SERMON: “Spiritual Autobiography”

Pego Rice

August 7, 2006

READING: "We Were Never Meant To Survive" by Audre Lorde (SLT #587)

SERMON

As I looked over my life to write this, I could see that in becoming a spiritual person, I have had to leave behind a life dictated by fear to find an existence that had a different center.

I am something of a watcher, watching my grandmother's black lace and priests, her distant god of rules and rote, her silent gracing Madonna. I also watched my father turn his back on that church in unspoken, unmistakable anger. I watched my mother in a church that spoke about acceptance, while watching her rage against god, religions, people and circumstances that she didn't accept at all. Children see not everything, and not only what you would wish, but instead what comes to them by chance, the irrevocable uncontrollable incidence of life. Truthfully, so many chaotic things come to children that they spend, as we once did, so much time putting together both what is said and unsaid about everything, including spiritual matters.

The child I was watched her rather disastrous family and the friends of her childhood making their way in the world, learning both from what they said and did, and from the results of their choices. Not only was my family of origin simply crazy, with every dysfunction you care to name, so were my friends. Survivors of murders, suicides, Indian removals, missionary boarding school efforts at reprogramming, genocide and attempts at passing as white, they had become liars, addicts of every sort, workaholics, under and overachievers. This isn't to say that they were or are all bad people, but when you move from living, to the desperate, angry and frightened state that is survival, you will lose sight of everything that made you a whole human being.

I don't know how long it took me to learn this law, at least the first 30 years of my life, but I do recall “when” I began to see what the other side was, what not coming from fear was.

I was 9, when I sat in our house on the bluff over the beach, as my own hurricane, Celia, passed over, tearing down fences, as we crouched in the hall watching every window of our house blown in and saw the roof trying to tear away over our heads. I know I was afraid, but somehow the sheer breathless amazement took me so far outside that fear, that I will always remember that day and the days after the storm in amazement, looking at the bare foundations of buildings that were so completely gone that not even a brick had been left. I grew up an incredibly shy child, stuttering, reticent and very lonely, finding comfort in isolation. Afraid of the world, of people, I lived through books. Reading voraciously expanded my thinking about religion, justice and life.

Still, that one single day stayed inside of me, while I looked on in wonder through the years, realizing how much fear my family had taken from Celia. To this very day, not one of my family that had been there during or even afterwards, will remain within a hundred miles of the coast when a hurricane comes near. Not a one, except myself. I don't disagree with them. I can see and feel why they feel as they do. Yet I can't share their fear. Perhaps it was this: that one day I looked at my shyness and recognized that there was nothing in my timidity that had ever helped me with my life. There was nothing that my schoolmates could do that would hurt me more than I had already hurt myself with all of my fears. I had begun to pass through my life without actually living it. I then took my fear as a marker for what I must try to do, rather than what to avoid. I joined the Journalism class and at the end of the year I asked every single guy I had ever had a crush on out to the prom. I didn't get a date out of any of them, but none of their rejections hurt as much as the fear had hurt. As it turned out, I went to the prom with a college guy.

I spent many years after that involved in the doings and disasters of my family's lives. Racing desperately in any direction that promised distraction, esteem or at least validation, I went to college. Joined a super-Christian church that accorded better with the kind of god I thought really existed while wrestling with my understanding of god and Christianity. Then one day I could no longer ignore the plain fact of my own dysfunctional existence, the reality of having joined completely in my family's insanity. A day when I recognized my mothers rage in my own actions, holding place over a vast empty spot that a soul was supposed to inhabit. I was still living out of my fears, not living my life.

The next several years were years of great introspection, watching myself instead of everybody else, tearing apart my understanding of myself, my family and of my understanding of god. For once, I looked directly at what I thought god was and how every person who had ever had power over me in my childhood had shaped that. This signal connection utterly changed every understanding I ever had about my spiritual life, my whole life. I chose to look at the people and incidences that had shaped my conceptions of god, and recognized that I knew nothing, nothing about god, nothing about myself and nothing about the world and people around me.

Mark Twain said it best: “It isn't what you don't know that hurts you, it is what you know for sure that just ain't so.” I had known many things that just weren't so. Leaving that, and stepping out in wonder, was a shock like freefall with no end in sight. This moment can only teach faith because that is the only thread by which I can walk in an acceptance of entirely unknown consequences. This I now know is true. You can be afraid forever.... Or not, it just depends on what you pay attention to. You can live a blind life, centered in your own limits and grievances, or you can take all that has happened to you and know that each sorrow, each pain and each joy connects you with the existence and experience of all others. I have had to leave behind a life dictated by fear to find an existence that had a different center. Gratitude, acceptance and wonder are the commitments that changed everything, that became tools and lenses through which I changed my focus. I don't know today what god is; every shape that makes one god, for me, still echoes that terrible unjust capriciousness. I have chosen to live with that as an unanswered question. Instead I have come into a world of wonder, of seeing every person, creature and object as a great source of energy, a cycle that is spiritual in source, each life bound into a web of existence with each other and with me.

I leave you again with Audre Lorde “For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us."