November Meditations on Ancestry by Terri Pahucki

Every November, I walk among gravestones.  This annual trip to visit the neighborhood cemeteries is a reckoning with the ephemeral and the eternal nature of time. In one instance, reading the dates transcribed on stones, I am awestruck by the brevity of our lives. And yet, there is some deep awareness in me of time’s seamlessness, of lives lost that remain ever still, memory and wind in this crisp fall air. Something transient… and something permanent beyond our short span of individual life.

This year, my ritual encounter with death has been more intimate. In the middle of the night, I am called to attend to the bedside of a woman who has just breathed her last breath.  Her lips are parted, frozen open, body still like a figure in a wax museum.  I touch her hands, offering prayer, speaking her name, honor for the deceased, comfort for those in grief.

And so we die- with our mouths wide open, the last breath leaving- but to where is it released?  The word breath in Hebrew- ruach- is the same as spirit, and the two are linked in age-old faith.   The woman in the bed is gone, but it is clear in the lives of loved ones, her spirit remains.

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I am listening to a song by the Indigo Girls….”and when the river eclipsed your life, and sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me, then it was my rebirth.” Singer-Songwriter Emily Saliers wrote this song in 1993 in honor of Virginia Woolf.  She was inspired after reading her diary.  

I have listened to this song over and over this month; as it describes so clearly my own connection to a historic figure- Margaret Fuller, a fellow Unitarian and contemporary of Parker’s.  In November of 1844, Margaret Fuller walked these same streets, and penned America’s first book for women’s equality-- just steps away from the coffeehouse where I sit typing away right now.  And reading her letters and diary, I came to know not only her ambition-- but moreso, her longing for justice, for the human equality whose lack had caused her deep suffering, for connection and spiritual union with life.

And I wonder too if words, written in books and diaries, might be a transmitter of breath… a transmitter of the soul.

“The apathy of time laughs in my face…”  sings Emily...

“Did you hear me say ‘each life has its place’? “

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I remember my first visit to cemetery when I was eleven years old.  It was November after my grandfather died.  We went to decorate his grave on Veterans Day.  My Grandpa Bill, a WWII vet, had died of a stroke, but I did not feel his presence in that graveyard.  Later I knew it through a visit, in a dream.  

The soul - the breath- is timeless.  My grandfather, my father, and all the other loved ones I have lost remain in memory, in blood, in dream, in the carrying on of life.

I think of those whom I have lost: my grandfather’s adoration of cats and tomatoes he grew from seed; my father’s love for morning prayer, walks in fresh air, and his Howard Zinn outlook of American history; my maternal grandmother’s childlike expressions of delight in ever simple gift; and my paternal grandparents devotion to serving the poor, as they cooked meals for the homeless shelter and brought bags of groceries in place of Christmas presents for each other every year.  

I come from a long line of people who taught me sacred ways of living in this world. These stories remain with me always and consciously and unconsciously influence my way of life.

As time goes on, the intimacy grows stronger. I have called upon my ancestors, have felt their presence within me.

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In my time of living on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, I came to know ancestry in another way.  There were stories shared generation to generation, and songs- the wail and beat of drums- cast through the night air.  There was a soft wind over plateaus made of dust, the way the trees swayed in the breeze.  And there was also the haunting echo of women and children’s tormented voices, the tremors of horrific violence reverberating into present day’s inherited wounds. But also, passed down generation to generation, were the ways of knowing and healing this birthright of trauma.  The call of the people was to reconnect with their past, their tribal ways, in order to heal these scars.  

It seems that living in Beacon, NY for the past seven years, I have come to know place differently, as a transmission of ancestry. I know what ancestral land is, that when something is called sacred it must contain a story.  It must be literally infused with heritage, with the stuff of our human lives. I have known some of those souls in cemeteries, others in the written word, and still others in crumbling architecture and mountain air.   

Knowing our ancestry is a kind of timeless remembering, of RE-membering.  Putting back together- the body with the soul, the timeless soul reborn in new bodies, animating our lies with the stories of our past.  This soul- filled world might be our inheritance, might be a place where everything around us is filled with meaning.  

To discover our ancestry in its fullest, I believe, we must be mystics-- a term I define as coming into our full aliveness, of moving out of the mind and into the heart, into the sea of oceanic awareness. But it is also a place of full earthly embodiment-- and maybe the place where these worlds meet.  This is a place where time knows no bounds, and voices of our past whisper in our ears like long lost friends.  The ancestors breathe, they live in our bones, they walk beside us.  We have lived before, and they live with us still.  They revive us with their presence, and embolden us to walk in footsteps they have tread before, while paving a new way still.

And in that final moment when the breath is released, I know deeply in some intuitive way that the place of the soul’s release is not to some heaven light years away, but into the bodies and lives of all those who surround the departed with love… she breathes her last breath into us.  This most intimate of transmissions is a call, as soul enters into hearts as love eternal.

Letting Go: Thoughts on Envy, St. Julian, and Greener Pastures

Yesterday, when I could have been writing this piece, I was instead reading a review of a new novel by a woman who attended college with me, and who also worked in publishing. It’s her first novel, but her third book. She writes for the New York Times, she speaks on NPR. While reading the review, which was very positive, I was simultaneously listening to a podcast of a conversation between this woman and the editor of the New York Times Book Review. I suppose, in their barest facts, my life and this novelist’s life were reasonably similar: the aforementioned college, publishing careers in New York, and both of us now in our late thirties). But she worked in publicity while I worked in editorial, which, when I was swimming in the navel-gazing puddles of NYC publishing, seemed like a world apart. And she is very skinny and very pretty, neither of which I am. She still lives in the city, something I gave up over half a decade ago. She is not married. She is childless. I am married. I am not without children.

It’s so easy to go down this path, and you all know where it is taking us: she has time, hours of it every day, to devote to her art, and the result is she publishes three books. And she can travel to author events, book signings, conferences and podcast tapings because she doesn’t have to feed anyone dinner, or give anyone a ride to school, or change anyone’s diaper. She is free, her life is a wide open and glamorous expanse. But I am bounded on every side by obligation to others. She rises to the glorious, fabulous heights of the literary atmosphere, and I sink beneath the weight of soccer practice and laundry.

It feels good and true, at first, this kind of simple math: no kids + New York City = art, freedom, the better life. But then, it doesn’t. Because this is fuzzy math indeed: many assumptions, few proven statements.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an interfaith discussion on “religion in the public square.” It’s rare for me to go out on a weekday evening, but a good friend was moderating this panel, and it was being held all of five minutes away, at the synagogue in town. 

            Up on the stage there sat a rabbi, a Presbyterian pastor, an evangelical minister from a nondenominational Christian church, and a Latino minister from a Baptist church (I know, it sounds like the set-up for a joke). The rabbi and the Presbyterian were casual in hippie sandals and windbreakers. The evangelical fellow looked very 90s-alternative: gelled spiky hair, thick black-framed glasses, goatee. The Baptist minister, in contrast, was tiny and trim in a grey suit.

There was an air of bonhomie and relaxed friendliness, although almost immediately, the rabbi and the nondenominational minister got into a long, windy back and forth on Paul the Apostle. I itched to sneak out my phone and check my email, but resisted the temptation. My moderator-friend managed to untangle this digression by posing a question to the four, on the topic of invitation. The panel was one of several events being hosted by the synagogue to mark the fall harvest holiday of Sukkot. I don’t know a lot about this holiday, but it is centered on the building of a hut called a sukkah, and it is traditional to invite others into the sukkah to share a meal. It is a welcoming holiday. So, my friend asked the men on the panel, whom would they like to invite to the table during this Sukkot holiday?

The Presbyterian pastor was in his thirties, with John Lennon glasses and shaggy hair. He was relaxed in his fleece vest and Birkenstocks. I could see his toes. He said that he had recently learned about an historical figure named St. Julian, a fourteenth-century Christian mystic, so she was the person he would choose to invite. He explained that she was an anchoress, which means she lived in a cell attached to a monastery—a cell she never left for the rest of her life after she entered it. In fact, “Julian” was not her name—she is called that because she was enclosed at the Church of St. Julian in Norwich. We don’t even know her name. We know that she had visions, and wrote about them in a work given the lovely title Revelations of Divine Love. This is generally considered the first book written in the English language by a woman. This, I believe, should be a generally more well-known fact than it is. 

The pastor spoke aloud the lines Julian wrote for which she is remembered the little that she is: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” I reminded myself that these words were written by a woman living alone in a dark, cold, bare stone room, with no human contact. Given the circumstances of her existence, this seems to be a remarkably sunny outlook. The pastor then noted that Julian also wrote movingly and passionately about her belief that the relationship between mother and child was the closest approximation available to us of the relationship between Christ and the believer. The bond between mother and child is the only earthly relationship that comes close to approximating the bond between Christ and the Christian. “Julian believed that the mother’s role was the truest of all jobs on earth,” he said.

This pastor, whose name was Ben, reminded me of Father Mike, from the Catholic church I attended until I was thirteen. Father Mike played the guitar, and insisted that we call him “Father Mike,” so he was somewhat cool, as Catholic priests go. Father Mike was friendly in an unforced way to us awkward Catholic thirteen-year-olds (is there a more awkward demographic?). So I was already inclined to feel warmly toward Pastor Ben, although I did not and still do not quite know what Presbyterians believe. But between his casual, open demeanor and his admiring words about a female medieval saint, I was attuned to everything else he said that night. Eventually the talk shifted more overtly to the theme of the night, “Religion in the public square.” Pastor Ben made a point about the superficiality of how religion, and religious squabbles, are portrayed and often portray themselves in the greater social consciousness. The squabbles and seemingly changeless back-and- forths between different denominations brought to mind, he said, a line from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” But, according to Pastor Ben, a more accurate translation would actually be “vapor.” As in, “all is vapor.” Transitory, ephemeral, ultimately without weight, it leaves nothing of value, nothing at all, behind. Later in that same passage in Ecclesiastes, the speaker moans, What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.

As I listened to the novelist chat with the editor through the tinny speaker of my iPhone, the novelist living my imagined perfect life, I felt my lungs collapse, my breath constricted by the weight of my jealousy.

Letting go. It sounds so easy, clean and pure, light and fresh like laundry billowing on the clothesline. Just let it go! There it goes! Good-bye!

But it’s hard work, hard and necessary work. St. Julian did the work, the way she interpreted it. Think of all she let go of: a family, a home. The touch of another human being. Sunlight.

“Letting go” is an active process; it’s no coincidence that the verb is a present participle, an active word, ongoing. I stopped reading the review of the novelist’s new book; I paused the podcast, and then deleted it. I reminded myself, Vanity and vapor, that’s what it is. All is vanity, all is vapor.

As I write this, the sun is shining, and my baby is napping. I am still letting go of the envy, of the too-easy regret and magical but pointless what-ifs and if-onlys, and I know I will need to let go of them again tomorrow, and all the days after that. But I am doing the work. I am diving deep into the dark waters, and every time I manage to kick my way to the surface, I take another breath.

INVITATION AND LETTING GO by Terri Pahucki

The choice to leap is a dangerous one.  This my heart told me, as I stood on the edge of the cliff mid-summer, looking down at the swimming hole beneath the waterfall.  Was the water deep enough?  What if I stumbled and fell in at some unusual angle?  What if I did not jump far enough, and my limbs hit the rocky ledge?  Though assured of safety by those who had leapt before me, my body did not trust- delivering its persistent protest with rapid heart beat, flip-flopping stomach nerves, and sweaty palms.

I made my way back to safer ground, still determined to jump… my own way.  I was not alone, but accompanied by my 8 year old daughter.  I knew that she was watching everything I did, and overcoming my own fear would offer her an example of bravery and courage.  So together we practiced.  Our friends led us to a lower ledge, and there we took our first jump.     

Little by little, we climbed to higher ledges, until we were at last ready to leap from the highest rock. Taking the leap, I felt the free fall descent-- first through air and then deep water.  Woo hoo! I shouted, emerging from the depths, the voice of exhilaration escaping my body.  

This experience of answering the invitation of the water, and letting go of fear, is one that has followed me into other leaps this Fall, especially my work as a hospital chaplain intern. My clinical pastoral education (CPE) supervisor has said that even as we grow in skill, we should never become too comfortable.  That the sweaty palms and the stomach butterflies will come back, again and again, and that this is the important work of being a chaplain.

In beginning this work, I have known great fear and trepidation, and I have also known the grace of surrender and letting go.  Each time I approach a patient’s room, I approach the unknown-- the man or the woman on the other side, his or her story yet to be told.  I approach places where great grief, or fear, or pain reside.   What if I stumble and hit the edge?  

But what I have found in moving through that fear is a tremendous capacity for grace.  I have found the sacred encounter of our shared humanity, the stories of life and spirit that emerge in our time together, the intimate connections-- like a hand reaching out to squeeze mine.  With each encounter I am moved:  to climb a step higher, to leap a bit farther, to dive a little deeper.

I have seen great pain and loss-  the tears of a father who has lost his grown daughter;  the fear of a woman who will lose a part of her body to cancer;  the heartbreak of a man who sees the reflection of the woman he loved who has died in his little girl’s eyes.  But it is also here, in the eyes of his beloved child, that he finds his meaning to go on.  

It is there, in daring to gaze deep into the things that scare us, that we find our way.  To be honest, we never really let go of fear.  My supervisor told me too that “letting go” is not something we strive to do;  rather, we simply cease to give our energy to the fight of holding on.   

And so I pray-- May I allow the grace of this life to be, to enter into the places of heartbreak and joy with all I am.  May I know fear, discomfort, trepidation still-- but may I cease to offer them the power they crave-- that I may know the beauty in broken places, and share it with another.  

Opening my hands to the sky, I leap-- allowing the cool, cool waters to embrace me in the fall.