Celebrating Another Taste of Freedom

Here's something to marvel at (at least, if you're me). I sat down to write this post, gave it the title you see above, then proceeded to write a back story to the intended post, and that back story got so big and so NOT about a taste of freedom, that I decided I had to rename it and make it another post altogether. That one is now called "How Drawing Saved Me" and hasn't been finished yet.

This one is much simpler. It's about noticing another taste of freedom. I can't decide if it's a tiny taste of freedom, or rather an immense taste of freedom that happens to be subtle enough to have almost escaped my notice. I believe it's the latter.

Pressing a little further, I'd say that the inclination to label this taste of freedom "tiny" is part of the process, usually unconscious, whereby my mind likes to minimize and even dismiss most such progress as nothing worth noting, certainly nothing worth celebrating. Following that unconscious process my mind would have done its best to keep me where I was. (I'm guessing that my mind and your mind came with similar operating systems, though I don't want to be presumptuous about that.)

AHA! This time I'm not fooled! Here's what I mean and what I'm celebrating.

David has just returned from two days away on a silent meditation retreat. This is nothing new. He has been doing this kind of thing for most of our twenty-two years of marriage (twenty-two years as of yesterday!). For a while his retreats were explicitly Christian in orientation and practice; more recently they have been predominantly Buddhist (of the Zen variety) in orientation and practice. (Over the same passage of time I have had my own version of going on retreats--but that's a bit off topic. I'll save it for another day.)

Before David left on Thursday, as we discussed the kind of schedule and routine and sleeping accommodations he could expect, I said with total honesty: "I am so glad I'm not doing that! That does not hold the slightest bit of interest for me!"

Now this sentiment is, like David's retreat practice, nothing new. But saying it aloud without any trace of guilt or shame or trace of "you're so much more spiritual than I am; I should be doing something like that" kind of thinking--now that's entirely new! And believe me, this marks a huge liberation from what might best be described as my formerly hyperactive religio-spiritual superego that has so often functioned as a meat grinder of my soul. (Am I making myself clear?)

For more years than I care to count (but if I did count, it would be something like thirty-five going on forty), ever since I took my first tentative steps in the direction of "finding religion" as a late adolescent, I have been highly susceptible to comparative religio-spirituality. Constantly comparing myself to (my perceptions of) others and their spiritual practices, and constantly coming up short.

"X is more disciplined about prayer than I am; I should be like that." "Y is more contemplative than I am; what a spiritual failure I am." "Z describes having actual, phenomenological spiritual experiences; I'll never have those, so I'm hopeless."

You get the (highly repetitive, incredibly nauseating) picture, I'm sure. This comparative religio-spirituality would get triggered by people in books as well as people in the flesh, intimate friends as well as utter strangers. Put me too close to the gravitational pull of almost any spiritual or religious book, and the meat grinder of my soul starts loosening up its gears ready to get to work. If a meat grinder could salivate, it would be doing that, too.

I finally took a step in a positive direction, albeit not entirely consciously, when I decided to stop reading so-called "spiritual books".  At first this was more like an aversion, but it became a conscious choice. This means that I've skipped over and maybe missed out on a lot of books that people around me were reading and raving about. Like The Power of Now. I even avoided Eat, Pray, Love for the longest time because the word "Pray" was in the title and a picture of prayer beads on the cover! (More on that another time.)  

Clearly, the pattern of comparing myself to others (or to at least one other) and coming up lacking is an old, old pattern, predating my interest in organized religion and my subsequent ordination. I will only say that without a doubt the whole wide realm of spirituality and religion has proven to be a more than able partner for the care and feeding of this unhealthy pattern.

I have a strong hunch that being ordained only made things worse, harder, more loaded with expectations and a sense of professional as well as personal responsibility. Which is one among the several reasons why I am happy to be ordained no more. I so much prefer living with a lighter heart--I can't tell you how much I do!

Of course sometimes I wonder if I might have been able to find a way to arrive at this place of self-acceptance and lightness of spirit had I stayed ordained, and then have been a splendidly light-hearted priest. Maybe. But I have a feeling it would have taken me twenty years instead of twenty months to reach this point. And besides, that rather avoids the more central question of whether I even wanted to remain a priest, why I chose to let that go, and whether I was ever truly "called" to be one in the first place. That, too, is a topic for another day.

Somehow I find myself thinking of some of the parables of Jesus, especially the one about the woman who has lost a small coin, lights the lamps and sweeps her house until she finds the coin. And when she has found it, she calls her friends and neighbors in for a party, saying, "Rejoice with me! For I have found the coin that was lost!" Want to come to my party?

Now here's something else to marvel at--the way that every now and then a story from the Bible or a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer--two books that used to dominate my life that I choose not to spend much time with these days--will pop up out of nowhere and make contact. It's kind of like getting an email from an old, half-forgotten acquaintance (one you aren't sure you've even be missing), saying, "Want to be friends on Facebook?"! And you get to decide to become acquainted on new and more healthy terms. A marvel indeed.

The Earth-Body Story

So I left that writing workshop exercise feeling kind of stupid and small and story-less. If I wasn't ready to write about starting to live my life without God, then what the hell was I going to write about? We participants in the workshop were about to enter into 24 hours of silence so that we could go deep into our writing. It seemed to me of course that everyone else had a story firmly and clearly in mind. Everyone but me.

My story, the one I had tentatively tested in that exercise, didn't seem ready, or ripe. Or I guess it's more truthful to say that I didn't feel ready or ripe or brave enough to start writing it.

In fairness, what I had declared to myself and my workshop companions, though I wasn't exactly clear about this at the time, was more about how I intended to live than about what I intended to write. As I said before, it only stands to reason that in order to write about starting over to live my life without God, I was going to have to start to live my life without God. To cut the cord, saw off the ball and chain that were shackled to my ankle, slash the lashings of the sack on my back, to use my own rhetoric.

But I had no reasoned or reasonable plan in mind. I loved imagining that somehow I could go back to the way I was before I got ordained, and even farther back than that, to the way I was before I decided to embrace Christianity around age twenty (I wasn't born that way!).

And as much as I loved thinking that I could somehow return to my own personal era "Before Christ," to a time in my life without theology, without doctrine, without too much thinking--was that it? Without religion . . . was it that?-- I wasn't really even sure that such an enterprise was possible. And I certainly didn't have a clue how to go about doing this, living this, or being this.

You begin to see how tangled a matter this was for me--when the "entity" I wished to live without was really a massive knotted mess whose individual strands included the human concept of "God"; the religious enterprise in general; Christianity in particular; ordination; and most particular of all, my being an Episcopal priest. I even thought I'd love to go back to a time before words or behind, beneath, and beyond words, to reclaim and to dwell simply in experience, in the realm of my senses in this very sensory and sensual world.

Wasn't that what I meant, what I had written just weeks before?

It's time to start over--
to know what I know
and feel what I feel,
from earth to skin,
blood and bone,
blossom and leaf bloom.



As I walked out of our workshop meeting space and back toward the main house for dinner, I dawdled on the boardwalk that led through a graceful grove of alder trees. It was moist and marshy (the name of the retreat house is "Aldermarsh/Marsh House" in reference to and in reverence to this particular stand of alders with their roots in the wet). I got captivated by the lush moss and the greens of the ferns and other undergrowth and by the wild shapes of foliage, many of them leaves I don't see anywhere in Maine. To me they were exotic! There was birdsong too, thought I don't remember now which birds or what songs.)

The wind stirred in the branches above me; the light shifted. And something shifted in me. I stopped worrying about what to write. I had a new story, at least one to get me through the next day! I would write about my love for the earth, my rapturous connection with the natural world. It might not have been the story that I thought I wanted to tell, but it was a place to start.

In my tendency to fall into either/or, this or that thinking, I have often imagined since that day that my story was either about "going godless" or about my love for the earth. I now suspect--no, better than suspect, I know-- that they are simply two fundamental aspects of the same story. They are not in opposition to one another, nor in competition with each other, but in on-going conversation with each other.

When I search far back in my memory for traces of my earliest "inklings" of God, of the transcendent dimension of life (though I would never have thought in such terms), the clearest moments of my harvest have to do with my place, my experiences, my responses to the natural world, often in moments remembered as happening by myself. Seeing the moonlight on the ocean, knowing the tides and their rhythms, smelling balsam firs and fresh lake water and hearing the melancholy cries of loons while visiting a beloved island in Squam Lake, seeing a skunk cross our lawn in the middle of a hot summer night.

Whether I name such experiences as being "of God" or "of godlessness" hardly matters. (Oh, taste that delicious and delightful freedom once again!) They are what I know and have always known about my "place/ in the family of things" (from Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese").

These deep earth-body connections have often and over decades seemed extraneous to, incongruent with, and unwelcome in, the church's liturgical celebrations and most of my hundreds of sermons. While this may have caused me to overlook them and to undervalue them, they remain solid, faithful, and undimmed at the core of my being.

Image: photo by David (I think!), from Kidney Pond

Really Starting Over

"The story I am writing is about starting over to live my life without God." I declared this to my partner in an exercise at a writing workshop on an island off the coast of Washington.

It was June of 2006, only a month or two after writing my two poems about feeling shackled to God and burdened by God. I was trying to be faithful to what I thought those poems were telling me.

And I was far enough from home, from people who knew me as an Episcopal priest, many as their former priest, to feel a bit more free to be honest. Since I was in the Pacific Northwest, north of Seattle, I had imagined (in other words, I had assumed) that most of my workshop mates would applaud and embrace a kind of loosey-goosey, unconventional approach to religion and spirituality and that my talk of living my life without God wouldn't raise eyebrows or upset anyone and might even find a ready and sympathetic embrace. I guess you could say I was kind of hoping for that, maybe even counting on that.

And I guess you could say I had been a tad unrealistic. Actually, I'd been really seriously off base.

My story idea went over like a bad joke, and I, already feeling very tentative about it, was hyper-vigilant for any signs telling me I should reconsider and turn back from the brink. I already wondered if perhaps I wasn't yet ready to write this story, that perhaps I didn't have the requisite perspective and "distance" that time could provide. After all, I hadn't actually embarked very far along this journey of living my life "without God," whatever that might mean. But I was seriously thinking about it, imagining it, planning it. (But in order to write about it, I was really going to have to live it. Damn! I hadn't fully considered that.)

My partners in this exercise, three different people in sequence, were invited to listen to my proposed story line, then respond with questions for me, and I was to do the same for them. My three compadres, more or less randomly selected in the course of milling about the room, all seemed to react to my story in similar ways. Each one in turn posed questions that felt strained to me, unenthusiastic, even slanted in such a way as to suggest that this idea of living my life without God was misguided, dangerous, a temporary delusional detour from which they hoped I would eventually recover.

They seemed to want to talk me back into God, to reassure me that this dark time would pass. Almost as if they were worried about me, as if this talk of going godless signaled depression and despair, maybe a sign of mental illness (that would be my mental illness), some kind of breakdown, as if next would come talk of suicide and wanting to end it all.

But nothing could have been farther from the truth! What my companions didn't seem able to comprehend or to guess was that my wanting to live my life without God was a jailbreak, a life-or-death bid for freedom! It was my best hunch of what I needed to do to shed an immense burden and to become--perhaps for the first time since childhood, perhaps for the first time ever!--simply and joyfully myself, a human being alive and awake on this amazing planet. I wanted liberation, and the best I could figure it, that meant letting go of God.

I suppose I can understand and even appreciate their response. It's not as if sane people usually speak of going godless every day, with strangers! It's not generally considered a casual endeavor, like, say, going topless or braless (and even speaking of going topless might raise eyebrows).

I could have told them, if I had wanted to pursue this line of thought, that of course I know that if there really is a God of whatever shape or form who or which is everywhere in the universe, then my intention to live my life without this God was preposterous, ludicrous, impossible even! That I could, in my limited, misguided ego kind of way, imagine myself cast adrift and free of such a being/force/entity, but that in fact my very life and my every breath would still be dependent on it/her/him. In which case the joke would be on me!

But I really wasn't interested in that kind of thinking, so so familiar to me from my twenty-something years of theologizing, preaching, and fitting life into a particular religious worldview to be packaged up and delivered for the hoped-for good of others.

Maybe that's just it: I no longer wanted to have to think and write and speak about God at all. God had become (or at least thinking, writing, and speaking about God had become)--how shall I say it?--boring to me!

I wasn't depressed; I was energized, hopeful, yet also fearful, and I was trying to be brave. I wasn't trying to be offensive; I was trying to tell the truth. And the truth was, I was sick to death of God--fed up with god, with talking about God, thinking about God, shoring up other people's faith in God or ideas about God , trying to make God (the Judeo-Christian God? any and every God?) make sense, tired of being a spokesperson for God in any way, shape, or form.

After being ordained for twenty-two years, I wanted out. I was barely able to acknowledge that truth, even to myself, but this workshop on the other side of the continent had seemed like a good place to start.

By the conclusion of this exercise I wasn't so sure. I got scared; I retreated. I decided I wasn't ready to write that story and that, at least for the purposes of this writing workshop, I'd have to find another one.

Tasting Freedom

I've written elsewhere about how I imagined (and hoped against all realistic hope) that I would experience an immediate sense of being boldly and radiantly set free in the wake of renouncing my ordination. But it just wasn't that easy. Nor that quick, which is really probably both appropriate and all for the best. Important, deep things usually take time, and that way they have a chance to grow from reliable roots.

(In addition to the above linked post are two others written in early April of this year looking back on that experience of renouncing my ordination: "Renouncing my Ordination Vows: One Year Out" and "Renouncing Vows: The Day After".)

But within a month or so of renouncing my ordination vows I began to taste one particular flavor of freedom on a regular basis. I would be walking Digory, our Corgi, around the block for our first morning walk after David and Anna had left home for the day, and after my bowl of cereal.

We tend to take the same route on these morning walks, Digory and I, heading left out of our driveway, then left again at the corner of our neighbors' yard, and continuing to travel counterclockwise around the short, not precisely rectangular block.

 Rounding the second left-hand corner I usually glance to my right toward the east-southeast and the salt water inlet of Casco Bay known as Broad Cove. In the winter with no leaves to obscure the view I might glimpse the water itself, but at all seasons there's always at least a vista of sky and the known and sometimes sniffed, even if unseen, presence of the water, mud, sand, sea algae, and various creatures. I guess I like to check in with the bay that way as we make our way around the block, and as Digory likes to pee on the neighbor's shrub at that corner, too, it works well for both of us to pause there.

After turning the corner we find ourselves on a street where the trees are more plentiful and actually arch and meet overhead so that we proceed through a spacious tunnel of limbs and branches and, for half the year, leaves of various seasonally appropriate colors. An old stone wall runs along the right-hand side of the road, a favorite place for chipmunks to scramble and dip into and out of crevices, and so on. I love being in the company of so many substantial tall trees, and I suppose they help me to notice things like the wind, the sky conditions through gaps in branches, and the songs of birds.

In roughly the same twenty foot stretch of road it would dawn on me, this particular taste of one particular form of freedom: "It doesn't matter any more what I think!"

Maybe it came to me there not only because of the stone wall, the trees, and the birds, but also because beyond the stone wall and trees stands a house belonging to neighbors who were members of the church where David and I had been co-rectors for nearly fifteen years. (They still worship there, they and three other families who live in our neighborhood; we're the ones who left.)

If I were to try to recapture the recurring sequence of semi-conscious actions and thoughts that led me to this realization, not on every walk but many, many times over, I'd come up with something like this:

I'm walking along, simply enjoying the scene, the morning, the trees, maybe some birdsong, the clouds and sun, breathing in the scents of the day, my heart and indeed my whole body swelling with delight and gratitude, pulsing with energy. And I think to myself or perhaps even whisper audibly or speak aloud, "Thank you!" Sometimes my thanks accompanied by a small bow to what's around me, sometimes with a spontaneous (but very small and contained) gesture of hands clapped together a few times.

I take a few more deep breaths, relishing the moment. And then I think: "Who or what am I thanking? The universe? The unceasingly fascinating and dazzling natural world of this planet? Do I believe in some kind of creator of all of this? And if so, would I call that creator or creative force 'God'? What do I believe?"

At that point a slight cloud would cover my sun, the cloud of thinking theologically and not having an answer and feeling a knee-jerk sense of obligation to know what I think and believe about God and to be able to articulate those thoughts and beliefs for others and to mold them in such a way as to fit, more or less, "the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church." A sense of obligation, struggle, and constraint (and a good measure of failure) I know way too well.

And then it would dawn on me: "It doesn't matter any more what I think!"

I am free of that obligation. I have slipped out of that noose, cut the tether to those vows, that "Declaration" to which I had once signed my name "in the sight of all present" and that sometimes haunted and taunted me both day and night.

"I solemnly swear that I do believe the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation; and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church."

It doesn't matter any more what I think or don't think about God. It doesn't matter any more what I think. It  . . . doesn't  . . . matter . . . what . . . I . . . think.

While I welcomed this clear taste of freedom, I will say that it was also just a wee bit unsettling. I had, for good or ill, largely defined myself for more  two decades by that feeling that it did matter what I thought about God. At the beginning of those decades I carried this charge mostly with harmony and eloquence, and in the latter half of those decades with struggle, resistance, and conflict alternating with reconciliation or at least with the quiet of exhaustion and a temporary truce.

If it no longer mattered what I did or didn't think about God, then who was I? and what was the goal of my life or the nature of my particular contribution to the world?

False Thinking Number One

I have no idea just how many posts about "false thinking" I could or may eventually write. Trust me, I have no interest in actually sitting down to analyze, categorize, and count up! And trust me again, we all might get a little fatigued and bored if I wrote about every last itty bitty one.

I'm sure there are lots of variations on false thinking that will crop up as I proceed, so it's likely there will be more posts related to this one.

The kinds of false thinking I'm thinking about usually relate to fear. Fear, especially the unacknowledged subterranean kind, conjures all sorts of stories, scenarios, reasons, strange logic, and the like, all designed to keep us safe and sound, and for me that usually means, stuck, hidden, playing small kinds of stuff.

A perfect example cropped up a couple of weeks ago after I saw the movie Julie and Julia. I called it "The Julie/Julia Syndrome" and blogged about it over on Trusting Delight. The basic gist of it was this, the fruit of the old, familiar deadly comparison game:

"Well, clearly I haven't got the right kind of blog to become a big hit and turn into a book and a popular movie starring Meryl Streep, so . . . why bother?" and "I keep reading and being told that no one reads blogs anymore, so . . . why bother?" and "Blogs are SO passe internet phenom, so . . . " You get the rather repetitive idea."

The current example (so, I suppose this should be called "False Thinking Number Two" or maybe even Two Thousand and Twenty-Nine) is the suggestion--no, it's more than a suggestion; let's call it a forceful, pig-headed opinion (and I mean no offense to pigs).

This particular stubborn and false-thinking opinion holds that I have no right, no authority from which to tell my "journey to freedom" story until I have gotten to the promised land. What do I know about the way to freedom if I haven't really gotten all the way yet? (Questions like how will I even know when I've gotten "all the way" are not considered relevant by the manager of the false thinking factory.) Why should anyone trust me?

Even though trusted friends as well as people who barely know me seem to agree that the real, raw story of traveling to freedom is what interests them. That is, the pitfalls and false starts and wrong turns and the keeping going make for a more compelling, real, and accessible story than if I were to write from some obnoxious higher ground of invulnerability or perfection.

And there's always that possibility that the process of writing the story little bit by little bit might also be part of the key to freedom, might even be the last little vessel or vehicle needed to cross the last bit of territory. Because writing, like most every creative endeavor, has the power to carry the creator to new and usually unexpected, or at least hard to control, "places".

"Places" such as the promised land and freedom are of course not really places on a map, places to arrive at where you plunk down your bags and set up shop and stay put happily ever after. Freedom, to state the obvious, is much more likely to be an ongoing process, a matter of personal commitment to keep facing my fears when they arise, to being open to learning new tools and practices for staring down, or better yet, befriending the fears and moving forward with them rather than waiting for a time when they cease to exist.

Moses is said to have seen the promised land from afar just before he died, but he wasn't allowed to cross over and actually to set foot in it and on it. But really, the promised land, the territory of freedom (happiness, joy, creativity, and so  much more), is an inside job, not an outside location. And that means we get to be there now, moment by moment. And that's plenty to sing and dance about right now! And now. And now.

Hallelujah!

The Freedom Diaries Are Born

Earlier today I decided that sustaining two blogs was one blog too many. Now, at the risk of becoming the poster child for some sort of multiple blogging disorder, I'm starting another one a mere four hours later.

But this one's different. This one, in fact, has already been written. Just not published. 

This blog already exists as entries in my various journals--most in spiral-bound notebooks, handwritten in Parker's washable blue fountain pen ink (most of the time); some in bits and pieces in my computer's memory. All that needs to happen is for me to choose and copy journal entries from one format into blog format, and presto! The Freedom Diaries will become a reality.

For weeks, or more truly for months, if not years, I've been saying to myself and occasionally to others that I was going to write the story of my journey, first out of parish ministry, then out of the Episcopal priesthood entirely and into my present unfolding life as a writer and a painter and a collage-maker, all part of my "new life of freedom". 

From time to time I would make little inroads into telling that story but then I'd stop, feeling stumped as to how to continue honestly and compellingly without torturous effort. I'd feel overwhelmed by the task of having to shape some sort of over-arching narrative in order to tell the tale (thanks, Patty, for that observation yesterday!). I know, too, that fear of offending people who knew me as a priest often hampered my progress.

I'm not interested in too much torturous effort, nor in being hampered by fear or the challenge of shaping a great narrative. I want this process to be as enjoyable as possible. And I really want to tell the story in a gutsy, honest, funny, and compassionate manner or not tell it at all.

This morning I happened across some of my random journal entries in my computer's documents, usually filed with the words "ramblings" somewhere in the title. I opened up one such document and started to read, and something shifted.

"Why not just start putting these into a blog and out into the wider world?" I mused. 

I still get to decide what to publish and what not to publish. I can do minimal editing for clarity or humor or grace (but not too much grace! these are just journal entries after all), or to remove the names of the innocent. 

Why ever not? And with that I was on my way. 

I looked up "diary" in the Oxford English Dictionary and found this rather lovely line from D'Israeli: "We converse with the absent by letters, and with ourselves by diaries." 

And for a long time I've been savoring a snippet from Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, and now I have a reason to use it:

"Toni Morrison said, 'The function of freedom is to free someone else,' and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of you family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?"

And now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present to you: The Freedom Diaries: the previously unpublished chronicles of my midlife journey from Episcopal priest to free-lance human being.