We've Taken The Leap

This morning Dwight and I made a commitment that we have been wanting to make for years, but had not found the right group of people.  We joined the Hyattsville Mennonite Church, where we have been attending for several months, and it's hard to express how much joy this brings me.  We've been without a community of faith for a lot of years, and while I cannot say we've been wandering in the desert - life has been good! - we have nonetheless been wandering.  Who would have guessed that it would take a cross-country move to feel like we have arrived at our spiritual home?

The service was filled with singing and the stories of each of the seven people who joined this morning.  Speaking in front of the congregation was a little scary, but it seems like a good way to say "here I am, and thanks for including me."  What follows is what I had to say.

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to be a member of a church – more than 10 years, in fact.  And so I’m really happy, and a little surprised, at how much I want to be a part of this community of faith.

My family background is Mennonite Brethren.  I grew up in a small MB church in a small town in Central CA, sitting each Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening on pews with my sisters, parents, grandparents and great grandparents.  When I was in Junior High our small church merged with the small General Conference Mennonite church in town – a pretty unusual step – and so my ‘coming of age’ years were very influenced by the GCs.  I think of myself as a Mennonite hybrid.

Undergrad work was at Fresno Pacific, an MB school, where I studied Anabaptist History as well as child development.  Dwight and I married and joined the most progressive MB church we could find, raised our daughter there and were very active in the church.  But I was doing a lot of changing in those years.  Along the way as I mothered and wifed and moved through my career as a Montessori teacher, environmental education program director and university lecturer, my spiritual journey took me on a path I did not anticipate.

All of those little children in my school were teaching me something about a purer, more wide-eyed and open spirituality than could be contained in any one faith tradition.  The astounding beauty of the California landscape and the San Joaquin River was teaching me  something about spirituality as an organic part of my biological being.  Working with college kids who were just beginning their own path to adulthood was teaching me about the variety of ways we seek both to find our best selves and to serve others with our gifts.

In short, my faith was losing its packaging.  It had been so tidy and wrapped up.  It had been so simple – I was well trained n Biblical literacy, I can sing all the old hymns, am well schooled in the value of community and our ultimate dependence on grace.  But it was no longer enough.  What I had known to be true was no longer as true as it had once been.

And so, by the time our daughter was off to college, Dwight and I began a spiritual journey of actively looking – seeking – wandering, really.  It was kind of like trying to scratch an itch that you can’t quite locate on your body.  I felt a little lost and more than a little scared, but took comfort in these words from Wendell Berry, which I kept on the refrigerator:

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work                                       

and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey."

We left our church behind and began looking for another, spending more than a year at two of them, but couldn’t find that place of peace that tells you that you’ve come home.

Finally, we decided to stop looking.  Sundays would be spent hiking or sometimes canoeing, or breakfasting with friends or often doing what I came to call worshiping in the church of my garden.  When I just could no longer articulate what it was I was even looking for, I’d find some peace with my hands in the dirt, with the bugs and the weeds and the flowers and the vegetables.

Then we turned our lives completely inside out and upside down by deciding to leave California – the only home either of us had known – to join our daughter and her family here in DC.  This, we thought, might be a good time to make another attempt at church.  We found the Hyattsville website, were intrigued, and decided to visit.  I wanted a church community, had missed it so much, but had learned to guard my heart against disappointment.

I can’t say exactly what it was about our first visit late last August, but after the service, Dwight and I looked at each other and said . . . I think we’re home.

A few weeks later we had coffee with the pastor, Cindy.  In our conversation I told her that I am, in my deepest heart, an Anabaptist Christian.  Yet that deep heart also beats with other traditions and resonates with additional practices.  I would, at this point, I told Cindy, call myself an Anabaptist feminist- spirituality, Catholic-ritual  loving, Buddhist, earth-based pagan..

Cindy didn’t flinch.  In fact, she reacted in a way that made me feel normal.  That’s how I knew for sure that I was home.

Now we are part of a small group, I meet with WOCA (Women of a Certain Age) and participated in yesterday’s wonderful women’s retreat, and I feel like I can be myself.  For the first time since I began to step away from the prescribed and standard faith, I feel I can be myself in church.

Thankyou, Hyattsville.

This is particularly important with all the changes of the past year . . . leaving my friends, my profession, my home, my garden.

I’m still transitioning from professional educator to professional Oma (my new job is being home to care for Asaka, age 3 and Kiyoko, 6 months), I’m still developing friendships, still learning the flora and fauna of the mid-Atlantic, still learning to find my way around, still learning how to understand how it is that I have come so far away from home when before now I have never lived farther than 60 miles from where I was born.

I am amazed at God’s nurturing, patient love that has brought my spiritual path here, with you, and I am so grateful.

Our Church

 

A Song For My Grandmothers

I spent a lot of time crying in church this morning, which sometimes happens when the singing or the visual art or the spoken words press on a touchpoint.  Today that touchpoint was the topic of "song."

shirlihughesandovation.org

  Our speaker was Shirli Hughes, a DC area singer and spiritual leader who comes from the African Methodist Episcopal tradition. Shirli had coached several members of the church into singing in a gospel choir style, brought some of her own singers, drew the congregation into song and shared some of her story with us.  She talked about points in her life when she had lost her song, when darkness and challenges brought her to the point of not being able to sing.  She tied together the themes of a crisis of health, of burn out at work, of song that came from slavery, of the journey of being a stranger in a strange land.  Singing, she said, singing is what gets you through.

My eyes filled at the 'stranger in a strange land' imagery.  As someone who has enjoyed the familiarity of a lifetime in the same part of the world, and an entire adulthood in the same community, even this wonderful new land is strange.  I cling to the things that bring me comfort:  our art collection on the walls, music that has accompanied me through phases of life (yes, I do have lots of Joni Mitchell on vinyl) a lamp that we bought when we first married.  But Shirli has made me wonder, has made me face a painful question about my own song.  Where is it?  She told stories about her mother and grandmother, bringing to mind my own grandmothers, and their search for their own songs.

Anna as a young woman

Anna Harder Plett came to America in the early 1900s as part of a Mennonite Brethren colony from the Russian Ukraine.  She was educated and accustomed to a simple but comfortable life, but it wasn't long before she found herself married to a dirt-poor farmer in Kansas, raising eleven children in a strange land.  I never heard her tell this story, but my mother tells me that Anna was often so distraught that she would wake up in the morning crying, and would sing hymns as she cared for her children and household, sing hymns until she could stop crying.

Kiyoko in her 90s

Kiyoko Miyake was born to a Presbyterian Minister in Japan in the late 1800s, was educated and lived a genteel life until hardship came to that country.  As a young woman she emigrated to California as a picture bride - betrothed to a man she had never met.  He turned out to be considerably older than she, uneducated and working as a farm laborer. At that time it was against the law for Japanese immigrants to own property. They were also strangers in a strange land.  She worked hard to cook for a camp full of laborers, bore seven children, and was eventually able to buy a small farm with her husband.  In her nineties Kiyoko would tell me stories of her life as I sat, literally, at her feet.  Sometimes life was so hard, she said, that she would wake up crying, and would sing hymns as she carried out her work, sing hymns until she could stop crying.

How can we sing when life is hard?  This morning Shirli reframed this question that we sometimes ask ourselves in dark times.  How, she asked, can we not sing?

Anna and Kiyoko are buried quite close to each other in our hometown cemetery.  I hope that in some way that I do not yet understand they are able to meet each other, share stories with each other, sing together.  I hope I can sing with them one day, too.

My Life Flows On In Endless Song . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BifkC92nT8