Spirituality & Slavery Part I

By yielding, slave to Master Stern
yielding@bdsmu.com
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Spirituality &Slavery Part II
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To understand the nature of spirituality in slavery, I must first be able to define my own spiritual nature. That's a task. For me, spirituality has always been a quest, beginning with my initial search as a child and as a young adult for answers in organized religion. It wasn't until I was able to define "God" for myself, based on my own system of values, that I was able to apply spirituality to any part of my life. The "answers" have been paradoxical, ambiguous, and often confusing, and I've learned to expect nothing more of the thing I call 'God' than I expect of myself. I understand spiritual well-being in a vast sense of active, positive participation in the workings of the universe, and, equally important, in the sense of individual self-awareness and the desire for growth within the insignificant parameters of my existence.

Everyone has epiphanies. When it comes to slavery, mine has been protracted - always surprising, but slow to evolve. There was no moment of clarity or flash of understanding. There were, however, years of suppression and misguided or misinterpreted feelings. I blame my tendency toward self-repression on the Judeo-Christian ethic with which i grew up, a system of ideals that is so profound as to be almost inherent.

I was raised in the midwest. We were a church-going family, but hardly "religious." When I say "church-going," I mean that my mother drove her three girls to Sunday School each week and sat in the car reading a book until it was over. Then we drove home where Dad waited for lunch. Our lunches often consisted of a Kraft American Cheese single between two slices of white bread slathered with mayonnaise. Too obvious a metaphor for literary ventures, this small scrap of information is nonetheless disheartening in its poignancy.

I think its fair to say I felt baffled during most of my childhood. My father was never a well man, although I think a good deal of his malaise was the result of my Mother’s control issues. She was the head of the household, and she seemed to resent it, because she was in a terrible mood for many years. We were taken to Sunday School because it was the "right thing to do," although my father, until shortly before his death, was an agnostic.

My mother prided herself on education, to the point of favoring reason over feeling no matter what the circumstance. At one point during Sunday School classes, I admitted to the teacher that my mother believed in evolution. This began a ridiculous dialogue between the teacher (who wanted further information) and my mother (who wouldn’t come into the classroom because she wasn’t ‘dressed for church.’) I became the courier between the church and the laity, delivering questions to my mother and relaying answers to the teacher. As I left each Sunday, the teacher would ask something like, "How can your mother say she believes in the Bible and still believe in evolution?" which prompted a response to him for the next week that "biblical stories are essentially allegorical in nature and therefore easily reconcilable with science."

The conversation went on for a few weeks until my mother said with evident disgust, "I’m not going to argue with this idiot anymore." (Arguments with my mother always ended when she proclaimed her opponent to be an ‘idiot.’) I was alternately embarrassed that she would not conduct the conversation herself, and proud that she was so sure of herself and so astute in her answers. I wanted the conversation to go on forever, because in those few weeks, I had a better understanding of a Christianity in which I wanted to participate than I had ever received from years of memorizing the books of the bible.

Faith, however, eluded me. I was terrified of a God I was supposed to love, petrified of being sent to hell by a God who loved me, bewildered by a God whose fits of temper had global consequences, and appalled by a God who behaved in ways I would never have been allowed to behave at home. I didn’t understand how this enigma could exist, and I wasn’t sure I could trust it. My distrust quickly turned to guilt and fear. I prayed fervently for forgiveness and then ardently begged the creator to turn the fear-based prayers into honest feelings, which I did not have.

In the early Sunday school years, we took our crayons and colored in black & white drawings of Jesus as he hung on the cross. Sometimes he looked radiant, as though he hardly felt the gaping hole in his side – he smiled down at his murderers with a face full of forgiveness, or turned his eyes toward his heavenly destination. At other times his expression was agonized and horrific. The ‘courtesy’ cloth draped around his emaciated hips sagged as though it would slip away at any minute, adding humiliation to injury. This was our savior. This was what he endured for us. What one of us could possibly do the same?

It was much later in life that I questioned the judgment of those who created the pictures we colored each week. It was later, too, that I remembered the scene at the base of the cross. It was littered with grieving women. The disciples had conveniently made themselves scarce. I imagine a subconscious desire on the part of the illustrators to convey the natural role of women – care givers to the bitter end, but I saw the drawings as indictments of men in general and of the core church, although there seemed to be little distinction between the two.

I did like the music. We always got to sing before adjourning to the classrooms. I remember how hymns like "In the Garden" and "Onward Christian Soldiers" gave me goose bumps. My dad used to say that the Southern Baptists had the monopoly on good church music. He was right. His favorite hymn was "Bringing in the Sheaves." Even when anticipating death, the Baptists can clap along.

When I moved to the northeast, I found that most of the hymns sound like dirges. Even those sung in joy and celebration are slowed to a tempo that mimics old age, induces monotony and reminds one never to shovel snow for fear of a heart attack. Lent is especially painful musically. Apparently the Yankee tradition is to spend forty days and forty nights internalizing Christ’s feelings on the cross; although this self-imposed stigmata is coupled with a sensibility and reserve that precludes actually bleeding.

But when I sang as a kid, and the goose bumps rose, I wondered if I was closer to God. I began to associate "spirituality" with "feelings." When I didn’t have the feelings, I worried about my faith, and thus, my destiny.

We changed churches when I was a sixth-grader. I found myself in a Sunday School class unlike any I had been to before. The pastor’s wife was the teacher. She had long blond hair parted straight down the middle, and the wire-rimmed glasses that identified her as anti-establishment. In her class we held séances. Ostensibly we did it to prove that it didn’t work; yet we tried every week. One Sunday we called upon the spirit of Gandhi to enter me. And I felt something. I lost all sense of time and place. The room and the people in it disappeared as though I were somewhere else. My head dropped and words began to form in my throat. Just as I was about to speak, one of my classmates said, "Oh, she’s faking it," and I was instantly alert. I don’t know that I have an adequate explanation for it even now, except to suppose I was eager, and therefore susceptible to a completely relaxed, self-hypnotic state. At some point, the pastor and his wife left the church. When the elders went into the parsonage, they found all the walls painted black. I immediately developed a belief in magic.

At an age when I was desperately searching for my own identity and my own path in life, I became involved with a group of charismatic Christians who embraced me, professed their love for me, understood me where my parents did not, and offered me a new vision of God, one that would fill that hole and end my search. They were good, kind people. And I immediately succumbed to this new method of fulfillment. I became "reborn," I went to prayer meetings and faith healings. I sang and danced and fell down when the Spirit touched me. I spoke in tongues. Granted, it was gibberish, but I maniacally believed it was a language of angels, and in it I was praising God.

I was 14. It was a banner year for me. I had my first sexual experience, my first joint, (do they call them joints now?), learned to drink wine that cost only $1.99/truckload, ran away from home for the first time, perfected the art of skipping school, and had the Holy Spirit descend upon me. Two years later, when my parents could no longer control my erratic and reprehensible behavior, I was "taken in" by the same group through foster care. By the time I moved in, they had progressed to "casting out" demons, of which, it was determined, I had many. My record albums were burned in the back yard. The black smoke, they told me, was the demonic influence leaving the records themselves. Books were burned, especially anything that had to do with psychology. "I’m OK, You’re OK," is one title I remember sailing through the air to the fire. We prayed almost continuously, but only men were allowed to lead the prayers. Women could lead a prayer only if a man – any man – was not present. Something satisfied me about that, although I could not identify what it was. I carried my bible to school with me, and sometimes the concordance as well, without the least sense of embarrassment. The "laying-on-of-hands" was also very big with us.

After dinner each night, when the two young sons were in bed, we performed the "demon" ritual. Each time a demon was cast out of me, I flailed about and made guttural noises, invoking the thrilling attention of all present. There was a bucket handy in case I needed to throw up one of the demons’ "nests." (While the demons were invisible, their nests were tangible.) I never did throw up, but once was able to produce something, to the delight of the adults. There were also screams, loud enough to alert the neighbors, who dutifully called the police. Al (the father) was always honest when the police showed up. "We’re casting out demons, praise the Lord," he would say. "Uh-huh," the cop would respond. "Try to do it with a little less noise." Al would return to the room, with a beatific, knowing smile on his face. We, the enlightened, felt a wave of pity for the poor fools who didn’t understand the significance of the young girl flopping exhaustedly on the beige carpet.

I could not have attributed my reactions to these things accurately then. I believed them. I was certain that even if I was forcing noises from my throat, it meant only that as a person of faith, I was fighting the demon within me. It was the demon within me that created doubt and kept me from being fulfilled spiritually. It was the demon within me that once in awhile said, "Why am I buying into this crap?" It was Satan talking, trying to deceive me.

Eventually I noticed a certain reluctance on the part of the adults to continue with the nightly ritual. I had so few demons left, and they were insignificant enough to render them less exciting than Monday Night Football. So I created a new one. I gave her a name that sounded evil and inhuman, and announced her as "the favorite" of Satan’s lovers. The crowd went wild! I spoke in her voice, and dared to say things that never would have come out of my mouth had I not been possessed. I said "f__k" and "c__t." I laughed at the appalled looks on their faces. I brazenly came on to Al and called his mortified wife a b__ch. In truth, I made everyone happy. The attention returned to me, and the Christians were able to destroy the most horrible of demons they had yet run across.

The disappointment was in having to expel her. I knew that by the end of the night, I would have to spit her out and she would be sent her back to hell. I drew it out as long as I could. I proclaimed that they could not "get rid of me" with their silly chants and prayers. Eventually, though, I caved. But they never did get rid of her. She was simply a side of me that I held in check. She wasn’t made up at all. She was in complete opposition to what I had become…and it was only in merging the two that I eventually became the person I wanted to be.

The "list" that is my search for God and my spiritual self doesn’t convey the feeling I associated with the search. There was only one. I was scared. Often i was paralyzed with fear. The most intense God I knew was perhaps the one I gibbered to in tongues. Once I attended a meeting at someone’s home. The guest speaker was a self-proclaimed prophet; a Latino man. I sat alone in a corner, away from the group, hoping that by doing so I would attract attention to myself; that my angst and inner-struggle would be apparent and oh-so-moving. I needed those feelings, and when they were absent, I was just another teenager. There was nothing special about me. I wasn’t special to God.

After half an hour or so, I had stopped paying attention to the talk altogether. I had stopped paying attention to methods by which I could get attention. But in the middle of his speech, or testimony, or prophecy, the speaker paused and said in a loud, assertive voice, quite unlike the one he had been using before, "God has great plans for that little girl in the corner!" All eyes turned to me. A chorus of praise-the-Lord’s rose from the room. The speech resumed as if it had never been interrupted, as if some greater force had compelled the man to expel those words. I began to cry. God had noticed me. Not only had he responded to my ploy for attention, he had a plan, and it included me.

After the meeting, Al’s family and I went up to the speaker, who reiterated the divine plan less dramatically, and since he was a faith-healer as well as a prophet, we asked him to pray over me in hopes of ridding me of epilepsy. The prophet didn’t know what epilepsy was, and he mispronounced it as he prayed. That irked me. Superstitiously, I felt that the prayer would lose some of its power if it weren’t worded with correctness so exact that the Lord couldn’t be confused.

Semantics were everything. Despite God’s supposed omnipotence, we were careful with our words and prayers, as if God appeared after rubbing an oil lamp and warned us to use our three wishes wisely. Even as early as fourth grade, when my Sunday school teacher told us about Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ and his subsequent consumption by eternal flames, I wondered about words. I asked the teacher why, if Judas was so sorry about what he had done that he hanged himself, God hadn’t forgiven him, as we had been taught God does. "He never actually asked for forgiveness," the teacher told me. "But can’t God read our thoughts?" I wondered. I want to say the teacher glared at me, but that may be a faulty memory. "Of course He can, but it doesn’t matter anyway," she snipped. "Judas committed suicide and if you kill yourself, you go to hell."

Such a God is an interesting concept. A mind reader with the power of eternal judgment who is willing to overlook the insincerity of the spoken word and the veracity of thought. A madman who sends blights upon the face of the earth, wipes out millions of his unworthy children through flood and famine and plague, creates and destroys whole groups of people without apparent misgiving and for the slightest of sins; this God cannot tolerate the self-destruction of the one man who betrayed His only begotten son.

I still have epilepsy. I still have doubts. But now I don’t doubt God. I doubt the men who invented Him. And yet - "God has great plans for that little girl in the corner," – something inside me resonates remembering. I can’t forget that night, or the force with which the prophecy was made, or the feeling that my Creator cared for me. I have held these words in my heart for 27 years, clenched them, rather, in a white-knuckled fist, afraid to let them go, afraid to let them evolve, afraid of the miracle that I am.

I no longer believe in demonic possession, but demons still scare me. I am often certain that we share this earth with fallen angels and the ghosts of our dead. I believe the man I see on TV, the one who speaks to the dead on behalf of the living. But I am just as certain he is lying, too.

I believe in the bold and fiery expansion of the incalculable universe and in the small incalculable spark of the individual epiphanic experience. I believe there is no force more powerful than God, and none more insignificant than me. Likewise the opposite. I believe that when I die all time and space, all delight and despair, all dreams and illusions, all things planned for, all things unseen will stop in an abrupt and absolute instant, and I won’t even be there to experience nothingness. And yet I believe, by whatever means, my soul will be reborn and will continue without my influence. I believe that the artist formerly known as God is, and can remain unnamable; that the God of the bible is nothing more than a figment of our collective imaginations; an escape from our greatest of fears, non-existence; created in our own image and flawed beyond repair. I believe all things men have told me are wrong; wrong in motive and in reason, and wrong in the eyes of the God they created, in whom I believe.

I still believe, despite countless warnings, that there is no faith without feeling, no spirituality without sensation, and that contenting oneself with a spirituality that bears no viable, arousing and disturbing fruit is nothing more than a stolid march toward the end of a painless and pointless existence. I believe if I were able to escape the constraints of my own mind, all notions of time and place and good and evil would be erased, and everything, like God, would simply "be." I would know god because I would be god. In absence of that, I believe that faith without doubt is ignorance. I believe, as my friend and spiritual advisor Owen Meany does, that without doubt, there is no room for me.

© 2003 yielding, slave to Master Stern