Some early Sunday mornings, when an October morning remains dark for two hours after I’ve risen from my bed and feel cocooned in the warmth of home, I lean into memories of childhood. On an October morning like this one when clouds grey the promise of day and revelation of a first winter storm becomes more than notation in an almanac, pulls from outside my room fly away and pulls from inside myself strengthen. There is no memory from fifty and sixty years ago as clear as that of singing hymns during a church service. Voices raised in harmony; lyrics remembered from Sunday to Sunday and year to year; sounds bounced from baptismal and choir loft to ceiling and walls that protected and bound us to each other. Keep me safe ‘til the storm passes by.
Although these memories feel precious and hold me with arms of love, and I with thankful heart remember people like Mrs. Day and Mr. Swackhammer who were so kind and lived as far as I knew honest lives in the bigger community, my good memories do not press me on these cold, leaden Fall Sunday mornings without the infiltration of other lessons learned. It was inside these walls I was taught that Black people lived forever under an Old Testament curse, consigning them to work less important than our own, to lives in poverty and illness and always on the brink of violence and sin. I was taught that women must be humbly and gratefully subservient to men and authority, that my developing aspirations, my early inquiries could not be realized, that only as an adult could I begin to understand my place in the world outside our church walls. Lyrics such as Beyond the sunset eternal joy taught me to necessarily pursue duty and eschew joy, that happiness is not reached until at death’s door.
I was taught to distrust science, community leaders, all people whose position or fame seemed in opposition to us. I was taught an us/them stance from which I liberally designated enemies and hostile messages, from which I viewed adversarial territories as places to which we must venture with our messages of salvation and liberation. I was taught to keep silent among adults, then among men, then among ministerial authorities. I was taught authoritarianism. I know you are thirsty; you won’t be denied was a promise to which I must extend my singing voice and praying arms knowing that I could be denied because of my gender and future foray into knowledge or experience. I was born the correct race but in the wrong body/mind.
The Truth/Hope/Joy Hierarchy placed me above the Black woman who took care of us when a baby sister was born in 1957 and the Black students who I met for the first time as people my age in junior high school but rarely saw again after eighth or ninth grade and the single brown family that denounced their Catholic faith to worship with us three times a week; however, the hierarchy placed me below the future husband who would turn down a full four-year college scholarship near his home for a sure thing out of West Virginia with the Air Force though it meant possible Vietnam time, below the boys who got drunk every Friday night after football and used girls to make babies they wouldn’t raise, below the pastor I honored until I began to question his intentions and decisions and found out that I could be so traumatized by my family’s public shaming in church by this pastor that dreams would wake me crying for decades afterwards. Above a selfless and learned man like Martin Luther King, Jr., below a self-serving and willfully ignorant man like Donald J Trump. Above a Black nurse who helped me learn how to feed my newborn, below the white doctor who tried to rape me in his office. Jesus, Jesus, How I trust him; how I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er but, where was He?
I have learned to ask a better question, where was my mother? When I ask that question, I do so with empathy for her own childhood lessons learned. However, I also know from life experiences now that every woman of any race or cultural identity must tear down the hierarchies that hold our sons and daughters, nieces, nephews, students, and young observers within weak and hollow, barren and cold walls. There had to have been that first experience in which my mother questioned the hierarchy’s judgement. What was it? Why did she let it defeat her? I remember my first experiences well. And I remember that tearing down those walls began with painful journeys which never got easier. That walls were being thrown up almost as quickly as I was ripping them apart. When I began to see my grown daughters take up the banner of equality, freedom, integrity, and servant leadership, I knew that my path was showing achievement and promise. Every self-indulgent tear over my own inadequacies, every doubt connected with failures and worries on my path were merely the residual of lessons learned in Sunday school.
This October day remains warm and grey. The storm arrives late this evening. But I will not wait for the storm to arrive and then pray for revelation or deliverance. I am going forth this morning to buy extra wild bird food, a new filter for the first day of using the furnace, and some wine to share with family. I will donate to a food shelter, too. Finally, I say Thank You to the church people I knew who started me on this path. There is joy in singing along with the YouTube video of old hymns, knowing I remember the words and how to harmonize, and reflecting on the people who shaped my childhood.