Revisiting the Church of My Childhood

I double-dipped today, attending the 8:30 mass at St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in Wayzata, Minnesota; then taking in the 10:45 at Wayzata Community Church (UCC) just west on the boulevard.

The Protestant church (pictured) is bigger by several times than it was in 1950, when my parents were married here, or in 1952, when I was christened. My first Bible (RSV with black leatherette binding) is inscribed to me by Wayzata Community Church and dated 1959. I still have it.

So when I returned, a Catholic convert, to my childhood community this weekend, visiting relatives, it was important to me to return to where my faith was born.

Four babies were baptized at Wayzata Community Church this morning in a rite conducted by pastor John Ross, and they helped me revisit the spirit of my own entry into the fold, at seven months old during my first Minnesota winter. My Uncle Truck, a longtime member of Wayzata Community, warned me that Pastor Ross would be sermonizing on the Protestant Reformation, the 500th anniversary of which we “celebrate” this month.

The sermon topic was being saved “by grace, through faith.” I noted that the Protestant preacher mentioned the pope only once and used the word works in a positive vein though also only once. I told the pastor so as we exited.

“You walked to the edge of the precipice, referring to works,” I said, “but you pulled back from the brink. Well done.” He laughed. I think Truck had warned him that Catholic relatives (my wife and I) would be in attendance, and Ross went easy on us.

Tonight, we had dinner with Truck’s two children, their spouses, plus three grandchildren, all of whom are faithful Christians. It was a rich and rewarding feast to celebrate my return home, geographically and religiously.

I record this short post to register my gratitude.

One Boy’s Boston: A Great Little Memoir

And now for something completely different.

I am planning to teach an adult education course this fall. The working title of the course is “Memoir: Reading Others, Writing Yours.” The idea is for students to read excerpts from memoirs and then to begin making notes on their own lives in light of the readings.

It will be a low-pressure, not-for-credit course directed to older adults living in Boston who may have considered writing their memoirs but haven’t done so. It will draw on my experience of ghostwriting and publishing fifty memoirs for private clients over the past twenty-five years at Memoirs Unlimited.

The Week in Review: Go in Peace, Gulliver

I recognize that this blog is not the norm in Catholic blogs, if “Witness” is a Catholic blog. For one thing, I don’t go in for politics, not most of the time. Generally, I am writing about my experience as a meat-and-potatoes Catholic man, working out his salvation one day at a time, one post at a time.

Even the rare “political” post linked to the previous paragraph, about certain comments of Cardinal Burke, had a personal point. It celebrated my female friends in the Church, who are dear to me.

The highly personal nature of some posts may annoy or offend some readers. It may even make you squirm. That’s all part of the deal, I think. This, I am saying, is what it is to be a Catholic man today, at least for this one Catholic man. Not always easy to live. Seldom easy to write about.

But my experience is all I have to offer. I am not a priest or theologian, any more than I am a political commentator.

So when I look back over the posts of the past week, or any week, I see my life. For example, this week:

Forgiveness: Not So Fast

Since before I can remember I have said the Lord’s Prayer. Taught me by parents I thought would live forever, The Lord’s Prayer seemed eternal and unchanging. Then when I was ten it changed.

My family began attending Episcopal services instead of Congregational, and I no longer asked and offered forgiveness of debts and debtors. Now I had to wrap my tongue around the word trespasses and the ungainly phrase those who trespass against us.

As a young Christian, I never thought much about the difference between debts and trespasses—one an unpaid bill, the other a boundary violation. In fact, I never thought much about this part of the Lord’s Prayer at all. By saying Forgive us our debts or trespasses or whatever, I only figured I was striking a sort of level bargain with God:

Lessons of the Camino

As readers of this blog know, I have finished posting excerpts from a memoir that I may never publish. The eighteen pieces listed here trace the arc of my religious life—from Episcopalian altar boy to spiritual cult member to happy Catholic.

This may strike you as an unusual arc, but I think it’s actually representative. Like many in my generation, I grew up in a church- (or temple-) going family. Also like many of my generation, I left formal religious observance for “esoteric” alternatives. My testimony is that of one who, after a long and winding road, has found religious fulfillment in the Catholic Church.

Much has been left out of the “memoir.” The first draft completed more than a year ago totaled 150,000 words. The eighteen excerpts at right total closer to 20,000.

All along I thought that my experience walking the Camino de Santiago with my adult daughter (above) was a good way to end the story. Now, three years after that walk, my road seems to stretch forward to an unknown horizon. So I recognize that the Camino is nothing like the end.

Still, many people seem interested in my experience on the Camino de Santiago. Just yesterday, my friend JC said he “envied” me my experience and wanted to know all about it. So I thought I should share this not-really-concluding piece on the Camino.

The title is “Lessons of the Camino.” Don’t worry, there are only six lessons:

How Can An Abuse Victim Be a Happy Catholic?

In yesterday’s post summarizing my memoir, I dodged a critical question, knowing that I would come back to it. I wrote the following, referring to myself and my experience:

It is reasonable to ask how a man who was sexually abused by a spiritual teacher could have ended up in a Church with its own well-documented sexual abuse problem. I don’t have an easy answer to that question.

There are no easy answers to evil, especially evil that has touched something one loves. In my case, evil has touched the Catholic Church.

I love the Catholic Church, having entered it as a convert in 2008. I did so as a victim of sexual abuse myself, knowing that the Church was—even at that time—tragically guilty of abuse within its ranks.

How could I have done so? And how can I be a happy Catholic this morning, ready and willing to attend 7 a.m. mass, with fresh accusations of abuse staring at me from my computer screen?

Summing Up My Memoir

After reading my conversion memoir, a priest friend told me, “You, Webster, are the last man who should have ended up a Catholic in the first decade of the twenty-first century.”

I believe that my friend said this because of two blots on my résumé: (1) For thirty years I followed an alternative spiritual program that set Christ aside. (2) The man who introduced me to this program, whom I have called Gulliver in my memoir, abused me sexually, beginning when I was nineteen years old.

And here I am for all that—a happy Catholic without regrets six years after my conversion. Hence the priest’s comment.

For those wishing to know how I came to the Catholic Church, here is a table of contents followed by a short summary of the subject matter:

Memoirs Unlimited: Starting Up Again

There are New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve made one. But there are also New Year’s priorities, and these I take even more seriously. I have three of these for 2015.

1. To finish posting excerpts from my memoir, The Long Walk Home, on this blog, and then to be done with it, for the foreseeable. Posting should be complete by the end of January, which will leave me only two priorities—

2. To plan, prepare, and walk a pilgrimage to Montreal. The preparation will include speaking to several school groups about pilgrimage in general and my own experience of pilgrimage, including the Camino de Santiago in 2012 and my projected walk to the Oratory of St. Joseph in May-June 2015.

3. To begin prospecting and promoting my original writing and editing business, Memoirs Unlimited. News about this can be found at my other blog, the name of which won’t surprise you: Memoirs Unlimited, Inc. That blog has lain fallow for three years, but I’m restarting it, effective today.

Resolution Time: Catechism

I don’t hear voices or see visions, at least not in waking hours. But quite often in moments of quiet prayer—at mass or at home in my quiet-prayer place—a thought will come to me with crystal clarity. I have yet to go completely wrong following one of these “prayer thoughts.”

Such a thought came to me about a month ago after a long sleepless night of tossing and turning over my memoir, The Long Walk Home, and what the bloody hell to do with it. I went to mass at 7 a.m. as I often do, with only two hours’ sleep under my hat, and I had the thought that led to Gulliver.

That is, in the middle of mass, when I probably should have been more attentive to the liturgy, I understood that I could publish my experience with an abusive guru at age nineteen by fictionalizing it in a certain fashion. Doing so, I could preserve all the dynamics of what happened, especially its effects on me near the beginning of a long, winding path to the Catholic Church—while also veiling the identities of others.

That’s as clear as I can be or want to be about what I’ve done in posting thirteen excerpts so far, including the latest yesterday, “Aftermath: Dreaming of Gulliver.”

All of which is preamble to this: I had another clear thought this morning while attempting a small bit of morning prayer at home.

The Challenge of Gnosticism

I was speaking with a priest friend recently, explaining to him why I had followed the Gurdjieff system of ideas for many years, then left it for the Catholic Church.

This is the core purpose of the memoir I am writing—not to expose a predator (Gulliver’s dead) or to tell my life (who cares?) but to explain why a relatively well educated person of my generation chose to enter the Catholic Church after a Protestant church-going childhood and a long midlife of alternative spiritual practice.

I think this is a story that might speak to some people.

To my priest friend I said that I thought the Gurdjieff Work was “gnostic.” The Work calls itself “esoteric Christianity,” claiming an insider’s knowledge that ordinary church-going Christians can’t attain. Turning to the dictionary this morning, I find that my use of the word gnostic was apt in this context. It means “of or relating to knowledge, especially esoteric mystical knowledge.”

The priest said, “If I understand the system you are describing, it presumes that Jesus Christ did not leave us everything we need for our salvation.”

In Praise of Gurdjieff

During a moment of clarity this afternoon, I realized that I must write about my long-time interest in the teaching of George Gurdjieff (left) and my admiration for his system of ideas known as The Work.

This is only fair, both to those who still follow The Work (I do not) and to myself, as well. If not for my sincere interest in Gurdjieff, I might not have followed Gulliver for five years, as I did; and I would not have sought out another teacher of Gurdjieff when I moved to Massachusetts in 1976. Not to acknowledge this interest would be to imply that I was a brainless idiot hypnotized by a mad man.

Gulliver might have been mad, and I may have been hypnotized, but I have never been a brainless idiot. Gurdjieff appealed not only to the religious searcher in me but also to the intellectual, trained at The Cilley Academy and Whambam College.

I have persistently associated Gulliver with Gurdjieff in my writings about Gulliver, and if I don’t set the record straight here and now, Gurdjieff and his followers will be guilty by association with my former manipulative guru—who used Gurdjieff to attract his own devoted followers but in the end did not represent Gurdjieff well, in my opinion. So here are a few things I find notable about Gurdjieff and his teaching. Don’t expect anything like a summary, only a sincere tip of the hat.

Halfway There

Excerpts from my memoir threaten to overrun this page, so I have moved them to the right column, under St. Joseph’s watchful eye. About halfway through my exercise of posting these short pieces, it’s time for a recap.

After a short prolog that defines the spiritual dilemma I faced at midlife, my story begins in Minnesota. I (left) was raised by good church-going parents, including a father who taught me about the varieties of sexual experience. We went to Congregational and Episcopal churches, but I developed an interest in saints, which wasn’t on the program in either place. When I went away to boarding school at The Cilley Academy, I lost my religion.

Off to college at Whambam and no longer churching, I met a guru, Gulliver, at a growth center named Lilliput. When Lilliput went bust, Gulliver took me to Europe with him, a “grand tour” with some disastrous consequences. But Europe also introduced me to Catholic culture, in which Gulliver was well versed. My experience at Lourdes was a highlight of this introduction to Catholicism.

Back in the States, Gulliver and I returned to school, he as a professor of psychology, I as an undergraduate. Meanwhile, he founded an alternative bookshop, Dulcinea, where I volunteered, then worked as president. Here I deepened my reading in Christian literature begun in Europe. Here too I met and dated and was torn up by my relationship with Stephanie, a beautiful young woman Gulliver instructed me to marry.

After this fresh disaster, I left Dulcinea and Gulliver, though not the Gurdjieff Work which he claimed to have mastered. It would be a long walk home for me from Gurdjieff circa 1976 to the Catholic Church, which received me in 2008. I had much help along the way, like that from my grandmother, “Ammie.”

More stories of help and hindrance, before and after Ammie, will be posted in the days ahead. Thanks for reading!

Word for the Day: John

Today, the Catholic Church honors St. John, son of Zebedee, brother of James (Santiago), a fisherman who followed Christ. John was present at some of the most important moments of Jesus’s life, passion, and resurrection, and like another of my literary heroes, Norman Maclean, John wrote two great books late in life: his Gospel and the Book of Revelation. John gives hope to the unpublished sexagenarian Christian writer.

But that’s not what prompts me to write about John today. Instead, I want to share a brief story from my early years with Gulliver the Guru, a story not included in the excerpts posted above. This story demonstrates two widely divergent truths about Gulliver, which I hope to make clear by the time I’m “done” with my book, if I ever am. These paired truths are, in fact, the big wow of my life.

First truth: Gulliver was a manipulative messiah. (Wait for the story.)

Second truth: In spite of the first truth, and in spite of himself, Gulliver helped lead me to the Catholic Church.

Another way of saying the second truth is that the way, truth, and life offered by Christ in the Catholic Church can be so compelling as to overwhelm any other “spiritual” influences in one’s life. For me to overcome Gulliver was to overcome much. But I do believe I had help. As does anyone who searches sincerely. Knock and—

The story, a short one, comes from my first trip to Europe with Gulliver:

Metanoia: Re-encountering Maurice Nicoll

It can be awkward to hear one’s tape-recorded voice. It is often embarrassing to see old photos of oneself in bygone fashions—say, in late-1970s disco wear.

Worst of all, though, is reading a book you once thought canonical and realizing that it was and always will be nonsense. You feel stupid to have ever given it credence. But then, you think, I was twenty then.

I have just re-read Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man after a forty-year hiatus, and it has brought home how gullible I was in the Gulliver years. Nicoll was a physician and former student of C. G. Jung who met G. I. Gurdjieff, became a student of Gurdjieff’s estranged disciple P. D. Ouspensky, then wrote a five-volume compendium about it all called Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspenky. (Gurdjieff and Nicoll are the left and right bookends in the photo above.)

Gulliver taught his own version of the so-called Gurdjieff Work, relying heavily on Nicoll. We used to sit endless hours reading aloud from the Psychological Commentaries. In this way, by coopting a piece of a teaching that he wasn’t authorized to teach in the first place and using it to instruct students in his own personal way, Gulliver was like countless other so-called teachers who take up a so-called system and give it their own personal spin. It’s all about control.

Meanwhile, the world spins out of control: madness into more madness.

Gulliver was no different than the new preacher in town who hangs out his own shingle, calling his storefront the New Church of the True Word—a tormented character out of Flannery O’Connor, who may not believe what he preaches. But the teacher, like the preacher, controls the game. The teacher or preacher answers to no one else. Doesn’t have to. Doesn’t want to.

That was Gulliver. He used the work of a student of a student of a “master” to “teach” us, thereby somehow turning himself into another “master”!

The problem for the searcher, especially the youthful searcher like me in 1971, is distinguishing the real teacher and teaching from the false, the wise from the empty. I was not good at such distinctions when I was twenty. Returning to Nicoll, and finding him empty, is shocking to me today. Looking into his book, as I do below, is a way of coming to terms with my own youthful folly and the man who led me astray.

Kilpatrick: The Sensitivity Movement was Damaging to the Catholic Church

As an American Protestant born in 1951 and converted to the Catholic Church only in 2008, I missed a lot of the “good stuff” that cradle Catholics of my generation had to endure.

Like Vatican II. Like priests and nuns marrying each other, strumming guitars, and feeling OK/OK about themselves. Like much of the abortion wars. Like the abuse scandal that began to rock Boston and then the entire Church in 2002.

Missed all that. Came to the Church in 2008. Said, “Hey, wassup? Golly, this is a beautiful place.”

One thing I did not miss on my long and winding road to the Roman Catholic Church was the sensitivity movement that began carpet-bombing the American landscape with love, love, love in the 1960s and 1970s. Several chapters in my memoir, excerpted above as Lilliput, Europe, and Dulcinea, show that I got both sensitized and bombed.

When to Publish, and When Not

My decision to fictionalize my encounters with a sexually abusive guru has drawn fire from left and right, as the media commentators say.

There is a loud minority that would rather I publish nothing at all about my experiences with “Gulliver” when I was nineteen. I have heard from one by e-mail; I am dreading meeting another in person this weekend. He’s an old friend. He means well. He just wants me to shut the hell up.

These folks, whether they like it or not, are in the same camp with the mainstream media, which has failed to report on the sexual shenanigans of a key Obama adviser. Like the press, these silence-is-golden folks seem to think that it’s OK to give a pass to those who prey on others, especially older gay men who prey on youths.

On the other side, there are those who want me to go whole hog, pardon the expression. These hail from the 16 percent who voted “Publish but only with real names” in my recent poll. Expose the bastard! Destroy his name! they shout at me. Never let anyone think Gulliver did any good!

Meanwhile, I sit huddled amidst the hue and cry, making up stories about places that may never have existed like Dulcinea, the antiquarian bookshop and floorshow. But I know what I’m doing. Dumb I ain’t. My parents didn’t rear stupid children.

Let me explain with a recent exchange. A dear old friend—definitely one of those in the whole-hog camp—wrote me last night:

The Polls Are Closed, The Work Goes On

I have taken down the poll and closed the comm box. My discernment is complete for the time being.

I will continue posting excerpts from my memoir, The Long Walk Home, which are displayed as tabs at the top of this page. For the time being that is all I will do.

This despite a strong majority in the poll encouraging me to go ahead with book-length publication.

The final tally was

• Yes (publish book-length work) = 68%
• Yes but (publish but only with real names) = 16%
• No (do not publish book-length work at all) = 16%

Thanks for your support. It is heartening to know that there is interest in my work. However, discernment is a private affair. My private angels have counseled me to go slow.

You can expect some more excerpts in the days ahead, however, as I round out the story. If this is all I ever do with this memoir (and it may be) then at least I will have communicated something about my experience. Excerpts still to come include:

• Dulcinea The story of an alternative antiquarian bookshop opened by Gulliver the Guru in 1973. How I served there, first as a volunteer, then as president, until the unhappy affair of—
• Stephanie The story of my romance with a fellow worker at Dulcinea, a relationship first encouraged, then blown up by the manipulative Gulliver. 
• Massachusetts How I escaped the guru (but not really) and moved to Massachusetts to follow another teacher of Gurdjieff. 
• Collapse How Gulliver’s community collapsed and why.
• Needled How a single book by Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity, summed up for me all the reasons for and against Gurdjieff. 
• Convert How I came to the Catholic Church in 2008 and why that is a reasonable choice for a 57-year-old ex-Gurdjieffian once abused by his guru.
• Merton How a single e-mail from my old Whambam College pal changed my perception of Guilliver, and not for the better. 
• Camino Why I walked the Camino de Santiago, what I saw, and how it helped me heal the scars left over from my youthful exuberance. 

A revered Catholic mentor told me, after reading a prior draft of this work: “You, Webster, are the last man who should have ended on the doorstep of the Catholic Church in the first decade of the 21st century.”

How that happened—and not all the muddy details of what happened along the way—is the story I still feel called to tell. I hope to continue doing so, not only in the posted excerpts, but also in the pages of this blog, my witness.

Word for the Day: Mary

Today the Church celebrates the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is to say that, as it does so often, the Church celebrates Mary.

Reflecting on the Gospel readings this morning, I realized how central “Mary” has been to my life.

• Her apparition at Lourdes as the Immaculate Conception in 1858 led to an important experience for me in 1972, as I wrote in the memoir excerpt posted yesterday
• My daughter, whose name is a variant of Mary, invited me to walk the Camino de Santiago with her forty years later in 2012, a definite turning point in my spiritual life.
• One of my sisters, another Mary, has been instrumental more recently in helping me see certain things about myself, for which I sincerely thank and honor her.

I salute Mary in these and other guises.

The first Mary in my life may have been the most important. Long before I myself became a Catholic, my mother’s mother, named Mary, did so. I have decided to post an excerpt about her today in her honor and of course in Mary’s.

Now a grandparent myself, I recognize that “Ammie,” among all my parents’ parents, may have done more for me—unnoticed, uncelebrated, not always appreciated—than anyone in my young life. Every time I play with my own granddaughter, she inspires me.

This is her story in brief.

Followed by Socrates

I wonder if the dead can have Twitter accounts? Because this is just plain creepy.

After posting the excerpt “Europe” (see above), in which “Socrates” plays a disturbing role, I learned that I am being followed by Socrates.

Forty-three years later.

Two Epigraphs and a Comment

The great Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor said, “Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.”

The latest excerpt from my memoir, “Europe,” posted above begins to explain—though not fully—why I have chosen this quote as an epigraph for my forthcoming book.

Because of events described in the excerpt and for other reasons too, a priest friend commented after reading an earlier draft of my book, “You, Webster, are the last man who should have ended up on the doorstep of the Catholic Church in the first decade of the twenty-first century.”

I agree. This is why I experience my new life as a Catholic as so surprising, so beautiful and graceful, and worth “witnessing” about.

How did this happen? How did “this man” become Catholic after the events described and others to come in future excerpts?

I’m pretty sure that an answer lies buried in the other epigraph I have chosen for my book. I will end with that quotation, leaving it for the reader to interpret. I myself am still interpreting it!

“Certainly, I have always contended that obedience even to an erring conscience was the way to gain light, and that it mattered not where a man began, so that he began on what came to hand, and in faith; and that any thing might become a divine method of Truth; that to the pure all things are pure, and have a self-correcting virtue and a power of germinating."

The words were written by another convert, the 19th-century Anglican-cleric-turned-Catholic-cardinal Blessed John Henry Newman.