Spiritual Autobiography

Education for Ministry (EFM) is a prgram for lay theological education widely used in the Episcopal Church. Participants write a spiritual autobiography and share it with one another. Here's mine:

1. I was born in 1952 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My parents were both 3rd generation adherents of a relatively harmless Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren. The Plymouth Brethren came into existence in the early 19th-century in Great Britain and Ireland as a rejection of the established Anglican Churches in those countries. These were, at least in the eyes of the Brethren's founders, hopelessly mired in accretions of empty ritual, formalism and hierarchy, not to mention dead heterodoxy. In opposition to this, the Brethren conceived themselves as returning to pure and simple New Testament Christianity, in which there was no professional clergy and no liturgy. An esoteric volume entitled Early Brethren Missionary Work in the Maritimes includes a chapter called "The Conversion of George Wacome of Pugwash, Nova Scotia." That was my paternal grandfather. For the first 17 years of my life we never went to church; we went to meeting, where, every Sunday morning we sat in a silence punctuated episodically when one of the men of the congregation would rise to his feet and pray a spontaneous prayer, announce a hymn, or hold forth with a brief exegetical word from Scripture. The service would culminate when the Spirit moved someone to get up and break the bread to begin the Lord's Supper. The women were to remain silent through all this and to have their heads covered with hats--this, in practice, a major distinctive of the denomination. St. Paul's remarks on these matters, like everything else found in the Bible, was taken without question as a direct instruction from God. Children tend to filter out the qualifications and explanations and receive a simple and pure version of the nuanced adult system of belief and what I took for granted until I was a teenager was that we, the Plymouth Brothers, were more or less the whole Christian Church, and while there were isolated misled Christians among the Baptists, Presbyterians and even the Roman Catholics, they were few and far between. This, I suspect, inoculated me against religious bodies that style themselves the 'true church,' the sole possessors of the truth about God. Also from my PB heritage probably comes a predilection for worship that is quiet and serious. There was an intense focus on the suffering of Christ to an extent perhaps unique among Protestants. People raised PB's are rarely content with the circus-like atmosphere and shallowness of many evangelical churches and wind up in the Anglican fold in surprisingly large numbers, given the superficial differences. I was, I think, also inoculated against the idea that what is unstructured and non-liturgical is thereby spontaneous: it seems that I heard the same man rise at precisely 9:20 every Sunday morning for 17 straight years and pray in his heavy Northern Irish accent: "Save me O God, for I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing, I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me...!" Never since have I doubted that the opposite of ordered liturgy is unconsidered human habit, not the spontaneous action of God's Spirit.

The particular Brethren 'assembly' to which my family belonged (my father, uncle, and others founded it in the mid-1950's) was, I realize now, a particularly liberal and open-minded example of the species. Situated in an affluent growing suburb of Boston, it was unusually open to outsiders and conceived itself as having an evangelistic mission. And in fact, over the years, many people did first discover Christ under its auspices. I was 'saved' several times as a child. The earliest I remember must have been when, as a preschooler, I was subjected to a filmstrip of the story in Daniel about the writing on the wall. Apparently, this was largely a matter of my being frightened by the concluding picture of the Chaldean king Belshazar lying dead, issuing blood on the floor of his palace. Some years later I seem to have been saved again, this time, for some reason now lost to memory, in my grandmother's bathtub. This eventually evolved into something of an embarrassment, since one's conversion experience was something one was expected to happily relate in public on demand. Despite its aim of converting people to Christianity, this church generally avoided the 'hellfire and brimstone' psychological manipulation common to other churches that had essentially similar aims and similar theological beliefs. Although sometimes there were deviations from this: I remember sitting in a service resigned to the eternal pains of hell because I was not going to go forward for the altar call; at the time it seemed a reasonable trade off for me, a shy, self-conscious child. This was in the days before evangelical and fundamentalist Christians developed a taste for political power, when Christian practice was almost completely a matter of personal piety, expressed in refraining from drinking, dancing, smoking or swearing, but my church tended not to emphasize the legalism that characterized most groups that held similarly conservative theological beliefs. These good features were largely due to the fact many of the members were well-educated professionals, including graduate students and professors from the nearby universities in the Boston area. Some of these latter, particularly a youth group leader then completing a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at Brandeis University, were important influences on me when I became an adolescent in the heady atmosphere of the late 60's. Although I now look back at many of the beliefs I was taught growing up in that congregation with incredulity, and in general see the PB as an inbred backwater of insularity, I remain grateful for having been raised in an environment that combined a degree of open-mindedness and tolerance with a firm religious commitment.

My parents, as I said, were third generation Plymouth Brothers, born into a generation that did not marry outside the sect. (My generation initiated that.) I suspect that the main attraction of the one to the other was that they were of marriageable age and not already related to one another, since my mother was a recent immigrant to the Boston area, having moved there with her family from Cleveland shortly after finishing high school. (The Brethren then resembled the Russian royal family; it seemed everyone was related to one another in convoluted ways I have yet to fully comprehend. One wonders about hemophilia...) My mother was (and is) a warm and accepting person; who has never had any aim in life other than to be a mother and to love and care for her children in a clean home. My father, a very smart and somewhat sarcastic and iconoclastic New Englander, had a rather distinguished career as an organic chemist in industry. I was well-loved by both, although my mother's love was more expressed than that of my father. So far as I can tell, they managed to raise me without doing too much psychological damage. In an era when it seems normal to have some sort of abuse or trauma in one's background I feel rather at a loss. My parents were as kind and competent as one could reasonably expect human parents to be. Their religious faith was deep and genuine and, while profoundly conservative (and in my mother's case, radically unreflective) not fanatical. The main negative thing about it was that it seemed to produce a thinning out of human life, an attenuation of experience, a cutting off of its adherents from the riches of human existence in God's world. I have difficulty, for instance, imagining either of my parents having a hobby, or intensively pursuing any purely personal interest or enjoying a bottle of wine, or a movie or a play. Such things weren't precisely sinful, it's just that they were 'worldly,' and tacitly regarded as a waste of money, or time, or energy, a distraction from the duties of life. Our religion was always the center of any activity. For example, we always sang two 'happy birthday' songs: the standard one, and then the Christian version: 'Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, born again means salvation. How many have you?'--i.e. have you had your second birthday; have you been born again? As a child, all of this seemed entirely normal, and while I can look at it now and appreciate the fact that our faith was the center of gravity of our lives round which we, in all our everyday activities, orbited, I realize as well that for me and many others it was too tight an orbit. I was in a universe that was too small, intellectually, emotionally, and imaginatively claustrophobic. Much that styles itself 'evangelical Christianity' seems to me a trivialization of the authentic Christian faith. To this day, I harbor an abiding resentment and cynicism toward this aspect of the Christianity I grew up with, and which I encountered in latter life in more virulent forms. That the Christian faith could be distorted this way, into something approximating its opposite, into a caricature of real human life, continues to amaze and anger me. Fortunately, the real God is much larger than that--or any--small religious world.

2. By the time I reached my mid-teens, the influences of my church, my father, and probably that of a couple of teachers, as well as years of eclectic, undisciplined reading (I started reading science fiction as a third grader, with who knows what irreversible negative effects on my tender psyche) bore their fruit. I had become someone for whom ideas are emotionally of the first importance. What one believes, and why one believes it, are to me the defining facts about a person: that was a given of my universe. Taking personal responsibility for the articulation and justification of my beliefs, especially my religious beliefs, and experiencing this kind of intellectual activity as one of the most real and vivid aspects of life, usually of more significance than what I feel or do, had become for me normal. So my spiritual autobiography is, for better or worse, inescapably an intellectual biography, the shape of my attempt to believe, and to make sense of what I believe.

Although some late-adolescent enthusiasm led me to decide to go to a religious college, as I entered adulthood it became obvious to me that in important ways I am not a religious person. I doubt that if I hadn't been saturated with religious teaching from the first moments of consciousness I would have never been drawn into Christianity or any other religion. Among Christians, especially as I moved out of the enclave of Boston's Plymouth Brothers, who were atypical PB's within an atypical niche of evangelicalism, I often felt myself among people who do not much care about what is true, and whether they have any good reason to believe what they believe, and that they have their beliefs for the sense of comfort and security that unquestioned faith provides. Nor did it seem to me that the believers cared what they literally meant by their beliefs; jejune unexplicated metaphors were apparently enough for them, and the request for something more was threatening. Overall, it became increasingly clear to me that evangelical Christianity, which at that time I still took to be coextensive with any genuine Christianity, however distorted and in need of reform and renewal, was not a bastion of intellectual honesty and thus not a champion of what I cared most about. Secular intellectuals, especially scientists, seemed to me to by and large have an integrity of thought that religious people usually lacked and even held in contempt. My worldview is basically naturalistic, not religious, and skeptical, not credulous.

Nonetheless, my college years--the early 70's--were a time of intense thinking, reading and talking, a four-year conversation about the meaning of life as a Christian. Many times my roommates and I saw the sun rise on our extended arguments about the Christian faith. In this intellectually engaged environment I acquired whatever limited powers of self-reflection I have, and my mind reorganized itself, as I was transformed from a would-be poet and artist to a ferociously analytical philosopher. During these years it was with a sense of Providence that I encountered the honorable exceptions to the stereotypes of the Christian religion, friends like Karen Halvorsen, i.e. people who did care about an honest faith, and that I stumbled upon books pointing toward a more plausible, honest, and human Christian faith. While most everything in my officially Christian environment pushed me away from Christianity, I always found reasons and ways of imagining that let me think it all might really be true, after all. Probably the most important of the writers was C. S. Lewis. One night in my freshman (or maybe it was early in my sophomore) year I was reading Perelandra and got to the passage where Ransom sees Dr. Weston disassemble the frogs. Although what is portrayed in this scene is the force of gratuitous and petty evil the Bible calls the Devil, I was pierced by a sense of the gratuitous goodness, kindness, and beauty of God. Other books by Lewis, especially the Narnian Chronicles and The Great Divorce later had a similar effect, keeping alive in me a sense of the reality of God and the truth of the Christian faith, despite my tendencies to disbelief.

For the ten or so years after college I was at work trying to put together some understanding of Christian faith that held on to something like orthodoxy but which rejected the moralistic and dehumanizing religion of evangelicalism, something which would fit with the glimpses of the good, sane and interesting God I had in college. During this period, under the guidance of Gustav Aulen, Karl Barth, Frederick Buechner and Jacques Ellul, I arrived at many of the beliefs and attitudes I still have, but what is clear in retrospect is that the system of belief I was piecing together was emotionally somehow empty; essentially just a system of belief; however sincerely and fervently held, however ardently I sought to live out its practical applications, it lacked a certain reality, though at the time I would have assiduously resisted that claim; my earlier self would not have know what my later self is talking about.

During this time I had an ongoing mild attraction to the Episcopal Church, because while knowing little about it, I regarded it as the place where they have to let you in, and thus where I might end up when the evangelicals finally realized I had moved beyond the narrow pale of their orthodoxy. There were also the obvious aesthetic attractions and the pull it has on any American Anglophile. Indeed, it was my awareness of these latter motives that kept me from investigating the Episcopal Church; one ought not to choose one's church on aesthetic grounds, I thought.

3. In the early 1980's a speaker came to speak in chapel at the college where I was then teaching. In the course of her address, she quoted Paul F. M. Zahl, rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Scarborough, New York. I don't recall precisely what she said he said, but it had to do with the transforming power of God's grace. Since that church was only about a mile from where Karen and I lived at the time we had often passed by it, and I had often noticed its beauty; a fine example of the many charming old stone Episcopal churches nestled in the Hudson Valley. Intrigued by what I had heard in chapel, the following Sunday we went there. Then and ever since that church seemed brightly-alive with God's love, full of human beings made gracious by hearing the good news about God's grace. It does, I think, live up to its mission statement: "An accepting family growing in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ and sharing God's love with others." I don't remember much of that first visit beyond this general but vivid impression other than that at some point in the sermon the rector referred to the Holy Spirit and then, almost as an aside, said 'Whatever that means.' This had a profound impression on me: here was an obviously genuine Christian faith that did not feel compelled to pretend to know what it does not know and to understand what it does not understand. Here was the kind of intellectual integrity I had despaired of in Christians. I was completely hooked. I don't think that at any time after that first visit I ever doubted that I wanted to become a part of that Church. A crucial part of what hit me so hard in this encounter was a matter of theological theory. The constantly repeated center of preaching and teaching at St. Mary's was the first principle of the Reformation: people cannot make God approve of them by being good or smart or by trying hard. Christ isn't for people who are trying to be good; he's for people who have given up on that. God accepts us a exactly as we are, no strings attached, because he counts us as good as Jesus. I had long known the theological dogma that justification is by grace through faith in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, and that the real core issue of the Reformation was the rejection of the Medieval idea that God accepts us because he has infused goodness, like a virtue, into us. But retrospectively I have to confess that I did not really believe it, in the sense that the implicit mental reservation was always there: 'Yes, but ...' and then I would go on thinking about whatever it was one had to do to make oneself O.K. in God's sight. It was for me anyway one thing to believe that salvation is by faith not works, and another thing altogether to emotionally, existentially grasp this as a real fact that matters more than everything else. It is, I think, terribly hard not to really, deep down think or at least feel that there must be something we have to do to get God to like us. What happened to me at St. Mary's was that I came to know in some deep and real sense that God accepts me as I am, no matter what I do or don't do. (Not that God doesn't care what I do or become, but as a well-used slogan at St. Mary's puts it: 'Look to the root and the fruit will take care of itself.' Doing good things is the natural outgrowth of hearing this transforming word of God's love for us.) This happening to me was somehow tied in with the forms of Episcopal worship. Kneeling and receiving the Eucharist and saying and hearing words like "Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost feed us, in these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious body and blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us...;" this, for reasons that remain beyond me, brought the good news about God's gracious acceptance of us to life for me. It was as though now, after years of being a Christian, at long last I heard the Christian gospel.

This experience, which has been ongoing, has had a variety of consequences for me. One of them is a great sense of liberation. My new-found realization of God's unconditional love for us in Christ has become a secure center from which I feel able to move out freely, not afraid to doubt, question, and probe. I have learned that the opposite of doubt is not certainty; it is faith. All my life I have assumed that I ought to be the best critic and challenger of my own beliefs; now I feel I do that in good faith, free while securely held in God's love. I am confident that those who begin in certainty will end in doubt and that those who begin in doubt will someday end in certainty. While appropriating this good news one of the things that crystallized for me as an obvious fact was that the evangelical Christianity in which I had been born and raised, and to which I still held, however skeptically and diffidently, simply wasn't normative Christianity. The Church was greater and larger and more ancient than my evangelical friends took it to be; it was and is and will be alive wherever this good news about God's grace goes to work on human beings. And I feel I have been freed from the widespread inclination to try to replace Christianity with some program of moral betterment designed to change the world, whether it takes its start from the political left or right; while I am more convinced than ever that the only work God does in the world is what he does through individual human beings acting out of trust in him, I think that it is not our task as such to try to change the world, but to bear witness in our words and actions to the fact that God has already acted decisively in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus to change the world.

Also at this time the Bible, which had been in my childhood in function, if not in theory, an object of worship, a collection of sacred oracles, at last became interesting and personally important to me. This was in part because, being an amateur hanger-on to Karen's serious biblical studies, I was exposed to the critical study of Scripture. I realize that many persons over the last century have had a very different experience, but I must report that the honest, critical examination of the Bible--JEPD and all that-- brought it to life for me as the living word of God. Before, the Bible was a book of moral principles and theological doctrines. Now it made deep and beautiful sense as the story of the good news of God's gracious involvement in human history, a story I now saw myself as sharing in.

Despite my enthusiasm for the Christian gospel, I remain a basically non-religious person. I can only shake my head in irritation when I hear people reject evolutionary theory in favor of some sort of creationism, or confidently assert that human beings are immaterial souls rather than just bodies. And I have little identification with the tortured conscience that drives many to seek salvation. I don't think I need God to be an ethical human being. What I am overwhelmingly impressed with is the goodness and greatness of God, not with my own sinfulness or need. But there are, I think, many roads into the kingdom of God. In general, whatever its comforts, religion strikes me as a haven for superstition, intellectual cowardice and dishonesty. I remain impressed with how easily people take as obvious the deliverances of the subcultures in which they grow up. Few of us really look into the abyss: is there really any God at all? For me Christianity involves not only faith in the traditional sense of trust in God (the reality I so belatedly found--or was found by--at St. Mary's); it at least sometimes means faith that he exists in the first place. As I have become less sanguine about the intellectual security of belief in God in general, I have been compensated by coming to understand the Christian faith as something one should want to be true, as something winsome and wonderful, perhaps too good to be true, but on the other hand perhaps too good for any of us humans to have dreamed up....

I continue to be surprised at finding myself a more or less functioning Episcopalian, and for resonating so deeply with all its strange gear and lore. Yet I have no hint of a tendency toward belief in transubstantiation and no inclination to move in the direction of Rome. I remain bemused and skeptical toward the prelacy with its funny hats and toward the notion that priests have special authority to absolve us of our sins and perform Eucharists for us; in some ways the old Plymouth Brother lives on. My evangelical friends and relatives take it for granted I am an Episcopalian because I love the liturgy, but I say no, that's not the crucial reason: I go to that sort of church because that's where I hear, see, and feel God's grace. I go there because there they talk about what God does for us, rather than telling us what they think we ought to do to make ourselves O.K. in God's eyes. I go there because that's the place to hear the good news.