… I really want to respond to your hope of converting me to Roman Catholicism! Too late! I already am one - and I'm not! The first part - the "am" - happened when I was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr and the girl whose room was across the hall from mine heard my record player, which had taken me several years of savings to accumulate money for, playing - oh, perhaps Deems Taylor's The King's Henchman (Lawrence Tibbett) or Ravel's La Valse, or Georges Inescu's Rumanian Rhapsody, or Richard Strauss' "the dance of the seven veils" from "Salome."
Anyhow, we became close friends, first, on the strength of our mutual obsession with music, later on my attempts to absorb St. Thomas Aquinas' ideas (based on a paper she was writing for a philosophy course). Marie ultimately invited me, as a supreme privilege, to accompany her to five A.M. mass during Lent. I had grown up as a totally back-slidden Unitarian (the monophysite - i.e., New England - not the latitudinarian variety, as a friend of ours who taught philosophy at Bowdoin when Bill was teaching phil and psych there as a lowly instructor called the two kinds), and was blown away by the astounding power of the experience, especially shared with this young women, on whom I had a sort of awed crush.
So even though the Order that supplied the church was Augustinian and the priest a very portly, earthbound Irishman with a very red face and a whiskey-gargling huskiness in his voice whose mind was solely on fund-raising for his nuns - at least if one could go by the topics of his sermons (one of which I remember waxed eloquent on the splinters on the ancient toilet seats used by the nuns!) - I fell in love with the alien and awesome beauty of this forbidden God-worship. I had been brought up at least officially anti-Irish by my WASP New England Protestant parents (my grandfather had been a Presbyterian, as I think I once mentioned to you), although my very best friend earlier in my life had been half Irish and half Polish, and a WONDERFUL human being! But now I fell in love with discovering something both beyond and outside of the contents of my inside cupboards, which until then had been filled with my growing-up family idioms, I having been a wild but also programmable child, mentally, such that a senior in my hall once told me I was just a carbon copy of my parents' beliefs! She was right, appalled though the idea made me feel.
At any rate, Marie graduated a year before me, and the next fall I began taking instructions for converting, at a nearby Catholic College, Rosemont, from a Franciscan Father Sparrow (honest!) and the Mother Superior herself! I even did a retreat on Ignatius Loyola one weekend, although reading his Spiritual Exercises didn't really get me very far into spirituality! I did better with Thomas`a Kempis' Imitation of Christ and The Little Flowers of St. Francis. However it was, I was finally ready to finalize the process by the spring break, went home and broke the news to my mother. She was no dummy, and so talked me into promising her I would wait until I was 25 to bind myself officially to the church. She told me I was still too young to know my mind fully. She was right, actually, but in any case, I did as she asked me to do.
I still went to mass every Sunday, longing for the sacrament of communion each time, faithfully reading the Latin from the missal my friend Marie had given me for graduation, and dutifully entered nurse's training at The Children's Hospital in Boston in the fall. I remained a pretty faithful aspiring Catholic for the three years of my training until I met Bill, who was a philosophy doctoral candidate at Harvard. They were in the midst of a scarlet fever epidemic there and Stillman Infirmary was full, so when Bill caught it by drinking beer out of a glass that had been used by a friend who was celebrating his release from Stillman, they sent him to the contagious ward at Children's where I took care of him for a couple of weeks while he was recovering.
We became an item, both bereft of previous cross-gender connections, both pretty alienated, feeling instant kinship on that basis, plus a fascination with ideas and with Bill's fasci-nating Harvard friends, a whole new world to me! It took very little time for me to lose my "faith," which had been based on lack of challenge I could relate to, as much as anything else, plus equal fascination with a way of life based on a new dogma - i.e., other than my parents' dogma, which was largely hygienic (my father's beliefs about healthy diet and discipline for children) and old New England moralism. By the time I was twenty-five, I was married with a child, and pregnant with a second - and religion of any variety was very far from my mind!
The scene shifts to the 50s, my discovery of Judaism in Texas, where Bill had finally found a job (after he received his PhD) teaching phil and psych at Texas State College for Women, and one of our few new friends was a Jewish family who invited us to a seder at their home. I found this experience so gemütlich as to be generic, in some strange way. I had long since abandoned Catholicism, and had begun a love affair with Unitarianism in this small town, where Yankees were pretty thin on the ground. We established a Unitarian Fellowship together, and a husband and wife architectural team who were Texans AND members worked with us to build a Fellowship building. It was an inspiring way to practice our ways of the need for an expression of something beyond the ordinary, yet none of us was willing to call ourselves Christians!
By 1960 Bill, who had felt exiled to a kind of hot Siberia in Texas, had finally received an offer from a kook who still headed the philosophy department at the new SUNYA following the changes from a normal school to a state college to a Rockefeller university - and was lured by Bill's Harvard PhD, no doubt). So in the early 60s Bill and I (with five kids, now - it's called "careless love"!) trekked diagonally across the country by camping trailer and tent all the way back east to live in Albany. And old black man (I would have said "nigger man" if I hadn't feared being misconstrued) followed us in an ancient stake truck packed high with our worldly goods. This move proved to be quite an ordeal for both of us - all of us. We had been living in Texas for nine years, and had begun to take for granted the basic folksiness of small-town Texans. Belatedly, I, at least, began to realize how much of a sense of connectedness we were giving up for the cold-hearted impersonality of a northeastern city! Actually, we all suffered from the culture shock of the change, and it took us several years to adapt.
It was the sixties. I responded to this shakeup by a) trying to involve myself in "faculty wives" affairs, b) political protest, c) illness, and d) Unitarianism, again. It didn't really work all that well. I was pretty unhappy, feeling, I suppose, like a very small fish in a very big pond, and spent several years trying to worm my way back to a more livable state through both individual and group therapy. I guess in a sense it began to work, because I began writing poems for the first time, and persuaded my husband to take a student/teacher flight to England (cheap) in 1964. We did a six-weeks tour of England, Germany, Austria and Italy, the European part of it in a VW bug we rented from one of his cousins in Braunschweig, Germany. The trip whetted my appetite for more travel, and in 1968-9 we took a Sabbatical year at Oxford with my two youngest kids, at my persistent urging. I began Reichian therapy in London there, and fell in love with my therapist, David Boadella! Actually, we are still good friends. He was unhappy in his marriage then, has since remarried a Swiss woman, had a child and has a therapeutic center in Switzerland which I have visited three times.
Returning in the summer of 1969 to the prospect of Albany's awful city schools and Mark's protests and importunings for the right to be taught at home, plus my reading of Summerhill and brief correspondence with Neill, led to the start of what soon became The Free School, in the late fall of 1969. It was very exciting, but not all-consuming. I was still unhappy in my marriage, and continued my Reichian therapy with an orgonomist in Philadelphia, whom I drove down to visit every other week - for over three years!
I guess by now Judaism and Catholicism had both assumed equal status in my mind as com-pelling religious pathways, not so much a part of my inner life. And just as my Unitarianism hadn't survived the year abroad, having been based on a close friendship with a minister who finally got rejected by his congregation as too liberal, neither of these sects now beckoned me to become a real follower, Instead, I became fascinated with Sufism, when the western branch found its spiritual Abode in an abandoned Shaker settlement in New Lebanon, NY, an hour's drive from Albany.
I spent quite a bit of time attending universal worship on Sundays, going to retreats to learn the esoterica of mystical Sufism, practicing zikr, going on Sufi tours to Jerusalem and to Konya, Turkey, for a Rumi Sema with the Mevlevi dervishes. I made friends with a number of really great Sufis, and those friendships have survived - at a distance, of course, but at least my dear friend Ashraf, who lives in Maui now, and I are really good friends.*
I guess it was at this juncture that I came across a book written by a Maine guy about dowsing, giving a lot of space to extolling the astounding feats of a man he dubbed "The Wizard of Bath," a guy named Bob Ater, whose prowess was so fine that he could locate lost objects by dowsing a detailed map of a region. And since I was driving up to Brunswick every week or so to visit my aging parents, and Bath is the next town over, I got up my courage to visit Bob Ater to find out whether or not this earth energies power was true! After my dithering in front of his little house for a while he apparently spotted me and invited me in, evidently realizing intuitively what I wanted. He took me downhill to a crafts shop, bought me a willow bough and a big wooden button, brought them home, soaked the willow in hot water, bent it and slipped the button over its middle and then took me down to the city park, where I located THREE wells using the wand. It was a kind of turning point in my life, opening a new world of vision to which I had hitherto been almost blind, although the gates had opened momentarily when I had taken mescaline in 1973 or so.
This must have been somewhere around 1983 or 84. By now I was sixty-five, and the Free School was very well managed by the younger people who had come to teach during the sixties and early eighties and had stayed to buy up old houses close-by, for back taxes - and had begun having children of their own. I had been offering members of the community Reichian therapy for a number of years (with the consent of my two Reichian therapists), and had also done quite a bit of personal and marital counseling, and we had set up a growth group, starting in 1974, which was still meeting once a week, and had become one of the foundational bases for the community that had been developing around the school. It was clear to me that I was no longer needed, except for an occasional course the kids wanted me to offer, and I had begun wanting to document some of our discoveries and achievements, so I basically retired from daily participation in the affairs of the school.
By this time I had become fascinated by the female Godhead, and had begun having dreams and moments of rapture over my awareness of female divinity, had begun to write poems about it. Reading Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman created in me a sort of passionate longing for actually seeing and dowsing Goddess sites in England and Europe, including stone circles in England, Cornwall and Scotland and ancient altars and sacred sites n France and Greece. I heard from a Sufi friend about a woman named Alice Howell who was a Jungian astrologer who had done a lot of this kind of sacred travel, especially in India, Greece and on the sacred isle of Iona, and so visited her for suggestions about places to visit. She gave me many Goddess sites to visit in a great many places. She also suggested I attend a conference of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology on my return, which was meeting at a Catskills mountains resort hotel named Mohonk Mountain House in January.
I did all that, found the dowsing very enlightening and often inspiring, and did go to the ATP meeting. Alice was giving the keynote address, and I also became riveted by the presentation of a friend of hers, Roger Woolger, also a Jungian, a graduate of the Jungian Institute in Zürich. Roger was a real scholar with a masters in philosophy from Oxford and another one in comparative religions from the University of London, who had been married to an American and living in Vermont, and had unexpectedly fallen into the experience of an apparent past life while doing rebirthing in a hot tub in Vermont. His vision was that of a life in which he was a common laborer who had got caught up in the Albigensian Crusade in Simon de Montfort's army that was in Occitanie wiping out the Cathars. This laborer became so horrified by the slaughter at the city of Béziers that he tried to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, but only broke his legs and pelvis, was rescued and cared for by Cathars and eventually became one himself.
Roger decided to pursue this area of his life, spent a year in California working with an MD named Morris Netherton who used his skill of evoking focused regression to help patients with intractable symptoms of one sort or another to heal by reliving directly the actual traumatic event from which the symptom arose. And quite often what emerged from these sessions involved apparent past lives - and especially the deaths suffered during those lifetimes. So Roger became a certified Past Life therapist. He gave us a stunning demonstration at the conference, and I realized how much of my own unresolved pain and fear represented residual material from the past!
Following this gathering, I began editing and publishing a new quarterly journal I decided to call SKOLE, the Journal of the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools, which I published in a new enterprise I called Down-to-Earth Books. During the seventies I had established a little store at the school that I called the Down-to-Earth store selling natural foods, so took the name and made it my title for the new publishing company. I also wrote a book detailing my Goddess trip that I called Rushing to Eva, which I published in 1985. At that time I also began driving down to Roger's house near Kingston every week to attend a group experiment he and his wife had begun to experience and teach past lives therapy, starting in January, 1985, and continuing until June. Four other members of the community came along as well, and then two others joined after two of the original members of the group dropped out, so there were seven of us altogether.
It was here that I began recapturing many of the lives I had not realized were so powerful an influence in my current life, explaining my inordinate fear of both fire and water as a child, and my terrors of various sorts throughout my childhood. We continued to guide one another after the group ended in June, and I now have data about fourteen lives stemming from one each in Lemuria and Atlantis, plus two very early indigenous lives (Polynesian and Eskimo) to the most recent one as a boy child who died on the Titanic! I have even found the name of my "family" - among the steerage passengers, at the back of a book about the event.
But it was the life as a Cathar that have created both my inner devotion to Catholicism AND my insistence on defining that membership in my own way. That too is a long, tortuous journey which I hope you can bear with me to detail. During the eighties I persuaded my husband to begin marital counseling with me, to try to discover how we could create more common ground for our marriage than just the habitual commonalities of daily living together. It turned out to be an over three-year experience which finally ended when our therapist gave up trying to get Bill to venture out of his shell into a more interactive, more confrontive mode. She told me I had a choice - either to accept him and the marriage as it was or leave. I left, taking up living in a small apartment two doors from the school, for six months.
Bill was bereft without me, and I stayed in almost daily contact, buying him food, doing his laundry, taking him to the doctor, talking with him on the phone, so it wasn't a real separation. I came back at the end of that time, having spent my time writing a book about my life that I first called The Glass Garden, then later published as The Flying Bird Brings the Message, after the I Ching. I seem to have resorted to the "geographical solution," in which a change of scenery or residence solves the problem - and begged him to let me engineer the rehabilitation of a house much closer to the school since he no longer needed to live within walking distance of the university. We did that, with a lot of help from our sons, especially Tom, who came over to Albany from Ashfield, Mass., where he and his wife were homesteading. Many of the school people, as well as his wife, put a lot of time and skill into the rehab as well. Truly, this was a family-community effort! It did help - for a while - but by the nineties, I was at a dead end, and moved out again, this time to an apartment just up the street from the school.
This time I had come to the conclusion that my marriage was over, whether or not I got a divorce, which would have been a dreadful ordeal for Bill. I got a call from one of my Sufi friends about a lost soul who had been living at the Abode and wanted to find a community. He asked if this guy could come and live in ours, and of course I said yes. For twenty years the school had been buying up old buildings and fixing them up to rent as a strategy for generating income without having to resort to an exclusively tuition-based economy - so we had apartments to rent, and one was free just across the street from mine. What I didn't count on was my susceptibility to falling in love! It happened, and we became lovers. It was very intense, but it couldn't last, because he was hopelessly ambivalent, and soon reverted to wanting to get back to his former female connection, a Dutch woman. He also had an abusive streak, and I felt devastated by his lack of empathy with my reactions.
During all this time since 1969 I had been corresponding off and on with my former London therapist David Boadella, and in fact, he had come over to America twice to conduct Biosynthesis (which was what he called his neo-Reichian therapeutic modality) workshops in Albany. I also visited him and his wife several times in Dorset, and became friends also with his wife, who was a poet. During one of these visits he showed me a book by an MD/therapist named Arthur Guirdham entitled The Cathars and Reincarnation which described his experience with a patient who identified him as a character in a past life in which she and he were Cathars during the persecution. It was David's influence that persuaded me to visit Montségur during my European sacred trip, where I had found such compelling memories of this place I had never known in this lifetime which had persuaded me to work with Roger Woolger.
David also showed me a book by a German writer named Holger Kersten called Jesus Lived In India. This was an account of Kersten's gradual conviction that a Muslim professor of antiquities and Director of Archaeology for Kashmir named Fida Hassnain at the University of Kashmir in Srinagar was telling the truth when he asserted, citing numerous authorities in Europe, India and America, that Jesus did NOT die on the cross, but was taken down alive, probably in a drugged coma, resuscitated, that he subsequently visited with his disciples, left Jerusalem, met Paul on the road to Damascus, kept on traveling east, accompanied by Mary Magdalene and his mother Mary, finally met up with his brother Thomas in Taxila in India, and then on to Kashmir, where he ministered to the "lost sheep of Israel" for many, many years, known as "Hazrat Issa" or as"Yuzu Asaph," Yuzu being an alternate of Issa, and Asaph, meaning gatherer of healed lepers.
I developed a great urge to go to India, speak with Professor Hassnain and see and dowse the energy at Jesus' tomb, known as the Rozabal, in Srinagar. Again, my motives were partly based on my "geographic cure," but certainly not entirely. One of the places Alice Howell had urged me to visit was Varanasi, in Bihar province in India. I had also become good friends with a Japanese Buddhist nun, a member of the order known as Nipponsan Myohoji founded by former Nichiren Buddhist monk Nichidatsu Fujii, known as Fujii Guru-ji, so dubbed by Mahatma Gandhi during a visit made by him to Warda to visit the latter. After World War Two, Guri-ji had a dream or a vision of building Peace Pagodas on every high place visible from one of the resorts where the Emperor took his vacations, to remind him never to make war again. He began doing this, and founded a new order in the process, gathering followers who were hungry for spiritual meaning in their lives in post-war Japan. Jun-Anji-san Yasuda came to the Albany area with a mission to build a Peace Pagoda on land donated to the order by a war veteran named Hank Hazleton, who had become a Nipponsan Myohoji Buddhist after the war. During the winter Jun would sometimes stay with a Quaker named Liz Pearson, whose apartment was right across from The Free School in downtown Albany. From my apartment in a school building up the street from the school I would hear the throbbing of her drum and would watch her bowing in front of Liz's apartment - and I became fascinated. We had a Japanese weaver teaching at the school at the time, and she had met Jun-san, and offered to introduce us - and did. The entire school soon developed a good relationship with Jun-san, and would often go out to the Pagoda site to help with her project.
So when I decided to go to India, I mentioned it to Jun-san, who offered to write to some of the monks who cared for Peace Pagodas and temples in India, so that I could stay with them during my trip - especially the nun Katsu-Angi-san, who took care of the temple in Laxmi Nagar, across the Yamuna River from New Delhi. She was trying to get permission to build a Peace Pagoda there, but had not yet succeeded.
The trip, like my Goddess trip, became very quickly one of several goals. The temples at which I stayed took on a central significance fully equal to that of visiting the Rozabal. I developed a respect and abiding affection for the goodness, the basic kindness and selflessness of the nun Kat-san, and for the monks at the Peace Pagoda temples where I stayed - first, in Laxmi Nagar, then, after Srinagar, in Changspa village above Leh, the capital of Ladakh, and finally, in Rajgir, on top of a mountain which was one of a cluster of peaks, one of them known as the Gridhuta - the Vulture Peak, where the Buddha is said to have promulgated the Lotus Sutra. Nabatame-shonin, the monk there, was wont to patrol the grounds of the entire cluster every morning at sunrise, ending by meditating and drumming at the site of the ruins of a small monastery built by the followers of the Buddha after his death. He let me go with him on one of his tours. Walking back down alone, I stopped to dowse at a cave halfway down the mountain, and found it to hold much more of the earth energy than the ruins on top. My pendulum whizzed so fast in the clockwise direction that I just stood there amazed. Clockwise is the "male" direction. The only other place I've known the energy to be even partly that intense was at the Altar of Hera in Olympus, in Greece, where the young village women come with a burning glass to light the Olympian torch - but of course, that energy was "widder-shins," or counter-clockwise, the "female" direction.
While I was in Ladakh, I wanted very much to get to the monastery known as Hemis, where the Tibetan scrolls describing the life of Jesus had been shown by the monks to Russian traveler Nicholas Notovich in the 19th century - but the snow was too deep to travel on the pass. Instead, I visited the closer monastery known as Thikse. The trip was by bus, and looking up at the city in the sky that was Thikse was a profound experience. Walking to its summit was wearying, exciting and frightening, in equal amounts, and when I arrived, and was let into the great temple with the huge Buddha, whose full length stretched over two stories, I fell on my knees in awe, bowled over by the impact. So, although I never did get to Hemis, the Gompa of Thikse remains in my mind as the ultimate Buddhist shrine and community in Ladakh.
Several years later, when Chris and I attended the dedication of the Peace Pagoda at Changspa village north of Leh, which had been half-built when I was there, monks and others from Hemis came and danced their mystery play at the ceremonies in the plaza below the pagoda, so we did get to see the monks of Hemis after all; but I still think back to my mystical ex-perience at Thikse as the epitome of that religious expression.
Back to the Sufis. One of my Sufi friends, Ganesh, became a travel agent during the eighties, and of course began organizing sacred tours. One I have already mentioned - the trip to Jerusalem and then Konya, Turkey. My friend Ashraf co-led the non-Jerusalem part of the tour, which also included Syria. The next year Ashraf and Ganesh decided to do a tour of Cathar castles, and asked me to co-lead it with Ashraf. I was happy to do that, although the idea of being responsible for explaining the history of the Cathars left me a bit tongue-tied. Ganesh had planned the tour around the legend of the Grail as described in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which has been connected with Montségur only as the Grail castle, but my connection was somewhat different, and I knew very little about the culture of the other Cathar castles - more about the ordinary level of Occitanian life, which did not interest them. Still, I did it, and it worked out pretty well.
I guess it was as much as anything the past life experience at Montségur that has defined my life as a believer. The end of that life included the year-long siege by Simon de Montfort's army, and the final scene of the mass pyre of the last of the "pure ones," aided and abetted by chanting Dominicans from the nearby monastery. I was an eighteen-year-old girl in (unreciprocated) love with one of the Cathar priests who suddenly discovered that her faith was not equal to the ordeal of dying by fire, but that she wanted desperately to live! I died with the rest of them in the mass pyre, yet felt like a traitor to all the others who had made their peace with dying. This was a painful reversal of the sensed integrity of my soul which had haunted many of my subsequent lives, so rediscovering it was an important change in my present life's direction. I am still struggling with the implications of that lifetime.
It was the loving support of Ashraf at Montségur during this Sufi tour - he had had a past life as a Templar - that enabled me to break through the taboo I had been obeying against receiving communion. During the previous Sufi tour of Israel, I had received baptism by an Episcopal woman priest at the traditional place of baptism on the Jordan River where Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist - but feeling unworthy to receive the sacraments because of the lack of official endorsement by the Church had held me back from reestablishing my sense of membership . With Ashraf's encouragement I now made my first communion on this tour at the Crusader church of Simon de Montfort in Carcassonne, with the sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows and the choir singing plainsong - but still had to overcome my doubts as to my fitness to receive it, having failed to go through with the terms of the original conversion. I still take communion on occasion - I did at the cathedral in Strassburg, and have done at St. Ann's in Albany, and once at the cathedral - but I still do not have a feeling of total belonging, which must surely include a sense of being accepted, not just of accepting.
So you might say that I both am and am not a Catholic, as you could also say that I both am and am not: a Jew, a Muslim (Sufi), a Buddhist and a Pagan. Perhaps the story about belonging and not belonging is appropriate here. A Jewish doctor becomes wealthy and purchases a yacht, of which he is very proud. He acquires a smart blue and white captain's uniform and invites his old father to come aboard and admire his new-found status. "Look, Papa," he says proudly. "I'm a captain!" "Wait, son," says his father. "By me, you're a captain. By your mother you're a captain. By you you're a captain. But by a captain, you're no captain!" I guess that's how it is with me.
4/11/2000..
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