Jesus, in the Book of Thomas the Contender, says: “whoever has known himself [or herself] has simultaneously come to know the depth of all things.”3 In a lifelong effort to answer The Question, I have spent a lot of time, energy, and money getting to know the depths of myself and making connections to the world around me.
I never made the connection between my birthday and history until I walked into the Martin Luther King Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. And there before my eyes, as big as life itself, was the front page of the New York Times, dated May 17, 1954, with a headline that boldly proclaimed: “BROWN VS. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION.” I have always felt that the complexity of racial justice was implanted in my soul and grafted into my unconscious, and in that moment I knew why. I came into this world on a decisive day in the life of the civil rights movement, and I have spent my entire life in the midst of that struggle.
Like lots of suburbanites, I never knew many people of color. In fact, I knew very few people of any ethnicity other than WASP or Jew. What I did know was that the maids and gardeners who were black did not have last names we remembered (or even knew), and that it was best to stick to your own kind (even if your own kind was not purebred). I also knew the anger and rage in my father’s face when the race riots found their way to our city, and his inner city furniture warehouse suffered smoke damage from a nearby fire. When I was in fifth grade, the public schools in Columbus, Ohio, were integrated, and I was sent to private school. My parents insist this was a coincidence, but I believe there is no such thing as coincidence; it is just God (or the devil) at work unbeknownst to us. So off I went to receive an excellent education in an even more pristine, privileged, and guarded community of affluence and homogeneity. As I entered the hallowed halls of the Columbus School for Girls, The Question—that haunting question of passing or claiming myself—was lurking in the wings.
In the summer of 1970, something happened that changed the vocational direction of my life. While my friends were off at summer camp, Europe, and Outward Bound, my parents insisted that I get a job—volunteer or paid, it didn’t matter. So I went to work with a big, angry attitude as a volunteer teacher’s aid in a new program called Head Start. I was assigned to the Ohio Avenue School, where I spent two months accompanying a wonderful group of “underprivileged” preschoolers through their daily routine. I would prepare their snack, ready them for naptime, read to them, and play with them. And sometimes, I would make home visits with their teacher to see how and where my young friends really lived. On those field trips, I saw firsthand the pain of the poor, and I learned about the struggles of raising children in urban poverty.
It was also the summer I got my driver’s license and a car. With wheels came the newfound freedom to explore beyond the boundaries of my neighborhood and to go where I wanted. I drove through communities that my parents said were not safe, trying to see and experience the danger for myself. I drove to the Ohio State University campus, getting involved in the antiwar and student rights movement. I drove through the foothills of the Appalachians, touching roots I still had not yet discovered. That summer changed my life. My eyes were opened; my sense of exploration and adventure was awakened; my awareness of poverty, racism, and oppression was provoked; and my passion to work for justice was born.
As the passion and anger of the sixties brewed and boiled over, so did my own passion and anger. How could there be such extremes of wealth and poverty in our nation? How could there be such hatred and fear among blacks and whites? How could women be told to stay in the kitchen? How could young men be sent to fight in a war that shouldn’t be? How could I go back to school and act like nothing had happened?
The decade of the seventies was an endless, exhausting, but exhilarating marathon of running away from all that I had known to a world beyond myself. I did a lot of hard growing up in a very short time. At eighteen, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and I responded to the news by jumping into an ill-advised marriage. Less than two years later, the marriage was dissolved, and I returned home, a prodigal daughter, to be with my father, who died a year later. By the age of twenty-one, I felt older than my years, and I was angry with God for letting “bad things happen to good people.”4
As a young adult, perhaps to compensate for my rebellious nature, I had a strong need to achieve, excel, and prove myself worthy of The Question. By the time I graduated from college, I had organized and directed a landlord/tenant agency and coordinated the development of a neighborhood revitalization program. Following college, I went to graduate school to study community planning, and for a few years I worked in a variety of community institutions, ranging from the United Way to the Girl Scouts. All the time I still was angry with God, but God was quietly watching over me—guiding me through every mess I got myself into without intruding into my fierce independence and self-determination.
During my early twenties, I also began coming to terms with my sexuality, realizing that I was a lesbian. It’s hard to understand the coming out process if you’re not gay. I liken the journey of coming out to a second adolescence with particular rites of passage that often include falling in and out of love, and sometimes looking for love in the wrong places. Fortunately, with support and acceptance from friends and family, I sorted out my sexual identity issues, and those confusing years actually have made me a more responsive and compassionate pastor to young adults and their families. By the time I rounded the quarter century mark, things were finally beginning to make sense, but The Question was becoming more complicated as the issue of passing took on new significance and meaning.
At the age of twenty-five, I found my way to Boston, where I lived The Question of faith and started getting some answers. Along the way, I decided it was safe to be baptized—I was finally convinced I wouldn’t be sent to the gas chamber, and I wanted to belong. Moreover, I wanted to be an ordained minister. After years of struggle, I felt pushed in the direction of seminary, and every door seemed to open without a key.
My first semester at Union Theological Seminary in New York City was a wrestling match with God. Exhausted from taking on someone bigger and stronger than me, I found myself walking down Forty-second Street one day in January asking God to let me go. And then it happened. Suddenly, a voice called out to me from within me saying, “I’m not going to let go of you.” “What do you want with me?” I asked. “I want your life,” the voice answered. “Why me?” I responded. “Why not?” the voice replied. At this point, I realized that something was happening and I needed to stop and pay attention to this voice. I went into a nearby McDonald’s restaurant, ordered my usual cheeseburger, fries, and coke and began frantically scribbling down a conversation with this voice from within. The voice called me by name, identified itself as God, confronted me with my own issues and private wounds, contradicted my theology, answered lots of questions, called me to the ordained priesthood, and reassured me when I protested. The voice said, “I brought you to New York for a reason, to look beyond yourself and those like you. . . . I want you to celebrate my Eucharist. . . . You must feed my people. . . . You will guide people to come to me through this and other acts. . . . You will help people to love each other and me. . . . You’ve changed; why can’t others. . . . It’s a loving revolution, so be my hands and my mouth, not your own.”
In the course of the conversation, I questioned why the voice was talking with me, and it responded, “Because you’ve been asking for it.” It was true. I had been asking, begging, even challenging God to be clear with me, to help me answer The Question. And here I was—on a cold January afternoon, sitting in a McDonald’s restaurant on Forty-second Street in Manhattan, having this private conversation with a voice. At the end of our time together, I asked, “If you’re inside of me, then how can you be God?” The voice replied in words I’ll never forget, “What’s so special about me is that I’m inside of anyone and everyone who wants to know me. And, if the world would hear me and follow me, my kingdom would come.” With that comment, the conversation ended. I got up and walked home in quiet amazement, wondering if I had really spoken with almighty God. Like Mary, I kept silent and treasured these words, pondering them in my heart.
A few days later,