My friend David asked me to go to church with him today; as usual I had too much to drink the night before and arrived at the church tired, nauseous and disoriented (I usually don’t feel like that until after the service ends). Before I dared go inside, I wandered up and down the street in search of some peppermint tea to settle my stomach. A kind waitress in a nearby coffee shop took pity on me and brought me not only the tea, but some B-complex tablets and a homemade chocolate muffin. By the time I finished the tea I felt somewhat less hellbound, and ready to brave uncomfortable pews and self-righteous sermonizing. Yippee-skip!

I wasn’t always so church-phobic; actually when I was younger I went religiously, as it were. I learned to appreciate and eventually cherish the tight-knit sense of community fostered there, and I adored most of the congregation, who treated me as they might a dear cousin or niece. As a streetwise New York latchkey kid and a natural loner, I didn’t often get to feel part of a family—my own family was deeply flawed and really lousy at keeping in touch with each other. I got the impression that my mother didn’t hold them in especially high regard anyway and was just fine with their prolonged absence from my life. (We recently learned that our cousin Joan, who lives in Detroit and happens to be the only member of my extended family that my mother likes, was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. Well, at least there’s no reason for me to go to Detroit anymore. Just kidding. Joan actually laughed when I said that to her.) So it was with a profound sense of relief that I made my weekly pilgrimage to the friendly, joyful haven of Rutgers Presbyterian Church.

After my beloved minister died of AIDS in 1987, the demographics and general attitude of the church underwent a dramatic shift. It was as though his death administered a walloping slap across the face to our previously ostriched congregation. Reverend Coonradt was a gentle, loving, deeply spiritual soul who was also possessed of a loopy sense of humor and an awesome empathy towards his fellow human beings. He was a tough act to follow even as ministers go. Upon his death, the terrible secret he’d been keeping from all but a select few came out. Knowing that the final days of this very special man were wracked with such silence, agony and loss collectively brought my church to its knees, and the floodgates opened. The church began to offer macrobiotic cooking lessons. A rainbow flag appeared suddenly one day alongside the Presbyterian flag on the church roof. Reverend Coonradt’s death had sounded an alarm, and formerly religion-estranged gays and lesbians citywide answered its urgent cry.

At the time my mother was serving on the church’s board of elders. Although she is a compassionate, tolerant and highly intelligent woman, she and I have been at odds for years over my involvement in the gay rights movement and my deep attachments to gay men and women in general. I think more than anything she simply despairs of me ever finding a husband amidst the throng of happy homos I surround myself with. I do get that, but her disapproval, both spoken and unspoken, cuts deep regardless. Anyway, the insurgence of homosexuals into Rutgers, and the changes that came in their wake, disturbed her and many of the other deacons and elders greatly. There were ugly, protracted meetings in the church for many weeks, and my mother would relate them loudly and angrily to her mother on the phone, as well as to anyone else who cared to listen. Granted, I didn’t know exactly what “gay” meant, but I do remember being left with the general impression that my mother believed that whatever Reverend Coonradt and others like him were could not, and should not, coexist with our religion. How could that possibly be? How could someone as dear and forgive me, holy, as Reverend Coonradt be an aberration in the sight of God? It just didn’t add up.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for my mother apparently came when Rutgers presided over a gay marriage, which was quite a big fat deal back then. The deacons and elders were convened and basically told that it was a fait accompli and no discussion was going to be brooked on the matter. Shortly thereafter my mother left the church and migrated to Park Avenue Methodist on East 86th Street. She urged me to follow her, but I was completely torn. I didn’t know any of those people, and didn’t want to know any of them. Who wanted to trudge all the way over to the East Side every Sunday, when Rutgers was a ten-minute walk away? And what the heck was a Methodist—we were Presbyterian! Rutgers had been the core of my entire religious life. I was confirmed there. I knew its cool stone walls and hushed corridors as well as the halls of my own school, and the idea of leaving broke my heart. But I didn’t want to stay there without my mother.

So I left my church too, and I stayed gone a long, long time. I know now that I suffered immeasurably because of it. You often hear stories of the fallen-away religious, and how they sometimes simply drift along, rudderless, seeking to fill the gaping hole in their spirits with whatever happens to be handy. Some end up none the worse for wear, while others end up broken beyond repair. I have a lot of “lost years,” mostly my teens and early twenties, where I don’t believe I grew emotionally. In a lot of ways I’m still a little girl. I’m not saying that weekly doses of church would necessarily have been a cure for all that ailed me, but having a stronger spiritual center might have helped me to deal with it more maturely and effectively. All I know is that my lack of faith preferred to launch sneak attacks on me like mean children on the playground, kicking me soundly in the ass when I wasn’t looking and then darting away before I had a chance to confront it. I would be blissfully oblivious for months and then bolt upright from a demon-choked nightmare with the terrible weight of the universe sitting on my chest like an anvil. Unanswerable questions raced across my brain at warp speed. How could a loving God allow a disease like AIDS to exist and steal away the closest thing to a father I would probably ever know? Why couldn’t he share his fear and suffering with his flock, who loved him so well? How could my mother call herself a Christian and walk away from the church I’d grown up in simply because it had the audacity to indeed practice what it preached?

These were the questions I pondered, at the ripe old age of eleven. And because I’ve never been (until recently) one to open up about much of anything, on my own hook I came to the unhappy conclusion that having faith, believing that there were answers suitable and just and fair to these questions, and accepting that maybe there weren’t answers to all the questions in life (and that fact was in and of itself an answer) was just too complicated and too much fucking work. I wasn’t exactly looking for a point-by-point layout of God’s plan, but I needed more than what He was choosing to give me. So I shut the door on my faith, slammed it hard, and except for the yearly Christmas Eve Service at Park Avenue Methodist, thought of it no longer.

*

St. Anne’s Church of the Holy Trinity is a lot like most any other church. It’s quite pretty, lots of stained glass, uncomfortable pews and pleasant-bordering-on-bland attendees. I arrived a few minutes ahead of David and his boyfriend Tri and took a seat near the back in case I had to make a fast break for the bathroom. The worshipers filed in slowly, all of them looking pleased to see each other. St. Anne’s is a church community slowly finding its way—from the little I gleaned at the after-service gathering, it appeared that the previous pastor had some serious, possibly criminal, problems and did not leave the church in a particularly honorable manner. As a result, the congregation has had to adjust to an interim pastor, one Angela Askew. Mother Askew looks like Estelle Parsons, the lady who played Roseanne’s mother on Roseanne, and coincidentally is also a foul-mouthed lesbian (Roseanne’s mother, I mean. I have no idea whether Estelle Parsons is a lesbian). After the obligatory prayer/hymn/prayer/choir/prayer roundelay, it was time for Mother Askew’s sermon. Instead of speaking from the pulpit, she took a cordless microphone and came downstage to us. I liked that a lot, and I liked her sermon even better. It was exceptionally literate, for one, almost at the level of a college lecture, not the usual Jesus-loves-you flowery platitudes dispensed by ministers who don’t have much regard for their audience’s comprehension level. For another, it left me pondering an interesting religious question.

The sermon was on the Beatitudes section of the Bible, also known as the “Blessed are the” section. Mother Askew went through each one and explained their meanings to us ecclesiastical laymen. For the uninitiated, they go like this:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart,
for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I particularly related to the “Blessed are the meek” one, meek in this case not referring to unfortunate societal doormats who go through life having the world wipe its collective feet on them, but those who are humble, who allow the presence of God to encompass and infuse their lives. The meek, in this case, are not only willing, but eager to embrace this presence and to give themselves up to it.

This got me thinking about whether spirituality is supposed to be as hard as it often tends to be. Is it a lifelong process, or something that just swoops in and swallows you up once you’re ready for it? I asked Jason, whom I think is remarkably well-informed in these matters, his opinion. As noted in my previous Tales installment, Jason is one of those people you expect to suddenly take out a loaf of bread and a fish and start feeding all the homeless people in Central Park. Like me, he was raised in the traditional Christian faith and attended church regularly with his family growing up. However, in recent years his focus has shifted from organized religion and he has been strengthening his spiritual side by participating in meditation sessions, reading a plethora of related material, and just a general walk-the-walk attitude towards his work and life. Jason reminds me of Reverend Coonradt in a lot of ways, including the off-the-wall sense of humor. Being connected in that way to an external consciousness is important to him in a way it has never really been to me, and I was curious to know what kept his interest for so long and so intensely. His answer was a combination of the above: yes, his spiritual growth has been a lengthy and difficult journey, but it only began in earnest after Shandy gave him the book Conversations with God. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading this book, but I’ve seen it on many an acquaintance’s shelf. It seems like an enormously powerful and suggestive compilation of ideas, but I submit that if Jason hadn’t been truly open and ready to explore the “what elses?” of the universe and all points beyond, then Conversations with God wouldn’t have registered on his radar screen. Or maybe he might have been momentarily inspired, like people who go to the gym for two months starting January 1st and then avoid it like the plague from then on. To torturously mix a metaphor, he could have traveled the road, but wouldn’t have appreciated the journey to its fullest until he had the right vehicle to do it in.

It occurred to me, as I listened to Jason’s answer, that as much as I loved and really needed my church back in those carefree youthful days, I wasn’t ready to devote the effort required to develop a strong spiritual foundation. Perhaps that was simply a result of youth, but then again perhaps not. I’ve always been something of a cynic, even as a little kid, and could drive my mother absolutely apeshit with my dourly sarcastic outlook on the world and its inhabitants. Being the child of an intellectual, especially a sociologist, forces you to hold even the most benign circumstances up to intense scrutiny, to basically overanalyze everything to death. How, then, was I supposed to be receptive to a God that didn’t provide answers to questions I desperately needed answered? A God who seemed to assert Himself in completely contrasting fashion to the loving, kind, merciful Santa Claus Reverend Coonradt told me he was every Sunday? I used to lie in bed and miss him with a physical force so overwhelming it was honestly as though I’d lost my own father. The circumstances surrounding his death were murky and frightening to me, but young as I was, I knew that he’d been dealt a terrible injustice and no one would tell me why.

It was while I listened to Mother Askew’s sermon that I felt the fingers of ice surrounding my faith melting away. For so long, I had wandered a lonely spiritual wasteland where I’d been unable to reach God. I was all of those things mentioned in the Beatitudes—poor in spirit, meek, mournful, suffering, hungering for justice. I had been hurt early and deeply by a reality I couldn’t comprehend, and turned my back on one thing that might have helped me to comprehend it. The other thing, plain old time and experience, wasn’t accessible to me then.

Indeed time and experience has helped me tremendously. Meeting my best friend and supporting him through his coming-out, getting involved with SWiSH, hearing the stories of all the amazing, wonderful gay men and women whose lives I’ve been lucky enough to touch—all of that was like salve on the open wound of my soul. I’ll never understand the ugliness and mercilessness of a disease like AIDS, why it’s with us, why it’s ravaged our community. I’ve always felt there’s a terrible, almost biblical pathos about this disease that separates it from all the others—the sense that love and sex are punishable offenses, and AIDS is the punishment (certainly enough right-wing fundie lunatics have jumped on that particular bandwagon). But the heart knows better. Like every other disease, AIDS finds its victims through unluckiness or irresponsibility, and for every physical indignity it brings, there’s a correlative ennobling of spirit that is awe-inspiring to witness. At the end of his life, Reverend Coonradt was thin, weak, frail—your typical late-stage AIDS patient. He looked as though every movement brought him pain. But when he preached, the last few times he did, there was an exceptional fervor to his words, as though he were lit from within by God’s love—he seemed almost to blaze with it. I remember being so moved by him then. Cynic that I was, Mark Coonradt made me believe.

I’m not angry with God anymore. I’m finally ready to accept Him back into my life. Although it took a lot of time and heartache to get here, now that I’ve arrived I find myself willing to be devoured by my faith like prey. So I guess the answer to my question is twofold: some of us are devoutly atheistic, while others are lucky enough to have the gift of unswerving faith. But I think, for the majority of us, getting to that next level, spiritually speaking, takes some work. As the Beatitudes say, I’m a peacemaker now. And in most things (though certainly not all), I am clean of heart. I see God in people I love, in places I find myself. I see God in the fierce devotion I have for my family, my friends and my cause. Life is marked by much pain and bewilderment, and that is why we can only feel truly blessed when we go out there, roll up our sleeves and try to take some of it away.

I think Reverend Coonradt would be awfully proud of me.

Yours in hagdom,

Jamielah