Strength for the Journey, Second Edition: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2017 EDITION

Processional

A WRITER’S COTTAGE

Alexandria, Virginia, 2017

A plaque hangs above my desk: Tell Your Story.

Those words serve as a daily invitation to a spiritual practice. Telling a story involves honest reflection on our spiritual struggles. The new edition of this book asked me to revisit my life’s trials and joys. In some ways, my story has not changed very much over the decades. I am, and remain to be, a restless soul coming to terms with loss, doubt, fear, and rejection as well as seeking my place in the universe and rediscovering the meaning and purpose of life. Through it all, there has been a shining mystery, a light of wonder and awe, always drawing me and driving me toward new levels of compassion, insight, and connection with that which dances right beyond the horizon.

Two decades ago, I had just published my doctoral dissertation on Episcopal Church history. In the 1990s, through a surprising set of circumstances, I wound up writing a weekly column on religion and culture for the New York Times syndicate, a feature that appeared in print newspapers across the United States. Readers requested a book. But what to write? Popular history? Theological advice? After reading Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk, however, I knew: I wanted to write a spiritual memoir. As I mulled over this possibility, a good friend said, You don’t want to do that now, when you are forty. You won’t have enough to say and you haven’t lived long enough to figure out what it means.

Her advice seems quaint now. Ours has become an age of public confessional writing, especially in blogs. It seems every person with access to a computer has written or is writing a memoir. We live in a culture where few thoughts go unsaid, few circumstances remain private, few doubts are held close. Words surround us; it can seem as if everyone is sharing the most intimate details of life every minute of every day to audiences both small and large.

When I wrote Strength for the Journey, there were few blogs. There was barely an internet and few people had the privilege—and its corresponding responsibility—of sharing a private story in a public venue. Yet spiritual memoir was gaining popularity in those days—beautiful works of literary nonfiction by writers like Norris, but Annie Dillard and Fredrick Buechner as well. Spiritual memoir seemed the right genre. I wanted to write like them.

But I took my friend’s comment seriously: What did it mean to be forty at the turn of the millennium, and to share the story of a contemporary life and its encounter with the ancient wisdom of Jesus and the church? For the first twenty years of my adult life, I had been a churchgoer, an unlikely choice for a young adult in the late twentieth century. It was never an easy choice, however. Like Jacob, I wrestled with Christian community, as if it were a wounding angel. Mine was neither a story of finding church and writing about it with honeymoon wonder nor a tale of leaving church in anger or pain. No, mine was a story of two decades of being in community with human beings who were trying to be faithful and who often failed miserably in the process—and how those failures intertwined with my own failures, questions, doubts, and sins. And that is what I decided to write about—me, God, the church. Three characters, moving from city to city as nomads and trying to find a life together.

One of my favorite early twentieth-century Episcopal writers, Vida Dutton Scudder, an English professor at Wellesley College and the founder of a lay religious order, wrote two autobiographies, twenty years apart. The second is much more honest than the first. I am not saying that Strength for the Journey is dishonest. But I do think my friend was right. It is more than possible to be too young to write a good memoir. Telling Your Story is a complex thing, involving a level of experience and reflection that I was only touching on as I entered my fortieth year. Telling Your Story is not blabbing or spewing; the art of spiritual memoir is listening to the heartbeat of one’s life with and in God, reflecting on that deeply, describing it in such a way as to invite others to cherish and recognize their own life-giving paths. There were things I intuited and did not say outright. There were things I wanted to say but was constrained by being nice. There were things I did not know because people either lied to me or because no one knew them at the time. There is a sense of incompleteness about this book because I was, in certain ways, as naïve as the fin de siècle in which it was written.

Strength for the Journey was mailed (yes, I said mailed) to my editor in San Francisco on September 10, 2001; since then I have written eight more books. Many of the themes and insights of those later works are found in some incipient form in this book, especially my passion for personal spiritual experience, the importance of practice, a deep awareness of history and tradition, and a concern that communities of faith be transformative, engaged in justice, and spiritually vibrant for the sake of the world. But what is missing in Strength (and what shows up with increasing urgency in the later books) is September 11, 2001, and its fear, grief, and rawness. And, of course, what is also missing is what has happened since in global affairs and American politics, and the near-utter failure of churches to come to grips with violence, racism, economic inequality, and social privilege. We have desperately wanted everything to go back to normal, without recognizing how normal did not work on behalf of God’s love and justice. We talk a good game about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, but I have grown increasingly alarmed that we—white, mainline church people, that is—mostly comfort the comfortable and afflict those who are already afflicted. These days, my soul is pained by what I experience in majority white churches. My friends tell me my work has taken a prophetic turn.

I do not know if the turn is prophetic, but I do know that in the almost twenty years since writing Strength, the situation for most mainline churches, like the ones I write about in this book, has grown dire. Although there are still amazing stories of numerical growth and congregational vibrancy and tender tales of small-scale love and transformation, the overall story is one of loss of prestige and membership. This loss is found not just in mainline churches: almost all majority-white Protestant denominations and Catholic congregations—whether liberal or conservative—are losing adherents and influence at a historic rate, a shift that is now well documented. We keep trying to fix things. We keep seeking the next shiny savior of the church. We keep waiting for the kids to come back. Fixing, seeking, waiting. Honestly, we are in a sort of spiritual exile. By the waters of Babylon, we are weeping. We do not really know what to do. We find it difficult to admit it.

If, when one is forty, one tempers hard news in favor of the good, then when one nears sixty, saying what is true is all that matters. I have not become a curmudgeon, thinking that the church’s best days are behind. No, I have become far more realistic and hopeful about faith. My fellow writer and friend, Marcus Borg, used to remind me that faith was about seeing widely. The eyes of faith do not fixate on what is immediately in front of us but learn to see softly, to include the periphery of the Spirit, to sense a wide field of grace and God’s intention that surround us all.

Spiritual memoir should not be an act of nostalgia—Ah! The good old days! Instead, spiritual memoir gives us the opportunity to retrace our steps, to uncover and rediscover God’s presence in the whole of the journey, and, by doing so, opens new paths ahead. Strength for the Journey has always been a memoir of us, not just me. In offering these words to the world again, I hope we can see where we have been that we might have more joy and courage to keep walking and keep waking up. That we all might see the edges of the Spirit at work in our own lives, our communities, and the world.

I hope that in telling my story, I might have told a bit of yours. The invitation stands wide open: Tell Your Story.

STRENGTH

FOR THE

JOURNEY

INTRODUCTION

Resurrection

ALL SAINTS CHURCH

Pasadena, California, 1996

Iam a churchgoer. Even at the rather traditional Southern college where I recently taught this was not an easy public confession to make. In the minds of many Americans, churchgoing conjures either negative or nostalgic images. Church people are dull, narrow, anti-intellectual, and unimaginative. They live by a list of do’s and don’ts. And everything fun is on the don’t side. More positively, they might be considered solid, old-fashioned, or traditional. A family praying around the dinner table, women wearing hats and gloves, a clapboard building on the prairie, a pie supper—all these images represent the comforting faith of an earlier, simpler America. A vision of Norman Rockwell religion.

That simpler America—if it ever existed at all—certainly exists no longer. These days, churchgoers rarely fit the old stereotypes. I certainly do not. Forty-something, a twice-married older mother, a professor and writer, I grew up in the waning days of what seemed a simpler time. It was Baltimore in the early 1960s. As a girl, I attended Hamilton Elementary School—the school where Miss Lillian Springfield taught two generations of my family to read. My great-grandfather laid its cornerstone when he served as captain of the local volunteer fire department.

Uncle Eddie, Aunt Doris, and the cousins lived across the street from us. Everyone in the neighborhood knew my family; they simply referred to me as Bobby’s oldest girl. The whole Hochstedt clan—grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—worked together in a florist shop that we had owned for more than a century. Like our forebears, we left the store at noon and gathered around the family table for a dinner of sausages, sauerbraten, and German potato salad. Although he was a successful businessman, Grandpop Hochstedt missed Miss Springfield’s academic ministrations and could neither read nor write. His father recruited him to work in the shop from age six onward. When he died, in 1985, he had worked in that florist shop for nearly seven decades and had never traveled more than sixty miles from his birthplace.

Late in the 1960s, it all changed—Baltimore, our neighborhood, the florist shop, and my family. Unlike Grandpop Hochstedt and the generations preceding me, I would eventually live in nine different states and trek three continents. My life has played out against the tableau of the baby boom generation, with all its doubts, seeking, and questions. Although every generation faces change, we grew up during a time of particularly challenging social ferment. As we came to adulthood, a global revolution of economic and technological change opened possibilities for us that even our parents often failed to grasp. Our nation no longer seemed a safe, homogeneous Christian America, as we instead embraced religious pluralism as an ordering principle. The world seemed relative and revolutionary at the same time. Living in such days, our lives were filled with change and changes—plunging us into a near-constant quest for meaning and authenticity amid the chaos.

For me, however, one thing has remained the same throughout: nearly every Sunday in the last forty years I have been in church. Most of those years have been spent in mainline Protestantism—a tradition that has suffered under the weight of change. Having lost millions of members in the last two decades, the old mainline denominations are usually depicted as the empty church, a spiritual dead end. Secular critics, when they paid any attention at all, gleefully predicted the demise of these irrelevant institutions. And when the denominations themselves attempted to be relevant, other critics assailed them for agenda-driven political liberalism and theological radicalism.

In spite of this catch-22, the old mainline is still around and finally stabilizing after the long descent. It is not, however, the same old church. Although diminished in size and prestige, it often possesses an unexpected and underestimated vitality. In the last twenty years, mainline churchgoing has been anything but dull as these churches have struggled to understand their identity and vocation in a changed world. In many places, they have succeeded in reinventing themselves, and old Protestant congregations are coming alive again. There has been a quiet resurrection in the mainline tradition, unnoticed and unreported by most observers of American religion. Those of us who have been around for the journey—and there are more of us than is generally suspected—know that mainline churchgoing is not like living in a Norman Rockwell painting.

One Sunday in September 1981, I visited All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. I cannot remember the exact date. I do, however, remember the day. It was very warm, more like summer than autumn. September in southern California is hard on those of us who grew up in the East and long for real fall weather once school has started.

That autumn, I missed both crisp northern air and classes. The previous spring I had graduated from college. For the first time since I was five, I did not start school in the fall. I had just moved to Pasadena to start my first job. I felt dislocated and I worried whether I could find my way in the world.

All Saints was new to me, as was the Episcopal Church of which it is a part. I grew up Methodist but left that church as a teenager under the influence of some conservative evangelical friends. From fifteen onward, I attended a number of nondenominational churches usually bearing such words as Bible Church or Christian Fellowship in their monikers. During my senior year in college, I began attending an Episcopal parish near my college campus in Santa Barbara and had become transfixed by the liturgy. Although I wondered if the denomination might be too theologically liberal for me, I sensed I had found a spiritual home. Upon graduation, I asked my priest, the Rev. Gethin Hughes, where I might go to church when I moved in the fall.

Gethin, who eventually became the Episcopal bishop of San Diego, recommended two churches: St. Luke’s in Monrovia and All Saints in Pasadena. St. Luke’s, he assured me, was a good church whose theology would resonate with my own conservative views. And then there’s All Saints, he said in his lilting Welsh accent. That’s a very interesting place. The rector, George Regas, is doing very interesting things. Very interesting things. Yes, yes, I think you should go to All Saints.

I knew nothing about All Saints, but I respected Gethin and trusted his advice. Three months later, I stood nervously at its doors with my then-boyfriend, Steve. He grew up in Pasadena, was a neoconservative, and was highly skeptical of the whole venture. You won’t like it, he warned. It is very liberal.

Why then, I insisted, would Gethin tell me to come here? He knows what I think. He said it is a good church. I want to go.

We walked into the neo-Gothic building and sat on the left side of the church. Even to a new Episcopalian like myself it felt familiar—the architecture, the flowers, the music were all very Anglican.

But something else felt strange.

As the party processed to the altar, I noticed that one robed man did not appear, well, quite heterosexual. My imagination? The church seemed traditional enough. I tried not to worry because I wanted to enjoy the service.

My no-worry attempt failed when George Regas began to preach. Unlike Gethin, who preached almost exclusively from the Bible, Regas launched into a political speech railing against involvement in Latin America. Years earlier, my parents left the Methodist church because of the left-wing politics they heard preached from the pulpit. They did not like it; neither did I. I wanted theology, spirituality, and scripture. I was mad. Steve grinned, I told you so.

At least they can’t ruin the liturgy, I whispered back. It is always the same—very orthodox. It is in the Prayer Book.

In 1981 I did not know that the Prayer Book we used was a new one. The church had recently replaced an older Prayer Book with one written in the 1970s. The change had created quite a controversy in the church and many people disliked the new liturgies. But even this book, the only Prayer Book I have known as an Episcopalian, reverberated with biblical theology and historical orthodoxy. In only a year I had come to love it.

The Lord be with you, Regas began.

And also with you, we responded.

The liturgy moved through its now-familiar paces. I had learned what to expect, where to respond, what words came next. My spirit rose as we pressed on to Sunday’s climax: the weekly celebration of the Eucharist. No leftist preacher can ruin this, I thought.

As is the practice for Episcopalians, Steve and I went forward for communion. Wincing, I recognized that the man whose apparent sexual orientation troubled me would be serving us the chalice. Not a problem—I reminded myself that St. Augustine had taught that the validity of the sacrament did not depend on the morality of the minister. Thank you, St. Augustine, I thought as I held out my hands to receive. The Body of Christ, said the priest, the Bread of Heaven.

The lay chalice bearer approached next. I eagerly anticipated the words, The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation. Christ’s blood shed for my sins—the theological centerpiece of orthodox Christianity. Jesus’ death on the cross saved me, even me, a sinner. The cup, full of sacrificial symbolism, summed up everything I believed about God and God’s grace. The Gospel of John proclaims, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Jesus’ blood. God’s cup of salvation.

Reaching toward me, the chalice bearer smiled. I reached out, guiding the cup toward my lips, and tentatively smiled back. The Blood of Christ, he said softly. Strength for the Journey.

Strength for the journey? What? No cup of salvation? What kind of sentimental nonsense was this? Where was the bloody sacrifice? Where was the heart of Christian faith? Was this some sort of heresy?

Nothing could have shocked or hurt me more. How could they do that? I asked angrily. How could they change the liturgy?

Had enough? asked Steve.

I will never go back, I vowed.

Fifteen years later I had all but forgotten that vow. Perhaps part of me wanted to forget that Sunday when, with all the hubris of a new college graduate, I judged All Saints and found it spiritually wanting. In 1996 I was still an Episcopalian and was living again in Santa Barbara. Theologically, however, I was now closer to All Saints than I was to the small Christian college where I had been a student, and later, for a short time, a professor. I no longer divided the world into orthodox and heretical camps. I had grown weary of theological nitpicking and religious right politics dictating church life. Increasingly I distanced myself from the world of conservative evangelicalism and I felt pretty sure I was a healthier Christian for having done so.

In April of that year I returned to All Saints, accompanied by my soon-to-be husband, Richard. Although he was new to the Episcopal Church, Richard had heard of All Saints—by this time a very well-known and successful liberal parish that had even been written about in Time magazine. Curious, he wanted to see it for himself. One weekend, I needed to research a story in Los Angeles and asked him to join me. On Sunday we planned to attend All Saints.

Only when we took our seats in the church did I recall my earlier vow. I found myself sitting in nearly the same place I had fifteen years before! The pew may have been the same, but everything else seemed different. In the intervening years, All Saints had renovated the sanctuary. The old rood screen—a kind of decorative fence separating the congregation from the high altar in Victorian Anglican architecture—was gone. The communion table had been moved forward, the choir stalls rearranged. The church seemed less forbidding than I remembered and much more open and inviting.

The processional was Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, a beautiful Methodist hymn I have sung since childhood. Still in the church’s Easter season, the service began with the acclamation: Alleluia. Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia. I felt God’s presence.

The words were familiar, but like the building itself, the liturgy had been altered. Although the traditional liturgical structure of word and sacrament remained, All Saints no longer used male pronouns to refer to God. They had replaced some words in the creed and used a new version of the eucharistic prayer. Responsive to concerns raised by feminist theology, All Saints was attempting to be more inclusive in worship and theology.

The morning’s scriptural passages were from the book of Acts and the book of Luke. The Episcopal Church places special emphasis on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and most sermons are based on these Gospel texts. We listened to Luke’s account of the resurrected Jesus meeting two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Even though they walked and talked together, the disciples failed to recognize their teacher until they sat down to share a meal. Most of the sermons I had heard on this passage depicted this as symbolic of Christians meeting Jesus in the Eucharist.

But All Saints’ new rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon, said that the passage revealed the disciples’ conversion from a faith based in fear to one based in love. Jesus’ followers failed to recognize him because they were mired in fear. They feared the authorities that had killed Jesus; they feared the rumor that his body was gone from the tomb; they feared they might be next to die. Only when they broke bread with this stranger did their fears abate. At that moment their eyes were opened and they recognized him. Bacon said that this story encapsulated the meaning of Christian faith: Christ invites humanity to reject the fear that separates us from God and to embrace God’s love that empowers us to serve others. Fear drives us from God; only love opens the way to wholeness, relationship, and compassion.

For several years, my spiritual director and I had explored the same idea. My adolescent faith was filled with fear—fear of the world, fear of hell, fear of punishment, fear of disobeying God’s will. As a result of this background, I did not really comprehend God as Love. I could say it, and believe it intellectually, but I could not live into the reality of a God who is completely Love. It took a protracted struggle to convince me emotionally and spiritually that God did, indeed, love humanity and all creation. And that God loved me.

From the pulpit, Bacon described the theological twists and turns of my own spiritual journey; it was as if he had sat in the room and listened to my story. I sat amazed, inwardly laughing and crying at the same time: Okay, God. I get it. I get it! The years leading to this moment had been as Ed Bacon depicted it—a journey from fear-based religion to the love-based faith celebrated that morning. I went from thinking I knew who Jesus was but failing to recognize him, to finally seeing him in the breaking of bread. It was the journey of a rigid, judgmental kid, who had feared heresy at All Saints fifteen years earlier, to an adult who felt safely cherished by God in that same pew.

After the sermon and prayers, we sang as we waited for communion:

The strife is o’er, the battle done,

The victory of life is won;

The song of triumph has begun. Alleluia!

The powers of death have done their worst,

But Christ their legions hath dispersed;

Let shout of holy joy outburst. Alleluia!

Lord! by the stripes which wounded Thee,

From death’s dread sting Thy servants free,

That we may live and sing to Thee. Alleluia!

As I walked down the aisle, the words buoyed me with a sense of triumph, telling both Jesus’ story and my own at the same time. It was Easter. The Resurrection. It was over. The long battle with childhood faith, the suffering of Holy Week, the dark night of the soul, the fear—all vanquished in the victory of Christ. I knelt at the altar and held out my hands. The body of Christ, the priest said, the Bread of Heaven.

The chalice bearer followed. As she served those ahead of me, I listened to those familiar words: The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation; the Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation. How much more I understood now than the first time I visited All Saints—the cup of life, God’s own life, drawing me into the divine mystery, united with Love. She served Richard: The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation. Finally, she stood in front of me, lifted the cup to my lips and said, The Blood of Christ, Strength for the Journey.

The tears streamed down my face—I was joyful, awash with the spirit. As I walked back to the pew, Richard asked, Are you okay? Through the sobs, I laughed, unable to say anything more than God has such a sense of humor. During the fifteen years between those two Sundays, we had been on a journey, All Saints and me. My story is not all that unusual. I grew up. I passed from adolescence to adulthood—spiritually as well as physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Mine was a spiritual coming-of-age story in which my understanding of God and faith deepened and matured through life experience and personal struggle.

My spiritual journey differs only slightly from the journeys of my peers. In recent years, many baby boomers have come of age spiritually. A number of fine authors, such as Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott, have written of renewing faith at midlife and have articulated a kind of generational spiritual longing. Psychologists say that our newly kindled concern with religion has to do with aging. Our middle-aged developmental task is to figure out the nature of existence and to be reconciled to it. Thus, millions of Americans—a generation reaching midlife at the beginning of a new millennium—are exploring faith and spirituality at the same time.

Sociologist Wade Clark Roof dubbed us a generation of seekers. Since we were children, we have done most things together—our individual stories are often personal expressions of corporate and generational ones. So it is not surprising that our seeker stories often follow similar plots. A person grew up in a particular religious tradition, but that tradition failed to answer significant questions during the college years. As a result, he or she rejected organized religion. Finally, after finding a modicum of personal fulfillment through work or family, the person still feels oddly dissatisfied. So he or she returns to religion (sometimes, but not necessarily, to the same