One Good Thing

Keeping The Vows You Make To Yourself

Keeping the vows you make to yourself.

Growing up, my family lived just up the block from the church, and everything we did revolved around our church and school. We never veered far from it, mentally or physically, and when we did, we could still locate its steeple even when we were blocks from home. It pointed to the heavens as a reminder of our potential and possibilities.

To enter the church, you had to open these massive wooden doors, which required you to lean back and pull with great force. As kids, sometimes it took several of us to get the job done.

But once opened, we were greeted by a dark sanctuary that rushed us like a cool and welcoming exhale from the marble floors and walls. The breath of this building was perfumed with incense and wood polish. The stained glass windows filtered reverence into the air.

But the main attraction for me was the people. It was always the people, the women in their lipstick and fancy hats, men in crumpled ties. The teenage girls, attempting high heels for the first time, clicked and clacked down the aisle as they delivered the offerings to the priest.

The squirly kids, doing their best to avoid secret pinches from their haggard mothers, while not losing their minds in the boredom of it all. And the wrinkled old men who slide the baskets of money under our noses, tempting us with the delusion of grandeur.

I loved the people, second only to the stories.

The ones that the priest told, the ones that made us laugh, think, and see things differently.

I was in awe of the alchemy of the stories that could draw us in and transform us into a better version of ourselves.

I loved church.

So much that I wanted to be a priest, but I was told right off the bat that I couldn't be a priest because I had a physical disability.

The physical disability was called “my vagina”.

As it turns out, anyone with a vagina, could not be a priest.

Which seemed like such a random, radical, and yet strangely specific criterion for holiness.

And so, instead of being a priest, I left for Hollywood and became an actress, a storyteller.

Telling stories on TV and film, and I did this for twenty years.

But after playing hookers, and drug atticts and jewelry thiefs, I decided I was done acting. I want to play the role I came for. So, I gave up my second-class citizenship as an actress and became a priest, of sorts. Priest was the only word I had for what I was destined to do, but it never quite fit. Soon, I learned the word “celebrant.” That's exactly what I do. I celebrate life with all its riddles, rough patches, and rites of passage.

I summon the sacred and weave a bit of wonder in the hem of the mundane, giving a poetic nod to a memorial service or blessing a young couple's vows. I weave the stories and sermons that help people feel seen and heard. Reminding them that there is something sacred about their humanness.

It was not always easy to step into the role; it was a coming out of sorts. But the gentle, intuitive prompt would not be denied, and after a while, I just got tired of fighting it, so I started a church and ordained myself. Vagina and all.

And for the last 13 years, I have been running a spiritual community called SpeakEasy. It was not born alone; it had a twin sister, called Voice Box Stories and Serenade, a monthly story event with a musical twist, where I helped to get storytellers. I started the church about the same time I started Voice Box. These two sisters grew up together, yet apart.

Which seemed right.

Some people would never go to a church.

And some people would never go to a bar.

Still, something sacred could happen under these twin peaks. People could gather and share good stories, the definition of gospel. This was church.

At both places, I got to collaborate with Cathy Richardson, the rock goddess. At SpeakEasy, she was the High Priestess of song, at Voice Box, she was the High, High priestess of Song. Cause the woman likes her weed. Though when I told this story at Voice Box, she shamelessly confessed to being high at church too. Which makes more sense than my original version.

Cathy Richardson, Rock Goddess and Lead singer of Jefferson Starship

Together, we created community. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and love all the people.

Things seem to go humming right along. We had ups and downs and in and outs, traumas, dramas, celebrations, and deaths. But even through COVID and catastrophes, we held our ground and showed up. Showing up was all we needed to do, and the rest of the magic just happened.

But this past April, showing up became impossible. My life blew up, and took everything down to ash, it was so irreversible, and irreverent that I found myself standing in the aftermath mumbling incoherently, “Oh my God.” Over and over.

My Inner teacher assured me that “there were no victims, no bad guys, and I was entering a time of a thousand kindnesses.” And yet, for all intents and purposes, it sure as fuck felt like an annihilation.

I was devastated, blasted right out of my shoes, and could no longer follow the known pathways. I couldn’t go to church, I couldn’t show up at Voice Box. Friends filled in for me, and I found myself driving to New York, my Motherland, with my daughter sitting side saddle. My daughter had decided a few months earlier that she was going to rent a place in New York, the three weeks prior to Easter, so she could experience the city and meet up with old friends.

When she first told me about these plans back in January, I asked, “Can I go with you?”

At which she promptly, clearly, and sharply replied, “NO, this is my time, Mom. It’s just for me.”

And yet here we were driving together to New York. There is nothing like a good catastrophe to bring mothers and daughters together.

When we arrived at the Airbnb in Brooklyn, it was a church, a beautiful old red church. I stepped out of the car and said, “What is this?”

And she said, “This is where we are staying.”

I said, “We are staying inside a church?”

She nodded and grabbed her bags and made her way in as I stared up at the steeple wondering what the ever living fuck?

I reluctantly entered the church and found myself in a renovated apartment. On one wall was a picture of a Risen Christ, and on the other, a large skeleton kneeling in prayer. I felt more like the skeleton.

Signs and symbols in New York.

The owner of this Airbnb was hitting the holy hard.

To get onto the internet, the password was Exodus 444.

Exodus is about leaving your home, leaving all that you know to lean into the mystery. Oddly appropriate at that moment.

My daughter wanted to know more about the 444. She reached for the bible on the shelf and opened it, only to find that it was not a bible, but a safe. A safe that required three digits. She punched in 444 and it sprang open.

And there inside the safe were drugs, mushrooms. I wish I could tell you that I took the mushrooms, ate them all, and met God. But the truth was that my daughter and I were so pixilated from the devastation of our lives that no amount of drugs would have made a dent or a difference.

So, we shut the safe and began to move through rotations of sadness, rage, depression, remorse, shame, sadness, rage, depression, remorse. They flooded in and tag-teamed us around the clock.

But the one thing I did not allow into the room was grievance. I was being marinated in grief, upon grief, upon grief, upon grief. Still, I had no budget for grievance, because I had already visited this particular place in hell, all those years earlier, when my first husband left me for Miss Universe (Full story here or on Audible). At that time, I took up a grievance that I could not lay down. I hated the man with every ounce of my being, I hated him from my bone marrow, and when that was not enough, I borrowed bone marrow from friends, and convinced them to hate him too.

And I was pretty successful in that, if that’s what you call success.

For 7 years, I stoked the flames of that hatred with my life energy. The attention that belonged to my children I placed on the fire, the energy for my creativity I placed on the fire. I offered all I had to keep this grievance well lit.

One day prior to opening my own church, I was employed at another church as the Youth minister. And this particular Sunday, I was supposed to teach the kids about forgiveness. Which I knew I couldn’t do, because I hadn’t figured out how to forgive. So, I said to my higher power, “What the fuck do you want me to do? How the fuck am I supposed to teach forgiveness to kids, when you know I hate this man.” Plus, these were city kids who could smell bullshit faster then a drunk uncle can ruin Thanksgiving.

The intuitive suggestion that I received back was that if I was willing to forgive him, all I had to do was think of one good thing about him.

You would have thought this would be easy. But remember, I had spent some years stockpiling this grievance. I had buried all the good things under my hatred. I tried to bypass this step, suggesting to my Higher Power that I could not think of one good thing. To which It replied, “I’ll wait.”

So, I took a minute —a good, long minute — to try and think of one good thing. And finally I thought of flower boxes that he had made, for our shitty appartment in Sunnyside Queens. I thought of a helicopter ride that he had surprised me with for my 24th birthday, and I thought of the moment in my life when I was down on my luck, and he came to me as a friend and said, “I will walk you through this thing.” And he did. He was a friend to me when I really needed one. When I remembered that, it was uncomfortable for me to imagine how I could have ever forgotten it, and suddenly something lifted.

So, I went to church and taught the kids about forgiveness, about having one good thought, about looking past the crime to the Christ, to the innocence, if you can.

Not long after that, I had a chance to see him, and when I saw him, I actually saw him. I did not see the hatred; I only saw the kindness, and when I saw that, I was so overwhelmed. I excused myself and sat in my car, crying because I saw him as innocent, which was such a sight that I made a vow to myself that I would never hate like that again.

I made a vow that I would never hold a grievance like that. I could not afford it.

I have made vows before, with people who could not keep them.

But that day, I made a vow to myself, and it did not require anyone to co-sign that vow.

And here I was at the cusp of breaking it. But what would it get me? And so I decided in that moment, in New York, to keep that vow. I would not spend a minute of my life carrying a grievance.

And I did what I had taught those kids to do, all those years earlier. In the middle of a nightmare, I had and held to one good thought.

It was enough. But I wanted more. I was done with nightmares and misery. I had paid my dues. I wanted, I deserved beauty.

To celebrate the kept vow, I decided to buy myself flowers. Because Milie Cyrus said we can.

Out I went to this janky little flower stand in the middle of this sketchy area in Brooklyn, and I gathered the most beautiful flowers I could find.

I stepped up to the stand, where a woman was waiting in sweats and a T-shirt, being circles by two snot-nose kids running around her, knocking into her as they chased each other like feral cats.

And as I stood next to her in line, I noticed a wedding bouquet on the counter that the man was fixing for her, pink roses and baby's breath and pale pink ribbons.

She told the man behind the counter that I could go before her, since the bouquet would take some time.

I smiled at her and leaned in with my credit card.

But as my card crossed over the top of this wedding bouquet, I paused and I asked her, “Whose wedding bouquet is this?” She beamingly replied, “It’s mine. I am getting married. I am finally getting married after nine years.”

There was an old version of me that wanted to scream at her… RUUUUUUUNN RUNNNN!!

But instead, I turned to the man behind the counter and said, “Put it on my card. I want to buy her flowers.”

The woman leaned back and said, “Oh, no, Oh No. You can’t buy…”

But I stopped her, “You cannot buy your own wedding bouquet, not on my time. I won’t have it.” If you know me, you know I can be bossy.

She smiled. And then she cried, a big, hot, wet cry that washed over her face like a tapped hydrant. As she swatted at her tears, she asked if she could give me a hug.

And there outside the jankie flowershop, with trash in the air and junkie on the corner, and squirly little feral children who were now clinging to their mother’s t-shirt and staring up at us as if they were angels bookending the blessed Mother, we hugged. A good, long, heartbeat-to-heartbeat hug. The kind you see at the airport when sisters are leaving each other for foreign lands.

And then she leaned back and asked, “Will you come to my wedding? Will you come to the church?”

To which I replied, “No.”

A hug would have to do. But she was bossy, like me, and typed her contact into my phone in case I changed my mind.

A month later, I texted her to see how her day went and to tell her that buying her flowers was the perfect medicine to heal my own heart.

She replied, “I hope you are well. In the name of Jesus, those flowers were very special to me. It was more than a gift because my mother was not with me at the special moment, and the Lord Jesus put you in her place, which seemed like a gift from heaven. May God take care of you and guide you always.”

And I was reminded once again that it was never the doors, and it was not the steeple; it has only ever been the people.

When you are ready, I’d love to take you to church.

Love, Maur

My new friend Esmeralda on her wedding day. Me with my true love, A Course in Miracles, the book that can turn ancient hatreds into current love stories. And my husband Will, for whom I am willing to find one good things.

EVENTS

Join me this week at SpeakEasy, the theme is Freedom! Link to join us.

Voice Box is on hiatus until September, but all paid subscriptions come with a private weekly Zoom Story Salon, where we workshop our stories.