I was born in 1960, the daughter of a beatnik of English-Irish descent and a
black jazz musician. My birthmother, the beatnik, had been kicked out of her
house for dating black men and for converting to Catholicism at the age of
sixteen, a decision that deeply angered her Lutheran father. She lived
hand-to-mouth, working in factories and movie theaters, and hanging out in
blues clubs, where she met my father. At the time, she lived in a state where
anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books, and she landed in jail more
than once, basically for "race-mixing." While pregnant with me, she
moved to Chicago, a city she'd heard would be an easier place for a white woman
to raise a child of color. In the end, she put me up for adoption, and I was
placed in a Catholic home for infants in a smaller Midwestern city. When I a little over
a year old, I was adopted by a black couple, a physician and a registered
nurse, who were involved in the civil rights movement. My adoptive father had
helped to desegregate hospitals in Chicago and other Midwestern cities.
Several months before my adoption, I was baptized, as was customary then for infant orphans taken in by the church. My parents were among the first black people to adopt children through Catholic Charities. Both of them had been raised as Protestants (Baptist and Methodist, I think), but my mother had converted to Catholicism during college, after befriending a kindly older priest, whom, she recalls, was the first white man who seemed to value her presence and take her seriously. She began attending the local Catholic parish that he pastored – a black congregation, as the church was still segregated at that time. In those early days of her conversion, what she loved the most was the peace and quiet of the church sanctuary.
My mother’s college conversion
fulfilled a requirement for those adopting Catholically-baptized babies: that such
children be raised in a Catholic home. Our family included another daughter
and a son, who years before had also been adopted through Catholic Charities.
I attended Catholic girls' schools through the twelfth grade. However, unlike most of my classmates, I did not have my first Holy Communion as a girl, nor did I go through Confirmation as a teen. My mother had started having a testy relationship with both my father and the church when I was about six years old, and she left it up to me to decide if I wanted to participate in these rituals. I didn't really like the frilly white first-communion dresses, nor did I want to be paraded around like some holy cherub during some frankincensed Mass, so I opted out. My mother herself had stopped receiving communion, although she still took us to church (us kids, that is; my father did not usually join us). Since she never ate the consecrated wafers, I saw no reason, at the time, to do so myself.
Still and all, my childhood was fairly religious, largely because of the Jesuit-influenced school I attended. My education was academically rigorous, progressive, and broad-minded. Part of the mission of my school was to foster interreligious dialogue, particularly between Christians and Jews. Many of my classmates were from Protestant, Jewish, or agnostic backgrounds. In the 7th and 8th grades I took religion classes that focused on the pre-Christian Hebrew prophets, and world religion and philosophy courses were offered in high school.
At one point, my mother stopped
attending Catholic churches altogether--and beyond the Masses that we had at
school, I hardly went to church myself. Every now and then, though, my mother
and I would feel a certain odd hunger, and we'd visit an AME (African Methodist
Episcopal) or black Baptist church.
Later, in my early teens, for a variety of reasons (to be explored in my writings), a strong anti-church leaning prevailed in my life. I picked up on my mother's impatience with doctrines, and her hatred of the hypocrisy and duplicity displayed by some church leaders. My mother read the Bible and continued to believe in God, but she didn't want to have anything to do with church.
As a young adult, I entered a long agnostic phase of my life. "Agnostic" is not quite the right word -- it's more like I became spiritually indifferent. I didn't know if there was a God, and I didn't really care one way or the other. Various priorities -- college, friendships, exploring life possibilities, travel, falling in and out of love -- kept me very busy. Furthermore, most anything that had any connection to "God" or religion seemed, at that time, oppressive, narrow-minded, prudish, and frequently haughty and mean-spirited. I associated religion with televangelism, and several televangelists had some very high-profile scandals going on. It reinforced my stance of spiritual indifference, and I soon developed an outright scorn for institutionalized Christianity. At times, I felt rather smug and self-satisfied with my religious disdain. I poked a lot of fun at Christians and Christianity. And in my history, literature, and sociology classes, there was a lot more focus on the atrocities and mishaps and horrors of religion gone wrong than on anything that religion might have gotten right...
And then, in my early thirties, there was this unexpected interior shift. I was in a graduate-level creative writing program, working very slowly on a book of poems and short stories for my master’s thesis. I had a falling-out with one of my thesis advisers. A writing block ensued, and then a depression. Life felt pointless, and I began to experience a disturbing self-loathing. I sought solace in food and marijuana, television and sleep.
In this anesthetized funk, on a late-winter morning, I had a terrible nightmare. It remains burned in my memory to this day: I am on a beautiful, sunny mountain trail, hiking with my boyfriend. At one point he notices blood on my shirt. I look down and see that my left nipple is bleeding, the dark stain soaking through my bra and T-shirt. "I probably just scratched myself on a branch," I tell him, but he insists that I see a doctor. At that moment, a horrific low roar booms down from the sky. We look up, but cannot see where it is coming from. I sense a fast-rushing, impending doom -- the roar itself is the sound of doom. Time speeds up, and the dream images become blurry and impressionistic as I watch all of humanity racing, rushing, running, cowering away from the doom, from the sound that seems to have no source. Then, with a great crashing, all of Earth rips apart, stone by stone, cell by cell, atom by atom.
I awoke groaning, crying, and sweating. I had not had such a disturbing night terror since early childhood. It lingered with me for days as a kind of emotional after-image. Though functional, I wandered about in a kind of mild shock, disoriented and discombobulated. At the same time, I seem to have been jolted out of my depression. I kept thinking about the dream, wondering what it signified. Was some terrible disaster at hand? Was my life in danger? Did I need to see a doctor? Pondering these questions, the answer that emerged was both "no" and "yes." My psyche had sprouted a kind of koan.
The dream -- which somehow felt tinged with the numinous (hence my pseudonym, Numi Nossa) -- was less literally precognitive and more of an existential slap. It seemed to be telling me: Life -- your life and all other life, could just end at any moment, with little or no warning. If there is any meaning to be found, or created, in life, the best time to do so is now. Tomorrow is not a guarantee.
So I began a search for this meaning. I was not very methodical about it. Initially, I found myself drawn to books like Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections. That led to an exploration of world religions and meditative practices. In the suggested reading section of Lawrence LeShan's How to Meditate, Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism was mentioned. By chance, I came across a copy of Underhill's text in a used bookstore. That seemed very Jungianly synchronous, so I bought it.
To make a long story .... well, a little less long, Mysticism invited me to explore religion, particularly Christianity, with new eyes. This exploration began very haltingly, because I still had a distaste for all things churchy. I was in graduate school in a department, and in a time, that frowned on Christianity. Now: Buddhism, Hinduism, Native traditions, even Judaism -- those were, for the most part, hunky-dory. But not Christianity. Approval-craving me did not have much immunity to the academic and literary fashions of the day, so my road back to my home lineage was circuitous, stumbling, full of hesitations. I experimented with more “acceptable” spiritual paths: some home-spun Zen, new-agey neo-paganism, voudou and other Africa-influenced inspirations.
As luck, or synchronicity, or grace would have it, I discovered -- just by flipping through the yellow pages one winter day -- an independent (non-Vatican-affiliated) Catholic church in my neighborhood, and I decided to visit. It was a small, short-lived community, the perfect place for a tentative seeker or disaffected or lapsed Christian to set up camp for a while. The group welcomed partnered gays and lesbians, unmarried couples, feminists, theosophists, people allergic to dogmas and papacies, and various and sundry other questioners.
Through a friendship with one of the parishioners there, I came to learn more about the regular Roman Catholic church. I saw that despite its largely conservative hierarchy and the stern institutional face it seemed to present to the world, the church – that is, congregants (lay people) as well as a good number of clergy and other leaders – had a deep, wide, compassionate heart, an ear open to the cries of the poor, and an engaged and inquiring mind. A surprisingly wide spectrum of political and social opinion was represented in its pews. One of the biggest draws for me, however, was a rich mystical and contemplative vein, a nourishing underground stream flowing through the church’s horrible and beautiful history like a river in the desert. Eventually I found a multicultural Jesuit-run parish with a politically moderate-to-progressive congregation, and I went through the year-long RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) process to become a fully confirmed Roman Catholic.
It’s a little more than ten years
after my confirmation. I now practice a form of Christian contemplative prayer
and facilitate a contemplative prayer group in my parish. I also participate in
an ecumenical and church-sprouted community that aims to learn, deepen into, and practice the
kind of self-emptying love and compassionate action that Jesus lived, taught,
and died for. I’m married to an open-hearted agnostic and have friends from a
variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds – thus can’t help but find
great value in interreligious dialogue and interspirituality.
But don’t get me wrong. I still like
to party, cuss, and do the nasty. My favorite television show is Breaking Bad.
And I have a crush on all astrophysicists.
