The Pastor Who Learned to Dance: How I Learned to Be Myself in the Church

By Howard S. Fuller

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, here would be no dance and there is only the dance. (T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets)

The metaphor of the dance is one I have chosen to describe the movement of the Spirit in my life as pastor in a small Protestant congregation in northern California during 197888.

I dance a light and joyful dance when I remember that God in Christ is the still point of the dance around which the various parts of myself arrange themselves.

As the people of God and I dance together we become a healing energy field in which the Holy Spirit powerfully moves .

I have written this book in gratitude for the gift of the presence of the Christ as the creator of our dance together with all creation.

It is a book for pastors and for students in training for church ministry, but it is for lovers, parents, business executives, and teachers as well.

I invite you, my brothers and sisters, to dance with me.

From a colleague: Your book is very good; very readable, very insightful and sometimes profound. I appreciate your open (and courageous) description of your personal spiritual journey, also your description of Psychosynthesis and its possible manner of application to ones self and to the activity of the Church. . . . I think . . . that your work could be particularly helpful as a teaching tool for ministers and Seminarians.

THE PASTOR WHO LEARNED TO DANCE:

HOW I LEARNED TO BE MYSELF IN THE CHURCH by

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 2, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467832328

Howard S. Fuller

Howard Fuller, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC),  was born near Boston and received his theological and pastoral training at Union Theological Seminary, N.Y. C. After ten years as pastor in upstate New York  and community organizer in the inner city of Buffalo, he was asked to be a Western representative of the national staff of the UCC.  He and his family moved to Berkeley, California where he studied the religion of Protestants and Roman Catholics  in  the highly secular communities of  the 1960s and 70s.  He received his Ph.D. in the Sociology of Religion from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973.  Soon after he  was gifted with  a transforming spiritual experience that Christ loved him unconditionally.  He studied the trans- personal psychology Psychosynthesis for five years and taught its theory and practice to hundreds of Roman Catholic pastors.   He was called to be pastor of the Benicia Community Congregational, California, from late 1978 until early 1988. He is  also the author of  the autobiographical _Treasure Hunting-A Journey towards Intimacy_ (Authorhouse).  He was married to Annette for 46 years.  They were parents of four children and four grandchildren.  She died in 1997.  He is now married to Polly P. Gates.  

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© 2007 Howard S. Fuller. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/18/2007

ISBN: 978-1-4343-0630-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-3232-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007902645

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1 The Mountain Trip to the Christ

Chapter 2 Learning A New Dance

Chapter 3 Dancing Exercises For The Journey

PART II

Introduction To Part II

Chapter 4 Right Seeing Leads To Right Action In The World

Chapter 5 Singing My Song, Dancing My Dance In Worship

Chapter 6 How I Am A Prophet In Benicia

Chapter 7 The Passionate Pastor—administration In The Church As An Alternative Society

Chapter 8 Saying Good-bye And Letting Go

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

A Glossary Of Terms

Notes

An Annotated Bibliography

About the Author

There must be the experience of a principle infused from above into you, that shall be indeed Christ formed in you and Christ living in you... a principle of piety, even the love of God, thus produced in you shall be the root of the righteous in you, perpetually bringing forth fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory of God.

Cotton Mather

Dedication

This is for the members and friends of the Benicia Community Congregational Church, for my colleagues in ministry, particularly in the Northern California Conference of the United Church of Christ and in Pilgrim Place, Claremont, California, and especially for my wife, Polly Gates.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my teachers and fellow students at the Redwood City, Palo Alto and San Francisco Psychosynthesis Institute 1973–78, the staff of Wellspring Renewal Center, Marcia Lapp, who edited the original manuscript, Browne Barr, Jane Vennard Dan O’Connor, Ronald Weber, Emmett McDowell, Valerie DeMarinis, John Brooke, Russell Fuller, John Firman, Fanny Erickson, Don Chorley, Ben Potter, Ginny Mackey, Len Kovar and Annette Fuller—who read and offered valuable suggestions and encouragement. Special thanks to my 2006 copy editor, Sid Hall, Mary Hall, and to Trina Lee and the design team of AuthorHouse.

The publishers have given permission to quote portions of:

Embracing Our Selves by Hal Stone, Ph.D. and Sidra Winkelman, Ph.D. First Edition. Copyright 1985. Published by Devorss and Co., Marina Del Rey, Calif.

Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallax Press. Berkeley, Calif.

Miss Giardino by Dorothy Bryant. Ata Books, Berkeley, Calif.

Running through the Thistles by Roy Oswald. Reprinted by permission from the Alban Institute, Inc., 4125 Nebraska Ave., NW, Washington D.C. 210016. Copyright 1978. All rights reserved.

Psychosynthesis: A Psychotherapist’s Personal Overview. Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 25 No. 1, Fall 1976. p. 29 ff. Human Sciences Press., Inc. New York, New York.

This book was completed in 1991 and revised in 2006–7. All rights reserved. All the exercises may be copied. Your comments are eagerly solicited.

Introduction

Who Was I?

During my twenties and thirties the answer had always been: It is true that you have a well-developed sense of humor but you are also a drab kind of fellow, solid, responsible, hard-working, but stiff and judgmental and very serious. If you had met me in those days you would have observed a 5-foot 10-inch, large-muscled 160-pound male, with short-cropped hair, horn-rimmed glasses, full lips and beard, walking heavily on his heels. Once I would have answered the question, Who are you? with the response: Just me. You know. Me.

Until I was in my forties, my personality was shaped by the expectations of my ancestors, my parents, my teachers, my church leaders, the heroes of my nation. In order to survive and to succeed in the world I knew that I had to please these living and legendary beings. In response to their expectations I could either do well at home, at school and at church, or retreat into a fantasy world or become a rebel. I chose to do well. I was a pleaser, a good boy.¹

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

Who am I? They often tell me

I would step from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a squire from his country house.²

This building was important and necessary work. I agree with Jacob Needleman who wrote: I don’t think you can undergo a path toward inner transformation until you are a relatively normal outward person. I think you have to have a more or less normally functioning ego before you can work toward transcending that ego. A lot of problems arise when people who have an undeveloped, or badly formed ego go right into some transformative effort.³

I remember that what gave me most satisfaction when I was a pastor in Irondequoit and Buffalo, New York was organizing the congregation so that everything ran in good order. When things were working, the machinery operating smoothly, I went home to sleep feeling content. I was a juggler of my own and others’ energies. Later, when I worked for the United Church of Christ as a Minister of the Metropolitan Mission in Buffalo from 1961 to 1967, I was circus ringmaster, cracking the whip as high-spirited horses, bears, tigers, and lions, performed tricks according to my previously-arranged program. In those days I seldom slept well satisfied. The modern city is a chaotic arena for pastoral work. Joy, laughter, and non-judgmental love were missing as I responded to endless appeals for assistance.

It is true people learned to respect themselves. There were good programs for various groups in the community. I received public recognition. But I remember how easy it was to say good-bye to the people and move on. And how little I really knew them. I held those closest to me at arms length, just as God seemed to be holding me at arms length. In those years God was distant, hard, admonishing, and very much a heavy, pushing, demanding father. After a while I realized that I was using a small part of my personality in my role of pastor. These well-managed congregations had a different vibration than the energized alternative community which I was to experience many years later in Benicia.

After years of directing, managing, organizing, pushing, shoving, thrusting, after seventy hour weeks and restless nights, I received an M.A. in Sociology of Religion from the State University of New York in 1966. After I had passed the written exams for the Ph.D. degree I was asked to fly to California to visit our aided mission fields. I remember one fine February day in 1967 arriving in San Francisco after a flight from Buffalo, N.Y. where it was zero degrees and winds blew hard. Here in the West was springtime! My frozen self began to melt. When I was next in New York I persuaded my boss, Purd Deitz, that we needed a field secretary living on the Pacific rim. He agreed, and assigned me when I pleaded for the new position! The beauty, the openness, the eroticism, and spirituality of the West called me with a visceral force. I left city mission work and moved with my family to the San Francisco Bay area in 1967 to do research, planning and field visitations for the Board for Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ in the Western Region. We bought a home in Berkeley, California.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation based on field research in a suburb of Oakland, which helped me understand why people joined and became active in mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. I traveled from east to west across the country and north to south in the Pacific region, listening and advising and making small grants for new church starts and community organizations. I studied new ways people in the West gathered for spiritual growth and ongoing community.

Beginning in 1973, about five years before the Congregational Church in Benicia, California called me to be pastor, I had several very hard years. The board had decided to close its field offices. There was a real possibility that I would have to move back to New York or lose my job at a time when my wife Annette and I had four teenage children to support. They were beginning to get caught up in the wild and often dangerous world of the early 1970s in Berkeley, California. I had to take some risks and make some choices about what I would do and who I would be in the next part of my life.

I dreamed one dream several times. I am on a trip from a small town to a large city, carrying an immense amount of baggage. The bus driver says that I can only take two suitcases but I want to take them all. In another dream I see my father dressed in his Dartmouth-green jacket and gray flannels in a photography studio setting. The light is subdued, the background soft. I watch from the place where the photographer stood as my father passes through the background into the sky. As he moves away he seems to become a young man. In another dream I observe my daughter Susan packing a suitcase. She is going away. I awoke from these dreams feeling very heavy and dragged down.

My dreams seemed to be emphasizing that I was going to let go of old ways of being in the world. They revealed important attachments in my life that were changing. I wanted something new and my dreams were telling me that I would have to let go of some of my attachments. That would be difficult.

When I was in my mid-forties, I saw myself as a leaden box, set in a garden, with a tiny flame burning within it. As I watched the box, it began to come apart, as if burned by hot fire, the sides and top curling into the fire, the flame within transmuting into a butterfly. This was sign of hope for me as I moved into another turn of my journey.

I think about the rhythms of nature. The slow germination time as the seed waits through the winter for the first rains and the sunlight. As I look back on that year when I was forty-five, I marvel at the patience I had to wait things out. Where did that come from? The willingness to wait, nothing more, not knowing.

But of course my mind wasn’t waiting. It was working overtime scheming, planning, suggesting, outlining, questioning, trying to help me on to the next phase of life. Only there didn’t seem to be any answers. The parts of myself which before had planned, organized and controlled my life’s journey were very unhappy, confused and feeling useless. Something had to happen! But what?

I have woven three strands together in this book. The first is the story of my personal preparation for and the practice of being a pastor in a small United Church of Christ church in the northern San Francisco Bay area. The second describes the method and theory which I use in my spiritual growth and practice. It is based on a transpersonal psychology which was developed by an Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974). He called this practice Psychosynthesis. Finally, I have included a number of exercises which I have used myself and taught to others seeking to take the next step on their journey toward being deeper and clearer channels of the Spirit of God.

The glossary contains definitions of key terms in Psychosynthesis. I have included it in order to show how I integrate Psychosynthesis concepts into my understanding of Christian faith and practice.

Part I

Chapter 1

The Mountain Trip

to the Christ

A Mid-Life Conversion

Something very important occurred in my forty-fifth year far from the place of my New England birth and the cities of New York state where I had worked. I wrote in my journal:

June 1973. On a summer afternoon in a retreat center thirty miles east of San Francisco. A group of us were sitting around in a circle in a room on the ground floor of a converted carriage house. We had been together for several days getting acquainted. There was a good deal of trust among us. The leader led us through some relaxation exercises. Then he asked us to close our eyes. He said he would describe some visual images which we might see with our inner eye. He said:

Choose a beautiful meadow and see yourself in it. Be there with all your senses.... See, there is a path which leads up a mountain. There is a sacred building at the top.

I remember suddenly being on a path which led up a mountain. In my interior vision a woman was with me. We were running back and forth, singing and throwing blossoms at one another. Then we swung higher and higher on a great swing fastened to the sky. Now we were at the top. I entered the sacred building alone. The interior room was filled with a soft golden light. As I sat there, a Christ-like figure came toward me, his hands outstretched. He spoke words of love and appreciation for me. I began to weep. Softly, quietly. Tears of joy fell down my face. My jaw dropped, belly relaxed, shoulders fell, and I laughed inside.

Christ did dwell within me! He loved me!

Later, the leader and I swam in the pool, snorting like seals, our beards curled by the water.*

*Material in italics is taken from my journals.

Because I acknowledged that Christ loved me, something was freed up in me allowing me to become someone else.

Now I saw myself as containing within myself the loving figure who came toward me, hands outstretched, in the sacred building on the mountaintop of my vision. I contained many other energies, I believe, expressed as the woman racing up the mountain, the seal snorting in the pool that bright summer day, the commuter in a gray flannel suit riding the bus to the city. I was the lover slipping between cool sheets, the kid playing in the arcade, the mountain man striding into the forest. Inside me there were a whole host of energies who now and then expressed themselves in my life. They were dancers circling around the still point.

Who was I? Apparently not one big ME, but a myriad of energies whose interactions create the drama which my personality plays out moment by moment.

It is as St. Paul wrote:

God put all the separate parts into the body on purpose. If all the parts were the same, how could it be a body? As it is, the parts are many, but the body is one. The eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you, nor can the head say to the feet, I do not need you.¹

The Rediscovery of My Ability to ‘See’ Pictures

The journey to the mountaintop in June 1973 was important because it revealed to me again, after many years, that my imagination—in my case my ability to easily imagine entities, symbols, memories—was presenting me with material which I could use as I was being transformed. It was a marvelous discovery to know that, after years of being ignored, my imagination or ability to see pictures was reawakened. My imagination was ready, willing and eager to give me images to look at. In those years of moving from the old to the new I spent a lot of time contemplating inner pictures, some of which came to me spontaneously in night or waking daydreams, some through exercises led by others. Even more important, I chose to stop long enough to look at the images that my imagination presented to me. Furthermore, I believe that the images were representations of energies of my personality. They seemed to be projections of elemental energies which resided deep within my bones and flesh. They presented the subconscious energy systems which were determining my beliefs, dogmas, ideology and world view. I have come now to regard these images as gifts from God, clues from my past and hints of my future.

I likened my exploration to that of Odysseus, except that I was exploring my inner worlds and the relationships between the drama within myself and the drama I was acting out in the world. I was like Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In my own voyage I seemed to be recapitulating the experience of the males of humanity. I was on a voyage in which the center of my awareness was moving from its primitive place deep in the lower unconscious part of my psyche to a more central place, more exposed, more open to the energies of nature, friends, and symbolic forms of other realms of being.

The guided daydream to the top of the mountain was a sign that the journey was going to become central to my life for the next few years. I had to get going. There were too many adventures awaiting me!

Francis Geddes, the leader of that June 1973 workshop, had taken some workshops based on a transpersonal psychology called Psychosynthesis. I enrolled for courses in this discipline and in March 1974 I began working with Tom Yeomans, a guide trained in Psychosynthesis, to help me around the turns in the road and through the hard places.²

A Place to be in Order to Observe and Act: The Discovery of the I.

Who was I? During these sessions in Psychosynthesis I discovered that I was someone who had many fascinating and mysterious parts which were called subpersonalities. I also understood that I was much more than an assemblage of subpersonalities. I was an I, distinct from all the various parts. An I which could observe all that happened on the dance floor of the personality even while directing the dance of the subpersonalities. The I was the dancing teacher, separate, observing, directing the intricate moves of the many subpersonalities. Jung described his discovery of the I in these words:

I had the overwhelming experience of having emerged from a dense cloud. I knew all at once: now I am myself. It was if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an I. But at this moment I came upon myself.... Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew. I am myself now, now I exist. Previously I had been willed to do this and that: Now I willed. There was authority in me.³

The discovery of myself as I was an act of tremendous liberation. I see and I make choices. I direct the dance of many subpersonalities. I, under the direction of the Source who is God in me, the Christ, the divine spark, have the power to recreate the way the energies of my personality are experienced and expressed in the world.

Being Patient And Trusting

I put this sentence up on my mirror: Patience is present when I don’t feel trapped. The part that feels trapped is also the part that wants everything to happen quickly. Go slowly. The unconscious takes time to move the parts into a new arrangement. There is a part of me that really doesn’t trust the process, the life process. It’s not going to happen unless I do something. I want qualities of trust and patience. Waiting was a hard lesson to learn. Everything had to happen so fast in the instant life of the last quarter of the 20th century. I had to slow down. My experience of the fourth decade of my life was of a slow rearranging of my interior furnishings— a loosening, an opening, an allowing. It was slow, but there was change.

I learned the discipline of concentration and practiced meditating each day. I began to keep a journal of what was happening in my inner life as well as my outer life. I tape recorded and transcribed the sessions with my guides.

As the months and years went on, people described me to myself in a new way. I moved more lightly. My face was less frown-filled, my body more supple. I was seen more and more as a sexual being. I allowed my body to dance in a much freer, abandoned fashion. No longer just a box step, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Laughter bubbled up at odd moments, and now and again there was a flash of joy. I lived in the world with more compassion even toward those whom I had defined as enemies. I imagined love as light flowing down and around the dark New England shapes of my November self, breaking the big ME into smaller dancing parts, the light streaming out through the chinks in the walls to the worlds beyond. These rearrangements of the energies of my personality did not happen in an afternoon or a year. They have been taking place over many years. But they are taking place.

At a Progoff Journal Worship in March 1974 I wrote:

The period I am in is a transitional one for me. I am leaving a work role which is segmented from the rest of my life and moving to a new sense of self.... These are times of anger and frustration at those who cannot see who I am and cherish me.... There are times of great peace. A waiting... a precious sabbatical time... a listening time... a time of being energized by that which comes from within rather than that which comes from without... the new me will be at once more unique and more a part of the community, with great power flowing through from sources only now being unplugged.

The Christ Which Dwells In Me Is My Center Or Higher