My "Racism"—Brief Anecdotal History. Part Thirteen. Choices.

My very first choice was at three when I left my parents to their own cocktail hour and went off on my own to meet God with my reckless imagination. Whether that choice could be considered free I can’t say, except that it felt free to me. Looking back, I’d like to say I had good emotional intelligence, yet honestly it was more likely impulsive, childish creativity writ large—accidental grace. Is there any other kind of grace?

My first morality-laden choice had been choosing my own pleasure against loyalty to my black friend Carol Lee. The burning memory of it still stings. Whether I called it racist or not didn’t matter. My conscience did. Carol Lee and I were different—not just because of our skin color but because of my choice—my choice.

My early experience set me up for knowing that choice was an intimate part of life and that it would always be impure.

Scene XXXIV. Why?

I was nearing forty. I’d made made choices about marriage and children. These might not have been perfectly timed, but I had no regrets as I watched the children I adored and admired grow and thrive. They were my greatest pleasure. But something was missing. I didn’t know what exactly. I sat in my kitchen conjuring up fake images of myself as a domestic wonder-mother when an interruptive question—the kind only God-from-within could inflict—broke into my reverie.  

Why are you doing this?  

I sat down at the kitchen table, rested my bowed head on my crossed arms and sobbed—sobbed.
Why was I doing this?  Truly, madly, deeply why?

Scene XXXV. Leap

As I sat in my tears I made a choice to answer the question—truthfully. What was missing from the lovely picture was me. Yes, me. I leapt first into a part-time job as a local weekly newspaper reporter.
I faithfully reported on the most boring of town meetings. I was a stringer, paid by the column inch, so I made my articles as long as I dared. Soon I leapt into writing features, then editing.  

I listened carefully to the instructions from the hang-gliding teacher. He strapped me into my glider wings. I took a deep breath, swallowed my fear, and leapt off a mountain top, well, really a ridge. Lifted and held by puffs of wind, I was airborne—a soundless plane. The thrill was—forgive me—godlike. I looked down and saw the world, my world. I wanted it all. All. I wrote it all.

Choice by choice, I devoured my freedom—moving, leap by leap, away from traditional and expected roles. I could blame the 70s or Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, but that would be cheap grace. I took it anyway. I would deal with the sin of my profound selfishness in time and through tears. My four children were too young for this loss, for my leaps, for my evenings meetings, for too much maternal abandonment—paternal too.

I got involved with the local church and took on leadership roles. I eyed the altar territory with something akin to lust. I wanted to stand up front. I wanted to be a woman-in-the-flesh up front and not a statue draped with sorrowful looks and roses. I also leapt from the Republican party to the Democratic—away from my parensts'  party to one of my own, one I thought more in line with the  kind of values and choices I thought Jesus would make.  I was sure Jesus would ordain me if he were a bishop—or still enfleshed, or not Jewish.  
 
In 1977,  just after the Episcopal Church had voted—not by a landslide—that women could be ordained priests, I made application to get into the ordination process in Connecticut. The Bishop of Connecticut had voted against the ordination of women priests—unbeknownst to yours truly who had an outsized idea that the Church was the Body of Christ, therefore apolitical. My application was rejected, mostly because I had “2.24-too-many children”, and I couldn’t be a mother and a priest. “Dual vocation” they said. No mention of men and fathers, of course.

I leaped into God-school anyway. Anyone could get a theological education, the bishop had said. I applied for a student loan—something I thought carried great authority. Paying it back I’d worry about later. The second I came onto the campus of Yale Divinity School for my interview, I gazed at the very Protestant chapel keeping watch over the quadrangle of buildings, went to sit in its emptiness, and filled it with my prayers. My heart soared. I leaped into seminary education in the autumn of 1978.

In March, 1979, my youngest sister died unexpectedly at 34 after surgery for congenital aneurysms in her brain, leaving her husband and three young children. Her death precipitated severe asthma in me. There is nothing like not breathing well to make one feel like death. I never thought this was divine judgment or punishment. I did feel a terror I hadn’t known before—and again the pain of  betrayal. On medical advice, I found a new home for my second daughter Jill’s two cats. Fear-based choices never work well.

There was probably no better place for me to be than studying the Old Testament, not a single word of which was free of anguish, pain, grief, sin, and relational turmoil—all of which God created, absorbed, healed, frowned at, and and wept for. Sin and mayhem were as omnipresent as divine love no matter what. I chose it all.

Scene XXXVI.  Free?

All my choices, my leaps, shaped me, hurt me, hurt others, helped me grow, helped others grow, required amends—and forgiveness.

I was dimly—gradually, painfully— learning that most of my personal big choices could be followed, because I was white, privileged, and moneyed.

My freedom was not bound by poverty, class, or the color of my skin, although I knew the pain of being restricted because of my gender. White freedom of choice looked free, but it was racist. It was embedded in a context of racial injustice. Others, chiefly blacks, couldn’t make the choices I could. There wasn’t room for their freedom in American society. Black people and others did not have the same access to the famous and, to my mind questionable, “American dream” as whites did—even though such freedom was preached. A racist set-up if ever there ever was one.

My choices were made in a racist context and therefore indirectly partook of racism. My racism was getting clear enough not to surround it with quotation marks.  All it needed was to be fleshed out.