Introduction

                                                                                                                   © Jo Spencer  2012

Faith Like My Mothers

The Way of a Baptist Catholic Woman

Introduction

It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary

the mother of James, and other women that

were with them, which told these things unto

the apostles.

                                                     St. Luke 24:10

    

     My faith journey cannot be told in a few words. It is not something that can be spoken about in a casual way, even with other Christians. It has been so profound, so extraordinary, and so vast, that it will require a book. This is that book.

     I am an ecumenical Christian. This means that I do not belong to any denominational body… I simply belong to Jesus, and to the One True God who sent Him here. As you will soon learn, my mother’s family was Baptist, and my father’s family was Catholic. But this is not enough to explain the very deep roots of my faith and all the ways I celebrate it.

     In the New Testament Jesus brought ‘signs and wonders’ to the Apostles. He has also given me those signs and wonders. I write this book as a witness to a being named Jo, and all that has happened to her. These signs and wonders have come to feel like a burden, like something I carry but cannot tell others about. Something that does, in fact, makes me peculiar,

      ‘But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own peculiar people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.’ I Peter 2:9

      God has given me physical signs of His presence, and so, each chapter here will begin with a photograph of these signs. Each represents the supernatural at work in my life.

      Angel

      Sword

         Water

            Ring

               Stone

                  Hawk

     Fourteen years ago I was visited by an angel in San Rafael, California. I was at a retreat at Dominican University. I will go into great detail about this in that chapter. It was very clear to me that God was asking for my baptism. I prayed about it for a year-and-a-half, attending many different denominational services. Then, I was driving from Kentucky to California one summer and, all alone in my car, kept picking up radio programs of black preachers preaching sermons. By the time I got back to Santa Rosa, I was convicted that I should be baptized in an African American Church. I found my way to Community Baptist Church and was baptized three weeks later by Reverend James Coffee. I then sang in the mostly black choir for a year.

     But still, I questioned why I had been visited by an angel in a Roman Catholic Monastery.  So, two years after my baptism I was confirmed in the Catholic Church.  Now, my ecumenism runs very deep, a never-ending well that connects me with all Christians who know and worship Jesus and the True God.  Whenever I see a church building with a cross I know that I am welcomed there because it is the Lord’s house.

     In the chapters titled Sword and Stone I will tell about living on my great-grandmother’s farm in the Red River Gorge of Kentucky.  Alone on 120 acres of land, I was somehow under divine guidance and protection. After two years of God speaking to me and telling me I would find a sword on the land, I did. It is antique, and rusty, and hand-forged. No one has any idea about where it may have come from.  The handle is in the shape of a Celtic Cross. And, for all you skeptics, it was not placed there by someone who had heard me say I would find it. I had never voiced that to a living soul, and that’s the truth. Then, the following summer I found what looks like a long stone with the word ‘Germany’ inscribed on it. This happened the day after I prayed to feel communion with my German ancestors.

     The diamond ring I wear on my hand was the engagement ring my father gave to my mother. When I was ten, the ring disappeared. It was found over twenty years later, in the yard in Ohio where we lived, buried in the dirt. This happened just when I had made the commitment to work on the trauma I experienced in infancy due to my father’s Post Traumatic Stress and alcoholism, subsequent to his World War II trauma. This book is about faith, and psychology.  As I am always saying, ‘There are insane Christians, and sane Christians.’ I am sane, and whole. This is from psychological work. It does take more than prayer.

      After my mother’s death, my sisters and I felt that she would let us know she was still with us in spirit. I knew that somehow this would happen through our Indian ancestry and our connection to the natural world. She has ‘visited’ us now on several occasions, and the form this has taken is through a hawk. I have since read about other people having similar hawk visitations after a loved one has passed.  Both of my sisters, myself, and my brother-in-law have experienced my mother this way. Both of my children have had her come to them in dreams. All of this is a mystery.

    ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ I Corinthians 13:12

    My life began in two places really, the forest and farms of Kentucky where my mother’s people lived, and the working class neighborhoods in Ohio where my father’s family lived.  I was surrounded by people of deep faith who tried to pass that on to me. It has taken my entire lifetime to sort out their failings and behavior from the faith they clung to.

    It was my aunt Rosaleen, my mother’s sister, who took me to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. She had the pale red hair and watery blue eyes like so many of our Spencers. She had left the hills of eastern Kentucky and gone to Ohio as a young woman, as did my mother and two of their brothers. Every Sunday morning of my childhood, I went hand-in-hand with her to the little white Church of God.  I obediently sat through Sunday school, and was then ushered back in to sit next to her on the pew.

     My aunt brought with her to Ohio the spiritual legacy of our ancestors in Kentucky, who before that had been in Virginia and North Carolina, and before that the British Isles and Germany.  This faith then became merged with the deep and Holy traditions of my Native American ancestors.  As a child, my life was divided between two worlds, Ohio and Kentucky. As a young woman, I moved to California, and that is where I raised my children. Now, I divide my time between the places of my childhood, and the places of their childhoods.

     At the age of twelve, I refused to attend church any longer. I remember very clearly having the realization that the adults around me were not living the faith they were trying to instill in me. I did not so much as hold a Bible in my hands or read one verse again until my mid-thirties. Since then, I have read it almost daily. Just as I have come home to the hills of Kentucky, I have also come home to my faith. The two are so deeply interwoven that they are the same in my heart.

     What I remember about that little white church filled with white people was  the preacher’s voice filling the air, preaching about a God full of vengeance and wrath, eagerly waiting to have me burn in Hell for sins I hadn’t yet committed. What I remember about Sunday school is coloring pictures of Jesus and trying hard to stay in the lines so I wouldn’t burn for eternity.

     But I have one other very strong memory of a particular Sunday. We had sung the song ‘Red, and yellow, black, and white, Jesus loves the little children of the world.’ Then, we came back home.  I was six or seven years-old. I was sitting in my uncle’s chair and the adults were standing in the living room talking. My uncle used the word ‘nigger.’

     Why is it, that although I had heard that word my whole life, it was in that instant I recognized it as something very wrong. I stood up, and staring up at my uncle, I asked him why he had used that word. I told them that in Sunday school we had sang about Jesus loving all the children. My uncle said something to the effect that black people are (and he used the word again.) I asked ‘How about Mack?’

     Mack was the older black man who lived in the basement and worked with my uncle in his odd job business. At some point in time, then or later, I was the one who found Mack at the bottom of the stairs to the basement with his head cut open from a fall. Mack was alcoholic (but I would be too if I was a black man living in my uncle’s basement.)

     My uncle replied that Mack was an exception. It was then that my little soul began to remove itself from that church. When I was twelve, I announced to the adults that I wouldn’t go to church anymore.  That week in school I stood up in English class and proclaimed myself to be an atheist.

     All the years between that time and the instant of my conversion, I prayed silently to Jesus that if he was real could he please reveal Himself to me. And, then, when I was forty, He did.

     This book is also about religious wounding.  Just like me, there are many people who turned away from Christianity because of the sins and faults of the people around them. Instead of ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ they threw Jesus out with the Holy water. So many of my white friends are very cerebral and educated. They stand outside the sanctuary analyzing it with their rational minds. They go on and on about the wrongs done to people all over the earth in the name of Christ. Being a Christian is not a rational choice…it is a conversion experience of being in relationship to the Holy Trinity. It is being adopted by Jesus because you have adopted Him, and offered Him a home in your heart.

     Last Sunday I was at Mass. The priest was saying that it is a sin to not be at church on certain Holy days. And I thought to myself, how about the countless young people who were molested on Holy days by priests? This ‘sin’ does not just belong to the Catholic Church. It happens just as much in Protestant churches. All of this has toppled our church leaders down off their Holy pedestals where they can be more truly Christian, ‘humble, meek, long-suffering.’ They abused their power, but the rest of us participate in that by giving up our discernment and power. We each can have a direct line to God, through Christ Jesus. This was His promise to us.

     My great-grandmother, Dora Johnson Spencer, was another saint in my life. She died when I was six. She never left Kentucky. I have only two clear memories of her. One, of her on her death-bed. Another of a meal we were preparing to eat as a family. This was at my great-uncle Arlie’s farm. Arlie was her son, my grandma’s brother. He was very mean. He had the same pale-red Spencer hair and watery blue eyes as Rosaleen, but his eyes burned with hate.

     Great-grandmother would have been in her eighties then. She dressed the same as she did in the picture I have of her in front of a log cabin next to my great-grandfather, Nathaniel, and six of their children.  In that picture she is carrying another baby and by the time he is born Nathaniel will be dead.  No one in my family knows how he died, not even his grandchildren. He stares at the camera with confidence. He is strikingly handsome and strong. Dora, on the other hand, looks miserable and battered by her life. She is in her early thirties, has carried at least seven babies, and wears the same type of clothing I knew her to wear as an old woman; a long dress with a high neck, leather boots laced up past her ankles, her hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. She had a crippled foot, possibly from polio.

     There was a house full of us preparing to eat dinner at Arlie’s.  Dinner back then meant the noon-day meal, served after all the morning chores were done.  Grandmother had her own special dinner plate. It had a painting of Jesus on it. As we were all waiting to take our seats, I was drawn to that plate and started to sit there. Uncle Arlie’s voice stopped me dead. ‘You can’t sit there. That’s mother’s place.’ Grandmother kindly put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That’s alright, she can sit there.’ Grandmother gave me my true place at God’s table and I am still doing my best to honor it.

     She died in the middle of a snow storm. We drove down from Ohio in my uncle’s red and gray Buick. She was still with us, weakly hanging on to life from the twin-sized bed, a quilt covering her thin body. I went into her and she took my hand, and gave me one last gift, a perfect pear that had no-doubt been kept in the root cellar.

     We then drove back to Ohio. I did not return with the grown-ups for the funeral. Years later they described it to me. How the snow was so deep they had to bring her body out on a flat-bed wagon pulled by a mule.

     Rosaleen died when I was twenty. She had suffered with rheumatoid arthritis all during my life. It had crippled her, as it did my mother Dora who died five years ago of lung cancer. Although they both suffered constant physical agony, it never kept them from loving others or giving of themselves. The summer before my mother died I stood at the stove watching as she made fried cornbread. When it was time to flip it over she did so with her crippled hand, landing it exactly back in the middle of the frying pan. I made the comment that I didn’t know how she could do that with her hand so crippled. She laughed and said that sometimes she couldn’t…and then it ended up on the floor.

     It was a cerebral hemorrhage that finally killed my dear sweet aunt Rosaleen.  I was living in Chicago with my baby daughter. By the time I arrived in Cincinnati at the hospital, she was in intensive care, hooked up to life-support equipment and unconscious. My family told me I shouldn’t go in to see her. I ignored them and went and found the nurse who took me to her room.  I looked down at the emaciated shell with thin red hair that had been my aunt Rosaleen and said to the nurse, ‘She’s not here.’ I knew, absolutely, that her soul had left her body. The next day, as we all waited in the waiting room, my cousin signed the papers to turn off the equipment. Her body then quit.

     I drove away from the hospital, my baby daughter in her car seat. My heart was in such agony. I asked God from the pit of my grief, ‘Why did she have to die like this?’

Tears were streaming down my face. I looked out over the fields and saw the sky suddenly change. The sun’s rays burst from behind a cloud, making a golden-white halo. When I was a child and the sky looked that way, I always felt that God was there with the heavenly host of angels, shining behind the clouds.

      In that instant, my grief turned to a peace so total there are no words to describe it. It is ‘the peace which passeth all understanding.’ It is the peace of heaven. Four other times in this life I have had the same experience, of knowing that my soul was transported to the throne of God. For an instant, my aunt’s spirit filled me and I knew heaven. The peace she had passed over to was inside me.

      I was there as Rosaleen’s soul passed over. My sisters and I spent the last five days of our mother’s life with her in the hospital. I was there when she passed. And, on the morning that my aunt Ruth passed over at home, I had just left her. By the time I arrived back at my house twenty minutes later I got the call that she was gone.  Several weeks ago I was there when my 94 year-old neighbor, Opal, passed in Kentucky. And, when I was thirteen-months-old my father died in a pool of blood in front of my crib. I have truly been the ‘angel at the tomb’ for so many people who have been a part of my faith journey.

       My mother…at times I still miss her so much that I feel I will break in two. You know how it is, grief?  Something happens to trigger it. She was an innocent. Born in 1930 in a farmhouse outside of Hazard, Kentucky, she weighed a little over two pounds. Since her passing, I have thought a lot about that tiny baby that would someday be my mother. I once asked a doctor what a two-pound baby would look like. He held out his hand and said, ‘Something between a fetus and a baby.’  I am now certain that mom had an undeveloped corpus collosum, the bundle of fibers in the brain that connects the two hemispheres and allows for complex reasoning. It explains so much about her.

     It was not my mother who instructed me in faith, took me to church, or prayed with me. But, by the example of who she was I learned humility, and self-sacrifice, and an ever-present desire to meet life head-on and never run from anything. She said of herself that being born so tiny made her into a survivor. Widowed at 24, she raised two daughters on a waitress’s income. Our mother worked so hard. And, so much a part of her story were the men who were glad to help her along in exchange for time with her body. All she ever wanted was love and respect from a man, and someone to be a father to her girls. Instead, she got heartache time after time.

     My aunt Ruth passed away at the age of 92. She was always, not only the matriarch in our family, but a woman who was admired greatly by her small Kentucky community. My relationship with her had its ebbs and flows. There were a few very special times when we grew close. Then, the differences in our lives and souls pulled us apart again. I had not been with her much for the past few years. But then, as she was dying, I felt her soul tugging at mine, enough to let me know the heaven she was going to.

     Ruth Drake Duff was a Christian woman. She was made of that stuff that  Kentucky women of faith are made of. It’s in their honesty and the way they use their words, in the strength that comes from a well deep inside themselves that they proudly name Jesus, women who embody the spiritual legacy that our ancestors brought over from the British Isles and Europe.

      Aunt Ruth will never know how much of my faith came from her. We only spoke about these things the last few years of her life. She stayed reasonably healthy and independent and then, so suddenly, she was with us only a few more weeks. In that time, her hair turned from brunette to the most beautiful silvery gray (she had been dying her hair for many years to hide the gray.)  As she made that final bend in the road, and her body and then her mind shut off, I had some very wonderful moments visiting at her bedside. The last words we exchanged were what I most needed her to know. I told her that she had taught me that Jesus is what is most important. She smiled and said, ‘Yes, Jesus is what’s important.’

     The morning she died, I had woke up early with it upon my heart that I had to get to her.  She lived about a half-hour’s drive from my house.  I had been visiting once a week or so and heard the reports by phone that she was slipping. That morning, I felt her calling me.

      When I arrived at her house, her daughter was taking a long overdue break and there was a young woman from Hospice who was with my aunt. After looking in on her, I sat in the living room and cried a moment, knowing that she wasn’t ever coming back. I went into her and gently laid my hand on forehead. Her eyes were closed to this world. I felt her soul and it felt like a helium-filled balloon, gently bobbing up and down on the wind, wanting to break free.

      Deep inside myself, my soul said directly to her soul, ‘If you are ready to leave, we will let you go.’ I then drove home. By the time I got there my sister Debby called me to tell me aunt Ruth had passed. I have heard many similar stories since. Sometimes it seems that a soul needs permission from others beyond the immediate family in order to let go.

      When I was fourteen I did a drawing for my grandma Ila, and it remained on the wall behind her bed for many years. It was about a foot-and-a-half tall, in pencil, never framed. It was Jesus kneeling in front of a rock, with His hands in prayer, face turned toward heaven and the Father. I was so very shy then. It would have been my way to do a drawing for my grandma instead of trying to talk with her about faith. It would have been her way to hang it there, nothing more needing to be said.

     My father’s family was devoutly Catholic. I never met my grandmother, Mary Englehardt Holweger, nor my great-grandmothers, Margret Carew Holweger and Margarette Leisen Englehardt.  These paternal lines came from Germany, Ireland, and France.

     I do not know if I was baptized as an infant in the Catholic Church, and I have no memory of ever having been inside one as a child. What I do remember is going to my uncle Justin’s house at Easter and having cake with real cream frosting and being allowed a sip wine with dinner to celebrate Christ’s resurrection. For a little girl who was being raised Baptist it was exotic indeed to taste wine. (Baptists believe it is wrong to consume any alcohol… but that didn’t keep my great uncle Claude in Kentucky from making moonshine.)

      And I cannot fail to mention my daughter’s paternal grandmother, Bonnie Dunn Moore. Although I gave birth to her son’s child when I was eighteen, I chose not to marry him. Bonnie and I had a deep bond that grew. She will forever represent to me the true meaning of being a Christian woman. During the last years of her life she would sit patiently on her couch, in a little house not much more than a shack, and her face would shine with love for every person who walked through the door. I have never known anyone more humble than Bonnie.

      These are my female ancestors who embodied the spiritual legacy of our Christian faith. It was from them, and other women like them here in Kentucky and Ohio, from which I have always drawn my deepest strength. Not that I haven’t learned from the men, I have, and still do.  But, life is so very different for women and men. It is from the lives of Christian women that I learned how to be a daughter of God. There are no words to say how much I miss them.

     Two winters ago I lived in another house in Kentucky.  I made a prayer place for myself, a mossy bank overlooking a valley. I put a small cross in the ground and hung a tiny crucifix on a tree. I call this going to the mountain to be with God. I go to meet Him and He is always there; “Yesterday, Today, and Forever”.

      I would sit there, surrounded by the forest which has been my one, true home in this life, the green canopy of leaves, the raindrops, or sunlight, filtering through, the birds singing a sweet melody to my world-weary ears. I smell the earth beneath me, I remember all the long-sweet days of my childhood, and I give a blessing for my spiritual mothers.

     I believe that this land, Kentucky, has been anointed by God for the purpose of establishing His kingdom.  The faith my ancestors brought with them from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, continues to live and grow here.  I will do my best to explain my sense of this.

     We live in rural eastern Kentucky.  My ancestors settled this county and the counties continuing down into the south east, the ‘poor’ part of the state. You can still see it in the dwellings people built over the last hundred years or so.  No multi-storied, grand mansions here.  It is as though my people knew their true mansions awaited them in heaven. What was more important was living close to the earth in a way that was humble and simple.  In their poverty they walked with Jesus. My spiritual mothers all died poor women. In my eyes, they are Queens.

    

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping;

and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into

the sepulchre. And seeth two angels in white sitting,

the one at the head, and the other at the feet,

where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say

unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith

unto them, Because they have taken away my

Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

And when she had said thus, she turned

herself back,  and saw Jesus standing,

and knew not that it was Jesus.

Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why

weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?

She, supposing him to be the gardener,

saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence,

tell me where thou hast laid him,

and I will take him away.

Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself,

and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not;  for I am not

yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren,

and say unto them. I ascend unto my Father;

and to my God, and your God.

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that

she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken

these things unto her.

                                                                    St. John 20:7