What are you?

A few months ago three friends started coming to my house every Wednesday afternoon.  Shannon, Colleen, Jana, and I fill our coffee cups and settle in.  I love autumn.  It's a good time to settle in.  We range in age from 36 to 61.  The first time we met, we watered our laps with tears...tears for ourselves and for each other...and I knew that the meaning of life was present.  I've known each of these women for a long time, years, but never in this way and every week my heart is astounded at the richness of it all.  Our conversations usually overflow the clock.  We take turns emailing something ahead of time...poetry, quotes, pictures, stories...so we have time to reflect a bit before filling our cups together.  Conversation is never boundaried by those words from others...they do not define...but they do weave, inspire, assist.

This past week, the text below was our launch.  I haven't studied Maya's life and I've only briefly read the Unity School's "Lessons In Truth" and whenever this remarkable woman is mentioned I always think about the remarkable women who Oprah will never notice and I want to be in the room with them instead.  I love being in the room with them.  At the same time, Maya's poetry is beautiful too and I too hope to be more amazed the older I get and Mamma's faith seems so solid.  So on Monday these words landed in my in-box and on Wednesday Shannon read them aloud to us, her northern Alabama accent lilting the words warmly, and then followed with this question:  What are you?  And so I ask you:  What are you?

Many things continue to amaze me, even well into the 6th decade of my life. I am startled or taken aback when people walk up to me and tell me that they are Christians. My first response is the question, “Already?” It seems to me a lifelong endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian. I believe that is also true for the Buddhist, for the Muslim, for the Jainist, for the Jew, and for the Taoist who try to live their beliefs. The idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.

One of my earliest memories of Mamma, of my grandmother, is a glimpse of a tall cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air on nothing visible. That incredible vision was a result of what my imagination would do each time Mamma drew herself up to her full six feet, clasped her hands behind her back, looked up into a distant sky, and said, “I will step out on the word of God.” The depression, which was difficult for everyone, especially so for a single black woman in the South tending her crippled son and 2 grandchildren, caused her to make the statement of faith often.

She would look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and tell her family in particular and the world in general, “I will step out on the word of God. I will step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her. Naturally, since Mamma stood out on the word of God, and Mamma was over 6 feet tall, it wasn’t difficult for me to have faith. I grew up knowing that the word of God had power.

In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around in the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Christianity.

One day the teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, asked me to read to him. I was 24, very erudite, very worldly. He asked that I read from Lessons in Truth, a section that ended with these words: “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and I sarcastically read, “God loves me.” He said, “Again.” After about the 7th repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me. Me, Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

- Maya Angelou, from Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now