God Under a Pile-up of Chairs

The Light at the center of the wreckage

I drank in the “Life of Prayer” class I took at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge MA, as if it were holy water, and at the same time felt like an outsider. It was a small group, and everyone else was Episcopalian. They had their inside jokes. My favorite: “where two or three Episcopalians gather, there is always a fifth.” Unitarian Universalists had their own jokes. Q. What do you get when you cross a UU and a Jehovah’s Witness? A. Someone who knocks on your door and then isn’t sure why they’re come.

The Episcopalians in the class shared a deep collective faith, and what seemed to be a sense of comfortable belonging to their human tribe. I envied that. I wanted that. For a short time I felt called to jump ship and become an Episcopal priest. I have never truly unpacked why I did not. My stated reason was that I would not be able to get a position in a church, not as an out lesbian, which was probably true back then. And there were many Christian narratives I was not reconciled to. But there was much more to it.

One thing is clear. I had a deep mistrust of authority which was, at least partially, responsible for my turning my back on that call, and all the previous ones. And was wildly apparent on this one particular day.

I enter the large wood paneled classroom to find a tall pile of chairs precariously balanced on the small stage up front. The chairs we usually sit on. So maybe sixteen of them. This is annoying. I depend on this class for sustenance. This is a disruption. The chair pile looks like a Jenga Tower that might topple over if you pull one chair out. Is this a joke? Where is the Dean who teaches the class?

The other fifteen or so students mill about the pile. You can almost see the collective mental chaos as our energy zigs and zags in the air waves between us. After four or five minutes of silent wandering the chaos speaks.

“Maybe the custodian did this when he was cleaning, and didn’t have time to put them back.” 

“No, this looks intentional.” 

“I think we’re supposed to cooperate in taking the chairs down. I think it’s an exercise in community.”

“I think we’re supposed to just meditate on it.” 

“I think this whole thing is a psychological mind game,” I offer. “I might just leave. This sort of thing really pisses me off.”

Everyone looks puzzled by my comment, so they ignore me as they continue to sleuth the possible meanings of the psychotic looking pile of chairs. I don’t make good on my threat. I always want to see how a story reveals itself.

Someone cries out: “there’s a candle in there! At the center.”  Everyone moves in closer, even me, peering between the wooden slats of the chairs into the tangled mess. Indeed, there is a small flickering candle, way in there at the center of the wood pile.

Immediately I spin around on my heel. “For sure it was the Dean,” I say, “the symbolism is so obvious.” But I don’t actually want to be the surly, always-has-to- question-authority-liberal-outsider all of the time, so I keep my next thought to myself: I fucking hate this kind of emotional manipulation. 

I don’t hate the Dean himself. Not at all. He is a quiet, patient man who teaches via his way of being, as much as by his words. This is the class I’d been looking for, the one where the point is to learn how to live out an embodied faith. By studying about, and practicing with, those who have gone before. I had finally found a road map.

This class (as well as a few other classes I will take at EDS) is where I am learning about a long tradition of Christians who have a personal relationship with God. We have read of Christian women leaders who lived between 500 and 1000 years ago, and were revered for their insights, revelations, writing, art, service, even, sometimes, their political activism. I’d had no idea!

Particularly memorable has been the life of Teresa of Avila, a Spanish mystic who wrote her book “Interior Castle,” in the 1500’s. Teresa worried that her mystical experiences were of a diabolical rather than divine origin. I had recently asked myself very nearly the same question after waking from a dream in which I am being tossed about in a too brightly lit white room.¹ Are you God or the Devil? I scream out, over and over, in the dream. Teresa, too, seems to be asking this question. No wonder I am drawn to her writing.

Teresa was lucky to have a Jesuit mentor, Francis Borgia, who reassured her of the divine inspiration behind her (admittedly bizarre) experiences and unusual ideas. A year or so after this Chair Pile Day I will speak enthusiastically of her writing and experiences to my own mentor at the suburban Boston, Unitarian Universalist congregation where I will be a ministerial intern. The minister will adjust his glasses, sit back in his well upholstered brown leather and say, “it is universally agreed that St. Teresa of Avila was an hysteric.” I will let him have it.

Then there is Catherine of Siena, an Italian mystic, layperson, and political activist of the 1300’s, who wrote “The Dialogue of Divine Providence.” My favorite takeaway from Catherine: “God is a sea in which we are the fish.”

Swimming around in God with our friends the other fish

Hildegard of Bingen is the mystic whose poetry I will most often return to in the future. She was not only a writer but a composer and visual artist.

Hildegard of Bingen

In my first congregation I will deliver a sermon entitled: “Hildegard of Bingen: In Love With God.” That same Sunday the choir director, Dr. Adolphus Hailstork, a renowned composer (how amazing a gift was that, for a novice minister!) will have our choir sing one of her compositions. A bizarre, and to me somewhat atonal, piece of music. “Difficult,” Dolph will tell me after the service, the choir standing behind him sighing.

For years into the future these words of Hildegard’s will sustain me and give me courage, as they have so many others.

I am the one whose praise echoes on high.

     I adorn all the earth.

     I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.

     I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.

     I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.

     I am the rain coming from the dew.

     That causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.

     I call forth tears, the aroma of holy work.

     I am the yearning for good.

So I love this class, “The Life of Prayer.” And I respect the teacher. And yet. As I stare at that chair pile every cell in my body is pinging in hyper-vigilance mode. I know very well, intellectually, why I hate this messy pile of chairs that I am certain is an experiment imposed on us by the Dean. I am not completely lacking in self-awareness. I’ve had enough therapy by then to know my reactivity is about my life-long story of My Dad the Powerful Minister/God-like Father Figure.

But I am so deeply triggered I have fallen into a non-verbal, somatic flashback. Not having this concept in hand yet, I am unable to escape the windy interior room in which my past prevails. Staring at the pile of chairs from inside the flashback I am at my father’s dinner table. It is one of those nights when he is playing darts inside his four children’s minds. It is a night that will leave my already over-functioning neuron pathways raw. A night when we will not be allowed to leave the table until he has reduced someone to a blubbering mess.

Dad singles out, (it is never me in the earlier years) one child to mentally and emotionally torture until they break down and cry. Then he will say gruffly, “Well, good! At last some real emotion in this family!” That night’s victim will become dazed and confused because, maybe, they’ve said the right thing after all. Maybe they just didn’t get what it was he was trying to achieve. The one who cries resembles a cartoon character. You can almost see stars floating around their head from being hit so hard by Our Father’s sheer mental force; and from working so hard to understand something that is not meant to be understood in the first place. I am tortured watching this scenario play out, and want to cry for the sibling who is being tortured, but can’t. Fight, flight or freeze. I always freeze.

There are other nights when I leave the table with a mind that sparkles with new ideas. After we are excused I fly off like Peter Pan to my books and my room.

Problem is, you never know which kind of night it will be, not when you first sit down at that round table. I hate that I am suckered in every time. That I will sit down eagerly, every night, like someone with amnesia, hungry for not only my mother’s cheesy thick casseroles, and the nightly dessert, but for the one place I can enter into an interesting, lively, conversation. I hate that even after I figure out he is not to be trusted, I keep on wanting to trust him. I hate it that he once told me, you are the one who understands me. The already worn spots in my brain are scraped raw as I stare at the piled-up wreckage of my past.

The rest of the group launches into a theological discourse on the symbolism of the candle. The meaning of it. Whether to leave it there. Whether to liberate it. What to do? I hate their collective bewilderment, feel sorry for them, pity them. Hate that the Dean is no doubt sitting somewhere nearby, listening to all of this, smugly smiling. Hate that we are giving his ego so much energy, allowing him to take charge of our lives, pleasing him like this.

I consider wandering around, poking into the corners of the room, finding the curtain behind which he has hidden himself, triumphantly throwing it back to expose the Little White Haired Man playing the part of Wise Wizard. Why is no one else bothered by such an obvious game? Why are they such willing guinea pigs?

The Dean strolls into the room at last. He has us stand in front of the Chair Pile and the rest of the students carefully, verbally, deconstruct it, which involves a nuanced discussion of symbols and theological tropes. We then very carefully deconstruct the actual pile of chairs, so as not to disturb the small candle. At last we return the chairs to the shape of our familiar circle. The candle is brought to sit at the center. The flame has survived, as several people note.

The Dean then asks us to deconstruct our personal experiences of the Chair Pile. Oh oh. “I should tell you,” he says, “that I was sitting over there,” he points to a door that opens into a storage area, “behind the open door, and overheard your conversation.” Seriously? Does he think we wouldn’t know that?

I look at the faces in the circle. Some people express surprise. You’ve got to be fucking kidding kids, of course he was over there, that’s the whole point of a Mind Fuck. To enjoy power over you.

“I thought you were never going to see the candle,” the Dean said. “I think that was the longest it’s ever taken a group to see the light.” Everyone else laughs with delight.

“So what I’m truly interested in knowing,” he says, “is how you reacted to the light once you saw it.

We go around the circle and each person shares their experience. When it comes to me I say, “Honestly? I was just angry. I felt manipulated by the whole exercise.”

“Well, I’ve done this exercise many times,” the Dean says, slowly, “and I’ve never had that response. Can you say more?”

I can’t. And won’t. I am surprised that I am the only one who sees how manipulative an experiment this is. I want to keep on feeling stunned by the fact that no one else sees it, so that I can swaddle my pain in smugness, and the belief that I am the most perspicacious person in the room. But it does occurs to me, fleetingly, that I might need to think about my strong reaction. Also, I don’t want to alienate the Dean, whose wisdom I need. I shake my head. The Dean lets it go.

At the end of the hour he says: “what I want all of you to take away from the chair exercise is this. I want you to ask yourself, in many different circumstances, I want you to notice, when am I drawn to the light? When do I turn away from the light? When am I indifferent toward it?” 

~~~~

May the light always be there for you, at the center of your wreckage.

Actually, I believe it always is.

Photo by Tehzeeb Kazmi on Unsplash

1. (See my piece, “God and the Devil Fight it Out in a White Room”)

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