God and the Devil Fight it Out in the White Room

~On my struggle with one particular binary

In some of my early pieces on Substack I wrote about my call(s) to ministry. Then I veered off, turning in this direction and that, uncertain how to proceed with a serialized memoir about my vocational journey. In this piece I pick up the scent again. I have just arrived at Harvard Divinity School after finally succumbing to “the call.” It is 1988. “The only way out is through,” I told myself.

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In my first congregation, a member who was a history professor, came up to me after a Sunday service and said, “Do you know how often you use the word crucible about church life? A lot. It’s a very violent image. Why do you use it?” 

“I don’t think of it as violent,” I said, and then went and looked the word up to make sure I was using it correctly. Ordinarily I would have studied the etymology of any key word before I used it in a sermon. I love following the trail of a word back to its origins. This one I had put out there purely on instinct (over and over, apparently). It just felt apt.

Crucible: “a vessel in a refining fire, a place where precious substances are tested, purified, and strengthened.”

Not violent. Though the metaphor of fire is a pretty intense visual. For me, ministry was a crucible. My faith was tested in the fire of community. I wouldn’t say I was purified in any way, not a fan of the word purity in general. But my skills were definitely strengthened. So too is the church itself a crucible, for its members. They are themselves the precious substances.

A dream can be a crucible too. I had an earthquake of a dream, more like a nightmare, the first night I slept in my Harvard Divinity School dorm room. I believe it was symbolic of the new crucible I had entered that day, the ministry.

This was the nightmare:

I am in a totally white room, a kind of cell, about 20 feet by 20 feet, much too brightly lit by white lights, blindingly so. There are absolutely no shadows, no place to hide, no place to rest. A ferocious wind throws me about the room, flinging me into walls. I am terrified. I scream and scream, over and over - Are you God or the Devil? Are you God or the Devil? 

hahaha, you tell me.

I have kept a bookmark for thirty years with a picture of Emily Bronte on it. And these words of hers: “There are dreams that have run through me like wine through water, and altered the colours of my mind.”

Picture, dear reader, red wine pouring into a half-full glass of water. Notice how it disperses when it hits the water, how it swirls its way downward, the thick red distrupting the color of emptiness, eventually bonding with every part of it, changing the whole. The most powerful dreams do that. They merge with our every cell.

And there is another quote I have kept close, about dreams. This one is taken from the Talmud (a primary source of Jewish law). “An unexamined dream is like a letter unopened from God.” Those words had caused me to begin a dream journal five years earlier. No question I would open the letter about the white room. But was it God who had sent the letter? Or did the Devil send letters too?

I was surprised, even embarrassed, that a message from my psyche could be so black and white. How could such an either/or model of Ultimate Reality be hiding at the center of my (wonderful! delightful! enormously complex!) mind? Was I really that childish, that dualistic, in my thinking? I didn’t believe in the “Devil”, and wasn’t so sure what I believed about God. Was my psyche revealing a secret desire to embrace the religion of my grandparents, all of whom were conservative Christians?

“Oh Honey,” my Nana, a member of the Swedish Evangelical Covenant church had said when I told her of my plans to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, “Oh honey, why can’t you be a minister in a real religion? Even a Presbyterian would be alright.” Her son, my father, had been ordained in the Presbyterian faith. He soon moved his papers to the more liberal Congregational denomination. He was running as far from his conservative origins as he could, and still be a Christian.

And now I had run as far from his faith as I could, no longer being a Christian of any sort. Some UU’s are Christian, I was not, not in the beginning. In Unitarian Universalism the God concept, for those UU’s who will even entertain the concept (much less the word), has a plurality of names, most of which avoid gender references entirely. Or any kind of human embodiment for that matter. Spirit of Life and Ultimate Reality were favorites back then, in the late eighties. Many UU’s then and now are agnostic, atheist, humanist, or earth-based. They come from many different religious backgrounds, and none. This theological pluralism was one of the reasons I had jumped into the UU faith so wholeheartedly. So how could this stark dualism be lurking about in my psyche?

I would have dismissed the dream of the white room, and the voice in it, as “just a dream,” but it would not let me go. My brain was the white room, for about two weeks. My throat felt scraped raw, as if I had actually screamed my way through the nightmare. Maybe I had. An intense psychic pain remained in its wake. Which tells me it was likely connected to childhood trauma.

Fear. Lack of trust. Obviously (if you’ve been reading the posts up to now) the terror of the dream was based on my powerful father’s influence on me as a child. I had, as a child, been sucked into the vortex of his charismatic personality. He was a household god who loomed large in the imaginations of all of his four children. His influence had been both powerfully for the good, and horribly disturbing and distorting to my mind. He was not trustworthy.

Dad - another handsome devil with a pipe.

The unspoken, largely unconscious, questions haunting the dream must have been: If a person proves untrustworthy once, should you ever trust them again? If you then went on to trust someone else, how did you know whether their guidance would lead to a good or bad outcome? Safe or unsafe? How could you know which leaders, which wise persons, were who they claimed to be? Look how many gurus, and ministers, and cult leaders there were out there who seemed loving and wise, and then turned out to be corrupt, and abusive.

Is this God or the Devil?

I went into therapy for the duration of my time at HDS, knowing I needed help as I navigated a profession in which my childhood god would be lurking in every hallway. But secular therapy was helpful only so far. I needed a person who could do God talk, one whom I could trust. So I sought out Sister Mary Hennessy, an older nun who worked in the Ministerial Studies office at Harvard Divinity School.

Sister Mary wore her gray hair in an old fashioned bun, and had a quiet, patient disposition to go along with it. She seemed to like me, as I did her. There was something about her that invited you in, rather than made you want to straighten your spine, as had Sister Jane, the head nun at my high school in El Paso. Though I’d loved her also, and found a solid comfort in her presence. Sometimes you need a firm yet soft pillow, sometimes a Strong Tall Pine tree.

Because Sister Mary was Catholic I assumed, hoped, I’d be able to discuss a binary like God versus the Devil with her as if it were really real. The word “binary” was not yet a no-no, back in 1988, nevertheless I felt simple-minded being so taken over by one. In liberal religious circles one sought to be not only brilliant and articulate, but a person who was able to “accept ambiguity.” No, sorry, one who relished ambiguity. That was how we knew we were sufficiently open-minded, interesting and complex.

I knew I could talk about the psychological ramifications of the dream with a UU, but I needed to discuss the quandary of the binary I was beleaguered by as if I were a six year old. Kind of like how Denzel Washington went about his investigatory technique in the film Philadelphia. “Now I want you to explain this to me as if I were a six year old.”

Sitting together in her wood paneled office, Sister Mary listened kindly, and deeply, her warm eyes on me the whole time. I don’t recall what she had to say about the dream itself. Only that her eyes widened in compassion. And I remember her look of anguish as I went on to complain about a void I felt at the Divinity School.

“Most of the profs,” I said, “don’t really share what they themselves believe. I mean how did they come to choose a particular theology to teach? Why? What draws them to it? How does it sustain them? Do they really believe in what they teach, or are these just intellectual ideas for them? And if so what’s the point of all this?”

Sister Mary’s eyes seemed to be saying: I know what you mean, but I cannot say what I really think about the theological approach of HDS. Of course I have no idea what she was actually thinking, but I know I didn’t mistake that look of anguish.

I believe she knew what I needed, a community with shared devotional practices. Maybe that’s why she told me about her own life in community, and that their shared devotional practice was what kept her going. The words “devotional practice” sounded old fashioned to me, too Catholic. But the phrase must have landed in my twitchy brain that day, because within a year or two I came to understand that was exactly what I’d been missing.

Sister Mary Hennessy. I found this pic with her obit on the Net. I Had forgotten that her eyes were not only warm, but also very sharp. Like, cut the shit sharp.

I felt less alone having Sister Mary to talk to, yet remained confused, irritable, and self-righteously angry. Why doesn’t anyone help me? went the litany in my head, as it would for a long time.

Had I known to say: Sister Mary, how do I practice a direct relationship to God? And not just theorize about it? I am quite sure she would have directed me. But I had no idea it was even possible to cultivate a relationship to God through prayer, meditation and other spiritual practices. Which might sound odd. I mean, what else is prayer for? But the prayers I had heard ministers give in public often sounded (do to me still) like they were giving God marching orders. Other times, not so subtly, actually speaking to their audience.

The sense of the Presence of God was something I had experienced more than once, as I’ve written about. But I thought such experiences were something you had to powerlessly wait to come along and bop you on the head. I didn’t know there were methods by which I could learn how to clear the air enough to hear, and feel, and see, and sense, and become one with, the divine that is everywhere present. Except of course in nature. But there was something missing there. The human factor. I needed a more direct presence. I needed something more personal.

I should add that the feminist Christian theologians/authors at HDS, whose classes I took, definitely taught out of a sense of personal and collective urgency and agency. But they too were largely constructing systematic theories, which did not (at least for me) strengthen the sense of the felt, connective tissue between self and God.

I also must add that most of the other professors had chosen a philosophical or theological narrative that deeply moved them. At times you could hear that in their words and the tonality of their voices. But they did not force their beliefs on the student body. Thank God. I would have run. But teaching religion and theology in a pluralistic setting is not about faith formation. At least not directly. And I needed to form a faith. And a spiritual practice that would be foundational when I had to actually minister to others on a spiritual path.

What I did, at first, was sort out my assumptions about the Bible, and Christianity. I remember saying: “If I am going to reject my religious origins I’d better understand what I am rejecting.” So I learned Hebrew and took classes on both the Hebrew scriptures, and the New Testament. I took Christian history and ethics, and theology. “God Talk,” that is.

My brain pinged with shock, and awe, and regret, and amazement, as I “unpacked,” to use a popular Divinity School term, my conscious and unconscious biases about organized religion. I realized I had stopped growing theologically at the age of fifteen, which was when I had stopped going to church. I had frozen Christianity in place, based on my singular experiences in a particular place and time. I had not done the same with Judaism, Buddhism, Sufism, Islam, Hinduism, or Native American religions. All of which I also studied during those years at Div School. It is so much easier to appreciate, even revere, a religion whose devils one doesn’t know. And whose devils have not done you damage.

I began to see how complex Christianity and Christian history, were/are. I still struggle to describe this to my friends, most of whom see religion as the cause of all the evil and the violence in the world. I came to see religion as a living, changing, growing organism, impossible to dismiss. I’m picturing it now as something like a vast continent, shaped by changing weather systems over thousands of years. Christianity is like a continent, and a continent, over time, becomes host to a multitude of different countries with changing borders, richly varied cultures, numerous stories and myths and histories, and poetry, and differing interpretations of each of those writings. Not to mention populated by a variety of peoples, tribes, ethnicities, all speaking a multitude of languages.

It is impossible to separate religion from the container of culture. And it is within a culture that a religion’s origin stories creatively, and destructively, evolve. Is this God or the Devil?

Of course they do both, heal and destroy. They are human constructs.

For years I said I was “spiritual but not religious,” a term that has been around longer than the internet. I came to see “organized religion” as the place some of us go to practice our spirituality within a community.

I now see organized religion as a crucible for spirituality. A crucible can be violent, the history professor was right about that. There is no avoiding one’s own, or others’ devils when you are in one. It is far safer to gape in wonder at a sunset or a sunrise, alone or in a group of friends. It is far more pleasant to listen to the trees talk to each other (which we now know they do!), and the birds sing to us from those same trees.

But I would rather be fired up, tested, purified, and strengthened in a crucible than play it safe by avoiding the fire. Being part of any organized religion means taking a huge risk on humanity. Any human project is dangerous, and annoying, and often just plain wrong. If it’s going to push at our collective edges and help us to evolve spiritually, we’re going to make mistakes. Terrible ones sometimes. We’re also going to experience intense beauty, the power of love, joy, and a deep sense of meaning and belonging.

The complex history of Christianity definitely tells a tale of misogyny, and sexism, and racism and xenophobia, and homophobia and transphobia, as well as all the other ‘isms and phobias. These enormous negatives made me reject it wholesale for seventeen years. Everything I had read previous to Div School I read only to confirm my bias. I ignored the obvious. That Christianity has (as has every other religion) been engaged in a very long, complex conversation, one that sometimes breaks down into an argument, sometimes into an all-out war. And, religion has undergone not only endless schisms, but profound and positive transformations, of selves and society.

As I learned more about Christian origins, my heart began to soften toward my own origins, religious and familial. My mind opened. And I had thought I was so open minded! I was not.

Best of all, I looked for, and a year or two into my studies found, the class I needed. The one that would teach me how to grow my native, but occluded, friendship with God. That class, which I’d say set the path for the rest of my life, will probably be my next piece.