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CHAPTER VII Faith and Fear It has been said that faith and fear can't live in the same house. With me, they can. As it says in the gospel, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." At about the age of forty-five years, I was living in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State, in a little cottage I had made into a hermitage. I wrote letters to every bishop I thought might be interested in hearing my vows. After years of trying to get a bishop to even talk to me about taking me under vows, I had finally given up in despair. Dear reader, be aware that a true ecclesiastical hermit is under vows just like any other monk, only those vows are taken directly to a bishop instead of a Superior of an Order. This is not to say that there are not many people living an eremitical life who are not under vow--there are. But in order for a hermit to be a monk, he or she must be under obedience to somebody. All of that is to say that, while a hermit will experience solitude, he or she must have a way of remaining connected. A hermit is not the same thing as a loner, much less a kook who makes pipe bombs in the living room of a shack in the mountains. I was saddened when no one would even talk to me about my going under vows. But--and this is an important but--I decided that I had to live the life I believed myself to have been called to live. I knew I was a hermit, and would, to the best of my ability, live the life of a hermit whether or not anyone ever heard my vows. I went right on praying the Gregorian Chants, doing my meditations, and working as director of music in a local church. That church, St. Joseph's Church, was Roman Catholic. I remained Episcopalian, but worked in a Roman Catholic parish. One day, two weeks after a visit to Holy Cross Monastery where the prior talked to me about my translations and transcriptions of Gregorian Office Music, my phone rang at The Hermitage. The day was Wednesday in Holy Week. It was mid-morning, and the voice on the other end of the telephone was unknown to me. The caller announced to me that he was Bishop Richard F. Grein, of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and that he had received letters concerning me from two individuals, the prior of Holy Cross Monastery and also a priest friend of mine in the Mid-Hudson region of upstate New York. He said that they both had recommended to him that he take me under vow as a hermit. Realize that bishops are not anxious, as a rule, to take individuals under vow. A busy bishop like the Bishop of New York does not have the time nor the inclination to supervise individual monks or nuns, nor to check up on them. They can very easily become loose canons running around the diocese. So for Bishop Grein to take me under vow was a huge step of faith for him as well as for me. After asking me for some information about my lifestyle, he asked me to write to him directly and tell him why I would like to be taken under vow. Then he hung up. I was stunned. To get even a few minutes of time from the Bishop of New York is amazing. He is one of the most powerful prelates in the Anglican communion. To be asked by him to go under vow was impossible to describe. All I can say is, I had to become willing to stop trying to make it happen for it to happen. I had to become willing to be what I knew myself to be at all costs for the inevitable to come into being. I wrote to the bishop saying essentially the following: "The vows of a hermit are poverty, chastity, and obedience. I can live the vow of poverty outside of the institutional structure. It isn't easy, but it can be done, and it is done by people both inside and outside of the church. I can also live the vow of chastity without a bishop or an institution. It isn't easy, but it can be done. But the vow of obedience cannot be lived without the person of the bishop. I need you in order to fully live the vow of obedience." The bishop called me back again and said that we should set a date for my first annual vows. We did. Surprisingly enough, at the same time I was contacted by a parish priest in Connecticut about the possibility of my moving my hermitage to Connecticut and becoming Director of Music at a little church in the Northwest Corner. It was and is an ideal location for a hermitage. I found a carriage house, restored to its turn-of-the-century state, and negotiated to rent it from its owner. It sits back from the road in a country area which, for much of the year, reminds me of living in the middle of a National Park. There are rivers and brooks, water falls, lakes, and just about every kind of outdoor beauty I could ask for. The downside is that it tends to be a rather wealthy area, largely populated by New York City people who are weekenders and who hope to retire here when they no longer are working in the City. Shortly after my move to Connecticut, the bishop came here to receive my vows as a hermit. First, he came to hear my annual vows, and three years later he came back to hear my lifetime vows. What's it like to be a hermit? Although it is hard to put it into words, I will try. Being a monk in a community is counter-cultural enough by itself, let alone being a hermit. True ecclesiastical hermits are rare. They exist in the Orthodox tradition, and they are being revived in the Roman tradition. Along with us Anglicans, those three are the only churches I know of which have hermits. There are probably more. We hermits are, for instance, indigenous to the Egyptian Coptic tradition. I suppose I have always thought of myself as being a bit eccentric--no, a lot eccentric. One thing about being a hermit is that one is expected to be eccentric. It is a requirement! Living the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience makes one, by definition, counter-cultural. I remember growing up in the Bay Area in the 1960s during the time of the People's Park demonstration at U.C. Berkeley, and while the Flower Children were in the Haight Ashbury district. We all thought of ourselves as being counter-cultural. We were against the establishment. Now most of my friends from those days are either investment bankers or securities analysts or .com owners--hardly counter-cultural. No matter how one looks at it, the vows of a Religious in general and a Hermit in particular turn the normal value system of our capitalist marketing society on its end. Society says that owning as much as is possible is healthy, good and positive; the vow of poverty says that many things just get in the way of spirituality. Society says that free sex between consenting adults is always and for all people a good and healthy thing; chastity says that being true to oneself, including being celibate if that is what one is called to be, is healthy and normal. Society says that freedom from responsibility to others is a good thing; obedience says that we are all interconnected beings with boundaries, and that recognition of that interconnectedness is not a loss of freedom at all, but a positive value. Being a hermit has taught me the difference between isolation and aloneness. I am called to live my vocation in solitude, not in loneliness. There is a difference. While spending a good deal of time alone was and is important, I have learned that I do not have to be apart from people all of the time in order to experience solitude. And it is solitude which is the heart of this vocation. In Fall of the year 2000 an event occurred which was to change my vocational direction. Actually, two interlinked events happened. First, the opportunity came to expand The Hermitage to include a small guest house which might specialize in working with alcoholics, primarily clergy and religious. The objective is to invite others into my life, not for me to enter into theirs. Fortunately, the Bishop of New York has been extremely supportive as well as has the diocesan agency which deals with alcoholics and addicts. The second event to occur last Fall was that I had another episode with neurological problems. This time it expressed itself in lack of balance and lack of coordination in the left extremities. After about one month the flare-up cooled down and most of my physical functioning came back, but not all of it. It became clear that I need to leave my treasured role of the musical scholar. This is not easy for me, since from my childhood until now the role of the musical scholar has been my salvific image. It has been my backup. I always knew that should anything happen to me, I could always depend upon my keyboard skills to make a living. No more. Now I get to test my faith in new ways. I have to go without my spiritual insurance policy. This hermit has a contemplative vocation. Some are not contemplatives, but I am. I am vowed to the Daily Office, the Opus Dei, as it is sometimes called. I am vowed to pray the complete monastic Office each day as the heart and center of my life. Everything must shine forth from what happens in my little chapel. Oh yes, being an icon is part of it too. Just like a doctor with a lab coat or a judge with a black robe, the minute I put on the habit I became a walking Rorschach test. Few people react to the real me, but most react to the image. Part of my vocation is to be a screen to allow for the projections of others. The important part of it for me is that I not allow myself to buy into the projections of others. I must not believe in their fantasies. It is just as important for a judge to appear wise, but not to believe him/herself to be overly wise. CHAPTER VIII Reflections in the Moment As I intimated early in this work, the one nagging question which has plagued me for years after entering recovery was why I had to experience the horror of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my own father. Could I have been in any way complicit, or even responsible? After all, it did not happen to anyone in my family but me. The only member of my biological family in whom I had confided my experience was my sister, Betty. Secrets are easily kept in my family since none of us save Betty and me keep in touch at all. About a month after my fortieth birthday my telephone rang just as I was getting home from an AA meeting. The caller, to my surprise, was my brother, Kenneth, now fifty-eight years old, and two-and-one-half years clean and sober in his own recovery program. We had not spoken for years, hence my surprise when I heard his voice. He called to tell me that he had gone into therapy himself--to deal with his own childhood incest issues. He further told me that it had also happened to our older brother, Robert. Kenneth gave me the last piece of the puzzle, and at the same time answered the last gnawing question in my mind. I was not the only one, and I did not play any complicit part in the act of my own violation. So where does all of this leave me now? with the benefit of years of sobriety and a great deal of spiritual healing, what do all of those years mean? What are they telling me? Healing and Forgiveness I am told that my own healing is my responsibility in cooperation with the God of my understanding. In fact, I no longer even think in terms of the God of my understanding, because that implies that in order to have faith in God I must first understand God, a clear impossibility. I do not claim to understand God at all. In fact, I now refer to the God of my non-understanding. After having sat for many hours in shrinks' offices pounding pillows and screaming my anger at daddy and mommy, I finally have discovered that anger is not the key--forgiveness and love are the only true keys. Oh, don't get me wrong--sometimes it is necessary to first bring the anger out of hiding, but the trouble was I had never gotten past the anger to the forgiveness part. And that, dear reader, left me in a far worse position than I had been in before. Much of my understanding of myself and God has been shaped in recovery by the 12 Steps themselves, as understood through the optics of Jungian analysis and Valentinian Gnosticism. While seemingly divergent schools of thought, they form together a marvelous, healing synthesis as seen in such modern metaphysical systems as that found in A Course In Miracles and that of Emmanuel. While such a synchretistic synthesis seems to be at odds with orthodox Christian thought (and, at times it is). such a faith system is quite compatible with what we know of many early Christian belief systems. I have found that I can be completely comfortable in the environment of the modern, orthodox Christian church so long as I am willing to accept that it is perfectly all right for me to interpret Christian symbols differently than does the church itself. I can image God in any way I like--the God of my non-understanding. Celibacy My lifestyle is celibate. But what does that mean? It is easier to state what it does not mean. It does not mean the giving up of sex. It does not mean the acceptance of loneliness. It does not mean the voluntary sacrifice of need fulfillment. In fact, it does not mean the giving up of anything. If one looks at celibacy simply as giving something up, then one is not called to a celibate lifestyle. One is simply into being a martyr and should most likely be in therapy. To me celibacy is simply embracing who I am--who God created me to be. It is the recognition of an ontological reality, not an externally imposed discipline. Celibacy is for me a profound respect for others and for myself--a refusal to allow myself to use another human being or to be used by another human being, as anything other than a channel for God's love. I have never experienced love in my entire life as intensely as I have in these past years. Every day is a gift and a surprise--albeit not always a pleasant one. But whatever each day brings, I can share it with others in my life--male or female--regardless of any sexual subcontexts or sexuality conflicts. Through the gift of celibacy I can love a gay man, or a straight man, or a gay woman, or a straight woman all equally. I could never love anyone before. No, celibacy is not a discipline, but a freedom; not a sacrifice, but a gift. For how can doing God's will be anything but a gift? Ultimately, if God's will is for me to be happy and fulfilled as a fully-alive human being, how can God's will be different from my own? Vocation Another thing that has finally become clear to me has to do with vocation. For most of my life I thought that my justification for being was to be found in my doing--in what I did. I had to be a top quality performer. I had to be a professional computer expert. I had to be a good monk. I was always looking for what I did to fill in the gaping hole I believed was in my soul. At one point in my healing process the reality finally traveled from my head to my heart that my true vocation--my reason for being on this planet--had nothing directly to do with what I did, but rather who I am. The problem was, I didn't know who I was. I never had known who I was. But through the 12 Steps I began to realize exactly who I am. I discovered that the God of my understanding heals me in order that I can heal others--and that is a vocation. The vocation to be a healer. It's not a vocation to do anything at all, but a vocation to be the man God created me to be in the beginning. Nothing is more important to me now than being the healing presence God intended that I should be. In fact, my own continued healing depends upon it. I have received God's love through the channel of my Big Brother that I may give that same love of God to others in need of it. I have received the gift of knowledge in order that I may share it with others. I have received healing in order that I might in turn be a healing channel for others. The Prayer of St. Francis is, I have discovered, more than just pious words and pretty poetry. It is literally true. "It is in giving that we receive ... it is in dying that we are born to eternal life." Lifestyle and Sacrifice Since leaving the monastic community I have chosen mostly to live alone--celibate. People who visit me find it initially awkward and hard to understand my lifestyle. I have no television and do not want one. My stereo is usually playing classical music or some form of Eastern or Western chant. There are full bookshelves everywhere, and hand-made papyrus manuscripts on the walls. There is a collection of Egyptian art and books, and there are books and artwork in every room that were gifts of my Big Brother. My home nearly always smells like either incense or delicious food cooking in the kitchen. Often people ask me if my lifestyle isn't a tremendous sacrifice. I reply that it is no sacrifice at all. Rather it is a gift to live for the first time in my life as I believe God intended for me to live. There is nothing that I cannot do, provided that I can understand it as a form of prayer. I have love in my life and I give that love to others. I experience healing and share that healing with others. So long as I am living my "being vocation" I am fulfilled in ways I never experienced when I had a live-in lover and made great sums of money in Silicone Valley and lived life in the fast lane. While my cottage is in the country, I have a great deal of people-to-people contact, quality time spent in quality interaction. I have time to indulge my passion for Gnostic literature, Jungian writings, and modern metaphysics. I can even find the time to use my calligraphic skills to make gifts for my friends and decorate them with beautiful expressions of art. On top of all that, I can still find the time to play the pipe organ--better than I ever did before. Music as a Healing Tool When I was in school, my music was something I did--something I did compulsively because I needed to prove something to myself and the world. I needed to justify my existence, and music was the way I did it. Consequently, there was never a sense of freedom about what I did. It was more than an activity, more than a job--music was my reason to exist. If I stopped playing, I would stop being. In recovery my musical performance has become something quite different for me. After having not played for over five years I learned that I did not have to play in order to exist. Recovery has shown me that music is a gift of communication, just like a language. As with any language, one must first acquire the basic tools and skills of vocabulary, grammar and syntax before one can communicate effectively in, say, the form of the novel. So, too, in musical performance one must first learn to negotiate scales and arpeggios before one can handle a concerto. But when all is said and done, one can have a perfect fluency in all of the tools and techniques, but one still must have something to say. I now have something very important to communicate with my music--healing. My music is now a channel through which I can communicate love, forgiveness and healing to others. It is a means to an end. And it is not the only means I have at my disposal either. My writing, my music, my art, my presence as a non-judgmental man are all tools to communicate God's healing love. Performance at the pipe organ has not gone down the scale of importance for me, it has simply been put into proper perspective. Whatever I do is not nearly as important as who I am. While my music has lost its ontological significance for me, it has gained its true value as a tool for communication to others of healing, love and forgiveness--all of which have true ontological significance. It is for these that God created me from before the beginning. Fantasy and Archetypes The older I get the more I find myself drawn to archetypal fantasy, the kind I have not indulged in since my school days. Such writers as J.R.R. Tolken are back in my world. The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Star Wars, Harry Potter, C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia are all very present to me. In fact, I think that they were never far from my consciousness all along. When I stop to look at the archetypal symbols that surrounded me from the moment I entered the front portal at Holy Cross Monastery all the way down to the present, where images of the Mother and Child, the Crucified Redeemer and the Saints of the past form and shape my present spirituality, it becomes clear to me that there is a very deeply felt link between my religious life and my mythological experience. That link seems to be best explained by Jung's archetypes. Whether I am looking at Star Wars, with its clear image of a redeemer who is sent to save from the grasp of the ultimate evil Emperor, or The Lord of the Rings, with its savior, Gandalf, sent from the land where all is good and perfect to point the direction for rescue to us in this land, Middle Earth, threatened by the Evil One, Sauron, all of the Christian Mythmakers have their roots in the same Greco-Roman tradition, a tradition which informed early Christian theologians and tradition-makers, including St. Paul. I don't pretend to understand that link, but I am grateful for the wealth of material that forms my mythos, whether it is Aslan the Lion, Frodo the Hobbit, or Harry Potter the Wizard. They are all as real and as important to me as The Angel Gabriel. Whether I pray to "God" or to "The Force" is no issue at all. Post Script This is an unfinished work, rather like an unfinished symphony, with the last two movements still to be written--or lived, as the case may be. I wouldn't even try to predict what the future holds. I neither have a crystal ball nor do I read tea leaves. And furthermore, given the completely unforeseen way I have changed and grown and healed over the past few years, I have learned that I am not at all in charge of the process. God is. The one thing I do know is that right now, today, I am willing to get out of the way and hang on for the ride. So far it has been everything from outright disastrous to euphorically wonderful--but never, ever has it been dull. I wrote this autobiography for myself--to help me to see things in a more organized and focused way. If someday anyone else should read this, I hope and pray that you might find it meaningful. After all, the only thing of meaning I have to share is myself--my experience, strength and hope. Nothing else really matters anyway. May The Force be with you
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