levtruth10web

After Dad died, Mom sold the house where she'd lived for 56 years, and my sister and brother-in-law, a mile away by the Barnegat Bay, took her in. And while she was living with them, Mom was found one day reading a little book none of us had ever seen. It had been authored by our Mom herself as a high school senior in 1935, and even though she seemed to know that she was its author, now the contents seemed entirely new to her.

I don't know when the word Alzheimer's first came up. Mom was losing a few words and some long-term memories. I would ask her about people and events in the past — elders know these things — and more and more often she'd laugh and say "You know I don't remember very much." She could still laugh, I don't know how. The missing words multiplied until a complete sentence was impossible. But still she was her same dear, funny self. Until that summer, really. Now she was confused, frightened, and crying, pleading with Pat and Al not to leave the house.

The loveliest of good lives, the kindest, the sweetest, whose gentle laugh can never be forgotten — reduced to confusion, and terror, and helpless oblivion, dying, finally, in a state unrecognizably remote from the person we knew.

But the little book. We'd never known the dreams and convictions she cherished and had once committed to the little book. She describes herself — in 1935 — as an "anti-war fanatic" and makes a strong case. She speaks of her hopes of higher education, shattered by the Depression. She wants to travel the world as an ambassador of peace. She wants to be a broadcaster. She wants to leave the world better than she found it. But, she writes, "I have been advised not to be a nurse."

After she earned an RN she spent her whole professional life as a public health nurse. She devoted herself to her work, even though the pay was appalling; she ran about Ocean County tending to the county's clients who, when they needed her, called her at home.

She never traveled the world or crossed an American border. After Dad was gone, while I was living in London, I almost persuaded my sister to bring her across the sea. She really ought to have seen the great monument on Great Portland Street — near Florence Nightingale's — to her great-great (there may be more "greats" in there) grandfather, Sir Joseph Lister. We waited too long.

Her forebears — mine — lived in Yorkshire, England. Some crossed the Atlantic between 1820 and 1830 and settled around Philadelphia and then New Jersey. I found that in another book she'd kept and never told us about, a very old family Bible. By the time we found it in the attic of the old house, she didn't know what it was.

While we were picking through rooms crammed with 56 years of living, — attic, basement, garage, all stuffed — there it was. A stash of photographs and a family Bible.

There were hundreds of photographs. There were photographs of some I knew, and some I'd never met, and many I never knew of. There was my grandmother's mother — as a child! There were ladies in enormous hats, [dour|severe-looking] gentlemen, going back to the 1890s, and mixed in, pictures of myself at various stages of life. Time telescoped, collapsed. Here we all were. This is my family.

In the Bible, there was a register of births, and deaths, and marriages. First there was John Lister, born in 1786 in Hoccondwicke, Yorkshire.

I followed the names in each list. Sometimes the year of birth was also the year of death; sometimes it was two years after, or five, or ten. Some lived long lives but for each there was a death date.
Farther back I found the most extraordinary thing that my grandfather had added to the Bible: an
Index to the Germ-Plasm
registered with the Eugenics Record Office. A Eugenics record table. I knew this had been kind of a fad, the purpose of which was to breed better human beings. The problem — they held — was a matter of the individual 's genes— defective "germ-plasm"; the solution was encouraging the breeding of people with "good" genes and discouraging breeding by people with "bad" ones. The idea goes back at least 3,000 years, when the Israelites marked the Amalekites, I guess you could say the Palestinians, as corrupting the Jews through intermarriage, since they had been created evil and were worthy of extermination.

With the mantle of "science," eugenicists got laws passed to keep social and ethnic groups separated, to restrict immigration, and to sterilize the "unfit." They got anti-miscegenation laws passed, forbidding interracial marriage — the last of which were only struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. Indiana enacted the nation's first law providing for sterilization on eugenic grounds in 1907; Connecticut followed, then most other states. And what would warrant sterilization? Being "feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed; and dependent." The concept of preserving the purity of the germ-plasm would later be taken up by Nazi Germany.

In America, the Eugenics Record Office operated at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York from 1910 until 1944. I guess I understand why they closed down in the 1944s.

My grandfather was, apparently, among the believers. In the family Bible there were tables of things you had to fill out. I learned that Dr. Leon Goble, my great-grandfather, was of phlegmatic temperament, whereas my grandfather was of nervo-phlegmatic temperament. Under the heading "Special gifts or peculiarities of mind and body" I learned that Henrietta Goble "thinks she is sick all the time" and that James J. Goble, born in 1799, was a "tobacco fiend" and died of dropsy of the heart. Several were described as "narrow minded." I learned that Beula Lamb was cheerful and was paralyzed at 36.
Apparently after family approval as eugenically fit, there were the marriages.

All these had lived and loved and worked and wept and died and I had never heard most of their names.
Nevertheless I was aware of this fact: It was because they were where they were and did what they did when they did that I am here, and had it been otherwise, I would not be.

And this extremely improbable existence of mine is also precarious. Despite all the care they took to assure eugenic fitness, with the few exceptions of those born later in the twentieth century, they got sick, and died, are all gone, vanished.

How very extraordinary to be here! How improbable, and how utterly astonishing! What some exploding star cast out billions of years ago, taking human form on a little planet, passed through these long-vanished lives in Yorkshire, England, and has come down to this.

We empty the house. I keep a few mementos. Pat brings me boxes of my past; things written and recorded and photographed and long lost. I send them to the trash. I drive home, and pull Sam Keen off the shelf, and turn to this:

Your past
just disappeared.
Now what?

The future begins when I cease to rehearse old scenes in which I recited lines written for me by the directors. When I become my own playwright I act in a drama I helped to create. The play begins when I become the author, the authority, of my own life.[1]

Amazing and improbable that I am here; here because they were there; but they won't write the script and each of us changes the drift of the master script somehow. (I'm the one who got them scouring their minds and questioning their gods about what it means to be gay. They will do with it what they will; I'll go on writing my script.)

So Sam Keen concludes:

We are shaped more
by what is not yet
than by yesterday.

The vacuum more than the thorn
in the flesh makes us who we are.
the not-yet may be a place of hope or despair.
Stay hungry for the future, but be nourished
by past and present. We are moved by
the promise of a fulfillment that is forever
slightly beyond our grasp.

My Mom's father was a dentist and a devout Presbyterian — except for when he was a devout Baptist. It all depended on which minister he was most displeased with, and then he'd move his men's Bible study from Washington Street to Main Street and back again. And such a Calvinist. A dentist who refused to use Novocaine. (I just wanted you to know what we went through.)

Both sides of my family, staunch Republicans, united in their loathing for Franklin Roosevelt. My grandfather once refused to shake President Wilson's hand because Mr Wilson was divorced.

My father's side of the family had been even more severe evangelical Republicans. Dad believed in the Vietnam War because an American victory would mean Christian missionaries could go in and covert all those poor doomed Southeast Asians from Buddhism or whatever they are over there to Christianity and they could go to heaven.

In so many ways they pretty much resembled their cultural surroundings. Their Bible was the only one worth reading, and it contained all truth. Their America, their church, their South Jersey — not to be confused with North Jersey, which was heavily Democratic. Dad was the head of the household — mowed the lawn but didn't do dishes, always drove the car, always held onto the TV remote, though he'd be asleep on the couch.

Without saying much, Dad could be chilly and severe. Mom was utterly loyal, always deferring to him, never contradicting him. Sometimes I could see the wrenching conflict on her face, but she remained silent.

At first, their world was my world, with its values and beliefs. Their gods were my gods. If they were evangelical Presbyterians — my form of revolt was to become an outright fundamentalist.
That was all a long time ago.

In his In Over Our Heads, Robert Kegan talks about life as a big school. The curriculum consists of our growth through orders of consciousness until we arrive at one where we stay. Unless we keep growing!

My mom watched in anguish as I disappointed Dad. I felt his disappointment, though never hers. I didn't turn out different in order to disappoint him. The world changed. I found in my own soul different realities that had to be reckoned with. I had to abandon the household gods, evangelical Presbyterian sorts of gods, fundamentalist gods. Leave them behind.

That's the hardest part. It made me a fish out of water — which is a fish who has nothing to suspend it and has to move toward something that can.

To Robert Kegan, a fish out of water is "a desperate, expiring creature cut off from what it needs to survive." But that is also the story of the evolution of our species.[2]

You won't find that fish exulting in this marvelous evolutionary triumph onward and upward, into a creature that can live on land. Mostly they're looking desperately for another pond to jump into.
I found a few transitional ponds. Then, when later on I found my religious home in Unitarian Universalism, I remember telling someone, "Now if I change my mind, if I evolve some more, I'm still home. I don't have to find another home." Here was a spacious pond that understands what we're in this world to do — evolve our consciousness, and suppor each other in doing that. Never standing still.
When Carl Jung went his own way, he disappointed both his mentor, Sigmund Freud, and his father, who didn't understand. In a dream — Carl Jung is looking at the glittering roof of the cathedral, and he sees God the Father sitting on his golden throne high above the world, and then, from under the throne — let me quote Jung, I'd really better quote him here — "from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder."

And Jung goes on to say:

I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. . . . A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood, I thought: he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. . . . He had taken the Bible's commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of his freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In His trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred.[3]

We've got to discover a bigger Self, capital S, a Self bigger than the little one we thought we were. And we have to be the authors of our own book.

Sometimes that calls for a changing of the gods.

There had been in my former Chicago church a young man who came out as a gay man to his parents in a letter, and then he went home for Christmas. They had changed the locks. Their gods told them to do it.

I wondered what Mom and Dad would do. And what they did astonished me. They transcended their own past, their family gods, their own limitations. From then on out I could go back to the old house and the doors would never be locked against me. Even if who I am was not fully understood, I was accepted — well, except for my Unitarian Universalism, which they found a deep mystery!

How could they do it? For a long time that huge Presbyterian church provided Mom and Dad with no support in that kind of expansion of consciousness. I don't know where it came from.

There is a quality about Being Itself — a property it has; — a capacity in Nature to evolve and grow in complexity and depth.

Spiritual writers through the ages have often spoken of a Self so big and expansive that it can look on the identity you present to the world and see it with detachment, as if you were looking at your ego-identity from a distance, not from inside that ego-mind —
look at the values and beliefs of your culture from a bigger place —
— and remind you that you are more than that, more than you know.

Mom had that quality. There was more to her than she knew how to talk about. She could embrace what she couldn't understand.

This trait — it reminds me, strangely, of William Ellery Channing, really the founder of American Unitarianism — and of his children.

Channing's spiritual children were the Transcendentalists — Emerson, Parker, Fuller. He knew it and they knew it. But Channing was a committed, biblical Christian. He firmly believed in the miracles of the Bible — not a very Transcendentalist point of view, and today, not a very Unitarian one. He worried that they didn't see Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation. He feared for their souls, even while he believed they had seized on some great truth and he deeply honored them. He wanted them to speak freely from, as he put it, "a full heart." Even thought they made him a bit nervous.

Mom and Dad, and Dr. Channing, held their fears about their offspring in this same way. It's explained by Samuel Johnson — he was one of those spiritual children of Channing, too, another great Transcendentalist minister. And he said:[4]

The limits of Dr. Channing . . . were of the head, not of the heart; and the ever forward look of the prophetic man inspired all younger and freer minds.

There were times when my mother made some pretty startling statements that show a degree of vision, and ability to comprehend, that her Presbyterian church didn't give her. Where has she gone? Is all that lost?

I don't know. I used to think it was. I'm not so sure now. But I do know that the curriculum of life is not about better genes and germ plasm. It consists of our growth through orders of consciousness. The time to come may be a cataclysm or it may be a saving transformation and it's going to depend on what we do now.

The world is changing fast and so is what's required of us. Can we see beyond the realm of separated cells and particles and the small-s individual "self" — and genuinely sense and feel that all of Life is one, to sense and feel the soul of the whole that is not diminished by disease, not extinguished by death?
A new consciousness is rising now and every one of us shares in it. We won't always have the tools to understand it, but we have to try. And when we cannot — let our limits, like those of Dr. Channing, like Dad's and Mom's — let them be limits of the head, and not of the heart. Let us trust the creative powers that are at work in us and in this time, and commit to them, because what is at stake is this whole world of life.

To take our place in that work — to commit ourselves to it without reservation — is to make our lives worth dying for.

READING

Annie Dillard
from Holy the Firm, pp. 43, 65

So this is where we are. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? . . . Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other — for world . . . — is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and racing to the realm of spirit bare.
. . . . . . . . .
Each thing in the world is translucent . . , and moving, cell by cell. I remember this reality. Where has it been?. . . . Everything, everything, is whole, and a parcel of everything else. I myself am falling down, slowly, or slowly lifting up. . [I] see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth's contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone.
For outside it is bright. . . . It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable. There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time. There is only this everything. There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise.

Sam Keen,
Beginnings Without End:

We are shaped more
by what is not yet
than by yesterday.
The vacuum more than the thorn
in the flesh makes us who we are.
the not-yet may be a place of hope or despair.
Stay hungry for the future, but be nourished
by past and present. We are moved by
the promise of a fulfillment that is forever
slightly beyond our grasp.