Pastrix Page 2

  Dale Douglass was the first man I ever had for a Sunday school teacher. He was soft spoken and funny and parted his full head of thick, sandy-blonde hair so far to the side that it looked like an unnecessary comb-over. Dale started where the woman who taught us the year before (when she still had authority to do so) had left off: testing us to see how many facts we knew about the Bible. I knew a lot of the answers, and it took just three weeks for him to have a special meeting with my parents, at which he informed them they would have to do something about me. I was answering the questions too quickly and it was keeping the boys in the class from having a chance to answer. To their credit, my parents quietly thought this was awesome. They did encourage me to allow space for others, but really they just loved that I knew my Bible and they weren’t about to shame me for it.

  Precociousness gave way to sarcasm as my ability to analyze the doctrine and social dynamics at church developed. The moment I was able to recognize the difference between what people said (all sex outside of heterosexual marriage is forbidden) and what they did (clandestine affairs with each other) and the difference between what they taught (women were inferior and subordinate to men) and the reality I experienced in the world (then why am I smarter than my Sunday school teacher?), I knew that I had to get out. I was a strong, smart and smart-mouthed girl, and the church I was raised in had no place for that kind of thing even though they loved me.

  By the time I left the church, I questioned everything I had ever been told and knew, based on the criteria that I was for sure “not-Christian,” but I still didn’t manage to be an atheist, as one might expect. I had never stopped believing in God. Not really. But I did have to go hang out with his aunt for a while. She’s called the goddess.

  My first experience with Wicca was in the mountains west of Denver, on a brown grassy hill above a yurt—a round, nomadic-looking structure inside of which all the lamps were covered with red scarves, making the interior look like an outdoorsy bordello.

  I was about twenty years old when my friend Renna (who is as straight as they come) asked if I wanted to go to a lesbian wedding. I replied, “More than anything in the world,” so we drove the forty-five minutes listening to the Indigo Girls just to get in the right womany groove, and I held a huge bowl of strawberries on my lap; apparently lesbian weddings are often potluck.

  “This is a Wiccan wedding,” Renna informed me. I didn’t entirely know what that meant, but it sounded “not-Christian,” like me, and I suspected that my parents would not approve, and that there would likely be hummus involved, so I was fine with it.

  I loved the service and had never seen so many strong women. Women with shoulders back and hair shorn tight and nothing to hide. We stood in a circle and sang some simple chants, and the brides were so happy, like any other brides, only these two wore Renaissance fair–style garb and were marrying each other. There was talk of perfect love and perfect trust, and we fed each other bread and wine saying, “May you never hunger and may you never thirst.” It felt like communion.

  There was something safe about being around women. They let me hang out with God’s aunt, and I couldn’t help but think she liked me. I spent a few years with these women, marking the seasons and sharing our lives, and always there were potlucks. We talked of relationships and pregnancies that didn’t last and bosses and roommates that didn’t appreciate us and how much garlic to add to vegan salad dressing. At one month’s potluck every one of us brought dessert and no one thought that was a problem.

  There was no doctrine. We never talked about belief, we just shared our lives and spoke of the divine feminine in ourselves and in the world. The goddess we spoke of never felt to me like a substitute for God, but simply another aspect of the divine. Just like God’s aunt.

  When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess, I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided, and that I have now thankfully come back to both Jesus and my senses. But it’s not like that. I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can’t imagine that God doesn’t reveal God’s self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

  In fact, I felt guided by God the whole time I sojourned outside of the church. The divine source of my life and my identity perhaps knew that I needed to bask in a female face of God for a good long while outside the church before I ever could return to it whole and be able see the divine feminine in my own tradition. If feminist scholar Mary Daly was right, that “If God is male, then male is God,” then there was some undoing to be done inside of myself after a childhood of being told that God is male and I am not (but sixth grade Jimmy over there is!).

  Much later, in my mid-thirties and after PJ died, was when I realized that what I really wanted, more than anything, was to be a pastor to my people—preferably young, urban, smartasses who wanted something more than the categories of late-stage capitalism to tell them who they are—I had, through the right combination of time, sobriety, and therapy, ceased being angry about the fundamentalism of my childhood. But there was one problem with my being a pastor: I’m a lousy candidate. I swear like a truck driver, I’m covered in tattoos, and I’m kind of selfish. Nothing about me says “Lutheran pastor.”

  So I was scared. I was scared about the fact that in order for me to be the kind of pastor I would want to be, I would need to look at some of my own personal stuff, which I was perfectly happy ignoring. I struggled with the idea of being a spiritual leader. I struggled with knowing I don’t really like emotionally needy people and, given the opportunity, I will walk the other way if I see them coming. I struggled with being available to people all the time when really I’m slightly misanthropic. I struggled with many things, but, despite my upbringing, what I didn’t struggle with was my gender. My calling to be a pastor, while still shocking, had become less and less ambiguous and even started to feel precious to me. That’s why I didn’t want tell my parents.

  I was experiencing a feeling of purpose, perhaps for the first time in my life, and the last thing I wanted was for them to squash it. And yet, they had to know at some point, so on a Saturday in November of 2005, I sat in my parents’ living room on their brocade, overstuffed sofa, and while they stared at the brand-new tattoo of Mary Magdalene that now covered my forearm, I confessed, and not very elegantly.

  “I… um… am really enjoying seminary, and I need to tell you that I’ve changed my degree track from an academic degree to a pastoral degree. Umm… see… I feel like maybe God is calling me to start a church, and I guess I think maybe I’m supposed to be a pastor to my people, but I’m scared, and well… I am… but…” I had no idea if any of it made sense, but it was being spoken. I was terrified that they would reject the idea and shame me for my disregard for the scriptures, which forbid a woman to teach. And I wasn’t sure what felt worse: the possibility of them shaming me or the fact that they still could.

  At that moment, my father silently stood up, walked to the bookshelf and took down his worn, leather-bound Bible. Here we go, I thought, he’s going to beat me with the scripture stick.

  He opened it up and read. I could tell from where he was turning that it wasn’t one of Paul’s letters at the end of the book, but something closer to the middle. My father did not read the 1st Timothy passage about women being silent in church. He read from Esther.

  From my father I heard only these words: “But you were born for such a day as this.” He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can’t speak of without crying all o
ver again.

  CHAPTER 3

  Albion Babylon

  Circa 1988

  They should fix that light,” my older sister Barbara said. The long fluorescent lights in the dingy basement hallway, which led to the two-bedroom, garden-level apartment I now shared with seven roommates, flickered in and out like a strobe, making our walk to the third apartment on the right look deceptively short.

  My sister and I had been close most of my life, and she had agreed to hang out with me as I moved into this squalid apartment. I’d recently dropped out of college after a single semester and had very little, whereas Barb was getting her PhD in English at Indiana University and owned things like a washer and dryer. At nineteen, in the winter of 1988, I owned a single apple crate of essential possessions: a worn copy of The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, my combat boots, an old mannequin head, and several important cassette tapes: Ziggy Stardust, Violent Femmes, Road to Ruin.

  The Ramones. I was twelve years old when I bought Road to Ruin from Big Apple Tapes & Records across from the caramel corn stand in the Mall of the Bluffs in Colorado Springs. Until that day, there had been only Jim Croce, John Denver, and the Kingston Trio in our middle-class Christian home. But now those guys, with their mustaches and mildness, had to step aside for four boys from Queens because I had spent all my allowance money on the Ramones’ Road to Ruin. And every afternoon for weeks I sat in my Holly Hobbie bedroom playing that record over and over on my plastic orange and white Fisher-Price record player while I stared at the album cover. Hoping that maybe Joey and Dee Dee Ramone would magically show up at my house in their ripped Levi’s and leather jackets and take me away. The anger of punk rock felt custom made for me.

  At the time I began my love affair with the Ramones, my parents didn’t know that I was buying punk rock records, just like they didn’t know that I was stealing food at school. Teachers at my junior high school would leave snacks on their desks, and I was so hungry that I’d take their granola bars and baggies of crackers, not because there wasn’t enough food at home, there was, I just couldn’t get enough to eat no matter what I packed in my lunch or packed in my mouth.

  I was eleven when I slowly started weighing less and eating more. And my parents, Dick and Peggy, with their love and can-do attitude, just thought it was due to a growth spurt and encouraged me to be proud of my height and stand up straight. The next year, when my handwriting was so terrible that my grades were crashing, my mom bought me a lovely calligraphy set hoping to inspire some pride in my penmanship. And when I became pale and lethargic, my mother thought some fresh Colorado air might be in order and took me cross-country skiing, which was the day she realized something more was wrong than could be fixed with discipline and optimism. I slept in the backseat of our Chevy Citation on the way to the mountains, the movement of a stick-shifted Chevy causing my gut to lurch. Later, when we had finally gotten geared up and started skiing, the weight of my wool sweater felt like one of those lead X-ray aprons and my legs just wouldn’t move, so I finally insisted that we leave. Plus I’d already eaten all of the snacks. When we got home my mother made a doctor’s appointment.

  What I had was Graves’ disease. It is a thyroid-related autoimmune disorder, which causes many delightful things to happen in one’s body: rapid heart rate, hand tremors, pale skin, increased metabolism, lethargy, mania, depression, and sensitivity to heat. It’s like methamphetamine without the part that feels good. Oh, and it’s free.

  The disease had caused fatty tissue to build up behind my eyes, forcing them to protrude out of their sockets. The sphere of my eyeball bulged so far out of my head that my eyelids could no longer close. White was visible all the way around the iris, as though I had just received an electric shock or seen something terrifying… only I looked like that all the time.

  All the time.

  From age twelve to sixteen. Every day of my life.

  Mom would drive me to Denver to see eye specialists on a monthly basis, so they could make sure my corneas weren’t damaged (I’d started sleeping with a salve in my eyes to prevent them from drying out) but also so that they could keep measuring the bones in my face. The bug-eyed thing could be corrected with surgery. But not until the bones in my face stopped growing. And it ends up that you can’t make the bones in your face stop growing through discipline or optimism.

  Most junior high kids think they look like insects. I actually did. So most days on the school bus, I would spend the twenty-minute ride pressing my palms over my eyes, thinking that were I just determined and consistent enough in my efforts, I could force my eyes back. But it just doesn’t work like that. Kids can’t wish hard enough that their divorced parents get back together and they can’t make themselves good enough students to make their manic-depressive mother stop being crazy and they can’t force their bug-eyes back into their eye sockets by twenty minutes of pushing on them on a school bus ride. But that has never stopped kids from trying.

  It’s unclear if every school bus in America is installed with its own bully in the backseat as standard equipment, along with a fire extinguisher and the driver’s silver-elbow door lever, but it sure felt like that. My standard-issue bully was not that special: a larger-than-the-other-girls chick named Becky, who had feathered hair and wore Def Leppard T-shirts.

  She noticed my palms over my eyes, and when she called it to attention, I lied. “What the hell are you doing?” Becky asked with a sneer. “Trying to fix your bug-eyes?”

  “I’m meditating,” I said. “Buddhist.” And then I sat with my skinny legs crossed on the bus bench.

  The next day I just wore sunglasses.

  Eventually I’d begin to walk the low-ceilinged halls of Horace Mann Junior High School with my eyes squinted and not looking directly at anyone, the way the girls who developed early held their Trapper Keepers in front of their chests. I may have averted my eyes, but I never dropped my chin. Not once.

  Everyone has their own middle school horror story. It’s a trial by fire, and the person we will become can usually be traced back to seventh grade. But everyone reacts to their middle school experiences uniquely. For me, what I was developing in those low-ceilinged hallways was more than just a “problem with anger,” as it would later be called. The daily barrage of malicious language spat my way from Becky and others made me angry, and yet somehow the anger protected me. That protection took the form of cynicism and a heightened awareness of people’s bullshit. I began to smell it out like a drug dog in a Colombian airport.

  Church, for all its faults, was the only place outside of my own home where people didn’t gawk at me or make fun of me. I could go to church and be greeted with my actual name and not a taunt. I could go to church and be part of the youth group. I could go to church and no one stared. Which is why it sucked that there were other reasons I’d eventually not fit in.

  Belonging to the Church of Christ—and therefore, being a Christian—mostly meant being really good at not doing things. Not drinking, obviously, not being snarky and sarcastic, not having sex outside of marriage, not smoking, not dancing, not swearing, not dating people outside the church and, of course, perhaps most important of all, no mixed bathing. The better you were at not doing these things, the better a Christian you were. It did not seem to me, even back then, that God’s grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united people in the Church of Christ; it was their ability to be good. Or at least their ability to appear to be good. And not everyone can pull that off.

  So while I was accepted at church despite my bug-eyes, the rage and cynicism I had developed as a result of those bug-eyes was decidedly “not Christian.” My newfound appreciation for the word “bullshit,” for example, was not Christian. Sarcasm was not Christian. Punk rock proved there were other people out there who also wanted to scream and break shit, which changed my life, but punk rock, screaming, and breaking shit was also… not Christian. That is to say, I was not Christian.

  I continued on the unchristianlike track when, six months bef
ore I had the surgery to correct my eyes, I started drinking. Fast forward four years, and I was a no-longer-bug-eyed nineteen-year-old with purple hair, a drinking problem, an attitude problem, and a smoking-pot-every-day problem.

  Most of my peers were in college by then, an endeavor at which I had tried and then quickly failed after only four months. I had succeeded in impressing the frat boys with my ability to drink “like a man,” but I had not succeeded in actually showing up for class, and only later did it dawn on me that perhaps these two things were related.

  Having graduated from high school with a 2.0 GPA, I had basically sweet-talked my way into Pepperdine University. It was technically a Church of Christ school, but being located in California and not in a proper Christian state like Texas or Tennessee, it was suspect among traditionalists. Given the church’s feelings about “mixed bathing”—boys and girls in the same swimming pool at the same time—they probably thought locating a Church of Christ school in the beach community of Malibu was like locating an Amish boarding school on the strip in Vegas.

  After my brief college career, I went back to Denver. I’d been there a few months and was washing dishes part-time in an upscale Mexican restaurant with marginal food when I met Scotty, a long-torsoed, big-hearted nineteen-year-old pothead with an apartment on Albion Street where he said that anyone could stay. Within a week, Barb was helping me move in.

  From the open front door on the night I moved in, my sister pointed to the unwashed kitchen counter, a huge green bong, a bedroom with three mattresses on the floor, and a guy asleep on a torn sofa. “Honey,” she whispered, “really?”