BEYOND DRESSING IN HOLY IMAGES

Polly Ann Brown

Many years ago we left our suburban church to attend an inner-city Mennonite church. The boundaries and call were clear: this was a "mission" church; we joined others who were helping those "in need."

Soon, however, boundaries began to blur. During a Sunday morning service, a recovering alcoholic made his way to the front of the church, announced that he had fallen off the wagon, and asked for prayer.

Trying to name my discomfort, I thought about the wagons I’d fallen off in my life, my own history of substance abuse, and how church was the last place I would have brought the subject up. Church was a place where my helping self could flourish and keep me from acknowledging even to myself my own spiritual neediness. Church was a place where I put on my best face and guarded my image.

My image: As a child, I was a "good girl," "mature beyond her years"; as an adult, a rock, "someone we can lean on." I was dependable friend, nurse, doctor’s wife, and mother to four sons.

I became an achieving student in my 40s, returning to college and then graduate school. I learned how to play the academic game, found another place to hide (in my head), got my Ph.D. by writing 219 pages in which I cited the ideas of 174 others, never once using the personal pronoun I, and became a university faculty member. But most important to me, I was seen as an upbeat, upright, all-around "nice person." Someone once said to me, "I see Jesus in you." Who would want to give that up? Not I . . .

At least not until I grew to know folks in our new congregation, persons whose dignity and clear-headedness were born of suffering, who had plunged to the depths and come up whole, at peace, living in a no-nonsense kind of way, whose candor was refreshing, whose lives conveyed, "This is who I am: a forgiven and loved sinner, seeking healing and growth the best way I know how, needing God, needing you for the journey."

Hanging around such attitudes began to chip at the edges of my veneer. Plus dressing in holy images was wearing me out. With others championing my cause, step by step I began to inch my way toward my rightful place as a member of the human race in a broken world, caught with everyone else in a cycle of woundedness, like everyone else longing to be known and, being known, accepted and loved.

Ten years ago, with others, I helped to plan a class built on the Twelve Steps. We sought to create a space where people could talk freely about their struggles and triumphs. Each week we continue to meet during the Sunday school hour in an office in a corner of the church. We read from a book that combines Scriptures with the Twelve Steps. We talk about how what we have read has challenged us and how we plan to work the wisdom into our everyday lives.

A friend asked me once where I find true spirituality. My mind immediately went to the people I am with on Sunday mornings—in our Twelve Steps class, in worship service. In these places, I move a little closer to acquiring that most elusive of all spiritual convictions—the conviction that I am loved absolutely and unconditionally by God.

"The root of Christian love," said Thomas Merton, "is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved by God." And so I have been learning how to serve not in the old way, not out of fear of chaos—a habit that can be traced back to childhood—but rather out of the realization that I am loved.

Each week, at the end of our Twelve Steps class, we hold hands. We say together a simple and familiar prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Then we head out to the sanctuary for the worship service.

Standing in the back row, singing, in English and Spanish, I bring "the sacrifice of praise." Amid the din of outside city noises, I look around. Annie Dillard once wrote that she knows enough of God to want to praise him. So do I. And I know enough of these people to want to praise God with them.

—Polly Ann Brown lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Ken. They are members of Norristown (Pa.) New Life Mennonite church. Polly Ann, a semi-retired educator, is writing a children’s book and planning another book encouraging ongoing dialogue among communities, families, educators, and students.