I grew up steeped in church life--my father the organist/choirmaster of my parish (as well as organist at a synagogue), my mother a choir member and, eventually, an ordained Episcopalian minister. My parents have authored and co-authored at least a dozen books, all of them relating to "spirituality, religion, and ritual" in one form or another (including books on prayer, yoga, sacred music, etc.).
Many of my childhood memories revolve around the church and around religious celebrations. The musical memories, instilled through my father's organ-playing and through congregational and choir singing, are the most pleasant and the most enduring. Singing with my friends in the boys' choir was an opportunity for lots of fun before, after, and even during practices and services (the adults always managed to be more solemn than we were, though we put on a passable act and descended into uncontrollable giggling on only a few very inappropriate occasions). The familiar seasonal rituals seemed special, too--the Advent candles, the Christmas pageant, the Easter egg hunts, the hymns that came at only one time of year and so gained an added emotional power.
Alongside those are the memories that are less pleasant. The constricting clothing we had to wear to church--especially the ties. The smoke-filled room at coffee hour (a.k.a. "the rector's forum") immediately after the service. The words in the liturgy and hymns that, once I began to understand and think about them, often said something very different from what I believed and felt myself. The internal church politics of which I slowly became aware, and which affected both of my parents in less-than-positive ways. The unconvincing (to me) spiritual devotion of people who drove to church once a week to get absolution for the sins they committed--by their own admission or insistence--all the rest of the week. (Driving to church itself started to count as a sin in my book, when I began learning about ecology and before I stopped thinking in dichotomies.) The heavy weight of "original sin" and guilt, still incomprehensible to a child, which seemed to burden some of the adults and caused them to need to repent every Sunday.
I absorbed many of the lessons of this religious upbringing. I am still grateful for a good number of them, though others have not always been helpful (for example, until I finally abandoned it in frustration, my earnest ambition to be "perfect" and Christlike was probably something of an obstacle to achieving that status).
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As a child, my own religion or spiritual path was play. I was hopelessly addicted to the pleasure I got from playing--from being in my body, being outside, leaping as high or as far as I could to catch the ball or the frisbee, eluding the catcher while playing "running bases," sledding down the hill in front of our house, taking part in innumerable childhood games both with and without rules, and generally having fun at every opportunity. My brother, my friends, and I constructed play houses out of refrigerator boxes, robots out of art easels (one of these squirted baby powder out of its belly button), a genuine illegal radio station (constructed from an electronics project kit) which broadcast for nearly a two-block radius, and a ghost-pulley system (rigged up between our attic window and the maple tree in our front yard) which had trick-or-treaters doing double-takes and sometimes beating hasty retreats at Halloween. We played with astronaut dolls to simulate moon landings and interstellar travel, put on magic shows, collected, traded, and flipped baseball cards, made forts in the woods and secret tunnels through the forsythia bushes, played "nerf" basketball and ping pong in inclement weather, and found countless other pastimes whose one common denominator was that they were expressions of creativity, exuberance, love of adventure and the unknown, and delight in being alive and being ourselves. I never felt ambivalent about playing--I did it passionately, and had to be dragged away from it for such necessary activities as eating dinner.
Intellectually and as part of my bond with my family, I maintained allegiance to Christianity, and as a child I took it seriously with the same kind of respect I gave to most adults, especially ones I loved, like my parents--after all, these adults seemed to "know" about such things. But I never did understand some of the doctrines. My true passion--what connected me to life as no church service ever did (except, in moments, through some of the music)--was play.
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Play exited stage left sometime early in my high school years, as did my attempts to be a good church-goer. These were replaced by a much more structured form of physical activity and release--long-distance running--which, along with schoolwork, became my religion for several years. I did have many transcendent and mystical experiences while running, but I found these difficult or impossible to incorporate into the rest of my life. My early childhood spirituality--which embraced life through play, and made the world feel whole--had become a much more ascetic, painful spirituality, in which I was conscious of living in a very fragmented, "fallen" world, connecting with the sacred by running away from the mundane. I fell in love at the age of seventeen, and discovered a renewed appreciation of life for a period, but ultimately was still unable to connect the different parts of my world. Spirituality was something I couldn't seem to experience with most people. I had to hide it, grab it in snatches between classes and schoolwork. It was therefore fun only in a relative sense.
Fast-forwarding a few more years (since various versions of my life story have appeared previously in these pages more times than I can count), we find me on the Hopi Reservation, drawn by the ceremonies I had witnessed while visiting as a student during my last years of college. The Hopis' dances expressed everything that had been missing from my life and from the formal spiritual paths I had known: a beautiful melding of reverence and irreverence, wisdom and whimsy, creativity, story, art, and real connection to the land and to each other. Hopiland itself seemed like the most sacred place I had ever been--and it still does. Perhaps this is because, for thousands of years, it has been held this way by the people living on it. Of course, every corner of the earth is sacred, and every piece of land I've lived on before and since has been sacred too--but in Hopiland, the intention of the inhabitants to hold their land that way was palpable. Ceremonies were performed constantly; prayer feathers could be found on the sides of all the mesas; photographs were frowned upon and even disallowed, for they were believed to steal some of the spirit of the place.
My role at Hopiland, I discovered, was not to become part of their traditional ceremonies--but instead to help as I could, which was working as direct-care staff at a center for developmentally disabled Hopis. I developed my own rituals, which consisted of spending most of my free time (and much of my working time) taking the residents for walks up and down the beautiful canyon in which the center was located. I experienced a timelessness in that place that I have not known in the same way before or since--a timelessness related, I am sure, to the timelessness experienced by the residents themselves, as well as to the ancient geology which surrounded us. I was almost constantly in awe of the place where I was living and the experience I was having. I felt as if I'd been born into a new world, that everything here was new--as indeed it was for me, since I hadn't known anyone before arriving, and had relied on none of my previous work experiences or developed skills to find or create a role for myself in Hopiland. I was living in a dream, it seemed.
And eventually, the dream had run its course, and I recognized that the kind of relationship to the land that I sensed in Hopiland--that permeated all their rituals, that created their social structures and mores--was based in their ability to feed themselves from the land. Their prayers and their dances were all about asking for abundance (or at least sufficiency) in this challenging desert environment. Their culture, which had so enticed me and drawn me to Hopiland in the first place, was based on agriculture. And I knew not a whit about agriculture.
For various reasons, I sensed that Hopiland was not the place for me to learn about agriculture. I was overcommitted at my job at the Hopi Center, had found no gardening/farming teachers on the Reservation, and didn't know where to start. So my spiritual attraction to Hopi ways, which led me to live on Hopiland for a year-and-a-half, also caused me to leave it, in pursuit of a way to develop that same relationship to land within my own life and my own culture.
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To cut a long story short, gardening, and eventually community as well, became my spiritual paths (described in much more detail in "Getting to Know Beans About Community,"Vol. 9, No. 1). Music, creative expression, and a reawakened love of whimsy and absurdity soon got thrown into the mix as well (see "A Long Night's Journey into Day," Vol. 8, No. 2). Since my editor is telling me to wrap this up, I'll conclude by describing where those paths have led me today.
In truth, they've led me back to where I started--to that sense of connection I felt as a child. But instead of being part of a congregation that meets once a week, I'm part of an intentional community that meets, lives, and works together every day to uphold and nurture our common values and purposes. Multiple times every day, we sing songs--ones that actually reflect my view of the world and my sentiments. (Admittedly, we could probably use some voice lessons and occasional choir-directing from my father.) We hold seasonal rituals which also celebrate our connections to the land. And we nurture that connection, and our connections with one another, by living with as much ecological consciousness and responsibility as we can, given our circumstances, on these 87 acres and in our lives in general.
As added bonuses, we dress comfortably, not in constrictive clothing; we don't allow smoking indoors or in shared public spaces; and the language of our daily lives and our ritualized gatherings (which include weekly well-being circles as well as business meetings) is, for the most part, one which reflects my values and the connections I myself feel. We deal with "internal politics" by practicing as much honesty as we know how, both within ourselves and with one another--by creating a community which supports open communication, personal growth, and empowerment of all, rather than hiddenness, backbiting, and petty (or large) hierarchies which ultimately disempower everyone. Our "spiritual practice," in whatever ways each of us understands that, consists of how we live our daily lives--not what we do on one day of the week to make up for what we do all the rest of the time. And the idea of "original blessing" comes much closer to our commonly-held worldview than does "original sin."
Anyone developing a Christ complex here is quickly brought back to ground by feedback from others. We're each "imperfect," meaning fallible humans, and we recognize that imperfection itself is perfection. None of us are any holier than the others--as soon as any of us thought so, we'd be divorcing ourselves from the spiritual journey we (with all beings on this planet) have undertaken together.
I'm part of a subculture seeking to relate to the land, to one another, and to ourselves in more compassionate ways, both with more reverence and more humor than we may have found in mainstream society or mainstream religion. Drawing from various cultural strands, or sometimes just from our own inspirations, we are, I realize, trying to put back together the kind of village culture, land-based spirituality, and holistic approach to life that have sustained the Hopi and their ancestors for millennia. I'm once again in a place where the most sacred ceremonies can be interrupted by a clown (or a child) peeing off the rooftop (as happens in some Hopi kachina dances), and where such events only add to the power and relevance of the ceremony. The "sacred" and "profane" are not separate in this world, nor in the world of play--they're the same sacred reality. (It's their separation, in fact, that can take the life--the playfulness--out of religions when they take themselves too seriously. I believe any spiritual approach which cannot laugh at itself is doomed, because Mother Nature is eventually going to call someone to pee off the rooftop, and others will follow suit. None of us is blessed with an infinitely large bladder).
As in childhood, I now play outside whenever I can, though this time the play is channeled into productive work whose perceived value to others is production of vegetables, education of gardening students, and growing of community (I'm co-facilitator of Lost Valley's organic gardening program). In the same way that I as a child listened to the world and spoke to the world through play, made friends through play, developed my body, my intellect, my passions, and my creativity through play--I now do those things through my daily activities in community. Even writing, working on this magazine, and gathering together volunteers to help mail out the next issue, are forms of play, expressions of spirit, activities that connect me to life.
Far from being an escapist route or a spiritual cop-out (as some would judge it--as even I have judged it in my most disconnected moments), play is not always easy. It's full of challenges, pain as well as joy, a million sensations and emotions that accompany surrendering to the forces of life flowing through us. Play can bring on conflict, injury, and heartbreak. But play is what helps children grow, it's what helps adults grow, and it's what we as humans are called to do. Play is healing, compassionate, and the most compelling spiritual path we can take--it's where we learn to cooperate, to joyfully help others, to empathize and care about the whole. When we stop it, we stop the flow of spirit; when we forget it, we forget the sources of our own spirituality. When we can't have fun, all our seriousness may become an unbearable burden. But when we play, we engage with all creation.
Seen in retrospect, giggling in church looms as one of my greatest acts of unintended spiritual insight as a child. Now, peeing into the compost pile or behind some weeds in the garden is second nature. I'm thankful.
Chris Roth is author of The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook (Carrotseed Press, 1997; http://members.aol.com/growseed) and editor of Talking Leaves.
©2001 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2001
Volume 11, Number 2
Spirituality, Religion, and Ritual