Mysticism, Music, Marriage,
and Ministry:
A profile of Kathryn and Brian Christian
by EEWC Update editor Letha Dawson Scanzoni
(First of Two Parts)
Introduction.
Readers who attended
the 1998 and 2000 EEWC biennial conferences will remember Kathryn
Christian's magnificent music direction. At the 2000 conference,
her life partner Brian and baby daughter Lydia were with her.
Being quite sure that EEWC members would be interested in knowing
this young family better, I interviewed Kathryn and Brian early in
December. They spoke by phone from their home in northern
Michigan. I wanted to know about their lives, their pilgrimage,
their ministries, the importance of music in their lives, and
their experience of marriage and parenthood. They shared freely
and honestly. These are their stories.
Kathryn's Story
Kathryn and her only sibling, an older
brother, grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan "in a
beautiful log cabin right near the woods." She relished the
outdoors, spending as much time there as possible. Her father was
an attorney, her mother a poet and teacher.
Although they were a close-knit Catholic
family, they didn't attend church until Kathryn was in middle
school, at which time her mother had a personal conversion
experience and persuaded the family to attend Mass
regularly.
The summer Kathryn was 15, her life was
changed drastically. She was participating in a traveling
adventure camp, and while the group was in Utah, an urgent message
came for Kathryn, along with arrangements for an immediate flight
home. "I remember when they came, and I knew there was a
tragedy in my family," Kathryn said, "I just assumed
that my mother had died. My mother had been ill for many years, so
I had already lived with that kind of ongoing stress."
But her mother had not died. Her father, who
chaired the board of Mercy Hospital in Muskegon, Michigan had been
killed in a private jet crash, along with all the other board
members.
"When they said my father had died, it
was such a strange shock," Kathryn recalled. "While I
was adjusting to his death, I also felt responsible for the care
of my mother. And during this time, I had a big conversion
experience-a deep awakening. That was a big turning point in my
life, because I really needed to reach for a Source greater than I
for strength and healing-and survival."
As she spoke, I thought of a song that Kathryn
composed many years later, based on the writings of Julian of
Norwich-a song that focuses on God's motherly love.
Come Holy Mother
Let your mercy fall like rain,
Come, Holy Mother
Still my soul, and heal my pain
You enfold me with your love,
Giving cover with your wings. . . .
God my Power, God my Rescue,
When all is dark and I cry out,
You're the One who hears me.
After her deep awakening, Kathryn started
private prayer and began leading a group at her Catholic church
and singing at Mass. "I was very involved, " she said.
"It was then that I started really using my musical
gifts."
She had done some singing and drama during
middle school but had kept her vocal talents hidden from her
family. "I would wait until I was sitting alone in the car,
while someone went into a store or something. I'd opt to stay in
the car, and then I would sing."
I asked why she had kept her music secret. She
laughed and said she had developed several theories over the
years, attributing it at first to the shyness and embarrassment
that so often comes at the threshold of adolescence. Later, she
wondered if perhaps she had purposely concealed her singing
abilities from her extremely close family so that she could have
something she could call entirely her own. "It was just me,
mine; no one has to know about it! But later I was disappointed
that I never sang for my dad," she told me.
"My spiritual awakening at that point,
which really came about in my suffering, was tied to my music. So
music and spirituality for me have been connected from my
spiritual start. All of my human experience came out in my
music-expressing myself through music in praise and prayer and
agony and ecstasy."
The Next Step
After high school, Kathryn majored in religion at Oberlin
College and earned her bachelor's degree. "I studied some
music but didn't major in it," she said. "I studied
world religions but was very unclear about my path-what I wanted
to do. Music was always there, although given my ideas about how
to make it in this world, I figured music could always be only a
hobby. I needed a real job." That way of thinking
partly came out of her "family stuff," she said.
"We're degree collectors, the more the better! I even
considered law, following my father's path. My mother had also
been in law school but had to drop out due to illness. God saved
me from that path," Kathryn said, relief showing through in
her laughter. "It wasn't my path."
After graduation from college, Kathryn married
a young man she had met there. Looking back now, she says she
entered that marriage "for wrong reasons-unhealthy reasons. I
was a rescuer, and he needed some rescuing." He had been
diagnosed with cancer at the time, but later recovered
completely.
She was still unsure of her career when a
friend on the faculty of New Brunswick (NJ) Theological Seminary,
a Reformed Church in America (RCA) school, invited her to earn her
master's degree there. "So I went," Kathryn says,
"still not sure what I would do with the degree. Again, I
started playing my guitar in worship, and I started writing music
for the first time."
During her theological studies, Kathryn
volunteered to work for a few weeks one summer at Holden Village,
a Lutheran retreat center in central Washington in a remote area
of the Cascade Mountains. That decision would change her life
forever.
At this point in the
interview, Brian, who had been listening on a cordless phone as he
walked around carrying 6-month old Lydia, came into the room.
Lydia was becoming fussy. "Hi, Lydia. Mama's coming."
Kathryn said soothingly. Then, addressing Brian: "Maybe we
can switch phones, Hon, and I can nurse her." Brian agreed to
lead up to the point where Kathryn had left off.
Brian's Story
"In humility, I can't say I chose
God," he began, "God chose me."
Brian grew up in Colorado as one of seven
children in what he calls a "traditional Catholic home,"
adding that he "did not suffer the wounds of traditional
guilt-ridden Catholicism." For him, the Roman Catholic Church
was "a nice home," he said, because of his attraction to
the sacred.
At Colorado State University, he majored in
forestry. (I remarked that his helps explain why Kathryn once told
me Brian is her "mountain man.") He stressed that
anything that connects him to the wilderness holds great
importance to him. "As music is to Kathryn, the wilderness is
to me," he explained, adding that growing up in Colorado
allowed him to experience a joy beyond description because it made
possible frequent wilderness excursions.
Right after college, he had what he described
as "a profound awakening that was preceded by an incredible
crumbling." He was 24 years old. It was an awakening that
would lead him to embark on countless wilderness journeys,
listening for-and to-the voice of God.
"It was a traditional born-again
experience at an evangelical church in Lubbock,Texas," he
said. "God grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and it was
such a decimating of my life and every dream and vision that I
had." He said he felt he must stand up for Christ. He
felt God saying, "If you don't stand up, you're going to die
in three years from the pain."
"It was that intense," Brian said.
And he also heard God saying, "And if you stand up, your life
is never, ever going to be the same." So he stood up,
"and there was just an incredible washing and
cleansing," he said. "and I knew it was never going to
be the same. And it hasn't been."
Rocky Mountain High
Experiencing a state of personal crisis, Brian needed to be
alone. "So the natural thing to do was to spend every free
moment in the high country of the Rocky Mountains." he
explained. "I think it's no accident that the prophets of our
Judeo-Christian tradition have always flocked into the wilderness
to hear the clear voice and give them a vision. There is an
integrity of spirit in the wilderness-a primordial awakening that
just draws us into that creative fire of God's love. You taste it
very profoundly when you're standing at 12 or 13 thousand feet by
yourself. I just wanted so much of it; it was an
unquenchable thirst." He began spending weeks and months
alone in the wilderness.
He also experienced a new level of
spirituality while on a cycling trip in Europe. It was a time when
he felt God brought closure to the crisis and conversion that had
occurred two years earlier. "I experienced so much a divine
consciousness, a oneness, an incredible closeness to Jesus and
God," Brian said, the warmth and richness of the cycling
memory evident in his voice as he told me about it.
He hoped and expected to have another such
experience when he traveled to Alaska and worked among native
Alaskan children in a village called Bethel.
But unlike the meeting between God and Jacob
in the biblical Bethel, Brian's experience at Bethel was not a
major spiritual turning point. It was, however, a time of growth
and learning from the native people in the village who were
undergoing "an incredible identity search as their culture,
though still intact, was crumbling."
But he yearned deeply for something more. For
one month, he stayed alone in Denali National Park-the 6-million
acre wilderness area that includes North America's highest
mountain, Mt. McKinley. "The Alaskan wilderness is unlike any
wilderness in the lower 48," Brian said. "I was in the
middle of a dark night of the soul, and I was expecting a
breakthrough in my spirit there. But it didn't come. And so toward
the end of this month alone, I asked God, Why? I'm leaving more
broken than when I came. And He said, 'There's still more work to
do.' And so I resumed the work I had come to Alaska to do- until
one day God said, 'You're done.'"
Brian returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado
for the winter. But he had learned one major lesson: "I will
never follow any voice but God's voice." he said. "So
I've made a real effort just to listen to that quiet voice that
speaks within all of us at every fork."
He continued: "I was really a wanderer by
now; I lived in Steamboat Springs, but I was really very free,
quite 'wild.'"
I interrupted his story to ask how he
supported himself during this time. "I lived very simply. I
taught skiing in the winter, and then in the summers I would
travel and sometimes work in Steamboat," he replied. "I
did odd jobs; and if I had $200 in my pocket, I considered myself
a millionaire. And I had no expenses."
Kathryn, still nursing Lydia, chimed in on the
other phone, "No house payments, no family. . ." Brian
picked up the theme: "No car, no insurance-nothing. Just God.
Just God and me."
He described himself as being "quite out
of sorts" when he came back from Alaska. "Life is very
different when you live in the Alaskan bush. Everyone told me it
would take six months to adjust. They were right!"
Brian began praying for God's leading to the
next step. He said he could see himself living as a hermit and
began trekking to the Southwest in search of a hermitage. One
night, in the Sangre de Christo Mountain Range above Santa Fe, New
Mexico, he had a dream that he was speaking with a Native American
man. In the dream, he was supposed to listen to him.
The next day, as Brian was hiking, he struck
up a conversation with a man along the trail. The topic of
religion came up, and soon they were discussing world religions.
The man talked about the Hopi people, whose name means
"people of peace." Brian's interest was especially
piqued when the man mentioned The Book of the Hopi.
The Book of the Hopi was published in
1963 after the noted southwestern author Frank Waters had spent
three years on a Hopi Indian reservation and had collaborated with
a Hopi artist, Oswald White Bear Fredericks, who had provided the
drawings that illustrated the book and had tape-recorded stories
from older Hopis, which served as the book's source
material.
"I just got done perusing that
book!" Brian exclaimed, adding that he wished he could meet
the person who wrote it. "You can!" said the man.
"My best friend is doing a documentary on White Bear, and you
can go see him right now." It all began fitting together for
Brian-the dream, this man, and now White Bear. "I'm a slow
learner," Brian said.
But where was White Bear? "In Arizona, of
course," the man replied. Arizona is home to the Hopi nation.
"So I put out my thumb for Arizona," Brian continued.
"White Bear and I became very good friends. He was 83 years
old, an elder in his clan, and we became like grandfather and
grandson." The two men spent three days together, talking
spirituality all through the night. "He was both Christian
and Hopi," Brian said, "and I admired how he had woven
the two." White Bear explained the Hopi way of mysticism and
took Brian to Hopi sites and ceremonies. After one ceremony, White
Bear took him to the desert and asked him repeatedly if he could
hear the earth speaking. Brian could not. That night he asked
White Bear, "Can you really hear the rocks and trees and the
plants?" Then-after hearing White Bear's yes-"Tell me
how."
White Bear said, "I pray about four every
morning over by this rock, and there I listen. When I hear
the voice of God clearly within me, I will hear the voice of God
in all creation. And through the Spirit of God, I will be able to
converse with everything."
Brian took those words with him as he
continued his pilgrimage and went on to spent nine months as a
hermit. He told me what he learned.
"I realized that White Bear could listen
with his spirit and that was what he was trying to tell me
to do, not to listen with my heart or mind, but to let my spirit
melt into God and melt into creation and just let the Spirit of
God move through me freely like a river. As I began to do that, I
began to hear the voice of trees, the language of the earth, and
the language of God in all things. It was just mind blowing. And
when I hear it , I just cry-because it's so sweet. And it
just speaks of oneness. It speaks of God, and it speaks of
abandonment, and it speaks of love. White Bear was a pivotal
person in my life. He opened the door for me to believe that all
life is sacred and all life can speak in a spirit of God. And I
owe him a great debt."
The Journey Continues
The nine months in the hermitage "womb" birthed a
new vision for Brian. It came in the form of a strong desire to go
to the state of Washington and live alone in the wilderness there
for a year, working out his survival skills and learning edible
plants to prepare to return to Alaska. Once in Washington,
however, he wondered why things weren't working out for him on the
Olympic Peninsula, so decided to go to the drier Cascades. After
spending six or seven weeks in the Cascades wilderness,
"God's voice whispered in my heart that a change was
coming,." Brian said. He remembers thinking that was good
because his current situation didn't seem that great. "And
the next night God said, 'I'm going to bring a woman into your
life." Having not dated for the eight years since his first
awakening, he said, "I was kind of shocked-and yet
eager."
He felt compelled to get out of the wilderness
but didn't know where he would go. Coming upon a man running a gas
truck, he asked for directions to the highway. He then hitchhiked
to Chelan, Washington, the gateway to a huge lake, 55-miles in
length, that cuts through the deepest gorge in North America.
"I walked around Chelan sniffing the air and saying,
"God, is this where I'm supposed to be? And I didn't feel
yes, and I didn't feel no." Lacking confirmation that this
was the right place, he prepared to leave. A van stopped, but
instead of giving him a ride, it picked up another hitchhiker who
had seemingly jumped out of nowhere. Being passed by seemed like
God's sign that Brian was already where he was supposed to be.
Holden Village
He stayed overnight in Chelan. and the next morning boarded
the ferry to travel to the other end of the beautiful Fjord-like
Lake Chelan. There lies a tiny village called Stehekin, accessible
only by boat or float plane.
As he sat on the ferry, reading a book about
edible plants, an older woman leaned over and said, "Are you
going to Holden Village, young man?" He said, "No."
She said, "I think you ought to. The staff director is right
on this boat, and I think you ought to go back and talk to him
right now."
Brian told me that he could hear God's Spirit
inside and knew that "God was on the move"-that doors
were beginning to open. So he told the woman yes, he would go talk
to the director, who did indeed invite him up to "a very
wonderful place" unknown to him before then-Holden
Village.
Holden Village was once a copper mining town
and now operates as a year-round ecumenical retreat center. It is
directed by a board composed of representatives from the major
Lutheran bodies of the U.S. and Canada. Its official Web site
states that "the Village welcomes all, regardless of
denomination, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or age."
According to its mission statement, Holden Village "is
organized to provide healing, renewal and refreshment of people
through worship, intercession, study, hilarity, work, recreation
and conversation in a climate of mutual acceptance under the
Lordship of Jesus Christ."
Brian was thrilled with everything about the
place-especially its spiritual emphasis and its utter remoteness.
One of its vehicles had met the Holden-bound ferry passengers at
the Steheken landing to transport them over the final 11 rugged
miles. Holden Village makes its own electricity, but there are no
telephones or television and no way of communicating through
pagers, fax machines, or e-mail. (Its official Web site is an
external, stand-alone arrangement to provide information.) It is a
retreat center that provides both a time and a place which is set
apart in the truest sense of the term.
Brian was placed in what he described as
"the lowest volunteer position, which is working in the
dining room, setting up tables." In his second week there, as
he walked through the dining room, he glanced over to his left.
"My eyes fell upon Kathryn. And my spirit jumped. I knew that
was her-the woman God was bringing into my life," he said.
"Then I saw her wedding ring, and I said, "Uh-oh.
Something is wrong."
***
At this point in the
interview, Kathryn was ready to rejoin us. The baby had quieted
down. "Lydia is in her favorite place," Kathryn said
softly, "asleep at the breast."
I couldn't help but
think off Kathryn's song, "Gather Me Under Thy Wings,"
which she invited us to sing with her at the two EEWC conferences
where she led the music. I remembered the part in which the song
invites us to hear the voice of God saying:
I long to
mother you, comfort you, hold you.
Rest in My arms
and be loved.
Their Story Together: The Beginning
Kathryn had volunteered to work at Holden
Village for three weeks that summer, arriving the week after Brian
had stepped off the ferry and into his dining room
responsibilities. "
After meeting Brian and seeing his walk and
his life and his spirit, I had a profound awakening again,"
Kathryn said. "I really felt like my soul was opened up at a
deeper level. Attending college at Oberlin and studying religion
had sort of intellectualized my faith, and I had become cynical
and lost my simple fire. After meeting Brian, it was rekindled to
a much greater degree, and we were very connected at a soul
level." She paused. "I didn't realize I was in love
with him until later-after going back to school and really
reflecting on it." It would be the beginning of a long and
painful struggle.
After Kathryn returned to school, Brian
remained at Holden Village. Yet, "there was this incredible
connection," he said, "and we both fought it-and thought
it was wrong; and yet the more we fought it, the stronger and
stronger it became." Where was God? he wondered. Then Brian
did what he had done so many times before; he decided to seek
answers in the wilderness. This time, he fled to the bottom of the
Grand Canyon and stayed for two months.
Continue
to Part II
In the next issue of
EEWC Update, Brian and Kathryn continue their story, sharing their
thoughts on marriage and parenthood, ministry, and music.
© 2000
Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus
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