Cocoon

Cocoon

When I was a kid, I not only imagined that my bedroom was its’ own world, I also worked to make sure that it was. Surviving the red-velvet clutter and “Chuck Wagon Gang” gospel music that assaulted you at the front door and making it to my bedroom was, in my mind, akin to surviving Mordor on your return to the Shire, or making it through the rest of *Texas to get to Austin. Even at a young age I was deeply embarrassed by my simple, unrefined parents and, much to their frustration, I took every opportunity to accentuate our differences. In fact, I thought we were so different from each other that we couldn’t really be related at all. I was filled with new hope as an adolescent at the idea that I must have been adopted. My determination culminated in an exhaustive, but futile secret search through my parent’s boxes and drawers, looking for papers that would prove my adoption. Years later, at my high school graduation, I would take great satisfaction when adult friends would comment to me that they couldn’t believe Mom and Dad were my parents. Now, other people; adults, suggested that perhaps I was adopted and I couldn’t have felt more . . . proud. In a room full of people, a stranger wouldn’t connect me with my parents; not by looks, or speech, or demeanor. My determination to be as different from them as I could be, had paid off.

Of course, my adult perspective of my parents is more seasoned; they’re not complete scapegoats to be sure. While I don’t remember an exact moment of such a decision, I think that maybe, at some point early on, I made up my mind even as a child, that I didn’t want a relationship with them. Some of my embarrassment was certainly typical of most all of us growing up: floundering for independence and embarrassed by our dependence. Like every child and adolescent, like every teen, like every human, I wanted to be and to belong. But there were other factors that grew the need in me to retreat to my imagination; to cocoon in my room. When my refuge was ruined, when my retreat was destroyed, I would eventually rebel. But, before there were clearly drawn enemy lines, before I defected, it’s true, I fought for the cause.

If Mom and Dad had a “cause”, or purpose, or a life at all it was the country church we drove forty-some miles to attend. Every Sunday morning and every Sunday night; every Wednesday night, and at frequent week long revivals, the piano and tambourines were banged, people “spoke in tongues”, desperate altar calls were given, and “sinner’s prayers” were repeated. Best of all, my Sunday school teacher, Sister Opal, would routinely amuse and frighten me by “shouting” the vast number of bobby pins out of her carefully constructed, pinned, and sprayed hair. If the old joke about Pentecostals, “the higher the hair, the closer to God”, is true, Sister Opal surely must have touched the nail prints in His hands. At home, Dad didn’t allow a television in the house for years. No secular music was allowed in the house at all, none; not jazz, not country; only gospel. This was, for the first part of my life, the only world I knew. I knew nothing else, so I emulated what I knew, certain that it would please Mom and Dad; and ‘pleasing Mom and Dad’ if nothing else, had to hurt less.

An aunt of mine is still fond of recalling how at five-years-old, I would take my little wooden chair and stool that Dad had varnished and painted with my name, “Jimmy” and turn that little chair into a pulpit for some of the fieriest sermons stuffed animals never heard.

“You MUST be born again! Huh!,” I shouted at Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and my sister’s harlot Barbies, who always sat in the back pews.
I pumped my fist and pounded the Bible and worked myself right into a little five-year-old-holy-roller-frenzy. I was determined that my polyurethane-stuffed congregation would REPENT! and be spared hellfire. Now, what I knew, at five-years-old, that you had to have for a good sermon were three things: a sturdy Bible, a glass of cool water, and a handkerchief, or a “hanky” where we were from.”

The “prayer hanky” came from my favorite family friend at church, Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Williams was round and happy and chocolate brown and had the very best laugh and I loved her. I reckon I believe that if anybody ever did know anything at all for certain (and most of us don’t), Mrs. Williams knew something for certain and from the very first time that I had special permission to sit with her in church, I just wanted to be like Mrs. Williams. So it was only natural that I had to have a prayer hanky in my belt, just like Mrs. Williams kept in the belt of her dresses to dab her eyes or mop her brow, but it wasn’t the female accessories, it wasn’t the belt or the hankies that was alluring. “Pentecostal drag” is frequently gender-neutral: soaked hanky, dry hanky, Bible, and lotsa perspiration. What I wanted to be near; what was magnetic, what I wanted to be like was what folks like Mrs. Williams were like. I wanted what they had, or what “had them”, to know what they knew that made ’em move like they did -real sure and real humble; to know why Mrs. Williams always did seem like a calm sky and a solid place, no matter what, when everybody else felt like hard rain.

Deepest the deepest convictions of my pre-Evangelist trail-five-year-old-self, I was still only five, so even I eventually grew impatient and restless in church services. As a result of my talking and squirming, I became so accustomed to being taken out of church and into the Ladies Room to get switched, that one Sunday on the way into the church I simply looked up at Mom and said, “We might as well go in now and get it over with before church starts.” Now, I imagine the resignation that must have been in my little boy voice, knowing that this, violence, was just a fact of my day, and it makes me sad for a moment, to know that at five, I felt beaten. I felt so beaten in fact, that I soon gave up the continually prophesied big calling on my little life to be a preacher. Soon, I hardly spoke at all. Ever. People began to inquire aloud as to if I was mute. “Can’t your little boy speak?”, people would ask my Mom, their voices offering pity even before she could answer.

Now, I was born in 1966 and unfortunately for me, any changing with the times my parents might have done stopped a decade before my arrival. Looking like an extra from “Peggy Sue Got Married” surprised by the 1970’s, even Mom’s best Sunday dresses were worn with the ever-present white bobby socks. Our modest home felt like a time warp. Mom alternated between secret shopping trips and illness. Dad always stank of the burning rubber he molded into tires at Cooper Tire and Rubber. When he wasn’t breaking his back at work, Dad would sometimes sit and read his Bible and write early in the morning and sometimes late at night. Sometimes he would lose himself in the garage, which was so full of stuff, that getting lost was actually possible. And sometimes to break up that routine up, he’d beat the daylights out of me. As I grew older I became more ashamed of my parent’s simple, poor, country folk ways and “old time religion” fervor. In a world in which I increasingly felt I didn’t belong, these two characters were apparently sent the long trip down Walton’s mountain to be certain that I never would. In our family’s defense, it should be noted, that there was not a velvet oil painting of Elvis over our couch. Appropriately enough, the velvet oil painting over our couch was of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was a kind of a morbid marquee:

“Now Playing, In It’s Record Breaking Twelfth Year: “SUFFERING.”

In the picture, Christ is kneeling at an altar of rock, arms outstretched, hands clasped together in prayer, His face pained and pleading, as He and I ask that this bitter cup pass from us.

My bitter cup, as I saw it, was to survive, not only my father’s welts and blows, but also the crushing embarrassment of my Mom’s elastic-waisted polyester pants and incessantly cheery habit of answering the phone, “Hello! God loves you!” I imagine myself as Carrie White in the Brian De Palma directed movie and Stephen King story, “Carrie”. I can see the scene now; although, unlike Carrie, returning home from gym class where she was terrorized by her first period and tormented by the other girls, I am returning home from a church youth group gathering where the very people that I saw in church each Sunday played records that, to my serious horror, were not (gulp), gospel!

Imagine, me, twelve and Piper Laurie as my mother:

“I can see your dirty little Top 40 music, Carrie.”

“It’s not dirty, Mama. It’s just pop music. It’s just Anne Murray. Even the folks at church like her, Mama.”

“Heathens and Hypocrites. First sin was secular music. Say it.”

“No, Mama. Why didn’t you tell me? They all laughed at me ’cause I was so surprised they weren’t afraid of going to hell for listening to “Daydream Believer”. You shoulda told me Mama.”

“First sin was secular music. Say it child!”

“No, Mama!”

“Go to your closet!”

And so, I did go to my closet. I could be found, but it bought me time. Sometimes just a few minutes could give mom enough time to calm Dad down a little. So, in the cramped, smothering hiding place in my bedroom closet I continued to learn the value of retreat; the safety of invisibility. If my bedroom was going to be my safe haven to retreat to it must be guarded and insulate me from all that was frightening, painful, and tacky just across the its’ threshold. However things might be outside the four walls of my bedroom, they would be as opposite of that as I could make them within.

Since the rest of the house was unkempt and cluttered, my room would be immaculate: no clutter, no dust, no wrinkles in my bedspread. In my room I countered the harsh light the living room picture window cast on my reality by creating indirect lighting with night lights and desk lamps hidden behind the removable speakers of my 8-track stereo. Since the only music in the rest of the house was country gospel, there would be classical music in my bedroom. I won the battle to play classical music as an exception by emphasizing its’ lack of lyrics and syncopated beats. Just by being thought about in my room, the lowly fiddle became a violin. There was a cork board that hung over my desk that I decorated to celebrate each season and holiday. My “desk” was actually a carpenter’s workbench. Of course, I had stored away all of the ridiculous carpenters’ tools and now imagined it to be a roll top desk.

Perhaps the most stark cultural contrast between the world inside my room and the “outside world” of the rest of the house was during the Christmas holiday. One of my more vivid childhood memories is of the annual Christmas conflict over whether or not we could have a Christmas tree. Dad saw it as an unwieldy arm of evil meant to replace Christ with commercialism. Mind you, I didn’t necessarily disagree with him, it was just confusing and embarrassing when he threw the Christmas tree into the front yard. If there would be no Christmas or only Christmas conflict outside my room, then it would be a Christmas-effin’ wonderland in my room. It began at Thanksgiving with a huge roll of colored paper from school on which I would create a Christmas mural. By the time the holiday arrived I would have a wall-size chalk depiction of the nativity. Garland and evergreen lined my dresser, bookshelf, and windowsill. Scented candles burned while Christmas carols played softly on an 8-track loop. From the ceiling I painstakingly hung hundreds of individual icicles, for what I saw as a tremendous effect. By just the streetlight from my bedroom window, when the furnace kicked on blowing warm air through the floor vent, all I saw were dancing flashes of silver light; stars in the low-slung heavens of my very own room. Here, it was a little easier to believe that I was somewhere else. Here, maybe I could find that hope again, that hope I use to have when I was sure I must have been adopted. Here, maybe I’ll find hope while I ponder the question posed by the quietly playing carol, “What Child is This?” What child is This, indeed.

In the end, I retreated to my room so frequently that my dad, the enemy, began to infiltrate my camp, even in the daylight. It became a rule that my bedroom door had to be left, not only unlocked, but open all the time. I broke no rule more consistently. As a result, my bedroom door was unhinged and removed by my Dad, as I would be very soon. It was sort of a cocoon C-section, and yet there would be wings; tattered and atrophied, but still, wings – wings that I could flex and extend, strengthen and bend – wings that could heal and mend and, for now, wings that would keep me warm while I learned to walk.

– PreetamDas Kirtana 2004/20014

*sorry, Texans, but well, you’re in Texas, you’d better have a sense of humor.

**a slightly different version of this story first appeared in the chapbook, “Growing Up Jimmy: Tales of Bible Belt Survival on the Yellow Brick Road”, at http://www.sematikon.com, and in “Dayton City Paper”.

“One Size, One Way, One Love”

One Size, One Way, One Love

There’s a lot of conversation lately about “third ways”, “middle ways” and new ways. There’s a good deal of energy being spent to “discern” what our approach should be to God’s children who don’t affirm our sense of “normal”, who are outside of our self-blown bubble. So far I’m convinced that most of these efforts are just more gently worded barriers to inclusion. A wall painted with a beautiful mural remains a wall. Most of what is manufactured and passed around as new angles and perspectives are actually “subways”, that is “sub-way”, not The Way, less than The Way. They allow those in power to feel better about themselves while those that they hold power over and who they are making decisions about remain “sub”; a little less, sub-“real” Christian, sub-“real” man or woman, sub-“real” human. It seems that our constant push back against the fact there’s been no revision to “love one another” is to do a little, or a Lot less than what was asked, by which I mean commanded , or we actually don’t do it at all, but instead do something maybe related, but still altogether different than what we were told to do. This reaction reminds me of my sophisticated tactics from childhood when I would do anything else, any other chore to try and appease my parents to make up for the fact that I had not done the chore they had actually requested done.

Picture it: Findlay, Ohio, 1978 (spoiler alert: more than just about anything, I hated doing
the dishes when I was a kid.)

Findlay, Ohio, 1978, and my parents return home, having told me to do the dishes when they left.

Mom: “Did you do the dishes like I asked?”

Me: “I took out the trash.”

Dad: “​Son, I think it was the dishes your mom was asking
about. Did you do the dishes like your mother asked?”

Me: “Well, I think I ran outta time because, Look! I
dusted Everything!”

Now picture it: Your church, my church, The Church, Judgement Day (which by the way, is
everyday; every day ​we’re judged to be living love or loving our life.)

The Church Judgement Day (tomorrow, for instance)

God: “Did you love women?”

Us: “We did Lord. They’re fine Sunday School teachers, just fine. Don’t have to tell you how
much we love’em at the church potlucks! Oh, and in the choir;like angels in the choir.”

God: “And did you love your brothers and sisters of color? Did you love black folks?”

Us: “Lord, we do. We love what they’ve done with their church on the other side of town.
Oh, and you know, the three that do go to our church have voices that are just such a
blessing in the choir.”

God: (inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly)
“I see. And my gay children? Did you love them?”

Us: “Well, Lord, we do love them . . . and we’re talking a lot, still, still meeting a lot
about how best to, You know, do that, but You know, there are a couple of very well-
behaved ones that have been attending,and You know where they really shine,
of course, is…”

God: (interrupting)
“I’m gonna just go ahead and guess, the choir?”

Why do we remain unconvinced that the same essentials that nurture and sustain us, nurture and sustain everyone. Too often in government, education, in The Church, our signifying differences and individual and cultural qualities are seen as “issues to deal with” or “problems to be addressed” and then we end up with serious seminars promoting serious new books that wrestle with proposed serious questions like:

“How do we minister to people of color? or single people?”
“How do we reach young people?
“How can we honor And define women’s role?”
and, of course,
“What is our new plan on how to deal with the ‘issue of the
gays’ in The Church?”

When we’ve chipped away enough of their humanity we create a new label for another category of “other”, of “subs”, and we comfort ourselves that they are not really like us. And, sometimes, you know, through terrific sacrifice and several years of listening committees and assembly debates and synod councils and after much division, we have finally “wrestled with the Scriptures” enough now to decide that God’s love does, after all, even include them, too. And then, sometimes we really “hear the message” and we “pick up our cross” and (deep sigh) deign to “love” those people. Some of us do this by ministering to them in their own special group. “Them”. “Would you look at them? Aren’t they something?” “God sure is good,” we crow, pretty pleased with our new “missions”, our “project” that we’re pretty passionate about now that we understand that God, in His grace, even loves them too, even though they’re not white, or male, or heterosexual, or coupled, or monied, or even Christian. Yes, God is good and now that we’ve decided that God loves Even them, we’d better let them know, too! (Imagine, right now if you will, Everyone who’s Ever been a “them” collectively doing the Most Epic eye roll EVER. Thank you.)

Our obsession with “us” and “them” confirms my often repeated suspicion that most of us, like myself, are on the spiritual path and most of us, like myself, are also on the short bus on the spiritual path. We’re slow learners, to put it mildly, repeating Love Class over and over again.

Not a “fresh approach”, but still the ancient words stand:

“Love one another.”

God, neighbor, and enemies, the unlikely “one-cruciform-size-fits-all” proposition, commandment actually, is to love them all.

But how do we really understand this beyond just an undeniably noble sounding idea? There’s none of us unwounded or learned in how to actually trust and how to be free, free indeed; free, even to be vulnerable. We’re all learning, all struggling until loving one another becomes so natural that it’s just how we live with each other. A vital part of our witness is helping each other understand that we’re not the lowest or the worst or broken beyond repair. It’s a vital part of our witness to distribute hope and relay the Truth that, contrary to echos from childhood playgrounds or the constant media assault of advertising, we are, Still and Always, loved and lovable. We need reminders from each other that our outstretched hands and open arms are not a siphon, but a bridge; a bridge somehow strengthened by the shared weaknesses of its’ frail and burdened crossing pilgrims.

When my spouse, Kevin, and I first attended the church that would become our home church, I noticed him right away across the sanctuary. First, of course, I noticed his outrageous full head of dark, curly hair. I say, “of course” because even though I’m not even fifty yet, I haven’t needed a barber in a few decades, just lotsa hats, and his hair is great. If a man can have beautiful hair, Rocky does. What? Does admiring another man’s hair sound gay? Really? Well, I promise that I am not saying that any man, straight or gay, with thinning hair or a bald head that says that they don’t notice other men’s hair is homophobic. I am Not saying that. What I am saying is that they’re lying. All of them. They’re liars. Their pants are on fire. We do notice. Rocky’s hair is pretty cool, pretty unforgettable. And then, of course, there’s his name, “Rocky Banks”, with its’ comic potential forever seared in my memory. I decided immediately upon meeting him that with a name like “Rocky Banks”, he’d better be a boxer or a patched-eye blues singer. But beneath the great hair and in addition to the great blues singer sounding name, there is in Rocky such a solidity and a tenderness that somehow coexist in him simultaneously that you feel welcomed. His integrity invites trust and a sense of safety. As Rocky and I have shared some responsibilities at church and a few lunches we’ve gotten to know each other better and discovered, among other things, that we have an Evangelical upbringing in common. Rocky shares custody of his daughter with his ex-wife, Sandy. Yes, that’s right, her married name was Sandy Banks. Personally, I’d like to think that if I was Rocky that I would have considered our first names and my family name and would have considered that a foreboding enough of a warning that this union canNot be a good idea. Recently, I aimed directly out of my comfort zone and asked Rocky if I could crash at his place in the city so that I could make it to an early morning meeting at church the next day. I stayed over, keenly aware of the new territories of trust that I was exploring for myself.

Then, Rocky called just the other morning. Another dating situation ended recently and he is, in the plainest terms, lonely; an intelligent, handsome, compassionate, tender-hearted and lonely man. My heart aches for his. I want so badly to somehow lift his heaviness, to help him know that his loneliness right now isn’t a price he’s paying for something in the past, but is instead, maybe, the cost he’s paying now for something beautiful still to come, and I want to dry his tears or know that he’s held while he cries them. Rocky had called to talk about how we experience God’s presence and those dark, quiet, desperate times when we simply don’t feel God’s presence at all; when the ether’s that previously seemed to spirit our prayer and longing to the ear and heart of God have suddenly become an echo chamber mocking our every plea.

“Hello? God? It’s me,” we speak again into the ridicule of the resounding silence and when the inevitable echo of our own voice returns,

“Hello, God. Its Me,” we are too easily fooled by the Holy inhabiting our voice. We don’t recognize the inflection and authority in the returned words and fail to credit the affirmation to God. We miss the lack of question in our echoed words. Where there was fearful, doubting desperation in our asking, “Hello? God?”, the same words returned are now, not a question, but a statement of recognition. God recognizes God seeded within us. Our prayer, it turns, might be like a two-way mirror that God passes. Looking out from our non-reflective side, we see everything or nothing depending on what appears on the side of our window. But God, drawn by our prayer, passes the mirror and whether it’s me avoiding vulnerability, or Rocky speaking his loneliness into the shadows, or you on the other side of the mirror, God, forever and always, sees only God – the image and likeness and spark of God, Herself.

We look out in fear of strangers.

God looks in and sees only family.

I imagine angels cooing and fawning over tiny, ethereal soul bassinets. One, shaking his head, warns, “He’s got a heart of flesh. That’ll be trouble for sure.” The other angel, though, looks more closely and says, “Yes, but he’s got his Father’s eyes.”

The family resemblance is always what God notices first, no matter how many other lovers or tribes we’ve tried to belong to.

He sees us.

He sees His own.

He sees His children, God’s co-creators created to look like and behave like their Savior. Designed to imitate God’s qualities and reflect the character of the Creator, we, too, are called to see the family resemblance in each other first. We were made to see each other and be fulfilled in each other’s vision. It is by design that we live the truth of St. Augustine’s words, “In loving me, you made me lovable.” (“Quia amasti me, fecist me amabilem”) It is on purpose that we were made to rightly feel like something is missing if we don’t know the regular blessing and balm and refuge provided by a firm handshake, a close, tight hug, or simply that look that assures us that we are each other’s own. We belong to each other and this, too, is the liberating work of the Spirit. Our broken places are mended and old wounds are healed as we practice the agape love that knows that the first healing is in being heard and in hearing and hearing comes by the Word of God and the Word of God is this:

“You belong. I belong. We belong.
We are reconciled and one day all of creation will be reconciled, but it begins now.
We rehearse,
with each breath.”

Rocky and I talked for awhile. I hope I said anything at all that was helpful. I hope I made any sense, but mostly, I hope I listened. Our conversation was ending as both of us needed to get the day started and just as I was about to say that I’d talk to him later in the week, Rocky said, “Thanks, I love you, man.” Half a beat later I responded, “You know I love you back,” trying to sound confident not startled, which is kind of what I was. I mean who knew? How long are you friends with a straight man before somebody uses the “L-word”? Who knew they even said that to each other?! But here, is such a man; a man whose priority is love; a man who offers hope through his humanity and points to God. I’d like to be that kind of man.

Our hearts and lives, communities and even our world depend on our answer to our call to care for each other and tend to each other: women and sisters and mothers, brother-to-other, and brother-to-brother living in the simplest acts of devotion like just hearing each other, like reminding each other that there’s Nothing we could do to be “trespassed out” of each other’s heart, and there is Nothing that can taper or tame God’s ferocious love for us. So many simple acts heal us, like extending trust, like risking intimacy, like surprising your friend by saying, “I love you, man.” These are witnesses to an outrageously subversive hope! These are words of Life speaking words of Life from the Source of Life and spoken by another living reflection of that Source right in front of us! If the light was less dynamic, if the hope was less radiant, unbelief might be a choice, but there wasn’t a moment of choice. There was only a moment with no hope and the next moment seeming to matter as if the next moment after that could somehow be different now.

Brennan Manning tells the story that “in 1980, the day before Christmas, Richard Ballenger’s mother in Anderson, South Carolina was busy wrapping packages and asked her young son to shine her shoes. Soon, with proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so pleased, she gave him a quarter. On Christmas morning as she put on her shoes to go to church, she noticed a lump in one shoe. She took it off and found a quarter wrapped in paper. Written on the paper in a child’s scrawl were the words,
“I done it for love.”

Like Richard’s returned quarter, wrapped and placed in his mother’s shoe, inside our reaching out and back to each other is wrapped a bridge; a bridge that somehow grows more durable with use, a bridge made of and sustained by the One who “done it for love” and who guards our heart, sets its direction toward our Source and destination, wraps it, and places it, not in a shoe, but in the middle of our bridge and requires two sets of hands to lift it.

It may seem a simple thing to go on about: a man said, “I love you,” but in my life and in our world That IS cause for notice and celebration. Three or four days after Rocky’s phone call, one morning just before I was really awake, I smiled and relaxed more deeply for just a few seconds before I could even realize why. Because of Rocky’s call I remember some essentials, and when I do wake up, I feel lighter. Slowly, I realize that something is missing – the low-grade ache and the echos – they’re not here. Maybe this is when we really wake up: when we realize that our glorious differences are not obstacles and don’t require an approach fresher or a campaign newer than, “Love one another”, when we realize finally that our shared humanity makes the divine prescription always the same: Love, of course, but not love as a concept from a distance, but love that holds us close till we exhale; love that draws us home to roam in the vast hills and valleys of the heart space between outstretched arms; love that is, as that old chorus said, “deep and wide”: deeper than any hurt, wider than all our fears; love that plants hope with a phone call, love that waters that hope with tender truths and a gentle witness like, “I love you, man.”

– PreetamDas Kirtana
11/11/14