I Am From The Lord’s Original Religion
Posted by Holly at October 10th, 2007
I go to church with Jim just about every Sunday. It’s a lovely little building right in the town of Cornelius and is the focal point for many people in this largely Mexican community. It isn’t fancy at all and is beautiful in its simplicity. Picture a Christmas image of a white clapboard church with a steeple, big windows in graceful arches and clean lines completed by golden wood trim. The interior is a sanctuary with an alcove to seat the overflow and a perimeter on one side of the building with classrooms/meeting rooms and a kitchen. The sanctuary is decorated with framed images of the Stations of the Cross and charming homemade banners that declare different things at different times of the year, all praising Jesus. Above the chancel is an image of the Virgin Mary. Jesus on the Cross hangs to the side. The alter is usually decorated with vases of flowers that are clearly from people’s gardens. Above our heads and in the back of the sanctuary is the choir loft, used only during the holiest of celebrations at Christmas and Easter. The choir, voices and instruments including a keyboard, couple of guitars (one played with a definite bluegrass twang), flute now and then, and an actual triangle and tambourine, is more usually situated to our left, in front of the overflow crowd. On occasion, I have sat in a mass and experienced an otherworldly feeling. Since it doesn’t happen every week, I speculate that it might be the presence of a saint, angel or even God paying a visit to one of his humble flocks. There are a couple of buildings nearby that the church owns, one of which houses the offices used by Father David and the parish secretary, Maria; and, one that houses the Food Pantry and a couple of offices for Deacon Jesus and the parish bookkeeper. It is through the Food Pantry that I got involved beyond just going with Jim on Sunday morning.
When we first started dating and I started to get to know the parish and hear the plans for expansion in which Jim was already involved, we thought it would be a nice idea to have dinner with Father David to see if there was any way I could offer some input. I don’t want to say advice because I was such a newcomer to the situation I didn’t know what I was talking about, really. So we went to the Japanese restaurant we love with Father David and our friend Cindy who is deeply involved in the parish as was her late husband who was a driving force in getting things done. At one point in the conversation, Father David mentioned that the Food Pantry had just lost its funding; money that came through a gift from another parish. I asked how much that was and he said $3000. “A month?”, I asked. He said, no, that was a year’s funding. Out of my mouth came words offering to help find new money to continue that function. The fact of the matter is that I think fundraising is the hardest thing in the world and, at that point, I was looking forward with gusto to being able to give it up when Jim and I got married. But I do love being able to make change happen and I had already figured out that most people want to do that – fix what’s wrong in society – and not everybody can work in the nonprofit world or even volunteer so their contribution comes in the form of giving the money that allows others to act in their behalf. Once I had figured that out, I could ask people for money wholeheartedly as long as it was for something in which I could thoroughly believe. I have been pretty lucky in my career to have almost always been able to choose causes that were important to me from the very first job I had in Brooklyn working for my childhood park, raising money to maintain the magnificent parkland and the special features built there like a Charles Carmel hand-carved wooden Carousel, and also for the programs produced by park staff that taught children about nature, conservation and the environment and entertained children and their families with wonderful performance series throughout the year.
It was a total fluke that I even ended up there. I was volunteering for the Parks Department in New York in an after-school program for homeless kids run in an indoor recreation center in a Manhattan park. With about a dozen or so kids from, maybe, third grade through middle school age, we produced a newsletter called We Say. It was whatever they wanted to write about or illustrate and it was a safe place to say things they might not otherwise. For a Christmas issue they wrote what they wanted for the holiday. One child said she wanted a blue sweater for her grandmother and for the murders in her building to stop. It was compelling. I was working as Executive Director for a Jewish congregation and would ask different members for the $250 I needed to get We Say printed every quarter. Then I would find out where the Mayor’s public schedule was taking him and I’d make sure I was there so I could get a copy to him. He needed to see how all the constituents in his city lived and what they thought about. Anyway, I loved the Parks Department for doing this and decided it might be a great place to work so I asked my friend who ran the press office if there were any jobs and he said, rather apologetically, there is one but it’s out at Prospect Park in Brooklyn and it’s in fundraising. He didn’t know it was my childhood park. I took the subway out there – I was living in Manhattan – and met with the Administrator of the Park, a devoted and rather wild woman named Tupper Thomas who is still there, successfully riding herd over every blade of grass in the 585 and 1/3 acres. After an interview in which I couldn’t stop crying so overcome by sentiment to be back there, I told Tupper that she would probably find many people with more experience than I had in fundraising but she would never find anybody who loved the park as much as I did. She hired me. My first assignment was the restoration of that hand-carved Carousel I had ridden as a child in its two homes – Coney Island and Prospect Park. Brooke Astor was the first underwriter, choosing a horse to be restored and named, as she chose, Gitchigoome. I thought fundraising was easy.
The career kind of moved forward from there with me moving onward and upward every few years into a new job, the only way one can advance in fundraising unless you’re at a big institution like a hospital or university where the departments are bigger and there’s room to advance and I knew that wasn’t for me. In the next 20 years, I had only one job that was dead wrong and I left it in three months, and one where the chemistry was dead wrong with the head of the organization and that one ended in a race to the door, with the boss winning so I got to collect unemployment for a while and finish a writing project I had undertaken. Otherwise, it was a satisfying if frustrating career that ended with my raising money through a fundraising breakfast for an organization that teaches literacy skills to kids very much like those I worked with at the beginning of my career, bringing things full cycle.
It makes me think of an experience I had at a march on Washington in the 90s led by Oz Elliott, the publisher of Newsweek Magazine, called Save Our Children, Save Our Cities. I was, by then, working to bring health care to children who have no other way to get it. It’s a national program that, in New York, means kids in homeless shelters and, in other parts of the country, maybe not in homeless shelters but definitely in poverty and need. I was standing in the press area behind the speakers’ platform with the nine year-old son of one of the nurses in the program just as Jesse Jackson was finishing his speech and coming down the backstairs from the stage. Ryan, the little boy, was almost trembling to see one of his heroes practically in front of him and I knew I could probably maneuver us into position so he could meet him. One of Jackson’s people caught my eye and nodded that he saw what I wanted and would make it happen and he did. As little Ryan was standing there with his small brown hand inside of Jesse Jackson’s big black hand, listening so hard as Jackson told him to keep hope alive, and as I was weeping, a black woman to my left came over to me and said “I know exactly what you are thinking; didn’t we already solve this problem once.” I never saw her before and spent only a few minutes talking about her civil rights experiences in the deep south – very different from my privileged white woman protests in the northeast – but we were blood sisters for those moments. We held each other and cried and then we parted. The encounter was full cycle from my earliest thoughts about civil justice and, although some things are different, there is still a lot to do in this world, a lot of change required if we are going to live together peaceably and save each other and the planet. I think those are the two hand-in-hand issues that compel me to do the kind of work I do. So when Father David noted that the funding had been lost for a Food Pantry that provided for people in need in a community of largely migrant workers, I didn’t even think about whether it was a Catholic or Jewish or any other kind of Food Pantry. And money materialized to the tune of $9000.
By then, Jim and I were married and it seemed important to him to go to church on Sundays and that I go with him. We had talked about it before marriage and he said he didn’t expect that I would want to go every Sunday but that he would think it was very nice if I could go with him when I wanted to. Even though it still has the ring of the unfamiliar to me and, in fact, makes me long for the melodies of the Jewish services of my own growing up in Brooklyn in the majestic splendor of Union Temple, the first Jewish congregation of Brooklyn and Long Island and a wonderful place in which to understand my faith, I go to church with Jim, listen to the readings and the homily, hold hands at the right time during the Lord’s Prayer, stand up and sit down with the rest of the congregation and exchange a sign of peace with the people near me at the appropriate moment in the service. Most of the time I am reciting to myself the parts of the Jewish service I can remember that are so similar to the Catholic one and also listening for the interpretations that I think crystallize the mindset that, despite what is preached about tolerance and God’s love for all of us, say you’re only right if you believe exactly this way and in this “holy, apostolic church”. One on one, people act in a different way, going out of their way to signal acceptance of me and my Jewish upbringing and some of them even mean that. Others, I know, think it’s okay to accept me because I am only one person and they don’t run the risk, in Cornelius, of an onslaught of us. While I haven’t experienced any anti-Semitism, there have been a couple of close misses: in church, on Sundays, there is always a little commentary before the actual mass begins. One Sunday, the commentary was about King Solomon and the woman delivering the message referred to him as an SOB. Now, he was an SOB but it was a bit of a shock to hear him characterized that way in a religious setting. I was not the only one to react as there were several audible gasps. I called the person who said it the next day and she told me that four or five people had already called her and that she really regretted saying that, surprised, even, when she heard it come out of her mouth. I don’t think it was directed at the Jews, in particular.
The other near miss was at a small dinner with neighbors. Our hostess was so proudly describing her brother’s flourishing business in another state and all of a sudden launched into a story about how they sometimes tease him that he is so smart because they found out, recently, that they have a Jewish grandfather. Okay, stereotyping us as smart; not too bad. But we all know that means shrewd in The Merchant of Venice sense. I waited for a beat or so to pass and, with a conversational opening, I was able to indicate – and let our hostess reach the conclusion on her own – that I am Jewish. It was obvious that she was very surprised and, in that moment, reexamined her beliefs long enough to accept me; but, not long enough to forgo a story about how she discovered her Jewish ancestor. The story had to do with a gathering of cousins and meeting one she had not seen before. She was talking to an aunt and saying what a good looking man the newly-seen cousin is but, he just didn’t look like the rest of the family…look at that nose….and she was informed that he had that nose because their grandfather was Jewish…denied he was Jewish, but that was the fact. Hmmmm; stereotyped by a nose. My nose is pretty perky and it’s a Jewish nose, too.
I wish I could go to temple here but the closest one is in Portland and it’s just too much on Friday night after we’ve worked hard all week. It’s not that I used to go every week and now don’t; I found I couldn’t even do that in Seattle because the sight of the temple there was so close, in many ways, to Union Temple that I was completely overcome by sentiment and homesickness and wept my way through the service. Besides, I don’t think God cares where I speak to him, church building, synagogue building or standing in the shower where I sometimes have some of my best heart-to-hearts with Him because it’s one time I am truly alone as even the cats and dog don’t jump in the shower when I’m in it. What I have come to believe is that I am from the Lord’s original religion and that the Jews made a mistake by not following Jesus. What I have trouble believing is that God is vengeful and the disasters that have befallen us, the chosen people, are because we made that original mistake. That couldn’t possibly be true, could it? That couldn’t be why there was the Holocaust? As is the case with every imbalance of power, even when the power is only in numbers and not in truth, actions or facts, I wonder if my words and actions really could draw attention to my difference which, in a society where homogeneity really rules, really could set me up as a target. Jim and I were talking about this when a story appeared in the NY Times about a French priest who has devoted his life to telling the stories of Ukraines who were witnesses to the slaughter of the Jews there who, it was reported, act as if the past 60 years have not passed and tell their stories as if it were yesterday. What an important act that priest is performing, talking to people one at a time, letting them tell their stories and building bridges between people at the same time. I am very sensitive to the power of mass thought and how easy it is to hypnotize a group. The only hope we have is to save each other one person at a time. I said to Jim, a German by heritage, that I knew he couldn’t shoot me because I am a Jew. I asked if he thought anybody at St. Alexander Church could shoot me and he asked me if I was afraid of that. I was maybe not so surprised to find that I am. Not in the specific acts of my everyday life, to be sure, but in the abstract, yes, I can see where a hate crime could be committed. The more people know me, though, and see there is little difference between us, certainly nothing dangerous about me, and that they might possibly learn something new just as I learn from them, the less I think they might shoot me if the circumstances presented themselves.
It’s that act of getting to know each other, becoming real as individuals defined by our humanity and integrity and bound by our mutual respect for each other and for our combined ability to make the world a sweeter, safer place that moves me forward from day to day. That I am doing it in a church setting is completely beside the point. I can’t spend time thinking about whether or not Jesus is going to rise again and return as the Messiah, whether or not I’m going to get into Heaven even though I’m not Catholic (although I have given that some thought now that I live across the road from a Catholic cemetery where my husband plans for us to be buried), or about any of the other things that set us apart from each other. I don’t even want to concentrate on the similarities because we are different and I like those distinctions. Those genetic strings that bind me to the melodies of my heritage are powerful and no less or more of a truss attaching me to my past than Jim to his.
The way faith and the practice of faith fits into daily life here in Cornelius is no different than it was the way I was brought up in Brooklyn where stories about ancient and mysterious times, Friday night services at Temple with family and neighbors and celebrations of holidays in exactly the same way every single year somehow, without our knowing it really, became the signposts for how we lived our lives and we learned that those lessons were just and right, sometimes by straying from and betraying them. Maybe that is too simple because the world is a really complicated place and sometimes we will suffer for sticking to our principles, but I don’t think so. You want to be treated fairly and with respect? Treat others that way, regardless of how, where and even if they believe in God and as if God is one thing or another.
Besides, as an old friend of mine used to say to me, it doesn’t matter where or how I pray because the other side just might be right.
