Spiritual History, Part One

I would like to give a bit off my spiritual history - both religious upbringing/background/training and spiritual experiences. I am assuming this is going to take some time, so this is part one.

This post was inspired by a discussion over at Sounds True between Tami Simon and Rabbi Rami Shapiro (if you are not a member of sounds true, this link will not last long), where Rabbi Shapiro talks about making a ethical will:

TS: Can you tell me a little bit more about these practices for preparing for death? What are they?

RS: Yes, sure. One that I’m very fond of in Jewish tradition is called an ethical will. And I have my financial will that [says] this is what I own and this is what I've got and this is who I want it to go to and what I want to do with it, and whatever. So I’m trying to influence the material aspect of my life.

But there’s also what’s called in Judaism an ethical will, and that’s a statement of what I value. And the way I prefer to do it is not a list, it’s not a PowerPoint presentation of, “Well, I think it’s good to be nice and kind and just and patient.” That would be cliché, I think. So I think the best way to communicate things like this is story. So I have people begin to identify the key stories, the touchstone stories, transformative experiences that they've had in their life, positive or negative, and then retell those in short story form—very short, sort of like a [speaks Hebrew] story, five, 10 things, 50 words, 75 words—and use those as a way of communicating to children or grandchildren what it is we truly value.

So that's one practice that I think is really a beautiful thing to do. So you ultimately put these stories in a book, and it’s a book that you write over the last years of your life. And leave them for your kids or your grandchildren or great-grandchildren as a statement of what really matters to you. But you do it as a series of life stories. So it’s not just, “OK, Grandma thinks it’s important that we have courage,” but she shows us where in her life she demonstrated that, or she learned that, maybe by having a lack of courage. I mean, the stories have to be honest.

In a way, I think of this blog is my ethical will for my boylios.

All right, let's do this thing. Any spiritual history starts as family history, imho. And I suspect some family members will need to do some correcting of this history in the comments, which is quite welcome and encouraged.

Teenage Mom

My mother was an "old Mormon" on her mother's side - i.e. pioneer people who crossed the plains from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City and made the deseret blossom like a rose (I'm sure you with some LDS background saw what I did there . . .) However, Mom left the Church in her early twenties after a devastating breakup (her fiancee decided to marry someone else). She never really left her faith, however, she was still Mormon through and through, and she eventually returned to active participation in the Church around the time I went to college.

Dad in Nam

My father grew up in the Seventh-Day Adventist tradition.  His mother, Erma, had joined the Church about five years before he was born. Her conversion was traumatic - case in point, my grandfather did not speak to her for one whole year after she chose to stop wearing jewelry - i.e. her wedding ring - in an act of piety and faith (Sevens generally do not wear jewelry and often exchange wedding watches). Dad was born of another of Erma's faithful acts - Grandma told me shortly before she passed away that my father was conceived shortly after she chose to discontinue birth control, feeling deeply that it was G-d's will that she do so. Dad was a very faithful member of the Church and studied to be a minister. Then, in an act of sheer courage, and possibly lunacy, he dropped out of college, knowing he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam. What he saw there shook his faith deeply. He did not return to college and did not become a minister, but became what Mom called an "itinerant carpenter." (And if you see a parallel there to a certain primary character in the New Testament, I would not say you are wrong, but Dad would . . .) Interestingly to me, Dad also returned to the faith of his youth, after Mom passed away and he remarried.

Anyway. My parents met in their mid-twenties, after they had both left religion behind, at least in theory. When I was born thirteen months after they were married, they found themselves fighting over whose religion - the ones they no longer followed - was right. To preserve their sanity (and their marriage!) religious discussions were tabled.

One of many photos taken by my parents,
trying to capture the beauty of our little neighborhood,
nestled in the hills.

Mom & I in the leaves

Thus, my earliest life was with no particular religious bent. My mother had me blessed in the Mormon tradition by her father, Victor, and I am sure that Erma said many prayers for my spiritual well-being. But no early training in the way my cousins and peers had. And yet. Both of my parents deeply respect the beauty and wonder of the natural world. They would both stop in awe at beautiful vistas, deep sunsets, miraculous moments. And I would stop with them. I believe my love for Mother Earth is a direct inheritance from my parents. I cannot tell you how many times we "had" to stop and soak in the bliss of a sky-blue pink moment or wonder at the sunset glowing on the mountains that surrounded us in Ogden. (Sky-Blue Pink is Victor's phrase - the Gaia-philia goes back to the beginning, I suspect). Most of our family trips included some sort of sight-seeing - of trees, rocks, lakes - natural things, not human-made things.

Exploring Arches
Mom & Vic are at bottom left.
Riss & I are the explorers.
Dad is behind the camera, one presumes.

My parents are also both deeply moral people, who have deep knowledge of right and wrong, of respect for all. (Mom remains a strong presence in my life, though she has passed to the other side, so please do not mind that I speak of her in the present tense.)  Mom & Dad taught me many moral lessons, made certain that I understood both my own worth and the worth of others. That no one was better than me, but also that I was no better than anyone else. Mom's stories about living in DC during the race riots, of her awakening to the racial reality of the south when she moved to Maryland in her teens, will always stay with me.

Right before I started kindergarten, we moved to a new part of the same town. After school, I stayed with a particular family who lived near the school, until Mom got off work. This home was also nearby the local LDS wardhouse. And this was my introduction to the LDS Church. This was back in the mid-seventies, when Primary, the organization for children in the LDS Church, met on weekday afternoons. Almost all the other children who stayed with this particular family after school were also Mormon and went to Primary. So why not me?

Oh how I loved Primary. It was like school, only we got to sing even more _AND_ we got to talk about G-d, right and wrong, love, being good - all the things I really wanted to talk about. When they consolidated the meeting schedule, and Primary was held on Sundays, I kept going to church, with a different local family. Eventually, when I was about eight and half, I was baptized.

I truly believe that had my introduction to religion been to any other Church, I would have joined up with whatever I had found. Because I had a desperate longing for connection to the Holy, to G-d, to prayer - all of it. And I absorbed the Mormon faith fully. I held my own Family Home Evenings with just me. When my sibs were old enough, I took them to church with me. I held numerous callings (which are positions or jobs within the church - children as young as 12 can have a calling) and went to every activity possible. I was truly all in - I even took early morning seminary so I could take all the academic and choir classes I wanted during the regular school day (in Utah, at least in 80s, you could be released from school for an hour to go to seminary, which is high school level religious education).

The really interesting thing is that along with the moral lessons of the Church, I was absorbing the moral lessons of my parents. Including their strong feminist and anti-racist stances. Their unnamed, yet deep humanism. Which eventually put me at odds at odds with my Sunday School and seminary teachers. I was unafraid of telling teachers they were wrong if they said certain things were for girls and others for boys. Or that you could tell that Native Americans were descended from Laman and Lemuel because of their cursed dark skins. Or any number of other BS kind of statements.

My first deep spiritual crisis happened in high school. I shall write about that in the next post, however.

Thank you to my dear stepmother, Neva, for scanning these family photos.