This path of disobedience felt obedient to me, “meet and right” as the liturgical prayer said. One of the first things I did was to have an affair with a man, a flirty fling that upped my aliveness. It might not have been God’s will, but it was mine. Who can ever know what God’s will is, anyway? All I knew was that God had asked me a good question.
My next action was to enter bioenergetic therapy. That was just after I’d smashed the small aqua sugar bowl, that went with the aqua-and-white set of everyday dishes, which didn’t go with the two-tone persimmon-and-copper kitchen, onto the kitchen table. It shattered into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty. Sugar mixed with chunks and chips of cheap porcelain fanned out over the table as four astonished faces, with spoons filled with Cheerios poised on the way to hungry mouths, looked up. This was not their mother. Silence as heavy as a dentist’s X-ray apron slapped down on us all. A couple of tears rolled down John’s cheeks and more than a couple down mine. Bev got up and began to pick the broken shards from the sugar. Jill went to fetch her Siamese cat, and R. B. helped Bev, and said, “It’s okay, Mom.”
“You’re getting in touch with your anger,” my new counselor said. He was handsome, bearded, and a Rev. named John. He explained bioenergetic therapy, the brainchild of Alexander Louwen, as body work with deep breathing based on the idea that all the emotions one has ever felt were stored in the muscles. Emotions seek release. Of course!
“You mean my muscles could mess up my happiness, make me smash sugar bowls and scare my kids?” I asked.
“Well, not your muscles exactly, but the unresolved feelings trapped in your muscles. We’ll take it slowly, and talk about everything,” John assured me.
“You’re seeing a psychiatrist, now?” my mother asked. “What ever for?”
“I feel fucked up inside,” I said.
“Lynnie, that’s just ridiculous,” she proclaimed.
I bought a pink leotard and joined a bioenergetics exercise group after I’d stored up my fear in some muscle or other. I followed the instructions with care when suddenly I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a woman collapse, curl up, and begin to suck her thumb. I kept breathing vigorously and tried not to gawk, or panic.
“I’m not sucking my thumb,” I told John, but didn’t tell him I’d sucked my thumb till I was twelve.
“Don’t worry, Lyn,” he said. “I know this woman and she was returning to her early comfort zone. She won’t stay there. You get in touch slowly.”
What in God’s name would I be “in touch with” next? I grew to detest that concept, but John seemed trustworthy. Some people, I’d heard, worked in the nude or underwear, so the therapist could see the muscles. Would I do that? I lost weight in case. Backbending over a stool released a welter of sorrow hidden under my breastbone. In my original family I’d cried at Christmas when everyone else was happy trimming the tree. I’d cried because Dad wasn’t there or was drunk, which my mother called “tired”; I’d cried because I’d broken my mother’s happiness rule, I’d cried because I felt different and somehow wrong. In therapy I didn’t suck my thumb or talk about the old god-man in the theater, but my body again asserted itself against my will, this time for my good.
Act III was to turn into Brenda Starr, girl reporter. I became a stringer, paid by the column inch, writing for a regional newspaper. My first paycheck was frameable, but I spent it. My byline thrilled me: “Planning and Zoning Commission Labors Over Decision to Close Town Dump” by Lyn Brakeman. Town meetings bored me stiff until I got home, poured myself a scotch, sat down at the dining room table with my typewriter, and wrote as many inches as I could, trying to infuse drama into tedium. My mother and my children did more babysitting than was good for any of them, a fact for which I remain grateful—and slightly guilty.
The Episcopal Church was as astir with change as I was. Right after my kitchen epiphany the church voted against a resolution to make it possible for women to be ordained priests. As a result, many women and some men restarted the life of the church, in ways about as untidy as mine. Women were raising hell, for the sake of heaven. Rules more ancient and entrenched than my, or even my mother’s, ideas of propriety, would be broken to force the church out of its torpor. If it couldn’t be done through proper channels, then it would be done outside canon law, outside God’s law too, some thought. Women took independent action and invaded the priestly caste. Would the church repent? Would I?
The Episcopal Church and I began our midlife crises together.
Free, wild, and frightened, I sat in the pew at my parish church and started to wrestle hard with my faith. What, besides God, did I believe in? I stared at the altar meal, my under-the-table meal, seeing it again as if for the first time—this time in a church that was willing to wrestle hard with women.
In the same year the church voted women’s ordination out, they voted that lay people (not just male ones) could be chalice bearers. Women were also permitted to read the Sunday Bible readings, and serve on parish vestries. I signed up for everything.
Being a chalice bearer required serious physical discipline just to hold the chalice steady for sips without emptying it down some woman’s cleavage while she knelt, her pious head bowed and the brim of her large hat making her lips un-locatable. It took more skill, in fact, than to scoot wee wafers into cupped fists as the priests did. Feeling a little like one of the Great Wallendas, I donned a black cassock and a long white-winged surplice over it. Such a pinafore! Thus I began a ministry inside the altar rail of God’s dining room table. I gripped that chalice for dear life.
Most astonishing among the expansive changes the church was enacting, was the new wording of the catechism defining ministry. The “ministers of the church” were formerly defined as “bishops, priests, and deacons”—the ordained. Now, the ministers of the church were “lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons”—hierarchy radically reordered on paper. It meant that baptism, not ordination, made a person a “minister,” a status prophesied by a T-shirt slogan of the women’s ordination campaign: “Ordain Women or Stop Baptizing Them!”
The Episcopal Church prided itself on its changelessness—a characteristic it ostensibly shared with God. But now, many parts of its touted tradition were becoming unrecognizable: prayers, hymns, the definition of “minister.” Would the gender of clergy follow? Would the final staple of the Episcopal security system fall away? The pace of change was so swift that many good folks felt the wind knocked out of their souls. They often sought safety and comfort in resistance. Though many felt qualms about women at the helm, at heart they needed a reassuring mother.
The Eucharist, already rich in sacramental beauty and a reenactment of my childhood spirituality, became charged with new meaning for me. I’d recognized divine womanliness in the preparation and serving of this meal, but now saw that God fed people with her [sic] own body and blood. How much more intimate and nourishing could you get? The holy blood of Christ was less like martyrs’ blood or blood spilled by young men in wars, and more like the blood of life spilled by women for fertility. Maybe the patriarchal church had the divine gender wrong?
I kept my ideas to myself, but I began to wonder if this meal was a very different kind of sacrifice than the one proclaimed in the prayers of consecration week after week: We remember his death, we remember his death—his bloody, awful death. What about Jesus’ life? Did Jesus die for me? I had no answers that worked, and I felt crazy-confused, so I stopped thinking. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would die for my children. Likely I would, but I knew for sure I had bled to give them life, and that this Eucharist had more to do with life than death—just as it had for me when I’d invented it under the table.
Next, I began to see Eucharist as a meal of justice: everyone was welcome, everyone got food, everyone got the same, not too little, not too much. One Sunday I sat and watched as everyone streamed up the aisle to kneel side by side at the altar rail, rubbing shoulders and extending their hands to receive their just portion of holy food. It wasn’t a dole. It seemed a miracle, because many of these same people had been quarreling vigorously all week about the rector’s latest decision, his tenure and sermons, the hymn choices, on and on. The Eucharist