MY WRESTLING MATCH WITH GOD

My wrestling match with God began when I was about eight years old. There was a discussion in my household about whether or not soul existed and I knew that it did. There was my body and there was my soul, two entirely separate parts of me. I was the only one in my family who believed this.

ANGLICAN ROOTS
I began life as an Anglican. My brother and I were expected to get up early on Sunday mornings and walk to Sunday school a few blocks away, while my parents slept.

Those Sunday school pictures confused me. God was the father but we couldn’t see pictures of him, just his son. At least I think it was his son. There was this benign, bearded man in white or blue robes with kids sitting on his knee. Then Joseph and Mary got into the mix and I was totally confused.

In my early teens I began to be present and prompt for 7:30 morning communion. I liked the fasting and the early hour, just me and the God I was trying to get to know.

There was something completely wrong about sitting in eleven o’clock service, following the same structure; hymns that went on at least four monotonous verses too long (two verses is plenty) and then the minister got twenty minutes or an hour if he wanted, to lecture us. It was nuts and I never left refreshed or satisfied. I had hoped to leave fired up to be a better person or climb a higher mountain. Something.

When I had my own family I used to starch the hell out of the children’s clothes on Saturday and on Sunday morning I took them downstairs to Anglican Sunday School and me upstairs to church service. Hal would have nothing to do with all this and remained peacefully at home with a third cup of coffee and quiet time.

THEN A UNITARIAN
I did a 360’ turn when my eldest child was about ready for confirmation class and one Sunday I hustled all of us, including a bemused Hal to a Unitarian church and that’s when I began to find my way. In this particular setting, we didn’t pray or sing hymns and whoever did the talk for the morning had to be prepared for a rebuttal time following the meeting, or service. Rebuttal might be too combative a word, but we tried to bring in speakers with off center viewpoints and we had the opportunity to ask questions and try out ideas.

NEXT UP-ECKANKAR

When the kids grew up we drifted away and I began following a path called Eckankar, which is an invented religion, mostly based on East Indian beliefs. Every religion is invented but this one was more open about it. I learned to meditate and sing Hu’s and began to listen to this inner voice that had always been with me. I just didn’t know I could speak to it.

During my meditations, I often received messages of things that were to come and sometimes in conversation I would reply to a question before it was asked. I’m not that intense now so this rarely happens anymore.

I know I am soul having a human experience.

NOW I’M A NO-NAME

I’m not a member of any group now but sometimes I drop into a nearby Unitarian church and find energy from the membership.

My daughter-in law Diana (I kept her as mine after her divorce from my son) calls her personal inner voice, “Mr. Nobody,” and that says it very well. I use the word god with a small “g” and that works for me.

Honestly, I don’t think Jesus would be at all happy with the trappings people have embraced to follow his teachings. He was a fighter and probably hard to get along with and he is one of my heroes.

Despite that, I’m not a Christian. I don’t think they’ve got it right yet.

Prayer. If it gives you comfort, then go for it. When Hal was dying, some friends would say, “I’m praying for him,” and I wanted to ask—“what are you praying to happen?” A miraculous recovery? That his soul will go to the right place?” I politely asked people not to pray for him. He was on a personal non-stop journey of his own.

I’ve learned that if you are a curious and passionate person, you can’t simply embrace whatever is presented to you as a child. You have to be sure its right for you. You dig, seek, question, listen. It’s hard work and sometimes scary, because you will irritate people you care about and learn new things quite foreign to you. Eventually you find what’s right for you.

I will always love the Anglican Church but it just wasn’t enough. I’m really only telling you how I found my way. Another time I’ll tell you what I found.

My way is to go it alone. It’s my god path and I follow it, stumbling every once in a while, but my inner voice and I are at peace with what we are trying to be.

The Great Escape

I’m slowly writing a book about my six kids. This happened when they were aged one to eleven.

We had just finished dinner. There hadn't been one ugly word about fish on the menu and the tidemarks on their wrists proved they'd at least passed their hands under a tap. Scott left his can of fishing worms off the table and Steven left his dissection kit in the kitchen.

"There's still some sun left, are you all going to play kick- the- can again tonight?"

Innocent eyes swivelled towards me.

"Oh no, we're going to go down to the dormitory and I'll read Treasure Island to the guys," replied Mark with the look of a seventeenth century saint.

"Tunna," said Melissa, and Mark quickly said, "Gee, she's learning to talk real well; see how she said treasure?"

A quick glance to one another and a silent agreement was reached to save the English lesson for another time. They were excused from the table and quickly clattered off downstairs. Children don't actually run or walk downstairs. If you didn't know better, you'd swear the refrigerator had broken loose from its moorings and was hurtling down at express train speed.

We had the uneasy feeling that something was wrong with the scenario we had just witnessed: our children posing as obedient polite fish-loving children, but we tried to reassure each other that they were growing up; after all, our eldest child, Mark was eleven, and so mature for his age. "That explains Mark, but are you going to tell me Scott really wants to go downstairs and read Treasure Island when he could be fishing at the pond?" The pessimist poured another cup of coffee and the conversation got sidetracked as he helped himself to the last piece of chocolate cream pie, an enormous clue right there.

Every day after school they rushed home to change into their scruffiest jeans and stayed quietly downstairs, emerging every once in a while for a brief trip outside. Melissa followed them back and forth, murmuring,"Tunna." there wasn't any fighting and I caught up on all the mending and diaper folding and tried out the recipe for marinated salmon with caper sauce.

Sure we knew we were teetering on an unknown precipice but we rashly took advantage of these suddenly perfect children to read, and, I don’t know, relax.

We'd recently had an addition tacked on to the back of the house, a necessity we couldn't overlook any longer when the snowsuits were piled so high by the back door that a small child was in danger of getting lost until spring. Along with a family room off the kitchen, we built a mudroom by the back door and underneath all this, joined to the dormitory housing the five boys, was a crawl space, about three feet above the floor. Steven made a couple of boards on casters from old roller skates, to slide from one end to the other in search of the missing hamster cage, or, often, the hamsters.

The mystery of ongoing family harmony and peace was solved one morning when they were in school and I was wrestling the dormitory into control. I leaned into the crawl space entrance to see whether they had dismantled the fort made out of my best comforter and three crib blankets and my foot skidded over a loose floor tile. I stooped down to pick it up and my peaceful time was over. Under the tile was a square piece of wood and underneath that was a hole about two feet deep and two feet wide. Closer inspection revealed a bottle of beer and a half full package of cigarettes in a dented coffee can at the bottom.

When they got home from school, I was waiting.

Mark and Scott dashed in, made only one peanut butter and honey sandwich each and raced downstairs. Soon they came back up, more slowly this time.

"You found it."

"Uh huh. Now, would someone please tell me what I found?"

Scott looked pained. "See, I told you she's never get it," he sighed. "It's a tunnel. We're building an escape tunnel right through to the street and over to the millpond. Just like that ‘Great Escape’ movie we all watched. See, we've even got bags with drawstrings under our jeans so we can fill them with the dirt we dig up, then we go out in the yard and release it, and you never caught on."

It was difficult to speak. They looked so proud and Melissa toddled over to clutch Mark’s, hand, "Tunna." Tunnel. Now it’s so clear.

"What did you dig it with?"

"Well, we started with Dad’s crow bar and pick axe, but the neat part was when we got through the cement and started digging up the dirt; we cut up the juice cans you were saving for recycling and shaped them just the way the men did in the movie."

Apparently the plan was to dig down for a while, and then sideways until they figured they were under the road, then up a manhole, which I don’t believe existed anywhere nearby.

A profound sigh escaped from me. "Tell me, is there some reason that you couldn't have just walked out the front door, if you were in such a tearing hurry to escape?"

An Apology To Rose

Dear Rose:

The last time we saw one another was around grade eight at Point Grey Junior High, in Vancouver. I was Pat Hawkes then.

World War two was underway and then came Pearl Harbor and suddenly every Japanese Canadian citizen on the mainland was considered an enemy and all of you were ripped from your homes and properties and incarcerated in the interior.

You were sent away and I didn’t question this. Why would I? My parents seemed to think it was the right thing to do.

We corresponded for a while and then came the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That was when I decided that writing to you was writing to the enemy and after consultation with my mother, I stopped writing.

I was a voracious reader as a child and eventually grasped the enormity of this injustice to fellow citizens and the shame of that time has never left me. Never.

I never forgave my parents for their acceptance of such an outrage. Would I have behaved better as an adult? Probably not.

I lived in Toronto as an adult when I read in the paper about a Rose Fujita, the artist, visiting the city. It had to be you—you were so gifted. I just remember thinking—is this “my” Rose? I could call and ask.

But I didn’t. What could I say? Perhaps I hoped you wouldn’t remember me.

I wish I could have been a better friend.

You were so clever and such an artist. You lived in Marpole, where all Japanese kids seemed to live and you took the tram to school in town every day.

All I can say, Rose, is that my adult life has been lived with an eye to fighting injustice and teaching my kids to do the same.

I hope you have had a good and prosperous life, Rose and that you can forgive me for not being the smarter, better friend you deserved.

Beginnings

My son Steve has a blog about his broken romance. He’s letting it all hang out for everyone to read.

That’s not my route but then I haven’t had a romance of any kind for ages.

This is about my life on my own. I was married to Hal for a week short of 38 years before he died of cancer.

The last year of his life was the most amazing spiritual journey I may ever take. I had never experienced death of anyone I loved and it was astonishing.

I have strong ideas about the leave-taking of a loved one so there was none of that toting the body to the funeral home for evisceration. Instead he was transported to the crematorium and we had a noisy party for him at home.

We quietly planted his ashes in the middle of the city at a place he loved.

Now I’ve been on my own for a few years and it’s the first time ever in my life.

I lived at home until I married, and then I was with Hal and never, ever was I on my own. I couldn’t believe I could manage and to my surprise, I have done very well.

Hal was the kind of person who wanted me to depend on him and I did. Just before his illness manifested itself he used to say to me, “You know it really would be best if you were to die first. I don’t know how you would manage on your own.”

At the time, I agreed with him. I was nervous to be alone at night if Hal was out of town. I didn’t like talking on the phone so he handled a lot of our social calls. The list is endless.

I wasn’t a complete dolt. While the kids were small (there were six in ten years) I ran a cub pack and worked hard to give the kids fun, challenges and diversity. I was on the line of a Distress center for a few years and ran the place for a a few months while they searched for a new director. When drugs were new in the 70’s I joined a small hands-on board of people who tried to figure out ways to handle the kids who were being booted out by their confused parents. Eventually I became a Human Resources specialist in a hospital and tried to keep several hundred nurses and head nurses from colliding too often.

So, as I say, I wasn’t a complete dolt. Just timid I guess.

A new life began when I married. I changed completely when I had kids. And another complete turnaround after the kids were grown and on their own and Hal died.

Some things I found out as a single person. I didn’t have much money (Hal spent most of his working life as a free lance journalist—not a lucrative way to earn a living). We didn’t save much while I worked. I figured out what to do and how to do it, but that’s another blog.

I’m much braver than I believed I was.

And I raised great kids.