Post 15: Where Do I Go From Here?
"These are the few ways we can practice humility:
To speak as little as possible of one's self.
To mind one's own business.
Not to want to manage other people's affairs.
To avoid curiosity.
To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.
To pass over the mistakes of others.
To accept insults and injuries.
To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.
To be kind and gentle even under provocation.
Never to stand on one's dignity.
To choose always the hardest.”
Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living.
Once back at Manhattanville, it didn’t take long for the evangelicals to start to guide me in the faith. Where I should go to church. How to behave. How to interpret the Bible. What music to listen to. A mentor took me aside and suggested that perhaps my listening to secular music, in particular Barry Manilow music, and involvement with the Fan Club was too worldly a pursuit for a new Christian.
Oh.
Confusion filled me. Was this a test? Yet didn’t Jesus say sell everything you have and give to the poor and come, follow me?
Maybe they were right. They were at this longer than me, right?
I felt confused and torn. I didn’t know who I could talk this through with.
Mother T.’s reflections at the beginning of this post are from her book, The Joy in Loving, are insights garnered from a disciplined lifetime of service and prayer. She was surrounded with spiritual directors and other sisters in her order to talk to. It is telling that I felt I had no one outside this evangelical circle to whom I could turn. My life had become that fragmented. The evangelical group, while not a cult, groomed its new members carefully to keep outside influence to a minimum.
It never occurred to me to talk to my parents or my brothers. That says a lot. I was still trying to live down my mother’s public announcement, at orientation day at Manhattanville to a group of unknown fellow freshmen, “well my daughter is president of the National Barry Manilow Fan Club.” That is why I went to college 500 miles away from home.
In the end I obeyed my mentor. I gave everything up. I wanted so desperately to belong. I wanted to be liked and accepted at last by some group in a school setting.
I agreed to resign from the Fan Club and to stop listening to Barry Manilow. As a test of my new faith I sold off my entire collection of memorabilia.
That included all my albums and cassettes.
All of my scrapbooks.
The photographs.
Even the few items I had that Barry had autographed. This included a handwritten three-page letter.
When it was finished I was left with one photograph, when Sharon and I first met Barry at Blossom Music Center in August of 1976.
Looking back, I was stunned at how easy it was. What I had invested so heavily into during those critical years became undone in a matter of weeks. The money paid for school books. I couldn’t have cared less in the end.
In the aftermath, instead of feeling liberated and all spiritual, I got that all-too-familiar, all-numbed-up feeling. I felt shame instead of freedom. I felt like I betrayed something at my very essence. The worst feeling was that I felt there was no going back. How could I explain what I had done?
So just like that, it was over. My self-imposed exile began.
It is one thing to let go of something naturally or move on because it is the right time.
What I did was different.
I did this because someone made a simple suggestion. The truth is that I was not threatened.
At that time, I just did not know how to say no.
My desire to “people please” and fit in destroyed a very treasured aspect of my life. So my journey entered a new phase.
It would take years of counseling and thousands of dollars to realize what happened when I was a 19-year-old. It was not about “following Jesus” or being “free from the world’s influence.” It was just about a particular group’s vision of being Christian that I fell susceptible to. That’s all.
As a survivor in the making, I didn’t know I had a choice. Later, a whole lifetime later, I would marvel that my one-year-old daughter could shout “no!” with such vigor over a cracker, a toy, naptime, even a hug – and that little word could almost make me weep. I thought, where were you, little spirit, all those times when I needed you? “No” had been erased from my vocabulary at an early age. It would take so long, so very long, to get it back in my verbal repertoire.
Tinged with feelings of shame, I pronounced my self-administered penance:
· I would not intentionally listen to Barry’s music on the radio.
· I would not buy another one of Barry’s albums.
· I would not watch a TV show or special featuring Barry.
· I would not go to another one of Barry’s concerts.
· I would not read another interview in a magazine or newspaper about Barry.
I would not keep most of these pledges. I just went underground. Alone.
Ironically, after all this happened, I slowly became ambivalent about the evangelical group I was with, and moved out of their orbit. I remained in lively dialogue with the Marxist-sociologists since I declared sociology my major. Through my Catholic connections I discovered the Catholic Charismatics, the Catholic Worker Movement, Liberation theology and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer who combined mysticism, social activism and comparative religion. My Marxist comrades approved of this.
Yet every now and then I sneaked an ear to the radio, searching for a Barry song, like I was scouring for a forbidden candy bar hidden under the couch cushion.
The only difference was I had no one with whom I could discuss my responses. I would scan for Barry’s new hits: “I Made It Through the Rain,” the hopeful “Somewhere Down the Road,” and “Ships.” That’s how I now felt, like a ship, passing out of sight. Yet it would be the song, “One Voice,” that captivated my heart and spoke to my longings to make my life mean something and to make a difference.
One Voice.
But you need a voice to begin with. There was nothing in the Handbook about speaking up.
Notes:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
info@manilowmusicproject.org
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the previous post.
To speak as little as possible of one's self.
To mind one's own business.
Not to want to manage other people's affairs.
To avoid curiosity.
To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully.
To pass over the mistakes of others.
To accept insults and injuries.
To accept being slighted, forgotten and disliked.
To be kind and gentle even under provocation.
Never to stand on one's dignity.
To choose always the hardest.”
Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living.
Once back at Manhattanville, it didn’t take long for the evangelicals to start to guide me in the faith. Where I should go to church. How to behave. How to interpret the Bible. What music to listen to. A mentor took me aside and suggested that perhaps my listening to secular music, in particular Barry Manilow music, and involvement with the Fan Club was too worldly a pursuit for a new Christian.
Oh.
Confusion filled me. Was this a test? Yet didn’t Jesus say sell everything you have and give to the poor and come, follow me?
Maybe they were right. They were at this longer than me, right?
I felt confused and torn. I didn’t know who I could talk this through with.
Mother T.’s reflections at the beginning of this post are from her book, The Joy in Loving, are insights garnered from a disciplined lifetime of service and prayer. She was surrounded with spiritual directors and other sisters in her order to talk to. It is telling that I felt I had no one outside this evangelical circle to whom I could turn. My life had become that fragmented. The evangelical group, while not a cult, groomed its new members carefully to keep outside influence to a minimum.
It never occurred to me to talk to my parents or my brothers. That says a lot. I was still trying to live down my mother’s public announcement, at orientation day at Manhattanville to a group of unknown fellow freshmen, “well my daughter is president of the National Barry Manilow Fan Club.” That is why I went to college 500 miles away from home.
In the end I obeyed my mentor. I gave everything up. I wanted so desperately to belong. I wanted to be liked and accepted at last by some group in a school setting.
I agreed to resign from the Fan Club and to stop listening to Barry Manilow. As a test of my new faith I sold off my entire collection of memorabilia.
That included all my albums and cassettes.
All of my scrapbooks.
The photographs.
Even the few items I had that Barry had autographed. This included a handwritten three-page letter.
When it was finished I was left with one photograph, when Sharon and I first met Barry at Blossom Music Center in August of 1976.
Looking back, I was stunned at how easy it was. What I had invested so heavily into during those critical years became undone in a matter of weeks. The money paid for school books. I couldn’t have cared less in the end.
In the aftermath, instead of feeling liberated and all spiritual, I got that all-too-familiar, all-numbed-up feeling. I felt shame instead of freedom. I felt like I betrayed something at my very essence. The worst feeling was that I felt there was no going back. How could I explain what I had done?
So just like that, it was over. My self-imposed exile began.
It is one thing to let go of something naturally or move on because it is the right time.
What I did was different.
I did this because someone made a simple suggestion. The truth is that I was not threatened.
At that time, I just did not know how to say no.
My desire to “people please” and fit in destroyed a very treasured aspect of my life. So my journey entered a new phase.
It would take years of counseling and thousands of dollars to realize what happened when I was a 19-year-old. It was not about “following Jesus” or being “free from the world’s influence.” It was just about a particular group’s vision of being Christian that I fell susceptible to. That’s all.
As a survivor in the making, I didn’t know I had a choice. Later, a whole lifetime later, I would marvel that my one-year-old daughter could shout “no!” with such vigor over a cracker, a toy, naptime, even a hug – and that little word could almost make me weep. I thought, where were you, little spirit, all those times when I needed you? “No” had been erased from my vocabulary at an early age. It would take so long, so very long, to get it back in my verbal repertoire.
Tinged with feelings of shame, I pronounced my self-administered penance:
· I would not intentionally listen to Barry’s music on the radio.
· I would not buy another one of Barry’s albums.
· I would not watch a TV show or special featuring Barry.
· I would not go to another one of Barry’s concerts.
· I would not read another interview in a magazine or newspaper about Barry.
I would not keep most of these pledges. I just went underground. Alone.
Ironically, after all this happened, I slowly became ambivalent about the evangelical group I was with, and moved out of their orbit. I remained in lively dialogue with the Marxist-sociologists since I declared sociology my major. Through my Catholic connections I discovered the Catholic Charismatics, the Catholic Worker Movement, Liberation theology and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer who combined mysticism, social activism and comparative religion. My Marxist comrades approved of this.
Yet every now and then I sneaked an ear to the radio, searching for a Barry song, like I was scouring for a forbidden candy bar hidden under the couch cushion.
The only difference was I had no one with whom I could discuss my responses. I would scan for Barry’s new hits: “I Made It Through the Rain,” the hopeful “Somewhere Down the Road,” and “Ships.” That’s how I now felt, like a ship, passing out of sight. Yet it would be the song, “One Voice,” that captivated my heart and spoke to my longings to make my life mean something and to make a difference.
One Voice.
But you need a voice to begin with. There was nothing in the Handbook about speaking up.
Notes:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
info@manilowmusicproject.org
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the previous post.