May you be happy

Spiritual beliefs can be hard to talk about these days. I don’t mean religion — in fact, I think that religion and spirituality are in many ways farther apart in our culture than perhaps any time since organized religion began. Sweeping statement, I know, and I’m prepared to be told I’m wrong since I am not myself religious, and so have little direct daily experience of how it’s working these days.

I was raised in the Episcopal church. I was the youngest person in our parish to be confirmed in the church. For non-Christians, that means I went to a series of classes to learn about Jesus and scripture, and to understand how mass worked and what it meant to say all those things to god — to be in communion with god. And then when a confirmation class graduates, there is a special Sunday worship service where the priest blesses you and welcomes you as fully practicing members into the church, and then you are allowed to receive communion (wafers and real wine for the Anglicans, thank you very much).

So there I was, Kelley Over-Achieving Eskridge, taking communion when I was eight and feeling pretty much okay with god. Then something happened.

My parents ran the EYC (Episcopal Youth… hmmm, Coalition, maybe?) — the youth group (teenagers) at the church. This was the late 60’s/early 70’s in Tampa, Florida, where we lived in an uneasy tension of cultural change — southern racism struggling with a determined and fairly effective civil rights activist movement, a growing awareness that the Viet Nam war was maybe not such a good idea, the reinstitution of the draft in 1969, the growing hippie culture. All of that was reflected in the kids in the EYC. They got drafted, or their brothers did. They did drugs. They marched.

And they decided to get involved with our church’s sister church in Jamaica. They did a lot to help the church in Jamaica. And eventually, they had about a million bake sales and car washes, and raised money for a trip to visit. I didn’t get to go, but my folks and the EYC kids came back transported by the loving reception they’d found, and the adventures they’d had discovering a new culture. So they had another million bake sales and car washes, and raised enough money to bring the priest, his family, and a bunch of the parish kids to Florida.

And when Father Macmillan arrived, full of joy and peace and eager to establish closer ties with our church, our rector refused to allow him to serve communion mass because Father Macmillan was black.

My parents left the EYC and the parish. And that was when I began to leave god. I am no longer religious. I do have spiritual beliefs, which I’ll keep to myself because I actually do think such things are private — a topic for conversation between people who are close, but not to be offered up in a blog post on a Saturday morning. What I do want to offer up is my experience that the older I get, the more I find myself and others willing to talk about notions of love, of acceptance, of tolerance, of humanizing others (rather than dehumanizing them), in ways that are not connected to religious practice. We are more willing to acknowledge that we’ve felt, for an expansive bright moment, that all people really are human, that we’re all connected somehow to each other and that perhaps that’s a good enough starting place, without the rules and rigidity.

So in that spirit, here’s a thing to share. My friend Karen went to a meditation workshop by this woman and told me about the mediation mantra that they used, which is intended to extend lovingkindness toward oneself and others. I don’t meditate, but I see great value in these words and so I offer them to you:

May you be happy.
May you be safe.
May you be peaceful.
May you live with ease.

That’s my wish for all people today. I will continue to struggle with all the ways that I find to distance myself from other people — irritation, intolerance, anger, disappointment, fear, self-asborption. But this morning I feel that expansive bright moment of connection, and I wish us all well.