My Search for the Holy - Sep 2020
Much of my life has been a searching for God, for the divine.
At six years old, I received a certificate for perfect attendance at Sunday School. I thank my parents for introducing me to church which, fortunately, was not a foreign land to me when I came back to it as an adult, not alien, as it seems to be for the “unchurched,” people who have had no involvement with a religion.
At eight, I devoured the graphic comic-style stories of the missionaries and martyrs who faced extreme dangers. The horror of some being cut in half vertically fascinated me. At that age, I put God to the test, bargaining that I would believe in God’s existence if God allowed me to see my captive caterpillars create their cocoons. Next morning, I woke to see the miraculous transformation. Even before I learned that the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly is a symbol of resurrection, it held promise for me that I might change into something more beautiful and less mundane.
But, as an adolescent, in our youth group with an inexperienced student minister, my questioning and increasingly skeptical mind led me to ask whether the virgin birth was an attempt to disguise not knowing who Jesus’ father was. The teenage boys snickered and the student minister stumbled awkwardly in his response.
As a young person planning to pursue science, I felt religion should be examined with a skeptical mind because its apparently comforting answers to the meaning of life and death are what our human minds long for. God, and church, became no longer part of my life. In college, when I arrived in Rome as part of a summer archeology course, my first evening there, on an exploratory walk, I entered a Catholic church. The dim light, the smell of incense, the relics of bone and bloody sponge, the statues of saints and emphasis on the Virgin Mary were so alien to the Protestant United Church of Canada that had been my childhood experience. Seeing religious art in museums – St Sebastian with arrows protruding from all over his body, I felt so ignorant of my European cultural and religious background that I wanted to quit university and immerse myself in studying the history of humankind from our earliest times.
After graduating university and again traveling in Europe, I traveled to Japan where the Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples intrigued me. But God and faith were not a part of my life until after I had flown to London specifically for an interview that would have opened a career. I knew on leaving the interview that it had not gone well. Several days later, seeing Anglican priests in silhouette processing towards their church on a hillside in England, I strongly wanted to run to them to ask their help but held myself back, perhaps realizing I could not formulate the question to ask for the help I needed.
I began 2 ½ years of traveling alone in Europe and Asia. Some 15 months of that time I was in India, again intrigued by Hindu temples and Moslem mosques so that hearing the Islamic call to prayer still evokes strong memories of that time. In northern India, I encountered a Benedictine monk who had incorporated aspects of Hinduism into his worship, appreciating the similar use of incense in Catholicism and Hinduism. That extended time of traveling alone was motivated by my inability to commit to marriage with a man who loved me. In northern India a self-taught medical missionary invited me to join him and two young male travelers living on a houseboat in Kashmir and tending to sick Muslims. His intention was to save my soul while I accepted wanting to grow a better soul, one that would not inflect pain on others.
I welcomed our paddling to leper villages to treat the people but when the medical missionary, Isaac, told us to wear sandals there as a sign of our faith, I left it foolhardy to put my health and God to the test. I wore my hiking boots.
When it became apparent to me that I had to sacrifice my individuality and questioning to become “one in the spirit” as Isaac required, I left the mountain hut where we had gone and walked down the mountain with Isaac’s last words ringing in my ears “If you leave you will lose all memory of ever having been touched by the spirit and will become a ‘dead’ woman.” Now, back in North America, I recognize the tactics of a cult leader but, alone on the far side of the world from family and friends, I had to muster my courage to take the risk to leave. Half way down the mountain, I stopped to rest under a pine tree and felt the presence of the Holy Spirit assuring me that I had made the right decision. That sheltering evergreen inspired the first line of my version of the Lord’s prayer years later when Rev Mark, after a study group on John Dominic Crossan’s The Greatest Prayer,” invited and challenged us to write our own version of the prayer that Jesus taught.
Years later, living in New York City, I began attending a nearby Episcopal Church less for the worship services than for the half-hour study sessions preceding worship, led by a professor from Fordham University. To illustrate how differently language is used in different parts of the Bible, he pointed out that “I’m going to kill you!” has very different meanings uttered by a friend who sees you after you’ve been distant a long time, compared to a criminal robbing you at gunpoint in a back lane.
Fast-forward again to Hamilton and my living in Guatemala and my fascination with the celebration of blood, sacrifice and suffering that I found embedded in both the Mayan heritage and in the Spanish Catholic tradition. Throughout Lent there, I photographed the processions with their somber music. They became larger and more elaborate, approaching the climax of Good Friday. Easter’s white and gold celebration of the Resurrection was a startlingly pale anti-climax.
When Hamilton and I returned to the US and found a place to live in Bennington, it was he who suggested, one Sunday morning, that we go to church. Our plan was to start with the nearest church and shop around on following Sundays. But Mary Lee-Clark’s sermon blew me away with her incorporating her personal stories as well as her bringing in both modern thinkers and influences from other religions. And the friendly welcome, beginning with Ginny Irwin greeting us after the service, led to our abandoning church-shopping and returning to Second Congregational week after week.
My involvement with church as a passive recipient changed when Tom Steffen phoned one evening and asked me to become a member of the Board of Education. I felt surprised but honored to be asked. My six years in that board helped get me involved in the working of our church…my first active role in “being church” rather than just attending Sunday services.
Someone asked me to take part in the Antiques Show, selling tickets at the door, where my newness to Second Congo was emphasized by a long-time church member coming up to me at the ticket table and asking “And who are you?”
The next year, I was asked to sell tickets for the Quilt Raffle. Plunging in with the intensity of having a project to manage and with a newbie’s enthusiasm, I photographed myself in a vintage dress with the quilt spread on our bed. I made tickets using my mother’s tiny portable singer sewing machine to punch the holes, until Anita Bellin rebuked me for abusing a vintage portable machine that quilters would treasure. I wrote an article for the Banner and took it to the newsroom with the photograph. I sold tickets to people lined up for the Bennington Battle Day parade. After the Antiques Show, I made cards with photos of the quilt which I sent to people in our church to thank them.
After the quilt raffle year, the Antiques Show was approaching when the co-chair suddenly left town. I happened to approach NancyJean, the other co-chair, as she stood talking with other women in the church hallway. I had a small favor to ask her and she replied, “I’ll do that if you will co-chair the Antiques Show with me” (a hugely more significant request than mine of her!) I thought about it for only a moment and decided it was an opportunity to learn from NancyJean, who I admired for her abilities to organize and get things done. When I accepted, one of the other women made a comment how they “would burn (me) out before long.” I decided then and there that I would not let fear of that keep me from involvement in projects where I could learn and grow. But, defiantly, I would also avoid burning myself out; I would choose what to get involved with and not feel obliged to take on everything I was asked to. (This helped me resist when a church member urged me to replace her on a committee that met in northern Vermont; I realized I did not want to drive great distances to attend meetings.)
My responsibility as co-chair was food… planning the menu based on the previous years’ dining hall, buying supplies and recruiting people to work in the kitchen and dining hall.
After a few years, when no one was willing to take on being head planner for the Antiques Show, I realized I, too, was not. With some sadness from church women for whom it was a tradition, our church stopped hosting it – a relief for many from a huge project that each year happened only a few months prior to the church’s other huge project, the Snowball Bazaar.
Recruited to help in the “Serendipity” huge tag sale that is part of our church’s annual Snowball Bazaar, Hamilton and I both began the pattern in which each year, during the week of preparations leading up to the bazaar, we sort, clean and price items. Hamilton picks up donations in his “vintage” 1996 Dodge Ram truck and washed a huge number of donated items. During the sale Friday night and Saturday, we act as “floaters” moving from one room to the next, making sure “Serendipity” cashiers have change and also bags for packing purchases. I enjoy the bazaar especially because of our church family working, lunching and joking together and because of my sister Mary coming from western Canada to “play store” as well as have sisters’ time together. One year I found a vintage swim suit amongst the donations and could not resist wearing it the next day over leotards (since moths had eaten holes in the wool fabric), occasioning one of many moments of hilarity amongst bazaar workers over the years. After my six years on the Board of Christian Education, when I had to leave the board, Gay Burke asked if I would become a Deacon. I had to decline because Hamilton and I were considering moving to Burlington, on the advice of a family member. It took a depressing visit to Burlington for us to realize that, whatever benefits that city had, we had begun to put down roots in Bennington and in our church and did not want to yank them out.
Hamilton became a deacon, assisting with worship services and “member care” (keeping aware of congregation members facing challenges and having a specific homebound person he undertook to visit regularly). He invited me along on his visits and, after that person died, Hamilton began helping an elderly neighbor who was part of our congregation, becoming “her Deacon,” and taking me along for visits and to give what help I could. When I became a Deacon a few years later, she became my homebound person, first in her home and later at CLR. As a member of the Board of Deacons, I served as co-chair and then chair.
I had thought I’d be best suited to the Board of Missions but have not served on that, instead being involved with organizing our church’s participation in mission activities including Ski for Heat and the Crop Walk. I was one of those helping Pat Haines with Kits of the Heart for several years and, when she felt she needed to retire from that, she asked me to take over leading our Health (Hygiene) Kit endeavor. I first met Pat in the Questers group which met Wednesday mornings, with Mary Lee-Clark leading, to watch videos (later DVDs) on religious questions and then to discuss them.
I undertook to organize our church’s participation in the Crop Hunger Walk not only because SCC needed someone to do it but also because I have seen so many needy people in the third world. People from various Bennington faith communities walked either six or one-mile loops to raise awareness of, and money for, people in third world countries who have to walk long distances for clean water, food, shelter or to escape violence. Other folks sponsor the walkers by pledging money. In order that walkers don't have to do the soliciting themselves, I put up the names of walkers on the wall at the front of Webster Hall, on "feet" cut out of construction paper so that others in the church see who is walking and can offer to sponsor them.
To promote the Crop Walk in a pre-worship announcement, one year I painted the letters for CROPWALK in red letters on 8 big sheets of paper and recruited 8 people to carry a letter apiece. Each person said one word of the sentence "Loving Kindness And Real Caring Overcome World Problems." Each person read the word that begins with the letter they held and then went to stand on their letter which I had previously placed strategically on the carpet of the chancel... so, the one holding "L" reading "Loving" and then went to stand on the letter L. Letter by letter the word "CROPWALK" emerged.
One year the participants included an 11-year-old girl who had raised the most of anyone in our church the previous year; a 1-year-old whose parents took her around saying that if everyone in the congregation would give one dollar, her "walk" could really make a difference; a woman who has had repeated back surgery; a man who had a knee replacement; a woman who is almost 90; our pastor and our pastor emeritus. After the walk some people would come back to the church for the delicious Macintosh apples Hamilton and I had picked the day before from Terry’s orchard whose manager donated a bushel to support our Crop Walk.
After I expressed an interest in the Women’s Fellowship Mission Committee, I was told they had enough people on that committee but would I join Pat Haines and Marge LaRowe on the program committee. Pat’s creative mind came up with novel program ideas, including the ambitious 1999 “Fashion Show of the Century.” Members of the congregation lent and/or wore garments dating from as far back as the nineteenth century (the gown which Daryl Callirgos wore as emcee). Some garments were too fragile to be worn and I was struggling with how to display them when NancyJean came through Webster Hall and stopped to ask me if I could use her help. This kind offer epitomizes the spirit of Second Congo – helping each other, especially people new to the church or to leadership roles so that they can succeed as well as enjoy the project. In the fashion show, Lou Dana wore his military uniform and Alex Lee-Clark, a young teenager, wore the slender military uniform of another SCC member. Hamilton, wearing a 1970s baby blue polyester leisure suit escorted Katherine Marsden who wore her honeymoon “going away” pink silk suit from the 1940s.
One summer Hamilton and I were involved with teaching Vacation Bible School in the mornings. We had the "B" or middle group (in age) which chose the name bulldozers for themselves (well-named, since by far the most rambunctious group). Hamilton was their crew leader and a number of his new little friends often came to him for help. We discovered that these 6-year-olds just loved getting costumed and enacting the bible stories. One involved Hamilton getting on his knees to be the donkey while another rode on him. Another boy claimed that his grandfather was the oldest person in the world -- Hamilton figured the kid must think of Hamilton as Methuselah.
The Halloween that Ernie Tetrault created the Spookfest at our church, we helped transform the classrooms into a maze, a "witches’ forest" and other spooky environments. In the evening, when we guided people through the haunted house, I wore a black and gold "spider" mask and a red "pixie" dress, but Hamilton was the sensation - he wore one of my skirts and a blonde wig that I'd bought at the discount store for $3 and used in a community play.
Our church began hosting Sunday suppers for folks in need. Hamilton and I became members of the “Bluebird” team, which along with the “Roaring Chickens,” are the two SCC teams making Sunday suppers. Like the others on our team, we shop and cook and clean up afterwards. Hamilton mans the dishwasher after this community supper and, one Sunday a month, does dishes for the Social Hour following worship. We are involved with the environmental group Earth Advocates and our church’s summer festival Sun and Fun.
Getting back to our church after a vacation is often a little like getting back to the office and finding your inbox full of tasks that had piled up for you. Once, getting home, I had the current newsletter to put on-line and I learned I was chosen at the Deacons' meeting (that I’d missed) to co-chair.
In 2009, Hamilton and I were both involved in the renovation of our church's sanctuary. I photographed individual panels of the 1986 quilt in the sanctuary which was ceremoniously taken down before renovations began, then cleaned and stored. NJ asked me to photograph and make prints of the quilt's individual panels (the photos to be kept in a book where folks could look at them after the actual quilt is stored). Hamilton worked with other volunteers to dismantle pews and other sanctuary furniture before the reconstruction. I made photos of the dismantling and rebuilding. Saturday March 29 was a big event as church members gathered to move dismantled pews out of the church and up to the storage truck in the upper parking lot. The same day, in Webster Hall, the blue chairs were vacuumed and washed and set out for the worship service Sunday, the youth group were practicing to lead the service, and folks were enjoying the sandwiches, coffee and cakes provided for after the work. We had worship services in Webster Hall until the renovations were complete. I made a web album as well as a display for the celebration November 9 in the renovated sanctuary (for which I was in the handbell choir playing some 5 energetic pieces).
After reading an invitation in the Open Door for folks to join the handbell choir, I had gone to the church on a rehearsal evening and peeked in from the Room 2 door. “Don’t just stand there. Come in,” NancyJean told me. Not having been a musician, I grooved on playing my four notes which, combined with everyone else’s, made (at times) glorious music.
Our church handbell choir, under the direction of NancyJean Steffen, later Cindy Riddle, John Riddle and then Sue Green, went to numerous Spring Rings in April where we rang in rehearsal and in concert with some thousand other bell ringers all under the direction of talented conductors. We rang Christmas pieces outdoors for the National Christmas Tree's passing through Bennington (although we found that the cold made our bells ring off-key) and for folks in the nursing home. Each year we ring on Christmas Eve for the service in church. One Christmas eve Mary spoke of the Christ child being born within us – that concept hit me powerfully.
Singing with the gospel choir, I contribute enthusiasm if not always the correct pitch.
Our church exercise group was started by a woman who had congenital lung problems and needed to exercise regularly. Several times she invited me to join the group but I resisted because I thought exercise for seniors would be too easy for me. When I did try out the group, I found you can put as much energy as you want into the exercises. The conversation, even gossip, filled me in on happenings in our church. One day Hamilton and I started out by car together, first stop the church... rather than wait, he came and did the exercises with NJ, Nancy and Trudy and me. He felt it limbered him... the gals happy to have him, conversation not inhibited by a man present and he began attending regularly.
In various volunteer work at our church, I became aware, as did many others, of how difficult it is to fill each of the boards and committees with able and willing volunteers. Also, the names “Cabinet, Board of Deacons and Board of Trustees” not only sound like pieces of wood or furniture, but are institutions from the 19th century. Church leaders decided we should take a careful look at what functions the church needs done by laypeople and how could we re-organize the committees to make the best use of volunteers' scarce time and energy. Restructuring of our church organization eliminated most of the virtual pieces of furniture and replaced them with “the Administrative Council, the Ministries Council and committees. 12-member boards became the smaller Mission Committee and Christian Education was concentrated in the individual co-ordinator of CE. When I was asked to become of our church’s adult Christian Education program, a speaker I arranged to address folks at our monthly fellowship lunch spoke on the topic of “How seniors can avoid being victimized by fraud.”
At one point, Mary Lee-Clark became concerned about our becoming a female-run church (the pastor, organist/accompanist, and choir director all being w
omen and most of the Deacons as well. An effort was made to recruit more men to leadership positions.
This doing and relating to people in our church became a pattern independent of my faith or non-faith in God. My church became my community, my church family, a variety of people of different ages and backgrounds who came together in a multitude of combinations – weekly to worship using words and music we hold in common, and also in projects and mission work.
However, besides many Martha-esque activities, a powerful “Mary” experience for me was participating in Laity Empowerment Training. Lay people of the congregation met to learn from a study guide, as a whole group, and in small “breakout” groups of three people where we shared our spiritual journeys. This experience let me cross the barrier to being able to pray out loud in front of other people.
When I first had an announcement to make before worship, I was nervous ahead of time but as soon as I realized that my getting the message across was more important than my nervousness about being judged, I focused on conveying the message and, over time, my nervousness lessened. Similarly, when I first led the "Time for the Children in all of us," there were so many kids that I became engrossed in the interchange with them, including remembering their names, and forgot to be nervous. Also, there was no room for me on the steps leading to the cancel so I had to sit on the floor in front of them.
After this, I was able to offer prayer in Deacons ‘meetings and other groups, to lead worship occasionally together with the Eaarth Advocates group or by myself, and twice to offer the message/sermon in worship.
I attended a class Jane Norrie offered on prayer and meditation through the senses – she had shells, rocks and beads laid out on the sofa (meditation by touch); incense she lit and rosewater that she squirted (smell) and horseradish and honey which she invited us to put onto crackers (taste). With music adding sound to the mix, I was afraid it would be a sensory overload, but no, it was more like a bouquet of sensations anchoring me in the present, (even if the horseradish was so intense that it clashed with the taste of the cracker, leading me to lick it off and leave my cracker uneaten). Someone chose the sea urchin that would have been my first choice to feel; I rubbed and stroked a sand dollar. I was powerfully drawn to Lenten Taize services. A small group of eight or so of us would sit in a circle up in the chancel, Mary playing the piano. Named for a village in France where the monks started the tradition of repetitive singing of a mantra-like song, Taize appealed to me especially because of the chants, simple words repeated over and over, with evocative melodies. With more silence than in a traditional church service, I responded to the total effect being more emotional than intellectual.
My self-consciousness about my voice in such a small group inhibited me from singing these compelling chants right out loud as my spirit wanted to do, but I started going each Lent to the Taize services at the Catholic church, where each chant would begin with one instrument and progress with more instruments and choral voices joining to make a glorious swelling of praise or entreaty. I discovered I could find a pew at the extreme front left where I could sing without fear of my voice intruding on the rest of the congregation who, every year, remain silent, even though the Sacred Heart/Saint Francis choir director and organist invited everyone to sing.
I have always felt uncomfortable with the ritual/sacrament of communion – perhaps embarrassed by the open expression of faith in the mystical transforming of bread and wine. My attitude perplexes me since I value symbolism and chose to incorporate a number of symbolic elements into the marriage ceremony which I wrote for Hamilton’s and my wedding in 2005. On a more practical level, trying to assist in doing the sacrament correctly and consistently makes many deacons anxious, as it did me at times, so I had to ask: does God care as long as we do it reverently.... maybe better to relax and tune into the mystery rather than obsess about making a mistake.
Many Sunday evenings I went to “Bible Conversations” led by Bruce Lee-Clark at their home. From the selection of herbal teas, I usually chose licorice spice. Often conversations became deep as we stood in the kitchen preparing our tea. Mary usually joined us unless she had had a very tiring Sunday. The discussion around the dining table was usually stimulating enough that I felt glad to have attended. Bruce liked to put an unexpected twist on his interpretation of scripture. About Jesus: “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” Bruce said that Jesus turned the tables on the Pharisees when he asked them to show him a coin with Caesar's image. About the “Good Samaritan” it was the significance of Samaritan’s being considered inferior to Jews, the injured Jew having to realize his debt of gratitude to the Samaritan who helped him, someone he was accustomed to regarding as beneath himself. Years ago, my friend Theresa had noted that I, too, tend to come at an issue from an angle different from most other people and Mary Lee-Clark has also observed my oblique angle thinking.
In the fall of 2019, our pastor Mark Blank and I organized a 6-week reading and discussion group on “The Greatest Prayer,” a detailed and scholarly analysis of the Lord’s Prayer. Pastor Mark invited/challenged participants to write their own version of the prayer to be read during worship in the spring. I began composing mine on the walk home that evening.
To the question “If you had to stake your life on the existence of God or God’s non-existence, which would you choose …. I want to do the former even as I sometimes pray, “God, be Thou there/ be Thou real.”
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At six years old, I received a certificate for perfect attendance at Sunday School. I thank my parents for introducing me to church which, fortunately, was not a foreign land to me when I came back to it as an adult, not alien, as it seems to be for the “unchurched,” people who have had no involvement with a religion.
At eight, I devoured the graphic comic-style stories of the missionaries and martyrs who faced extreme dangers. The horror of some being cut in half vertically fascinated me. At that age, I put God to the test, bargaining that I would believe in God’s existence if God allowed me to see my captive caterpillars create their cocoons. Next morning, I woke to see the miraculous transformation. Even before I learned that the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly is a symbol of resurrection, it held promise for me that I might change into something more beautiful and less mundane.
But, as an adolescent, in our youth group with an inexperienced student minister, my questioning and increasingly skeptical mind led me to ask whether the virgin birth was an attempt to disguise not knowing who Jesus’ father was. The teenage boys snickered and the student minister stumbled awkwardly in his response.
As a young person planning to pursue science, I felt religion should be examined with a skeptical mind because its apparently comforting answers to the meaning of life and death are what our human minds long for. God, and church, became no longer part of my life. In college, when I arrived in Rome as part of a summer archeology course, my first evening there, on an exploratory walk, I entered a Catholic church. The dim light, the smell of incense, the relics of bone and bloody sponge, the statues of saints and emphasis on the Virgin Mary were so alien to the Protestant United Church of Canada that had been my childhood experience. Seeing religious art in museums – St Sebastian with arrows protruding from all over his body, I felt so ignorant of my European cultural and religious background that I wanted to quit university and immerse myself in studying the history of humankind from our earliest times.
After graduating university and again traveling in Europe, I traveled to Japan where the Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples intrigued me. But God and faith were not a part of my life until after I had flown to London specifically for an interview that would have opened a career. I knew on leaving the interview that it had not gone well. Several days later, seeing Anglican priests in silhouette processing towards their church on a hillside in England, I strongly wanted to run to them to ask their help but held myself back, perhaps realizing I could not formulate the question to ask for the help I needed.
I began 2 ½ years of traveling alone in Europe and Asia. Some 15 months of that time I was in India, again intrigued by Hindu temples and Moslem mosques so that hearing the Islamic call to prayer still evokes strong memories of that time. In northern India, I encountered a Benedictine monk who had incorporated aspects of Hinduism into his worship, appreciating the similar use of incense in Catholicism and Hinduism. That extended time of traveling alone was motivated by my inability to commit to marriage with a man who loved me. In northern India a self-taught medical missionary invited me to join him and two young male travelers living on a houseboat in Kashmir and tending to sick Muslims. His intention was to save my soul while I accepted wanting to grow a better soul, one that would not inflect pain on others.
I welcomed our paddling to leper villages to treat the people but when the medical missionary, Isaac, told us to wear sandals there as a sign of our faith, I left it foolhardy to put my health and God to the test. I wore my hiking boots.
When it became apparent to me that I had to sacrifice my individuality and questioning to become “one in the spirit” as Isaac required, I left the mountain hut where we had gone and walked down the mountain with Isaac’s last words ringing in my ears “If you leave you will lose all memory of ever having been touched by the spirit and will become a ‘dead’ woman.” Now, back in North America, I recognize the tactics of a cult leader but, alone on the far side of the world from family and friends, I had to muster my courage to take the risk to leave. Half way down the mountain, I stopped to rest under a pine tree and felt the presence of the Holy Spirit assuring me that I had made the right decision. That sheltering evergreen inspired the first line of my version of the Lord’s prayer years later when Rev Mark, after a study group on John Dominic Crossan’s The Greatest Prayer,” invited and challenged us to write our own version of the prayer that Jesus taught.
Years later, living in New York City, I began attending a nearby Episcopal Church less for the worship services than for the half-hour study sessions preceding worship, led by a professor from Fordham University. To illustrate how differently language is used in different parts of the Bible, he pointed out that “I’m going to kill you!” has very different meanings uttered by a friend who sees you after you’ve been distant a long time, compared to a criminal robbing you at gunpoint in a back lane.
Fast-forward again to Hamilton and my living in Guatemala and my fascination with the celebration of blood, sacrifice and suffering that I found embedded in both the Mayan heritage and in the Spanish Catholic tradition. Throughout Lent there, I photographed the processions with their somber music. They became larger and more elaborate, approaching the climax of Good Friday. Easter’s white and gold celebration of the Resurrection was a startlingly pale anti-climax.
When Hamilton and I returned to the US and found a place to live in Bennington, it was he who suggested, one Sunday morning, that we go to church. Our plan was to start with the nearest church and shop around on following Sundays. But Mary Lee-Clark’s sermon blew me away with her incorporating her personal stories as well as her bringing in both modern thinkers and influences from other religions. And the friendly welcome, beginning with Ginny Irwin greeting us after the service, led to our abandoning church-shopping and returning to Second Congregational week after week.
My involvement with church as a passive recipient changed when Tom Steffen phoned one evening and asked me to become a member of the Board of Education. I felt surprised but honored to be asked. My six years in that board helped get me involved in the working of our church…my first active role in “being church” rather than just attending Sunday services.
Someone asked me to take part in the Antiques Show, selling tickets at the door, where my newness to Second Congo was emphasized by a long-time church member coming up to me at the ticket table and asking “And who are you?”
The next year, I was asked to sell tickets for the Quilt Raffle. Plunging in with the intensity of having a project to manage and with a newbie’s enthusiasm, I photographed myself in a vintage dress with the quilt spread on our bed. I made tickets using my mother’s tiny portable singer sewing machine to punch the holes, until Anita Bellin rebuked me for abusing a vintage portable machine that quilters would treasure. I wrote an article for the Banner and took it to the newsroom with the photograph. I sold tickets to people lined up for the Bennington Battle Day parade. After the Antiques Show, I made cards with photos of the quilt which I sent to people in our church to thank them.
After the quilt raffle year, the Antiques Show was approaching when the co-chair suddenly left town. I happened to approach NancyJean, the other co-chair, as she stood talking with other women in the church hallway. I had a small favor to ask her and she replied, “I’ll do that if you will co-chair the Antiques Show with me” (a hugely more significant request than mine of her!) I thought about it for only a moment and decided it was an opportunity to learn from NancyJean, who I admired for her abilities to organize and get things done. When I accepted, one of the other women made a comment how they “would burn (me) out before long.” I decided then and there that I would not let fear of that keep me from involvement in projects where I could learn and grow. But, defiantly, I would also avoid burning myself out; I would choose what to get involved with and not feel obliged to take on everything I was asked to. (This helped me resist when a church member urged me to replace her on a committee that met in northern Vermont; I realized I did not want to drive great distances to attend meetings.)
My responsibility as co-chair was food… planning the menu based on the previous years’ dining hall, buying supplies and recruiting people to work in the kitchen and dining hall.
After a few years, when no one was willing to take on being head planner for the Antiques Show, I realized I, too, was not. With some sadness from church women for whom it was a tradition, our church stopped hosting it – a relief for many from a huge project that each year happened only a few months prior to the church’s other huge project, the Snowball Bazaar.
Recruited to help in the “Serendipity” huge tag sale that is part of our church’s annual Snowball Bazaar, Hamilton and I both began the pattern in which each year, during the week of preparations leading up to the bazaar, we sort, clean and price items. Hamilton picks up donations in his “vintage” 1996 Dodge Ram truck and washed a huge number of donated items. During the sale Friday night and Saturday, we act as “floaters” moving from one room to the next, making sure “Serendipity” cashiers have change and also bags for packing purchases. I enjoy the bazaar especially because of our church family working, lunching and joking together and because of my sister Mary coming from western Canada to “play store” as well as have sisters’ time together. One year I found a vintage swim suit amongst the donations and could not resist wearing it the next day over leotards (since moths had eaten holes in the wool fabric), occasioning one of many moments of hilarity amongst bazaar workers over the years. After my six years on the Board of Christian Education, when I had to leave the board, Gay Burke asked if I would become a Deacon. I had to decline because Hamilton and I were considering moving to Burlington, on the advice of a family member. It took a depressing visit to Burlington for us to realize that, whatever benefits that city had, we had begun to put down roots in Bennington and in our church and did not want to yank them out.
Hamilton became a deacon, assisting with worship services and “member care” (keeping aware of congregation members facing challenges and having a specific homebound person he undertook to visit regularly). He invited me along on his visits and, after that person died, Hamilton began helping an elderly neighbor who was part of our congregation, becoming “her Deacon,” and taking me along for visits and to give what help I could. When I became a Deacon a few years later, she became my homebound person, first in her home and later at CLR. As a member of the Board of Deacons, I served as co-chair and then chair.
I had thought I’d be best suited to the Board of Missions but have not served on that, instead being involved with organizing our church’s participation in mission activities including Ski for Heat and the Crop Walk. I was one of those helping Pat Haines with Kits of the Heart for several years and, when she felt she needed to retire from that, she asked me to take over leading our Health (Hygiene) Kit endeavor. I first met Pat in the Questers group which met Wednesday mornings, with Mary Lee-Clark leading, to watch videos (later DVDs) on religious questions and then to discuss them.
I undertook to organize our church’s participation in the Crop Hunger Walk not only because SCC needed someone to do it but also because I have seen so many needy people in the third world. People from various Bennington faith communities walked either six or one-mile loops to raise awareness of, and money for, people in third world countries who have to walk long distances for clean water, food, shelter or to escape violence. Other folks sponsor the walkers by pledging money. In order that walkers don't have to do the soliciting themselves, I put up the names of walkers on the wall at the front of Webster Hall, on "feet" cut out of construction paper so that others in the church see who is walking and can offer to sponsor them.
To promote the Crop Walk in a pre-worship announcement, one year I painted the letters for CROPWALK in red letters on 8 big sheets of paper and recruited 8 people to carry a letter apiece. Each person said one word of the sentence "Loving Kindness And Real Caring Overcome World Problems." Each person read the word that begins with the letter they held and then went to stand on their letter which I had previously placed strategically on the carpet of the chancel... so, the one holding "L" reading "Loving" and then went to stand on the letter L. Letter by letter the word "CROPWALK" emerged.
One year the participants included an 11-year-old girl who had raised the most of anyone in our church the previous year; a 1-year-old whose parents took her around saying that if everyone in the congregation would give one dollar, her "walk" could really make a difference; a woman who has had repeated back surgery; a man who had a knee replacement; a woman who is almost 90; our pastor and our pastor emeritus. After the walk some people would come back to the church for the delicious Macintosh apples Hamilton and I had picked the day before from Terry’s orchard whose manager donated a bushel to support our Crop Walk.
After I expressed an interest in the Women’s Fellowship Mission Committee, I was told they had enough people on that committee but would I join Pat Haines and Marge LaRowe on the program committee. Pat’s creative mind came up with novel program ideas, including the ambitious 1999 “Fashion Show of the Century.” Members of the congregation lent and/or wore garments dating from as far back as the nineteenth century (the gown which Daryl Callirgos wore as emcee). Some garments were too fragile to be worn and I was struggling with how to display them when NancyJean came through Webster Hall and stopped to ask me if I could use her help. This kind offer epitomizes the spirit of Second Congo – helping each other, especially people new to the church or to leadership roles so that they can succeed as well as enjoy the project. In the fashion show, Lou Dana wore his military uniform and Alex Lee-Clark, a young teenager, wore the slender military uniform of another SCC member. Hamilton, wearing a 1970s baby blue polyester leisure suit escorted Katherine Marsden who wore her honeymoon “going away” pink silk suit from the 1940s.
One summer Hamilton and I were involved with teaching Vacation Bible School in the mornings. We had the "B" or middle group (in age) which chose the name bulldozers for themselves (well-named, since by far the most rambunctious group). Hamilton was their crew leader and a number of his new little friends often came to him for help. We discovered that these 6-year-olds just loved getting costumed and enacting the bible stories. One involved Hamilton getting on his knees to be the donkey while another rode on him. Another boy claimed that his grandfather was the oldest person in the world -- Hamilton figured the kid must think of Hamilton as Methuselah.
The Halloween that Ernie Tetrault created the Spookfest at our church, we helped transform the classrooms into a maze, a "witches’ forest" and other spooky environments. In the evening, when we guided people through the haunted house, I wore a black and gold "spider" mask and a red "pixie" dress, but Hamilton was the sensation - he wore one of my skirts and a blonde wig that I'd bought at the discount store for $3 and used in a community play.
Our church began hosting Sunday suppers for folks in need. Hamilton and I became members of the “Bluebird” team, which along with the “Roaring Chickens,” are the two SCC teams making Sunday suppers. Like the others on our team, we shop and cook and clean up afterwards. Hamilton mans the dishwasher after this community supper and, one Sunday a month, does dishes for the Social Hour following worship. We are involved with the environmental group Earth Advocates and our church’s summer festival Sun and Fun.
Getting back to our church after a vacation is often a little like getting back to the office and finding your inbox full of tasks that had piled up for you. Once, getting home, I had the current newsletter to put on-line and I learned I was chosen at the Deacons' meeting (that I’d missed) to co-chair.
In 2009, Hamilton and I were both involved in the renovation of our church's sanctuary. I photographed individual panels of the 1986 quilt in the sanctuary which was ceremoniously taken down before renovations began, then cleaned and stored. NJ asked me to photograph and make prints of the quilt's individual panels (the photos to be kept in a book where folks could look at them after the actual quilt is stored). Hamilton worked with other volunteers to dismantle pews and other sanctuary furniture before the reconstruction. I made photos of the dismantling and rebuilding. Saturday March 29 was a big event as church members gathered to move dismantled pews out of the church and up to the storage truck in the upper parking lot. The same day, in Webster Hall, the blue chairs were vacuumed and washed and set out for the worship service Sunday, the youth group were practicing to lead the service, and folks were enjoying the sandwiches, coffee and cakes provided for after the work. We had worship services in Webster Hall until the renovations were complete. I made a web album as well as a display for the celebration November 9 in the renovated sanctuary (for which I was in the handbell choir playing some 5 energetic pieces).
After reading an invitation in the Open Door for folks to join the handbell choir, I had gone to the church on a rehearsal evening and peeked in from the Room 2 door. “Don’t just stand there. Come in,” NancyJean told me. Not having been a musician, I grooved on playing my four notes which, combined with everyone else’s, made (at times) glorious music.
Our church handbell choir, under the direction of NancyJean Steffen, later Cindy Riddle, John Riddle and then Sue Green, went to numerous Spring Rings in April where we rang in rehearsal and in concert with some thousand other bell ringers all under the direction of talented conductors. We rang Christmas pieces outdoors for the National Christmas Tree's passing through Bennington (although we found that the cold made our bells ring off-key) and for folks in the nursing home. Each year we ring on Christmas Eve for the service in church. One Christmas eve Mary spoke of the Christ child being born within us – that concept hit me powerfully.
Singing with the gospel choir, I contribute enthusiasm if not always the correct pitch.
Our church exercise group was started by a woman who had congenital lung problems and needed to exercise regularly. Several times she invited me to join the group but I resisted because I thought exercise for seniors would be too easy for me. When I did try out the group, I found you can put as much energy as you want into the exercises. The conversation, even gossip, filled me in on happenings in our church. One day Hamilton and I started out by car together, first stop the church... rather than wait, he came and did the exercises with NJ, Nancy and Trudy and me. He felt it limbered him... the gals happy to have him, conversation not inhibited by a man present and he began attending regularly.
In various volunteer work at our church, I became aware, as did many others, of how difficult it is to fill each of the boards and committees with able and willing volunteers. Also, the names “Cabinet, Board of Deacons and Board of Trustees” not only sound like pieces of wood or furniture, but are institutions from the 19th century. Church leaders decided we should take a careful look at what functions the church needs done by laypeople and how could we re-organize the committees to make the best use of volunteers' scarce time and energy. Restructuring of our church organization eliminated most of the virtual pieces of furniture and replaced them with “the Administrative Council, the Ministries Council and committees. 12-member boards became the smaller Mission Committee and Christian Education was concentrated in the individual co-ordinator of CE. When I was asked to become of our church’s adult Christian Education program, a speaker I arranged to address folks at our monthly fellowship lunch spoke on the topic of “How seniors can avoid being victimized by fraud.”
At one point, Mary Lee-Clark became concerned about our becoming a female-run church (the pastor, organist/accompanist, and choir director all being w
omen and most of the Deacons as well. An effort was made to recruit more men to leadership positions.
This doing and relating to people in our church became a pattern independent of my faith or non-faith in God. My church became my community, my church family, a variety of people of different ages and backgrounds who came together in a multitude of combinations – weekly to worship using words and music we hold in common, and also in projects and mission work.
However, besides many Martha-esque activities, a powerful “Mary” experience for me was participating in Laity Empowerment Training. Lay people of the congregation met to learn from a study guide, as a whole group, and in small “breakout” groups of three people where we shared our spiritual journeys. This experience let me cross the barrier to being able to pray out loud in front of other people.
When I first had an announcement to make before worship, I was nervous ahead of time but as soon as I realized that my getting the message across was more important than my nervousness about being judged, I focused on conveying the message and, over time, my nervousness lessened. Similarly, when I first led the "Time for the Children in all of us," there were so many kids that I became engrossed in the interchange with them, including remembering their names, and forgot to be nervous. Also, there was no room for me on the steps leading to the cancel so I had to sit on the floor in front of them.
After this, I was able to offer prayer in Deacons ‘meetings and other groups, to lead worship occasionally together with the Eaarth Advocates group or by myself, and twice to offer the message/sermon in worship.
I attended a class Jane Norrie offered on prayer and meditation through the senses – she had shells, rocks and beads laid out on the sofa (meditation by touch); incense she lit and rosewater that she squirted (smell) and horseradish and honey which she invited us to put onto crackers (taste). With music adding sound to the mix, I was afraid it would be a sensory overload, but no, it was more like a bouquet of sensations anchoring me in the present, (even if the horseradish was so intense that it clashed with the taste of the cracker, leading me to lick it off and leave my cracker uneaten). Someone chose the sea urchin that would have been my first choice to feel; I rubbed and stroked a sand dollar. I was powerfully drawn to Lenten Taize services. A small group of eight or so of us would sit in a circle up in the chancel, Mary playing the piano. Named for a village in France where the monks started the tradition of repetitive singing of a mantra-like song, Taize appealed to me especially because of the chants, simple words repeated over and over, with evocative melodies. With more silence than in a traditional church service, I responded to the total effect being more emotional than intellectual.
My self-consciousness about my voice in such a small group inhibited me from singing these compelling chants right out loud as my spirit wanted to do, but I started going each Lent to the Taize services at the Catholic church, where each chant would begin with one instrument and progress with more instruments and choral voices joining to make a glorious swelling of praise or entreaty. I discovered I could find a pew at the extreme front left where I could sing without fear of my voice intruding on the rest of the congregation who, every year, remain silent, even though the Sacred Heart/Saint Francis choir director and organist invited everyone to sing.
I have always felt uncomfortable with the ritual/sacrament of communion – perhaps embarrassed by the open expression of faith in the mystical transforming of bread and wine. My attitude perplexes me since I value symbolism and chose to incorporate a number of symbolic elements into the marriage ceremony which I wrote for Hamilton’s and my wedding in 2005. On a more practical level, trying to assist in doing the sacrament correctly and consistently makes many deacons anxious, as it did me at times, so I had to ask: does God care as long as we do it reverently.... maybe better to relax and tune into the mystery rather than obsess about making a mistake.
Many Sunday evenings I went to “Bible Conversations” led by Bruce Lee-Clark at their home. From the selection of herbal teas, I usually chose licorice spice. Often conversations became deep as we stood in the kitchen preparing our tea. Mary usually joined us unless she had had a very tiring Sunday. The discussion around the dining table was usually stimulating enough that I felt glad to have attended. Bruce liked to put an unexpected twist on his interpretation of scripture. About Jesus: “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” Bruce said that Jesus turned the tables on the Pharisees when he asked them to show him a coin with Caesar's image. About the “Good Samaritan” it was the significance of Samaritan’s being considered inferior to Jews, the injured Jew having to realize his debt of gratitude to the Samaritan who helped him, someone he was accustomed to regarding as beneath himself. Years ago, my friend Theresa had noted that I, too, tend to come at an issue from an angle different from most other people and Mary Lee-Clark has also observed my oblique angle thinking.
In the fall of 2019, our pastor Mark Blank and I organized a 6-week reading and discussion group on “The Greatest Prayer,” a detailed and scholarly analysis of the Lord’s Prayer. Pastor Mark invited/challenged participants to write their own version of the prayer to be read during worship in the spring. I began composing mine on the walk home that evening.
To the question “If you had to stake your life on the existence of God or God’s non-existence, which would you choose …. I want to do the former even as I sometimes pray, “God, be Thou there/ be Thou real.”
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