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purplerabbitI haven't written much on LJ lately and although this one is longer than my usual, I hope that you will still take the time to read it and reply. It is important to me.
Coming of Age and the End of Faith
Easter Sunday, March 30, 1975
30 years ago
I stood wearing a "brand new" floor length white gown with little blue flowers. Dad and Mama were beaming with pride. My dad also pinned a white carnation corsage on my gown. They brought me into their room and I sat on the bed when they handed me a present to unwrap. It was a pretty bible with my name embossed on the cover. Inside, it read, "To our darling daughter, May the Lord bring you many blessings as you have brought many to us. Love, Mom and Dad." My mother had a similar bible with her name embossed on it that had been gifted by her parents when she came of age.
This day was one they and I had been looking forward to for a long time. After months of reading and studying, I was finally going to take first communion at church. In the ritual of our faith, I was to become an adult. I had already gotten my period for the first time a couple months before around my 13th birthday. This was an important step on the path in my growing into a woman.
That day I stood before the church and recited the creed. I waited breathless with anticipation to taste the blood and body of God. And when I did, the power ran through my entire body like a tingling that was the touch of all love I had ever known. I nearly wept with joy. Behind me in the church I could feel my parents' love as a part of the divine itself. My only misgiving amidst my joy was that the companions I shared that ritual with found none of the mystic power I did. They merely drank grape juice and ate a bite of bread. I felt a distance from them that I could not express. To this day I have the small glass communion cup in a box of treasured memories.
After services, a photographer had been hired by the church to take family photographs of the entire church. On my wall today still hangs that portrait of my parents, myself and my three younger sisters. It hangs there as a moment of happy family life frozen forever in time. A memory of a life that was and what might have been for us.
Two months and a day later, the family life of that golden moment was forever shattered. On May 31, 1975 - Memorial Day Weekend - my dad, John D. Atkins was the victim of a hit and run accident while riding his motorcycle. He spent 20 days in a coma. He was severely brain damaged. My mother and our minister (also my dad's friend) begged them to turn the life support machines off and let him die. St. Anthony's Hospital in Oklahoma City - a Catholic hospital - had a policy of "where there's life there's hope" and refused. He came out of the coma in a "vegetative state" which he remained in for the next eleven years. He didn't remember his family. A shuffling zombie wore my dad's face. My dad was dead but his body, locked in a mental institution, didn't die until January 1986.
If there was a point in my life where one could say I experienced the "death of innocence" and a coming of age - it was the year I was thirteen. It was a year of heights and depths so steep as to reshape my entire world.
I started menstruating. I became a "teenager." I entered the church, taking communion. I also had my first lover. Jackie was a year older. She taught me I was beautiful and that my body was also a gift of the divine. She touched me like no one else and made me feel an ecstasy which I understood to be of the same source as the power I had felt in church.
Then came the crash of all that I had. The loss of my Dad in such a traumatic and powerfully alienating manner was beyond even the adults in my world to cope with. My mother was in her own world of pain. Church became a place of painful memories and awkward silences as the people in it failed to rise to the challenge that was such a moral crisis. My anger at God and at the world around me was without limit. The depth of my grief and loneliness seemed infinite.
I have always seen that Easter Sunday as the end of my childhood. The last moment of security I would feel for a very, very long time. All that I knew and held dear would change that year. The memory has been so very painful that I use to get drunk the Saturday night before Easter every year as an older teenager. I did what I could to block the memory. Eventually, I turned completely away from Christianity and all the pain it represented for me. I won't go into my philosophical disagreements with Christianity at this time. It doesn't work for me for many reasons. Understand though that I was a very devoted and radically progressive Christian up until that break point. I know that the way my parents framed Christianity was always more loving and moving that the church of which they were members. Their love was the foundation that gave my faith meaning.
I never stopped believing in a divine power that some would call "God." I have been blessed with those moments of transcendent and ecstatic communion many times in my life. I see the face of the divine in all those I love and in every moment in which we are trying to appreciate and love our universe.
I miss my dad still with a depth and pain which even thirty years has not dulled. I still weep to remember that perfect day and how fragile was our happiness. I can but still wonder at the life that might have been. I accept the love and joy that has been my life that is. Yet, I doubt I will ever think of Easter Sunday without shedding tears. I realize I was blessed in the experience of that happiness no matter how short.
Coming of Age and the End of Faith
Easter Sunday, March 30, 1975
30 years ago
I stood wearing a "brand new" floor length white gown with little blue flowers. Dad and Mama were beaming with pride. My dad also pinned a white carnation corsage on my gown. They brought me into their room and I sat on the bed when they handed me a present to unwrap. It was a pretty bible with my name embossed on the cover. Inside, it read, "To our darling daughter, May the Lord bring you many blessings as you have brought many to us. Love, Mom and Dad." My mother had a similar bible with her name embossed on it that had been gifted by her parents when she came of age.
This day was one they and I had been looking forward to for a long time. After months of reading and studying, I was finally going to take first communion at church. In the ritual of our faith, I was to become an adult. I had already gotten my period for the first time a couple months before around my 13th birthday. This was an important step on the path in my growing into a woman.
That day I stood before the church and recited the creed. I waited breathless with anticipation to taste the blood and body of God. And when I did, the power ran through my entire body like a tingling that was the touch of all love I had ever known. I nearly wept with joy. Behind me in the church I could feel my parents' love as a part of the divine itself. My only misgiving amidst my joy was that the companions I shared that ritual with found none of the mystic power I did. They merely drank grape juice and ate a bite of bread. I felt a distance from them that I could not express. To this day I have the small glass communion cup in a box of treasured memories.
After services, a photographer had been hired by the church to take family photographs of the entire church. On my wall today still hangs that portrait of my parents, myself and my three younger sisters. It hangs there as a moment of happy family life frozen forever in time. A memory of a life that was and what might have been for us.
Two months and a day later, the family life of that golden moment was forever shattered. On May 31, 1975 - Memorial Day Weekend - my dad, John D. Atkins was the victim of a hit and run accident while riding his motorcycle. He spent 20 days in a coma. He was severely brain damaged. My mother and our minister (also my dad's friend) begged them to turn the life support machines off and let him die. St. Anthony's Hospital in Oklahoma City - a Catholic hospital - had a policy of "where there's life there's hope" and refused. He came out of the coma in a "vegetative state" which he remained in for the next eleven years. He didn't remember his family. A shuffling zombie wore my dad's face. My dad was dead but his body, locked in a mental institution, didn't die until January 1986.
If there was a point in my life where one could say I experienced the "death of innocence" and a coming of age - it was the year I was thirteen. It was a year of heights and depths so steep as to reshape my entire world.
I started menstruating. I became a "teenager." I entered the church, taking communion. I also had my first lover. Jackie was a year older. She taught me I was beautiful and that my body was also a gift of the divine. She touched me like no one else and made me feel an ecstasy which I understood to be of the same source as the power I had felt in church.
Then came the crash of all that I had. The loss of my Dad in such a traumatic and powerfully alienating manner was beyond even the adults in my world to cope with. My mother was in her own world of pain. Church became a place of painful memories and awkward silences as the people in it failed to rise to the challenge that was such a moral crisis. My anger at God and at the world around me was without limit. The depth of my grief and loneliness seemed infinite.
I have always seen that Easter Sunday as the end of my childhood. The last moment of security I would feel for a very, very long time. All that I knew and held dear would change that year. The memory has been so very painful that I use to get drunk the Saturday night before Easter every year as an older teenager. I did what I could to block the memory. Eventually, I turned completely away from Christianity and all the pain it represented for me. I won't go into my philosophical disagreements with Christianity at this time. It doesn't work for me for many reasons. Understand though that I was a very devoted and radically progressive Christian up until that break point. I know that the way my parents framed Christianity was always more loving and moving that the church of which they were members. Their love was the foundation that gave my faith meaning.
I never stopped believing in a divine power that some would call "God." I have been blessed with those moments of transcendent and ecstatic communion many times in my life. I see the face of the divine in all those I love and in every moment in which we are trying to appreciate and love our universe.
I miss my dad still with a depth and pain which even thirty years has not dulled. I still weep to remember that perfect day and how fragile was our happiness. I can but still wonder at the life that might have been. I accept the love and joy that has been my life that is. Yet, I doubt I will ever think of Easter Sunday without shedding tears. I realize I was blessed in the experience of that happiness no matter how short.
