Transcription of Love, Spirituality, & Self, #115
Male: You’re listening to the ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’, recorded in the studio of ‘Maine Magazine’ at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Elaine: I could never have thought that my marriage would have the kind of fulfillment to have my husband say on his deathbed, “Your presence was deeply drawn into my soul.”
Sukie: I mean that maybe there is no one right that’s going to be right for your whole life. For some people, I think that’s true, and for others, clearly not. The past changes course and diverges and then you get to make choices.
Male: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors, ‘Maine Magazine’, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical, Sea Bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritgage, Ted Carter ‘Inspired Landscapes’, and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. Show number 115, ‘Love, Spirituality and Self,’ airing for the first time on Sunday, November 24th, 2013.
Today’s guests include Elaine McGillicuddy, poet, author and former Ursuline nun, and Sukie Curtis, artist and former Episcopal priest. As humans, we gravitate towards certainty and stability. We like to believe that life has an inherent logic. What many of us learned as we progress through our lives is that things are far less logical than they seem, or at least far less intellectually logical.
When we open ourselves the logic of the heart, we find stability through our deeper sense of our own spiritual selves. In opening their hearts to the love of self and others, our guests today have done just that. We hope that our conversations with Elaine McGillicuddy and Sukie Curtis will inspire you to open yourself to the logic of your heart, and perhaps gain a deeper understanding of your own spiritual self. Thank you for joining us.
I’ve always been a firm believer that life circles back around when you really need it to, and that people you hear about and you think, “I’d really like to meet that person some day.” Eventually, you do end up meeting them.
For me, Elaine McGillicuddy is one of these individuals. I’ve known about Elaine for many years as the founder, the co-founder of the Portland Yoga Studio, and I picked up her book at Longfellow Books, which was “Sing to me and I will hear you” the book of poems, started reading it and reached out to her and she said, “Good, because now I’m writing my memoire, ‘Sing to me and I will hear you the memoire’, a love story” which is about her relationship with her husband, Francis McGillicuddy. I’m really happy to have you in the studio with me today, Elaine.
Elaine: I’m happy to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Elaine, there are so many things that I believe you and I could talk about, you’re a poet, you’re a writer, you’re a former Ursuline nun, you’re a retired high school English teacher, and we have already mentioned that you’re a yoga teacher, you’re a certified Iyengar yoga teacher, and you do dances of piece, and you also have a prim culture at your house.
Elaine: Right.
Dr. Lisa: You’re very active in the Pax Christi Movement from what I understand. You’ve lived a very broad and full life in the decades that you’ve been with us. Let’s start with this love story idea, because I think that that is very central to you, and why I thought it might be interesting to have you here today.
Elaine: The wonder of what happened to Francis and me has never faded even now. We were aware of it. I was a nun and he was a priest when we met. The fact that we were both sent to Waterville Maine the same month, the same year, 1968 in September, it just seems to prove what we used to say that ours was a marriage made in heaven. Everything seemed to work together to indicate that it was all right for me to notice that he was handsome even though I was a nun and he was a priest. Around that time, it’s probably too complex to get into, but after Vatican two had a big influence on the thinking of Catholics at that time. Now, I don’t know how much our current culture is aware of Vatican two in 1968, but it was the council in Rome that opened the windows and it fit with everything that was going on in the ‘60s, the Peace Movement and all of that.
Anyway, there was an idea in the air called the ‘Third Way’ when I studied theology or religious studies at Providence College, one of the … I think it was a nun, wrote a paper. Her master’s degree was on the ‘Third Way’, which is like platonic love. When I met Father McGillicuddy as Sister Maureen, that was my nun’s name, I thought it was the ‘Third Way’, and then I was assigned as campus minister at Colby College, so I was teaching in his parish, so we kept getting thrown together because I was the campus minister and it was those heady anti-warriors, the students at Colby College occupied the chapel. I became friends as a campus minister with the students, so I had two lives in a way. I was living in a convent, teaching in Francis’ parish school, and then being campus minister at Colby College.
In the book I’m writing now, ‘Sing to Me and I Will Heart you The Love Story’, I relate how Francis and I kept getting thrown together. I was teaching at his parish, the school, eighth grade in Sacred Heart School in Waterville, Maine, I was campus minister at Colby College, and I was living at the convent.
At that time, it was the heady anti-warriors, the Colby College students occupied the chapel, so I was taken up with all of that and simultaneously, the nuns were trying to decide whether they could wear … let a little bit of their hair show. I didn’t say this in the book, but whether they could wear blue or black or another color, and I’d come home from the contrast between those two worlds, was so strong, and then my attraction for Francis which I thought was this kind of platonic love ‘Third Way’ that was, seem to be act fine, that was acceptable at the time. I really, gradually fell in love with him and that’s how the first chapter ends.
The first chapter is called ‘Through the Third Way’, because I allowed a relationship to happen that ended up being more than I could handle as a nun I guess. Anyway, it’s a very interesting story.
Dr. Lisa: You prefaced the book by saying, “Francis and I were convinced the love given us was bigger than both of us and so it’s a love story meant to be shared with those who love love.” You also dedicate the book to your goddaughter, Rowan.
As I’m reading your book, I was pleased to be able to get a draft of your book, I really relished every word that you wrote on the entire story. It was so powerful to me. It really struck me that you were talking about more than just the love between two people. It was this love that came from this higher place, higher or more universal place let’s just say.
I wondered if that was one of the moving forces for you, as you both made this very difficult decision to leave the priesthood, to leave being a nun is the sense that perhaps you were given this love from God, and perhaps there was no better way to celebrate God’s love than to love one another.
Elaine: There’s no better way to character … Who can speak of God? I just say God is love, and that is in the Bible. When Francis and I were married, we had this sense that our love was a witness to God’s love. That was very strong, and it persisted through our lives. I think we were so aware of how extraordinary our story was, because we were caught between the church laws, man-made laws to man-made church laws because in the Eastern Church, priests can marry, and yet, Francis was a priest in the Roman Catholic church and he wanted to remain a priest and I was a nun who left the convent, so we had a two-year underground period. That’s the second chapter called ‘Underground,’ where we were caught between our love wanting to be married with his still as a priest, and at the Vatican, they were actively debating this. It was a matter of, “Maybe they will allow married priests.” It looked that way, even now online, people can go and find some of those articles and I mentioned them in my book a few titles. We were hoping for that, but when they said no, and then I reveal in the book that a priest told a Bishop about Francis and my underground relationship.
When Francis died, and I didn’t say this in the book, although I alluded to it, when Francis was dying, the person who reported him to the Bishop emailed and Francis said so and so, “I forgive you. It was the biggest favor you did for me.” I only allude to that indirectly in the book. He made peace and this person felt bad about having done that, but Francis said, “You did me the biggest favor in my life,” because that was the trigger, his being in front of the Bishop and he said, “We’ll call it off,” and then we had the second of two moratoriums. It was not easy having an underground period. It was quite a joyous thing in the book I call the ‘Third Chapter from Exodus to Avalon’.
It’s so interesting, a young friend, Thomas Ambrose who we met through yoga was a principal I think or maybe a superintendent in a school now. Thomas Ambrose was working for his degree at USM, a degree in psychology or counseling, whatever. He needed a life interview, so he interviewed Francis in 1999. That’s 10 years or 10 years before Francis was dying, just that recently. Thomas was able to verbatim give me a written transcript of that dialogue with him.
In the book, have Francis’ own account of what it was like when he went to the Bishop and when he went to Massachusetts to try to think it over, and when he decided and came home and told me, so I quoted his words. I had to have his own words. He lapses into incorrect grammar. He lapses into the present tense and refers to the Bishop as the head honcho. He’s just so alive, and that second chapter which is called ‘Underground’ ends with the Exodus. Francis said, “It felt like the Exodus. Yes, the Exodus.”
The third chapter is from Exodus to Avalon, because the little house we bought that I still have is on Avalon Road without sidewalks, and then we ended up with permaculture for the last three years of Francis’ life, creating an edible landscape, which is really like an Eden. Yes, it’s just a wonderful experience for me to relive our beautiful love story and to share it with the world.
Dr. Lisa: You quote in your book, coming this line, “Be of love more careful than of everything.” It is this care and gentleness I think that I sense around the love that you have for Francis, you treated as something precious and something that when some people might leave the church and feel somehow bitter or angry or “We were forced to do this,” or … because there was a lot of loss you had to leave a lot behind. You had to leave your identities behind. I really don’t ever have that sense in reading about this. There is just this sense of gratitude that pervades the entire book. In fact, it even gets to the place where Francis is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and you know you don’t have very much time left. As sad as you are, I still feel gratitude. How do you manage to do that, because so many people can’t?
Elaine: Perhaps being older, Francis was … I forget exactly. He was eight years older than I. I was 36 when I left. I think being a little older when we found each other gave us a sense of the preciousness of it, how our marriage would be a little shorter because we’ve got married later in life. I don’t know.
Yes, we did consciously care for it. We did a marriage encounter weekend, two of those weekends. I mentioned in the book, in a sense those shaped us because … and it not only gave me a lot of primary sources to use in writing the book because I have his marriage encounter no books in mind, we didn’t identify with all of … We weren’t active in the movement as such, but those two weekends profoundly affected us because we kept up the practice that they suggest that we adopt of continuing to write, “Do you know how the marriage encounter works?” but we only did it on holidays and things like that. However, at Christmas or anniversaries or birthdays, I have these precious notes and it reflects the thinking at the time. I have a section in the book on our marriage encounter notebooks, and back and forth, I share what comes actually from our notebooks but I remember one instance which I did quote in the love story where Francis talks about how we keep the wonder in our relationship this way. It was about reflecting together.
I think that helped us and to not just take our temperature, but … The other very important thing is to look outside of ourselves. I have a section on the baby question and the attempt, the adoption attempt, and that’s a whole other story. However, I think in the end, because we didn’t have children, our lives which we wanted them to be generative ended up being generative in a different way. That consciousness of wanting to leave something for the next generation was stronger because we didn’t have children, so we had met over the Peace Movement, of the four big thing, the four big themes in our lives of the peace work. We met over that. The other three are what came along, and all provident … I’m big on providence. I mean I met Francis unexpectedly. I didn’t expect this would happen, so I’ve been aware throughout my life how at the major points of decision making, I seem to have a gut knowing. You know the enneagram? I have this one energy and once tended to have a strong gut sense about things, and I get kind of clarity about some things, and it’s strong, and providence is mixed in with that too.
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Dr. Lisa: Having read Thomas Merton’s, ‘The Seven Storey Mountain’, it was interesting for me to note that this was such an important reason for Francis having gone into the priesthood.
Elaine: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: I think from what I understand that he read it two years before he …
Elaine: Exactly. That was another thing that nudged him toward the priesthood to see that he was a sophisticated person, who had had quite a lot of experiences and yet he was drawn to that. Yes, the mysticism of that Thomas Merton demonstrated or witness to drew Francis, yes.
Dr. Lisa: Also, the beginnings of this understanding that there isn’t as larger divide between the Eastern and Western religious practices as we’ve once thought. Thomas Merton was very much exact.
Elaine: Exactly. Yes. Yes. In teaching yoga and learning a little bit about the Eastern thought, Francis was exposed to that too. That affected us when after we co-founded Portland Yoga Studio, in those days, we didn’t use the internet as much so we mailed out brochures every season, so two photographers took photos of me alone it first, and then when we had more teachers, a lot of us, and we would use those photos on these brochures, and eventually, there were 12 of those photos that were pretty special of me doing advanced yoga poses because I had a hip problem. I was almost hit by a car when I was five, and yoga unraveled my clinched hip that no one could diagnose what was wrong with it.
Anyway, my point is this, that the graphic artist who helped me put those quotes together … who took the photos, I don’t quite remember how it happened, but I created yoga postcards. I should send you some. There are 12 yoga postcards with quotes from the Western, from the Bible. They’re called ‘Eastwest Series’. Those postcards sort of signal in their being there the kind of marriage of East and West that we seem to have made spiritually, both of us, because when Francis was in the … when he was rushed to the hospital that first day on September 24, and we learned it was a cancer we didn’t know about, when I came to visit him the second day, he said to me, “I’m not having dying thoughts you know. I’m living in the present moment.” That was a phrase. Everybody says that nowadays, but that was a phrase, “Living in the present moment” that was kind of eastern in a way.
The word ‘Asana’ in yoga means “posture” literally. A literal translation for it is ‘Holding a comfortable seat’. I always used to share with my students the quote that I prefer to translation by Judith Lasater, one of the master yoga teachers. It’s this, “Yoga asana is staying with ease.” Staying with ease, instead of holding a comfortable seat, it’s staying with ease, just being present staying with ease. Abiding in stillness is the other one. That was my second favorite, “Abiding in stillness.” It’s all coming back.
For me, yoga is like brushing my teeth. It’s something I can’t imagine not living without it. I realize it’s not for everybody, but yes, yoga is for Francis too. For my mother, I was able to show her poses that kept her pain-free. Francis also was doing yoga even actually … and there’s a sense in which because I seem to be a little bit like B.K.S. Iyengar in India who used yoga to help people with almost any physical problem, I had that attitude so when Francis started complaining about his sacroiliac joint, I think I thought it was a musculoskeletal, so I tried all kinds of things to help him and they helped, but in the end, it was cancer all along but it delayed. It delayed the discovery that it was cancer, but as I say in the book, it was probably good that we didn’t know that it was this kind of cancer. They couldn’t have done anything anyway. We would have spent a whole year going back and forth to having all kinds of tests, and this way, Francis tried to live a normal life for a year, but he was in pain for a year.
I have instances … I have little stories in the book how he started to read to Rowan, but it caused pain so he couldn’t keep it up … little signs when you look back.
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Dr. Lisa: That is the challenge. When I was reading the book, I actually could feel your pain as someone caring for someone in pain. Love is wonderful, the abstract and more challenging on the ground, especially when you are as connected as you were to Francis. How do you move through a day in which this man that’s in front of you that you care for so deeply is in such extreme pain?
Elaine: In the moment, to be a caregiver, I was his bedside nurse. In the moment, there’s so much to tend to that adrenalin just carries you, and it’s as if you don’t have time to feel it all, and in the reliving it, that’s when it comes back. I certainly did feel it but I was just so exhausted.
I’m so grateful I gave him everything I had really. I’m very happy about that. He was able to be home when he died. I think ‘Grace and Grit’ … That’s the title of a book by the one who wrote ‘A Brief History of Everything’, Ken Wilber. His wife died and his book is called ‘Grace and Grit’. I think that it just kind of came up spontaneously. I think you get the grace of the moment and the energy. As I said, I was driven to try to save his life with macrobiotic, but in the end, my request through ‘Lots of Helping Hands’, that wonderful little website that my students found for me to get help, I found Meg Wolff who had just undergone surgery herself and she saw this request … She was a stranger to me. She saw this request and called up or volunteered to bring a meal. This is a Meg Wolff gourmet macrobiotic meal every day on her beautiful tray with different courses delivered to our home, every day the month before Francis died. I’m sure it prolonged his life because he was beginning to not eat but he had a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Everything conspired to give us this ending of his life that was so beautiful that it ends up being a big part of the book, that last chapter because it started with Christmas Eve when Francis started talking about his death. I could tell as I say in the love story, it was as if he was in an altered state and I just grabbed my pen and I took down what was transpiring between us, his …
I can’t describe it. Actually, I wrote a poem about that. It was so incredible, that moment when Francis was joking about eating two kinds of ginger cookies, a soft one made by one friend and a crisp one made by another, and yet he was in a kind of altered state aware that he was going to die. It was such an incredible exchange during, at one point after we talked, he said, “You’re in my central core …” No. How did he say? That’s what he had said in his love letter earlier. I need to backtrack because there’s two things that happened, two wonderful things that happened in his words to me. After I left the convent, he was still a priest. I was at Providence College studying religious studies of theology, so he wrote me love letters. After he died, he had these wonderful love letters. In one of the love letters, he said, “You’re in my central core and I am in yours.” After Francis died, I read those, and I was just so touched by the profundity of it. It’s Jesus saying, “Abide in me and I in you.”
I wrote … More than one poem came to me as a result of that. That was when he was before we married. He said that, “You’re in my central core and I am in yours.” Here we are now, Christmas Eve 2009, he’s talking about dying. Then he said, “I’ve been very well served.” There are these two moments. Now that I think of it, I actually wrote a poem called, ‘Your Poetic Soul’ that includes both of these moments, the first was his love letter to me after I left the convent, and the second was really on his deathbed. This is the poem. It’s in the first published book, ‘Sing to Me and I Will Hear You the Poem’. The poem is called ‘Your Poetic Soul’. “Two days before you died, you discovered yourself a new. I never thought myself a poet you said, but I have a poetic soul. It’s steered me through a lot of decisions. Oh Francis, yes, but there’s more. At 43, young lover, you told me my core was in yours and yours in mine, and on your deathbed, this at 82, your presence was deeply drawn into my soul.”
When Francis said that, I felt it was the culminate … I wrote a poem that’s not published yet called ‘Nadir and Zenith.’ Nadir was remembering … Last Christmas, I wrote that poem. It was like the low point of going through the pain and the loss, but Zenith remembering I could never have thought that my marriage would have this kind of fulfillment to have my husband say on his deathbed, “Your presence was deeply drawn into my soul.”
Dr. Lisa: The people are going to want to read more of your poems and to read your upcoming ‘Memoire Love Story.’ How do people find out about ‘Sing To Me And I Will Hear You The Poems’ or ‘A Love Story’?
Elaine: They can go to the Blogspot that one of my students created. If they just Googled ‘ElaineandFrancis,’ I think that’s one word, they’ll get to the Blogspot, ‘ElaineandFrancis.blogspot.com.’ That website ‘Blogspot’ has the actual letters that I wrote to family and friends starting the September 24th, 2009.
I brought people with me through the process, so I’ve continued to write a few, actually now that Blogspot has some poems that are not yet published, because every now and then it’s there.
Before this program is out, I will write a letter dear family and friends, I have been interviewed by Dr. Lisa Belisle, so I will turn them to your podcast radio story and all that. On occasion, every now and then, I write dear family and friends letters, and that’s where I will also tell people the book is published.
I have a feeling that ‘Sing To Me And I Will Hear You The Love Story’ will be published in early 2014 because I’m refining it with the help of my editor like I’m still working on it. It’s even better than rough … It was almost like a rough draft that you read. It’s going to be a good book. It’s going to be a big book too. Anyway …
Dr. Lisa: I can’t wait to read the finished product and I appreciate your brining me along with you not only through this draft, but also through the stories that you shared with me today. I know that people who are listening will find some great meaning of their own and …
Elaine: Thank you. It’s been my privilege.
Dr. Lisa: We have been speaking with Elaine McGillicuddy, author of ‘Sing To Me And I Will Hear You The Poems’ and also ‘Sing To Me And I Will Hear You The Love Story’.
The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: One of the things I do often is place a compass rose in the landscape, and the compass rose points to the four directions of the universe. It’s something that I really love to do because it does call out those very powerful directions. The north is really the head-based energy, the place of white buffalo. It’s where wisdom and knowledge live, but it’s also where conflict lives.
We live in the Northern Hemisphere, we are part of that whole ethos I guess you might say where South America is a place of play, it’s a place of innocence, a place of trust, it’s a place of love, and if you look at the South American people, they are very much like that.
The east is about bringing new beginnings into our lives. When we look toward the east, it’s always about “What are the new things that could happen and come into our lives?” The west is moving into the darkness. It’s the into the mysterious, into the most powerful I guess you might say of all directions because we have to move through the darkness to get to the other side, to get to the side of rebirthing and brining new things into our lives. Our lifetime is spent with a series of peaks and valleys where we move from a place of creation and the rise of that creation, and the care of creating that creation to the maintenance of that creation. Then eventually, we move into the disintegration of that creation. We have to be looking toward the future and toward what’s happening in our lives to not let that valley go down too deep, and to start to pick up something else new and start to rise again with it.
If you look at your own life, I think you can see that pattern. It’s quite evident and it’s natural. It’s the same thing of the seasons; the spring, the summer, the fall and the winter.
I’m Ted Carter. If you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at Tedcarterdesign.com.
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Dr. Lisa: Sukie Curtis is a woman who has lived a few different lives as I think many of us have, but her lives are very interesting because there’s such a contrast between them. I got to know Sukie as a fellow resident of Yarmouth. Sukie used to be an Episcopal priest.
No longer is she an Episcopal priest, however, her husband’s door remains with the church and now Sukie is an artist. I thought we’d bring her in and talk about what that was like deciding to become an artist or continue being an artist, and how she has made these big decisions in her life. How are you, Sukie?
Sukie: Hi, Lisa. As you can imagine, as you say, making that big a decision was not a simple matter at all. The people closest to me would concur that I thought about it and talked about it for probably 10 years or something like that in various stages of mulling over the way things go.
I think it began with perhaps a sense of somehow feeling I didn’t quite fit in the role of being an Episcopal priest, or something about it was maybe more burdensome to me than joyful and it didn’t feel that quite right, sort of mixed within my own soul, I guess you could say.
There’s a big sense of obligation and responsibility that I felt having taken ordination vows and really wanting to honor the commitment that I had made all the way back in 1983 I think it was. My memory isn’t always clear on that. It was really a long process of living in and in between place and thinking about responsibilities and what might be calling me forward.
At the same time that I was mulling over that, I had a growing hunger to be expressing myself in non-verbal ways. I think one thing about my … most of my, the first half of my life, my schooling and then the priesthood where you’re doing a lot of reading, writing, speaking, sermons and so forth, those are all very verbal and that was always an easy road for me in terms of expression. This hunger to find other means to express myself continued to grow and require attention I guess I could say. There is something growing well at the same time, my sense of myself as a priest was more troubled or shrinking.
Dr. Lisa: How did you feel called to become a priest in the first place, because making that decision is not easy from the get go?
Sukie: No. I think I had the benefit of youthful, naïvete at the time. I’m thinking about that from the … helps us get into some things that might be bigger than we had any way of imaging. I think for me, I was in my 20s, and even by the end of college, I probably had what was for people of my generation, in the mid 70s when I finished college, a kind of typical spiritual quest underway. In my case, it really led me to the Episcopal church through various friends and mentors that I admired and love of music which is a very big part of that church’s worship.
The quest for me, it was probably a lot of things rolled into one sort of a personal, spiritual quest. Maybe also looking for an identity and a place to fit in the world to know who I was and that I had a purpose and perhaps a home different from my family, but another place where I knew I belonged. Somehow, I think all those things were rolled into the sense of calling.
Actually, I get a little bit squeamish about claiming a calling because I think it’s a pretty hard thing to say, and to know for sure that we are interpreting what we claim to be God’s desires for us. It’s always been a hard thing for me to dare to speak loud, but I did have to get to the point of being able to articulate that when I was on my way to the priesthood. That was quite a long time ago now.
Dr. Lisa: If part of becoming a priest was claiming some sort of identity and some sort of identity that was separate from your family, then part of leaving the priesthood then meant that you left part of your identity behind. What was that like?
Sukie: I was very tumultuous. Sometimes I’ve looked back and I thought, “Perhaps I took on the identity of being a priest,” but there are special clothes that go with the job too, so there’s the metaphor of the clothing and garb actually fitting, but perhaps I took on that identity when my own kind of core identity was a little uninformed. I was still really lived out in the world a whole lot. I’ve often wondered if maybe if the people who get ordained later in life have a different way of merging this personal and professional identities.
In my case, I remember the day after that I had officially signed the papers that were … The technical term is ‘Renouncing my ordination’. I was completely exhausted and I woke up … I wrote in my journal “I feel like somebody has died,” and I think it really was a death. I’ve never been through a divorce. I’ve known people who have been for sure and my guess is it’s about as close to that experience as anything I’ve known before, but a real wrenching … As much as I felt like it was the right thing to do, there was a lot of grief with letting go of that life. Some of which had already happened before the official act and some of which happened afterwards. It led to a period of probably a couple of years of being back at square one and I really didn’t know who I was. I mean, I knew personally who I was but in terms of a place in the world and with an identifiable profession or identity in that sense, I was kind of in limbo again.
Dr. Lisa: One thing that’s interesting about your story is that your husband is still a priest. In fact, he’s still a priest in the parish that is in Yarmouth, is that right?
Sukie: No. We shared that role together as in the Episcopal church, the single title would be ‘Director of the Church,’ we were co-rectors. Because we’ve been called to that position together, we felt that it would be a little odd for one of us to leave and the other to stay. We both had reached the point of feeling we wanted to explore some other possibilities. We left Saint Bartholomew’s behind and many beloved friends and people there.
David, for a while, worked solely as a hospice chaplain, and now he’s doing two jobs part-time, one is the hospice chaplain and one as the Vicar which is a smaller parish’s pastor at Saint Nicholas Episcopal Church in Scarborough.
Dr. Lisa: You have two daughters. Both of whom are out and about in the world but went to Yarmouth High School, is that right?
Sukie: We actually lived in Cumberland. The church was in Yarmouth, so many of our parishioners lived in Yarmouth but some in Cumberland, some Freeport and so forth. Our house was in Cumberland and our two daughters went to the Cumberland Schools up through … One of them up through, back when it was Greely Junior High and Annette through elementary school and then they finished at Waynflete. They have friends in both places. Now, one is really out in the world. Our older daughter has just spent a year in Ghana and is about to go to graduate school in London. We’re all envious. Our younger daughter is going to be a junior in college.
Dr. Lisa: How did it feel to them to have two priests as parents while they were growing up, and then one priest as a parent and the other not?
Sukie: It would be an interesting conversation to have them here too, because they might … From time to time, the dinner table conversations come around to that topic and they have a rather blunt, plain way of speaking about these such things. I actually will never forget when David and I were first engaged, and we met, we were both already ordained when we met. One of the teenagers in the youth group in my congregation, this was back in Concord, Massachusetts when he heard that I was marrying another priest he said, “Boy, do I pity your kids.” I always thought, “What are we doing today?” I think they survived it pretty well. Much of that takes to the fact that Saint Bartholomew’s is a very relaxed child-friendly congregation so there wasn’t sort of the fishbowl eyes on the preacher’s family that some congregations might have.
I think they were a little bit wildered at my decision, not entirely sure they got it. Maybe some of the subtleties of it were just not going to be accessible to them at the time, but very supportive and now I think they just … is sort of part of the fabric of our life. I’m not sure that they ponder it in a big way. I sense that if anything it has modeled for them or I hope it has, a freedom to reassess one’s life and change course, which I hope is helpful to them at the place where they are in their lives now where I know they feel a lot of pressure to configure out what they’re going to do and get it right and all of that. Clearly, if I’m an example, you don’t have to get it. Maybe there is no one right that’s going to be right for your whole life. For some people, I think that’s true, and for others, clearly not. The past changes course and diverge and you get to make choices. I hope that’s something that supports them as they move along in the world.
Dr. Lisa: Sukie, how can people see your art? Where can they find you and learn more about the work that you’re doing now?
Sukie: Thanks for asking that. I do have a website. It’s ‘Sukieecurtis.com’ and that’s S-U-K-I-E-C-U-R-T-I-S. When I’m doing my job right, I keep my website updated. It’s pretty good at the moment, with new photos of paintings and so forth. I am on Facebook and I’d be happy to accept friend requests. If you’d let me know how you heard about me, that would be even better. Those are probably … An email, I’m happy to receive email too, but Facebook, I have made a lot of connections with fellow artists and people interested in art that way, and I enjoy that means of connection as well as people who happen to see my work, also and not to have at least something hanging all the time at the Yarmouth frame and gallery which is on Route one in Yarmouth.
Dr. Lisa: I do encourage people to spend some time looking at your paintings. They are beautiful and they do speak to this sense of being in the moment. I appreciate your coming here and taking time to talk with us about what it was like to be a priest and then decide not to be a priest, and your spirituality, and how you continue to live in the world, because I think this is something that people who are listening can probably relate to you in some way in their own lives.
We’ve been speaking with Sukie Curtis, an artist and former Episcopal priest. Thanks for coming in and talking with us today.
Sukie: Thanks very much for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 115, ‘Love, Spirituality and Self’. Our guests have include Elaine McGillicuddy and Sukie Curtis. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit ‘Doctorlisa.org’.
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