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Searching for Your Soul: Writers of Many Faiths Share Their Personal Stories of Spiritual Discovery - Softcover

Kurs, Katherine

 
9780805211115: Searching for Your Soul: Writers of Many Faiths Share Their Personal Stories of Spiritual Discovery
Softcover
ISBN 10: 080521111X ISBN 13: 9780805211115
Verlag: Random House Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Reflections on the importance of religion include contributions by such authors as Margot Adler, Rita Dove, Mary Gordon, James McBride, Kathleen Norris, and Malcolm X

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherine Kurs was born and raised in New York and graduated from Manhattan's famed High School of Music and Art in 1974, where she studied singing and music theory.  During and after high school, she performed folk and gospel music in coffeehouses and clubs in New York and New England, and then, in her early 20s, continued in the music business behind the scenes as an apprentice to the legendary record producer/engineer, Phil Ramone.  She was always drawn to the study of religion - she had been meditating since her early teens - and she recalls "sneak reading" Thomas Merton and Eastern philosophy under her desk while planning recording sessions for Billy Joel and Paul Simon.

Ms. Kurs soon left the "round-the-clock" music scene to work as a media producer in order to have more time to pursue a college degree and nurture her love of learning.  For eight years, she was tutored by four professors from the city and state universities of New York, completing her Bachelor of Arts from the State University of New York (S.U.N.Y.) in 1983.  She then left Manhattan for Cambridge, Massachusetts and graduate school at Harvard University.  At the Harvard Divinity School, she studied a wide range of subjects including Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, Jewish mysticism, the history of western Christianity, theology, and biblical studies in addition to receiving extensive preparation for ministry.  She completed the three-year Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree in 1986.  After graduation, she moved to England for three and a half years to continue her studies, receiving a Ph.D. from the Royal College of Art in London in 1989.  While in England, she also served on the clergy staff of the prominent progressive Anglican Church, St. James's, Piccadilly, in London.

Soon after she returned home to Manhattan in late 1989, Ms. Kurs went to work at historic Trinity Church, Wall Street, where she was Director of Communications for its corporation, a position which included the editorship of the award-winning journal, Books & Religion.  She left Trinity in 1993 to take up a one year post as Executive Director of the Association for Religious and Intellectual Life, a national interdisciplinary and inter-religious non-profit organization.

Since 1994, she has devoted her time to teaching, writing, and counseling.  She teaches religious studies, including spiritual autobiography, at Empire State College of the State University of New York, and is also on the faculty of the Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate college of the New School for Social Research where she teaches spiritual autobiography as a freshman seminar.  She has a Manhattan-based private practice as a spiritual/pastoral counselor, working with people of all ages and diverse backgrounds on a wide range of spiritual and religious concerns.

Ms. Kurs served for nearly 15 years as a liturgist, pastoral counselor, preacher, and religious educator at a number of noted Episcopal and Anglican churches including The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; St. James Church, Picadilly, London; and St. Mark's in-the-Bowery in Manhattan.  Committed to fostering inter-religious understanding, she directed the interfaith program of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in New York for eight years.  She is a board member of The Center for Jewish-Christian Studies and Relations of the General Theological Seminary in New York and is a member of the American Academy of Religion.  She continues to be involved with the work of the Harvard Divinity School, serving ex officio to the Alumni/ae Council and as a member of the New York Steering Committee of Harvard's esteemed Women's Studies Religion Department.

Aus dem Klappentext

"Spiritual genius emerges from every facet of God's diamond. All faith traditions share His light, brought forth most beautifully in this lovely volume."
-- Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles

"The spiritual life is often a journey and a process rather than a state of bliss. We might learn more about this essential part of life through honest and spunky stories like the ones told here than from books of guidance and doctrine. This book will instruct your spiritual imagination, and that is what inspires and sustains the work of the soul."
-- Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and The Soul of Sex


Searching for Your Soul brings together the stories of more than fifty writers who have eloquently explored the spiritual impulses that inform their lives. Whether Jewish or Hindu, Muslim or Roman Catholic, Methodist or Mormon, Buddhist or Pagan, Vodou or Jehovah's Witness, the rich experiences shared here offer a compelling glimpse into the uneven terrain that is often part of the spiritual journey.

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Ever since I can remember, I have known two worlds. The concrete, day-to-day physical world--deadlines, desks, dinner--the world of manifestation; and another world, the spiritual world of mystery, the world of God.

When I search now through the earliest recesses of my spiritual memories, I can see a little me, begging my mother to let me watch The Nun's Story for the umpteenth time on the Late, Late, Late Show. When Audrey Hepburn and the other, less beautiful nuns make full prostration in their long, stark habits, I do the same in a secret place inside myself.

I was seven when The Sound of Music was released. I went with my second-grade class and rooted for Maria, the flibbertigibbet postulant, to forget about Captain von Trapp and all those children and go right back into the serene, God-infused world of the convent perched on top of a snowy Salzburg mountain.

I must have been nine or so when I fixed my heart on a doll called Lonely Lisa from a B. Altman's catalogue. With her golden blonde hair and large brown eyes, Lisa was toddler size and probably about my age in doll years. She was the perfect companion for an only child and I was thrilled when my mother agreed that I could have her for Christmas. When she arrived, after admiring her for a brief period as she was, I took off her calico dress and carefully laid it aside. I found some material in my mother's sewing basket and worked for several days with an inner determination. Soon my project was finished. I dressed Lisa in a new outfit I had made specially for her--a nun's habit, including black "rosary beads" at her waist.

Lisa got to keep her black slippers (they matched her new, true identity), but her blonde hair was hidden behind her wimple. Her spiritual transformation was now complete.

For a little Catholic girl, perhaps there would be nothing very remarkable about these yearnings, but it was different for me. I was born a Jew.

My father was a hard-headed realist who came of age during the Depression on the Lower East Side of New York, the first-generation son of Russian immigrants. Taking over his father's paper-box business, he had no time for anything other than utter self-reliance. Work hard, rise early, and mind your business. Believe in only what you can bank on--and he meant it, literally. The Almighty Dollar, he used to call it, and on Yom Kippur this Jew would get up and go to work.

The only respite was on certain Sunday mornings in winter. While my mother slept late, I would dress myself, and my father and I would drive to the edge of Brooklyn to buy "appetizing"--smoked sable carp, lox, and pickled herring--Jewish food. As the car windows slowly defrosted, I settled in next to him for the drive, breathing in the reassuring smell of his worn-in tan windbreaker. The parkways merged into highways, Queens blurring into Brooklyn, while I listened sleepily to the stories of the Bal Shem Tov that he tuned in on the car radio. This was all I knew of Judaism.

My mother was no better equipped to show me the religious tradition of my birth. She came from a poor but arty Jewish family, her father a temperamental tailor who thought he was sewing couture and preferred finishing a seam to studying the parashah. Her mother--dark, flamboyant, and part Mongolian--gave her only son, my mother's brother, a pat on the head and violin lessons instead of a bar mitzvah.

My mother's rite of initiation was to join the Ringling Brothers circus. She became the lady on the flying trapeze, defying gravity, trusting the inner rhythm of the body as she went swinging into outer space with nothing to hold her here below.

In every way, her sense of the physical went beyond this world. For my mother, the universe teemed with souls and spirits, disincarnate entities, all somehow governed by the valence and pull of heavenly bodies. When I was growing up, people routinely phoned to let her know about their most recent trip to Mars or Jupiter, to which she responded as enthusiastically as if they had just returned from Europe or a posh Caribbean cruise. Others pleaded with her to read their cards or to accept an invitation to an upcoming seance.

I'd wake in the middle of the night, as children often do, for a visit to the bathroom or to get some juice, and I'd see her in the den, lighting candles, reading little books on spell casting or astrology, throwing the I Ching or laying out the tarot deck in a new pattern. Her present was bleak; perhaps the future would be better.

"You have a good head on your shoulders," my father told me on one of those rare occasions when he felt like complimenting me, but it was really to remind me that I belonged to his side of the family. I was practical, quick, and organized, and I positively reeked with a sober maturity.

But I also had no head on my shoulders at all. I could touch and see things that were not there, at least not there in a normal, everyday sense. Traveling ecstatically in inner space, I would sit in meditation for hours, watching my breath drop to nothing and feeling my body fade far away as I left my constantly arguing parents and this confusing world behind to draw closer and closer to God.

As a child, the stillness of empty churches called to me. When I reached the age when I was able to venture out on my own, I would retrace my steps toward my elementary school, passing through the arch that separated the outside, predominantly Jewish, area of Forest Hills where I lived, from the high-WASP precincts of turreted mansions, hidden closes, and cul-de-sacs. There, streets were quiet, voices were hushed, and Protestant churches abounded: silent, stately, and serene.

Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian, they were indistinguishable to me. At that age, I knew nothing of denominations. What I sought was the cool silence of these spaces where, on a weekday afternoon, I could kneel alone in front of a cross and pray to Jesus Christ. Was he human or divine? I did not know, but the sibilant sound of his name rang holy inside me. I felt his power, the power of another world merging with this one, moving through me as I uttered his name like a secret prayer. I stayed there for hours, transfixed, with Christ riding on my breath.

But then there was the weekend warmth of listening to elderly rebbes from the old country, real Jews, telling stories on the radio layered with meaning and sad irony. And my craving for the weight of my father's bread and potatoes that my mother, who traveled through the ethers, derided as "peasant food."

The world of the mind. The world of the spirit. The world of the rational. The world of the intuitive. The world of the Christian. The world of the Jew.

In which world, then, would I live?

Standing in the fading lavender light of an April afternoon the day before Easter, now nearing my mid-twenties, I bend over the baptismal font at the cavernous Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Everything feels cool here. The stone floor. The gaze of the priest. Especially the air, like having climbed to a high altitude where the atmosphere is thin and rarefied. I can hardly breathe. A cross, given me by a friend moments before, grazes my skin and I shiver. After years of waiting, I am about to belong to Him.

As the Cathedral grows dark, the rose window at the end of the nave hovers seemingly in mid-air. In a white silk blouse and a long, beige Brooks Brothers skirt, I kneel in front of the majestic, patrician bishop as he seals me in baptism with water and the holy chrism. Tracing the sign of the cross on my forehead with the oil he has blessed, he nearly boxes my ears as he holds my head in his enormous hands and marks me as "Christ's own forever."

I thought of my adult baptism into the One Holy Catholic and...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
080521111X
ISBN 13 
9780805211115
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
475
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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