By Daniel Rigney
Our friend Patricia is just two lives short of a cat. In her sixty-some years on Earth she’s already had seven personal incarnations, and she probably has at least two yet to go.
Patricia
is not reincarnating in the Hindu or Buddhist sense, though she does
teach mindfulness meditation in a shelter for homeless mothers. Her
religious affiliation is Unitarian (UU*). In this modern liberal
religious tradition, Patricia is finding ways to reincarnate herself in
this life and to share what she learns with others along the way.
Some may call this a process of “spiritual rebirth.” Others may call it reinvention, or resynthesis, or biographical reconstruction. But
by whatever name, many have experienced what we could call multiple
reincarnations (or “intraincarnations”) within the span of a single
human lifetime -- each of us undergoing transformations in his or her
own unique way.
This is the story of the transformations of our friend Patricia, an American original.
First Life: Catholic Mommy Bunny
Patricia
was born in Buffalo, New York in the 1940s, the third and final
surviving daughter of a devoutly Irish-Catholic homemaking mother and a
longshoreman father who loved opera and wrestling and had, earlier in
his life, briefly considered a priestly vocation.
Patricia
describes her childhood neighborhood as a working-class
Irish-Polish-Italian Catholic ghetto. Her Dad died unexpectedly of a
heart attack at the age of 54, and though Patricia was the youngest of
three daughters in her family, she learned to play the role of nurturant
“mommy bunny” to her older sisters.
Mothering her sisters would be the first of many symbolic parenthoods in Patricia’s life.
Strong-willed
and a little feisty (at age nine, she won a fight with a boy who
bullied her) Patricia learned from an early age that being a girl
doesn’t mean being docile or unadventurous. In a later generation of feminists she might have been called a “grrrl.” Her early years in upstate New York were only the start of her seven life adventures.
Second Life: The Southern Migration
Patricia’s
second life grew from the soil of her first. She was only ten years old
when her father died, leaving her and her sisters half-orphans. Her
mother felt like an orphan too. Financially and emotionally depressed,
Patricia's mother migrated with the girls to Shreveport, Louisiana,
where she found work through family connections as a clerical worker and
eventual office supervisor at what would later become Pennzoil.
Northern
Louisiana was (and still is) a steamy, forested stronghold of
Protestant fundamentalism and far-right politics. Life behind the “pine
curtain” was not the sort of cultural milieu a northeastern Catholic girl would readily cotton to, but she gradually adjusted to her new environment.
Experiencing multiple incarnations in a single lifetime often entails moving from environment to environment and
accommodating differences among the people we encounter. Patricia
prides herself on her ability to get along with people who are very
different from herself, including even conservative Southern
Protestants.
Patricia
remained faithfully within the cultural world of Catholicism during her
second life in a Louisiana Catholic school. Anyone familiar with
Catholic social teachings knows that the church has long taught (if very
unevenly practiced) a special concern for the poor. The church’s social
justice concerns are especially evident in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum
(1891), a cornerstone of the church’s social teachings, reaffirmed and
amplified in subsequent encyclicals, most notably in John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963).
Patricia “got” the church’s social justice message at an early age, and she strove to live it.
As
a teenager in the deep South, Patricia entered her second symbolic
parenthood as a self-employed one-girl babysitting service. Although she
is an enormously nurturing person, it was during her life as a
babysitter that she seems to have decided that biological parenthood was
not for her. Like the good Catholic girl her parents raised her to be,
and like her father before her, she contemplated devoting her life to a
religious vocation instead.
Girls
in Patricia’s school were urged, sometimes through
mysteriously-appearing locker notes, to ask themselves, “Is God calling
you?” Patricia decided to answer the call.
Third Life: Becoming a Nun
At the age of 17, Patricia became a novitiate in a socially-progressive order of nuns, the Daughters of the Cross, during the turbulent and exciting
(to some) Vatican II era of Catholic institutional and theological
resynthesis. (Think “Nuns on the Bus,” but decades earlier.)
From
her Catholic school, St. Vincent’s Academy in Shreveport, where she had
been an admired and accomplished student, Patricia set off to convent
and college, spending most of her next five years as an undergraduate at
Marillac College in St. Louis, an academically rigorous school that she
describes as a “West Point” for nuns.
Liturgically
innovative, intellectually stimulating, and a center of ecumenical
activities in the 1960s, Marillac college exposed Patricia to the
thought of modern religious scholars, including theologians Hans Küng
and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and religious historian Bernard Cook. She
majored in history and literature, acquiring a wide-angle liberal arts
lens through which to understand her life, and the life around her, as
it would continue to unfold.
Patricia’s
cohort of young, socially-conscious and energetic nuns knew themselves
as “the New Breed.” They prided themselves on not running away from the
world, but running toward it. Sundays at the infamous and ill-fated
Pruitt-Igo public housing projects in St. Louis opened Patricia’s eyes
to depths of poverty she had not seen before, and to a profound loss of
hope she sensed in the lives of people she encountered there. The
experience drew out her social justice concern for the well-being of
others and her empathy with underdogs. (As her first husband would later say, “Trish, you always want to right wrongs.”)
Patricia
and other young novitiates and nuns during this period chafed under the
old-school patriarchal and (in the convents) matriarchal leadership of
the church. Some church leaders, molded in earlier times, were nostalgic
for the church’s more hierarchal and frankly authoritarian traditions,
and their scowls showed it.
Patricia
and her progressive sisters ran afoul of the old guard when, showing
signs of excessive independence, and less monastic and more
socially-active than their more cloistered “pink sisters,” this new
“band of sisters” built a progressive underground network of social
action that she likens to other underground resistance movements against
social injustice through history.
Toward
the end of her religious vocation, Patricia moved back to Shreveport
and taught sixth grade (all subjects) at St. John’s School and was
caught up in the politics of church, school and
motherhouse, which were governed by a “kitchen-cabinet” or
backroomocracy. (Trishism: “Where two or more are gathered, there are
politics.”)
Patricia shared a house with old-school conservative German nun whom she describes as “paranoid,” “lacking in compassion,” and “situationally neurotic.” Out
of necessity, Patricia continued to develop her ability to live and
work with people very different from herself, though avoiding those who
were irredeemably toxic.
By
now, Patricia was realizing that her days in the traditional
patriarchal and matriarchal church hierarchy were numbered. Church
officials didn’t bar the door when she discerned that it was time to go. A new life in the secular world was waiting outside the convent wall.
Fourth Life: Starting Anew in Texas
Back
with her family in Shreveport and borrowing civilian clothes from her
sister, Patricia did clerical temp work for awhile. Her mother had tears
in her eyes when Patricia told her she was leaving the religious order.
Her mother was unsure how to break the news to her Catholic friends.
“Tell them,” Patricia suggested jokingly, “that I didn’t like the food.”
Her
mother, remembering that even as a child Patricia “did what she damned
well pleased,” accepted her daughter’s choice, though she’d hoped that
sending a daughter to the convent years earlier might have earned
herself a “higher place in heaven.” Her mother forgave her for leaving
the order, and Patricia recalled the saying that “though the Irish
forgive, they never forget.”
Soon
Patricia was on to Life Four. She and her good nun-friend Flo set off
for Texas to make a new life. Patricia completed her undergraduate
degree at Dominican College in Houston, worked at St. Joseph’s Hospital
and taught 8th and 9th grades at Galveston’s O’Connell Catholic for a
time, imparting social studies and life skills to a racially and
ethnically mixed population of students, many from disadvantaged
backgrounds, and some of whom were slow and “know we’re not smart.”
Once
again Patricia played the role of mother with some of these students –
not as their biological parent but as a nurturing social one.
Moving
on to Houston in her late twenties, Patricia took a job as a legal
secretary and became wiser to the ways of the secular world. She met her
first husband, journalist Carlos, at a party through mutual friends,
dating and later marrying this smart, hard-drinking and smoking
newspaper man, whom she describes as a good man with the tortured soul
of a poet. Carlos had worked his way up from the cotton fields to become
an urban sophisticate, a nice dresser, and an enthusiastic participant
in the after-work bar scene where journalists recovered from their
deadlines.
Eight
years after they married, the two parted amicably. Carlos was from a
traditional Mexican-American family that expected wives to be mothers as
well. Carlos had two daughters from a previous marriage, and Patricia,
childless by choice, stepped into the role of stepmother. She felt,
though, that Carlos often seemed to put his children first, to the
detriment of their marriage relationship.
Three
months after they divorced amicably, Carlos died of a heart attack at
47. After his death, Patricia prepared for her next incarnation.
Fifth Life: Toward the Healing Professions
By
now Patricia was working as a secretary at Baylor College of Medicine.
She would eventually work her way up to an administrative position,
shattering a glass ceiling in the process with the help of graduate
credentials she was earning in counseling.
Still
in Houston and single again, Patricia continued her studies, this time
as a graduate student in educational psychology at the University of
Houston, where she met her second husband, Roy, a doctoral student in
neuropsychology. They had a whirlwind courtship.
Patricia’s and Roy’s decision
to marry was driven in part by the bureaucratic requirement that a
couple had to be married to qualify for a VA loan on a house they wanted
to buy on their way to starting a counseling practice together. She
didn’t meet his family until after they had married.
Patricia’s
career interests were evolving toward psychology by this time, and she
was studying for a post-religious, post-teaching and post-secretarial
career as a marriage and family counselor, with related interests in
mediation, negotiation, and sustaining healthy relationships and
organizations. The amusing irony of this marriage counseling career
direction is not lost on thrice-married Patricia, who has an acute sense
of humor and an eye for the dark comedy of existence.
Roy,
like first husband Carlos, had worked his way up from humble beginnings
(Roy’s father had been a trailer park janitor) to become a high-status
practicing professional. Like Carlos, Roy wanted children, but Patricia
had long since chosen to have her tubes tied (“our bodies, our selves”).
They divorced but are still on good terms.
Patricia
continued to rise to higher levels of responsibility in the
administration of the Cellular and Molecular Biology Department at
Baylor College of Medicine under the direction of pioneering endocrinologist,
Dr. Bert O’Malley. Her work included being responsible for aspects of
medical education and for the school’s Willed Body program, and
advocating for the interests of both medical school research faculty and
students.
As
Patricia rose to become an administrator at Baylor Med, she joined
countless other women of her generation who made the “Peggy Olson”
transition, beginning from clerical positions and rising to assume
greater and greater responsibilities, and in doing so, paving paths for
the advancement for future generations of professional women.
Patricia brought systems thinking and a collaborative approach to her work, skills that transferred from
her counseling training. Her mission was to help make complex research
and educational operations work well and bear good fruit.
It was at about this time, in her fifties now, that Patricia experienced a wave of depression. An
older sister and two close friends had moved from Houston to distant
places (Massachusetts, Chicago, New Zealand) within a short span of
time, creating abrupt changes in her relational life that triggered
feelings of abandonment similar to those she had felt when her father
died abruptly during her childhood. With help, she pressed on.
Sixth Life: Soul Mates
Patricia’s
sixth life began when she met and joined her life with the life of
Matthew, a chemical engineer working first in research and development
for NASA and later for the State of Texas in the critically important
work (especially in industrial Houston) of maintaining and sustaining
environmental standards.
They
met through the video dating service Great Expectations in 1991 and hit
it off, recognizing in each other the qualities of personal integrity
and respect for others (exemplified in the golden rule), and a shared
belief in the importance of giving back to community. After dating for
four years, they made it official in 1995.
Though
they’re not political or religious twins, Patricia and Matthew have a
mutually affirming and supportive bond. Matt’s interest in biblical
archeology and scholarship bespeaks a serious interest in understanding
the broader historical context and deeper meanings of the teachings of
Jesus.
Patricia
and Matt describe each other as soul mates. They’ve been in
relationship (‘interdependent’ as Trish says) for more than twenty
years.
There’s a word for that these days: Sustainability.
Seventh Life: Creative Retirement
Patricia
retired from Baylor Med in 2010 after forty years of service. Her
going-away presents were a fine Irish crystal bowl and a hardhat (she
had helped coordinate the reconstruction of her building following
Hurricane Allison). The hardhat conveyed the message that she was
“hard-headed, not hard-hearted.”
Patricia’s
involvement in institutional religion had waned after she left the
convent in a reconservatizing Catholic church that seemed to be
regressing from Vatican II to Vatican 1.5 and falling, especially during
and after the papacy of John Paul II. Patricia has been a
religious liberal for most of her life, and there’s less and less room
for religious liberals in the shrinking tent of 21st-century
Catholicism.
Perhaps
it was only a matter of time before Patricia, estranged from
Catholicism, would evolve from a state of religious homelessness toward
affiliation with a more religiously liberal tradition and movement than
is represented by current official understandings of Catholicism.
It
is not so surprising, either, that Patricia’s training in humanistic
and compassionate modes of relationship counseling should lead her
toward an interest in what some may call “new age” (she prefers “cutting
edge”) spirituality, informed by eastern religious traditions and
meditative disciplines as well as by western philosophies and
psychologies of personal growth, brought together in the synthesis of
eastern and western personal growth traditions in organizations such as
the Forum (formerly EST), in which Patricia was personally engaged in
the late 1980s.
As Trish continues on her journey, resynthesizing herself from personal experiences accumulated
over the course of a life – indeed, several lives and personal
incarnations – she does so in the company of Unitarian-Universalist
friends who share the core values of social fairness, equity and
non-violent resolution of conflict.
In
her sixth and seventh lives, Patricia has been living these values as
she has worked (again as a kind of mother-figure) to create a peer
support group for GLBT young people (of which she is especially proud),
and participated in the church’s organizational and social justice
community projects and as a church conflict-resolution facilitator. (Her husband Matt refers to her as the 'church lady.’)
Patricia
has become like a social mother (once again!) to homeless mothers
living in the Madge Bush Transitional Living Center in Houston’s
historic Third Ward. She has also been active in the Houston chapter of
an Alzheimer’s support organization, addressing problems that arise in
early stage dementia.
Through
the years, Patricia has been a nurturing Mommy Bunny, a Daughter of the
Cross, a teacher and surrogate parent of discouraged students, a
stepmother, a medical education facilitator and student advocate, church
omsbudsman and a mother to homeless mothers. For such lifetimes of
nurturing deeds there should perhaps be a special award: “mother of
mothers,”or in less gendered terms, "nurturer of nurturers."
As a nun in the Daughters of the Cross, Patricia’s name was “Sister Christopher” in honor of the patron saint of automotive safety – humorous in retrospect because
Patricia describes her own driving as lacking a sense of direction.
(“I’m not lost. My car is.”). In her life as a social activist, on the
other hand, she has a clear direction.
In her post-convent and postconventional life, perhaps she should now be rechristened “Mother Trish.”
Now
in the midst of her seventh life, Patricia continues to explore new and
creative ways to grow and help others grow, in preparation for whatever
she decides to do in her eighth and penultimate incarnation. She
continues, as she has done since childhood, to take risks, to “run with
the wolves,” and to “leave it on the mountain,” an expression she
learned in a ropes course she has completed successfully.
Mommy
bunny, migrant, nun, wife and widow, counselor, soul mate, and
journeywoman on the road to further generativity and incarnation –
Patricia is on her seventh life, and still two lives short of a cat.
*UU,
or Unitarian Universalism, is a progressive community of religious
liberals with historic roots in Christianity, deism, American
transcendentalism and modern science among other sources. Unitarians are welcoming and ecumenical in spirit.
We’ll take our wisdom wherever we can find it.
word portrait by Danagram
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