Judy Maurer

I graduated from eighth grade first in my class in the entire school district. The district  was Arizona-large, stretching from the low mountains at sunset to the flatlands toward dawn.

There were only 12 other students in my class; two of them could barely read. They probably had diagnosed cognitive difficulties and received no support.

My father was the pastor in this one-church, two-bar town. It was an enduring puzzle to me  why most everyone else in school had dads who could fix pickup trucks and even build houses. But my dad could only read ancient Greek and Hebrew. I also wondered about the sign  hanging outside the only garage in town throughout my childhood, “for sale. will build to suit." How does one build a to suit?

My parents were New Englanders, and the underfunded high school 50 miles away very much did not suit them. So after graduation I was shipped off to boarding school in Massachusetts, where I did my time. But the school had a satellite in Barcelona, Spain, where I spent my senior year. I have not yet recovered from that experience. I am not fully American any more, especially since living nine years in Russia with my husband Johan.

In between I studied anthropology and Spanish at Beloit College in Wisconsin. I met Johan in Boston and married him in 1980,  a week before going to Charlottesville, Virginia where I received an MBA.

By now in my early 30s, I realized I had a spectacular education and was marooned in a low-level job. It did not suit, but I did not know why. I missed an easy promotion, and I realized my life had to change.

Once sober and on my way to recovery from childhood trauma, in my mid-thirties, I needed to make a decision – was the Christian message life-giving? Did it stand true? Or was it as destructive as a church in Phoenix had been in my life? My father had been transferred there, where I had no name. I was “Father Bill's youngest," well into my adulthood.

Newly sober, I started reading the gospels for myself. I was surprised. Much more pithy, challenging, nitty-gritty and at times bewildering than the sanitized version I had been given most Sunday mornings of my life. Every Sunday morning of my life except for summers, when my family all worshiped at the altar of the New York Times and The Boston Globe, in the white chairs near the shore of the lake in Maine, where my great-grandfather had built a fishing cabin, sans indoor plumbing, I might add.

It was the Resurrection that hit with a shock, a flash of lightening to my soul. I decided that the church was full of humans, and so was as flawed as humans can be, and as noble and self-sacrificing as we can be as well. Christ and the message he preached and lived was something altogether different.

I am now retired and living in Portland, Oregon. I am currently clerk of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends Communications Committee. I'm a member of Moscow Friends Meeting, Russia and Camas Friends Church.