All Faiths Welcome & Celebrated ! ~ ~ ~ www.interfaithcommunitychurch.org
Journeying again
This morning I was astonished to hear Brother Jamal say that we should take our faith to the internet, to post our stories on this blog. It was a meaningful coincidence, because I have recently been thinking that I should start a blog.
I got my basics in Christianity at a Church of England parochial school. My parents, traumatized by WWII, moved us around a lot until, when I was 12, they settled in Toronto, Canada. There they became spiritualists and joined a small church led by a Welsh wise woman. My father played the organ for services, Mother read ballots (unopened questions from the congregation, called psychometry), and I learned the Tarot. On Fridays there were seances in our living room. Not a normal childhood!
In 1963, I went to San Francisco, arriving just as the whole flower child movement began. On my first day I went to City Lights books and laid my hand on the Tao Te Ching. That started 17 years of reading about Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism. And years of wonderful conversations with others who were reading Alan Watts, Daisetz Suzuki and Swami Vivekenanda. When anyone asked, as they did in those days, "Who's your guru?" I answered Joseph Campbell. Every day I came home from work and meditated for one hour.
By 1980, when the New Age had mellowed into middle age, and everone but the gays had moved on, I came north to Seattle. At first I hated it because I had grown used to a place where outsiders like me fit in. Seattle seemed populated by WASP families, by conservatives, and by mould spores. I was snubbed for my California style and for the psychobabble I spoke. In Seattle nobody I met, in those early days, meditated or quested for truth or read the Tao Te Ching.
Getting older, with no family but a brother in Canada, I started longing to belong and shopped churches for a while. I have always liked churches, but at the ones I visited, they were not comfortable talking about God or spiritual journeys. They seemed, to me, just social centers.
One Christmas Eve I went to midnight mass at St. James Cathedral and was moved by the great crucifix. I saw Christ as Tammuz/Osiris, the One who dies and rises again and again, the human link with divinity. And I felt connected to generations of Celtic ancestors who had been Catholic. I joined the Church. I even became employed in the offices of the Archdiocese, which was not at all about sweetness and light. By working very hard and praying constantly for justice, and by what often seemed like divine intervention, I survived until retirement. I have remained a member of the Cathedral parish, facilitating faith sharing groups, reading the scriptures and telling Bible stories.
For 17 years I went to mass every Sunday, health and weather permitting. But it came to feel like a hypnotic induction in which the beta (everyday consciousness) level of the brain is lulled by repetition until the alpha (dreamy and visionary) level is reached and one is uncritically open to suggestion. Never comfortable with jargon, I accepted it as part of the Catholic tradition, also rote prayers and some theology which borders on the ridiculous. I have been befriended by some good, sincere, and even holy, Catholics. I learned much from our wise and compassionate pastor, from reading about medieval mystics and from a course on the teachings of Thomas Keating. I was always moved and inspired by the beautiful and grand liturgy with all its sensory glories of ritual procession, light, water, music and incense.
But I guarded my tongue and kept to myself what I had learned from earlier reading and from life. Of course, no human institution is perfect, but for me, with my expansive and varied background, the Roman Catholic parameters sometimes seemed like walls. And as the Church slides backwards into pre-Vatican II conservatism, I ask myself, "What's a nice liberal like me doing in a church like this?"
The Buddha told his followers to believe what might be validated by their own experience. But someone else has said that belief blocks experience. In plain language, religion can run you into a rut. What is not growing is dying. It is time to take up my walking staff and follow the good spirits who guide me.
I have come several times to Interfaith Community Church and like the sense of community, the openness to diversity, the gentleness. One warm Sunday morning, when your church door was left open, a cat wandered in and circled around me. In my darkest dreams, a little grey cat always comes to show me the way out, to bring me home, to wake me up. I'm paying attention!
The Hindus say: Many rivers flow into the one sea. In these times when religion is being used by extremists to further political ends and to stir discontent into violence, ignorance about other faiths may prove to be a kind of blindness. Those of us who learn about many paths may finally become useful in some way. We may be bridges. The work of Interfaith Community Church will be very valuable in this time.
I got my basics in Christianity at a Church of England parochial school. My parents, traumatized by WWII, moved us around a lot until, when I was 12, they settled in Toronto, Canada. There they became spiritualists and joined a small church led by a Welsh wise woman. My father played the organ for services, Mother read ballots (unopened questions from the congregation, called psychometry), and I learned the Tarot. On Fridays there were seances in our living room. Not a normal childhood!
In 1963, I went to San Francisco, arriving just as the whole flower child movement began. On my first day I went to City Lights books and laid my hand on the Tao Te Ching. That started 17 years of reading about Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism. And years of wonderful conversations with others who were reading Alan Watts, Daisetz Suzuki and Swami Vivekenanda. When anyone asked, as they did in those days, "Who's your guru?" I answered Joseph Campbell. Every day I came home from work and meditated for one hour.
By 1980, when the New Age had mellowed into middle age, and everone but the gays had moved on, I came north to Seattle. At first I hated it because I had grown used to a place where outsiders like me fit in. Seattle seemed populated by WASP families, by conservatives, and by mould spores. I was snubbed for my California style and for the psychobabble I spoke. In Seattle nobody I met, in those early days, meditated or quested for truth or read the Tao Te Ching.
Getting older, with no family but a brother in Canada, I started longing to belong and shopped churches for a while. I have always liked churches, but at the ones I visited, they were not comfortable talking about God or spiritual journeys. They seemed, to me, just social centers.
One Christmas Eve I went to midnight mass at St. James Cathedral and was moved by the great crucifix. I saw Christ as Tammuz/Osiris, the One who dies and rises again and again, the human link with divinity. And I felt connected to generations of Celtic ancestors who had been Catholic. I joined the Church. I even became employed in the offices of the Archdiocese, which was not at all about sweetness and light. By working very hard and praying constantly for justice, and by what often seemed like divine intervention, I survived until retirement. I have remained a member of the Cathedral parish, facilitating faith sharing groups, reading the scriptures and telling Bible stories.
For 17 years I went to mass every Sunday, health and weather permitting. But it came to feel like a hypnotic induction in which the beta (everyday consciousness) level of the brain is lulled by repetition until the alpha (dreamy and visionary) level is reached and one is uncritically open to suggestion. Never comfortable with jargon, I accepted it as part of the Catholic tradition, also rote prayers and some theology which borders on the ridiculous. I have been befriended by some good, sincere, and even holy, Catholics. I learned much from our wise and compassionate pastor, from reading about medieval mystics and from a course on the teachings of Thomas Keating. I was always moved and inspired by the beautiful and grand liturgy with all its sensory glories of ritual procession, light, water, music and incense.
But I guarded my tongue and kept to myself what I had learned from earlier reading and from life. Of course, no human institution is perfect, but for me, with my expansive and varied background, the Roman Catholic parameters sometimes seemed like walls. And as the Church slides backwards into pre-Vatican II conservatism, I ask myself, "What's a nice liberal like me doing in a church like this?"
The Buddha told his followers to believe what might be validated by their own experience. But someone else has said that belief blocks experience. In plain language, religion can run you into a rut. What is not growing is dying. It is time to take up my walking staff and follow the good spirits who guide me.
I have come several times to Interfaith Community Church and like the sense of community, the openness to diversity, the gentleness. One warm Sunday morning, when your church door was left open, a cat wandered in and circled around me. In my darkest dreams, a little grey cat always comes to show me the way out, to bring me home, to wake me up. I'm paying attention!
The Hindus say: Many rivers flow into the one sea. In these times when religion is being used by extremists to further political ends and to stir discontent into violence, ignorance about other faiths may prove to be a kind of blindness. Those of us who learn about many paths may finally become useful in some way. We may be bridges. The work of Interfaith Community Church will be very valuable in this time.
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