This represents a major divergence from my traditional mindset in a number of ways. Firstly. my mother is deeply spiritual and professes a deep belief in UFO's, crystal healing, reincarnation, ESP, psychic surgery, and government conspiracies - including a belief that the fluoridation of drinking water is part of a heinous Huxleyan plot to drug the populace into submission to evil government authority. When Barney and Friends came on the air on PBS circa 1994 she told me with absolute sincerity that the styrofoam man in a dino suit was in the employ of reptile aliens who seek to take over the earth. She calmly explained that the aliens were using kids TV to encourage children to like reptiles in order to facilitate their conquering of our planet. My mom practices reiki, meditation, levitation, vegetarianism, chakra therapy, and recently traveled to Britain with a gang of fellow aging New Age/neo-druids to break into Stonehenge after visiting hours to perform a sacred ritual they believe to be crucial to saving the planet. During the 70's mom studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi in Iowa for a week. This cost something like $10,000 in 1970's dollars and the organization has since been criticized as both a cult and a scam. Andy Kaufman was a fellow practitioner and my mother knew some people who knew him pretty well - and we all know he was pretty goddamn nuts. Though I am 26, I am only now beginning to understand the socio-historical context for my mom's beliefs as a product of the era of her youth. I always just thought she was bat-shit crazy, but I now realize that she got most of her ideas from fringe movements in the spirituality craze that came out of 1960's and 70's hippie culture. She also smoked lots and lots of weed. She called me last summer, whispering into the phone to tell me that she was watching a unicorn that had landed in her yard. This is all completely true. No bullshit.
As the title of my blog suggests I was also reared in a deeply blue-collar rural environment, around a fair amount of fundamentalism. The house I grew up in is a mile from a Primitive Southern Baptist Church that still practices shape-note singing and lacks any form of indoor plumbing. The public schools in my hometown are forbidden from allowing any celebration of Halloween among schoolchildren because of the objections of a local church - pastored by the town's substitute teacher - stemming from the belief that Halloween is a pagan holiday and therefore a threat to everything holy, scared, and decent. As kids we were all handed notes at school to carry home instructing our parents NOT to allow us under any circumstances to wear our Halloween costumes to school. We were reduced to generic candy-sharing among classmates under the suspicious moniker of a 'harvest party'. (How ironic indeed that in whitewashing halloween school officials may have returned it to its original orientation.) This same church also hands out little orange copies of the New Testament in front of the town post office on halloween in order to fight the annual evil of the holiday. As a result everyone in town has at least five of these little orange bibles floating around the house. (You can't throw away the Bible, but no one really knows what to do with them all. So they end up in junk drawers or under the couch.) There were constant small strategic attempts to drag Christianity into the public schools when I was growing up: prayers at football games, a prayer group around the flagpole every day before school, and - oh yeah - my high school graduation was held in a church. My history teacher wanted to post the Ten Commandments in his classroom and my biology teacher taught Creationism. I grew up watching Christianity encourage sexism and homophobia, shelter xenophobia, and generally foster incredible ignorance and intolerance.
So for many years I detested the whole idea of church. It was antithetical to everything I had moved to the city for: art, culture, learning. As a small child I had simply found it boring, and the older and more conscious I became the more uncomfortable I felt on a pew. I also abhorred the ludicrousness of my mother's ideas and detested all the alternative spiritual paths I knew of.
But the last decade has been really hard. The stress of putting myself through college, struggling to pay bills, and worrying about where it will all take me - while all the way amassing terrifying debt - took its toll on my psyche and soul. I often feel as though I spend most of my weeks fighting to get through all of the work I have to do, only coming up for air to get enough rest in between quarters. Needless to say this is not a healthy lifestyle. I have begun to meditate and pray fairly regularly, if only to try to stay sane.
Last year I nervously began attending a Buddhist meditation held at a center in my neighborhood. Sometimes I was too stressed out to really be able to get much out of it. Worries clouded my thinking. But once last summer I came out of that meditation class feeling more relaxed and present than I have felt in many years. I began to realize that this could be a meaningful - and also intelligent - addition to my life.
I am finishing a Bachelors in History at the University of Cincinnati this June. I never liked most of the people in my department because they were all pretty conservative and generally lame. I started out in art school, so I was used to a lot of ridiculous bohemianism. In comparison, my classmates in the History program seemed like a bunch of suburban stick-in-the-muds, and most of them on are their way to law school - down a life path that I find unthinkable. I valued the handful of really intelligent history majors that I have met and the discussion we had in many of my classes brought me to intellectual levels that I previously had not known to exist, but generally I have been dissatisfied.
For my people, history is largely the telling of hardships endured and tribulations overcome. Both my grandfathers left school as adolescents because they had to get jobs to help their families survive the great depression. My maternal grandfather is the bastard son of a flophouse owner and an alcoholic teenage runaway, both of whom were from Eastern Kentucky. My grandpa spent half his childhood there watching his kinfolks scrape a living out of the rocky soil, subsisting on coal mining and railroading jobs. In the rural community I was reared in the past was also viewed as a collection of memories of hard times and scarce and small pleasures. I remember being told incredible stories of self-reliance and survival as a kid. Most of rural America is only a generation or two - at best- from living basically hand-to-mouth as subsistence farmers. Growing up I loved hearing stories about the past because I was intrigued by its color, drama, and pathos. I read fervently about the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Civil War, the works of Jacob Riis and Charles Dickens. I wanted to understand the lives of hungry sharecroppers, dirty coal miners, and desperate immigrants crowding into Ellis Island. I understood history as a story of epic human endurance against incredible odds, oppression, and poverty.
However, I quickly realized the academic discipline of history is not really about such a perspective on the past at all. Mostly it is about debating politics, and arguing ideas for the sake of doing so. I was never satisfied with this. Also it is an incredibly white and generally conservative field. I had been hearing European-based history all my life and so when I enrolled at U.C. (which I refer to as Real College in order to distinguish it from the time I spent at the Art Academy) I signed up for African, Latin American, and Middle East History. I learned to speak Spanish and spent a week among the descendants of the Maya in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. I read The Economist for news about the developing world. I spent a whole summer on my job as a bellboy sneaking long dives into books about South Africa. And for the last two years I have immersed myself into African American history.
My African American history professor has been a great inspiration to me in a number of ways. She comes from inner-city Toledo, so we talk a lot about class issues. Also, she views her job as a professor as a way to educate young soon-to-be-running-shit white students about the issues that swirl around race in our culture. I have learned so much about racial inequality from her. During Cincinnati's world-famous 2001 race riots I was living in the inner city and have vivid memories of the visceral expression of Black rage that exploded onto city streets. I came to Black history with a truckload of white guilt, and a deep need to understand racial conflict in our country. My professor (who I am keeping anonymous lest her career be tainted by the irreverent and non-academic nature of this blog) is deeply spiritual, and simultaneously one of the most inspiring intellectuals I have ever met - something I had heretofore believed impossible. She has a Ph.D. and still beleives that the power of prayer is what got her into grad school.
Growing up I saw Christianity as a religion of intolerance, anti-intellectualism, and oppression. After all - was this not the ideological toolkit used to justify the European domination of half the world? This view began to chip away when I worked at a local church-run food pantry staffed by an integrated Presbyterian congregation in 2003. I began to realize that there were Christians around me who I could really respect, who saw God as a god of tolerance, charity, and compassion.
And then in studying Black history I came face-to-face with the legacy of the Black church. The Civil Rights movement was led in large part by clergy and churches played a crucial role as organizing bases. I read the words and works of men like Martin Luther King and realized that the oppressive nature of the Christian theology I thought I understood could be turned on its head. And I kept hearing about Liberation Theology, which I am still trying to learn more about.
And my Black history professor was a great example of how faith and intelligence can live together. The more I thought about it all the more I began respect the Black Christians I saw around me - at work, in my neighborhood, and at school. Their faith seemed so powerful; the source of so much of the strength that has enabled Black America to survive the endless litany of atrocities visited upon them by White Supremacy.
I have been thinking of attending a church for some time. My professor has promised to take me to a Black church with here sometime, but she can't find one that she likes in the city. After living in New York and South Carolina she finds Cincinnati's African American community to be excessively conservative.
I decided to start with what I was most familiar with. As a small child my family and I sometimes attended New Thought Unity Church, in Walnut Hills. I remember being in Sunday school there coloring pictures of Jesus and eating sugar cookies. I was born in Cincinnati and my family didn't move to the country until I was 8, so after living in Cincinnati for a few years I began to recall dim memories from early childhood of spending time at many places in the city. Church was one of them.
I remembered the Church being a huge Art Deco sanctuary. I also remember there being both Black and white parishioners, a GLBT support group, meditation during services, and my favorite part was the pipe organ. I remember church being crowded with friendly people who were really nice to me as a kid. There always seemed to be lots of other kids; I remember there being at least four Sunday school classes in the basement. It takes my breath away to remember being in integrated Sunday school classes at age 5; a few years later I would be living out in God's country (no pun intended) where open racism was normative and accepted.
When I went back to Unity today the first thing I noticed was that the building was smaller than I remembered. The pastor was different, a woman named Doris now. No one played the pipe organ but a small ensemble played onstage. I counted 12 people who were not white. This was of great interest to me as I recently read sociologist Korie Edwards' article Bring Race to the Center: The Importance of Race in Racially Diverse Religious Organizations. In her article Dr. Edwards argues that while interracial churches pay homage to the goals of integration, they end up being dominated by white leaders, theology, and cultural expression. This is basically because interracial churches end up cow-twoing before white power because white Americans beleive that their whiteness is normal and neutral, while others are deviant: whites are not predisposed - indeed equipped - to contemplate the consequences of their being raced in any way. The result ends up being non-white parishioners using their knowledge of the dominant culture to get along in church in what is essentially a white-run organization.
Unity did indeed seem pretty white to me. The music was New Agey and included a stock version of the shopworn R&B hit Ain't Nothin' Like The Real Thing. In keeping with the tenets of the New Thought movement the service was filled with affirmative prayer. The sermon was about how parishioners should meditate on the idea that no one or no thing stands in their way. I went to the bookstore/ lending library after services and perused the literature. I found Deepak Chopra's Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Isaac Asimov's Guide to The Bible, The Book of Mormon, How Alcoholics Anonymous Failed Me, The Celestine Prophecy, When God was a Woman, Aliens Among Us, Angels Among Us, the works of medieval Islamic philosopher Khalil Gibran, the best-selling novel Ishamel, Chakra Therapy, Joshua, and in the end I checked out The Book of Sufi Healing.
I figured this would be a decent place to start this archeology of spirituality/personal/intellectual history. I have had terrible health problems for the last six or seven years and I am beginning to explore faith as a path to improving my physical woes. I had to overcome a lot of reservations to do so, but being spiritually healthier seems like it would be nice, there doesn't seem to be much to lose, and it's free - unlike the alternative health cures that maxed out my American Express card.
I recognized lots of the books at New Thought Unity from books that I remember my parents reading. I realized after reading their website how much Unity's ideas shaped the ideas that my parents espoused when I was small. They really bought into the program it seems.
And I realized that the sun may be setting on that paradigm. The congregation seemed smaller than I remember it being and only a handful of children were present. The nice lady tending the bookshop told me that they have been downsizing the book selection because of competition from major chains and the internet. "This used to be the best holistic bookstore in the city...", she lamented. And the strange thing is that if I try hard enough I can remember that.
Most of the churchgoers I saw were grey-haired white folks, probably a lot like my parents I realized. I wondered if the church has had much success attracting young people, and then I thought about the their book collection. Most of the books were two or three decades old. They represent the ideas from the alternative spirituality movement of my parents' generation - much like the late New World Bookshop which closed down a few years ago in Clifton. I remember watching that bookstore die and realizing that it was part of a sea change - the end of an era - for both the neighborhood and American culture. Clifton was gentrifying, the book industry had been fallen victim to an uber-competitive near-oligopoly run by a few major corporate chains, and no one was buying New World's dated selection of books on health foods, spirituality, and other 70's-ish themes.
The other thing I thought a lot about is that I remember my parents being nervous about the neighborhood Unity is in. Granted Walnut Hills can be pretty sketchy. I used to live there - I oughtta know. I remember a lot of crack, violent crime, boarded-up buildings, and theft. So here is this church filled with aging white baby boomers in the middle of a mostly poor, mostly black neighborhood. And their services are filled with mantras of self-realization, and the path to the inner self via meditation, etc. I saw a lot of nice cars in the church parking lot. I remember my parents nervously instructing us to lock all the doors when we got out of the car there.
So I wondered where is the community outreach? I read an article in the Herald - the local Black paper - about a church member, a retired fireman, who volunteers in a mentoring program with at-risk youth. He sounded like an aweseome guy. But I saw scant evidence of the church as a whole being oriented in that direction. I know there are at least two food-pantries in Walnut Hills; Unity could be involved if they wanted. I know there are hungry people within a few blocks of the church, not to mention the anomaly of a mostly-white church in a mostly Black neighborhood. Cincinnati is really segregated and if I join a church I want to be part of a congregation that is fighting to change that.
Sometimes I feel like the ideological strains that were prominent in my parents' youth promoted a lot of selfishness. The hippie path to spiritual self-discovery and self-expression degenerated quickly sometimes into a narcissistic drug culture. My family is no exception: we are rife with dry alcoholics, ex-pill addicts, burned-out stoners, and the like. I have a homeless junkie cousin whose fate I believe to be largely a function of how strung out his parents were when he was a kid.
I appreciate the power of meditation and the inner path to enlightenment, but it seemed weird to me to be in church with so many middle-class white people in a poor Black neighborhood and to know that little to no relationship exists with the community. Parishioners drive in aboard their Volvos, lock the doors, hurry across the street, and barricade themselves inside for worship.
Surely this is not what Jesus wanted.
And it seems that for whatever reasons few people my age find Unity as attractive as I remember it being in the late 80's.
So my question now is where is the church of racial healing, community service, environmental sanity, political justice, and meaningful social inclusion?
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