About New Houses…

“New Houses out of Old Bricks” was the title of my undergraduate thesis in American Studies, with the subtitle, “Religious Experience and Individualism in the Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson” (Amherst College, 1994). 

In Fall 1993 I had set out to research feminine images of God, and a professor had introduced me to Jackson, an African-American woman from 19th-century Philadelphia who spent many years seeking a religious community where she could belong. I found her to be a more persistent and eclectic “church-shopper” than most of my expert-shopper contemporaries.

Jackson’s autobiography, published in the 1980s as Gifts of Power, began as the story of a married woman rooted in the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. By the end of it, she had founded a Shaker community unlike any other: both black and white members, and located in the middle of the city. In between, she had been called to celibacy, joined the Holiness movement, became an itinerant preacher, explored spiritualism, and joined, left, and rejoined the Shakers. 

Her fascinating struggles with community and theology quickly turned feminine images of God into a mere footnote in my thesis. In many ways they mirrored my own struggles, of which I was just becoming aware. In particular, one of the many dreams she recorded spoke to me. Here’s how I described it in my thesis:

“A dream on February 13, 1843, ‘Vision of the Ruins,’ provides a helpful metaphor for making ‘new’ doctrine out of ‘old’ experience. The ‘many houses’ in the dream have ‘fallen down for very age,’ perhaps in the manner of old doctrine which fails to provide for people’s needs. In the dream, Jackson sees three old men who ‘looked weary and discouraged. Their work was to pick out all the whole brick of these old houes that had fallen down, clean off all the old mortar, and pile them in piles, to build new houses.’ ”

Jackson’s “vision of ruins” spoke not only to what she was doing in her spiritual journey, but what I was doing in mine. For both of us, many “bricks” were available in our own Christian traditions, and outside them as well. Our task  then was building a faithful theology to live by, one that would have integrity and withstand the storms of life (borrowing the image of the house built on a rock, from Matthew 7). We do not do this building process alone, but with the help of community and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And the process is never “done.”

Once I started paying attention to this theological creativity in Jackson’s writing and my own life, I started seeing it everywhere, and that hasn’t stopped in the 15 years since I first met Rebecca Cox Jackson and gratefully came to think of her as a guide and friend. Today I still meet her spiritual heirs everywhere:

• in the congregations and campus ministry where I have served, particularly but not only young adults,
• in theologians I’ve encountered,
• in my friends and acquaintances,
• in people I’ve met through online communities, who are seeking “bricks” for their houses in cyberspace,
• and in so many people living at the edge or outside of faith communities, trying to build their faith with integrity, out of many different bricks.

I hope this blog can become a place where people can share the “bricks” of tradition and experience, and experiment with putting them together in new ways.