Letter to My Daughter - Maya Angelou [24]
Mt. Zion
Once in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and an acting agnostic. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented. And then a voice teacher introduced me to Lessons in Truth, published by the Unity School of Practical Christianity.
Frederick Wilkerson, the voice teacher, numbered opera singers, nightclub singers, recording artists, and cabaret entertainers among his students. Once a month he invited all of us to gather and read from Lessons in Truth.
At one reading, the other students, who were all white, the teacher, and I sat in a circle. Mr. Wilkerson asked me to read a section, which ended with the words “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book. The teacher said, “Read it again.” I pointedly opened the book, and a bit sarcastically read, “God loves me.” Mr. Wilkerson said, “Again.” I wondered if I was being set up to be laughed at by the professional, older, all-white company? After about the seventh repetition I became nervous and thought that there might be a little truth in the statement. There was a possibility that God really did love me, me Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the gravity and grandeur of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me, since one person, with God, constitutes the majority?
That knowledge humbles me today, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in my gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation of full growth.
Gratefully I am a member in good standing of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I am under watch care at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and I am a present member of Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco, California.
In all the institutions I try to be present and accountable for all I do and leave undone. I know that eventually I shall have to be present and accountable in the presence of God. I do not wish to be found wanting.
Keep the Faith
Many things continue to amaze me, even well into my seventh decade. I’m startled or at least taken aback when people walk up to me and without being questioned inform me that they are Christians. My first response is the question “Already?”
It seems to me that becoming a Christian is a lifelong endeavor. I believe that is also true for one wanting to become a Buddhist, or a Muslim, a Jew, Jainist, or a Taoist. The persons striving to live their religious beliefs know that the idyllic condition cannot be arrived at and held on to eternally. It is in the search itself that one finds the ecstasy.
The Depression, which was difficult for everyone to survive, was especially so for a single black woman in the Southern states tending her crippled adult son and raising two small grandchildren.
One of my earliest memories of my grandmother, who was called “Mamma,” is a glimpse of that tall, cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up in the air with nothing visible beneath her.
Whenever she confronted a challenge, Mamma would clasp her hands behind her back, look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and draw herself up to her full six-foot height. She would tell her family in particular, and the world in general, “I don’t know how to find the things we need, but I will step out on the word of God. I am trying to be a Christian and I will just step out on the word of God.” Immediately I could see her flung into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around her shoulders. Naturally, since she was over six feet tall, and stood out on the word of God, she was a giant in heaven. It wasn’t difficult for me to see Mamma as powerful, because she had the word of God beneath