Composing a Further Life

You couldn’t standardize the thing. I think that’s critical, simply knowing that when people said the same words, they didn’t mean the exact same thing to everybody. Now, for me it’s self-evident that they can’t mean the same thing to everybody. But in spite of the possibility for conflict that’s always been there, it’s been pretty resilient.
    “For a while Barkev and I had our own version of the Anglican compromise and went to Episcopal churches, he coming from evangelical Protestantism brought to the Armenians by Congregationalist missionaries, and me being what Episcopalians call high church. And there was room for both of us. But it was really because of a particular priest. Al Kershaw was a southerner and a superb preacher. He’d won money on
The $64,000 Question
on the subject of jazz, and after he did that, he thought he would go and be in a small country parish and not be in the city. He was a real scholar of jazz and brought musicians from New Orleans to play in Peterborough.”
    “Here?” Jane asked.
    “Here in New Hampshire. Inspiring and funny and paradoxical. And incredibly expressive. You know, people would come out of church and he would hug them and pick them up and swing them around. So we both loved him dearly. Eventually he left Peterborough and came down to Boston, where he at Emmanuel Church created the best music program at any church in the city. So while the theology wasn’t of so much interest to Barkev, the preaching and the music were important to him. And Al was also very much of a social activist. He was going to take this blue-blood, WASPy church that was dwindling in membership and get it involved with urban renewal and social change and generally shaking things up. We were both involved in that, leading discussion groups and so on. Barkev was on the vestry for a while. Vanni was baptized there.
    “But it really depended on that one person. So basically, after we left Boston to go to Iran, Barkev was not interested in going to church and began to get annoyed that I went. But there was that period when we had our ‘Anglican compromise,’ where I could find what I needed and he was finding what he wanted, and we were doing it together.”
    “It’s interesting how you describe it,” Jane said, “because when I was going to church in Atlanta, I tried many churches, and the only church I felt comfortable in was the black Baptist church. They have a fabulous preacher, also, with a lot of social engagement and great music. And that’s where I went, until the reporters discovered I was there, and then I couldn’t go anymore because reporters would come. But I liked that. It seems … the faith that comes from oppression seems to vibrate with me more.”
    Each of us, apparently, had had difficulty in integrating personal experience into a larger community. But community is an ideal that has always been part of the Christian tradition, in spite of all the schisms and divisions. If Alfred North Whitehead is right in saying that religion is “what an individual does with his own solitariness,” 5 a quote often used to argue against organized religion, then what we are called to do with that solitariness is to let go of it and realize that we are not solitary, to weave the threads of personal experience, including experiences in different contexts, into the fabric of community even as we embrace the knowledge that we are not alone.
    Jane continues to be interested in acting, and philanthropy is important to her as she continues to work through her foundation with programs for teenage girls, based on the conviction that population can be stabilized if young women are educated to have a sense of their own value and ability to contribute—a basis for hope. In 2009, she was back on Broadway, in
33 Variations
, a play in which she starred as a musicologist trying to understand why Beethoven wrote so many variations on a single theme. The playwright, Moisés Kaufman, was clearly inviting the audience to make a connection between themes in music and the thematic structure of lives—the lives of the composer and the musicologist, the place of creativity and selection, the ways in which an individual, looking at his or her own life, can play with multiple alternative interpretations, as in variations on a theme or the looser structure of a rhapsody. My husband, perhaps responding to the way the play overlaid two different historical eras, commented that Bach fugues “work”