Saturday, April 5, 2014

Nancy Austin's Lenten Meditation April 2, 2014

Central Congregational Church (Providence, RI)



I joined this church last fall and will be baptized by Claudia during the Easter vigil service. As a new member, I want to thank you, and everyone in the congregation, for so warmly welcoming me. It has been great to have so many varied opportunities to join in shared fellowship. At the same time, I also appreciate the respect shown for my pretty private, serious and contemplative nature.  Professionally, and by inclination, I spend a lot of time deep in thought, and it is not always easy for me to quickly transition from that place into the public realm of “Hello!” And words, sentences. All the happy sounds of voices sharing. So I might ask your patience. It takes me longer to the swim to the surface than some of you.

I want to send a special shout-out to my shepherds, Ann & Jim Scott, who couldn’t be here tonight. They went out of their way to make sure I got introduced to everyone - when I would have been much more inclined to try and blend into the woodwork, maybe for years. But Ann had me immediately jumping in to work on the Gift Baskets for the Christmas Bazaar – and it was a good thing. As was attending the Women’s Retreat, reading the book of Matthew together by candlelight, helping out at the Camp St. food pantry, joining the UCC- state-wide event, visiting the Coptic Church, being offered this opportunity to share my faith journey (in progress) during Lent with you tonight  -- these are some of the special events I have cherished, alongside coming to church every Sunday – a fundamental commitment in my life now.

I could repeat what many have said before. We worship together in an amazing sacred space, filled with luminous music. As those that went on the Women’s Retreat know, I admire people with beautiful singing voices. And it has been a delight to hear my own voice, un-judged, joining a church filled with singing voices. I like everything about the service: Rebecca and Claudia’s meaningful sermons, the Bible reading, Aidan’s generous work building the next generations, getting to know so many remarkable women – especially those older than me. (Shout out to Betty Selle - so vibrant and inspiring! What a mentor for how to live fully at 94!!!) All of this is giving me the strength and wisdom to imagine how to conduct a well-lived final third of my life. I want to get this next phase of my life right, and I am looking to this congregation to help me with that one.

So. This is my snapshot of the church that I joined a short seven months ago. Everyone has been wonderful and I have no regrets.

 Central Congregational Church Christmas Bazaar, Dec. 2013

Nancy Austin at the Women's Retreat, Feb. 2014



But why did I come to this church? In Providence? All the way from Newport?  What can I say about my personal faith journey that has brought me to stand here in front of you? Here is the way I’m going to try and convey that story tonight.

Nancy Austin at eight years old. A pensive me (May 1962)



In my first memory of church, I am in elementary school, and holding my father’s hand as we walked up the looong walk up to the austere un-ornamented, tall, steepled, all white (in every sense) Presbyterian Church in Westfield, NJ, a Barrington-like suburb of NYC where I grew up. I loved my father then and now very much and asked him as we made our way like slow pilgrims up to the church door that Sunday: "How is my Grandfather doing?" Since I knew my mother had flown back to Ohio to be with my Grandfather - who was sick. And my father, the Marine, looked into the distance, as only a Marine can do, and said: “Well, Grandfather had a few crackers to eat last night, and then he went to sleep." My mother would be back in a few days.  

Since I was a child, and so much in my family already struck me as cryptic, inexplicable and often, in truth, down right secretive, I gathered that my dad, whom I loved, was trying to tell me something important but I really had no clear idea what. And I shouldn’t press the issue.  No one in church that day (or ever for that matter) said anything to me about dying or my family’s loss or the mystery of heaven. We just each individually soldiered on with our day.

Around this same time my father was diagnosed with kidney cancer and had one of his kidneys removed. As it turned out, my dad became one of the few people at that time to live 5 years after a kidney cancer diagnosis. What is relevant here is that my parents were tremendously worried. Rightly so. And this worry was compounded by the anxiety that my dad would lose his job if anyone at Union Carbide far away on Park Avenue in NYC knew. So they kept his cancer a secret that we were never to talk about or ever mention to anyone in any way. My mother, raised in the Depression, became even more draconian in her need to never spend money, have no debt and save as much as possible. My father, who eventually died at 81 at home, with me, of a different cancer, spent all those years under this private death sentence and later said he felt that he never could justify spending even a quarter on himself.

Today, I am better able to understand how different generations are differently shaped by different world historical events. And this spills over into church life. Perhaps for my father the austere white church in Westfield reminded him of the vast acreage of white crosses at Argonne Cemetery in France, where his Uncle Raymond and 14,000 other American soldiers had died during one offensive at the end of World War One. Or, closer in time, the miracle that he had survived active duty as a Marine, for the entirety of both WWII and the Korean War. I better understand how unwelcome the 1960s were to my parents who were both raised in the Depression, and deeply shaped forever by the trauma of WWII. As I mentioned, my father was on active combat as a Marine Corp officer (mostly in the South Pacific) from the moment he graduated from college until Oct 1945 when his orders to invade Japan were stopped -  in his view, just in the nick of time - by the bomb. (How we argued about the V.J. Day Holiday here in Rhode Island!) Today, I can understand and empathize with all my parents were trying to do in moving to Westfield to live a normal, post war life. Although after my father got cancer, perhaps the normal was always just out of reach, or maybe it was all they could do to take care of all the many daily challenges of raising a family far away from the support of extended families?


Our Family on Easter 1962


The Presbyterian Church, Westfield, NJ


Easter Sunday 1966 at the Presbyterian Church in Westfield, NJ


Both my parents were very active in the church in Westfield, and perhaps they did turn to the church for their many private worries. But in my upbringing, I don’t recall anyone ever stopping to have a deep or forthright conversation with me about anything. Not that Sunday that my Grandfather died. Not in compassionate response to any of the many red flags I began raising from 4th grade on. Nor at any point in my career as a promiscuous Girl Scout or on through high school Confirmation -- despite many indications I was a girl with things on her mind, looking for someone to talk to and hear me out. Indeed, my few tentative efforts to speak even privately with someone I thought I could trust about what I had to say, …my efforts were met with behavior not unlike the authorities in Rebecca’s sermon last Sunday who wanted no one to disturb the status quo. … I still ponder the questions: How do we learn to listen and really hear another human being? How do we listen across generations and in changing times? What does it take to stand up for the innocent and vulnerable?


I offer this anecdote with compassion for my parents, to give you all perhaps some insight into why I am a keen observer, private, accustomed to being alone, self-reliant, keeping my own counsel, and not inclined to ask for help or trust that someone will respond to my request for help. On the flip side, this perspective has made me sensitive to the plight of vulnerable people, innocent people, changing teens and young adults – trying to find themselves, for better and sometimes for worse. And also I am attentive to outsiders. Often since innocent childhood, people in crisis or distress have turned to me privately, even secretly, for counsel or wisdom or solace against the void of their own demons and despair. And I have been strong helping to carry their burdens as my own. Even when it was never my job. I have walked this walk for people, deep into the night, with good people, confused people, even broken or downright evil people, even at the risk of my own death. And I have survived to be here with you in this congregation today. Only God knows what I have seen, soul to soul. 



Burying Mom next to Dad, near Ohio Wesleyan (June 2012)


Howard, Marshall & Nancy - pilgrimage to bury Mom 



When I was 19, I met my future husband in Worcester, and we moved in together the day we met.  For ten happy years we dreamed together our dream of the future, as we worked and saved and Bert became the first person in his family to go to college, then the first to become a medical doctor. I finished a Masters in Art History at Brown on a full scholarship and began teaching as an adjunct college professor. Both my brothers were physicians, married to physicians at the time, and my parents sighed relief that all had turned out so well. 3 married children and 5 doctors! What a bonanza!


Nancy Austin, Bert Woolard, Mary Alice Austin (Westfield, 1976)


And then there was me, who completed a double major in chemistry and math, but left science in graduate school to study sacred painting and architecture – which in many ways is really what the classical canon of Art History is composed of. … Only we leave out the faith part. I have probably visited more churches, synagogues, and temples all over the world than many of you, including prolonged stays in Rome, and over time the emotional experience of sacred spaces overwhelmed the analytical historian I had been trained to be. What was the mystery of faith that kept some of these buildings alive with worship for generations, even centuries, .. even millennia? 




c. 1200 Apse Mosaic of the Tree of Life, Basilica of San Clemente, Rome



50 Stimson Ave (May 1983 - Dec 1995)
Speaking of architecture, many people love the nearby yellow house at 50 Stimson Ave, tucked into the corner, and when my husband and I managed to actually buy that house for $170K in 1983, after he finished his residency at Rhode Island Hospital, I really felt like we were the luckiest people alive. We were an incredibly happy and committed couple poised to start adult life after 10 years of hard work spent dreaming of this very moment. And yet. It is a shock I never really quite get over.  Bert & I discovered – as many do - that dreaming a future was a very different occupation than finally getting the chance to live that dream. Within the year we discovered how much we didn’t know about one another, and how few skills we had to address our mounting adult challenges. Before our second child was born in 1985, we were discussing divorce.




Beloved Caroline, born January 1984
Beloved Cyrus, born March 1985

But. We agreed to soldier on. Especially since we both adored our children, and loved loving them. And on paper everything looked as if it couldn't have been more perfect. Except that it wasn't. Like my dad’s secret battle with a real cancer, our estrangement became a looming secret emotional cancer, and we didn’t even know how to find a doctor, let alone an emergency room, really, ever. Although of course we tried, in our own embarrassed, private, even secret ways. I panicked trying to finish my Ph.D. and secure a tenure track job to support myself. But Bert worked all the time and was happy to delegate running the household to me. Children got sick, and had to be taken here and there; and I never somehow could line all the pieces up for a Plan B.


Wait!!! WAIT!!! Was I blind? Here you all were as a congregation, all this time -- not two blocks from my house. With architecture, signage, a presence in place. What was my problem? 







Here you all were. All this time. Not two blocks away from my house. I ask myself often: what would have made it possible for 30- to 50-year-old Nancy to have joined this congregation at any point before divorce? Although this question is academic now for my family, I offer my regrets and reflections to you as a cautionary tale about people’s hidden burdens, the poisonous nature of secrets, about the challenges of making a marriage work, and the honesty and support every relationship needs from a larger community. I didn’t trust that anyone would hear my pain. Or that church fellowship could be about sharing difficult, even humbling, conversations together, - as well as soldering on side-by-side.

My now ex-husband & I never did figure out how to be an adult couple that communicated. We never did find a way to negotiate collective priorities and together as a family achieve shared goals. And so, in our daughter’s senior year at Wheeler, after many earlier efforts to find other ways to deal with one another, we agreed to privately – even secretly – to separate and divorce. We agreed that since this was about our failings, not anything at all our wonderful children had done, we would do everything possible not to impact them. I would set up a downsized home base; Bert – who only wanted to travel and hated houses as it turned out, would get a condo; never have more children; and we would continue to honor and help celebrate the only family our children had known their entire life. Needless to say, as almost anyone who has been divorced will likely warn you, the last 10 years have not followed that script.

I began here tonight with the story of my Dad’s failure to help me prepare for and process my Grandfather’s death. How do we end up repeating behaviors from our parents we so desperately wanted never to repeat? I am overwhelmed with sadness at how Bert & I sprung divorce on our kids, finally, after it was quietly and legally put in place.  I cringe at our inability to deal with conflict and how we lied to ourselves as well as our children about how this “adjustment” to living apart would change nothing, but really everything would change.

For a decade now, my two children and I have worked hard to rebuild a different kind of family. There have been and continue to be devastating moments of sadness. But it has been the journey to life lived in community. And so I come to you now. Ask and you shall receive. (Note that the Bible doesn’t tell you what you will receive!)  My journey of healing has brought me to this congregation. Hospitals may cure you of disease, but it takes a faith community to heal.

What words could have reached the long-ago 30-year old me? A new mother trying on unrehearsed adult roles with no mentors? Self-conscious; untrusting; assuming everyone else had it all together? I just don’t know, but I wish I had at least tried attending church in my confusion and pain. Why was it easier to let a malady fester into a terminal disease for my family rather than take the chance – a risk – to just walk in the door here any Sunday? Maybe stay for coffee; find a new friend? Why was it easier to endure, to soldier on, than imagine the possible light of transformation in a faith community?

Tonight I stand before you as a credible human being and share my story. I tell everyone I know: Come to Central - even if you don’t think it will matter. Bring your kids, especially if you think you have convinced yourself you are an outlier or carry burdens no one could possibly understand or empathize with. Know that even though people here look pretty pulled together, the congregation includes people I have already met in seven short months who are open to offering a trusting ear to listen. You are not alone. There is no need for the cancer of secrets. The Bible is a wisdom book that has helped me beyond all the books in my pretty vast library.    Or just come to church on Sunday and cry. Offer for those people to come sit with me! We can cry together side by side, and mumble the words to the hymns through our veil of tears.

In closing, I want to sound like I was a plant for the pledge drive this Sunday. But I am not. It matters to me that even though this church was here when I moved to Stimson Ave in 1983, and I was simply too blind to see… It matters to me that it remained a Beacon and a Reference Point that was really ALWAYS there for me to come home to.  I want to thank you for building an incredible community day after day, and year after year, to where I got to witness Rev. Rebecca Spencer’s 25 years of service celebration this fall. Thank you for continually renewing a congregation that was begun generations before. I must be a very slow learner, but 30 years later, God has reached into my heart and finally brought me to a place where I could join - and here you are!!! A thriving and established community, with deep roots that continue to yield. Steadily welcoming new members, including me - among many many others. Steadfastly continuing to do the work to care for the next generation. Offering fellowship. Helping us all find wisdom and love and peace as we age.

Thank you for welcoming me home to worship together in this faith community. Better late, than never.  Thank you so much.





Nancy Austin

Newport, RI
Lenten Meditation, April 2014

Nancy, Caroline and Cyrus - Christmas in Newport

Beloved Tugboat, 1997 - March 28, 2014







Friday, April 4, 2014

Baptism, Family Life, & Guns, c.1954




This Easter I will be baptized as an adult, as part of a deepening commitment to my faith journey.  Recently I asked my older brother, Marshall Austin, if he had any memories of me getting baptized as an infant? 

Tonight, as older siblings reminiscing,  Marshall and I had a good conversation about what it must have been like for our parents to move into a new suburban development outside Pittsburgh in the 1950s, while my dad worked briefly at Carnegie Mellon before heading to NYC, when I was just two. My parents would have been in their mid-to late thirties, with three children. Coincidentally, Marshall moved back to Pittsburgh about a decade or so ago and is a pathologist now at Magee Hospital, where I was born in 1954.


Thanks to Marshall's memory and my mother's love of photographs, I discovered that I was baptized on Sunday September 26, 1954 at the Bower Hill Community Church in Mount Lebanon. Marshall had 
clear memories of Mom chuckling over why we joined this particular church:

"We went to a small Presbyterian church just off of Bower Hill Road across from Jefferson Elementary School in Mt. Lebanon. I remember mom saying the very young pastor went door to door in the nearby newly built neighborhoods to solicit new members." My parents asked if they could speak to the Senior Minister, and the young man had to admit that he was the only pastor.



After 60 years, this church's current website describes a progressive history and active tolerant faith community:

"For the past 60 years, the story of Bower Hill Church has been shaped by a "hands-on" kind of faith. We have never shied away from those sometimes-troubled issues where religious conviction and contemporary life intersect. In the 1950s, we housed the first Jewish synagogue in the South Hills. In the 1960s, we were among a very few churches in the Pittsburgh area to support the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1970s, we hired the second female pastor ever to be ordained by Pittsburgh Presbytery. That story of relevant, socially-conscious faith continues still today. Whether we're supplying fresh produce to downtown women's shelter or sending school supplies to orphans in Kenya, we believe that "faith without action is dead." (James 2:20)"

Marshall remembered that the church was located across the street from the elementary school he attended. The church website speaks of a 60 year history, and a photograph my father took that September Day in 1954 when I was baptized suggest the new church was still meeting in the elementary school - most likely while the church was being built. 



I was baptized as an infant on Sept. 26, 1954.
At this time, it appears the Bower Hill Community Church in Mount Lebanon, PA
was still holding services at Jefferson Elementary School, across the street.


The tidy "before church" photo of my mom & I.
(Sept. 26, 1954)

Marshall Austin in 1954, age 4.


Howard Austin in 1954, age 7.

My Dad was the oldest of 8, but we seldom saw his large extended family.
Here is a 1954 reunion with my dad to the left, with Betsy - still thriving in Maryland,
then Emily, Fay, and Robert.
Perhaps a gathering when my Grandmother Austin died at 60 in Nov. 1954?

My paternal Grandfather Jason McVay Austin, Sr. in 1954.

Tonight I did some research and remembered again the crises my parents had lived through: from growing up in the Depression where my mother's father, a lawyer, lost the family house because there were no clients with cash. Then there was the trauma for my Dad of fighting in the South Pacific during most of his twenties. Next, when they had been married 5 years and had two small boys, my Dad was called from Oct 1950 until some point in 1952 to serve as an active duty Marine first at Camp Pendleton and then in Korea. I somehow hadn't understood that the Korean War had lasted until July 1953. So in some sense, our family's life in Pittsburgh played out against the very recent memory of my mother living on a military base alone with two small boys, and the uncertainty that this could happen again at any time during the Cold War. My father remained a reserve officer until 1956. At that time, after 18 years of service, apparently the danger that he might be called away again sent my mother over the edge and he permanently resigned from the reserves. At this point we moved to Westfield, NJ.

One of the things that jumped out at me from the preserved family photos from 1954-5 was the fairly violent energy of the boys and the prevalence of toy guns. Here are some of the photos my mother saved.

Boys at Howard's 7th Birthday Party.

Boys & Toy Guns at Howard's 7th Birthday Party.

My mother wearing my brother's Marshall's toy gun outfit, 1955.


Nancy Austin on Christmas Day 1955. Howard is to the left holding a gun,
and Marshall, dressed as Prince Valiant he tells me, is to the right.
I still have saved the rocking horse, but not the toy guns.

Looking forward to being baptized as an adult in 2014.
I'm bringing this wonderful child along too.