To The Attic (2004)
A Personal Essay & Spiritual Autobiography
Beginning in childhood, story is the first way that I learned about God. Those old stories revealed certain traits of a deity out there and left me longing for one to knowright here. My course into that desired relationship is charted with new words and stories. What does it mean, that the tool they used to teach me the beliefs I resist is the one that I cultivate and prize as my own?
Once upon a time there was a large house sitting on the top of a hill with long sloping lawns on each side. We all lived in that house and we did not know that there was anyplace else that we could live. On the first floor of the house there is the Big Room. All day and all night everyday that I can remember there is a man standing at the front of the room telling us how we must live in this house. Different men take turns and they each tell us what is right and who is wrong. They tell us what to eat, how to raise our children, why we are cursed. As the men are talking, strange sounds sink through the ceiling into the room. We tremble in our seats. We hear banging, yelps, and other unintelligible mutterings that wrap around the mind and draw it away from the lectures. Rumbling moans and sing song whispers wooing the listener up and away.
While I was growing up, my family attended church every Sunday morning. This event shaped the entire week, moving towards it, practicing memory verses at night before bed, mom getting three children in and out of the bath on Saturday night, and moving away from it, peeling off fancy clothes and eating a meal together on the good blue china. It shaped me.
At bedtime on Saturday night the whole family gathered on one child’s bed for a Bible story, songs and prayer. We reviewed our memory verses again before each tucking in at our own place. Everything prepared for the next day, we slept in clean pajamas between clean sheets, dressy clothes waiting to make us presentable, our little brains repeating the scripture passages we needed sharp and true for the morning.
In the car the next morning, each child recited their scripture again. Year after year my younger brother and sister studied simple Bible verses, ones with mnemonic devices for quick memorization or maybe a rhyme scheme. “First Thessalonians 5:26, Greet your brothers with a holy kiss.” My assignments compiled entire chapters of scripture. Plus I was expected to explain what it meant. I took pride in my knowledge and valued it as the way that I would please, and ultimately know, God.
Holding hands across the parking lot we scattered at the church door, disappearing down the halls to our classrooms. Mom would call out reminding us where to meet afterwards and dad urged us to be on time. Then they hurried on to a class oftheir own to learn how to be good Christian parents. There they were instructed in the rules to which they must hold their children and received warnings about the complacent child whose inevitable rebellion would bring worry and upheaval to the family.
Hurrying, I arrived to my classroom just in time to take a seat with the other children, facing the teacher. One by one we recited the verse. A bright shiny star wentup on a chart next to my name week after week. I couldn’t understand the other rows of intermittent stickers or no stickers at all. Didn’t those kids know this was important? God was watching. If I missed a week, because I was sick or with a relative, I came in the next week with two verses ready and a star quickly filled in the gap near my name. Some of these children had a lot to learn. Their parents must have been furious, or else they weren’t good parents. I decided my classmates were either dumb or from weak homes, where God just wasn’t taken seriously enough. I pitied them. Mostly I was afraid for them but later I wondered how it must feel to just show up on Sunday without a Bible verse running in your mind. All the other things you could think about. In the time you weren’t studying, all the other things you could do.
After Sunday School, I climbed a tall flight of stairs to join my father in the balcony of the sanctuary. I tried to attend to the sermon but mostly looked forward to the hymns. It was the only time we got to stand up and raise our own voices. I looked around the spacious sanctuary that held more than a 1000 people. We were all dressed up. As soon as the service ended we would rush home and to change into regular clothes and do regular things, like raking leaves or riding our bicycles. What did coming here each week have to do with the regular part of our lives? Where was God on Monday?
The men talk louder. Don’t be afraid of the noises they say. If you obey us, if you stay close, those noises can never reach you. My words will protect you.
One of our Bible stories was about a rich man, praying loudly in the temple. This man was compared to one who said his prayers secretly, where only God would hear them. It seemed I heard men offer loud long prayers in the church sanctuary. During the week, I started praying, knelt and quiet, in my narrow closet. God saw me there.
I earnestly believed that I would meet God in some literal and literary still small voice, burning bush, writing on the wall kind of way. Then, certainly, God would speak through me. Quiet time in the closet branched into a tiny service for one. I kept a worn green hymnal there and began crafting sermons, to no one, for God, in my head. I was going to be a pastor and my church would be different. God was really going to show up there. Week after week, people would fill the space to be with and know God. Then we would go back to our regular weekday lives, but God would still be with us. In fact, maybe the whole world would get better because we would bring God everywhere. It was exciting. I only had to wait and be good and eventually God would visit me and I would grow up to fulfill this vision.
A short time later another child, it might have been my brother, told me that girls couldn’t become pastors. I didn’t understand; I had a vision. Looking around church Isaw that he was right. All the pastors were men, even the Minister of Music. Women taught Sunday school and led projects. There had to be some mistake.
The Bible stories didn’t offer much to support my point of view. There were hardly any women mentioned there. The ones God actually seemed to like were quiet, married, and very holy. I decided I could marry a pastor or maybe a missionary. I practiced being quiet and quieter, and tried to understand holiness. I still wanted to meet God but it felt like he was getting further away from me.
The noises capture my attention in a way the man’s voice does not. I slip out of the room and creep carefully across the hallway to a dark corner under the stairs. Other women are gathered there already. They talk quietly. Have you heard the sounds? There was a thump right over my head. I heard wailing the other night. Something dropped from above; I saw them moving it off of the lawn. The women were curious and some were afraid.
“I’m going up there.”
Their faces all turned to me. Tell us what you find. Aren’t you scared? I wish I could go with you. Which way will you go? Don’t go. Let me go with you.
“I’m going alone.”
Come back. Wait. Find us.
I step out of the nervous huddle and walk to the staircase. I want to walk right up it but a man stands like a guard leaning back against the wall at the foot of the stairs. I turn back to where I started and the women are still watching me. One woman points to the back of the house and I leave them in the darkness as I pursue another way.
“I’m going up there.”
Their faces all turned to me. Tell us what you find. Aren’t you scared? I wish I could go with you. Which way will you go? Don’t go. Let me go with you.
“I’m going alone.”
Come back. Wait. Find us.
I step out of the nervous huddle and walk to the staircase. I want to walk right up it but a man stands like a guard leaning back against the wall at the foot of the stairs. I turn back to where I started and the women are still watching me. One woman points to the back of the house and I leave them in the darkness as I pursue another way.
During Christmas break my first semester of college my father asked a friend from church to bring him to the hospital. Dad had heart disease. He’d been in and out of the hospital since I was three years old.
My first memory was set in the dim grey cardiac ward of the Veterans Administration Hospital forty-five minutes from our home. My mother had brought me to see my father following his first surgery. But the nurse exploded with anger at the sight of me. She made it clear and irrefutable that children were not allowed on the cardiac ward. We brought germs and these patients would not survive contamination. My mother hadn’t driven all that way to be denied seeing her husband. “Stay here,” she told me and left me in the waiting room and walked down the hall to my father’s room. I stood there. The nurse craned her head to glare at me. In that moment I knew that I had made my father very sick and I would do anything to make him well.
Moments later a doctor strolled quickly down the hall to the nurse at the desk. He spoke sternly at her and kept walking toward me. Gently taking my hand, he brought me back along the same hallway to my father’s room.
Fifteen years later a family friend brought my dad to the same hospital and same doctor during my holiday break. Dad assured us it was nothing, just a tune-up. Mom was at work and after that she would be driving me about an hour north to pick up one of my college friends who would be visiting for a few days. Dad hadn’t met Cindy yet and promised me that he’d be back in time to do that. With a toothbrush in his pocket, just for the overnight, he kissed me goodbye and got in the car.
A few days later he died. How that could be shocking, when he’d been sick for so long, might not make sense to people who haven’t watched a loved one through a long illness. You become accustomed to the ambulances, extended hospital stays, and the patient’s miraculous ability to recover again, and again. You have to keep expecting a miracle. There’s no point to praying if you don’t believe.
In the weeks immediately following my dad’s death I was barraged with words about heaven and my father’s place in God’s good company. I threw myself into religious activity and graciously accepted all the beautiful depictions of my father (no longer tone deaf) singing praises. My grief suggested other allusions.
My father knew everything now. I could feel it. He knew the futility of the stories of quiet holiness, miracles, and heavenly hymns. They had not saved him nor had my obedience to them saved him. It had not made me pure and free of contaminants. He was laughing but I didn’t get the joke. I thought I was the joke. The quiet pursuit of holiness and God’s face that ought to have granted us a miracle instead got us the natural conclusion of a long illness and my father wasn’t angry. I felt his presence closely, closer than I’d ever known God. Dad was open to everything now.
At first it was betrayal, by God and Dad. I believe that they both knew that my obedience had no effect on anything yet they’d let me go through with it all those years. I’d honored my father, conformed to his sense of loyalty, justice, dedication to family, attention to God, commitment to church and it had done nothing to save his life. I had kept myself as close to holy as I could and it was meaningless. His laughter scorned my loyalty. He’d had nerve to die without telling me the truth. And God was complicit in that.
Slowly I perceived my father’s laughter wasn’t mocking me, it was inviting me. In death, he understood life and holiness in ways far surpassing the rules and terms of our religion. His death set me free by breaking the deal I’d wordlessly made to save him.
Where do you start when everything that you’ve believed in, all that has shaped your life since you were a child, that gave you security and identity, stops working? I sat surrounded by the set of stories that no longer held together. I had to choose which to keep, what to add, and how to arrange them. That required some criteria, from where, or whom, from me, for making these selections. Nothing was sure. It was terrifying and liberating at the same time. I was free for the first time to explore the world without loyalty to anyone but my own heart. That included spirituality without the church and God.
I move, head down and hunched over, through the kitchen to the laundry room. Here, in dust from the dryer and cloaked in dark shadows outside of a bare bulb’s glow, is a broken staircase that stops at the ceiling. It once led somewhere. It still might. I make the first step. It creaks under the unfamiliar strain of a woman’s weight. Bending over as I make each step, I reach the top warily and push my hands up against the ceiling. Surely it must open. With another glance against being caught, I hit the boards that come loose too easily.
Shortly after my father’s death my grades plummeted, the campus shrunk around me, and all the reasons I never should have been there convinced me to take a semester off. One professor, anxious to keep me from dropping out altogether, encouraged me to attend a summer program in Oregon exploring women’s issues through literature, psychology, and theology. When the three weeks concluded I decided to stay out West for the rest of the summer. One of my classmates encouraged me to volunteer at Holden Village, an Ecumenical Retreat Center in northern Washington.
I arrived in Holden Village with no idea what to expect. My classmate in Oregon described it as a place where you were valued for what you contribute to the community rather than how you look or other qualities. The emphasis on community is what drew me. She explained that it was Christian but made it sound more contemplative and intimate than the religion I’d encountered. That sounded safe. If it was that personal than I could deflect inquiries into my current faith status and still be included in the community life as a good worker. Being seen for my contribution offered a welcome respite from being known for my brokenness and faithlessness.
Everyone in the village, guests and staff, attended vespers every night. I assumed it was like Chapel at my Christian college and was surprised by the enthusiasm that carried these people down from their room or porch-side after dinner conversations togather in the largest hall in the village. Members of the community conducted the services. The kitchen staff led us in a liturgy using the metaphor of bread. I saw and was puzzled by liturgical dance for the first time. The children services got everyone laughing. In all of the services, and in fact throughout the village life, we used inclusive language.
At first the strange terms were cumbersome or just amusing. Especially inanities like waitri for the staff who set and cleared meals in the dining hall or posti for the woman who handled the village mail. But in vespers I yielded to the clumsy self-conscious wording that told me I was expressly and explicitly valuable in this place of worship. Until that summer, I’d only heard pastors and teachers defend the religious language that only named men. They explained that women were equally loved or worth something to God as men, so we didn’t need to argue about the words. As a little girl I resigned myself to it. I wanted to know God and those were the only terms. But to hear women named suggested that maybe the distance between God and girls was man-made. At Holden, women served as intermediaries the same as men, God was expressed in more than male metaphors, and the community was deliberately male and female, him and her. It felt like I was listening to an entirely new story. All these characters, that I’d assumed were lingering there in the spaces between the letters and lines of text, now came to life. And I was one of them.
I am still sliding the boards aside when arms twine around mine and I am hauled up onto a floor. The boards are slipped back into place next to my feet. I find myself standing in the center of another circle of women. The noises are louder and clearer here. I hear rattles and roars. A lilting melody sifts in through the walls. Bells tinkle and chime. We are silent in the flickering light of candles and the rush of sounds. I wait to learn who the women are. Will they help me or send me back? Here we are our own, the women tell me. Stay with us and listen to the sounds.
“What makes the noise?”
It is an opera. It is a nightmare. Here we can listen to it and no one rules over us.
“Who put it there?”
We listen to it here.
“You don’t know what it is anymore than they do, do you?”
We are our own here.“
I’m going.”
They turn in together to decide what to do with me. A young woman draws me aside and leads me away from the group while it is still discussing me. An old woman follows us. I am led down a hall, and the noises grow stronger. Slightly above us, in the wall, I see cracks that mark the outline of a door. The younger woman reaches up and tugs it open. Together, both women help me up into the wall and onto another ragged staircase. The young one backs away. The old woman leans in. Tell us what you find, she whispers.
“Thank you.”
They walk away, sided by side, and I want them to come with me. I want to hold hands in a warm circle and be in charge of myself and safe. They are gone. I am alone, on a staircase, hidden in a wall. I pull the door shut behind me and now it is only me in the narrow darkness. There is no light. I press my hands into the wall on either side of me and make each tiny step up in the wall.
“What makes the noise?”
It is an opera. It is a nightmare. Here we can listen to it and no one rules over us.
“Who put it there?”
We listen to it here.
“You don’t know what it is anymore than they do, do you?”
We are our own here.“
I’m going.”
They turn in together to decide what to do with me. A young woman draws me aside and leads me away from the group while it is still discussing me. An old woman follows us. I am led down a hall, and the noises grow stronger. Slightly above us, in the wall, I see cracks that mark the outline of a door. The younger woman reaches up and tugs it open. Together, both women help me up into the wall and onto another ragged staircase. The young one backs away. The old woman leans in. Tell us what you find, she whispers.
“Thank you.”
They walk away, sided by side, and I want them to come with me. I want to hold hands in a warm circle and be in charge of myself and safe. They are gone. I am alone, on a staircase, hidden in a wall. I pull the door shut behind me and now it is only me in the narrow darkness. There is no light. I press my hands into the wall on either side of me and make each tiny step up in the wall.
When I left Holden at the end of the summer, I felt eager for another strong community of women. I returned to campus that fall with my head shaved and a new vision for my time at school. I walked into chapel that first week with a list in my pocket that the faculty at Oregon had given me. It bore the names of women students they knew who were struggling, like me, against the evangelical roles and rules for women. Standing behind one of the women during a chorus, I leaned forward to introduce myself. “You don’t know me but….” By Friday I had reached everyone on the list. The following Thursday six of us crowded onto the floor of my dorm room: Karla, Cristina, Sandra, Katie, Angelique and me.
The group met each week. Over brown bag suppers we talked about where we felt the constraints and exclusions placed on women in our Evangelical Christian community. The conversations began benignly around body image or academic opportunities and quickly moved into the depiction of women in sermons, language for God, and the exclusion of women from being pastors. The weekly conversations increasingly focused on the many ways we explored and expressed our spirituality. Everyone was emotional. Everyone had stories to tell. For the most part we listened to each other with the occasional fevered interruption with a story that called out “me too” and “what do you think?”
One night someone raised the issue of the “fear of God.” Cristina a Spanish student, told us that at her home church in Spain they used the word respecto to talk about how to approach and know God and it didn’t mean fear. It startled us, the difference that one word made in how people could approach spiritual experience. This wasn’t even a word related to gender. Under the pretense of talking about this difference in translation we started to analyze the words and then stories that had been given to us to talk about our relationship with the divine. What did it mean to worship a god who abandoned and killed his son? What evidence did we have that God and His Only Son considered or knew about the lives of women?
Monday and Wednesday mornings we attended mandatory chapel services. Our dean of chapel, a man, exacerbated our frustration with religious language. It seemed that his sermons revealed women as either temptresses or virgins (who usually died young). It helped to have like-minded sisters with whom to bear against it. We became fixated on the dean’s specific words and the sermon illustrations he drew. It spurred on our search for words and stories that included our experiences.
We used our own lives as material and let our imaginations prevail. For example, the Bible stories say that the shedding of Jesus’ blood saves us. As women our blood is shed each month. There is even a story in the gospel where Jesus healed a woman of heavy bleeding. Maybe we tell a story there that connects us to him through our blood rather than curses us with it? His blood that was shed came from his mother’s blood that sustained him in the womb. What of the blood she shed to bear him? What of her? There were gaps in the stories they told us and we started to explore them ourselves. Hearing from each other nurtured each woman’s imagination to explore and trust whather life told her was true.
The staircase makes a turn and I look behind me to see the tiny cracks of light from around the door. I can always go back, I can always go back. I stand fixed on one step staring at the slivers of light. Repeating the phrase, I can always go back, like a prayer, like it’s all that I want in the world. There are whispers in the walls. My words come back to me, You can always go back, but now it’s a taunt. I turn my back to the light.
The whispers in the wall shatter into laughter. The walls shake with giddy raucous crackling delight. Frowning, I push my hand into the walls and resume the climb. Splinters grind into my palms and fingertips. I swallow hard and make each step. Silence settles on me. I feel like I am being watched but it’s different than how the men in the Big Room watch. I search for an eyeball in the darkness. Can what makes the noise see me? I close my eyes instead. I climb the stairs in darkness, silence, and alone. Fear subsides into exhaustion. I don’t know how long I am walking those stairs.
I entered St. Mary’s Church for the first time full of anxiety and curiosity. It was my first time in an Episcopalian service. The sanctuary was small, rich looking in darktones of wood, carpet, and tapestries. The people already in pews sat quietly or talked in hushed voices with their families. Others entered, pausing to cross themselves with blessed water in a small mounted fount at the top of the stairs. It all felt old and old fashioned. What would it have to say to me? What would this old tradition say to my new words and stories? A chord rose from the organ and we all stood as the choir and our rector processed into the sanctuary. I smiled. Our rector was a short, full-figured woman in a priest’s collar, robes, and black patent leather heels.
Mother Susan led us through the service, her strong soprano calling ahead of our droning response as we moved through the prayers, songs, and scripture of the liturgy. The sermon was brief and included excerpts from literature as well as stories from when she pastored a church in the Midwest. I basked in the sound of a strong feminine voice preaching, which married the biblical stories and a woman’s experience.
When we reached the time for the Eucharist, Mother Susan called up her assistants from the congregation. A string of three little girls in worn out hand me down dresses raced each other up the aisle to join her at the altar. I was jealous of them. From their earliest experiences of religion they were publicly central to sharing God’s word and telling the stories that bind that community. What did they learn, so young, by leading worship in a congregation of grown ups that followed them?
The liturgy we followed in that service was traditional and very old. These little girls were the latest chapter. How did something so old have the flexibility to include these children, not to mention our rector? As we finished the service I recognized that although Mother Susan spoke the text as it was written, using masculine pronouns for God, the congregation clearly spoke the feminine. I began to wonder about liturgy as an old story that had more room for difference and change than the comparatively young tradition I was raised in.
During the coffee hour following the service one of the professors from my college introduced me to Susan. I was nervous and shy. She was intense and interested. In the months after that first visit I became a regular at St. Mary’s. Mother Susan and I began a correspondence in letters and then meetings in her office where I brought my questions and ideas about Christian spirituality. She welcomed me warmly and seemed genuinely delighted to follow all the streams of my thoughts. It seemed to me that the unity and tradition of liturgy ultimately gave people at St. Mary’s the space to believe many ways. Even so, I still struggled against words like “Jesus,” “Our Father,” and the Bible stories.
The singing began sometime during my climb. I hear a woman give voice to words I don’t understand in a tune I haven’t heard before. I open my eyes to find I am standing just a few steps away from a door. Light glows and jumps beneath it. Shadows dance in the tiny space between door and threshold. The light is warm and yellow to gold to orange to white to red to yellow. Flickering and chasing the shadows. Aching and unsure, I lower my body where I am standing and draw my limbs close. In a tight ball I rest against the wall and watch the light.
At St. Mary’s I found new people to worship with, without relinquishing the questions and imagination. It wasn’t enough. The new structure, although it allowed meto retain these essential parts of my spirituality, didn’t provide a space in which I could explore and express them. This elicited more questions. Did I have to give up what I had grown up believing to engage with more? Did pursuing new ideas and forms of spiritual expression dilute the essence of the new things if I maintained Christian beliefs? Did it pollute Christian faith to engage other methods? Mother Susan had extensive experiencein the Episcopalian tradition but part of my struggle was against the terms of Christianity itself. She connected me to another woman in the congregation, a spiritual director named Cora. I had never heard of such a thing before St. Mary’s.
Cora arrived at my dorm on a very bright, very cold November afternoon. She was short, around fifty-something, in glasses and a parka. She looked like she could be the mother of one of my housemates and not the mysterious “spiritual director.”
We walked down the road to an Audobon bird sanctuary and shivered on cold stone benches in frozen flower garden. I remember she led me through a meditation with the old phrase “Be Here Now.” We talked about what spiritual direction is and how we could work together. I agreed to try it. We met once a month for the next six years.
Our sessions typically included a walk along the ocean shore. We tromped through the woods down to the beach talking about spiritual experience and sharing our questions. On rainy days we stayed in her home to make art, read tarot cards, and meditate. Cora was wildly eclectic and always had stories to share from a playgroup she participated in, a painting studio where they emphasized making art with meaning, or messages she received from her dreams. She always considered herself Christian. She served at church, prayed to God and called him God, and honored the stories of the Episcopalian liturgy. Simultaneously, she reached out to a feminine divine who is not named in the Bible. All these things were complementary in Cora's spirituality. Nothing offended her or threatened her faith. Everything could be talked about and considered for what it contributed to or how it interfered with knowing the divine.
I shared with Cora the story I used to understand God. I told her God is a madwoman locked in the attic. She is wild, incomprehensible, expressive, and powerful. She remembers a lush beautiful world and would make that here with us if we would receive it from her. I told Cora that I thought pastors tried to make the madwoman manageable and approachable. Only she can do that and by her choice. That doesn’t mean we can’t know her, it just means we can’t contain her. Yet she remains in the attic. I think she wants us to find her, know her, and be with her. Since that day, Cora used that story anytime she wanted to talk with me about God.
Cora’s eclectic practices granted me permission to experiment too. But her experience and her encouragement couldn’t carry me. I still longed for something no one could give me. I look for it in stories.
I am this close. This is enough. I can tell them that there is no where else to go. The stairs end at light. Light and singing. I can return to the other women. I can live on the landing. I can shoo them away. I can remain here forever. With the light and the darkness embracing me forever.
What have you found?
I was sleeping. She’s speaking to me?
“I came this far. I am resting.”
What is up here?“
You are here.”
Who do you say that I am?
“I have seen light and darkness. I have heard music. There is a voice and words.”
So now you know?
“I know something. I know things that they do not know. I know more than what they told me.”
How did I come to be here?
“They put you here. Or maybe you chose to be here? You could be anywhere. You are everywhere.”
I start to think I know less.
What am I? Who am I?
“You are the thing that rattles around us. That frightens us and coaxes us. You are the lullaby, the rage, the jubilee, and the groan.”
Don’t you want to meet me?
Silence.
Open the door.
I was sleeping. She’s speaking to me?
“I came this far. I am resting.”
What is up here?“
You are here.”
Who do you say that I am?
“I have seen light and darkness. I have heard music. There is a voice and words.”
So now you know?
“I know something. I know things that they do not know. I know more than what they told me.”
How did I come to be here?
“They put you here. Or maybe you chose to be here? You could be anywhere. You are everywhere.”
I start to think I know less.
What am I? Who am I?
“You are the thing that rattles around us. That frightens us and coaxes us. You are the lullaby, the rage, the jubilee, and the groan.”
Don’t you want to meet me?
Silence.
Open the door.
Jenni Lincoln, 2009