Search for community, search for beauty

"Seraphim" by Patricia Spears Jones

The last time I took a fiction workshop I wrote a not very fictional story about a person leaving the only church he’d ever known and trying to work through the loss that came with the decision. It wasn’t a good story, but also the audience (my classmates) mostly didn’t understand the stakes for the main character because the idea of belonging so deeply to a church didn’t resonate with them. That’s not a shot at them, to be clear. Like I said, it wasn’t a good story but also the concept of belonging so wholly to a church that controlled your life like that was outside their experience, perhaps even outside their imagination.

Except for Skip, who was teaching the class. After the workshop had gone through the ritual of vague question and comment and line-edit suggestion, Skip said something like “no one who has never been in a community as closed as the one you’re writing about can imagine how good it feels to be a part of it when you’re in it, or how much it hurts to lose it. You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for that kind of acceptance and will never find it, even if you go back. It won’t be the same.” He was talking to me, but also to the rest of the class by saying they needed to trust the writer, believe them when they’re describing the pain of the loss, the loneliness, the fear that no one will ever love them again, that this really is something that happens.

Skip didn’t use the word cult to describe the church I grew up in. I didn’t either until relatively recently. But any church that tells you that if you have to make a choice between staying in good graces with your family or your God and by extension your church that there is no choice, that it’s the church because they’re your real family is a cult.

I was hesitant to call it a cult probably because my early knowledge of cults was informed by the sensationalist stories of them from my youth. They usually involved claims of brainwashing and turning over all your financial assets to some hyper-charismatic figure and being isolated from any family members who would try to convince you to leave them. In the extreme cases, violence was a big part of it. Jim Jones was the first one I remember, and then later Heaven’s Gate and David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.

But also cults were familiar enough that they became fodder for sitcoms, like this episode of What’s Happening where ReRun falls in love with a woman who runs a cult that worships a head of lettuce.

And when those are your comparisons, then of course the church you belong to isn’t a cult. I mean yes, they do teach that you’re a part of the only church in the history of Christianity to get it right, which is why they have their own translation of the Bible, to the point that the euphemism for being a member is being “in the truth.” And yes, they do teach that the world is coming to the end any day now and that in order to reap the rewards on the other side of it in the form of eternal life in Eden that you cannot question the sayings from the people in charge. And yes, they do say that if a family member leaves the church, whether willingly or because they’ve been kicked out for disobedience unrepentant sin then you need to cut them off both to protect the body of the church but also to emotionally bribe them help them realize the error of their ways and return to the faith. And yes they do teach that you should never date or marry someone outside the faith, or even have close friendships with people “in the world.” And you should even be very careful about worldly influences in the music you listen to and the movies and tv shows you watch and the books you read and if you only consume the media the church leaders tell you is okay then you’ll be sure to be safe from the world because the devil is a ravenous lion seeking to devour true believers and if he’s not tempting you then that means maybe you’ve already fallen prey to him and you better seek refuge in the arms of the church that loves you no matter who you are as long as you’re one of us and not in the world.

But totally not a cult.

So leaving is hard, and in the majority of the cases I saw in my congregation growing up where some manner of scandal meant a person was disfellowshipped (the Jehovah’s Witnesses word for excommunicated), the usual response was that the person who was disfellowshipped eventually came back. They’d come to the Kingdom Hall, sit in the very last row quietly, not making eye contact while everyone around them chatted away about whatever. They’d follow along with their Bibles during the talks and presentations, maybe taking notes. And if they did all that, and they looked properly glum while doing it, then within 6 months or so they’d be reinstated, but with restrictions. Like they couldn’t comment during the meeting or give a presentation, but they could talk to people again.

Google street view of the Kingdom Hall in Tickfaw, Louisiana. I helped build the place. It’s the last place I ever attended a meeting.

And sometimes it would stick. They’d reintegrate into the fabric of the congregation, be invited to people’s houses and go to public functions. But there was usually a feeling like they were on probation, that a single slip would result in them being kicked out again, this time probably for good. And then as far as we were concerned, they were dead to us.

More often they’d come back long enough to be reinstated and then slowly disappear again. We’d call them inactive, which was in this gray area between being a full member and not. The theory was that so long as they hadn’t been removed from the congregation, then it was okay, our duty even, to associate with them and encourage them to return to full active status. In some ways it was more important to engage with them because they were in danger of falling out of community than the people who were safely in already.

And then there were those who were kicked out and never looked back. I used to wonder what happened to them because the thought was so impossible to me. I couldn’t have put it in words at the time but I knew that all my life was wrapped up in church family.

Clearly that thought didn’t stay impossible to me, as I left the church when I was 26 and never looked back. And when I did that, I had to start over from the beginning. I had to try to find a community.

Or join a community. Or build a community. Even now, almost 30 years later, I don’t know the right words to use because I’ve never figured it out.

Here’s what I mean when I say I had to start over from the beginning. Every close friend I had was a member of the church. The best man at my wedding. The members of the church that I played basketball with, that my soon-to-be ex-wife had over for dinner with their families, the people I had called brothers and sisters for my whole life and meant it all considered me dead to them. My parents were sad but resolute—no relationship until I came back to the faith. We could talk if there was important news to share but no association.

And my relationships with my co-workers had also always been contingent. I was friendly with them at work but there was never anything beyond that. Part of the reason for that was the handful of Witnesses who worked at the same place, so we kind of kept eyes on/looked out for each other (depending on your perspective). Leaving the church meant I lost that group but it also meant I had to remake myself in the eyes of all these other people who’d only ever known me as a Witness.

While all this was going on, my wife came out of the closet and we started the process of getting a divorce. And it was my first semester of college. Spring of 1995 was a lot.

Where was I going with this?

I said above that I never looked back. It’s more accurate to say I never gave it a long look. I considered going back for just long enough to get reinstated, to make it possible for my parents to engage with me without feeling guilty, and then disappearing again from the congregation. Entering the loophole and making a spot just inside it.

But I also realized that I liked being out. I liked drinking and cursing and fornicating and celebrating Christmas and smoking (which oddly enough was the thing I got caught doing that they kicked me out for). I liked learning about evolution and human sexuality and how translation is more art than science and that the world other people lived in was not the world the Witnesses had described in their magazines and books and Bible studies. I joined a fraternity and took some drugs (those two things were unrelated) and fell in and out of love a handful of times and made some friendships of varying lengths and seriousnesses. I liked all those things even when they didn’t work out or when I hurt myself or others.

The important thing was that I didn’t want to lie, not to my parents, not to my co-workers and classmates, to the new friends I was trying to make, not even to the God I wasn’t sure I believed existed anymore. Not to myself. If I was going to find community, it would have to be based on who I really was, not on who I was expected to be.

Skip was right about never finding that kind of acceptance again, the kind that feels unconditional but that is really uni-conditional, and that condition is to never stop being one of them. But I did eventually stop trying to find it. What I found instead was a bunch of smaller communities. I made friends, some from school, some from work, some from shared interests, some online. I fell in love for good and her family adopted me and my daughter and we’ve since added two more to the family. My sister, who never cut me off, and I have grown even tighter in the years since I left.

I would say that it’s not what I expected when I took the leap out of everything I’d known but my expectations were so skewed by what I imagined the world was like that that doesn’t mean anything really. What I learned, though, was that I had to change what my idea of community meant, and then I discovered that the ones I’m a part of now are so much richer than anything I had before, and while the price to find that was high, it’s been worth paying.

I started thinking about community this way a couple of months ago when I picked up my copy of The Beloved Community by Patricia Spears Jones. Just the title alone grabbed me, but the poems kept me in the book and thinking about the varieties of community we’re all in if we let ourselves be. The poem I’m focusing on here is “Seraphim,” first published in The New Yorker in July 2018. You can listen to Patricia Spears Jones read it if you follow the link, and I highly recommend it

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For those unfamiliar with the title, seraphim are a class of angel in the Christian tradition, and there’s a whole series of Wikipedia articles you can lose yourself in if you want to get into the details but I think it’s enough for our purposes to know it’s an angel. The poem begins with what reads to me like a person, “a beauty, full-figured, beloved” who has died and ascended, become part of that community that has been held out as the greatest possible achievement, the most wonderful reward.

But once a beauty remembers

Physical love and then its loss

Eternal life seems mundane

No conflict or need or desire

Thus this Seraphim held melancholy

Gentle as a lull in a long conversation

The afterlife the Witnesses sell is eternity on earth in Eden conditions, no want, no pain, no death or sickness. In the years since I’ve left I’ve thought that it would be a much more successful pitch if they didn’t demand so much of their followers in return, in time, in fealty. It’s more concrete than the heaven of their Christian brethren, after all.

But the fundamental problem of any afterlife is the question of what you do with all that time when there are none of the things that help us make time pass for better or worse. What does happiness mean when that’s all there is?

But heaven allows only jubilance

Possibly the angel needed to return

Human: with feelings, tears and laughter

Or find a way to shape the sadness into

A moment of beauty when the angel’s wings

Spread and flight moves to breathing

Full of vision. There the angel’s tears bond

with the visitor’s fear, awe.

It feels a bit like Spears Jones could be referencing a piece of art, which she does in other poems in this collection, but my internet search skills couldn’t narrow down a specific piece, even with the mention of Berlin a couple of lines later. But I want to focus on the seraphim, the feeling of needing to replace perfection with the broken and then create beauty from that. It’s a very human need, to transform moments and objects from one emotional state to another and to live in a state where that transformation can’t happen would be hollow. Maybe we want perfection because we haven’t really thought about what it would do to us to have it, about what we would lose in gaining it.

The poem shifts in this moment from being about the angel to being about the visitors who are “in search of a reason to consider / the spirit, those angels set / on top of monuments across the handsome city.” And maybe now this is about how some today see angels, less as fearsome messengers of an omnipotent God and more as expressions of the artists who created them. How now the visitors see in the angels

How dreams and death and a dearth

Of joy is visible. And wings spread

And wings fall. And the beloved becomes

A man who understands a woman’s

Full-figure. A man who fears fever.

A man who takes his lover in all

Her melancholy and lifts her up

And unto joy.

I’ve been sitting with the ending of this poem for a while and I keep landing on the weight of that last line, the formality of “unto” and that it’s set off on its own and most importantly, that the last word of this poem is joy. That that’s where we really need to end, is in joy, no matter what else, and maybe that the only way to really get there is to go through some shit, some melancholy, some loss, which is useful since there’s none of us who won’t be hit by it at some point.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re finding ways to be in your own communities and making joy out of whatever you have at hand.