zazen, eucharist, sabbath serve similar purposes.

Memoir Musings Part Four: Lady Wisdom

It's TAX day! Some of us enjoy the privilege of paying taxes that others who can't pay may enjoy needed services provided the government manages tax and service with equity and generosity in balance. If you can swallow that sentence whole and digest it without much argument you're in balance yourself!

One of my favorite biblical characters turned out to be Lady Wisdom, spirit of creativity and formation. Wisdom is portrayed as the feminine face of God, God’s sidekick in all things. Without Wisdom you don’t get very far in life. I’d valued wisdom, the integration of knowledge with experience, but had often confused it with bookishness, reading more than I digested and way more than I could possibly use—or integrate.

Biblical Wisdom calls us to “lay aside immaturity” (Prov 7:6a) She invites us to the table to eat of the meal she has prepared and drink of the wine she has mixed. She confirmed for me my principal reason for wanting to be a priest.

Wisdom was female now. I couldn’t afford to be without her, apocryphal or not. I prayed for ordination and for Wisdom, my vocational arc increasingly bending like a birch toward a truth I trusted: that all life is sacred, sacramental, everything a visible sign of an invisible grace, everyone holy.

As I read about Wisdom, I learned she had many fine attributes, more than her Boss in fact. One of her qualities listed in the Book of Wisdom is shrewdness. I loved that. Shrewd is related to the now obsolete shrew, something I once heard my father call my mother. Shrewdness enables someone to make astute judgments sometimes without cold hard facts. It’s like cunning and maybe wily, which brings me straight to the holiness of many biblical women who used their wiles to seduce dangerous men and eliminate (murder) them as enemies of the plans of God. May not be the best ethics or theology but in a power-happy world what can you expect even if you don’t approve? Today the same.

Wisdom, shrewd and wily, also seemed like a divine kind of mother to me, one who trains her children in survival skills, who teaches all her children wisdom, and fills them with joy. I also read: “At first she will walk with them on tortuous paths; she will bring fear and dread upon them and will torment them by her discipline until she trusts them.” (Sirach 4: 17)

What kind of mother was that? Well, maybe Mother Church. She could fill me with dread and fear and torture me with her closed doors. When would I be trusted? I wondered as I wandered.

All I could do was keep on, keep on, keep on. I got lots of support, lots of “milk” along the way. But the wilderness could be lonely. Friends and family got sick of my laments and my desires, to say nothing of my radicalized politics.

Determination to achieve my goal made me gritty.

As the years went by I reared four children, went to seminary, did everything in the parish church that I could except join Altar Guild—enough washing and ironing at home. I developed spiritual muscle. I grew tall inside. Adversity, not comfort, shapes souls.

A tender sorrow accompanied me, but it wasn’t bitter and no longer overwhelmed me. My own true voice began to sound more and more like the voice of divine Wisdom I’d heard from time to time inside myself.

That inner voice had awakened me and set me on the wilderness path in the first place. It spoke one day when I was baking chocolate chip cookies, batch # 1 million. They were good and brought pleasure and I was a good mother, but God-in-me gave me Wisdom who said, “Why are you doing this?”

Now I was in the wilderness trying to answer that simple shrewd question, trying to make it to the promised land which I thought was ordination.

Once along my “prayerful” obsessive way Wisdom interrupted me saying, “Lyn, I don’t care if you’re ordained.” Insulted as I felt, She made me laugh. Wisdom can be fresh—funny with a bite. But I suppose she takes her assignments seriously.

Memoir Musings Part Three: Staying the Course

It’s Holy Week, an important one for Christians. We remember the events leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection and we honor all our own grief and pain and place our trust once again in the hope that we have a God who reaches into our worst darkness, even death, and raises us up body and soul together, wounds and all. In these days we all have our own memories of death and resurrection.

I had experienced myself and life in a sacramental way by instinct from childhood. My movement towards priesthood seemed obvious. All I had to do was turn myself inside out. I thought the Church would be, well, nice.

It took a record-setting eleven years for me to get ordained, the usual time being four or five years. I stayed alive in the wilderness by thinking that if only I got ordained . . . what? My father would love me as I am? My mother would acknowledge my authority as an adult? I’d be happily married? All my life my way of establishing myself in the world had been by achieving, one glittering triumph after another. Now I was stopped cold.

All one can achieve in a wilderness is survival.

God as well as my self, my direction, my values, my vocational track, came under scrutiny and into question in my wilderness.

Going to seminary whether the Church liked it or not felt deliciously defiant—also dangerous. Sometimes in a wilderness you just have to find a building, a temporary shelter, a tent even— and of course a library! Falling in love with the bible and its motley cast of characters raised my spirits. In the bible, a best seller I’d never understood, I found vocabulary for some of my own spiritual experience.

For example, when, at three under the dining room table, I’d sit and chat to my imaginary friends who never listened and to God who did listen, I felt that I mattered. I received the gift of the authority of my selfhood without any judgment or abandonment. The psalmist calls it feeling yourself to be “the apple of God’s eye.”

Personal authority and belonging came together for me under that table. This “marriage” is rare if at all in a world full of fear, but perhaps it’s a gift only God can give, a gift of love not conferred as reward or power except the power of one’s being. I feel it in my body of flesh when my spiritual body takes residence in every bone, muscle, sinew. I feel alive even when I’m tired of trying. It’s what helped me stay the course.

Recently a woman in my yoga class asked me what I did. I told her I was an Episcopal priest to which she replied “Oh, I’m done with all that religion. I was raised in the Catholic church. My mother believes every word.” I told her I had many doubts myself. She said something like “We’re all just light, Just light. None of this matters.” She patted her body. I resisted for once a little sermonette on incarnational theology, simply saying. “You are a beautiful, graceful athlete. Your body is Light, sacred all by itself.” She looked stunned.

Our conversation ended and I don’t know what she thought. But that’s the way we connect isn’t it, by sharing what matters most to us with each other? I know I’m thinking of what I call the “light of Christ” in a more expansive way because of her Light.

Memoir Musings Part Two: Priest's Song

It’s April Fools’ Day and I should be writing about fools or at least April, but instead I continue my memoir musings with this poem.

Actually it is about some kind of foolishness —the kind I felt trying to get the church to ordain me when my life was messy, euphemistically, and I was lost in my wilderness. Growing up is be definition chaotic. You try all kinds of different behaviors, taste all kinds of different treats, experiment with all kinds of different role-free relationships and create grand messes only you can clean up. It’s painful and exhilarating.

Imagine my hoping and praying that the Episcopal church, known both for its breadth of heart and its stuffiness of mind, would find me acceptable for ordination anyway.

I didn’t write this poem in my wilderness state. I wrote it it after my lostness and my acting up days were, at least for a time, done with. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote his famous Serenity Prayer before he had to live its wisdom in the midst of a stroke. Before or after, I guess most people don’t write clear-headed wisdom in the middle of stark vulnerability. (Jesus didn’t recite all that biblical wisdom while stretched thin and gasping on a wooden cross. His followers knew what he would say if he could and wrote it much later.)

So I wrote my song of hope after I was ordained, remembering how it had been to be longing, lost and lonely—unwanted.

PRIEST’S SONG

When I have no title
I make one up - irreverend.

When I have no collar
I roll my neck round.

When I have no church
I steeple my fingers.

When I have no pulpit
I preach running.

When I have no altar
I celebrate my back yard.

When I have no wine
I weep blood tears.

When I have no bread
I am a sacrament.

When I have no God
I pray anyway. (this poem is published in Women’s Uncommon Prayers)

Memoir Musings Part One: Wilderness

Today the Christian Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation. In the biblical story a young girl Mary had a vision of the angel Gabriel and heard in her heart an invitation, an announcement, a deal: conceive, bear and nurture a son named Jesus. In return for her female gifts her biology and her commitment to a hard journey (Jesus wasn’t an easy son you know,) God promised blessings for Mary and for her son. Mary said yes.

Today is also the twenty-first anniversary of my ordination as an Episcopal priest in the Church of God. It’s Mary’s day and my day too, a good time to begin to tell you how my own call to say yes to God’s invitation to me.

* * * *

I’ve been writing all my life, most recently at length about my spiritual journey, trek really, from child to adult, girl to woman, and edging into old woman, with most of the focus on my middle years—thirty-five to fifty-five roughly.

What, I pondered, would be the right word to describe what it’s like to be moving, sometimes without consent, toward maturity? Mind, body and soul are all involved—not one holds back, not one dominates. Growth spurt seems too mild. Mid-life crisis lacks luster, too psychological. Transition is shopworn. And paradigm shift is for things much bigger than me. Liminality works but is close to spiritual cliché.

Into my mind popped wilderness and a quote: “The wilderness is where the child learns to love the mother more than the milk.”

Wilderness? A bit tired among the biblically literate but when something pops in like that I don’t resist much. Wilderness catches the ambience of a mapless pilgrimage, going nowhere and everywhere. Lost.

To learn to love the mother more than the milk? At a literal level, I don’t resonate with this wisdom. My mother didn’t nurse me or my sisters, thought is was “disgusting,” not part of her class or day. But of course milk and mother are metaphor for what life is like in wilderness time.

My wilderness was wild but it wasn’t hot or dry like a desert. There was plenty of water although nothing slaked my thirst. It wasn’t uninhabited, not bleak wasteland but teeming with people, places and things, forces driving me from within and whipping me from without. Tumbleweed.

I don’t know how I got into my wilderness or exactly how I got out. I careened through it tethered by one slender thread: I wanted with all my heart to be ordained a priest and celebrate the Holy Eucharist. I kept trying to persuade the Episcopal church, then (1970’s and 80’s) in its own wilderness of change—shifting words, hymn tunes, genders, and all manner of traditions.

My campaign began officially in 1977 in the diocese of Connecticut. I with five other women—the very first female aspirants—applied to enter the ordination process. We were “legal” now, voted so in 1976 by the General Convention, our legislative body. Fifteen women pioneers paved the way. In 1974 and 1975 they were been ordained priests outside of canonical authority. Roman Catholic women are doing the same now. (Such efforts remind me of the valiant and herculean way grass makes its way up through concrete taking the tiniest cracks as invitation.)

But since we Episcopal women had been accepted by vote, we thought we had an open door. We were thrilled, triumphant, and naive about the difference between the vote counts of our “congressional” delegates and the more invisible slow heartbeat of church officialdom back home. The numbers didn’t tally.

Before I applied for ordination I had entered and was lost in my personal wilderness, trying to break free from societal roles and rules for women, but this ecclesiastical wilderness was vast, harsh and sometimes toxic. I was rejected twice by “Goliath” after which I descended into the hell of my one million three hundred thousand internal demons—echoes of parental demons now mine— all proclaiming me inadequate.

I kept on–no promise, no blessings, no mother, no milk— driven by my soul’s adrenalin.