Interrupted by God. Tracey Lind

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СКАЧАТЬ completely letting go of her basic Christian teachings and customs.

      The way my parents raised my younger brother and me religiously was really very simple. They taught us to say our prayers at night: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take.” They taught us the Great Commandment, otherwise known as the Golden Rule: “Love God with all your heart, soul, and might, and love your neighbor as yourself.” They sent us to Sunday school at the Reform Temple where we would learn about God without all the superstition and myth about Jesus. We attended synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and we would celebrate an amalgamation of other religious holidays. To this day, I joke about lighting Hanukkah candles under the Christmas tree and finding Easter eggs at the Passover Seder. In sixth grade, I was sent to a private girls’ school where we went to daily chapel, a simplified version of Morning Prayer, Episcopal-Presbyterian style.

      I think of myself as half Jewish and half Christian, and I consider my rich heritage a mixed blessing. As a child, I wanted to be a preacher—I just wasn’t sure whether I should be a rabbi or a minister. Since my mother wasn’t Jewish, I wasn’t considered a real Jew, so I didn’t think I could be a rabbi—and anyway, I assumed I could never learn Hebrew. When I imagined becoming a minister, I couldn’t figure out how to do that either—you see, I wasn’t baptized, so I wasn’t a real Christian, and I didn’t want to be baptized because I had learned somewhere (an untruth, I now believe) that the Nazis baptized Jewish babies and then sent them to the gas chambers. Anyhow, I was a girl, and back then girls couldn’t be ordained either as rabbis or ministers. But I loved being in the house of God, and I loved playing “Saturday-go-to-temple” and “Sunday-go-to-church.” I still remember setting up the chairs in our family room, putting my stuffed toys and dolls in straight rows, and preaching to the silent, appreciative, and complacent congregation of inanimate worshippers.

      By the time I was in ninth grade, I was sitting through daily chapel at school, confirmation classes at the Temple, and playing my guitar for the weekly folk mass at the local Episcopal Church. No wonder I couldn’t answer The Question asked by the rabbi that day. I really didn’t know who I was. On Sundays while everyone was kneeling for communion at the altar rail, I was singing Gordon Lightfoot’s words: “I’m standing at the doorway, my hat held in my hand, not knowing where to sit, not knowing where to stand . . .”² It took a long, long time for me to figure out where to sit and where to stand. And there are still days when I feel like a rabbi in a clerical collar.

      Jesus, in the Book of Thomas the Contender, says: “whoever has known himself [or herself] has simultaneously come to know the depth of all things.”³ In a lifelong effort to answer The Question, I have spent a lot of time, energy, and money getting to know the depths of myself and making connections to the world around me.

      I never made the connection between my birthday and history until I walked into the Martin Luther King Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. And there before my eyes, as big as life itself, was the front page of the New York Times, dated May 17, 1954, with a headline that boldly proclaimed: “BROWN VS. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION.” I have always felt that the complexity of racial justice was implanted in my soul and grafted into my unconscious, and in that moment I knew why. I came into this world on a decisive day in the life of the civil rights movement, and I have spent my entire life in the midst of that struggle.

      Like lots of suburbanites, I never knew many people of color. In fact, I knew very few people of any ethnicity other than WASP or Jew. What I did know was that the maids and gardeners who were black did not have last names we remembered (or even knew), and that it was best to stick to your own kind (even if your own kind was not purebred). I also knew the anger and rage in my father’s face when the race riots found their way to our city, and his inner city furniture warehouse suffered smoke damage from a nearby fire. When I was in fifth grade, the public schools in Columbus, Ohio, were integrated, and I was sent to private school. My parents insist this was a coincidence, but I believe there is no such thing as coincidence; it is just God (or the devil) at work unbeknownst to us. So off I went to receive an excellent education in an even more pristine, privileged, and guarded community of affluence and homogeneity. As I entered the hallowed halls of the Columbus School for Girls, The Question—that haunting question of passing or claiming myself—was lurking in the wings.

      In the summer of 1970, something happened that changed the vocational direction of my life. While my friends were off at summer camp, Europe, and Outward Bound, my parents insisted that I get a job—volunteer or paid, it didn’t matter. So I went to work with a big, angry attitude as a volunteer teacher’s aid in a new program called Head Start. I was assigned to the Ohio Avenue School, where I spent two months accompanying a wonderful group of “underprivileged” preschoolers through their daily routine. I would prepare their snack, ready them for naptime, read to them, and play with them. And sometimes, I would make home visits with their teacher to see how and where my young friends really lived. On those field trips, I saw firsthand the pain of the poor, and I learned about the struggles of raising children in urban poverty.

      It was also the summer I got my driver’s license and a car. With wheels came the newfound freedom to explore beyond the boundaries of my neighborhood and to go where I wanted. I drove through communities that my parents said were not safe, trying to see and experience the danger for myself. I drove to the Ohio State University campus, getting involved in the antiwar and student rights movement. I drove through the foothills of the Appalachians, touching roots I still had not yet discovered. That summer changed my life. My eyes were opened; my sense of exploration and adventure was awakened; my awareness of poverty, racism, and oppression was provoked; and my passion to work for justice was born.

      As the passion and anger of the sixties brewed and boiled over, so did my own passion and anger. How could there be such extremes of wealth and poverty in our nation? How could there be such hatred and fear among blacks and whites? How could women be told to stay in the kitchen? How could young men be sent to fight in a war that shouldn’t be? How could I go back to school and act like nothing had happened?

      The decade of the seventies was an endless, exhausting, but exhilarating marathon of running away from all that I had known to a world beyond myself. I did a lot of hard growing up in a very short time. At eighteen, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and I responded to the news by jumping into an ill-advised marriage. Less than two years later, the marriage was dissolved, and I returned home, a prodigal daughter, to be with my father, who died a year later. By the age of twenty-one, I felt older than my years, and I was angry with God for letting “bad things happen to good people.”⁴

      As a young adult, perhaps to compensate for my rebellious nature, I had a strong need to achieve, excel, and prove myself worthy of The Question. By the time I graduated from college, I had organized and directed a landlord/tenant agency and coordinated the development of a neighborhood revitalization program. Following college, I went to graduate school to study community planning, and for a few years I worked in a variety of community institutions, ranging from the United Way to the Girl Scouts. All the time I still was angry with God, but God was quietly watching over me—guiding me through every mess I got myself into without intruding into my fierce independence and self-determination.

      During my early twenties, I also began coming to terms with my sexuality, realizing that I was a lesbian. It’s hard to understand the coming out process if you’re not gay. I liken the journey of coming out to a second adolescence with particular rites of passage that often include falling in and out of love, and sometimes looking for love in the wrong places. Fortunately, with support and acceptance from friends and family, I sorted out my sexual identity issues, and those confusing years actually have made me a more responsive and compassionate pastor to young adults and their families. By the time I rounded the quarter century mark, things were finally СКАЧАТЬ