by A. Anne Holcomb

From Sunday, March 14

[We hear the sound of a child singing "Jesus Loves Me"] Then Anne begins:

And that was my introduction to spirituality! Beginning when I was about two, my mother would have me sing children's bible song with her every night as she tucked me into bed. When I was four, my mother took me to a recording studio where a record was made of us singing "Jesus Loves Me" as well as several other old Christian standards. The record was a Christmas present for my father, though he never listened to is, and I ended up with it—enabling me to share it with you.

By the time I was six, I recall being quite dissatisfied with the Sunday school I was attending at a fairly large, thriving Methodist church in the privileged Columbia, Ohio, suburb of Upper Arlington, where I lived during the elementary years of my childhood. I was dissatisfied because in Sunday school the teachers never really read from the Bible but read some children's story instead. The Bible was the Word of God, Right? So why weren't they teaching the Word of God to children? I wondered. After I asked these questions, my mother took me to the adult church service with her. It wasn't long before I became one of the youngest children to sing regularly in the church's youth choir. And it wasn't long after that that the church youth choir became a city-wide interfaith children's choir. (The growth of this choir was similar to the growth of the Chicago Children's Choir, which began at this church.)

I remained a part of the Columbus choir for nearly seven years, and through it I was exposed to all the mainline Christian denominations, as well as Catholicism and Judaism. I very much loved the mystery of the Catholic and Jewish services, particularly the sweeping sounds of spoken and sung Latin and Hebrew. My parents were so afraid that I would become Jewish or Catholic that they shoved me, at age 12, into a Methodist confirmation class, even though neither of them had attended a church service anywhere since I had been old enough to get myself out of bed on Sunday mornings for choir.

Contrary to my parents' fears, I had no desire to become Catholic or Jewish. The fact was that I considered myself an agnostic. Each of the many faiths that I had been exposed to had demanded its members to choose their particular "path" as the only "right one" over all the others. I couldn't do that because I saw more commonalties among them than differences. And I had also begun to really question the pictures of God that all of these religions professed.

The Methodist youth minister who taught the confirmation class is someone I will always remember with fond regard. I felt I could trust this man. So I told him that my parents had forced me into the class and that If I didn't go along with the confirmation, I'd be severely punished at home. But I felt that if I did get up before the church on confirmation day and said all the right "yes's" and "I do's" on cue with the rest of the class, I would be lying. The minister proposed that I write my own belief statement and read it from the pulpit on confirmation day and then I wouldn't have to stand with the group but could still participate. This became my very first sermon, and the idea became so popular that three other children from the class also composed belief statements and read them from the pulpit.

I have told you how my mother would tuck me into bed at night and we would sing bible songs. What I haven't told you about is what else happened during these nightly rituals I shared with my mother. Every night after we had sung a song or two, I would tell my mother how my father had abused me earlier that day. She would try to dispel my fears with reassurances, but she never did anything that effectively put a stop to my father's verbal and physical abuse of me or of his sexual abuse of my adopted teenage sister. And when on my way home from school I would utter a prayer to God to protect me, to please not have my father be home, God would not seem to be there, but my father would be.

My father's last action of abuse toward me was an act of blatant sabotage. After promising to support my higher education, he suddenly decided that I didn't deserve his help, and he disowned me during my last years in college. I was forced to drop out of school and launch my independent young adulthood with only $350 in cash and assets, no college degree, and $20,000 in student loan debts that quickly turned bad. It was only a matter of months before I became homeless and found myself living on the street.

I spent the rest of my young adulthood using every waking moment to work my way out of the gutter. Besides finishing college and working two or three minimum-wage jobs at a time, I would do anything legal to make a buck. One of my many micro enterprises was dealing and trading in used books. One book I came across, Why I am a Unitarian by the Rev. Jack Mendelsohn (former minister of this church), had been published in the year of my birth.

In his book, Mendelsohn says: "For Unitarians, salvation is not an otherworldly journey, flown on wings of dogma. It is ethical striving and moral achievement... . The path of Unitarian religious journal leads from freedom, through reason [and responsibility], to a generous and tolerant understanding of differing views and practices. This is what we mean when we say we believe in salvation by character... . To know life is to see—to be gripped by the terrible pain and wonder of it."

Upon reading this book, I knew I had found my spiritual home.

By 1990, I had succeeded in getting myself far away from the street through a career in retail management and found myself with leisure time to devote to activism on behalf of homeless people. But the more volunteer work I did, the less satisfying my retail career became, and in 1994 I decided to change careers from retail to ministry for the homeless.

In the past five years there have been many setbacks to my ministry. A walkathon for the homeless in Chicago that I chaired as a volunteer no longer exists. A nonprofit homeless service agency where I was employed failed, couldn't afford to pay unemployment insurance on behalf of its last remaining workers and hence fired those who would not quit. Though fired, I did manage to collect for unemployment. A health crisis with my partner's elderly mother stalled my plans to pursue a graduate degree in human service administration and then to enter theological school at Meadville/Lombard. But I haven't given up. The ability to turn the worst thing that ever happened to me into something that helps others will be not only a ministry to others but a ministry to myself.