Between the Mystic and the Mainstream.

Then numinous is not captive to religion.

It can happen to me anywhere--and it does.

It is a Saturday morning in early autumn. The light filtering into the synagogue is gentle, golden; the mood contemplative but charged with ruach, with spirit. I get up from my seat momentarily and head toward the back of the sanctuary, my tallit billowing around me, when a tall, gaunt man wearing a tallit and kippah steps into the aisle. He looks so very familiar, I think to myself, but I am unable to place him. Just as I am about to pass by, he interrupts my stride and stretches out his hand to greet me: "Hello, minister!," he exclaims, smiling warmly. "That was a lovely service you did last Sunday."

My mind dives into rapid face-and-place search mode: Who is he and how does he know about the "other" part of my life? Is he a member of a church? Of a synagogue? A friend of a friend? What he is doing here if he was in church last Sunday?

Never mind for a moment all the other religiously complex factors of this particular morning. That the synagogue we are standing in--and of which I have been a member for nearly ten years -- is actually a Methodist church which shares its space with a Jewish congregation. And that the service on this Shabbat morning is an especially significant one to me because it includes the bar mitzvah of the eldest son of my ministerial colleague and his Jewish wife who, together, are raising their three sons as Jews.

If this "mystery man" was at last Sunday's service at the Presbyterian church where I am Ecumenical Associate minister (but I am not, I might add, Presbyterian), then he saw me co-preside at the liturgy, offer prayers and the Peace, chrismate twin boys, and then celebrate the Eucharist. Six days later, he sees me standing in front of him wrapped in tallit, a prayer shawl, a garment which should only be worn by someone who is a member of the people Israel. But this, too, is who I am. And this is how hive.

When I look startled by his greeting, he reassures me before I can respond or even begin to offer an explanation. This time, no words are necessary and I am aware of my relief. "Oh, I understand," he says, and I detect a slight German accent. "My father was a Mennonite minister, but I converted to Judaism." Presumably, what he understands is that there are many forms through which one can come to know God. And this understanding, which I share, for me means that I must live in more than one "world," in more than one religious framework.

Once I believed that if I could just be content within the boundaries of one tradition, then this uncontainable yearning toward God, whom I could glimpse through different doorways, would at last "settle down" into an "acceptable" religious lifestyle. And I tried. I reached into my closet for the tailored Brooks Brothers suit, black velvet headband, and two strands of pearls, all of which I hoped would convey the outward signs of an inward religious normalcy favored by "proper" Episcopalians, but my "otherness" seeped through nevertheless. Later on, I learned to read Hebrew so I could daven without restraint and follow synagogue services without the tell-tale transliteration booklet, but again and again, I'd watch people in shul take in my WASPy, vaguely exotic looks, my very "Christian" first name, and then I'd hear the inevitable question, "Are you Jewish?" -- even though I was not a convert. In my daily life, I came to dread simple application forms or questionnaires that asked you to print your denominat ion or religious affiliation in the box below. There was never enough space there for me.

In the introduction to my recently published book, Searching for Your Soul, I wrote about the "two worlds" I have always known: "the concrete, day-to-day physical world -- deadlines, desks, dinner -- the world of manifestation; and another world, the spiritual world of mystery, the world of God." But there are also other "worlds" that bisect this initial twinned reality: first, the world of the Christian -- the symbolic language of my earliest spiritual experiences which were largely Christ centered; and that of the Jew -- the religion of my birth, but not encountered until much later in life and then, as a baptized Christian. And finally, there are the two worlds that my spiritual director refers to as "the mystic and the mainstream" -- that is, the world of solitary, unmediated encounter with the Divine, and then the world in which one's experience of the Holy is mediated through an exoterically focused tradition, religious institution, or faith community.

I was in my early twenties before I ever attended a church service, and growing up, I had never been to temple with my parents. My father, an uneducated, resolutely unsentimental first-generation son of Russian Jewish immigrants, thought religion of any brand was a crutch for the weak-willed who were worthy only of his cynical contempt. My arty, freethinking Jewish mother had been the lady on the flying trapeze in Ringling Brothers circus, her talent for daredevil acrobatics no doubt inherited from her mother's Mongolian ancestors. She had known fire-eaters and elephants and sword-swallowers on a daily basis, but never the inside of a synagogue. Instead, she gravitated toward a kind of proto-New Age spirituality infused with a strong measure of the occult: tarot, trances, and astral travel. She was finally pronounced a minister in the Universal Spiritualist Church at the very same time that I was a newly minted Episcopalian at the Harvard Divinity School, hoping for eventual ordination.

That there was something called "a company of heaven" was one of the few points on which she and I could agree. But for her it meant receiving messages from dear, departed disembodied entities waiting to communicate with those loved ones still here on earth, while for me it was the Host of Heaven who veiled their faces to the Presence, chanting alleluias at the foot of Christ's throne. Suffice to say, in my childhood home there was never a trace of Shabbat, nor an inkling of Passover, not even a once-a-year shul appearance on the High Holy Days. My father went early to work; my mother, to her seances late at night.

When I was a little girl and an adolescent, my spirituality was formed not within the context of a mainstream worshiping community nor even within the context of family tradition, but through the mystical, the solitary. I found my spiritual place -- the place where the worlds opened up and I could know God -- first behind an orange upholstered wing chair in my parents' living room. It was a shelter for me: the way its broad back made the third leg of triangle with the corner of the wall. I went behind the wing chair to pass from this world, to go to the place that I knew was my real home.

You first need a place in order to then know no-place, and in my own room -- an annex to the kitchen, really -- there was not enough space for me to disappear into a world beyond this one. After school, I would go behind the orange wing chair, locate my spiritual "center" on the melon-colored carpet (I could sense exactly where it was), close my eyes, and almost instantly enter into deep meditation. Soon my breath would all but fall away, and "I,' was gone -- but now with God. Once in a while, my body, nearly an inanimate thing then, would shake. Volition to stop it was not mine in those moments. Sometimes, I would see layers of colors; not Crayola hues or Hallmark rainbows, but intense washes of color, and I would feel myself drop through a scaffolding of space and time.

I sat and I sat. Everyday. One hour, two hours. Time passed while I was away. It was where I went after school. Sometimes I went to the no-place place during gym class while sitting on the sidelines. I remember trying to tell my classmates about how easy it was to go there, but they cartwheeled away from me.

I came to know Christ in this mystical, contemplative way as well -- but not behind the orange wing chair. On my way to and from my elementary school, situated in the exclusively gentile world of the Gardens (as that restricted area of Forest Hills was then called), I would pass the large Catholic church and convent that stood in a kind of boundary-defining relationship to the WASP world beyond its borders and the predominantly Jewish area where I lived. As I passed that extensive complex of interconnected church buildings set off by its garish green-painted sidewalk, I felt an intuitive familiarity with what I imagined went on inside: the ritual, the pageantry, the forbidden, almost frightening, fragrance of incense and burning candles. I sensed a correspondence between what went on "in there" and what went on inside of me, what I was "made of," spiritually. I would whisper to myself with the conviction of utter certainty: One day I will belong to the Church. But most of all, I wanted to belong to Him, to C hrist. Long before I approached the font in an Episcopal Church in my mid-twenties I knew that he called me to Him and had marked me as His own forever.

I never did cross the threshold of this particular neighborhood Catholic church -- it seemed so vast and intimidating -- but as an adolescent, I ventured time and time again into empty churches in the Gardens, invariably Protestant, and knelt before the cross, waiting for Him. And in those moments, in that silence, my inner world, the receptive "ground" that I had tilled during hours of solitary meditation, was transfigured with what I eventually learned was called the mystical presence of Christ. I knew nothing of denominations, nothing of dogma, doctrine, or even the Bible. But I knew the Christ. In these empty churches, the valence of that unique presence and power were unmistakable to me. Years later, I understood that our ancestors in faith spoke of Him as the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, preexistent before all time, the Prince of Peace. Always transcendent, yet exuding a deep, resonant familiarity which let me know without doubt that truly there was, in Christ, no beginning or end.

Having had roots in such a solitary, mystical, and highly Christocentric spirituality, my desire to be baptized, to receive and, eventually, to enact the sacraments, perhaps seems understandable. But how far away this must also seem from the woman wrapped in a tallit, davening in a synagogue on Shabbat. Indeed, I came to Judaism much, much later, in my early thirties, trying to be supportive of my then-husband, an upper-class Oxbridge-educated Englishman who felt inexplicably yet deeply drawn to Yiddishkeit.

But when I first stepped into a synagogue to accompany him on his own spiritual quest, I was a baptized Christian with virtually no connection to anything Jewish. I'd logged in a considerable amount of time in the Episcopal and Anglican churches by then, much of it in the chancel, co-presiding at the liturgy, preaching, teaching, and counseling. Though I had faced a certain understandable transition moving into the worshiping life of the ecclesia after years of solitary, individualized spiritual practice, I nevertheless had quickly embraced the symbolically rich high church rituals of the Episcopal Church. And once I began to preside at the altar, I seemed to almost remember -- rather than have to learn -- its rites, so "second-nature" to me was this form of service.

In addition, the structure and the components of Anglican liturgy, coupled with its refined aesthetic which engaged so many of the senses, offered vehicles of transcendence that almost effortlessly brought me to heightened places of contemplation that were familiar from my youth. When I first approached the synagogue and its liturgical life, I had expected, quite narrow-mindedly, that I would become bored or restless without the "smells and bells" to which I'd grown so accustomed. But to my great astonishment, I found -- for the first time, really--that I was also a Jew. In the synagogue, I found a context for my love of reading and study, my predilection for wrestling with texts and meaning, and my craving for community.

In those early months of my synagogue attendance, as I watched the congregation sway to ancient prayers, I wept for what I had never known or received in childhood. I, who could chant the Great Thanksgiving with the proper preface in my sleep if I'd had to, suddenly had no idea what page we were on, let alone any understanding of the structure of the synagogue service. Yet once again -- but this time in an entirely unexpected context -- I experienced a sense of deep spiritual familiarity. The melodies and the cadence of the Hebrew prayers somehow seemed to course through my bloodstream, commingling with Cranmer's collects and Chrysostom's prayers.

I was, in some sense, neither a "cradle" Jew nor a "cradle" Episcopalian -- though I had worked hard at becoming the latter -- yet I felt myself at home simultaneously, paradoxically, in both worlds, unable to be an exclusive resident of just one. But in the late twentieth century, even in New York City, there seemed to be no way to live like this, no outlet or form in the religious world which could adequately hold or frame my experience of being a Jew and also a sacramental Christian. That I felt called to ordained leadership in the church and to a lay role in the synagogue made things exceedingly more complex, to say nothing of public. Months merged into years and it seemed that I was somehow doomed to spend my religious life caught in a revolving door of allegiance, or, because of convention and normative ways of being religious in this world, forced to put aside one entire part of my whole spiritual self.

I was grateful and content to make the motzi and the kiddush over the bread and wine on Friday night, savoring the warmth of my friends around the Shabbat table, but on Sunday mornings, I still dreamed about celebrating the Eucharist. I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit hovering in the cool, moist air as choristers chanted the vespers service in the chancel of a darkened cathedral, illumined only by candlelight. But as mid-week came around, I began to long for Shabbat. Crossing Broadway, I would find myself humming niggunim, the wordless melodies at once joyful and melancholy that give voice to the movement of the soul courting and being courted by hakadosh baruch hu -- the Holy One, Blessed Be He.

"Why must you be different? Why can't you be like everybody else?" my father would shout at me when I was little girl. His words only saddened and confused me. Yet once an adult, the more I ran from my difference -- especially my spiritual difference -- and tried to live in only one world, the more I met with spiritual anguish and peril. Any attempt, at various times, to deny or marginalize any of these worlds always resulted in those banished parts coming back to claim me, forcing me to own them, often much to my astonishment and, sometimes, my reluctance or outright resistance.

Through the circumstances and occurrences that God often delivers into our lives so that we will no longer turn away from that which is imperative, I was finally compelled to embrace all the worlds I knew: the spiritual and the physical; the Christian and the Jew; the mystic and the mainstream. In recent years, I have sought to hold within the framework of my spiritual life the commonalities as well as the distinctions and tensions implied by these apparent antinomies. Thus, I began to negotiate "passage" between them, to at last live and worship God in accordance with how I have been made.

Living the way I do, I have come to know a God who confounds categories and whom I encounter sometimes at the center of mainstream religious life and community, but generally more often at the margins of experience, at the border-crossing. And I find this same God in the lives of many others who are also negotiating their own version of "double belonging" or passage between worlds.

I am not a syncretist. I don't want to "mix it up" when it comes to liturgy or theology. And God forbid you should think I am a messianic Jew of any sort. I don't think about Jesus when I am in synagogue, except perhaps to occasionally note, rather ironically, that it is this kind of service that would be familiar to him, not what I do on Sundays.

I have, in my work as a spiritual counselor, explored many issues and concerns with both Jews and Christians who, of their own accord, feel deeply moved to convert. But I have also helped estranged Jews return to their tradition and marginalized Christians to enter fully into the life of the Church. We carry cultures, whole worlds and ways of knowing God inside of us, and some days I feel like a United Nations "translator" of the spirit, or, on an especially religiously diverse day, like a traffic director on the road to Damascus.

I'm not a proselytizer. I don't want to make Jews into Christians or Christians into Jews -- although I think it would do many Christians a great deal of good to spend time in a synagogue and to study the Tanakh within the context of Judaism. Not in order to be evangelists or witnesses to their own faith, but rather as respectful visitors, that they might gain a better understanding of the religion of Jesus, a first-century Jew, and perhaps whittle away at some of that persistent Christian triumphalism. It is one thing to read a book on the Jewish roots of Christianity; it is another thing entirely to hear phrases one knows by heart from the Christian tradition, and then to experience these very same words holding their original religious meaning in their original liturgical setting. Once you behold hundreds of Jews inclining on tiptoe as they pray "Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh" -- "Holy, holy, holy" -- as part of the Amidah, the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy -- one can never hear the Sanctus in quite the s ame way ever again.

Being both Jew and Christian means that wherever I go, I am perpetually "the other." I stand outside of a tradition at the very same time that I stand within it. Though I now serve very happily as an associate minister in a Presbyterian church, I do not feel that God is calling me to be a Presbyterian. There may be something to be said for not becoming part of "the family." Standing in the place of "otherness" can indeed have a unique power and vantage point all its own.

So I study Torah on Shabbat, and on Sundays, I celebrate the Eucharist. I whisper "Dust you are and to dust you shall return," tracing the sign of the cross with ashes, gritty and cool, and thus Lent begins. God's mighty act of deliverance from oppression, the rescue from mitzrayim, the narrow place, is what I remember when I sit down with a very religiously diverse group of friends in my apartment for the Passover seder. I begin every single day with "Modha ani lefanecha,[ldots]" thanking God for returning my soul with compassion, but when I offer myself for priestly service, it is the Collect for Purity that prepares me for this work. Most of this I have had to "test out" along the way to discern what feels "clean" or appropriate, but my religious lifestyle in and of itself is not meant to be prescriptive.

After years of wrestling, I have come to believe that God has made me not to "set up camp" but to cross borders, to stand at the boundary, to live and worship with few established templates to refer to. This is a spiritual life that requires one to journey forth and to return -- over and over again -- with complete memory of where one has been in order that one might use such experiences to then assist others in their own passage. These days, we are so often urged -- goaded even -- to self-identify. "What are you? Who are you?," people want to know before the first hello. But God's "self-identification" to Moses was Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh: "I am Who I am; I will be what I will be." And in so doing, God claimed God's own otherness, God's mystery, God's "becoming" -- and, if we are made in God's image -- ours as well.

On a Sunday night, at the very start of the summer of 1995, my spiritual director went to spend one week as retreat master for a small group of women Cistercian monks at their rural monastery in a forest of primeval-looking trees. He took ten of his students with him, nine -- Jews and me. It was during this week that I most dramatically experienced the movement back and forth between form and formlessness, between mystery and manifestation. During this week, there was no religious syncretism between Christian and Jew, yet I saw traditions and denominational forms as veils, with Reality beyond these "containers" that facilitate and symbolize our going to God.

In chapel very early each morning, I listened to these women monks. I listened to their breathing and to the stillness of their prayer. I synchronized my breath with theirs as we stood and chanted psalms while daylight began to filter through the four-columned tree visible through a glass wall behind a bare stone altar. The veil felt very thin indeed.

When late Saturday afternoon was upon us, in the final hours of the Sabbath and nearing the close of our week together, we--contemplative Jews and contemplative Christians -- fed each other the Shabbat bread, challah baked before sundown on Friday in the monastery's oven. I looked around the table and thought, "I wish this would never end." I realized, of course, right then, that this was, in fact, the true meaning of the Shabbat and of the Lord's Day: the foretaste of the Eternal Kingdom, the reign of shalom. Together, then, in that place of Eternal Time in the midst of God's Presence, with the veils lifted, we will feed one another, very much like this. Spiritual warfare, struggle, will have ended. There will be no strife.

This was a glimpse of the repair of the world, the tikkun olam, in which all Jews must participate; and it was the peace that passes all understanding that Christians know through the Presence of Christ.

This is what took place during this week-long retreat as the Presence of God passed through the world of form. And this is also what I experienced, time and time again, while growing up with God behind the orange wing chair and in those empty, silent churches. I have come to the conclusion that it is precisely because my spirituality was initiated and nurtured through the contemplative, the mystical, outside of the mainstream -- in other words, in the place where form does not ultimately hold sway -- that I have come to be able to live as I do.

I have indeed sensed the numinous, the transcendent, within the context of formalized liturgy. I have come to know, often to love and to revel in, the energy and the sheer spiritual strength of the minyan and of the ecclesia -- the power of people praying together in significant numbers. And I have experienced the delight as well as the difficulty in being part of a religious institution or community.

But ultimately, I can be both Jew and Christian, dweller and sojourner, the familiar and the other, not because of some particularly clever construction of theology or philosophy, and not primarily because I possess a particular aesthetic sensibility or tolerance for ambiguity, but because, in those early years, I met God, over and over, in the place where worlds came together and then dissolved. There were no denominations there, no dualities, not even words. Just the Most High and Holy God in the place where form drops away.

KATHERINE KURS is a Professor of Religious Studies on the faculty of the undergraduate college of The New School for Social Research and also teaches at the State University of New York and at The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church. Her book Searching for Your Soul was published by Schocken/Random House in Fall 1999.