Re: how the past informs the present…
Mother’s Day this year gives me the opportunity to make progress with the backlog of paper journal entries that have developed in the first month of my commitment due to computer calamities and the increasing volume and intensity of experience occurring in (and outside) my life right now.
April was a month full of significant anniversaries (more about that later). After the 21st anniversary of the beginning of my first GC course on April 1, the next chronologically was my mother’s birthday on April 3. She would have been 91; she died five years ago this November.
On that day, Anna Lisa and I visited her grave at the church where I was baptized and raised and where she taught Sunday school for a number of years during my high school and college years. After she died, since nobody else was interested in them, I took much of her teaching library, a collection that in retrospect was even more diverse and ecumenical than I realized, as I assumed her to be a fairly mainstream, middle class Protestant churchgoer. I am still making my way through this collection, bit by bit, and am continually delighted to come across her notes, clippings, internal church memos and communications, etc., as literal physical evidence of her continuing presence and communication with me.
The most stunning example of this was when I found among these books my own prayer book, with my full name embossed in gold letters across the bottom, which I had abandoned when I left the church around age 12, finding the language and symbolic system completely unsuited to my spiritual experience. She did not take this well, as I now recall, but I had forgotten about this until I opened the book and found the note she had written to me at the time, the tone of which seemed to me to have something of a flavor of fevered desperation. It read as follows:
“Bill –
You need a time and a place to be quiet in, to talk to yourself (or to God) in.
You need a time and a place to do that where other people are doing it too.
You need to be part of a larger worshipping group, even if you are saying your own prayers.
We can visit other churches.
You need faith (not belief)
You need instruction leading to and reinforcing faith.
You need mystery.
You need a faith that has some connection with your cultural heritage.”
(At this point it ends abruptly, as she ran out of room on the page, the last line crammed in on the bottom, barely legible.)
At the time I remember thinking, “ah, she’s just mad because I don’t want to go to her church anymore,” Now what strikes me is, having completely forgotten this note, how much my own feet have led me to do much of what she was talking about. Sounds a lot like Guitar Craft to me.
I read this note aloud at her grave; I also read the passage from Isaiah that the minister at her funeral handed me to read aloud. This guy knew my mother only second-hand through the members of the congregation, and knew nothing about me, my politics, my activism, or my interest in Liberation Theology, but this is what he handed me to read:
“Isaiah 61:1-3
A reading from the prophet Isaiah:
The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion – to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, to display his glory.”
If someone had handed me this passage when I was a kid, I might’ve stuck around. But then, in a larger sense, I guess I did.
At her funeral, I decided to take communion in her honor, since I had quit the church before I was ever confirmed. And as I took it, I had a Point-of-Seeing, where suddenly the whole symbolic system made sense to me, and I could accept it, as long as I wasn’t elevating the signifier (Jesus) over the signified (Love). As in ‘Love is the Way, the Truth and the Light’ – sure, I’ll buy that. And as I took the bread and the wine, I realized I was also taking in her learning and experience and giving it new life.
Driving home from southern New Jersey late Sunday, I tuned into Little Steven’s Underground Garage; it being Mother’s Day, naturally he was playing “Motherly Love” from the first Mothers of Invention album. This was an album that was dear to my heart when I was in first grade, and carries vivid memories of my mother with it. My brother bought it when it came out in 1966, and I was fascinated by it.
As I explored the incredible diversity to be found on it, from the doo-wop of “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” to the proto-jazz/metal of “Who Are the Brain Police” to free jazz and musique concrete, I was introduced to elements of almost every kind of music I’ve explored and loved since. But the coolest thing about it was when I discovered how much fun it was to put on “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” (opening with Zappa’s famous “Suzy? Suzy Creamcheese?” intro, the track is described in the liner notes as “what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o’clock in the morning on $500 worth of rented percussion equipment”), turn on the speakers in the kitchen while my mother was cooking dinner, and see how long it took her to fly into the other end of the house to demand that I take it off. Little wonder that she wanted so much for me to find a place to be quiet in.
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