This is my story. Or rather, it is the story of my story, a painting of the way in which I view myself. Retelling it means retaking my journey, not in the order that events happened, but in the order that marks out my direction forward, pointing the way toward home.
I am three years old, and playing in a park with other children and our parents. This park has a fish hatchery in it—long rows of narrow pools, teeming with young fish. I am not the first to approach the water’s edge, but leaning down I peer in, deep and curious, wondering at the countless lives before my face. And then I fall. For a moment I am lost below the surface of the pool, in and among the wriggling fish. Just a moment, fallen into somewhere new and different—strange, mysterious, dangerous—and then back up, swimming with a body that has never swum before, back to my mother, back to the world.
This is my earliest memory of disorientation, of the confusion and discomfort that unravels the familiar world and forces reaction, and change.
I am in my first year of college, volunteering one evening a week at a domestic violence shelter. The place has a strong, antiseptic smell, and I have the feeling of being perpetually in the way, out of place, lacking purpose. We have a new family coming in tonight, and I am making up the room where they will sleep. I am tucking in the sheets on one of the bunk beds when I look up to see our new guests, this woman and her two young daughters, standing in the doorway. The mother watches me with a confused look and says “I’ve never seen a man make a bed before.
It is not up to me how I will change the world; I cannot determine by myself which parts of my life will have enduring consequences, and which will fade away. The only means I have of repairing this world is by living in it.
The First Unitarian Church of Rochester, the church that I will grow up in, has an interior that compliments the humanism it is known for—all poured concrete, cinderblocks and blond wood. After years of trial and loss, my parents have brought me here to be dedicated—I am the first of their children to live. Presented by my parents to the congregation, the minister asks them “Will you name this child?”. They name me “Kelly Asprooth-Jackson”. It is a name they have fought hard to give me; it is a name I will fight hard to keep. This name will be endlessly shortened and truncated, misfiled, misspelled and misidentified. But it will be my name.
My gratitude, to my parents, to my congregation of origin, to my religious movement, gives me a sense of duty and of purpose. The love I have gratefully received calls me to resist and confront forces and powers both within me and outside me which are destructive to life and justice.
I am taking a class in my congregation on Unitarian Universalist history and theology and thinking about just where I might fit into all that. At the moment, I am fulfilling an assignment asking me to draw a picture of my image of God, but I can think of nothing better to do than to try for a cheap laugh. Later in this class I will write and deliver my first sermon, in which George Washington Carver will figure prominently. I will go on pilgrimage to Boston and have my first encounter with Arlington Street Church. I will also think, for the first time, that I would like to become a minister, but it will be years before I admit it to anyone else.
I am not only what I was in that moment. I am not only what I am I this moment. I am what I have been in every moment before now, and what I will be in every moment afterwards. Changing any part of it would change who and what I am.
Paper, pencils, a table, too much caffeine and a bag full of dice. It is very late at night. My friends and I are telling each other a story. We have been working together on this same story for a year and a half, one night a week, eight hours a night. We are roleplayers, which means we have no script and are our own audience. Each of us invents little pieces of the story, it is my job to weave those pieces together, to frame them into something larger, to assemble fragments into meaning. I had already been a preacher before this, but this is the first thing that I will look back on and feel like a minister. After three semesters, our story will end with this song:
And though they were sad,
They rescued every one,
They lifted up the sun,
A spoonful weighs a ton.
I believe that our lives carry the meanings that we make for them; without the stories that we build and inherit to connect the separate pieces of our being, existence would be colorless, flat and empty. It is a miraculous thing, the power of the stories that we tell ourselves and each other. For that reason, we owe the utmost care in the weaving and the telling of those stories.
In a large room of a small house, in a little liberal arts school on the banks of a very large river, we are sitting in a circle, on the floor. “We” are the twelve or so students beginning an encounter group convened by the Dean of Multicultural Affairs. Four spaces to my left is a woman in overalls, introducing herself to the group. We have each, just now, decided silently that we strongly dislike the other. I dislike her because her politics stir and motivate her, while I mine have grown quiet and complacent. She dislikes me because my religion gives me a sense of meaning—something she had once, and lost. Knowing her will reconnect my faith to my politics. Knowing me will reconnect her politics to her faith. I will change my name, and my faith, by adding each of hers to my own. With her, I will find the inspiration to dream bigger than before, and the courage to live out those dreams.
These are pieces of me, the first pieces that I would use to mark out my journey. These are the moments that I would relate, to tell you of how I came to be here, among you, telling this story. There is more to me, as there is more to you—but we have all year to tell our stories to one another.