Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  That October, before Unity-Clearwater responded to the charges, the AUC sent a letter to twenty-two other churches around Florida sharing “a hostile and negative series of announcements”136 about the U-P.C. and its alleged policy violations. Some of those churches made the letter public. Word of it reached Unity-Clearwater. The congregation went abuzz with concern.

  In response the U-P.C. invited Rowbotham and other AUC members via the letter to the next full council meeting in May 1995 for “dialogue and ‘respect building.’” The writer says, “As we affirmed from the beginning, this matter was not handled properly by the Association, and the challenges that have evolved in connection with it have not been caused by us.” According to the U-P.C., Rowbotham needed to rescind his negative statements about the U-P.C. until a proper investigation could be conducted following the AUC’s own procedure as set out in its bylaws. “This is not a personal matter to us,”137 the writer says, insinuating that it’s instead a matter of principles. The controversy only served to stoke the flames of purpose in U-P.C. meetings. The spirit remained one of revolution.

  That month, the Emma Curtis Hopkins College board, of which my mother was still president, decided to move forward with incorporating the school and preparing its application materials for the Florida Department of Education.138 They requested any gifts, financial or otherwise, that the U-P.C. higher education subcommittee desired to share, especially books.139 By that time, the board had collected just $8,000.140

  Three weeks later, Bob and Campbell Whitaker, president and dean of the school, came to the board with grave news.141 In light of the school’s lack of finances, a complete library, and a facility—three standards that must be met in the eyes of the state in order to obtain licensure—they believed that denial of the school’s temporary license application was a distinct possibility and feared that rejection of this kind would end the project entirely. To guard against this, they advised either further delaying the submission of the school’s application or seeking authorization to operate as a religious institution instead of an educational one. The board decided to pursue the latter. In March 1995, they received state approval and the Emma Curtis Hopkins College opened.

  In the church directory from that year, I appear in one photo.142 The tilt of my head is such that I almost didn’t recognize myself: I’m all the way to the left in a line of youths on an ice-skating rink with six chaperones. I don’t recognize anyone else in the photo, and they are not identified in the directory, but I vaguely remember this day: it was my first time ice-skating. My skates look oversized, as does my sweatshirt—I’m in the awkward middle stage of a growth spurt. I have bangs and my hair is pulled back in a French braid, my favorite style at the time because my mom had to do it for me. My stance is gawky, as if I’m not sure whether or not I’m meant to be there. I’m not sure if these other people know who I am.

  My parents are what you might call lenient. I was rarely grounded as a child; instead, we would have conversations about my decision making—how I should know better than to make prank calls in the middle of the night, or why I needed to do my math homework even though I hated math. They went vegetarian when I was four—the Fillmores were vegetarian—but I continued eating meat for six more years. I was allowed to read any books I wanted to read. I could watch almost any movie—only excessive violence was banned. We always debated ideas respectfully. I was taught early that ad hominem attacks were off-limits and that listening to an opponent is the best way to win an argument. My parents had always told me that attending church was my choice. By the time I turned ten, I’d stopped going consistently, riding along with my parents every other week or so.

  That same year, I switched to a new elementary school with an arts program. I was interested in dance and couldn’t wait to begin; I’d been doing gymnastics for four years and had a feeling that I’d be good at it. I had a hard time making friends, though. I was a shy kid. I spent a lot of time at babysitters’—my parents were busy people and I didn’t have siblings who could supervise me in their absence. I had a stutter, which was further isolating, and I’d become well acquainted with loneliness, almost to the point of not feeling it. I turned inward. Many times that year, I lay in bed in the morning affirming that I was sick so that I wouldn’t have to go to school. It worked: I missed a third of the school year. By the end of the year, one of my lymph nodes became infected and I had to have it removed. To this day I’m certain I did this to myself through the force of my own mind.

  I remember knowing I had a special power. I don’t remember being taught this in church—not explicitly. I remember the focus on language, on affirmations and denials. I don’t remember the lessons, despite having absorbed them in some deep way. I find this mystery fascinating, how much I am still shaped by something I no longer wholly remember.

  What I’m left with instead are snapshots of memories. In the spirit of supporting students’ unique spiritual journeys, Unity-Clearwater accepted people from all faith backgrounds: I remember a Passover Seder my father hosted in the fellowship hall, searching for the afikomen and finding it hidden under a folded retracting wall—my feeling of pride in that moment. I remember my Sunday dresses: one burgundy velvet, another flower-printed with lace. And hiding in the closet of the Sunday school, eating candy sprinkles meant for arts and crafts. Sitting in a circle singing hymns with other children. And sitting in the dim, Christmas-decorated sanctuary between my parents, holding a white candle ringed with white paper. Knowing we’d reached the end of the Sunday lesson when we stood for the Prayer for Protection. Even now the words bring tears to my eyes. I still feel safer when I say it.

  The opening ceremony of the Emma Curtis Hopkins College was held at a sunny six in the evening in August 1995,143 in the school’s in-progress library. By this time, the congregation of Unity-Clearwater had grown to almost 1,500 members.144 Eight had enrolled in the new college. The board of directors, their spouses and friends, and students and faculty gathered round as Leddy gave the welcoming invocation. “Dear friends, we bless and praise the grand opening of the Emma Curtis Hopkins College here this beautiful Indian summer,”145 she said, beaming at the group. “This unique educational opportunity has a long foreground, and yet there is much more to be done by all of us who care so deeply about Emma Curtis Hopkins College, because of the possibilities offered future generations.”

  Leddy urged those present to give the project the encouragement of their spoken and written word, the welcome of their actions, the gifts of their monetary substance, and the power of their prayer. Each person received a keepsake Emma Curtis Hopkins College bookmark, the back of which bore a portion of Hopkins’s own baccalaureate address from when she graduated the first class of New Thought ministers in 1891. “Although these words were first shared by the mother of the New Thought Movement, they echo in our hearts and minds today,” Leddy said. She closed with a blessing, and offered refreshments to the group.

  As the months added up, work on the library was diligent and accelerating.146 On Saturdays, volunteers listed and moved reference books onto two shelves in the cataloging room. Leddy and Russ, her husband and a former rocker in charge of the church’s audio-visual needs, donated three large bookcases to replace the small metal ones—and the college board was requested to release funds for the purchase of five additional bookcases, which they obliged. A generous church member donated forty dollars toward the effort. When Dell’s mother passed, he bequeathed her collection of hundreds of theological texts to the library: Unity books, a New Thought collection, and Christian Science books and journals. Space was made for more shelves to be built—all believed funds for a cabinetmaker would be forthcoming very soon. The board unanimously voted to call the library deChant Library, in honor of Dell’s mother.

  U-P.C. satellite centers began to open up around the county. Charles Throckmorton and his partner, Brent, opened a storefront church on Madeira Beach, which my parents and I soon began attending with Dell’s and Leddy’s blessin
gs, in order to support the spread of truth. My parents continued their work with the U-P.C. and the Emma Curtis Hopkins College. The boards of both missions moved forward with great faith, knowing Divine order was always at work in their endeavors.

  III.

  When I was twenty-six, I eloped to California with a man I’d been casually dating for less than six months. He was an acquaintance from college—we’d traveled in the same group but rarely hung out. After graduating, he moved to California and I moved to Florida, and after reuniting with him on Facebook, I discovered he was also a writer. I asked if I could publish one of his short stories in a small journal I was editing at the time. We became pen pals. Every few weeks, a piece of local trash from our respective coasts would arrive in a mailbox: takeout menus, receipts for coffee, matchbooks, lost homework. He typed up Biggie lyrics on a typewriter. I sent him a shell, black and big as my hand, in a cigar box. That August, we moved back to New York at the same time and started hanging out every day. On New Year’s Eve, we kissed for the first time.

  As a child, my husband was a Mass-frequenting Catholic. He went to Catholic school for seventh and eighth grade and then Jesuit high school, and in Jesuit school, they went to Mass. The discipline of it instilled in him a certain pride, but he also took from it a conviction of God’s vindictive nature. He believed he needed to earn God’s approval to counter his own base impulses, and that if he followed his gut instincts, he would likely lose it. He still has a difficult time trusting in his successes or believing he deserves them. He apologizes much more than I do. He’s believed, at times, that forces beyond his control were conspiring against him. And that people didn’t like him because of some intrinsic trait.

  He also believes that voicing a fear makes it less frightening. In Sunday school, he went to confession weekly. On the way, if he couldn’t think of how he’d sinned that week, he would instead come up with things to lie about and say he did wrong. The consequences seemed arbitrary, that each sin could be resolved with a requisite number of prayers. The process was nerve-wracking and nonsensical. But after my husband spoke his sins, real or imagined, aloud, the priest would absolve him of them, and my husband would be freed. He could walk away confused but feeling once again safe.

  When something goes wrong, my husband believes in the worst possible outcome. If we’re low on cash, we’re going to starve. If someone doesn’t answer an email, they’re avoiding him. Doing something wrong the first time he tries it has sent him into a panic. His tendency is to speak his fears aloud because in saying them out loud, he can hear how ridiculous they sound. Then they’re not scary anymore—by sharing them with someone, he’s able to let them go, even if fleetingly. Preparing for the worst, to him, is preferable to hoping for the best and being disappointed—in which case he’s the fool. When we argue, he tends to concede I’m right and that his list of sins is endless.

  I once heard him say, while sending a film festival application, “I won’t get in, anyway. They always choose the same people.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “How can you not get in? You’re the best.”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “Stop saying bad things about my husband,” I replied.

  “I’m not,” he said. “It’s the truth. I’m not sad.”

  He smiled to show me he was fine.

  When my husband and I were a few years into our marriage, I found myself feeling irrationally irked at him over minor incidents. We typically get along easily—we’re best friends. We make each other laugh all the time, sing together, feed each other. We can’t go three hours without talking. He’s the funniest, sweetest person I know. But we had gotten into a cycle of repeating the same argument over and over again: he would say something negative, and I’d jump down his throat. It got to the point where even relatively neutral statements about the laundry taking a long time or the refrigerator not being cold enough sounded negative to me.

  I finally realized his tendency to articulate negative ideas and fears was disturbing me. For me it was beyond his pessimistic tendencies and my optimistic ones—in articulating his pessimism he was sharing it with me, and in listening I was committing the mortal sin of casting doubt.

  By that point, I hadn’t been to church in seventeen years—I had stopped going entirely around the same time as my parents, when I was twelve, and had forgotten a lot of it. My most recent memory was of the storefront satellite ministry founded by Charles and Brent on Madeira Beach. We had never returned to Unity-Clearwater after that, and before long, the satellite ministry closed. Unity had become a distant memory, one inseparable from my childhood.

  I remember standing in the kitchen of my childhood home, practicing affirmations with my father. Shouting, “I’m not stupid!” in frustration—him responding, with his infinite patience, “I am smart.” I remember watching my words, afraid that I might affirm something bad accidentally, that I would fail a test or hurt someone I cared about. Over time, it became a kind of superstition in which I believed admitting I was afraid, even acknowledging the feeling to myself, would cause my fears to manifest as reality.

  Doubt to me was equivalent to mortal sin: to cast doubt upon a hope was to do away with all possibility for that hope’s fulfillment, and would doom me to a life of hopelessness. I refused to live a life of hopelessness. I was a child of God—and therefore I was successful, I was prosperous. I repeated this silently to myself. I believed in the power of I Am.

  Despite all the time that had passed, despite the fact that I had long forgotten Unity’s place in my life, in my mind, when I married, positivity wasn’t doctrine; it was truth. It never occurred to me that the yin might have a yang, that someone could find safety in negativity rather than positivity—negative outcomes were not possibilities I even wanted to acknowledge. Hearing them voiced so often by my husband infused my life with a low-grade terror that manifested as irritation. In saying bad things out loud, he was making them real—so I had to make him stop. The more I tried to explain this to him, though, the less it made sense, even to me. The cause wasn’t matching the effect.

  I return to what is now the Unity Church of Clearwater with my mom in the summer of 2015. The sanctuary’s tan-backed theater seats have been replaced with green upholstered ones, and the brown carpet with beige. Where rust-colored curtains once hung upon the stage alongside the gold-winged globe, there is an impressionistic painting of a seascape and wide white walls flanked by screens displaying soothing nature stills. A man sits at a drum kit with his sticks in his lap; another with a ukulele stands near him, and a woman with a guitar, with placid, faraway looks in their eyes. Above our heads, people murmur in a media loft, conferring over technical issues—I recognize Leddy’s husband among them. The room fills and people greet one another as they take their seats. My mom and I sit a few rows back, on the aisle.

  At ten thirty, three high-pitched tones play over speakers built into the ceiling and the doors of the sanctuary close. The room falls quiet. A middle-aged woman approaches the microphone and sips from a bottle of water, smiling at the audience. “Prayer is the heart of our Unity ministry,” she begins. “Prayer request forms are found in the lobby and in the prayer room down the central hallway.”

  On the screens, a message appears in white above a babbling brook:

  Many find God in the silence. Let’s be still and help them in their quest. Thanks for turning off your cell phone.

  “Let us affirm Divine guidance, healing, prosperity, freedom, and peace for every name that has been shared as we begin our worship with a reading of today’s Daily Word lesson,” says the woman. “Take a deep breath as we become centered.”

  The message changes on the screens: “Rejuvenate.” And changes again: “I am whole, strong, and full of vitality.147 Nature in its summer splendor invites me to rest and rejuvenate. Cats and dogs bask in the sunlight. A gentle breeze carries the scent of flowers. The sunset provides a moment of splendor at the end of each day.” And changes again: “You
have been born anew.—1 Peter 1:23”

  “It’s peaceful, I guess,” my mom jokes.

  The woman leads us through a guided meditation on the Daily Word and then steps to the side as the man with the ukulele takes over the microphone. His hair is middle-parted and very clean, almost fluffy. We sing along with his original song, written around the theme of rejuvenation, following the lyrics as they appear on the screens. Afterward, he leads us in a rendition of Unity Church of Clearwater’s anthem, “House Built on Love.”

  “I don’t remember it being this corny,” says my mom.

  Leddy comes up the aisle as we reach the final chorus. She shakes hands with people here and there, smiling solicitously, her expression a perfect example of tranquility, her red hair down and cascading over her shoulders. She reaches the microphone just as the song ends. A live feed appears on the screens.

  “You are here by Divine appointment,” she says.

  “Life bringers” deliver Unity Church of Clearwater tote bags to newcomers, who make themselves known in the audience. Leddy begins her lesson. The topic is family. “How do we get to be a family?”148 she asks. “We came across the universe to find this cluster of souls.”

  She speaks on this topic for a moment and then calls the ukulele man back to the microphone. He tells the story of his own family: he was adopted when he was eight from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program along with his two brothers. As he launches into another song, this one telling their story, a woman in the second row lifts her hands into the air and leaves them there for several minutes.