The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic Read Free Page A

widened. I had the preaching part down, but the question was, what was my practice? Because of my travel schedule and the expectations placed on me, I lived in a state of anxiety. Before each and every speaking event, I felt terror, dread, and the desire to jump out of my skin. It started before leaving the house. I was not afraid of flying; somehow I gave up control once I got on the plane, but don’t ask me to pack a bag and leave my living room.
    I did not “pray.” I did not have time. There was a lot of loss in my stories, but it was someone else’s loss. I was in charge. I stood at podiums and pulpits, giving and giving, talking and talking, and meanwhile
the things not happened yet
occupied my mind like a colonial army. I might describe what was saving my life, but I did not know that something was killing me.
    And there was a disconnect between what I got from Sunday church and what, as it turned out, I needed. In the church service, there was a lot of “Almighty God.” In the hymns, there was “A mighty fortress is our God.” Yet in the gospels read each week, one heard about a man who knelt down and hugged children and said, “Be like them.” Or who talked about lilies in the fields and swallows falling to the ground. This man healed someone every time he turned around: a blind beggar, a paralytic, a woman who couldn’t stop menstruating. And all those lost things—thecoins, the sheep, the son. This person—wasn’t he the reason we were here?—seemed to have been relegated to the corners of the church, in the shadows, just outside our vision, on the periphery.
    In “Suzanne,” Leonard Cohen sings: “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him …” Only desperate men, I took this to mean. Only those who were lost.
    I was, as it turned out, drowning, but my head was just enough above the water that I felt fine. I might be treading water with greater and greater speed, but you don’t know you’re drowning until you go under.
    When I was not writing and speaking, I worked for the environmental group within Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company. I am a part-time editor, the perfect day job for a writer. I write in the mornings and work for Patagonia in the afternoons. I have done this for over twenty years. Patagonia gives away one percent of sales to tough activists. At Patagonia too we did not always practice what we preached: one day one of our grantees came to visit us—this group of people hoping to help save steelhead trout and the Alaska wilderness and the river that ran right outside our doors, and she stood looking at us, with our heads bowed and our eyes glued to our computer screens. Finally she said, “Do you think maybe we could go outside?”
    There is much to be said for the life I led. I was lucky. I loved seeing towns I’d never seen, on someone else’s dime: I watched the Mississippi Falls one night in Minneapolis, woke to the mountains in Sun Valley, drank real bourbon in Louisville, drove late at night with a bunch of Episcopalpriests to swing dance at the Broken Spoke outside Austin. I loved meeting people in Idaho and Indiana and Kentucky, places I might not have visited on my own. Where I went was based on a toss of a coin or a finger traced on a spinning globe.
    In some of the parishes I visited, the idea of “small groups” was taking hold. In these gatherings, and the right climate, people were telling
stories
. I got to hear what people had found out about mystery or sacredness or what they called God, on the ground, in the trenches, outside of religious doctrine or within it, outside belief systems or within them. Inside churches, outside them. Once people had the freedom to talk about it, a wealth of knowledge emerged.
    In a church in a suburban town in California, I met with the altar guild, all of them women, most of them elderly.