Mothy McFey's blog: "Mystic Christian Path"

I write this for my fellow Christians who seem to think that I need converting when I don't. First of all, I am a baptised and confirmed Episcopalian who leans toward Anglicanism. I worked for a number of years at the parish church on the close at the Washington National Cathedral where my son was a chorister with the famous Choir of Men and Boys that later became the Choir of Men and Boys and Girls. I was the equivalent of the parish secretary there, handling sacramental events, running a transportation ministry for seniors, keeping records, and acting as personal assistant to three clergy. 

I was born in Kansas to an Air Force couple. When I was 13 months old, we were transferred to Japan where my father was a squadron commander. I remember a visit my mother and I had en route in San Francisco with the widow of a general my parents knew from their time in mainland China in 1948 before I was born, and the airplane trip with my mother to Japan that followed. I even remember the rather pleasnat odor in the plane. My first language was Japanese. I was tended at first by a Christian nurse and then by a Budhist. It was there that I contracted scarlet fever while I battled German measles & strep throat. My convulsive delirium was is something I still recall. The biggest trauma of that was getting a shot of procaine by a male medic at the Yakota Air Base hospital with my father there. I felt violated, which, of course, I wasn't, but I was only four years old and had always been tended by my own sex. One of my hallucinations had to do with falling off a swing and then being sprinkled with garlic salt by a human-sized shaker. I can still see the label on it in my mind. I turned into a witch and flew off to a nearby water tower. It scared me to death. A much pleasanter hallucination was of walking through a museum full of jade carvings in glass cases built into the walls. The museum was really the base officers club where I was taken for birthday parties, but it's curious to me that I somehow knew it was a museum. I later met another of my parents' old China hands who was a museum curator in Walnut Creek, California, and with whom I had the most marvelous childhood pen pal correspondence. I also later had an internship at the Smitsonian Institution in a couple of departments, including what was then the Office of International Activities, but later became the Office of Service and Protocol. It was run by retired US Department of State officials. Had I not decided to marry instead, I would have gone from there to the Folger Shakespeare Library to work in their paper conservation department. Had I done that, I would not have my son, so it's just as well that I chose the path of marriage, even though that didn't work out. I won't even get into how my parents knew my first husband years before I was even born. 

Prior to that, I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where I learned Ancient and Modern Greek for the purpose of translating texts. I translated portions of the Gospel of John from Coine Greek. I also translated portions of Rene Pascal's Pensees from French. Prior to that, as a child, I was introduced to Catholicism through a neighbor at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, where my family and I went after Japan. That was back when mass was celebrated in Latin and females wore head coverings. I remember standing outside one day after a rain and being overwhelmed by God in the color of the sky. It isn't something can quite describe because I am still, after all these years, processing it as part of a poem I am writing for my son and his wife about their wedding day that I could not attend because it was in Scotland, and I had to look after my mother who was here and dying and didn't know it. That day the sky was not the same kind of blue, but just as relevatory. Both blues are like those of our Lady. It will take me a while to "translate" that. It took me 30 years to do a decent translation of an experience I had with a tree after we left Omaha and moved to the north shore of Long Island, New York. While I was working at the Cathedral in DC, I discussed this with a chaplain who had spent some time in Brazil as well as Switzerland. He understood what I was saying. That story is also a long digression I won't get into now, but let's just say that he was a beautiful man who was helping me come to terms with certain extraordinary events that involved another beautiful man and peculiar phenomena.

I should say a little about Gothic cathedrals. They are structures that were designed to be both receptors and conductors of spirit. I came to see that quite an immediate way. But evil does bombard them. Not just evil, but also humorous situations that I think you could classify as "spiritual mischief." I will digress enough to tell you a short story of how I cleared up a years-long computer problem at the parish church by going to a Catholic priest. Our network kept crashing at random times and then coming back online over and over. Being me, I suspected some sort of "mischief" like I mentioned. In the Episcopal Church, they don't really use holy water, but for some reason, I felt that was required, so I turned to a friend of mine who was a bit of an elfy gal whom I knew was a friend of a Catholic priest close to my home. I had her set up a meeting with Father Joe, who was an Irishman. One evening we went for an audience with him, and I managed to weedle my way through conversation to request some holy water from him, explaining the purpose. He gave me a little bottle of Knock water from Knock, Ireland, but told me that I could not use it since the Episcopla Church was not his church. Hmm. But that is very Irish, isn't it ~ to gift you with the cure and leave you to figure out how you can use what you are told you can't? So, I went right to Father diBrandi ~ that Episcopal chaplain I mentioned, and asked permission of him, which, of course he granted. So I went around the offices in my church on a day I was working there and no one else was, and sprinkled the holy water on all the electronics. A few days later, the mystery was solved. What had been going on for all those years was that the little old people in the thrift shop next to the finance office had been unplugging our router to use their calculator and forgetting to plug it back in. This discovery solved everything. What a lot of people don't understand is the some very simple and mundane, but vexing, persistent problems are a matter of synchronicities, which, imo, are spiritual matters. Of course, I didn't tell the clergy what I did. I knew them too well by then. Clergy are often out-of-touch by reason of their egos, as I discovered, but I won't get into that, either. Just say I know too well their foibles.

Now, in addition to all this stuff, I want to explain that in addition to all the winding and myriad ways in which I see all sorts of correspondences and and marvels in my life, I deliberately went to St. John's College to ground myself in dialectic and reason. It was essential for me. My BA in Liberal Arts includes a double major in Philosophy and the History of Mathematics and Science and a double minor in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature.  My talents, however, are in a variety of fine & performing arts. I panic over mathematics, yet my best grades were in that because I worked hardest in it and got the most help in that. My son, who is mathematical and musical, told me it was weird that I took to integral calculus most of all when that is supposedly the hardest type of calculus. If he says so. Idk. 

This part may be the most difficult for you all to accept about me, not that all that I have said isn't hard enough to understand. I am a hermetic type of Christian. I love the Desert Fathers and the Early Church and Thomas Merton and that which I experience in my own very private and mystical manner, and, although I love you all, I really do not need you to question my faith and the way I live it. I have opened my home, in spite of my love of privacy and solitude, to a couple of homeless men whom I trust to be of some help to us a group. Yes, they get on my nerves sometimes, and yes, I am sure they get frustratrated with me as well. But we seem to be getting along with things as they are for now ~ barking sometimes, but mainly getting long like Christians manage to do. Mutual benefit in the process, and it is a process, of harmony.

If you do not care for my interest and appreciation in comparative religion and my soirees into philosophy, such as my two-year devotion into twice weekly online seminars on Plato's dialogues, pardon me, but you can get stuffed. I don't tell you what to read, believe, be interested in, nor judge your degree of faith. You do not need to convert me nor lecture me nor ask me about my love for Christ, God the Father, nor the Holy Spirit. I don't badger you about what I consider to be your most precious and private faith, and I would appreciate if you would simply trust in my having my own path, which may look different from yours, but which may in fact be no less profound. I accept that companions may merge on the same path by different pathways, but I do not assume that there is only one path. Please respect that I love you, but I do not need you to ask me how faithful I am nor lecture me about things about which you may have no understanding. Thank you.