Author Archives: Eileen
Memories of One Unfinished Much Loved Child of God
Chapter One
New Orleans, the French quarter, born in the heart of Dixie Land Music. Want to have “When the Saints Go Marching In” played as people leave my funeral. Shrimp Creole, French baguettes, and Eggs Benedict still on my favorites list.
Memories, when still in a crib around the age of three, looking out the window of the Pontalba Apartments on Jackson Square and seeing my parents walking away under the street lights. Feeling terrified, not knowing the doors between the next apartment were open so they could listen if I cried.
Early criminal instinct killed when Mom found a toy watch I stole from my friend’s house. The spanking wasn’t so bad but returning it along with my favorite doll did the trick.
Still remember the music and excitement of sitting on my dad’s shoulders catching beads thrown from the Mardi Gras floats.
Happy times sailing my sailboat on a long narrow pond. It always capsized before reaching the end. But I could not be consoled at five when we were moving to St. Louis on a train, so we sailed it out into the dark waters of Lake Pontchartrain. I didn’t care if it would make some other child happy when they found it.
But I have good memories of return trips to visit dad’s family and as an adult revisiting the Quarter including Pat O’Brien’s Bar and going to the large cathedral looking Catholic Church near Tulane that my grandfather built.
On one return trip as an adult, I was standing on Bourbon Street in the Quarter at night. This was some years after my conversion to a relationship with Jesus as the expression of God’s unconditional love, rather than a particular religion. I stood there enjoying watching very varied people and places. On the corner was a crowded bar open to the street with loud jazz flooding the area. Next to it were some transvestites in beautiful gowns on a balcony inviting people in for a show. In front of that building there was a preacher giving out religious tracts and urging people to repent. Next to him were some small black boys dancing for coins. On the opposite corner at a safe distance was a group of tourists sort of glued to each other for safety, suggesting maybe a group of Baptist Sunday school teachers in New Orleans for a convention. A steady mix of very varied people poured down the middle of the street. There were solid looking tourists in Bermuda shorts with cameras hanging around their necks, college students carrying Pat O‘Brien’s Hurricane glasses. and even a couple of priests coming through from St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. I experienced a strong and wonderful sense of being part of God’s motley crew; all of us loved just as we were.
THE JOURNEY THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S: MY MOTHER’S AND MY OWN
I’ve had a hard time forgiving God for my mother’s fourteen years of dying by inches with Alzheimer’s. I could not see any good coming from it.
It hit me today, that my walking with her through that gives me a heads up on my journey with it. And since I am aware of my losses partly through seeing hers, I can share the journey and the grace I am finding in it. Not sure how this can help others, but hoping it can somehow.
TO BEGIN WITH A WARNING: I did fine on the verbal tests the doctors give. I took them in the morning when I am usually at my best. I had to fight to get the Nuclear MRI test that shows the damage to the brain. It showed a definite area of my brain that is no longer getting oxygen through a blockage to blood flow.
But the classic symptom I myself had missed recognizing was forgetting what I did and becoming paranoid and blaming others. Often people with Alzheimer’s misplace things and think caregivers or others are stealing them.
In my case, driving back from Nashville after not sleeping on the plane trip from Portugal, I was so tired that I was afraid I’d fall asleep on the way to Dickson. I decided that a milkshake would keep me awake long enough to get home, instead of coffee which might keep me from much needed sleep. So, I stopped at a Sonic that didn’t have a drive through window. On the back side there were open slots, but pulling into them showed a sign that they were out of order. I pulled into two and finally on the third, I was trying to see if the sign was on its menu without pulling all the way in. Focused to the left I heard a “Klunk” to my right. I thought my right mirror had hit the right side menu but backed out without any change on the mirror. Since that one was out of order too, I gave up.
The next two days I didn’t leave the house between jet lag sleep and unpacking. On the third day I went to the grocery, not noticing a large dent and a long streak of yellow paint down the passenger side of my car’s hood! Sometimes I’m too focused and oblivious to the obvious!! In my defense, I’m very short also!
On the fourth day I noticed the damage and forgetting the “Klunk” decided that there was no way a truck or car could have done this because of where the car had been parked ever since I came home and even at Walmart. I had a Democrat candidate’s hat on my dash board facing front and I decided that someone in my neighborhood had made a political response!!!
I reported this to our wonderful apartment manager and he didn’t think any of my neighbors would have done this, but said I should report it to the police. Well, two child police came and were obviously convinced I had done this and was lying. I was furious that just because I am old, they treated me like I was senile or lying. My insurance people were great, but did want the police report.
In the middle of the night, I woke up with the horrible memory of the “Klunk” at the drive-in!
Early the next morning a police detective called. And I confessed the whole scenario to him, complete with apologies to the child police persons. Since my altercation with a menu was not in Dickson he closed the file. I confessed to the insurer and they still paid for the repair.
I was pretty sure the damage to the car was worse than to the menu and didn’t feel any responsibility for it, but I did pray that God would let me know if I should quit driving.
Two weeks later in a parking lot downtown, I backed into a pole. There was no damage to car or pole, but I decided this was God’s way of getting me off the roads.
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Sexual Morals and Love in our Day
I’m turning 89. My generation grew up not even knowing what queer meant. We knew boys who seemed feminine. My brother, who is very religious, dated a woman for ten years who was happy to be treated like a sister. At 40 he gave up and accepted that he was gay because he wanted to love someone his whole life. He and I discovered that we had lesbians in two generations of both sides of our family. We discovered the first, a great-great aunt who in the turn of the century in the late 1890’s became a pediatrician and founded a clinic for poor children in California. I saw a beautiful woman in a long dress in a photo of my cousin’s family album and asked who she was. When told of her achievements at a time when she would have had to been amazing to do this, I asked why I had never heard of her. My cousin pointed out another woman in the background of the photo and said, “Well, she lived with this woman all her life.” My brother and I also agreed that on our other side, a great-aunt who was very masculine and lived a very sad solitary life was also gay though she chose to live her life alone. My brother and his spouse have been together over 35 years. So, I was prepared then when one of my sons came out after college and moved to California where it was more acceptable. He and his husband have been together thirty years. Another son also decided he was gay at about thirty. My husband has one gay cousin that we know of. So, I’ve become pretty sure it’s a recessive gene that has to be on both sides of a family. We now have a grandchild that is trans. My brother and one of my gay sons have always been very religious and kind. And my other son and my grandchild are two of the kindest people I’ve ever known. In my spiritual journey and my sixty year heterosexual marriage, my experience has led me to see marriage as the best opportunity to make the journey from the neediness of a baby to the spiritual maturity of being able to love another person more than yourself. Our current sexual permissiveness for heterosexuals is much more likely to create children born into situations that are tragic. I personally did not choose abortion as a Catholic though I almost died having a fifth child by Cesarean Section when my church taught me it was wrong to use birth control. I have come to see NOT using birth control as one of the greatest evils we are currently doing since more children are suffering from that. Interestingly enough, if being gay had been accepted all along, so gays didn’t marry women and lesbians didn’t marry men trying to conform, maybe the genes would have died out by now! My first experience personally of becoming aware of gays was when taking art classes from gay teachers, which opened my eyes to how much better gay men treat women, even ugly women and old women. They treat us as interesting individuals and friends. Gays often have more women friends than men, because they treat them as people, not sex objects. I am a born again Christian, who has experienced the unconditional love of God expressed in Jesus and many miracles, including in my last years becoming free of judging people, even the judgmental people who find safety in the rules as they have learned them. I don’t agree with them and I see the terrible harm it does, but I understand them. Once you understand people, you may not agree and may work hard to make society more loving of minorities, but understanding frees us of hating and judging.
From Religion through Agnosticism to Jesus
I became an agnostic but came back to a very alive and relevant relationship with Jesus not connected to any religion. I went back to the Catholic church as a missionary. But Vatican II had changed the church enough that I could celebrate the spiritual journey of Jesus and the Holy Spirit there as our own. Years later I left again, because I wanted to share my experiences of freeing love and women couldn’t preach there. The liberal Presbyterian USA gave me that freedom. Though they stress mostly feeding and housing the poor or broken, more than the transforming grace of a relationship with Jesus that helps us in following Jesus’s life pattern of expanding our understanding of whom God loves. I think every original creator of any religion “got it.” But by the third generation, religion becomes about power…. thanks in a large part to being controlled by men. Fear is the root of all evil. When religion becomes about safety or power it loses the point of being about love. To me we enter a journey from the need of a baby to the freedom to love our unfinished selves and like Jesus eventually to even love those that disagree with us, the friends that abandon us, the enemy, and ultimately even God in those times when we feel abandoned by God also. To me the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is ALL. We are part of God and the Spirit of God is part of us and can along the spiritual journey become a larger influence in us. We are ALL in this together, believe it or like it or not. It’s about love, not salvation or power.
Our Time of Exile
Richard Rohr
Beside the streams of Babylon, we sat and wept.
—Psalm 137:1
Father Richard Rohr reflects on the fear, violence, and oppression that empires and nation-states continue to create, challenging us to respond:
Few would deny that there’s a palpable and growing fear and anger in our country. This fear is felt deeply by those who are most vulnerable. As a follower of both Jesus and Saint Francis of Assisi, my primary moral viewpoint is not centered on the wellbeing of those who are on top, but first in those who are at the bottom. For the vulnerable who have now been rendered more vulnerable, I lament and pray and promise to stand with you.
A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands.
I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see. That is what the Hebrew prophets told Israel both before and during their painful and long exile (596–538 BCE).
Yet the Exile was the very time when the ancient Jewish people went deep and discovered their prophetic voices—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—speaking truth to power, calling for justice from their own political and religious leaders. Their experience laid the solid foundation for Jesus’s teaching and his solidarity with the poor and the outcast.
Maybe some of us have naively thought that we could or should place our loyalty in one political agenda or party. Remember, Yahweh told the people of Israel that they should never put their trust in “princes, horses, or chariots” (Psalms 20:7, 33:16–17), but only in the love of God. We must not imagine that political changes of themselves will ever bring about the goodness, charity, or transformation that the gospel offers the world.
We must not be afraid to allow conventional wisdom to fail and disappoint us. This is often the only path to wisdom. Imperial thinking focuses on judging who is worthy and who is unworthy, who is in and who is out. We who know about universal belonging and identity in God have a different form of power: Love (even of enemies) is our habitat, not the “powers and principalities,” the kingdoms of this world.
The present disorder is our time of exile and has solidified in us an urgent commitment to our work of action and contemplation. It seems needed more than ever before! Grounding social action in contemplative consciousness is not a luxury for a few, but surely a cultural necessity. Both the Christian religion and the American psyche need deep healing, and I do not say that lightly.
Only a contemplative mind can hold our fear, confusion, vulnerability, and anger and guide us toward love. Those who allow themselves to be challenged and changed will be the new cultural creative voices of the next period of history after this purifying exile.
Exile from the Country We Love Can Happen While We Are Still Living in It
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes how praying with the Psalms can be an act of solidarity with our universal humanity:
The Psalms, with few exceptions, are not the voice of God addressing us. They are rather the voice of our own common humanity—gathered over a long period of time, but a voice that continues to have amazing authenticity and contemporaneity. It speaks about life the way it really is, for in those deeply human dimensions the same issues and possibilities persist. And so when we turn to the Psalms it means we enter into the midst of that voice of humanity and decide to take our stand with that voice. We are prepared to speak among them and with them and for them, to express our solidarity with this anguished, joyous human pilgrimage. We add a voice to the common elation, shared grief, and communal rage that besets uss. us all…. When we do, we shall find that the words of Scripture bring power, shape, and authority to what we know about ourselves. [1]
Exiled from Cuba, theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1943–2012) found solace in Psalm 137:
When I first read Psalm 137, I remember resonating with most of what the psalm says; I remember feeling it could appropriately voice the pain I was experiencing being away from my country against my will. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 I realized that my absence from Cuba was to a be a long one. Shortly after there came a day when my visa status changed from “tourist”: I became a refugee. Psalm 137 became my refuge: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept when we remembered Jerusalem” (137:1).
I recall vividly the day I dared to mention to a friend how much I identified with Psalm 137. Jokingly she answered me, “Are you going to hang your guitar from a tree?”… They were incapable of understanding the sorrow of being away from la tierra que mi vió nacer (the land that witnessed my birth). At times, my friends would ask me to talk about Cuba. Those around me could not figure out why I, who love to sing, always seemed reticent about singing “Guantamanera,” the song that uses for its verses poems from the father of my country, José Martí. One of them says,
Yo quiero cuando me muera
Sin patria pero sin amo
Tener en mi tumba
Un ramo de flores
Y una bandera.
I want when I die
without country but without master,
to have on my tomb
a bouquet of flowers
and a flag.
So I kept saying to myself, “How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” (137:4) [2]
Brueggemann concludes:
The psalms are not used in a vacuum, but in a history where we are dying and rising, and in a history where God is at work, ending our lives and making gracious new beginnings for us. The Psalms move with our experience. They may also take us beyond our own guarded experience into the more poignant pilgrimages of our sisters and brothers. [3]
The Ongoing Dialogue between Faith and Knowledge
What I value most in myself and hoped to pass on to and through my children is that I have learned by experience to try always to not limit either my faith by my fallible human understanding or my understanding by my limited faith. There is a tension often between my personal development in both faith and knowledge, just as there is between any culture’s or religion’s developmental level in both.
I believe this is healthy, though often uncomfortable. When I allow my religious belief system to be challenged by life experience, new or “foreign” ideas, or even my own “twin” to doubting Apostle Thomas, I experience turmoil and insecurity. In fact, as a believer, unless some basic faith has become “bedrock” for me, I probably will not have the courage to face the challenge of growth. And on the other side, unless I have faced the humbling limits of human understanding, I will never make that first leap of faith.
When we begin to think that we have finally “gotten it” in either faith or understanding, we better beware! That may have been Adam and Eve’s downfall, wanting to think they knew it all….no longer having to live vulnerably incomplete and dependent on God.
An unquestioned faith is not faith, but superstition. But understanding that is not open to the risk of a faith that explores beyond understanding is not intelligence, but arrogance.
Often, it seems to me that different personalities tend to lean toward one or the other, so perhaps allowing faith and understanding to live in an ongoing dialogue is one of the most basic challenges of life.
Commitment to this challenge of an ongoing inner dialogue will hopefully give us the freedom to dialogue and learn from each other.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 