Easter Sunday

It was Easter Sunday, 1968. I woke up in my shared apartment in Ann Arbor, longing for the rituals I would have taken part in, if I had been at home: everyone getting ready for church in their best clothes, mother putting the ham in the oven, the sunlight pouring in through the stained glass windows of the church, the lilies on the altar, the triumphant opening hymn and my father, emerging from the vestibule behind the altar in his white cassock draped with a white stole embroidered in gold to welcome, in his warmest voice, his joyful congregation. “He is risen,” people would say to each other. “He is risen indeed.”

After church, after the greetings as people shook Dad’s hand and then stood around outside blinking in the sunshine, talking, we would go home for Sunday dinner. The table would be laid with Mother’s lace cloth and best dishes, the Fostoria glasses holding milk or maybe grape juice, and a centerpiece contrived of flowers or ceramic birds. We girls all learned to lay the table with the silverware placed just so. Ten of us around the table when I was growing up, and that was without guests! A festive meal with mashed potatoes, frozen peas or corn (no fresh vegetables yet in March), dinner rolls with butter and slices of the delectable ham. 

Dad’s voice would be softer, a bit gravelly after singing the liturgy for two long Lutheran services and preaching two sermons. Us kids would be absorbed in our usual petty rivalries and silly preoccupations, somewhat moderated by Mother at her most gracious.

Instead, that Sunday I had waked to just another day. My roommate was Jewish, and could not be expected to share my yearning. I put on some clothes and left early. A few blocks away was Canterbury House, a large room in a nondescript building which had been set up to meet just the sort of student longing I had. The young Episcopal priest, tall with long hair and a long, dark cassock, stalked about the room, inviting me to partake of the cookies and juice he had put out on a long table. The table was covered with a cloth and candles stood on it. He could have performed a service from behind it, but in keeping with the non-threatening atmosphere in which he hoped to catch recalcitrant Christians, he did not.

Few students stood about that morning. The room was often stuffed with people. I stood in the back to hear the rabble-rousing Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who spoke to a packed room when his book Soul on Ice was published. He told women not to let any man who held incorrect political views have their “pussy.” Denise Levertov, a British poet, pointed out the injustices of the Vietnam war. I trace an intimacy I felt for Richie Havens to a concert he gave there. And Joni Mitchell played an acoustic guitar by herself at one end of a room full of admirers.  As soon as her Song to a Seagull album came out, I bought and memorized it. The Episcopalian church knew how to draw students in.

That Easter morning I was appreciative of the gesture the young priest made toward people like me. “We welcome seekers and people of all faiths,” he said. My Jewish friends applauded the radical leftist views promulgated at Canterbury House. I ate cookies and drank juice, but I wasn’t really a seeker and I didn’t want to talk. I was a lonely student, just turned 22, looking for the non-judgemental hospitality which I found.

My Christian faith had fallen away somewhat abruptly in a seminar titled “The Philosophy of Freedom” two years previously at Luther College. In a question unrelated to the course, the smartest guy in my year asked why Christ, the Son of God, had only come to one place on earth, the village of Bethlehem, in Israel, at one time. He implied that if Christ was the incarnation of God, His only Son, a single birth in a particular time didn’t make sense. Something in me instantly agreed. Years later, my brother told me this was known in theology as “the scandal of the particular.”

Since then I had been going through the motions of Christian faith. I never refused to go to church with everyone else, I bowed my head in prayer and mumbled the creed. But in and of myself, I was working on alternatives. When I arrived in Ann Arbor, the first place in my life I had been where I didn’t know anyone, I resolved not to do anything unless it was in accord with what my inner self felt was true.

I also felt I had a lot to catch up on! I had come from a private college and Oxford, England, where I studied literature. My roommate Susan had come from Boston University where Howard Zinn was beginning to re-write history from the people’s point of view. Ann Arbor itself was a hotbed of leftist politics and I was a willing participant. It was here I was introduced to the radical leftist rag The New York Review of Books which has been my main source of cultural critique ever since.

Drilling down at the place where my inner self met my outer world on that Easter Sunday, I find a young woman full of uncertainty. I was good at it. I could hold many ideas in suspension. Literature had taught me, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words, “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It would go on for many years, though not without calamity. 

That fall, I learned I had gone too far from home. I had a Herpes virus in one eye I couldn’t fix. It became so painful I couldn’t work and had to go home for a year’s recuperation. That time period healed both myself, and my relationship to my parents, though I could not return to the Christian faith I had grown up in. An early cornea transplant saved my eye from dangerous ulceration and I took off once more, for San Francisco.

The painful edge between my inner longing for a faith-based community and my growing interest in the realities of science and adherence to wider cultural norms than what I had grown up with continued. When I visited my home I often went to church with my family, weeping as I sang the old familiar hymns. E. O. Wilson, in On Human Nature, says: “The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature.”

But there was also something in my upbringing that kept me from falling back into belief. Lutherans take words very seriously. According to my father, words were actions. When he said “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” an action was performed. At the time of the pronunciation in marriage of a couple “man and wife,” they become that. When, at the end of every service Dad said in benediction, “May the Lord bless you and keep you,” each person felt blessed.

Thus, given their force, I could not say words I didn’t mean. Which meant there was some stiffness to that edge between inner self and outer world. No amount of longing allowed me to say what I didn’t feel was true. Even when my father stood over me, waving my church membership card and begging, “Now what am I supposed to do with this? If I cannot minister to my own children, I have failed.” In the end, my father had to leave it in God’s hands. We were always able to get past differences to love each other, but I was not able to make him happy before his early death at 63.

I did not make myself happy either, though eventually my reading led to taoism, where faith in nature itself made the most sense. The “abiding love of nature in its untamed aspects is a reflection of deep spiritual feeling, for the fundamental tenet [of Chinese people] has always been a conviction that life itself, flowing in accordance with mysterious natural laws that operate in sweeping cycles of change, is charged with spiritual significance,” wrote John Blofeld. This did not help my sense of community. Most taoists study alone. But I began to take the interlocking groups with which I interacted, not the least of which was my family, more seriously. They were my reality.

Which leaves me free to weigh and test the many stories around me for their truths, for their goodness and their beauty. Against what, you may ask. Against each other.