Halfway back
Zepezauer, Frank S.
REJECTING THE RELIGION OF THE INDIVIDUAL Halfway back FRANK S. ZEPEZAUER THE chaplain seemed half asleep when I first saw him at 6:45 A.M. My sense of urgency had summoned him from his bed an...
...I regarded the church as a family...
...Nudity discriminates against the pudgy...
...The feeling came first...
...Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind...
...The devout tolerance informing the etiquette also prevented parents from prying into the activities of the peer group cabins...
...Perhaps the Rev...
...He came down the steps at the Newman Center of the University of Chicago on a March morning that would begin the spring quarter of the 1948-49 academic year, my first at this influential secular institution...
...It opened in me one afternoon as we sat talking...
...We could also visit the "free beach" which in Californiaese meant "going nude...
...I THEN ENTERED a peculiar apostasy, peculiar because my Catholic nerves kept me close to my roots...
...At the moment I perceived the vacuum at the center of that faith, I also found that I resented its authority because I felt its weight constantly but could not locate its source...
...I don't have any buckets," I replied...
...You don't need religious education...
...But then, it occurred to me, few popes, particularly today, so thoroughly control the secular universities and the popular media, the instruments by which the modernist consensus is shaped and transmitted...
...I soon discovered why...
...In better control of his impatience, he asked, "Do you want some coffee...
...In its place we confront a modernist faith which divorces God from the world, fact from value, the individual from community, and produces an aggregate of rootless beings characterized by T. S. Eliot *as "hollow men...
...Yet by this time he seemed an anachronism...
...His face reflected tension between duty and annoyance...
...When someone described a companion as his "friend," that settled matters...
...They preached tolerance but imposed their values nevertheless...
...W. spoke so proudly of his faith...
...Marijuana smoke mingled throughout the week with the scent of the redwoods...
...Against what commandments, I wondered...
...In the midst of my shampoo, I glimpsed through the blinding suds a figure approaching me...
...Although we see them now as rebellious dissenters, thorns in the side of the nineteenth century establishment, their abiding sense of transcendent reality connected them with a powerful theistic tradition which has only in the past one hundred years been broken, at least among avant-garde liberals...
...At the camp, he set up a daily discussion group and made himself available for drop-in talks...
...at the evening sing-a-longs children as young as eight puffed away on the community pipe...
...They regard it with some justification as the American civil religion...
...What can I do for you...
...My particular contribution to its crisis occurred eighteen years after I had nervously consulted the campus chaplain...
...Apart from a shell necklace, she wore nothing...
...What I say from this point thus summarizes what I have learned and thought about since I walked out of that Unitarian camp seven years ago...
...The question of moral authority and our eventual submission to it connects us with an enourmous mystery which leaves us struggling with doubt...
...I recall him saying, "Ultimately you don't need faith...
...AS WITH my earlier response to the church, I did not break formally with the loosely organized religion of the individual although now, as before, my surface compliance masked another inner conflict which began as I drove home along the beautiful Pacific coast and reflected over my recent experiences...
...I review these details not to exercise your prudery or to disparage the campers whose tolerance also bred a friendly warmth...
...At the moment in my mind I replied, "Who are you to tell me...
...Who did?'', he asked, finishing with the collar and arranging his cincture...
...You don't need reason...
...In contrast to Monsignor Red Volcano, who in spite of his ego always made clear where he stood and where he fitted in, the dogmatists of the religion of the individual disclaimed personal authority and power, preached a do-your-own-thing tolerance and yet manipulated our culture with an efficiency that would excite the envy of a medieval pope...
...In fact, people belonging to conventional families comprised the minority of campers...
...Yet, for the most part, my wife and I settled into a nonreligious mode of living...
...And my recollection of Emerson and his colleague Thoreau, today's canonized saints of individualism, opened the internal debate...
...I would not submit either to a cassock full of volcanic ego or of pedantic piety...
...He and his wife served as counselors for the Unitarian Fellowship which gathered at a family camp once a year...
...W., a well-built man of medium height with wavy silver hair, carried himself with the formal dignity of an older Massachusetts where Unitarianism was born and once flourished...
...The church in turn reveals these truths toXhe faithful...
...I had sinned...
...I had never before seen that symbol of clerical authority in such casual disarray...
...Her voice communicated an assurance of authority which I had encountered many times before and always detested...
...His own cup quickly drained away his morning grouchiness, and we started a friendly visit between a well-informed campus chaplain and a new student whose nice Catholic boy behavior concealed an intense rebellion against priestly authority...
...Only later did I work with it rationally...
...But before I could compose myself, I observed that she was very angry...
...He served the needs of a frequently embattled Catholic minority, but not very often before breakfast...
...The collar in my memory offered the only spot of white in a sea of red fabric which flooded over the figure of our parish pastor...
...He continued...
...29 August 1980:465...
...Most of the others formed broken families or common law arrangements...
...But I've learned to live with doubt...
...I cleared my eyes and saw before me an attractive young woman about 19 years old...
...In that same moment I also found that I disliked the "religion of the individual," a paradoxical attitude for someone who rejected Catholicism to foster his individuality...
...That's arrogant...
...I was watching a TV panel discussion on abortion between four feminists and a young priest, when I experienced a shift in perspective...
...They said I should see you first thing," I replied, watching him fasten his Roman collar...
...My oldest son, Mark, walked by and I called him over for an introduction...
...Rev...
...What he said finally sent me on the way in a direction toward which I had long tilted...
...As Father Connerton struggled with a blossoming yawn, I FRANK S. ZEPEZAUER teaches English at Wenlo-Atherton High School in California...
...I began to feel guilty...
...I'm Father Connerton...
...He snorted and growled and terrorized the children as the nun stood nearby with a rigid helpless smile...
...Slightly built, thin-faced and pale—you would see that face in countless paintings of dedicated monks—he delivered Catholic doctrine like a schoolmaster conjugating Latin verbs...
...We quickly adapted to a new etiquette which accommodated the variety of ad hoc relationships...
...I am far from reconciled with priestly authority, or with any other authority for that matter, but few of us are...
...Presumably grooved into a mid-twentieth century kind of Catholic life, my wife and I stayed with the church even during the travail of the approved method of birth control which brought us four children in six years, rhythmically...
...He served as assistant to a Palo Alto, California congregation not far from where I worked teaching high school English...
...I brushed away some of the offending suds and saw with dismay that several fell into the swift current rushing them to the downstream bathers...
...In fact, they were marvelously skilled at every relationship except marriage...
...Nor did I trust them...
...My sense of urgency had summoned him from his bed an hour before his regular time...
...That interpretation of the need for obedience still leaves many questions in my mind...
...I felt abashed...
...That soap you're using will pollute the water...
...She never relinquished her initial indignation...
...If God granted us certitude, we would not need faith...
...I later learned that Protestant fundamentalists, who deeply distrust it, call it "secular humanism...
...Although they called it a "family" camp, the directors split the family unit and distributed its members to various peer groups...
...in other words to engage us to obey...
...I didn't like overbearing, sarcastic priests...
...A very earnest and pious priest unwittingly released it as he preached his Sunday sermon...
...I tried to fashion a funny response:' 'But this soap is biodegradable...
...After all, he and Emerson initiated a Commonweal: 464 movement called "Transcendentalism...
...I chose the priest...
...Yet he had relatively little ministerial business that week...
...So once again I restlessly confronted authority but as before, held back from a clear-cut decision until a relatively minor incident goaded me to action...
...He turned to Mark and asked...
...And as I listened, the insight which had been forming all week finally crystalized into an idea: Unitarianism had metamorphosed into liberalism and liberalism had evolved beyond a method of inquiry and a source of reformist energy to become a non-theistic religion...
...His essay, Civil Disobedience, which now serves as sacred scripture for devout individualists, does not, as many believe, oppose the state in the name of individual, but instead opposes the individual to the state in the name of a higher law derived from "purer sources of truth...
...I followed closely because I sensed once again that a man of the cloth was approaching a central value...
...I sat up to listen more attentively because he posed an intriguing riddle: what value could exceed education, reason, and faith...
...No wimple-crowned nun in full habit ever generated the moral outrage of this naked young woman...
...Finally, one of the women articulated her indignation: "How can men in the hierarchy dictate to a woman about what she can do with her own body...
...I remember him visiting our classroom smoking a fat cigar, his monsignorial robes stretched tightly against his ample belly...
...The priests back at Marquette...
...My experience thus adds one more incident to a larger story whose theme focuses on the church's current crisis of authority...
...I hoped she wouldn't notice...
...For all their apparent tolerance toward hitherto proscribed behavior, the campers exhibited stern disapproval in other matters...
...Looking now in a new way at the modernist religion which surrounded me, I felt that it was hollow...
...Emerson to him was like Ignatius to a Jesuit...
...I had seen my share of them...
...And so it seemed that between the assertive pro-abortionists and the outnumbered priest, I faced a choice between one form of authority and another...
...Nevertheless he recovered enough priestly demeanor to greet me: "Good morning...
...The spiritual descendant of the ferocious Puritans, he sat on the periphery of the camp's neo-pagan revelry ministering to an ever-dwindling congregation...
...Just last month his group performed The Night Thoreau Stayed in Jail...
...All you need, therefore, is the disposition to obey...
...His always helpful and charming wife spent most of the work/holiday sitting nearby with her knitting...
...No wonder then, that the Rev...
...The priest, a modernist symbol of the ecclesiastic tyranny, could not progress against the iron certitude and social power of the ' 'right to choose...
...I felt little need, for example, to join those frequently publicized apostates who celebrated their "liberation" by narrating the horrors of their oppressive Catholic upbringing...
...In the small talk that followed I said, "Mark acted in a number of school plays...
...These incidents fascinated me, however, because they connected with a value system I could not fathom...
...I was not so sure what restrained the individualists who believed that everyone should choose his own values and decide for himself what is right and wrong...
...To leave it, I felt, would be an act of personal betrayal...
...However, I did not openly rebel that morning, nor for many Commonweal: 462 years thereafter, even though I would debate almost daily with brilliant agnostics and would taste, on that urban and urbane campus, many pagan pleasures...
...The angry flare-up in his eyes alarmed me...
...Like the modern suburban secularists with whom I had lived for eighteen years, I assumed the primacy of my individual conscience...
...I swear...
...Nor did anyone in a cafeteria line react when a man greeted a newcomer with the news that "there was plenty of sex around, single and married...
...His Roman collar blended at that moment with an image formed years before...
...All reform aims to let the soul have its way through us...
...Look, all you have to do is to get two buckets and wash you hair up on shore...
...In his beautiful meditation on a universal spirit which he called "The Oversoul" Emerson, for example, said, "I...
...I still picture him as a red volcano rumbling and puffing with its importance...
...acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine...
...By mid-week when I pressed him to explain, once and for all, what his religion stood for, I alone remained in his discussion group...
...The person who activated my second apostasy was a minister in the Unitarian church...
...No detergents at all...
...Ultimately I chose the priest because he did not speak for an "I", but for a "we...
...The Rev...
...My family, which had joined the Fellowship the year before, arrived on Sunday and were assigned separate cabins...
...W. perked up...
...And my decision was activated by the overweening words of authority: "/ say that you must...
...He played the role of Emerson...
...We sent our children to public schools, told them nothing of religion, vibrated in unison with our suburban friends to a succession of liberal causes and believed that we connected with the best informed modern thought...
...Then one day about seven years ago, I turned around once again and started to go back to the church...
...Yet one day my rebellion finally broke through...
...continued with, "They wanted me to see the Newman chaplain as early as possible...
...My rebelliousness toward it simmered and boiled up frequently but other feelings prevailed...
...When they heard about my transfer to Chicago, they said I might lose my faith...
...I had, after all, lost my faith...
...He then returned to the altar...
...Now his annoyance momentarily broke through...
...On that Sunday, he lectured on obedience...
...God revealed to the church the facts of existence and the laws of morality...
...There are people downstream who want to use it," she began in that never-shout undertone which I call the counter-culture mumble...
...I sensed what was coming...
...I discovered this one day early in the week when I went 29 August 1980: 463 upstream from the beach to wash my hair...
...My wife and I incidentally, kept our bathing suits on, not so much from modesty as from vanity...
...The rest were single, divorced, or separated...
...After the Mass I walked out of the mission-style stucco building and never again returned to a Catholic church as a serious worshipper...
...For we often hear their fiery assertions of personal freedom, but we seldom hear about their profound sense of higher reality...
...In trying to resolve that paradox I have come to this halfway back position...
...Yet I write now as an apostate who eventually left the church and then, some time later, made another turn which puts me today "halfway back...
...Well, anyone around here would lend you some...
...Because present-day Unitarianism dogmatically rejected dogma, he could not help me locate its essence, at least not in the way an ex-Catholic would want it...
...After a moment's reflection Mark recited Emerson's best known words: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist...
...But during the course of the week the mysterious ethic of the campers together with a persistent drift in his talk nevertheless moved me toward a significant insight...
...I nodded with a silence that projected not only embarrassment but also, at a deeper level, sharp hostility...
...I met him in the holy land of the counter-culture, a redwood forest in California's Mendocino County...
...Do you remember any lines...
...The steaming cup of coffee which Father Connerton now offered me dispelled the image but not the feeling...
...As a Unitarian he served a dying sect, but as a liberal he professed a faith which dominated our culture...
...This same reverential sense of higher reality permeates the writing of Thoreau...
...Without formal organization the religion of the individual can nevertheless command a vast congregation by creating peer pressures, quickly disseminated beliefs that a particular cause is where it's at, where it's going, and where it's got to be...
...Well, you certainly made it early enough," he said...
...I started to apologize, but held back when his eyes softened...
...W. back at the main hall could finally enlighten me...
...I named it "the religion of the individual...
...Your highest duty is obedience...
...The fussbudgets who supervised my earlier training had not prepared me for encounters with naked young ladies in clear mountain streams...
...And I rejected the religion of the individual because I recalled at that moment the words of my favorite liberal, Emerson, who said, "The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself...
...Despite the fears of my former Jesuit teachers, I left the formidable University of Chicago still firmly committed to the church...
...Thus by following the law of the church, you follow the law of God...
...The good Reverend now built an impromptu sermon around the famous text connecting his troubled Unitarianism to the great Puritan/Protestant tradition of courageous dissent, its constant push toward the cutting edge of change, its noble defense of the individual against civil and ecclesiastical tyranny...
...I did not amuse her...
...From the new perspective that this little scene created, I saw his authority checked by a network of restraints: his clerical vows, the introspective illumination of his prayer, the moderating tradition of study, meditation, and discussion to which he deferred, the awesome and demanding principle of humility which he professed and his responsibility to a spiritual community centered in God...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
