The Reverend Doctor

It is hard for me to talk about religion or my roots in theatre without talking about my grandfather.   Boasting the nearly ridiculous full name:  The Reverend Dr. Kenneth Ackerman Friou, Senior,  he is, in many ways, the man with whom this journey began. 

As with any parents, my parents definitely had things they excelled at more than others.  Despite their splitting up when I was nine, one of the things I’m very grateful for was the approach they took to religion.  My mother had been raised Catholic and went to Catholic school through the eighth grade.  My father on the other hand was raised by a United Church of Christ Minister.   We had a bit of a Brady Bunch family.  My four older siblings are all from my dad’s first marriage.  I don’t know if it was ever a formal conversation or not, but I remember very clearly the rules regarding church in my family.  My parents felt it was their responsibility to raise us in the church but that ultimately religion was a very personal thing that only we could decide.  So the rule was, we went to Sunday school through the sixth grade and then it was up to us. 

I imagine this came about for a few reasons.  My mom being what she called a “recovering Catholic” had never been particularly pleased with the fact that she felt like religion had been something that you just had to swallow no matter if you agreed or disagreed.  And my father, well he was raised by the Reverend Dr.

As a child Grandpa was one of those magical figures.  We all have memories of him teaching us to do things like cartwheels, declaring rainy days in the summer days for painting, and I certainly remember that for as many years as he has had my address, that I have gotten a birthday poem.  He seemed like a man from a different time,  I never remember him wearing jeans, and he wears his 30 year olds suits on any occasion possible.  And Grandpa LOVED the theatre.  Every year he treated us to something.  I remember seeing Christmas Carol, the ballet of Romeo and Juliet and various other things.  When I was sixteen, he brought my cousins and I to New Yorker (where he grew up, coincidentally about half a mile from where I now live) and took me to see my first Broadway show. 

I remember Grandpa’s library filled beyond the brim of ancient books.  Most of them about either religion or theatre.  This, in and of itself seemed magical.  I don’t remember most of my friends having grandparents who even HAD a library.  My mother had gone to school to get her LPN, but that was it on her side and my dad didn’t get a degree until I was about 14, so there was something exotic and impressive about both my Grandfather and Grandmother’s level of education.   Grandma had studied biology in undergrade and received a Masters of Nursing from Yale when she was only 22.  Grandpa, likewise was educated.  One might say OVER educated.  If I remember correctly, he has a Masters of Philosophy, a Doctor of Divinity, and a PhD of some sort that I can’t quite remember.  He was specifically interested in Art and Faith. 

Anyone who has met the Reverend Dr. will tell you that if you even come remotely close to the topic of either of those that you may very well end up with a story/lecture that can literally last for HOURS.   But it was in his living room, dining room, in the cabin in Maine that I first heard the names of Ibsen, Strindberg and so forth. 

As a child I remember he and Grandma being very devout.  They would shuttle us to church even when we were visiting their cabin in Maine during the summers.  We always dressed up and as the minister’s grandkids, we were ALWAYS on our best behavior.  But even in my earliest memories, I also remember religion being something one wrestled with.  It wasn’t something one blindly accepted.  Sure they read a bible passage before dinner and we all politely folded our hands and blessed every meal.  But I always associated my Grandfather’s faith with that room full of books.  And I always thought of theatre as something imbued with philosophy, and faith – or why else would he have been fascinated enough by it to want to do a PhD on it. 

One day, most likely as a teenager, I asked him about being a UCC minister.  If my memory serves me correctly (please excuse anything I remember incorrectly,) the response was something to this effect.  He had grown up Methodist, as had my Grandmother, and went to Union Seminary in NY.  After living here for a number of years his approach to religion/life/philosophy and the fact he went to school there all makes soooo much more sense.  But at the time he told me that the Methodist Church didn’t allow their Minister’s to drink or smoke and he didn’t think the church had any place in dictating that.  Now mind you, my Grandfather neither drinks nor smokes, so that struck me as a little foreign. 

I remember my parents telling me about a time when my Grandfather used to do liturgical dance (!!!) and do readings of Walt Whitmann poetry.  I was always very sad I had missed that.

But when I got to college I discovered there was way more there even than that.  I was visiting them around the time we invaded Iraq and before my Grandmother’s Alzheimer’s had set in.  Something about it came on the news and I remember my Grandmother exclaiming, “This administration is a bunch of Fascists.”  I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped open.  It certainly seemed to me that she had used the “F” word of her generation.  Also, it had NEVER occurred to me, for some silly reason, that my grandparents were political beings.  Academics yes, but political?  In the conversation that followed I remember telling them that I was going to go to an anit-war protest with the chapel at school when I went back to Macalester.  My grandmother looked me in the eye and said , “You do it for us, because we can’t do it anymore.”

In telling my mother about this later, she was like, oh yeah, you didn’t know that your Grandfather was involved in some of the major civil rights protests in the late 60’s?  I was like, what????   How did I miss that part?  

Sadly, I became an adult just as my Grandmother began her regression.  I have more questions for her than I ever knew I would.  I’ve asked my Grandpa about it some and he certainly has stories…but she was always the one to corroborate them.  And one of which, will be a later topic for this blog.  I have however, also gotten to talk to my grandfather’s brother who was also a UCC minister who actually had a church in DC in the late 60’s.  From the pieces I’ve put together.  Beyond just being devout, the church, and the UCC church, represented an opportunity to be actively involved in social justice.  As a family equal rights were important to them.  My grandfather, from what I’ve gathered, was largely responsible for the first parts of integrating his first church here in New York State.  

When I got to Macalester and many of my classmates were very down on organized religion I was super confused.  I started thinking that maybe what I believed was some sort of something I had just made up.  Even after three years, I wasn’t completely sure that I hadn’t conjured up my own religion.  To me, the church represented love and forgiveness.  It represented peace. 

It wasn’t until I lived with a couple of religious studies majors who were like, oh, you were raised UCC?  Oh yeah, that’s the UCC’s thing.  It is a mostly progressive congregation denomination.   They have a very long history of ordaining women, and GLBTQ ministers.  Social justice is one of their primary tenets.  And to this day they have had their adds banned on major news channels because they are all inclusive.  Suddenly, it made a lot more sense. 

Needless to say, we were raised with that philosophy.  Strangely, I’m not sure I really know how strongly either of my parents believes in their faith.  Maybe I should ask?  But I do feel like they gave me a real gift.  I never had to rebel against my religion.  There was nothing to really rebel against.  In fact, the church is probably one of the best social service organizations I’ve ever been aligned with.    As an adult, I really appreciate having the freedom to choose my faith, and the understanding that it isn’t something that I should take lightly, or ever let someone else decide for me.  Faith is, in so many ways, one of the most personal parts of us.  What we BELIEVE.   I mean seriously, my Grandpa is still studying it.  He is 92 years old.  He spends his spare time learning Greek as he translates a Greek bible into English.   Last year he came to visit New York to attend a reunion/seminar about the King James Bible.  A bunch of ministers geeking out about various translations.     

On the same trip, he insisted I take him into Second Stage where I was working on The Blue Flower at the time.  I took him into the space, and I watched this man I looked up to so much as a child have his breathe taken away.  As we got back in the elevator, he looked at me and said, “Your Great Grandfather would be so proud of you.  You know, I would have spent my life in theatre if I could have.”  Its easy to forget our accomplishments, and for a moment, seeing it through his eyes it was magical.   Like any family, ours is very complicated, okay, that’s an understatement, it’s very complicated, and this is in many ways a sugar coated version of our religious history.  But in that moment it was so clear to me that I am my grandfather’s granddaughter, and for that, I too was incredibly proud.

Black Eyes and Sacrifice

On Wednesday night I went to the weekly Lent meditation series at Judson Church.  This is week two.  I find it really hard to tell friends etc. that I can’t do things on Wednesdays because I’m “going to church.”  But I walked in this week and there it was, all warm and candle lit again.  The same guy was playing piano.

So, I sit down and start reading the back of the program and it says:

"The "W", or the Gospel of "W", is a living document a compilation by Judson of stories, quotes, and testimonies of bodies, many times "W"omen's bodies, for whom sacrifice and crucifixion are daily realities. We play on the idea of the “Q” (short for the Germen Quelle, or “Source”), which is a hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus, assumed to be one of the two written sources behind the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  This Lenten season, we use as “text” for reflection the bodies in our midst for whom sacrifice and crucifixion are not just a 40-day religious tradition, but rather they sacrifice and are crucified on a regular basis”

After reading that, I knew I was a goner. Any pretense I had of having my “shit” together was gone.  I’m like a blubbering idiot.  I don’t even know that it has anything to do with God or religion.  It might be the space?  I have no idea.   But the combination of all of that and the fact that we’re going to talk about womens’ bodies had me in tears before they really got into anything. 

We talked about sacrifice.  Not the, I’m sacrificing sugar as a way to fast for 40 days kind of sacrifice, but the “what are you consistently sacrificing.”  I even had to write down on a piece of paper the “sacrifice [I] all too often make.

As an artist this question is HUGE!   Some days I feel like I’ve given up any semblance of a normal life.  Many things ran through my head.  Like the times I have to temp to pay my bills and that sometimes I spend hours upon hours of my life working for companies doing work I would much rather spend my life fighting.  In some ways sacrificing my morals in order to be an artist to not be an artist.  That was a huge one.  It’s not what I wrote down, but it was huge. 

But I did think, now we’re getting down to business, this is what church should be like.  It felt personal.  It felt intimate.  It felt like something that really truly mattered deep down inside.  So of course I go and lay my little slip in the bucket and then we stand and pray.  The ritual laying down of this sacrifice.  So I’m a blubbering mess and the minister is standing next to me and I don’t want anyone to see me crying.  She did politely seem to overlook that though she did introduce herself to me.  And look me very straight in the eye.  Some people just do that, and that also makes me want to cry.

I think about being a woman a lot.  I think about being a woman in theatre a lot.  I think about what the effect of my career is on my love life and if I’ll have children.  I have no idea how someone lives my life and has children.  I’m not even 100% certain I want them, but if I did meet someone I wanted to have them with, how do you do that?  And since we’re talking about sacrifice, it’s pretty emotional to suddenly think of being a woman and having your period, and all of that as sacrifice, as crucifixion.  But it’s also really hard to think about that and think about sacrificing that for art. 

So I duck out pretty quickly after the service because I’m a little embarrassed by the deluge of tears.  On my way down the street I text Emily and said something about “you’ll never believe what they talked about in this service – womens bodies in relation to sacrifice and crucifixion.”  No more than two minutes later I walk on to the platform at West Fourth street deep in thought and a man rushes past/toward me and before I know it, he has elbowed me in the face, right on the edge of my eyebrow.  I cried out in pain as I doubled over grabbing my rapidly swelling brow. I was only barely aware enough to notice that he didn’t stop to see what happened.  A very kind woman sort of stood me up and made sure I wasn’t bleeding, and a couple guys on the platform said “Shit man, he didn’t even stop to say he was sorry.”   How one manages to accidentally elbow someone in the face like that remains to be seen, but I was pretty shaken up.  I was also flabbergast as the words sacrifice and crucifixion floated through my half functioning brain.  

My entire evening was derailed, it’s pretty hard to think about much else when there is a searing pain in your head, and when your body feels like it’s been beaten.

There was more metaphor in that combination of events than I knew what to do with.  As a woman, as an artist, a lot of life is getting beat up by people who may or may not notice the blow they’ve dealt you.  There’s a lot of getting up day after day even when you’re black and blue and your brow is swollen, and just going for it over and over again. That night my reality really was that I got decked in the face and it hurt like a (insert explitives here).  I didn’t choose that. There are a lot of sacrifices and crucifixions I don’t choose.  But there are some that as they said I “sacrifice all too often.”  It’s important to know that, you can’t always stand up straight after a blow to the head.  It’s important to honor that, to give yourself time and space to heal.  It’s also important to take the time to see where I’m in control of the sacrifice, and how I can go about laying it down. 

I think part of why I don’t always want people to know that I’m religious or at least on some sort of spiritual journey is that I am afraid that they will associate that with my not being able to think for myself.  But on Wednesday, I really did need to think about what I sacrifice.  In fact, I go to church so I CAN think.  It is a space where I find amazing clarity and where I can think about the world from a totally different angle.  Obviously if it’s making me cry every week something is working.  God is a huge concept. As is Jesus.  I’m struggling with that.  But one of the amazing things about Judson is that they talk about the principles of Christianity using things like the “the bodies in our midst” as text.  I feel like even if I decided I didn’t believe in God at all that I would be comfortable there.  I really like going to Church actually.  Go figure.

So what about you?  What sacrifice do you all too often make?

Ash Wednesday - Amanda's First Entry

I am not an atheist.  Every time I have to tell someone that I feel like its some weird version of coming out.  If you’re reading this and knew me when I was twelve, this is not at all surprising.  If you’ve met me in New York, maybe it is.  In a world where most of my friends, and pretty much everyone I’ve ever dated – and everyone who currently sends me messages on OkCupid, is an atheist, people always seem surprised.  That is, if I even tell them.

On a technical level I am a member of the United Church of Christ.  I was confirmed when I was 14.  My grandfather the Reverend Dr. Kenneth Ackerman Friou Senior baptized me as a baby in the same church I attended until leaving for college.  Legend has it that when he put the water on my forehead I looked up at him and smiled.  I attended Sunday school through the sixth grade when I played Mary in the annual Christmas Pageant and went on to confirmation in the seventh and eight grade and youth group in high school.  Two of my nieces have been baptized wearing my baptismal gown and one of them is my god daughter.

So, why write this blog?  My history with religion is more complicated than the last paragraph, and my identity as a person of faith is more complicated now than just not being an atheist.  And my identity as an artist, well that probably complicates it all even more.  Emily and I have spent many conversations discussion how weird it is not to be atheists in our business and how we sometimes feel like its some dirty secret.  And yet, we both know that our work is influenced by what we do or do not believe.

I have been to church exactly twice this year.  Once on Easter, and once tonight.  I think I wept through the entire service.  I walked in a few minutes late, rushing from work.  And I got there just as the minister was explaining the labrynth they had laid out on the floor of Judson Church (more on Judson and it’s appeal in a later entry).  I wish I had caught the whole explanation, but her words about being on a journey and sometimes feeling like you have no sense of where you are, and feeling lost, hit home.  For whatever I do or do not believe these days (also something we’ll get to later) a beautiful church, with candle lights, and music, and people talking about the spiritual part of life, have a tendency to get me.  I think I just spend so much of my day being a tough New Yorker, or in college, a stressed out perfectionist, that if I find a good service like this one, it does exactly what it’s supposed to, what the UCC calls “creating a space for grace.”  I think we all need that, wherever we find it, yoga, meditation, etc.  So tonight, all of the sudden I just felt like I was standing there naked.

In the seven years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve probably attended service on Ash Wednesday more than any other.  I don’t know how it started.  I also started giving something up for Lent.  This may seem strange given that I am significantly less religious now than when I moved here, but there is something in the ritual of it that has taken on meaning to me as an adult.  I am into the idea of giving up something I love, and then coming back to it again in 40 days.  A fast of sorts.  I also at one point heard someone suggest that there are three parts.  You give something up, you take something on, and you add time for meditation into your day.  So I am giving up refined sugar (this is the craziest Lenten idea I’ve ever had, we’ll see how it goes!),  I am attempting to volunteer once a week, and then, the meditation part.  As part of the meditation part, I’m also going to keep this blog.

So what does Lent mean to me?  Bear with me, this may be a bit long.  About five years ago,  wow, this is harder to write than I thought….I got a phone call from my mom that my grandmother was in congestive heart failure.  We always assumed that if she passed away I probably wouldn’t go home for the funeral.  She had been sick with Parkinson’s for a very long time and I had mostly mourned the Grandmother I knew already.  But I found myself distinctly more upset than I anticipated.  Maybe it was because the only other person I’d really know who died was my Grandfather, and that was a good twenty years prior.

I ended up getting on the first plane the next morning, praying I would get there in time.  I arrived in Wisconsin at 10am and she was indeed still alive.  Over the next few days she seemed to inch closer to death.  None of us could believe she was even still alive.  She hadn’t had a blood pressure in days, and it was unclear if she even knew we were there.  After about four days, a bunch of us went out for dinner and when we came back we were all sitting  in her room.  I was across from the foot of the bed, the only one facing her.  I noticed the expression on her face changing.  Something just shifted.  So I got up and walked across the room and sat down on the edge of her bed and picked up her hand.  After a few minutes it became apparent that it was actually a pretty major shift.  I remember my mom trying to prop her up a bit more to ease the breathing and make her more comfortable.  And I remember realizing that this really was it.  A few seconds later mom said something to the effect of “If you guys want to be here, I think this is the time.”  And everyone in the room came and held on to her.  That cliché laying on of hands.  Her breathing became more labored, and then it was like someone reached in and tore her soul from her body.  She took the biggest inhale, but there was no exhale.  And suddenly it was like I could feel her dancing, like something was free of the body.  And then she was everywhere.  It was like there were a hundred grandma’s in the room, one with each of us.

The stillness was so profound.  It was like she was alive, and then not.  And I just sat there.  I think I sat there for half an hour. And I mean I guess it was sad, but mostly it was relieving.  And it felt like there was this great freedom.   I felt so warm, and cared for, like she was watching.  And slowly the million grandma’s in the room fell away.  I looked down at our hands entwined, realizing hers had become cold and stiff and noticed that the ring I had on my hand was actually her ring, that my mother had given me only a week before.

So.  Coming back to Lent.  The funeral was weird.  It was January, and after having been there for her death, the funeral meant little.  She was covered in makeup and the priest hardly knew her.  I was very surprised they didn’t do the “Ashes to Ashes” passage.  I mean, if you can’t count on that in a funeral, what can you count on?

And then I went home to New York, back to my life.  I still didn’t really feel sad.  But I started having these dreams.  I called them the “dead grandma dreams.”  I know that’s kind of a terrible way to put it, but suddenly there was dead grandma and alive grandma and it became a good way of distinguishing them.  For weeks, my grandmother would show up in my dreams every night.  I don’t remember much about the dreams now, except that she was there.  I wasn’t sleeping super well.

Then Ash Wednesday came.  For some reason I decided to go to church.  I even went to an Episcopal I think.  I don’t even know anything about the Episcopals.  They do communion and everything and I drank out of the big cup and spilled the wine and stained my sweater, it was a real to do.  But then they read the passage.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

I started to cry.  I went home that night and had the first big cry since my grandmother had died.  I never dreamed of her again.

Coincidentally, just before the time she died, I had made a weird sort of peace with death.  This is not to say I will never be really upset about it.  But I was temping at the time and had too much time on my hands.  I started looking up natural burials.  I had no interest in ever being put in a cement box and didn’t know if I wanted to be cremated.  But the former scientist wannabe in me, was really into the idea of becoming dirt.  That makes it sound really lame, I know.  But really, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  I knew that whatever happened to me, I really wanted my body to decompose.  I wanted to become a part of the dirt and the grass and the flowers and the stars and whatever else I could become that makes up our universe.  I realized I didn’t need the idea of heaven to make it okay to die.  In fact I wasn’t even sure I believed in a stereotypical heaven, or heaven at all.   So there I was, with my grandmother dying, not knowing if I believed in heaven.  It made it weird to hear people talk about her meeting Jesus.  But it also made it really okay to me that she was dying.  I knew that she would become part of our earth.  To dust she would return.

It was Lent that year when I started thinking about what the minister talked about tonight.  That it is a ritualistic brush with death.  A time to think about, and make peace with our mortality.  Did you know you’re actually not supposed to say Hallelujah during Lent? That is a celebration of life, and we have seven weeks to go before we can do that and I can eat cookies again.

So tonight, I found myself weeping again.  Something about Lent is very cathartic.  It’s about admitting your weaknesses.  Not in a bad way, but in an oh my god I’ve been carrying around the burden of this for how long?  Kind of way.  Lent is the time you get to cry for your grandmother’s death when you didn’t even know you were sad.  It’s the time you get to be lost when you think you have all your shit together.   And for me this year, it’s also apparently, oh my god do I even believe in God?  Or is that just the outside pressure talking?