Devotion (9 page)

One early spring afternoon, I met Steve Cope for lunch at Cafe Helsinki in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The cafe, a cozy spot furnished with scarred wooden tables and old sofas piled with comfortable cushions, had become our meeting place between my home in Connecticut and Kripalu. Over tabouli salad and falafel, I tried to express the confusion I had been feeling lately. I told Steve that I felt like I was stumbling along in the darkness. I was reading, thinking, exploring, meditating, practicing yoga. I had discovered gems of wisdom buried here and there. But there didn’t seem to be one, well-lit path opening itself up to me, the way I had hoped it might.

I wondered out loud whether this desire of mine for a little bit of this, a little bit of that, was spiritual and intellectual laziness. The smorgasbord approach to deeper meaning. I was reminded of a mom at Jacob’s school who posted flyers around town advertising herself as a shamanic healer, dream therapy guide, social worker, and facilitator of interspecies communication honoring
Native American, Buddhist, Kundalini, and Kabbalah influences. Oy vey. How could I give Jacob a spiritual foundation when I was all over the map? Did I have to choose one way? Was that the true discipline?

Steve shrugged, then smiled. His bright blue eyes were sharp, unclouded. He took a sip of his cardamom tea.

“Do you know anything about ayurvedic impressions?” he asked.

I didn’t.

“According to ayurveda, we become what we surround ourselves with.”

I nodded. That made sense.

“And so it stands to reason that we have to be discerning about what we surround ourselves with.”

Discernment
. Such a beautiful word. As usual, Steve had cut straight to the heart of the matter. I thought about what it meant to choose wisely—not just once or twice, but in every waking moment.

“Recently I’ve started going to church,” Steve said. This, coming from my friend the yogi, the Buddhist scholar. “After my mother died, I found it brought me comfort. Even though I only believe maybe thirty percent of what I hear in there—I don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the one true son of God, which is kind of central—I walk out feeling lighter.”

Steve didn’t sound remotely confused or apologetic. He could pick and choose what felt relevant to him, and leave the rest. Why couldn’t I do the same? When I was in an Orthodox shul, I felt like an imposter: a bacon-and-shrimp-eating fake who could still chant the liturgy like an old tune. When I was in more liberal
shuls, I wasn’t comfortable either.
Men and women davening together? Women wearing prayer shawls?
I saw it all through my father’s eyes: women in tallits and yarmulkes looked silly to me, like little girls playing dress-up. And in yoga studios, chanting made me nervous. The Sanskrit words sounded disconcertingly like Hebrew. I had been told that it didn’t matter, that the vibrations of the syllables worked their own magic, but still, I felt like I was doing something wrong.

As I sat with my new friend, I realized that perhaps he was doing the hardest thing of all: living inside the contradictions. Buddhism, yoga philosophy, the high Episcopalian tradition in which he had been steeped as a child, were all able to coexist for him and create a greater, richer equilibrium. This wasn’t spiritual laziness. To the contrary, it required even greater effort and clarity.

“You know, Dani, you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Steve leaned across the table. “There’s still a baby in there.”

I started thinking about the Sabbath. I had been reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book by that same name, in which he makes a distinction between the world of things and the world of time.
Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness
, Heschel wrote. Forgeries of happiness. Had truer words ever been written? I thought of the stuff piled in our closets, spilling out of chests of drawers. Or
the way sometimes (okay, often) I coveted some pretty thing I had seen in a shop window—a cashmere sweater, a pashmina wrap.

I was surrounded by the accoutrements of my modern life. From the kitchen table where I sat writing on my laptop each morning, just within my line of vision there was an espresso machine, a separate device to steam milk, bottles of gourmet vinegar, bee pollen, truffle oil. Piles of
New Yorker
s and
Vanity Fair
s, glossy catalogs, party invitations, and save-the-date cards for events scheduled months ahead. A scented candle burned near the stove. I lived in the world of things, and honestly, I didn’t want it any other way. I mean, what was I going to do? Check into Kripalu for the duration? Become one of the Haredim, like my cousins? No—I wanted to find a way to live in balance.
Things, when magnified
, Heschel wrote. The problem wasn’t the stuff of fast-paced life itself. The problem, he seemed to be saying, was one of emphasis. And the remedy came in the form of the seventh day—the Sabbath.

Heschel described the Sabbath—with its call to slow down, to devote a full day to quiet contemplation—as a cathedral of time. I had never experienced this. The Sabbaths of my childhood had not been cathedrals. They had been exercises in boredom—and also, in coming up with new and ingenious ways to bend the rules. We weren’t supposed to turn on lights, but there was a timer that did it for us. It wasn’t permitted to switch on the stereo, but my mother had the system rigged so that at two in the afternoon, the opening notes of her weekly opera program would miraculously begin to sound throughout the house. And then, if we happened to be visiting family in the city, there was the Sabbath elevator: in certain buildings, elevators were programmed to stop on every floor on Friday nights and Saturdays so that observant
Jews wouldn’t have to push the buttons. How could this possibly be the point?

The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments
, Heschel wrote. I wanted to face sacred moments. I knew that some kind of ritual was, if not essential, certainly useful. And so I began to consider lighting Friday-night candles. It was just one gesture, I told myself. I would gather my family together to do this one simple thing. It didn’t have to be the beginning of some slippery slope that would end in cold brisket lunches and desperate, quiet boredom. It was a beautiful tradition: the reciting of the blessing, the circling of cupped hands over the flames, ushering in the Sabbath.

I had the candlesticks from my childhood: tall silver ones from Tiffany that had been a wedding gift to my parents from Shirley and Moe. I moved them from the living room, where they had been a decorative touch, into the dining room. I placed them at the head of the table. I bought a dozen simple white candles. A book of matches was laid out and ready. Friday evening came and went. Then another. And another. The candles remained unlit. Homework got in the way. We had a dinner reservation. The Red Sox game was on TV. Each week, in the battle between things and time, things kept winning.

In my twenties, I spent several hours a week in church basements. I sat on metal folding chairs in smoke-filled rooms and attended
hundreds of meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, how I loved Alcoholics Anonymous! I was a lost, sad, lonely girl who drank to excess—who did
everything
to excess—and in those church basements I felt safe and cozy, like a wayfarer coming in out of the cold.

My father had recently died. My mother was in a rehabilitation center, where she was slowly learning to walk again. Before my parents’ accident—and much to their dismay—I had dropped out of college to pursue a career in acting. It wasn’t going well. Each day I put on my makeup, fluffed up my hair, and dragged myself to auditions for bit parts on soap operas. I didn’t know which was worse: getting the jobs, or not getting them. If I got a part, it meant I actually had to act. I was a terrible, self-conscious actress. Still, people sometimes hired me. On my agent’s suggestion, I adopted a stage name: Dani York. Instantly I became a generic blonde of indeterminate origins. Casting directors often asked me if I was the British actress Susanna York’s daughter.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, during those years, I found my sanctuary. People came from every walk of life. They were rich, poor, young, middle-aged, elderly. They were Christian, Jewish, Catholic. (You didn’t tend to see many Muslims.) The only requirement for membership was a desire to stop drinking—and I did have a desire to stop drinking. I had a desire to stop a lot of things. I had spent so much of my life adhering to a strict set of rules, and then rebelling against them. I had no idea who I really was—but I wanted to find out. And in order to do that, I needed a clear head.

I had a little problem, though. I wasn’t sure I could deal with the God stuff. That word—God—was everywhere in the program
literature. It was invoked four times in the twelve steps alone. The third step read: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” I had turned my will and my life over to God practically since the day I was born, and I wasn’t so keen on doing it now. And while I appreciated the “as we understood him” part, the truth was that I didn’t understand him. The God of my childhood was a man with a white beard in the sky who judged and found us wanting, who meted out punishment and responded only to heavy-duty petitioning and praise. And look what had happened to my father! He had played by the rules, and had been struck down in the middle of his life. How was that fair or just? What could God possibly have meant by doing that?

There was also the small matter of the Lord’s Prayer. Most AA meetings began or ended with everyone shuffling to their feet, clasping hands, closing eyes, and reciting the most popular of all Christian prayers:
Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name
…Even though I had walked (okay, run) away from the God of my childhood—even though I didn’t believe in him—he still scared the shit out of me. What would he do to a Jewish girl who had changed her name to York and recited the Lord’s Prayer?

Despite these incongruities, I stayed sitting on my metal folding chair, day after day, week after week. I went to meetings in high-ceilinged rooms in Episcopal churches, musty basements of rectories downtown. I attended meetings in other cities: Los Angeles, Paris, London. I felt the way people with strong religious affiliations must: at home anywhere in the world. Equipped with a list of meetings, I could find a place any hour of the day where I would be welcomed with open arms.

If pressed, I would have said that I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. I had been drinking too much, to be sure. But drinking wasn’t actually the problem. Occasionally I shared this sneaking suspicion with a fellow member, who would smile at me kindly and suggest that I keep coming back. The implication was that if I was at an AA meeting, I de facto belonged there. And it was true—despite all my self-doubts and guilt about the God stuff—I was comforted by a sense of belonging that I had never experienced before.

I didn’t mind calling myself an alcoholic. It was the price of admission. I would have called myself a two-headed turtle if it meant I could keep showing up at meetings. I felt allied with these people who were all trying to get better. I was trying to get better too. I was looking for a structure, a system, a way to live my life. Putting down booze was the least of it. And besides, no one’s life has ever gotten worse by
not
drinking.

Many of the twelve steps made sense to me.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
. You couldn’t go wrong with that, really.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Seemed like a pretty good idea. Living life based on a series of instructions developed by two recovering alcoholics—Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob—felt more relevant, more applicable to my daily life, than the accumulated knowledge from all my years in the yeshiva.

Each day I tuned in, mesmerized by the stories people told. Those meetings taught me, for the first time in my life, that people’s outsides didn’t always match their insides. A beautifully turned-out, poised woman broke down weeping over how her drinking had ruined her relationship with her now-grown chil
dren. A hip-looking man with a scruffy beard talked about ending up in a state mental institution, destitute and friendless. The stories were often harsh and painful, but there was redemption in the very fact that the teller had lived to tell the tale. It was never too late to begin again. The human heart was elastic. It could withstand untold grief and still keep beating.

I didn’t belong there—I didn’t have any right to be there, really—but still I stayed. I stayed for years. Sometimes AA felt like a fellowship. Other times, like a cult—with its own language, its own set of rules. But either way, something was happening in those meetings—something I had longed for but couldn’t have named. I now know it was a kind of grace. As much as I had tried to leave God out of it, once in a while, as I looked around any given dingy church basement, it would occur to me that perhaps this
was
God. Not the terrifying gray-bearded figure of my youth. Not the heavenly father from the Lord’s Prayer. But right here, in the eloquence rising out of despair, the laughter out of darkness. The nodding heads, the clasping hands. The kindness extended to strangers. The sense—each and every time—of
Me too, I’ve been there too
. Never before had I listened so carefully or learned so much.

We took a drive—the three of us—up north, into the Berkshire Hills on a random Sunday. We like to do this sometimes: drive an hour or two, making stops in Great Barrington at the cheese store, the Japanese restaurant, the candy store. Sometimes we play
mini golf. Other times—much to Jacob’s dismay—we pull into an antiques shop to poke around. On this particular Sunday, the leaves had begun to turn.

Autumn has always been my favorite season, and even more so since we’ve moved to a part of the country known for its foliage. As we drove past lakes framed with the fiery mix of color, I had a familiar desire to freeze the moment—to stop time.
Stay this way
, I silently asked. I wasn’t just asking the leaves to hold on to the trees. I was asking Jacob to stay a little boy, for Michael to remain vital and healthy, for myself to stay a while longer in this chapter of my life.

“Mommy?” Jacob piped up from the back seat. “I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat or drink?”

Even this—even my son calling me Mommy—felt bittersweet. When would I be demoted to just plain Mom?

I reached into the back seat and handed Jacob a bag of chips and a milk box. I was longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it. I was mourning it, as if we were already a yellowed photograph in an album: my family together on a country drive, young, healthy, happy, whole.

I knew better, of course. I knew that trying to capture time—to hold on to anything at all—was not only useless, but a terrible waste. Time was all we had. I had carried with me Heschel’s idea of time as a cathedral. It didn’t have to be Sabbath for this moment to be holy. It was holy precisely because there was no other.

We stopped at MASS MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, where we met a couple of friends and sat outside on that glorious fall day. We had brought our new puppy along with us for the ride. Jacob and the pup tromped through the dried
leaves together. It was almost too much for me—the crispness of the air, the cloudless sky, our friends, my husband’s hand in mine, the boy and his pup. The impossible bounty, the moment overflowing.

Let me feel this
, I found myself thinking—asking, wishing. Or maybe even praying, if this was praying.
Let me live inside this cathedral of time
. I didn’t want to think about the latest newspaper headlines, or what had happened yesterday, or might happen tomorrow. I just wanted to feel the warmth of Michael’s hand, listen to Jacob shriek with delight.

It was then that I looked above me, and realized that we were sitting in the midst of an art installation. Suspended high overhead were six cylindrical aluminum planters hanging upside down by wires. They hung from an armature made of steel telephone poles. Out of each planter, a tree grew downward. These trees were not small. Their trunks must have been eighteen inches around. They had clearly been growing this way for quite some time—perhaps years. Their leaves were a rich, autumnal red. They hung in what seemed a precarious way. It looked, in equal parts, beautiful and wrong. How could the trees continue to thrive? But wait—there was something more. As I adjusted to the sight of the dangling trees, I saw that they had begun to shift shape, their branches bending and twisting, so that they could grow away from the earth and back up toward the sky.

Jacob ran over to us, breathless from his romp with the pup. His sturdy little body leaned into Michael and me. The sight of those strange, displaced trees contorting themselves had forced me fully into the present. I felt it all, all at once—the way that time can slow to a near standstill simply by existing inside it. By
not pushing through it, or past it—by not wishing it away, nor trying to capture it. It was a lesson I needed to learn over and over again: to stop and simply be. To recognize these moments and enter them—with reverence and an unprotected heart—as if walking into a cathedral.