The word “rational” was spoken often by my mother. And, by my father too, in another home at the far end of Pennsylvania. Starting very young, I learned what the word meant through the context clues of a lifetime. I inferred that emotion was not rational, but love could be, under certain circumstances. That compassion was illogical, but existed. That religion was not and never would be rational, and thus (at best) not worth our time and (at worst) a societal cancer. It was not until I was six or seven that one of my parents finally acquiesced and took me inside a church.
It was my father. I had asked many times before and been told no, or simply been pulled past any and all houses of worship by a firm tug on linked hands.
I knew nothing about what these buildings were. But as I was pulled by the hand around my narrow world, I recognized (from the outside only) that they shared certain qualities, shapes, and imagery.
Just inside the entrance of this first-ever church, neck bent back, I whispered, “The top of the ceiling is very far away.”
I pulled my father by the hand to sit. I knew what a chair was. And a stool. I ate my breakfast sitting on a stool. I also knew what a bench was. When I took walks with my mother in Central Park, benches were where I’d rest my short legs. But those benches were nothin like these.
Even the windows were outsized, and so high in the walls I could never hope to look out of them. I loved the way the sun carried the colors of the windows into the space and spread it in long shapes on the floor and opposite wall.
After several minutes, I asked, “When will the giants come out?”
I was being rational. What else could be explained by such tall ceilings, high windows, and huge benches? Clearly, giants lived here.
Logic. Reason. Cause and effect. These principles ruled the thinking of my parents. Formerly allied with the Objectivist Movement and members of Ayn Rand’s inner-circle-once-removed, they rejected psychology, emotional sensitivity, and unconditional love.
Each of them told the story with great delight, narrating my first experience inside a church, thinking there would be giants. I had passed some kind of test. Cute, logical Vanessa using data to draw a conclusion that made sense in her six-year-old mind. But they never really explained to me in any satisfactory way what the beautiful building was actually for. Their contempt for religion did not permit them to express what such a space means to some—many—people.
The superiority of logic and reason ruled the world I lived in. My empathic little heart, my inborn intuitiveness, and the fact that beautiful music and paintings made me cry were downplayed—basically unacknowledged—while my intellect and capacity for drawing crisp inferences were raised up as my greatest qualities.
My mother’s mind-over-matter strength of will was a constant in my life. Her fierce commitment to career. Her—for that era especially—meteoric rise in the world of fashion marketing. Her ascent from copywriting lackey to big boss and decider. Her cubby at L’Oreal of Paris became a huge corner office at Peck and Peck in just a few years.
The move from NYC to Buffalo just a few years before the end of high school never seemed rational to me. It felt like a disaster. It was a wound that festered until I went to college and was happy and free. But, as ever, my mother’s version of irreproachable logic prevailed and, as always, I was able to see things from her point of view. A steppingstone—more responsibility in charge of marketing for a whole department store chain—this job will lead her back to NYC and bigger and better things. I would see.
One day, when I was a senior in high school, the book my mother was reading, left splayed on a table, spine broken, registered on my awareness. Not the typical escapist mystery novel she usually favored to unwind, this book looked more like a paperback textbook. It was called Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts. Reading the back, I was confused but did not try too hard to figure out what it was about. As large as Lee Park loomed in my awareness, I had my own problems to deal with. Namely Latin and chemistry, not to mention loneliness and homesickness, and a keen awareness that as nice as the girls in my class were, they were insubstantial stand-ins for the people I left behind in the school I’d called home for most of my life.
But after that, when I saw my mother reading the book, I noted that, rather than relaxing into the couch with her book held loosely in one hand, she sat hunched over Seth Speaks, shoulders curled inward, pen tightly gripped. She annotated and underlined wildly. A stack of Seth sequels beside her bed revealed a long-term plan.
Occasionally she’d read aloud to me, something that was clearly profoundly meaningful to her but that I could barely follow, so limited was my frame of reference at the time.
One day, something she read penetrated more deeply, and I said, “Wait. Say that again?”
This woman, Jane Roberts, was not writing about her ideas or research or philosophy. She was speaking for someone else. But not someone real. A being. An entity. It was called channeling. She was channeling the self-named Seth. His words, her pen. His words, inside her head.
As bereft of spiritual instruction as I had been my entire life, I was lost. This sounded, most definitely, irrational.
What has hindsight revealed to my brain that combines both the rational and the intuitive, a fact I’ve come to embrace?
My mother was searching for answers to explain the voices she heard inside her own head. The brilliant brain of Lee Park could not reconcile her conviction that reason, rationality, and objective truth were the only reality with the fact that she could hear things no one else could.
Jane Roberts gave her hope—for an answer she might be able to live with.
As it turned out, there was no answer outside of madness, and not really much hope, either.