Raw Edges: A Memoir

Bidden or Not

: : 54 : : God, Goddess, Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Allah, Krishna, the Sun, the Moon, the Virgin of Guadalupe. And God’s messengers: Joseph Smith, Buddha, the Pope, Mohammed, Confucius, Lao-Tse, St. Francis and his birds, Mother Teresa, Mary Baker Eddy, the Mystics . . . Somebody. Something. Help me. Bidden or not, God, by whatever name, was on the heels of each of my footsteps, even if I didn’t look behind me to take notice. I believed in the Divine, whatever it is, whoever it was. I knew I did. But all I could do the first two months in that Denver attic in 2002 was to wake in the middle of the night crying, surprised my bed hadn’t floated away or that the seams of the house hadn’t dissolved. In the dark of night, I slid off the bed onto my knees and prayed for help. Sometimes I begged. I didn’t know if I was praying to God, Goddess, Nature, the Mountains, the Ocean, the Sky, Imagination, Angels, my Loved Ones who’d passed, or what. Maybe God was a noun for all deity, people, and things, and maybe no one needed to know or could ever know the real name. I didn’t know who had the right answers about God. But maybe there was no choice to be made. Maybe life was the only true church, the only true religion. That summer in Denver was a repeat of the six-week crying jag I had when David’s and my marriage was coming apart, and also of the three months after Spinner and I broke up and he left our home in Minnesota. I couldn’t deal with breakups. Now there was a third. Why couldn’t I let :: Bidden or Not :: Bidden or Not : : 55 go as everyone told me to do? Why did I cling to everything I’d thought belonged to me in love and relationships? Was it the middle child syndrome (me being the middle of five) where everything got taken away by either the oldest or the youngest? Where was the braided metal cord I could use to pull my spine straight and fix my head on right? Damn these tears. Damn them. Last April, a month before Bill and I split, we both knew our marriage was in trouble. A chasm had been widening between us—maybe because we’d both been down the road and back too many times, maybe because we’d married too soon before we knew each other well enough and hadn’t taken the time to sort out our substantial differences, maybe because neither of us was in any shape to say “I do” in the first place. In a last-ditch effort to see if we could make things work, we planned a trip to South Carolina. But the tears were starting to fall again, even in the airplane and at the hotel. The sadness was creeping back, slowly inching up on me. I told him that the two things I most wanted to do on our trip were to find (1) a good blues club in Charleston and (2) a small, out-of-theway African-American church where I could find some descendants of the Gullah people, the ones who made sweetgrass baskets and had dreams about catching the moon with a fish net. I had a passion for gospel music and for the spirit of people who worshiped in small churches: Second Baptist churches, charismatic Christian, wherever I could find simple worship. I wanted to experience worship totally different from what I’d known. I suspected the Africans were my true spiritual fathers and mothers. We’d been driving around Port Royal on a Sunday morning for about fifteen minutes, looking for a church to fit my specifications, when Bill spotted a tiny white clapboard building. He braked. A dark blue van was parked in front of a simply constructed church that needed a paint job. A man sat in the driver’s seat behind a steering wheel. Another man sat on the passenger side. And there were others in the shadows of the back seat behind the window glass. “Is this what you’re looking for?” Bill asked, the motor of our rented car idling. “Sure,” I said hesitantly. 56 : : r a w e d g e s “You don’t sound too sure.” “No. This looks good.” I swallowed...