Searching for Higher Ground 

    In the l940's, when I was growing up in San Francisco, most people stayed within their own cultural square on the checkerboard.. Catholics, (sub-divided into Irish and Italians) did not mix with Protestants . Jews, were not accepted in Gentile society. The blacks were not accepted anywhere. And the Chinese, who lived in their own curly-roofed, lantern-hung section of downtown, were so removed from the mainstream that they came under the heading of a tourist attraction, like the cable cars, or Golden Gate Bridge. 

    I was not particularly aware that I lived in a segregated city. On Mondays, I took swimming lessons at the Jewish Community Center. On Wednesdays, I followed my best friend to catechism class at St. Edward's Catholic Church and on Sundays, when my parents thought to go, which wasn't often, I yawned my way through morning services at St. Luke's Episcopal Church on Van Ness Avenue. . But the real spiritual center in the family was inside my aunt and uncle's house in Presidio Terrace. 

    It was there that my grandmother, my father's two sisters, their husbands and children all lived in a huge household that doubled as the San Francisco headquarters for Moral Rearmament. Founded in the l930's by a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania, MRA was a quasi-religious international movement dedicated to fighting Communism and putting moral standards back into capitalist democracies. . Almost anytime I walked through my aunt and uncle's front door, there was something interesting going on. 

    Moral Rearmament primarily appealed to upper middle class , internationally -minded people who wanted to change the world without changing their material way of life. My aunt's tastefully slip-covered living room was routinely full of earnest, well-dressed men and women sipping coffee while they listened to delegations of foreign visitors in dirndls, kimonos and dashikis talk (or sing) about how MRA and the "Four Absolutes" of honesty, purity, love and unselfeshness had revolutionized their lives. 

    I liked looking at the different national costumes, but after awhile the different stories of how people found their way back to God and the virtuous life would run together in my mind. Beneath the catchy songs and boot-stomping plays MRA was too full of current events, seriousness, and grey-haired spinsters in gabardine dresses to capture my imagination or loyalties. 

    Then my parents made two decisions that, linked together, radically altered my prospects and perspective. They moved the family out of San Francisco to Marin County and, a year later, enrolled me in a nearby Dominican convent school for girls. One minute I was slouched in the back of a noisy public school classroom, idly defacing a textbook while I waited for lunch. The next minute I was wearing a starched gingham uniform , standing to recite, and perfecting a small hiccup of a curtsy we were taught to execute whenever a nun swept past us in the hall. 

    It was a dramatic change of circumstances, like being inserted into a l9th century English novel, where children wore pinafores and rolled hoops down sidewalks. Reinforcing this impression was the school, itself, which must have used up half the redwoods in northern California to construct. A massive, three story Victorian birthday cake of a building, it had cupolas, bell towers, turrets, covered walkways and - its most impressive feature - a wide apron of wooden steps that climbed from a circular driveway to a canopied, recessed entrance on the second floor. 

    I had never seen a building that was so intricate and important-looking and the fact that I was now related to it, by virtue of being an enrolled student, with the right to enter its cool, marble halls with waxed staircases and high curved windows, filled me with dignity-by-association. On my first day of school, dressed in my new uniform, carrying my newly-covered with oilcloth text books, I felt as if I had emerged from a trackless jungle onto a polished dance floor. 

    We were taught how to diagram a sentence, memorize a poem, dissect a frog and explain the difference, in neat manuscript penmanship, between a natural and a supernatural virtue. The nun's mission was to educate young women for a life of excellence. What I wanted was almost the same thing, an excellent life . Burdened with conflicting goals - to be saintly, popular and get my own way - I longed to be in a community where it would be easier to be good.. 

    I was eleven years old. The year was l950. The Dominican Sisters of San Rafael had been teaching the distinctions and difficulties of goodness to their students for a hundred years.

    The story of the Dominican sisters began with one brave nun in Paris. When asked by a visiting bishop whether there were any volunteers in the Monastery of the Cross who would volunteer to come with him to the New World to establish a school, only one sister, Mother Mary Goemaere, stepped forward In l850, she sailed across the Atlantic in a windjammer, traveled by mule and canoe across the Isthmus of Panama, took a steamer to San Francisco and, finally arrived, by stage coach, at her final destination - the Spanish speaking outpost of Monterey. 

    Mother Mary only spoke French. She longed for the refinements and stability of her Parisian convent. . But before the year was over, she had been joined by two other nuns who helped her turn a rough adobe building into the first Dominican school in California. By the time I was enrolled, they had established dozens of convents, hospitals and schools, from kindergarten through college in California and Nevada. 

    Most communities of faith call tell the same kind of story. . The Quakers of Philadelphia, Mormons of Salt Lake City, the Christian Scientists of Boston - , all of them began with a single person who stepped forward into the unknown, endured great difficulties in hostile circumstances and laid the foundations for what eventually became a "house of many mansions." 

    One woman's decision grew into a venerable institution and I am part of a world-wide network of graduates who regularly return to the school, like tributaries feeding into a river . We do it, not only to remind ourselves of how it used to be but to reinforce old connections that continue to provide support, guidance and inspiration. Every community of faith, if it is to keep growing, must do the same. 


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    Life is not static. I graduated from high school trained to fight for my Faith against all those who would seek to destroy or dilute it. What I found was an empty battlefield. Nobody seemed to care one way or the other what I believed . The absence of a sharply defined adversary began to erode my own sense of self and mission.. All my carefully learned answers were to questions nobody was asking. I began to wonder if God existed, whether I was anything more than a bunch of molecules inside a Shetland sweater.

    The price for having lived in the equivalent of a walled garden during my younger years was paid for in college, despite the fact that it was Catholic, too. But I was far from home and it took me most of the four years I was away to find my feet , and something more - a network of friendships that, after my family, is the most bullet-proof support system in my life .

    The church that shepherded me through college showed its rigid, parochial face after I graduated. I sought refuge in a liberal group of Catholic intellectuals who met for Mass in backyards under parachutes, collected money for Caesar Chavez' United Farmworkers and petitioned the diocese to ordain women. The archbishop responded by closing us down and excommunicating any priests who wouldn't go back to their diocesan parishes. 

    Next, I tried to pray my way into a conservative group of charismatic Catholics who met in the basement in a nearby church and spoke in tongues, which seemed like a short-cut to holier ground. But I never learned how to speak in tongues myself and finally dropped out, secretly wondering whether my presence in the room wasn't jamming the Holy Spirit's circuits. 

    I was married, with children, looking for a community in which to insert my fledgling family that was feeling the effects of modern life. A friend of mine suggested I try the newest "church" in town - group therapy. Almost everyone I knew, or their spouse, was flocking to therapists who were teaching people how to release their rage so they could get to the love trapped on the other side. Tears I couldn't shed for myself ran down my cheeks as I sat on a bean bag cushion and listened to other people's stories of hurt and humiliation. But I didn't know how to tell my own and was accused by some of the group members of spying. I quit, but not before the therapist practiced what he preached and told me how angry he was at me for leaving. . 

    Feminism was in the air. Magazines were full of pictures of Gloria Steinem smiling beatifically from behind her aviator glasses. She urged women to take responsibility for our own lives, share housekeeping with our husbands, bond with other women in Consciousness Raising groups. I only went to one, but my timing was off. I had just had a baby and could not see beneath my own joy. 

    Like Forest Gump, I seemed to accidentally wind up in the middle of every national upheaval. . I took a job in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department just before Bull Connor unleased his dogs upon the black marchers from Selma to Montgomery. When riots erupted after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, I wheeled my children past National Guardsmen who leaned against bags of peat moss in front of or local supermarket. During the Vietnam War, my natural childbirth classes were interrupted by anti-war protestors who were staying at my Lamaze teacher's house. 

    Looking back is exhausting. What felt at the time to be an agonizingly slow search for a stable life seems, in retrospect, like a rushed and jumpy series of experiments. Where,, given the fact that I had three little babies, did I find the time to learn Transcendental Meditation, become a born-again Episcopalian? 

    Between the time I left college and sent my own children into the world, I wandered in and out of more faiths, fads and folds than it now seems possible. But in this I do not think I am so different from most women in my generation. We were living in a culture that was spinning out of control and leaving everybody to find their own context and community in a way that had not been true before. 

    "Tell me" asked a woman who sat next to me at dinner during an ill-fated weekend religious retreat .. "What's your favorite television show?" 

    I wasn't sure why she wanted to know . 

    "The Carole Burnett Show" I replied. 

    "Any others?" she asked. Perhaps this was some kind of personality test. 

    "Why do you want to know?" I asked. 

    She kept her eyes on her plate when she answered. . "I thought it might give us something in common to talk about." 

    People were beginning to look at television more than they looked at each other. 

    "I like you" confided Mr. Rogers, smiling kindly into the TV monitor, "just the way you are." It had been a hard day. Tears came to my eyes. I felt he was sincere. 

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    We are now in the 2lst century. Over half the families in this country now have personal computers. We buy, sell, and communicate in cyberspace - the new community, if not of faith than convenience. The other morning, a friend e-mailed me that his wife's father had died. I e-mailed back my condolences. He e-mailed me his thanks and a day later e-mailed me directions to the funeral home where services were going to be held.. It was death by e-mail .

    But not the death of religion, at least not architecturally. The town I live in has more churches than Montana has bars. The Baptists favor impregnable brick buildings that are more fuel-efficient than graceful. The Episcopalians, influenced by Monticello, have tall Palladian-style windows with deep sills and the Catholics have just built a new church-in-the-round. There are several store front ministries, an Orthodox congregation whose plain stucco exterior hides a brilliantly decorated chapel inside. The slender New England steeple that punctures the tree line like an important thought, belongs to the Presbyterians and on a quiet summer night I can sit on my screened porch and listen to the Pentecostals singing their hymns beneath an open-air wooden pavillion at a nearby campground. 

    Americans worship in churches that mirror the tastes and aspirations of the people within them. Pulled inside by the need for human connection in a structure that both comforts and upholds us, we have always been a nation of faithful church goers but whether we are being nourished by them,, with the inspiration, guidance and support that keeps communities of faith alive is another question. Increasingly, Americans are supplementing or replacing mainstream churches with other kinds of spiritual communities which come together to pray, meditate, or study the works of a particular spiritual teacher. In this age of gurus on tape, we don't' have to travel to India or Ireland to hear them. . We can have them sent, in little cassettes, from Amazon.com or tune into the Oprah Show and become part of her daily "congregation. " 

    Men and women from an earlier age belonged to a church or temple that bound them, some more tightly than others, to a code, a creed and a culture which gave them whatever dignity and "blessed assurance" was available in this world. . One strayed away from the fold at his or her peril. How different from today, when it is very possible for someone to belong to many communities of faith that overlap and reinforce each other without actually touching each another. 

    Consider, for instance, the woman who takes a weekly yoga class, belongs to a book club, and meets once a month with a group of other women who get together to share their writing. Or consider the man who volunteers at a downtown soup kitchen and goes to weekly AA meetings. None of these activities is specifically religious but they are spiritually rewarding and anybody who has wrestled with the dark forces of addiction knows that Alcoholics Anonymous is probably the most effective non-denominational religion in the world.

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    Not long ago I returned to California to give a writing workshop (a major source of spiritual community these days) and attend a millenium reunion at my old Dominican school which, in fact, does not exist anymore. Ten years ago, the entire building went up in flames, which was a terrible blow to the surrounding neighbors who wept at the loss of such an elegant landmark. The nuns were sad but philosophical. It was not the first time they had lost everything and had to depend upon Our Lord and His Blessed Mother to make it up to them. They saw no reason to lose confidence now. 

    Rising from the ashes of the old Victorian building is a sleek, shingled complex of convent and offices that manages to look both airy and functional. Nestled nearby, in 500 acres of untouched hills, is the new school, staffed entirely by lay teachers except for the principal and a few elderly sisters who are mostly retired. 

    On reunion day, hundreds of women assembled beneath a giant tent for the luncheon. To hear one's name , to turn and see a face, brush the cobwebs from it and see the friend beneath , and then to wrap one's arms around 40 years of history is a joy that my twenty and thirty year old children must wait their turn to know. 

    I used to think, even though I knew it was not right to do so, that there were human beings who unfurled like flowers, and others human beings who did not flower at all. Less and less do I think this is true. We will, all of us, get to where we are meant to go, realize what we are mean realize before the end. But looking into the faces of my old comrades made me think it is better if we travel together. 

    For four days before the reunion, I lived on the school's campus. At breakfast, I sat with the remaining members of the order (they get very few vocations now) and asked them about some of the nuns I remembered from school. 

    Sister Damien, "dead, quite young,' recalled one of the nuns, "of cancer. It was very hard, but she sang with us at the end." 

    Sister Francis Xavier, also gone. . "Oh," said another nun, "she had such terrible arthritis. She used to wait until the pain wasn't so bad before she came into the study hall to give singing lessons. But then, one day, it went away." 

    It was a miracle they said. She prayed for it to go away and it never came back. The sisters at the table talked as easily about the departed members of their community as if they were at the table with them, or only separated by the thinnest of veils. 

    "She is with me all the time," confirmed Sister Gervaise, about her former superior who died a few years ago. 

    "Does she still give you advice?" I asked. 

    She laughed. "Sometimes" she replied, "but mostly she just says 'figure it out.'" 

    After so many years of doing without, making do, cobbling together temporary support groups, and shopping between churches until I finally gave up the search, I had forgotten what it was like to be in a real community, with people who worked, ate, slept and prayed for each other under the same roof. 

    "Did you know," said a friend of mine at the reunion "that nuns get less Alzheimer's disease than any other group of people?" The woman who told me this is married, with grown children and a thoughtful, satisfying life. 

    "I think," she added, "it's because nuns live in a community."

    In the case of the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, that community extends into Heaven.