Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith Page 4

  Her purse said, “I’m a liberal, and a grandmother, and I keep my teeth clean and my skin soft. If I can’t remember something, I can write it down. If I get a cut, I’ll bandage it right away.” Her purse made my heart ache. I threw away most of the contents that day—the Kleenex, the lotions, the toothpaste—and the purse itself. It was a dusty navy blue organ she didn’t need anymore. I kept her wallet and the things in it, even the old library cards. I glanced in a small mirror she carried. It scares me how alike we look. I wear glasses now, as she did. I look tired—I am tired. And I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I had a thin waist before. Now there’s this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in it, as in a fanny pack.

  I put the wallet back in the closet, next to my mother’s ashes. I said a prayer, to Jesus: “Here. Could you watch her a while longer?” I left her ashes there for another six months. It was during that time that my three pets died. I was inconsolable. You want a great mother, I’ll show you a Labrador-retriever mix. Yet there was great happiness, too, because I fell in love. I went to Hawaii with my boyfriend but got very worried beforehand about how I’d look in a swimsuit. My friend Robyn suggested that I rub lotion lovingly into my thighs, so they would feel cared for, and that I decorate them with small flower tattoos. It helped, and while I did not quite look like Brigitte Bardot in her heyday, I felt better, and this, on a beach, can be a miracle.

  I had that on my mind when I got up this morning, for no particular reason—the lotion, and the rose tattoos. After breakfast, I went and got the brown plastic box of ashes out of the closet. I couldn’t very well rub lotion into it, but I sat with it in my lap. The pouch on my belly is nice for holding children, so I let my mother sit there for a few minutes. Then I wrapped the box in birthday gift paper, lavender and blue with silver stars, and taped a picture of a red rose on it. I got a little carried away—hey, late Happy Birthday, Noraht—because the thing is, I don’t actually forgive her much yet. Besides, only part of a day had passed, and I was definitely not hating her anymore. Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

  When it happens—when you stop hating—you have to pinch yourself. Jesus said, “The point is to not hate and kill each other today, and if you can, to help the forgotten and powerless. Can you write that down, and leave it by the phone?” So I picked up my mother’s ashes, and put them on a shelf in the living room, and stood beside them for a while.

  five

  holy of holies 101

  I did not mean to help start a Sunday school, and did not have a speck of confidence that I could do so: I have only mediocre self-esteem when I am doing things that I am good at or that don’t require any self-esteem. I grow anxious on my way to the dump with a car full of garbage, convinced that my garbage and I will be rejected, either because I am throwing out perfectly good stuff, or because it is so disgusting that the people who run the dump wouldn’t want it. I suffer from what a psychiatrist friend calls clinical sensitivity; she recommends that I avoid too much stimulation. I do not particularly like large groups of children, which is to say, more than two at a time, and I could not bear to miss any of the regular service, with which Sunday school would be concurrent. There was one more problem: There weren’t any children, except Sam.

  But six years ago I came to believe that I was supposed to start a Sunday school, while our church was temporarily located at a senior center during the construction of a new building. The land that our old building was on was part of a redevelopment plan for Marin City. Our building was falling to pieces. I like this in a church. You see more clearly how held together we are, in spite of the sags and the creakiness and the buckled floors. Gravity is still in effect. And besides, down the street, the builders were including classrooms in the new church building.

  One day at the senior center, I could feel something tugging on my inside sleeve, which is the only place I ever hear from God: on the shirtsleeve of my heart. I understood that someone needed to start a school, because it was the right thing to do, and most important, I needed to make church more fun for Sam.

  I was utterly open to the call, in a tense, clinically sensitive way. So I told Kris, my best friend at St. Andrew, that we were having a call.

  “We are?” she asked.

  I nodded grimly.

  “Where would we start?”

  I know that with writing, you start where you are, and you flail around for a while, and if you keep doing it, every day you get closer to something good. Carolyn Myss said that we are responsible not for the outcome of things, but only for the ingredients, so Kris and I bought everything we could think of that young children would need to learn about God: juice boxes, blankets, beach balls, moist towelettes, a children’s Bible, a boom box, and art supplies.

  “And what will we teach them?” Kris asked.

  This was a problem. I don’t know much about God; only that He or She is love, and is not American, or male. I do love Jesus, and I’m nuts about his mother. Mary Oliver said something to the effect that the best sermon she ever heard was the sun. I thought, That’s the sort of thing we’ll teach.

  You’re not supposed to love Mary so much, if you’re not Catholic, but I do. I wear a picture of her inside a gold oval frame, on a thin gold chain. Her arms outstretched in blessing look as if she has pulled the orange lining out of her blue robes to show everyone that there’s nothing hidden inside, no tricks up her sleeves. Golden light pours forth from the pocket linings as if, were she to put her hands back in her pockets, the light would be plugged up from inside. “She looks so cas,” Sam said once—for “casual.” She doesn’t look like she has missed many meals, either, not the usual anorexic piety. She looks like Myrna Loy.

  I wear Mary for two reasons: Because she helps me remember the song “Let It Be.” And because I used to pray to her as if she were my mother when I was coming down off cocaine. I’d lie in bed beside whatever cute coked-out boyfriend I had at the time, who’d be snoring and muttering while I ground my teeth in the dark.

  Hail Mary, full of grace. This is what the angel says before telling Mary that she will be Jesus’ mother. Denise Levertov writes:

  She did not cry, “I cannot, I am not worthy,”

  Nor, “I have not the strength.”

  She did not submit with gritted teeth,

  raging, coerced.

  Bravest of all humans,

  consent illumined her.

  This is so, so not me.

  When I used to lie in the dark grinding my teeth, utterly whipped, surrender came, and then the miracle, motherly kindness toward my own screwed-up self. One reason you’re not supposed to be a big Mary enthusiast if you are Protestant is that you might be overcome with the need to genuflect in public places. But Mary is for me the feminine face of divine love. Archbishop Carlo Maria Martini of Milan wrote that “full of grace” is in the passive: grace is something Mary has received, and the phrase is in the distant past tense, so it really means something like, “You have been loved for a very long time.” Knowing this—that I could call on a woman who had been loved for so long, stretching backward and forward through millennia—could trump my self-loathing, and I would hail Mary even as I imagined hitting the man next to me over the head with my tennis racket.

  I have been hailing her all along, through my son’s birth and early childhood, right through to these teenage years, through all the men I’ve been with, through my son’s reunion with his father, through health scares, through my mother’s terrible death of Alzheimer’s, through the early days of my love affair with the man I’ve been with for a while now. But some of the most desperate hailing I’ve done has been in the years of trying to help start a Sunday school at St. Andrew Presbyterian.

  We moved out of the senior center into our new church, which had a nursery and two classrooms. Word got out in the community that a new Sunday school had started at St. Andre
w, and children started arriving. Soon we had eleven kids: four black, four white, two Mexican, and one Asian—reflecting the make-up of the church. Each week I announced in church that I would take the children after the children’s sermon, and that we would be needing adult volunteers. We took the children to a classroom, gave them each a juice box and some corn chips, and tried to teach them about God’s love—about the beauty that enlivens our hearts, that awakens and welcomes us, even in our current conditions. Usually, at the end of the hour, one child had been in tears. But Sam started to bring his friends.

  It turned out that I did not like children, or at any rate, they made me extremely nervous, and I had almost nothing to share with them, except that Jesus loved them, and I did, too, even when I was in a bad mood. I had imagined a wacky sort of rainbow love fest. I had not counted on so many minor injuries. For example, I had hoped we could throw around a beach ball while we memorized a line of Scripture—calling out one sentence, like “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” But the kids had the attention spans of fruit bats, and the boys would throw the ball too hard at one another, as if playing dodge ball. I quickly switched to “God is love,” but the children could barely remember that, either, and wanted it to be their turn only so they could try to hurt the others with the beach ball. “God is love,” I said through clenched teeth, and then threw the ball to a girl, who froze, so that it slapped her in the face like a whale’s tale.

  Finally, three adults came to help, all middle-aged white women. This was sort of frustrating, but one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. We met every few weeks. We figured out that the only things that worked were a short Bible story, the juice boxes, and art, and so we stuck with those.

  The teachers were all hard-core left-wing types, and that worked for me. One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.

  I clutched my Mary medallion when things went south, which was often. When I clutched it, I could hear the Beatles singing “Let It Be,” over the sound of the voices in my head. The mean voice in my head said that this was a catastrophe, white liberal guilt run amok, a total waste of time—day care, not church school. The mean voice said that when you don’t have a clue what’s going on, maybe it’s better that you not be in charge of a lot of things, which is something I keep meaning to point out to George Bush. But the kind voice said, So what if it’s day care—it’s enough to be there for the children. And they liked it.

  During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy received two letters from the Kremlin. One was aggressive, the other gentler. And because Kennedy said to his men, “Let’s respond to the saner message,” we didn’t get blown up, or have to blow up the world. So I tried to respond to the kinder voice.

  Some days went better than others. Most of the time, I could relate to the kids, all of them—black, white, rich, poor, in between—and to the stress and loneliness of their lives. I nearly broke under the weight of these myself, as far back as I can remember. I think that by kindergarten, the only thing that could have helped me was a nice refreshing drink. If you had just given me a flask, I could have handled things a lot better.

  One Sunday when there were too many kids, and not enough teachers, we decided to write cards to people who were reviled in the world. This had been the Bible study: If you want to feel close to Jesus, find the people who are suffering, or whom the world doesn’t value. The kids made cards for kids in juvenile hall, and Israel, and Palestine; one boy made a card for George Bush. And two seven-year-old girls came up to me and asked, “What was the name of the woman whose two dogs killed the teacher last year?”

  “Marjorie Knoller?” I asked, astounded.

  They made a card for Marjorie with cats and suns and glitter blobs, which said, “We are from St. Andrew and we are saying hello because we know you did not want your dogs to kill that girl.”

  People from church made sandwiches for us every week, peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, and brought bags of Doritos, and fruit, and prayed for us. We got by. But it was hard. Some of the kids were needy and vulnerable and depressed, with faces of dubious, aged concern, rumpled foreheads, downcast or shuttered eyes. Some were wild. We did not exclude anyone, because Jesus didn’t.

  On bad days, I could not imagine what he had been thinking.

  I could always feel Jesus in the room, encouraging us in every way, although maybe he would have stopped short of sharing Doritos with us. But peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, definitely, and juice boxes when it was hot.

  Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes—in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.

  When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.

  Other times, I would be so angry with the kids that I would get a stomachache from the effort of suppressing my anger, and I would watch the clock, trying to wear down the morning. Someone long ago said that God is not a boss or a judge, that God is a purpose, and I tried to live by this. My purpose was to show up and offer myself to people who were having a hard time, and part of doing that was to run this funky school.

  We kept lurching forward. It reminded me of driving through the rain to do an errand in the rural parts of Marin, on the road that leads to the ocean, past farmland and forest: you drive worriedly through poor visibility on a slippery surface, and you think you’re heading to one place, for a certain efficient reason, but you space out for a while, and there’s slippage in the sky, and all at once a long, low beam of sun slants through.

  For a while at Sunday school there was a girl who seemed retarded; she rarely spoke. She was so black her skin looked navy blue, and she had a huge growth on one eyelid. What did we have to offer her? Juice boxes, decent art supplies, and our beliefs that love and patience would be like Holiness Helper in her life.

  The girl appeared to be very sad much of the time, but she loved to draw. One difficult day, I let her sit in my lap next to the open window, while the other teacher read the children their Bible story. She studied the dust in the air while we listened, and kept putting her finger out, like E. T., to touch the glitter. The dust was letting her see the air, suspended as we are, held and blown about, even though we appear to be sitting, planted. The dust made the invisible visible, for a few moments, immersing both of us in another dimension, beyond what we could usually see.

  Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean. One day, a mouthy eight-year-old said something insulting about my dreadlocks. Rather than hit him over the head with the Wiffle Ball bat, which was my first impulse, I sat beside him and said, “It’s only been in the last ten years that I learned how beautiful my hair and I are, so please don’t say critical things about me. It hurts my feelings.”

  He gaped at me, and said, “You’re freaking me out, Octopus Head.”

  The other teachers and I had dreamed of taking the kids on field trips, to remove them from the grip and tangle of life—of a day on the beach; of sandy, sacramental hot dogs; of playing in the ocean, making sculptures, and drawing with sticks. But we could barely manage them in class.

  Then there was the fact that although there were equal numbers of blacks and whites in the church, all the teachers were white. We wanted the influence of the black adults. But only a few of them volunteered to assist (we gratefully put them on the schedule), and we white teachers were too shy to say anything. Even at a progressive and diverse church like ours, it’s sometimes hard to bring up uncomfortable
racial issues. After a while, though, there was a small breakthrough.

  One of our teachers, a blue-eyed blonde, stepped to the pulpit during worship to talk about something that was tearing her up. She was teaching Sunday school that day, and had to make it quick. She said that even though she was a progressive and a civil rights activist, she had secret thoughts about race that scared her, that made her feel she did not deserve to be part of the church anymore. She’d been watching the news, she told us, and the image of a black man in a T-shirt had flashed on the TV screen, and her first thought had been, “What did he do?” He hadn’t done anything—he was an expert on the law. She didn’t have a clue where to begin with this old ugly thing inside her, except to stand before us, crying, and say it.

  Then she walked down the aisle to go teach, and so she did not see that every single person in the church had stood to applaud her.

  While she had not been referring specifically to her confusion about the lack of adults of color at the Sunday school, her words wedged open the topic of race. We let things sit for a while before being more specific, because somehow, without our particularly noting it, we had grown to enjoy Sunday school more and thus were not as resentful that only white people were teaching. Time and one another’s support had helped us develop muscles—as when Sam helped me start doing push-ups. At first, it was pathetic. But he bossed me until I could manage six or seven, and eventually three sets of ten.

  I protested: “Jesus never forced Mary to do push-ups.”

  “Mary was a weakling.”

  But Mary was anything but weak. Denise Levertov writes:

  But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage.

  The engendering Spirit

  did not enter her without consent.

  I know what Sam meant, though. He meant bony, and worried, like the Mary in most art. I personally like to think she looked like a demure Bette Midler.