Navigating faith
Finding acceptance and light in an unexpected place
I was brought up in the Catholic religion, although maybe not in the traditional way. Even though my mother was also brought up Catholic, she was no longer practicing and neither of my parents went to church.
Most of my Catholic education came from an all-girls Catholic school I attended until I was eleven. I didn’t mind going to church on Sundays with my grandmother, but I loved school: I loved classwork and homework, I loved my classmates, I loved the kind Dominican sisters who were our teachers, and I enjoyed the rituals around the idea of church.
When we prepared for our First Communion and had to spend several hours in quiet contemplation by ourselves, I was delighted. I spent a long time that day contemplating the vastness of God’s Universe and the concept of infinity (which sort of freaked me out). I also worried excessively about the fate of my very kind but non-Catholic friends who according to my church were doomed to, at best, purgatory. That didn’t seem very fair to me: it wasn’t their fault their parents weren’t raising them to be Catholic.
Once I reached sixth grade (about age 11), I started going to the local public school. All of a sudden there were so many other things to learn. First off, there weren’t just girls anymore; there were boys! And boys behaved so differently to girls! And the girls, well, they behaved so differently to my previous classmates. There were endless new codes to decipher around life at the new school: clothing choices, which people were friends, who was not liked, how different people were treated and why, what words were ok to use, and what were not, and finally, what was ‘Going Steady’?
For the next three years there was a lot to navigate. Too much really, and I didn’t always understand things very well.
During this time, I started playing folk guitar. I had tried playing flute at Catholic school, but one of the nuns said my lips weren’t shaped properly and that I shouldn’t bother trying any further; I believed her. After a year or so playing guitar, I joined the folk mass musicians in my church. We played at the 10:30 mass each Sunday morning, replacing the standard droning hymns with upbeat new folk music. The songs were catchy and very similar to the popular folk music of the day. I loved being part of the multi-age group, and contributing to a service with songs that focused on love, spreading kindness and forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War continued each evening on the news while older siblings were drafted to join the casualty lists. Anger and resentment free-floated around the country. There were racial issues bubbling up. Leaders advocating peace were assassinated. Confounding my earlier joy in my church services, I learned the position of the Catholic church towards women in society was not, let’s say, ‘equitable’. I noticed the hypocrisy of our parishioners saying ‘love your neighbour’ inside church, and behaving rudely to others in their cars outside church.
In my discomfort, I started looking around at what other religions were offering by way of trying to understand our tumultuous world. In those early teen years I spent several summers and early autumns with family friends, attending various Jewish services with them and became very much enamoured by their ceremonies. I went to a nearby Presbyterian church once or twice, and an Episcopalian church too. I read Siddhartha.1
There were a bunch of us exploring different religions amongst my friends, and someone discovered a rather renegade church in San Francisco. Unlike most other organised congregations at the time, this was a church located in one of the poorest, racially and economically diverse areas of San Francisco. It was in the early 1970s and the era of hippies, drug use and sexual liberation was still in full swing. The African-American Reverend Cecil Williams2 was a powerful and charismatic leader of the church, preaching acceptance and love for everyone, particularly for those who are hard to love.
Apparently a few of us got it into our heads that we needed to go to this renegade church. And somehow we convinced our school principal, Mr. Cooper, to take a small group of us to Sunday morning services at Glide Memorial Church3 in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood.
Mr. Cooper was a young, freshly scrubbed, very straight looking young man. He looked as if he could have worked for the CIA at the time. He had close cropped short dark hair, and wore well-ironed button-down shirts and ties every day. He was firm with discipline and the behaviour expected of us, but also reasonable. We liked him but would never admit it to each other.
There were four or five of us who piled into a car with Mr. Cooper as our chaperone. Why did he give up his Sunday off to do that for us? San Francisco was a 45 minute drive from our school, it was difficult to park in the congested neighbourhood, and he had to shuttle the little gang of us safely through the homeless and drug-affected people milling on the street into the church.
Imagine five 13-year old white suburban kids walking into an inner-city church with a white CIA agent man. In true teenage form, we ditched poor Mr. Cooper immediately thinking we would otherwise ‘blend into’ the congregation. The church was packed with people who looked like very few people who lived in our home town. They covered all the colours of the rainbow, all sexual persuasions and kinds of dress; dirty homeless people, colourful prostitutes, transgender youth, and so much more that my 13 year-old self couldn’t process. It was thrilling from the very first moment.
We were directed to go sit down on the floor in front of the pews of the packed church, close to the larger-than-life Reverend Williams and the choir. Oh my, the choir! A choir that was loud and boisterous and singing their hearts out. And they DANCED! I had never encountered such fervour and enthusiasm for singing either from a choir OR a congregation. During the entire service, people were standing, swaying, dancing, clapping, singing, and chanting along. There were hugs and hand-holding, and joy was bursting out of every molecule in that building. It was mesmerising. We clapped and cheered and danced and sang along.
I remember soaking up that church experience to my core. THIS was how I imagined practicing and living the messages of love and acceptance. People here were engaged with their full body. Not just mindless chanting but fully embracing love and acceptance. More than anything else, I wanted that sense of love and acceptance in my life.
I remember it still so vividly. It was a rare occasion to feel such unconditional love. Especially when trying to navigate the unspoken rules of being a teenager in the strange new land of almost-adulthood, where the weight of expectations was piling up. Not only the social rules in our little community, but also how to belong in the bigger world that we were awakening to, often unpleasantly.
Our world was cracking open to the injustices we had been so blithely unaware of in our safe suburban childhood bubble. War was taking our brothers from us; a war that many of us didn’t support. We not only learned about prejudice and privilege but began to see it in our friends and families. Our world was not safe, fair, and comfortable. The people who were meant to keep us safe did not always do so.
But for a short while on a magical Sunday, in a little oasis in a bad neighbourhood of San Francisco, chaperoned by a kind adult, that light of acceptance, forgiveness and love shone bright and gave us hope.
As Minister Marvin K. White, Glide Church, said on Christmas Day December 2022:
“There are some people, just outside even, that need some of this light that you have generated. Can you please share some of that light that you are feeling right now with others? Keep some for yourself, but share the rest with the rest of the world.”
I hope we can try to keep that message in our hearts each day, and do our best to share whatever light we can.
With love and light to you all.
Thanks so very much for reading, and let me know your thoughts!
xx Sabrina
PS: Here is a sample of last year’s Christmas services at Glide, if you want to see just a few minutes of the joy and love and song infusing the world, still: https://www.glide.org/church/?playlist=15797e0&video=49a80c9
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Williams_(pastor)
I encourage you to take a look at their website, and particularly their history: https://www.glide.org/about/
As I’m currently in the midst of a two-week stay in Rome - the culmination of a month in Italy - your Catholic experiences certainly hit home. Even though my mother was born in Italy and was nominally Catholic, I grew up completely unchurched, and finally was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church as an adult. Honestly, as a latecomer, I greatly preferred the old liturgy, hymns, etc. - the “bells and smells,” as they say. All Saints’, our parish in Austin, was very traditional liturgically and musically, though quite progressive politically. Since my wife’s death in 2014, however, I’ve stopped going to church, not because I’m disillusioned or angry with God, but because I’ve realized that most of the appeal for me was social (we had a great community of friends at All Saints’) and esthetic rather than spiritual.
Another lovely piece. Thank you. I'm sorry I missed that outing (I really don't think I went; it's not just a memory issue). I wonder if MY mother wouldn't let me go. Maybe someone would slip drugs in my pocket. And speaking of my mother, she would have loved your white smocked, maybe Florence Eiseman, dress. You looked so cute ready for communion. She was also very fond of Mr. Cooper.
But onto the bigger picture, the message of this essay about love, acceptance, and forgiveness remains just as important now as then. It's a sorry thing that the world has not progressed very far in all these decades. Thank heavens these oases exist to inspire all of us.