Angel Harp: A Novel

by Michael Phillips

  “Just keep being myself. And I preach what I consider the true essence of Christianity. If those who find me a heretic oust me from the pulpit, then so be it. My nature is not to contend but to enlighten. That I will continue trying to do, whether in the pulpit or out of it.”

  “You don’t really mean that there are some who consider you a heretic?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Too much goodness in the gospel is heresy, don’t you know. Believe me, Calvin’s roots run deep. You have to remember that were it not for Scotland’s role in the Reformation, Calvinism might never have gained the doctrinal stranglehold it did throughout the rest of the church.”

  “Why Scotland?” I asked.

  “John Knox exported Calvinism from Geneva here to Scotland. It took over the religion of the entire country. Scotland in the early seventeenth century provided the greenhouse, so to speak, from which Calvinism spread worldwide.”

  “Ever since I came,” I said, “I have been learning about Scotland’s history. But I guess I haven’t paid much attention to its religious history.”

  “Scotland’s history, at least of the last five hundred years, is religious history. Religion is the engine that has driven everything else.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Everything in Scotland goes back at some point to religion. This is where Calvinism’s roots remain deepest. But…” he said with a little laugh, “I didn’t mean to start a church history lecture. As you said, you’re not a ‘church person.’ ”

  He grinned, as if to reassure me that he meant nothing but good humor by the comment.

  “And it really doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

  “That you’re not a church person?” he rejoined.

  I nodded.

  “Not in the least. People are people. They’re not divided into church people and not church people. Every man or woman I meet has something I can learn from. I like people. I don’t try to categorize and pigeonhole them into this group or that group or this belief or that belief, but to find out what I can learn from them. Actually, if you want me to let you in on a little secret, if I had the choice to spend the afternoon talking theology with a group of church people or with a group of intelligent and logical agnostics, I would pick the agnostics any time. They’re often more interesting!”

  “Maybe you are a heretic after all,” I laughed again.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Oops!” he said. “I’ve got to be somewhere. One final plea—at least do this for me, come visit the church. During the week, I mean, when no one is there. Bring your harp and play for a while. I will leave you alone if you like. You may have the place to yourself without fear of heretical redheaded curates popping up from out of nowhere. Just play and see if you do not feel a majesty, a reverence… maybe something like what you feel here. Our church is a wonderful place, twelfth century… the acoustics are marvelous. You will think you are in Westminster Abbey! It’s just a small country parish… but, well, just come and try out the church before you decline my invitation.”

  He was looking at me with such a childlike expression of expectation, how could I refuse?

  At last I smiled and nodded. “All right,” I said. “I will agree to that.”

  “Good. Here’s my card and telephone number. Ring when it’s convenient for you. I will come collect you if you like—where are you staying?”

  “At Mrs. Gauld’s bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Ah, right. The church is a mile from town, in the country, and somewhat difficult to find the first time. How is tomorrow?”

  “Fine,” I nodded.

  “Good, give me a ring then.”

  He took several steps along the path, then paused and turned back.

  “Oh,” he said with a sheepish smile, “—if it is not too presumptuous of me… might I ask your name?”

  Chapter Nine

  Confusing Roots

  Michael, row de boat ashore,

  Hallelujah.

  Michael, row de boat ashore,

  Hallelujah.

  —“Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”

  My parents were hippies of the 1960s, my mother Canadian, my father from the U.S. They went to Woodstock and traveled around in a VW bus plastered with bumper stickers about Vietnam and Nixon and Whales and Tibet and Authority. I’ve seen pictures. They got “saved” and then became part of the Jesus Movement, which was sort of the hippie version of Christianity at that time. In those days hippies named their children with trippy Mother Earth designations. Then the Bible-carrying parents of the Jesus Movement went to the other extreme and gave all their children biblical names. A flood of Rachels and Sarahs, Davids and Jonathans, Ruths and Rebekahs joined Generation X along with Sky, Clover, Moon, Fawn, and Willow.

  My parents sort of split the difference and named me Angel Dawn Marie. I was never quite sure if my roots were in the hippie culture or in the Jesus culture. It seemed as if they couldn’t make up their minds and so threw in a little of everything, with an extra name to boot. The result was that I didn’t feel I belonged to either culture—or to any other for that matter. I never had a sense of belonging.

  The whole thing was cumbersome and I hated it. The “Angel” added such a subtle pressure to be a “good girl,” a perfect little child—“That’s a good little angel!”—that sometimes I couldn’t bear it. From before I could remember I vowed that when I grew up I would drop the Angel the first chance I got.

  And I did.

  When I went away to college, I told not a soul my full name, including the college admissions office. I kept the change secret from my parents because I didn’t want to hurt them—they were good parents and had no idea how I felt—but I filled out all my college papers sans Angel. I didn’t blame my parents. It wasn’t their fault how I had reacted to a name that I’m sure meant something very special to them. They didn’t know and didn’t need to know. It was something I had to work through myself.

  My mother was sincere, but I have the idea the “Angel” was her idea. All through the years I was growing up, there still lingered about her the aura of hippiedom. She was notoriously disorganized, was invariably late, tended to dress with a peculiar flair, and was always taking up the banner for some oddball cause or another. She was utterly mistrusting of government. When Ralph Nader came along, she was all over that, even though she couldn’t vote in the U.S. elections. I think she may have even contributed to one of his campaigns.

  I don’t know how to describe it… she just seemed like one of those people who never outgrew the sixties. My father was a lawyer so it was different for him. He sort of by definition became part of the establishment. But my mom never really was able to mainstream.

  After being away a few years, and coming home to visit mostly on holidays, and at first for the summer, though that gradually gave way to two- and three-week visits, suddenly it dawned on me, Gosh, my mother’s a space cadet!

  Perhaps it’s the swing of the generational pendulum, but I tended to be fastidious in how I dressed and orderly in my whole outlook on things. I suppose you would say I was conservative and intellectual in my approach to life. I wasn’t an intellectual, a“brain.” But I tended to process information intellectually and rationally.

  After I began playing the harp in connection with music studies in my second year away, the irony of it could hardly escape me—that within a year of dropping the name Angel I had taken up the very instrument associated with angels! But it was coincidence, nothing more. It only deepened my resolve to never let my given name pass my lips again.

  Good heavens, what was I going to say, “Hi, my name’s Angel. I play the harp”?

  No way.

  Coming out of the Jesus Movement, my parents were of that broad general classification of Christians called evangelical. Such I always considered myself, too. I hadn’t thought much about my beliefs. I just adopted what the church taught and what everyone else believed. I suppose that’s what most people do. I “accepted the Lord�
� when I was thirteen at a church camp. I was baptized. I went to Sunday school and church and youth group and knew all the songs and slogans and catchphrases and doctrines that evangelical young people were taught. Gradually I thought of that teaching as what I believed. It never occurred to me that there might be a difference between being taught a bunch of doctrines and real personal belief.

  When I went to college, I started attending a church near the school where many of the Christian students went. Everything continued on as before, though as I said I was then going by a different name.

  I met my future husband—his name was Edward—in my last year of school and we were married two years after that. He made no profession of belief. He was a thorough secularist. The fact that I became involved with him, accepted his proposal, and then married him, without worrying too much about our different outlooks, probably says something about the lazy nature of my own belief system. People can make of it what they will.

  I suppose loss of faith comes slowly.

  I said earlier that making concerted, definite decisions is hard and takes courage. That’s the opposite of what happens when you lose belief.

  Does anyone suddenly decide to stop believing?

  I don’t know. I sort of doubt it. That isn’t what happened to me. I just gradually drifted away from beliefs I thought I held. I don’t know when it started, or when it ended. It was gradual, invisible. I just slowly stopped believing. And if my beliefs had just been learned from what others taught me, maybe it was no great loss. If they were really the beliefs of other people that I had just latched on to and pretended to believe, how could I sustain them anyway? Maybe I’d never really believed at all, only had held to some religious culture of ideas that were current among the people I was around.

  If making decisions is hard, mental drift is just the opposite. It’s lazy. When you don’t summon the courage to do hard things, and instead allow yourself to be carried along by the current, taking what comes, that’s the lazy way. I have the feeling that’s how most loss of faith comes—from laziness rather than decisiveness. That sounds flaky. More like my mother than me. But there is a lot of our parents in us, probably more than we want to admit. Maybe in the drift that occurred I was my mother’s daughter more than I knew.

  When I went away to college and dropped the name whose implications were so burdensome, I didn’t immediately also drop the Christian faith of my upbringing. That came more slowly. But I think that’s when a few cracks began to develop in my belief system.

  Asserting my independence in such fashion with my name, and asserting it against the familiar persona I wanted to wear no longer, was an act that had implications, too. Maybe deep in my subconscious, saying “I don’t want to be called Angel anymore” led also to, without my stopping to think about it, “I don’t want to be called a Christian anymore.”

  But I am guessing. It’s hard to know ourselves accurately. That being we know best will always remain a mystery.

  The bottom line is this: Because I had never thought deeply and concertedly about what I believed, or thought I believed, and because I was spiritually more lazy than courageous, when the drift away from my shallow beliefs began, I never even knew it.

  Edward and I were married for seven years. He was a good man, entirely faithful, loving and kind and considerate. He provided for me, made me feel safe and secure. He believed in me. Actually, he was far nicer than many Christian men I knew and had dated. I kept going to church after our marriage, which he encouraged. But he had no interest in it himself. Neither of us really minded that our beliefs were different. We got along and respected one another in spite of our differences. We had a good relationship and a good marriage. Somehow belief never entered into it.

  My friends and acquaintances at church, however, were concerned about my being “unequally yoked” with a nonbeliever, as the expression goes. They were always praying for my husband’s salvation. I prayed for him, too, in my own way. But it was difficult for me to share their anxiety about his soul. Maybe I should have. Perhaps that shows how weak my own faith had become, I don’t know. I’m not sure why I kept going so regularly—it seems odd to me now.

  But honestly, my husband was kind to me and we loved each other. Somehow I found it difficult to fret about his lack of spirituality. Especially so in that at the women’s prayer meetings and Bible studies I attended every week, half the time was usually taken up with everyone’s complaints about their husbands—their Christian husbands.

  The way the other women talked, I wouldn’t have traded places with any of them. Three of the most outspoken members of the group were divorced. One woman was on her third marriage. The leader of the Bible study was divorced and remarried, and both her husband and ex were active in the church. Her ex had remarried, too. All these women were eager to counsel me about my marriage. They felt sorry for me because my husband wasn’t “saved,” yet I wasn’t sure I didn’t have the best marriage of the lot. My husband was a good, nice, gracious person. It seemed that should count for something. It meant the world to me.

  But in their eyes such human qualities didn’t matter. Only salvation. What someone was like as a person had nothing to do with it. It was something about the Christian outlook I never could understand. None of them had the slightest interest in knowing my husband, or knowing what I saw in him. Their inconsistency—can I go so far as to call it hypocrisy?—bothered me more than I realized at the time. It wasn’t until later that I realized how shallow it made them all seem, not only as women, but spiritually shallow, too. They didn’t really care about people. How could that not make what they called their faith seem superficial as well?

  When my husband died my world was shattered. By then my mom was also gone, one of the millions who make up the breast cancer statistics of those who didn’t benefit from early detection. My dad, still with dual citizenship, eventually returned to Oregon in the United States and went on with his life. I hadn’t seen him since Mom’s funeral, and he was too busy when my husband died to come to his. His lack of compassion hurt, and communication between us, never the best, drifted toward nonexistence.

  During those two years of my life I discovered how little faith I had left. In fact, I began to wonder if I had really ever possessed true faith at all. What had it ever meant? I had just gone along with what everyone else believed. I had prayed to “invite Jesus into my heart” at thirteen because I knew that’s what you were supposed to do.

  It isn’t that I had faked it. When you’re young you think you’re sincere. But how capable are you of knowing your deepest self, of gauging true sincerity? As time goes on, you’re taught what to believe. Gradually you just accept things without thinking about them. It becomes more a system of belief than anything very personal. You learn the pat answers. You memorize the doctrine. You catalog the Bible verses that confirm and validate all the points of belief so there are no cracks in the system. Somehow you flatter yourself that you know the Bible, when in fact you’ve actually read probably about one two-hundredth of it and haven’t a clue about its overview and bigger picture.

  Of course I could remember constant talk about one’s personal relationship with Jesus. But all that meant was that at some point in your life you prayed a prayer whose words someone told you to say. Where’s the personal relationship in that? I was never taught how to live, how to behave, only what I was supposed to believe. How personal is it when you’re taught exactly what to think?

  I never considered any of these things when I was in the church. I just went along. It was only later, in retrospect, that I began seeing it with different eyes—seeing that the talk of personal relationship was really masking a pervasive blanket of conformity that actually prevented much personal expression of belief. At least it did in my case.

  I had one weird quirk to my personality that I never quite understood. It didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the me that I knew. In the same way that perhaps I had more of my mother in me than I realized, this quirk pr
obably came from the same gene pool that led my dad to become a lawyer, to chase lost causes, to stand up for the underdog, to try to right the world’s wrongs.

  As contrary as it sounds, because they obviously pursue such a career for what would seem to be a love for children, teachers can be remarkably clueless to the true dynamics at work between the youngsters in their classrooms. I have worked as an aide with several teachers through the years who seemed completely taken in by their cutest, smartest, most “in” students, while remaining utterly oblivious to those less-fortunate boys and girls with real needs who were right before their eyes every day. When I started working in classrooms, and often being given playground duty, I always sought out those boys and girls on the fringe, those with special needs, even those who were looked upon as troublemakers. Once they realized that I genuinely cared about them and would listen, such children flocked to me during every recess. Most of the regular teachers had no idea why.

  I certainly wasn’t a campaigner for right and truth or anything else. I was generally soft-spoken. But a sense of justice for the underdog was always with me. And there came times in my life when a great sense of anger and indignation would rise up unpredictably within me against something I perceived as unfair or simply wrong.

  Probably my interest in the unpopular children as a teacher’s aide grew out of my own experience on the playground when I was young and that unpredictable Don Quixote complex suddenly came over me, and against all odds I would speak my mind without considering the consequences. Usually those consequences weren’t good. Who pays attention to the shy girl on the playground who suddenly takes it upon herself to get in the face of the class bully for being cruel to one of the other children? I got more than one bloody nose and skinned knee for my trouble. It was very confusing to my sense of youthful justice to realize that not even the teachers cared about why I did what I did. They put the blame on me for causing trouble, and I, not the class bully, was the one who had to stay in at the next recess.