To Janis, George, and the Seekers

Several weeks back I watched a biography of Janis Joplin on the Biography Channel. Since my birth year approximates hers (she was born in 1943 and I in 1944), I began to realize that our lives were parallel to one another. The same is true of Beatle George Harrison, also born in 1943. As I have done some more reading on these two influential musicians, I have come to an awareness that both were seekers as well as non-conformists. I follow somewhat into that line of thinking also.

Janis was a native of Port Arthur, Texas, and grew up like several of us in the early 1960's with a realization that segregation was not necessarily the best choice for society. Her support of African American issues alienated her from her classmates. When she had achieved great prominence in the latter part of the decade, she returned home for a high school reunion. Evidently, her parents were appalled by her dress and behavior and kept a very low profile during the event, even leaving town to avoid the publicity that followed Janis everywhere she went. I believe she wanted acceptance from her high school peers, but she never received it. She lived her life as a non-conformist and seeker, hooked on alcohol and heroin until her early death at age 27.

George likewise was a non-conformist and a seeker. His biography indicates that his school did not appreciate his choice to wear jeans to school and to have long hair in the early 1960's. George also often found it difficult to adapt to what he considered the rules and regulations of Christianity. He, therefore, became a seeker of other religious philosophies. His settled upon Hinduism since he felt it was large enough to accommodate a variety of ideas and thoughts. Since the Mantras, or religious chants, are musical, he was pulled further into the faith and its emphasis upon meditation.

Like Janis and George, in our parallel worlds, I have never accepted easily the tenets of my culture and faith without many questions. When I was 15, I was astonished to read the court trial papers of the murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till in the county in Mississippi in which I lived. I, like the rest of the country, realized these two defendants were guilty, yet like OJ Simpson, they were acquitted of a brutal crime. My subsequent brief conversation with one of the defendants' lawyers convinced me that I needed to seek a different journey, which would take me away from the prevalent voices of my state.

My journey away from my original church denomination of childhood has been longer, fully fought, and arduous. The first glimmer of it began, as a child of divorced parents in the early 1950's, as I watched my mother struggle, like George, with the rules and regulations of the faith. It began in the 1960's when my husband and I were college students. It has continued to the present. Could we ever find a faith that truly accepted with love and grace all races and all sinners? Could I, an avid seeker of truth, ever have a position of leadership in a church that told me every Sunday that I could not? Could our daughter be welcomed and accepted because she lived an openly gay life?

My struggle is especially problematic because all of the most wonderful times of my life were spent in that denomination. It was in that denomination that the church ministered to our family when we were in dire poverty during my parents' difficult marriage, it was the church in which I was baptized at the age of nine, it was there where I met my to be husband to be in 1962, it was there where I was the honoree of a traditional White Bible ceremony before my marriage, and it was there where my own children were baptized.

I still have no answers as I continue my search for truth, but unlike Janis and George, whose search led them to alcohol, drugs, or other religions, I stay within Christianity convinced that a benevolent God will show me the answer in His time.