July 14, 2015 – Starting with Surrender

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Making a commitment to write every week has taken a leap of faith. I so feared that I’d peter out, leaving my abandoned online journal as evidence for all the world to see that I’m not able to stick with things. And, I keep worrying I’ll run out of things to write about. This week my faith is being tested – no clear ideas were coming to me. Yesterday morning in a conversation with my dear friend Vicki the word “surrender” came up and then it echoed in me throughout the day. But what to say about it eluded me. This morning I woke with a memory of being in an African American church in San Francisco a few years ago and experiencing surrender in a way that I’d hadn’t ever before. From there, thoughts threaded through about my spiritual evolution, including how I have come to see myself as thoroughly Christian. And then the thought: are you really going to go there?

It’s so loaded, that word Christian. The word Christianity seems less so – within it is tradition and history and ideology – more heady words. But to call myself Christian has me need to explain to you what being Christian means to me – which is very particular – in case reading this has you make things up about me. Because I would have made all kinds of things up about someone calling themselves Christian in my earlier life!

Our family is culturally Christian in the way that many Americans are, we celebrate Christmas and Easter – but we are not religious. We almost never went to church. I think once we went to an Easter sunrise service when I was a kid growing up. I remember having a sleep over with a new friend when I was junior high age and going to a Catholic church with her family and her. The holy water inside the door, the sign of the cross, the kneeling at the pew, I felt so far outside of belonging in this place, so uninitiated. It was foreign and scary. Except for travelling in Europe in my early 20’s where I visited churches as historic tourist attractions, this was my experience of church.

In the first months of our relationship, Joe got very sick from the chemotherapy and had to be hospitalized. Someone needed to handle the payroll for his employees, so I called his bookkeeper. At the end of the conversation she asked about me and I burst into tears. She suggested I call Sara Vurek, the pastor at the Fairfax Community Church. I moved aside the protesting thought – call a minister? – and I called Sara. Her voice was warm and real – she seemed so normal to me. She put Joe on the church’s prayer chain and connected me with Unity to put him in their big prayer network. Though a spiritual life had awoken in me out of my divorce, it was more new-age. I really didn’t really relate to what prayer would actually do, but it was comforting in some way that is hard to articulate.

Not quite two years later we were planning our wedding and we needed someone to officiate. Sara came immediately to mind. Joe saw her Birkenstocks and discovered she’s a fervent San Francisco Giants fan and he was sold. The ceremony Sara created with us was just right for us and through the experience I fell completely in love with her. At that same time I found myself hungering for a spiritual community, a spiritual home. Two Sundays after our wedding, I went with a friend to a service at the Fairfax church. I was unable to even say the word church out loud; I wanted to mumble it behind a brush of my hand across my mouth. It was all so foreign to me and I had all these ideas about brainwashed people who spoke straight out of the Bible – which made them completely un-relatable to me.

This 1950’s era church was in the middle of being remodeled, there was paper all over the wood floors – it was hardly an inspiring sight. That Sunday Sara was away. I don’t remember who the woman was who presided. Besides offering us a blessing with water she’d recently brought back from a trip to the Holy Land, I have no memory of what happened. But I knew I was coming back – something called to me. Through Sara’s reflections (they were not called “sermons”) I found a way in – a way to understand the teachings of Jesus and the traditions of Christianity that were actually applicable to my own life. In retrospect, I see the enormous impact that the decade I spent with this little church has had on my personal evolution – my leadership capacities were incubated in this sweet community. But what’s most precious to me now is that, along the way, I discovered the part of me that is deeply devotional. There is a place in the center of my chest, in my heart that longs to long, to revere, to surrender, to worship even – something greater than me.

I’ve done a couple of silent meditation retreats within the Buddhist world. Loving-kindness meditation is a beautiful and effective spiritual practice. But to me it doesn’t feel devotional. I don’t feel that place inside me of surrender, giving myself over to the presence of the source of infinite love. And then there’s the iconography. Images of the Buddha and Quan Yin and other eastern spiritual figures are interesting to me, but they don’t enter in like seeing St. Francis in my dad’s garden, or Mary, the Blessed Mother, Guadalupe in Mexico. I surprise myself as I realize that there is even a way that the image of Jesus on the cross can enter the deepest part of me now. I used to be incredulous as to how a spiritual tradition would use execution – what looked like torture to me – as its primary symbol. Eckhart Tolle (the author of The Power of Now, A New Earth) helped me see how Jesus on the cross symbolizes the emotional pain that we all experience in living a human life. I’ve come to understand that it is when this pain is most intense, it strips away our fallback coping mechanisms and has us open a space for another way to see. This allows our consciousness to expand to hold all that the present moment contains and it is how we are resurrected from our own crucifixion. Ok, now I can allow this symbol to mean something to me.

For the first 30 or so years of my life I lived within a shell that had me believe I could use my agile brain as a way out of any struggle. The little crack in that shell that started with leaving my first husband has become so wide it’s hard to see the edges of it in my spiritual peripheral vision. Through this bigger space I pour in the thinking and teaching of Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault, who seem to me to be the growing edge of Christian thought. I’ve heard and read them say things that blow my mind in the very best way – things that have been almost entirely missed in the stories of Jesus and Mary Magdalene – at least in the mainstream understanding. The clearest truth for me is that Christianity is a relational faith – as much as the source of infinite love exists in each of us, is each one of us – it’s most potent as the connection between two or more of us. I have a hard time putting words to my experience of it. It’s a feeling in my body. I have the sense that the center of my chest is expanding. Love is being received as well as emanating out from me. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking all at the same time.

I have more to say. Where I’m called to go next is to share with you how I relate my faith, my spiritual evolution to my work – my painting and my teaching. But this is a whole post in itself. For that, stay tuned to next week.

Love,

Cara