My spiritual journey….
by Holly Labbe
July 8, 2007

This talk was presented as a part of Our Spiritual Journeys service.

When Beryl asked me last week to speak about my own spiritual journey at the service today, I don’t know what I was thinking; clearly, I wasn’t because I said ‘yes.’ We’re in the midst of a move. We have one foot at the old house in Harrisonburg — cleaning, shampooing carpet, mowing — and one foot at the new house in Bridgewater — unpacking, childproofing, cobbling together furniture. Ada and Wyatt are each having their own versions of transition anxiety. So am I. So is the cat. (Scott’s fine; he always is.) All week long, I’ve been grumbling to myself about the service today. Cleaning the old refrigerator and thinking about my spiritual journey. Organizing the new play room and thinking about my spiritual journey. I used to have my most brilliant thoughts in the shower - I called them my “shower epiphanies”-so I took a few extra showers while muttering “spiritual journey, spiritual journey.” Still nothing. Why was I struggling so much? Finally, after a few wine-soaked conversations with Scott, it occurred to me.

There are two very different journeys to be addressed: there’s my RELIGIOUS JOURNEY —which is objective, fact-based and ultimately inarguable, and then there is my SPIRITUAL JOURNEY — which is subjective, deeply personal, and the revelation of which renders me feeling quite vulnerable. But, I don’t feel that I can really address one without the other. Given that, we’ll start with some inarguable facts about my RELIGIOUS JOURNEY and see what subjective SPIRITUAL JOURNEY vistas we can pull off at along the way.

The legs of my religious journey have included: practicing Catholic, fallen away Catholic, inquisitor of paganism, Sufism, Buddhism, 1/2- practicing Catholic while still keeping an interest in non-Christian belief systems, ticked off leaping away Catholic, spiritual flounderer, and most recently, congregant at Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

Practicing Catholic -

My formative years in Central Maine were religiously spent as a Roman Catholic. French Canadian Roman Catholic, to be exact. That’s the religion not only of my childhood, but of my entire extended family. My earliest memories about being Catholic are mostly comforting: 7 a.m. Sunday Mass with all of my extended family and old Augusta families sitting in the same pews each week, my family helping with coffee and donuts in the church hall after the Mass, the small statuaries and paintings adorning the homes of my grandparents and my older aunts and uncles: images of wide-winged angels guiding little children across bridges in thunderstorms, children kneeling in prayer, eyes cast innocently upward toward a golden-glowing image of Jesus embracing them from on high; a grandmother and her sisters who prayed to St. Anthony when they lost something, who drove with medallions of St. Christopher (patron Saint of travelers) hanging from their rear views, who prayed to St. Jude for any number of ’special requests’ and dutifully published those novenas in the local paper as they were supposed to do and who buried statues of a-saint-whose-name-I-don’t-recall in the yard when they were trying to sell their homes. There was a magic and a mysticism about the Catholicism of my childhood that appealed to me. I loved the ritual. I loved the familial feeling. My young child/adolescent mind loved the idea that if I were good enough, if I simply followed those 10 little commandments, took all the sacraments from baptism through final rites, and when I strayed, confessed my sins and did the required penance, then I could get the Big Gold Star: admission to heaven, rising in glory to be with Jesus and Mary and all the choirs of Angels. I even thought it might be kind of cool to ‘marry’ God and become a nun.

Yet, even as a child, I had a few nagging concerns. I remember feeling ashamed a lot and feeling like a bad person. Each week, I was told in mass that I was a sinner and ‘not worthy to receive Him.’ Apparently, all God had to do was ’say the word and I shall be healed.’ But what if he DIDN’T ’say the word’? It seemed so conditional. I felt like God was impossible to please, that I’d never do right by Him. Once I got into my high school years, I more questions, concerns and more than a couple of bones to pick with The Vatican. For instance, those little tiny graves on the hillside of the cemetery, separated from the larger cemetery by a boggy brook and a broken little fence: that’s where they had buried the babies that died before they were baptized. They were separated because their souls were unclean, they couldn’t ever go to heaven. That just didn’t seem right. If a newborn baby didn’t have a pure soul, who did? And what about the fact that a priest, the bishop, the Pope, always served as go-between with me and God. I took issue with the fact that I couldn’t ever get a direct line to the Man Upstairs (heck, and why was it always the “Man” upstairs) — I had played enough Telephone at slumber parties to KNOW how mixed up things could get when words were passed and passed and passed through a line of people. I wanted to be in direct conversation with God — especially if I were asking for His forgiveness. I questioned women’s roles, both in the church and as lay people. I took issue with what I perceived to be hypocrisies. As example, my mom got pregnant with my brother when she was in high school, she and my Dad married a couple of months later and were disgustingly in love and so committed to one another for more than 35 years until my Dad died, yet the Church turned my Mom out. She was shunned. Maybe not always blatantly, but she was clearly not allowed to participate in the same ways because of her Mortal Sin: she had engaged in premarital sex and no amount of confession and penance could wash her soul clean again. As a teenager simultaneously grossed out and so inspired by my parents’ relationship with one another, I didn’t understand what was so wrong about what my Mom had done: she had loved another person so completely, with her mind, body and soul and they created a life together. How was this wrong? And if it WAS wrong, why was it only wrong for her? Didn’t my Dad have a part in the sinning too? Why wasn’t he turned away? There was too much judgment being done, and it was by God’s agents, not by God Himself.

It was about that time that my Mom and I talked about her being an ‘a la carte’ Catholic: picking and choosing what served best and disregarding the rest. I decided to do the same. Still, I was annoyed with the less-than savory individuals I saw going to mass every week. Those oh-so-pious souls (including my own) who could screw up all week long, hurt people, do bad things, but still be ok with it all because they were, after all, “good church-going people ” and as long as they presented their laundry list to the priest each week, it didn’t matter. What really became glaring to me was that I don’t think many of us even knew what we were saying in those prayers and creeds we muttered each week. We were all mumbling, bumbling, stumbling through words. I started having those “I-want-to-scream-in-church” fantasies…. Those “what-would-people-do/think/say-if-I-just-screamed: “what the hell are you people even saying???” fantasies. Or, better yet, those “what-would-they-do-if-I-started-praying-and-saying-the-words-like-I-actually-meant-them” fantasies. That’s about the time I headed for the next leg in my spiritual journey:

Fallen Away Catholic

At college, with no one taking attendance at church, I stopped going. I decided that being an ‘a la carte’ Catholic felt hypocritical. I felt like a fraud going to mass and saying the Creeds and prayers and casually coughing at a word here or there to mask that I wasn’t saying something because I didn’t agree with it in my heart of hearts. I became close friends with Jessica, a woman who was also raised Catholic, but whose parents started attending their local Baptist church because they were hippy-type singers and liked the choir better at the Baptist church. (You could do that????) I was inspired by the altar her Mom kept in her bedroom: there were photos of her at a women’s retreat in the desert, her face painted in a way that looked tribal, dancing, her head thrown back in joy, fulfillment, enlightenment; there were stones, feathers, candles, objects of importance. The only altars I had ever seen were at the Catholic church and none of them had ever spoken to me like this one. It charged and vibrated with a kind of spiritual energy that I craved. Jess introduced me to ideas about paganism, Wicca, goddess worship-all things her own Christian mother had taught to her. I read a bit about a lot. Details escape me now. What resonated then and continues to resonate is respect for moon, nature, earth, the cyclical ways of things, feminine energy, the anima.

I added those pieces to my a al carte Catholic selections and continued to form my own sense of what it meant to be a spiritual person while I went away to grad school. When I interviewed for my grad program, the co-director asked me if I was ready to let go of all I thought I knew and held true, cast it aside, and then re-assemble, deciding what still served me and what was better left behind. She was speaking about dance. I took it as an invitation for some spiritual housekeeping. It was such a sweet submersion — a striping away, a coming clean. While studying dance, we were reading selections from and practicing aspects of Sufism, Buddhism, Shamanism, yoga, body-mind practices. I drank up the feeling that comes from - respecting the WHOLE self-mine and others -, from just Being rather than always doing, from seeking my authentic self and trusting that stewardship to the Whole begins at home. Feeling shored up by all of these elements, I felt compelled to check out the Catholic church in my Cleveland neighborhood of Little Italy. I felt like I needed to bury my hatchet , to attend mass with fresh eyes, fresh soul. What I found at that particular church restored my faith in what Catholicism could be. The priest was amazing: a priest who encouraged everyone to chat and visit with one another before the mass started-something we take for granted in a UU fellowship. He talked about the fact that Roman Catholicism had many sects - some that allowed priests to marry and women to play more prominent roles. He didn’t speak of the sects as ‘wrong’ or condemnable, just different paths to the same destination of loving thy neighbor and right action. He spoke of other non-Christian religions with the same respect. He actually narrated a Mass — taking us all through the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ of the prayers and the rituals. That mass and those thereafter for as long as I attended were infused with new meaning, new purpose. We truly celebrated the mass. I learned that my spirit thrived best with a mix of reverence and celebration. Still, I was ‘a la carting’ the Catholic creeds and doctrines while dabbling in other religious practices.

I realize now that I was essentially doing what Scott and I have been doing for the past two weeks: moving. I had one foot in the old-though-reinvigorated house of Catholicism and one foot in a new place that was… I wasn’t yet quite sure what. I wondered about the possibility of all these pieces peacefully co-existing.

Shortly thereafter, there was my big, angry, ticked off with God and the Church leap from Catholicism. That’s a long story that has much to do with hypocrisy (mine and others) and disillusionment. It was a clean break this time, and it happened on Christmas Eve of 2001. I had just left my parent’s house and was stinging from multiple hurts in own little world and the world at large: the terrorist attacks, our country at war, a divorce, my father’s diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s, my parents financial ruin. I needed a lift, some hope, so I drove to the Catholic church for their midnight mass. I went in on what was supposed to be the holiest of holy nights, desperately seeking sanctity, a reconnection to my own broken spirit, some sense of larger purpose, and I found…. Nothing. The Christmas Eve sermon spoke about ‘evil others’ and the need to battle them, to put up big walls to protect our sacred cities. My mouth hung open in disbelief and I was deeply, deeply saddened. This was the Christmas message? Don’t trust your neighbor, wall him out, and destroy him at all costs? Where was the hope? The healing? The new life? I didn’t resonate with that place, those people… or the doctrine. It was the final straw. I broke from the church.

Free fall
into

RELIGIOUS FLOUNDERING.

No religious affiliation. Picking and choosing from eastern, western, pagan, whatever happened to peak my interest at the time. Journaling extensively on a daily basis and coming to know myself more thoroughly. The anger turning to acceptance as I renewed my belief in Fate and in the Universe providing exactly what I need when I need it, if only I can be open enough to recognize it. That ALL is for a reason. The feeling of being very, very spiritually connected. Getting out from under church doctrine was freeing. Of course, moving to Seattle— the least religiously-affiliated city in the nation— probably helped too. Scott and I often found our conversations or our reading drifting towards issues of religion and spirituality. We spoke about wanting to feed our spiritual lives-as individuals and as a couple. After Ada was born, our conversation turned toward finding a religious affiliation that honored all our bits and pieces, what seemed to be our a la carte choices. We found out about Unitarian Universalism and said ‘huh.’ The principles coincided with our own. But, we never actually made it to a UU church in Seattle.

Then we moved to Harrisonburg, where right after ‘where ya from?’, the next question invariably seems to be ‘what church ya go to?’ Our pat answer of ‘we don’t’ didn’t seem to be winning us any popularity contests, and suddenly, preachers from the various churches in our neighborhood started appearing at our door with flyers. It was time to be proactive. I found HUU on the web. I printed out the material, handed it to Scott and issued an edict: “We’re going this Sunday.” Why was I so adamant? As a newbie in town, I made a lot of assumptions about the ‘churchiness’ of the place — the conservativism, the prejudices, all of that— and I feared we would be eaten alive, that our values and beliefs would be harder to instill in Ada (and now Wyatt) unless we found reinforcements, unless we found the village to help raise our children. I nearly wept the first time we came to HUU… the service, the songs, the principles, the potential friends. It felt right, like we had found our village. My free fall ended –or perhaps suspended– at Unitarian Universalism, HUU style. Unitarian Universalism allows for my continued floundering, questioning, and exploring, and it has shored me up enough to see the greater Harrisonburg community with fresh eyes; I realize now our differences are not always so great and that if I shut out and wall this little city of my family in an attempt to protect it from ‘evil others’, I am no better than those Catholics I fled from in 2001. The strength, support, frustrations and joy we get from HUU help me to grow. It offers a beautiful vista on my personal spiritual journey.

SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

Now, to close, in the spirit of the Creeds that were so very important to my Catholic upbringing, I’d like to share with you my own Creed, cobbled together from the various a la carte choices I have picked up along the way:

  • I believe in God -Father, Mother, animal, plant, person, light, taste, smell, energy — all things, all thoughts, Universe, and therefore, Holy.
  • I believe bridges are not for burning.
  • I believe that the distance between Here and There is not that great.
  • I believe that a good storm is sometimes just what is needed to clear the air — and I am reminded nature doesn’t hold a grudge.
  • I believe that the pronouns ‘us’ and ‘them’ are divisive; while the pronoun ‘we’ can unite and heal.
  • I believe that the grass may sometimes be greener on the other side of the fence, but that on my side, I know where the cow patties are.
  • I believe more sentences should use the conjunction ‘and’ rather than ‘but.’
  • I believe in the power of knowing context.
  • I believe that while I can’t expect to change a person, I can expect to be changed BY that person.
  • I believe that the only way I can take a person where I want him to go is to meet him where he is now.
  • I believe in fate, that all things unfold just as they should, when they should.
  • I believe in curves, detours, loops and the helix. As there are no straight lines in nature, let me remember that each person’s path is her own, and while her path may not match mine, we may meet at our common destination. Best I mind my manners along the way.