red light, green light

Chapter One of Cosmic Heart

It’s November 2016. My partner Tracy and I go to our polling place - the basement of a church near a university campus - to vote in the presidential election. It is misty and overcast. I am nervous about the election, and lean into everyone who says, “Don’t worry.” I lean into the fact that Clinton is ahead in the polls. “First woman president,” people say, and I hope they are right. Surely they are right, and the sinking feeling in my solar plexus is wrong.

We wait in line, cast our votes.

We come back outside; there is a low, thick fog on the ground. As we cross the street to go back to our car, a deer comes running down the sidewalk. She is terrified, her hooves hitting the concrete. I have never seen a deer in town. How did she get here? Where would she end up? We stand there, our hearts racing, as she disappears back into the mist.

That night, our neighbors are hosting an election watch party. We take our dogs out before heading over. I watch Rocky walk through the monkey grass in front of our house. I hear a clear, unemotional voice speak inside my head.

“He wins,” the voice says.

When my mother was ten years old, she decided to go to church. Neither of her parents was religious. My grandfather would later have a conversion experience, which he never spoke about, and become a devout Christian, but that had not yet happened. My mother decided to go to church on her own. She arranged for a neighbor to pick her up on Sunday mornings, and my grandmother gave her a coin to put in the collection plate.

Soon after she started attending, the church learned that my mother could play the piano, and that is how she became a church musician, first playing the piano, and then the organ at Red House Baptist.

Both of my parents grew up in rural Kentucky, my mother in the central part of the state, my father in the mountains of the eastern part. He, too, attended a Baptist church, but it wasn’t of his own volition. As a child, my father found church to be hot, insufferably long, and frightening.

Married while they were in college, my parents moved from a small town in Kentucky to a small town in Missouri for graduate school. It was there that my parents saw women wearing jeans for the first time. It was there that they saw real hippies for the first time. Graduate school broadened their peer group and their horizons.

By the time I was born, they had made the switch, which seemed radical to them at the time, from the Baptists to the Methodists. I was christened as an infant in the Methodist Church, as was my brother. We were back in Kentucky by that time, living in Frankfort, where my father had taken a job at the State Department of Education.

I remember our church in Frankfort as a warm and sunny place, and when my family moved back to Richmond, we moved our attendance to the United Methodist Church there, one of three large buildings that faced one another on Main Street.

My parents were friends with the minister, who rode a motorcycle and wore a leather jacket. I was a flower girl at his daughter’s wedding. My grandmother made the dress I wore, a silky floral pattern and butterfly sleeves. I remember standing in the vestibule before the wedding, with the bridesmaids, understanding the importance of the moment. I took my flower girl duties seriously. I don’t remember, but was told that instead of tossing handfuls of flower petals as I walked down the aisle, I meticulously plucked one rose petal at a time from my basket and dropped it ceremoniously onto the burgundy carpet.

My early childhood memories of church are pleasant ones. Even after a change in leadership and a new minister whom my parents did not like at all, I remember church as a place where there was good food, crafts to be made, and music that was fun to sing. I do remember once sitting in a Sunday School classroom listening to the teacher tell us a story that I did not believe to be true. I remember thinking that even though this woman meant well, she was wrong. I looked past her to the dust motes dancing in the sunbeam streaming through the window, biding my time.

My mother, though she didn’t have a permanent position, was still a church organist and often filled in for other organists when they needed a substitute. That is how she came to play at the Episcopal Church. My Brownie troop met in the basement of that church. While the Methodist church was all pastels, the Episcopal Church was dark and serious. We played Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror while we waited for our parents to pick us up.

(If you’ve never had the pleasure, the game is played by each person going into the bathroom one at a time and turning in circles while chanting the name Bloody Mary three times, then gazing into the mirror where Bloody Mary - the ghost of Queen Mary I - will appear in the reflection. I never saw her, but I tried.)

My mother was nervous about playing the complicated service, but the moment it started, she had a conversion experience of her own. She says it felt like a homecoming. She found, at last, what she’d been searching for when she first took herself to church at the age of ten. She was an Episcopalian.

The organist at the Episcopal Church followed the priest when he left to lead a new congregation in the neighboring county. A small historic church, surrounded by thoroughbred farms, had been restored and would house an interdenominational congregation, included both the Episcopal Diocese and the Presbytery.

The organist asked my mother to sub for her not long after making the move, but never returned, and my mother became the full-time organist for Walnut Hill when I was six or seven. The stone church was built in 1801. Once fallen into disrepair and used by a neighboring farmer to store hay, when the building was renovated, the balcony where enslaved people were once forced to sit was closed in. I remember wondering if this was done out of respect or erasure, and I still don't know.

The sanctuary was plain but elegant with minimalist stained glass windows. The pews were grey wood. The prayer book was an Episcopal-Presbyterian hybrid, but the priest was Episcopalian.

And so, my family began to get up and dress on Sunday mornings and drive to Fayette County for church. There was no Sunday School at Walnut Hill, but there was a coffee hour, with cookies, and after church, we would often go on to Lexington, where we would eat lunch at the Oriental Inn or Morrison’s Cafeteria and browse the shops in the mall. We looked at records and books. My dad would go to the pipe store for sweet-smelling tobacco.

Once, a friend asked my brother what denomination we were, and he answered, “Walnuts.”

So early in life, I was a Walnut, but I also visited churches with my friends, sang in their choirs, and spent the night at their lock-ins. I even went to Vacation Bible School one summer with my neighbor Charlotte at the Red House Baptist Church, the little country church where my mother had been the child organist.

We played a game on the hillside beneath a large willow tree called Red Light, Green Light, a game that involved running, then abruptly freezing and standing still. It was fun to play outside, and it was fun to go inside, into the sanctuary, where we sat in the pews and sang from the hymnal, the late afternoon light softly glowing.

In the front of the church, on a little stage, was something more like a podium or a school lectern than the pulpit I was used to, but I was mesmerized by what was behind it - a set of heavy stage curtains pulled open to reveal a glass tank and on the wall behind the tank, a painted mural of the Holy Land.

Charlotte explained that the tank was for baptisms. It was filled with water, and the preacher would dunk the baptised person underneath the water and pull them out again. I could hardly believe it. It was so dramatic. I wondered what it was that happened to the baptised person, held beneath the water in front of a church full of people, that resulted in their being reborn. Saved, Charlotte said, and I knew what she meant even though I didn’t personally believe in hell.

“Your dad is going to hell,” another neighbor said to me once, with sorrow and resignation in his voice.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he’s working on Sunday.”

I stood with my neighbor and watched my dad, who was mowing the lawn.

I didn’t argue, even though I was surprised that anyone could think such a thing. I'm sure that when I got home, I shared the story with my family. We probably laughed about it at first, and then my parents probably expressed concern for my neighbor, that he would be so fearful.

In my house growing up, there was a lot of laughter. A sense of humor was highly valued, as was critical thinking. We talked about anything and everything around the dinner table, much of it was funny and irreverent, but we also talked about philosophy, politics, theology, ethics, history, and science. My parents never told me or my brother what we should believe. They gave us the skills to explore and think, and discern on our own.

As a child, I was aware of things my parents believed. I was aware, for instance, that my father found it a reasonable, perhaps even likely scenario that Jesus was a visitor from another planet, the wheels within wheels in the book of Ezekiel a description of a spacecraft. My mother’s beliefs were more traditional, but both of my parents believed in a loving god, not a hateful one, and they embraced mystery.

I was raised to question everything and to think for myself. And that is probably what has kept me out of cults, to be honest, because cults are often shiny and seductive, and it is often comforting to think that someone else holds the key or the answers we seek, and I have been somewhat obsessed with spiritual matters my whole life.

We all come from somewhere. The neuro-pathways forged from early experience shape and guide us. What we perceive as reality can be unwound like a ball of twine, leading us back to our earliest moments on earth, the influence of our families, our homes, and the churches we did or did not visit on Sunday morning in our too-tight shoes and combed hair.

When we are indoctrinated as children into high-control authoritarian belief systems, we are much more susceptible to relinquishing our autonomy later in life. We grow up to be adults who are more easily controlled and manipulated through fear-based tactics.

I have watched this first-hand. I grew up surrounded by fundamentalist Christianity, which demands that you ignore your inner wisdom and accept outside authority. I have watched it kill people, slowly but entirely. I have watched it turn good hearts into bitter fruit. I know it well but was never indoctrinated into it, and I am grateful for that, just as I am grateful for the opportunities I had to navigate Sunday Schools, Bible Schools, and Youth Groups at the church homes of my friends and neighbors.

I went to church as a child, but wasn’t damaged by it. I have no real church trauma to unpack or indoctrination to deconstruct. I mostly didn’t understand the sermons I heard as a child. And as I grew older and began to understand them, I was mostly in agreement with the “Walnut” theology, which was loving and intellectual, but I did notice the glaring lack of women. I can tell you the two times a woman was mentioned in a sermon with any real importance.

Once was during a Christmas Eve sermon when we learned that the word “Virgin” has nothing to do with Mary’s sexual status, but was an indicator of her age and the fact that she belonged to neither her husband nor her father. The other was about Mary Magdalene. “We know she’s important,” our priest said, “because she is identified by her name rather than through her relationship with a man.”

By the time my mother asked if she and I could be confirmed into the Episcopal Church during the Bishop’s visit when I was eighteen, my heart wasn’t in it. My brother and my father chose not to do it, but I agreed because I knew it was important to her. I knelt with the other confirmands. The bishop said his prayer over us, drew the cross with holy oil over our third eye, and brought us into the Church. Afterward, he handed each of us a single red rose.

I took the flower home and placed it on top of the carved wooden box that held my tarot deck. I confess that I wanted something to happen. I wanted to feel changed by the ritual, but I did not. I watched as the rose dried and darkened and began to shed its petals at the slightest touch.

We all come from somewhere.

We come from people and their hearts, their journeys of belief and lack of belief. While I am glad I was not raised in the fundamentalist church and was never pushed into a tank of water, I have only good memories of Red House, playing on the hillside, and sitting inside to sing. I loved the way our voices sounded, braided together in the dying of the summer day.