Composing a Further Life

even read the Bible in full. That’s when I enrolled in the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. Not for long, because I got a job to do a movie called
Monster-in-Law
. But I was there for part of a semester and did my homework, and I loved it, just loved it. I want to go back there. The problem is, I travel so much that it’s hard to get any kind of consistent study. I began to read Elaine Pagels and Karen King, and the Gnostic Gospels. 4
    “So I’m a work in progress, and I’ve sort of moved, although they don’t seem to be contradictory to me, from prayer to meditation. Ted and I split up on January 3, 2000, and I moved with my dog into a little house my daughter has in a nongentrified part of Atlanta, while she was in Paris, a little guest room that had no closet. I was very sad because I had wanted the marriage to work, and yet I knew that it was right that I didn’t stay. I knew that I could have stayed and not had to work and died married, but I wouldn’t have died whole. I felt myself becoming … moving back into myself. I was conscious of it, and I knew that what I heard myself saying again was, This is God. This is what we are meant to be, and it’s what Jesus preached, it’s what he taught. Wholeness. Not perfection. Wholeness.”
    “Very different,” I said. “You know, in Hebrew, the word
shalom
, ‘peace,’ comes from the same root as the word
shalem
, which means ‘complete.’ It’s another one of these linkages like
holy, holistic, whole
, where you can follow the track of people’s understanding unfolding in the connections between words and yet the words get debased as people use them without thinking about their meaning.”
    “They get ironed flat,” said Jane. “Now my Bible study teacher, the woman who saved me, would say that what I’m experiencing in [Zen] meditation is—I don’t know, she’s a very wonderful woman. She wouldn’t say it’s false but that it doesn’t count in a way, but I—It’s a somatic experience for me. I feel a lot of the time now the way I used to feel only when I was by myself at the top of a mountain or in the woods. I feel the presence of God. I feel reverence, humming within me. And I feel it when I’m meditating, and I feel it when I’m reading Scripture, when I’m trying to sort out my religious feelings. There have been times when I thought I should be an Episcopalian. I like the ritual. And other times when I felt guilty about that, because I don’t have the depth of understanding of what it means and I don’t stay anyplace long enough to really get into it, so I’m a little bit confused, … which seems ridiculous at seventy, but … I should have it all straightened out by now.”
    “No way,” I said. “The divisions between the denominations of Christianity are all wrong. They are competing versions of one truth, and we ought to be able to think in terms of that one truth and not go around with one little sect saying to people in the other little sect that they’re going to Hell. It has a lot to do with issues of power and control and competition and all that. And it’s obscene.”
    As I have thought back over Jane’s story, I have been fascinated by a word she used, that she was looking for a “container” for her developing spirituality, a context in which to plant and cultivate the beginnings of faith. I took this to mean that she understood the need to situate herself in a community and in a historical tradition. But her early efforts had confronted her with rejection rather than affirmation. I could see why the Episcopal Church attracted her.
    “The great strength of the Episcopal Church,” I told her, “has been what is called the Anglican compromise, though recently that’s looking pretty ragged. After Henry VIII broke with Rome, things went back and forth for over a century, sometimes violently, with martyrs and countermartyrs and general hatefulness in both directions. When Elizabeth I became queen, she reasserted the authority of the crown over the English church, but in the Act of Uniformity of 1559 she affirmed norms of governance and liturgy that eventually provided a viable long-term model for coexistence, with a prayer book that carried on the tradition and the structure of ordination, bishops, and so on, which became the Episcopal Church in the United States, with a sort of acceptance of local variation and of the fact that people might have different preferences and understandings.