Brave Soul: A Spiritual Memoir

Contents

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act I

As my generation danced to disco music, experimented with pot, and started having sex, I was a teenage Pentecostal.

For five years I lived a life separate from the world and followed a strict code of dress and deed. Old-timers called it holiness. They could spot us females by the way we looked: always in dresses; no pants, shorts, sleeveless blouses, or short skirts; no makeup, jewelry, short hair, painted nails.

Today it’s almost unbelievable that I, born fiercely independent and a die-hard feminist, adhered to a fundamentalist doctrine—this during the most liberal era in American history, the 1970s. Those were the days when the mantra was If it feels good, do it. Drive-ins showed X-rated movies. Marijuana laws were loosened. Cocaine was called the champagne of drugs. Porn magazines at convenience stores were not yet wrapped in brown paper. Some gals went braless. Everyone snickered about swingers and nudist colonies. Abortion was a private option for girls in trouble. The drinking age was 18. Ads for head shops were in high school newspapers. Cigarette machines were everywhere. My high school provided two outdoor smoking lounges for students. At the close of the ’70s, kids my age really believed marijuana would be legalized soon.

Within this permissive culture (the polar opposite of the decade to follow), I was a religious conservative when conservative wasn’t cool. This was a time prior to massive rallies over abortion, school prayer, and Christian values. To kids my age, such emotional appeals would have seemed fanatical, a sign of an unhinged personality. The way for a teenager to be back then (and maybe always) was cool, low key. Don’t be a Buzz Kill. The Moral Majority was just taking hold in politics. I wore their bronze lapel pin, shaped like a cross, proclaiming Jesus First.

Though most kids at my school attended church, a couple also wearing the Moral Majority pin, teens didn’t make a big deal about it. Church was not the center of life for most teenagers. The religious path I walked, seemingly alone within a school of 2,000 students, made me a target for cynical youth, even church-going kids, who were quick to put down conservative beliefs or knock religion altogether. It was the golden age of sacrilegious humor in Saturday Night Live and Monty Python movies. We were taught by teachers who maintained a secular stance that Christianity interfered a lot throughout history: the Crusades in the Middle East; Christianizing Native Americans and Africans; the legacy of slavery in America with its biblical roots.

Believe it or not, in the 1970s it was hard to tell people I believed in Jesus and the Bible. It took a lot of bravery.

Pentecostals were stricter than the Moral Majority, mostly Baptists. A lot of the Pentecostal teachings on dress and worldliness were based on Bible scriptures and particularly the teachings of Paul (about whom Pentecostals seemed to quote more than Jesus Christ). Pentecostals were not supposed to own or watch a TV. Of course, going to the movies was out of the question. We could not participate in activities that interfered with church services or our dress code such as girls’ softball or basketball, marching band, or for women employment with a uniform that required pants. With jewelry prohibited, wedding bands were controversial but ladies’ watches permitted. Pentecostals were not supposed to go to almost any kind of recreational activity enjoyed by other Christian denominations: dances, bowling alleys, skating rinks, public pools, cinemas, rock concerts, nightclubs. As if still clinging to Victorian mores, Pentecostals did not condone males and females swimming together (called mixed swimming) or in wearing swimsuits. Pentecostals enjoyed getting together at church rallies and to eat at restaurants.

Most disheartening for me was the Pentecostal position on music. We weren’t supposed to listen to rock, country, jazz, or blues—music of the world, songs that weren’t about God. We were taught to listen only to gospel and contemporary Christian music. That wasn’t so bad in the ’70s as new Christian music evolved into a pop and rock sound appealing to young people. Yet music in the Pentecostal church was a major part of the service—peppy, energetic, and loud with drums, piano, organ, guitar, bass, even brass instruments. The church cited Psalms to support singing and music instruments to worship the Lord. Everyone in the congregation sang and clapped along with the fast-paced tunes. Most services kicked off with modern upbeat versions of old-time gospel standards like At the Cross or Everybody Will Be Happy.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

I’m the product of two types of large country families influenced by the Depression Era South. My dad’s family was Pentecostal, very religious, the one we visited most often. I’d have to remember to bring a dress to go to their church—always without Dad. Mom’s family didn’t belong to a church though they were aware of and made fun of Pentecostals. Mom’s uncle was a Pentecostal preacher who tried to persuade her to join his faith, but as a teen she preferred the Methodists because they permitted dancing. In the 1950s her young brothers formed a country swing band and played nightclubs. I grew up hearing their records alongside Mom’s albums by Merle Haggard, George Jones, Ray Price, and Ray Charles. In the ’60s a couple of my older cousins who inherited the family musical talent formed a rock band, cutting their teeth on the Beatles’ music. By 1972 when they were young adults, they looked and sounded like the Allman Brothers Band. To them I was just a kid, but I dug their long ponytails and free spirit. Smoking. Joking. Cussing. Wearing shades. Always practicing their music and playing really loud. God, they were cool. Mom’s family was the fun side, but we rarely got to visit them.

As a child who didn’t understand holiness teachings, the way my dad’s family lived, the Pentecostal life was hard to believe let alone follow. But as a teenager, I changed my life and joined the family religion. The Pentecostals would say I allowed the Lord into my heart. Because I sincerely wanted to be good (daily fighting peer pressure to be otherwise) and because I certainly didn’t want to go to hell (a major theme of Pentecostal sermons), I joined the church after three years on the pew. My parents joined after a few weeks when we started going to the strict church in the spring of 1975. For the second half of the decade, my parents brought my brother and me to church twice on Sundays plus Wednesday nights and any week-long revivals, special services, singings, and rallies.

My brother refers to our pre-church years as the good old days. Before my family got religion, we were notorious if not cacophonous within our expanding suburban middle-class neighborhood of tract homes and chain-link fence. My folks were simply blue-collar stock, but neighbors looked down their noses on us. Our small, three-bedroom brick house was the one on the corner where Dad and his buddies worked on cars all hours of the night while drinking beer. Our property was reported to the city for looking unsightly as broken appliances sat in the backyard to be repaired. Junk cars were parked beside a large, stand-alone garage my dad built behind the backyard, where the racket of power tools and clashing hammers against steel was commonplace. Neighbors also heard Bob Wills’ music blaring through outdoor speakers over the patio when my parents cooked out on the gas grill. Neighborhood kids jumped on our trampoline. We were the family who did not go to church other than vacation Bible school for my brother and me. Yet Mom never missed the Happy Goodman gospel music show on TV every week.

But when I was 12, my family abruptly turned from our so-called worldly ways and joined what might be termed a cult today: with its certain plan for salvation, control of lifestyle, mandates to give everything to God, suspicions of friendships or relations not of the faith, and end-time prophesies. My Pentecostal past was an embarrassing secret as I grew into adulthood, went to college, and broke from the church and organized religion. On my own, I studied world religions which teach reincarnation and karma. My quest was no longer religious but spiritual. I followed a solitary path toward spirituality and illumination in beliefs from around the world and throughout history, even secret Gnostic records, The Lost Books of the Bible, and the New Age movement. My relationship with God remained personal, private, and honest.

As I think back on my teen years as a Pentecostal, when I lived in the world but not of the world, I’ve grown to appreciate both sides of age-old arguments, helpful today as politics and religion meld together. People who know me now have no idea when I was in high school I was so religious, I was unapproachable to former friends, family, and prospective dates. Nor do they know the epiphanies that led me back to a childhood rooted in little religious training, where music was the family passion, humor our trademark, sin debatable, and a philosophy that life though bittersweet is meant to be enjoyed.

Sweet By and By

The night my dad’s best friend was killed marked the end of an era for my family. Throughout my childhood, the three constants were: a case of beer in the fridge, country music in the background, and fun times. Our family motto could have been Let the good times roll. From the 1960s to the mid ’70s, our family-of-four routine was familiar but at times chaotic. Mom was a school teacher, always punctual to work and when home grading stacks of papers or preparing projects at her desk in the den. Dad was a building maintenance engineer who left early mornings to work in a big-city skyscraper. My father also liked working on cars. He constantly traded automobiles, routinely driving home in a different vehicle. He stayed up late working on cars and drinking, usually missing dinner with the family. By the time I saw him at the end of the day, he was usually drunk. I could tell by the look in his eyes, his loud voice, and Mom’s disgust.

Mom spent the summers with me and my younger brother. During the school year, we kept busy with separate interests (dance, band, and plays for me; bicycling stunts for my brother and the neighborhood kids). Summers meant a trip to the library for the book club, swimming lessons at the city pool, carnival rides, and drive-in movies. We slept late, sometimes outdoors on the trampoline to gaze at the stars, or watched TV shows like Night Gallery or reruns of The Twilight Zone. The big highlight was Mom’s family reunion, which started when I was an older child. It was a weekend event in the forest of a state park where my uncles and cousins set up their music equipment; plugged in the guitars, steel and fiddle; assembled the drums; and commenced to playing country and rock music till the wee hours of the morning. Dozens of kinfolk camped together in cabins. Smoking and drinking was a family tradition although my mother did not partake.

In stark contrast, the more frequent visits to my dad’s family were sober and boring. Thoughts had to be censored. I watched what I said, careful not to offend lest there be an argument and my behavior or attitude proven biblically wrong. As children my brother and I had to remember to pray before every meal instead of grabbing the food set before us like we did at home. And somehow we were supposed to do without TV for the trip’s duration. We had to find other means of keeping ourselves occupied like playing board games or going to town. Cards were not permitted in Maw Maw’s house. When my aunts or cousins of the faith came to visit her, they all talked about the Lord, particularly the end times in which they were certain we were living, and the Rapture, when Jesus would appear from the sky to claim the souls who were saved. The way they told it, it could happen any day.