Bead and other timeless work

Bead and other timeless work

I am reading The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. And I meet Bankole, a character sharing some of my skepticism and disillusionment over “the church” and organized spirituality. He had gone to church with his wife while she was alive, and had “wanted to believe,” but never could. 

Years ago, when our son was in primary elementary and junior high, we had given the church a lot of our time and energy, and a fair bit of cash from our on-again-off-again contract teaching jobs (though according to one rector, none of us never gave enough—because we were too materialistic…). We felt we owed it to our son to expose him to that side of human nature and society, and let him eventually make up his own mind. Eva had been raised Roman Catholic, but felt pretty much unwelcome since her divorce and remarriage to me, another divorcé. But we went to the next best thing, historically speaking, an old-line Protestant church nearby with a dynamic rector and sound congregational involvement. That lasted until he left to take another parish in another city. 

Then the parish got “professionalized,” and began to be constructed around some weird shifts in theology. A long story. But it involved things like the next rector giving a lesson to the children that involved a lot of toys (including toy guns, as I recall), then telling the ones who had received the toys as props that they could keep them: “Isn’t that cool! You come to church and you get free stuff!”  Then after the children went off to Sunday School, he preached a sermon to the rest of us about not being materialistic, but willingly separating ourselves from a lot of our cash to support the good work of the church. Like renovating, refurnishing, and re-equipping the staff and clergy offices, paying the highest salaries in the district, including to a lot of part-time staff in the youth and children’s ministries. People with no theological training, but the right attitude.

That’s where it began to hit the fan, for us. We would go to church after a week of demanding work, looking for a period of calm and contemplation. Volunteer still for greeting and coffee serving and, in my case, reading the lessons. But be harangued about needing to give more. And be pounded mercilessly by a pair of bands that replaced the “old fashioned” church music we could all sing along to with new religious rock, sometimes in five and six-minute concert arrangements that left us standing there listening instead of participating. And we would leave feeling worse, more left out, than we had when we arrived. 

And then there was the new Youth Minister—who was paid more than I was for my job, even though I had four degrees to qualify for mine, and he had a single degree, not in theology, to under-qualify him for his. But could he talk the talk…and arrange the new music for a youth band. 

Unfortunately, he could not actually prepare the material in advance or show up on time for things like taking the teens on a weekend retreat. Nor could he handle some basic questions of the sort that teens will ask. Especially teens like our son. 

One day, the Youth Minister was giving a talk about recognizing and avoiding cults. He explained by rote some of the ways cults created communities and organized youth activities and demanded a lot of time and cash for the good work of the faithful, etc. And our son, maybe 13 at the time, said, “Yes, but we do all of that kind of thing here. How is that different? Or are just another cult?” And got pretty much a “because we’re a church doing God’s work and I say so. Stop being impertinent” answer. Not very convincing. So he left the youth group and we left that congregation and after a few visits elsewhere to listen to other smug preachers reassure their smug congregations that their community was the front door to heaven, stopped going to church anywhere. 

And nobody called from those expensive new offices to find out why we were no longer attending or donating our time or talents. Evidently we had not been donating enough cash to be worth worrying about, though some other long-time, better off members who also left did get calls. And friends from the congregation never called, and our son began to be unwelcome to come and visit their kids. Who wants a trouble-maker visiting and spreading a bad attitude or asking difficult questions?

But honestly, I would have had to leave anyway. I had begun to feel like a fraud and hypocrite reciting the various creeds. I could not truly “get with the narrative.” Though I could deliver the lessons with gusto, it was all a performance. I wanted faith in something, and my parents and grandparents and their generations had believed and had taught us that the church is where you went to find it. Not for me. Not this way.

When I read some of my contemporaries—their poetry, or their advice on getting my life and soul in order and finding the path to true spiritual harmony with everything (especially the nature we as a species seem bent on destroying because God gave us permission and even the responsibility to do so)—I wonder where I will ever find that something. But there are hints that seem to work. A morning meditation helps with my blood pressure problem. So, of course, does the medication I take in the evening. That also seems to be helping my insomnia, which is too bad in some ways—I used to get a lot of writing done between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. 

The advice to get up and write something, produce “morning pages,” as Julia Cameron calls them in The Right to Write, is sometimes a help. Better yet was the advice I found there and elsewhere to write wherever and whenever the urge and opportunity coincided. And some advice on not beating myself up when there were periods of total unproductivity. That last sounded then and sounds still like Matthew Arnold and his idea that in human history there were of periods of preparation and periods of creativity. The periods of preparation were periods for criticism. 

Or for blogging instead for writing new poems?

Or for walking along, thumbing the smooth glassy pebble in whites, light butterscotch toffee and streaks of  blood purple that I found in a pathway of crushed grey rock. It has become my one-bead worry string, I suppose (without the string). And I realized the other morning that the pebble and my thumb were rubbing atoms off each other and releasing them back into the dust and ashes of the universe, to find new attachments. That was a strangely comforting thought. The pebble and I are, after all, dust from the same exploded star of eight or so billion years ago.Or so Jill Tarter explains us.

Back April, during Poetry Month, I was part of a local “30/30” group writing a poem a day each in response to prompts from a pair of sources. One prompt, from Day 5: “Grave Indifference,” put me into a carpe diem mood, musing on the cycles of life and reconstitution. It observed, in part, our lot as

Dust of a dead star conformed

as living earthly humans

working out our places

in the grander order of things,

An order that seems to be:

From dust we come,

as complex dust we thrive

to reproduce more dustlings.

To reproduce, we seize the day

take or induce erotic chance

to make something from ourselves

to carry on the erotic dance.

So cheer up. Keep worrying that bead, and let it worry you back. We never stop having an atomized place or function in it all.