A Conversation with Darren Kenworthy: A Gift of Grace

Judy Maurer 

I am so pleased! When you talk to people, who do you say you are? 

Darren Kenworthy 

How would I introduce myself if I was in the room with a group of people from your annual sessions? 

Judy Maurer  

Sure. All I know is that I was thrilled with your discussion on zoom with the gathering committee. And I know your mom.

Darren Kenworthy  

The thing that people might want to know is that I have a sort of vocation as a lay spiritual accompanist. I discovered that when my family decided that I should sell my construction company and be a full-time parent for our newly born son. My wife had a difficult and demanding job as a primary care physician. She felt like as a family, we needed someone who was completely concentrating their entire energy on creating a safe, emotionally stable, nurturing home environment. That is not something I'd ever thought that I would do. But I turned my entire attention to two things — to accompanying Audrey on her journey of “how do I, within a broken healthcare system, do my very best to provide good care to my patients?”

The second was the journey of discovery for my son of “what does it mean to be here in this world?” It is such an interesting and difficult conundrum that we all have to face. Of course, every parent does this, and being a full-time homemaker meant that I had time to devote myself to volunteer work of various kinds. So I volunteered on the board at his preschool and did additional parent volunteer work with the kids on field trips. 

I discovered that I had a sort of gift for meeting children as human beings who were still developing, relating to them as people. I am an amateur in the sense that I do it for love — puppet shows and creative work with the kids. I was on the advisory board there. 

The sister who is in charge of the school asked me to accompany them as a group. That was the first occasion where I really felt the vocation of doing spiritual accompaniment work with a group of people. It’s not like I was leading, I was just present with them. My calling was to ask the questions that nobody else would ask because they were basically intimidated by Sister Therese, who has a very commanding presence. It's not that I had enormous impact because of that, but it was the thing that I felt like I was there to do.

Judy Maurer 

Yes. You felt you were there to ask the questions?

Darren Kenworthy  

Yes, to ask the difficult questions and do it in a way that people can hear, so that they can know that you love them. There were other ways in which I discovered this kind of calling, with the middle school age kids at my meeting, doing care during the meeting time. I did that for several years. 

It was a pretty small group, but it was the same kind of calling: can I really be present for these people, to help them discover what it is that they want to do together? My questions were like, how are we? How can we create a moment of spiritual encounter where we really meet each other and do some kind of work together that brings out for each of us, and for all of us, what is important for us now and for us in the future? How do we generate meaning? Or, what kind of purpose do we have together and individually? 

Doing that with kids is really fun. They're always open to questions in a way that adults aren't, because they're still learning what it means to be alive. You can always get them to ask the question that comes before the assumption of this is what I'm supposed to do. You can always call them into that moment of, what am I here for? And have the question be radically open. Adults get there too. Sometimes it's harder because adults are often playing a particular game.

Judy Maurer

That’s sad!

Darren Kenworthy

They know what the rules are. It can be hard to get them to go back before the game, and ask what games should we be playing right now? What should we be doing? What should our values be here? This is something I love doing for myself. I love doing it with groups of people and other individuals in a loving and caring way. 

So that's a pretty long introduction. I have more specific instances of times I've done that work. My mother [Betsy Kenworthy] and I were asked to do a series of workshops at the Ben Lomond Center in northern California on the question of how do we call young people into the meeting, help them feel welcome, and help them be a part of our meetings?  

I had experiences as a clerk with my Junior Friends group back when I was high school age. It was a very formative thing for me spiritually. My mom was a teacher for her whole life and experienced that as a spiritual calling. Together, we had a really good time with a fairly large group of adults trying to do this.

I find that  we have all assumptions about what it would mean to have kids in our meeting. How do we go back before those assumptions and ask ourselves the right questions, to really give kids in our meeting an opportunity to be there for the reasons that are right for them, not because we like to have kids there or because it makes us feel like the meeting is growing or because it validates our sense that this is a worthwhile thing to do?. But how is it worthwhile for the kids? Because that's the only way they're really going to want to be there.

Judy Maurer  

That's right. That's the way everyone is. 

Darren Kenworthy  

Then, most recently, when I discovered about two and a half months ago that my father was dying, I knew that my work was going to be to accompany him on that experience of the revelation of his mortality, and then dying the way he wanted to and helping his family and friends around him accept that and be consoled and even be enlivened by it and awakened, reawakened and renewed, in their own sense of why they are alive and what they're here for

Judy Maurer

Yes! Early in my retirement those questions came back to me. What have I lived for? What am I here for now? 

Darren Kenworthy 

Yes. The work with my father was spiritually rich. I'm still processing that and wondering what it means. I feel a strong sense that there's something out of that that I can bring to your annual sessions — some of the experiences of standing aside with the things that I thought were important in order to help somebody else do something that is completing and fulfilling for them.

Judy Maurer  

Yes. At the same time, you were losing your own father.

Darren Kenworthy  

Yes, but I was accepting all these gifts from him, in the sense that he, by accepting with a certain kind of serenity, the truth of his mortality, and the knowledge of it, and not asking for anything to console him, other than a sense that he was held by this broad group of people whose lives he touched. He was not requiring any other consolation than I'm here. I've had this life. I lived. For these reasons, it had this meaning for me. It had this meaning for all of these other people who are now praying for me and thinking of me and loving me. That was enough to console him. 

It was very powerful. He held open the possibility that there was some kind of continuity past that veil, but that was not what gave him that gift of grace. It was very powerful to see that, be part of it, and help him find words for it. 

His childhood was such that he was introduced to spiritual language in a very negative way, so it was inaccessible to him. It was coded for him with, you know, an authority trying to oppress him essentially, and telling him things like, if you don't do exactly as we say, use the words we tell you to use for your experience, you're going to be tormented eternally after you're dead. This kind of thing is extremely traumatizing for a young person to be told that there's only one way to express themselves spiritually. It has to be expressed in a way that won't anger or upset authority figures, and that if they fail to placate those authority figures, they're doomed to eternal torment.

So he rejected spirituality entirely for his whole life and found a different way to live a meaningful and purposeful life. My cousin, for example, is very dear to me, and is a deeply convinced Christian, and has always said, your father is the most Christian man I know. But my father himself utterly disavowed Christianity for his entire life. He was very proud of the fact that he was an atheist, a materialist and a rationalist with a scientific mind. 

But, nonetheless, I could always perceive the Spirit moving him. It wasn't in spite of his atheism; he just had a different way of noticing and naming. I could see that and feel that. He would show me how to notice the world around me. For me, it's a noticing that I should get back before language and just feel the presence of the Spirit. He taught me how to do that in nature, especially, that powerful kind of noticing, just being at home in the world. 

In the last couple of months, I could just sit with him. I could just notice how present he was, despite his imminent death. He was here for it. He wasn't trying to hide from himself or from the world. It was a powerful, powerful experience. That's a lot of talking for just one question.

Judy Maurer  

This is great. It's wonderful. This is always how things go. I plan it out, but it goes in a different direction, and it’s where we’re supposed to go. 

You used the phrase “gift of grace” at the end there. What was that for you?

Darren Kenworthy  

The gift of grace that I saw, for my father, was just that the fear of death was taken from him. He had no fear of dying. It meant he could connect and love the people around him in a way that I think he had had difficulties doing. He was a deeply traumatized man. He tried very hard to be present for his family and the people that he loved. He was 83. He had been afraid of death. I could see him in decline for these last two years, and he didn't want to think about his mortality at all. So I know that he was afraid. When he learned of his imminent death, there was just this gift that took that fear from him. 

He could hear my spiritual language in a way that he'd never heard it before. He could understand what I meant when I talked about the movement of the Holy Spirit and the living water. He could hear me. 

It wasn't like he suddenly became a Christian. He just suddenly understood that, Oh! These things that I have felt, these are the names you use for them, and they're also present for me. I just don't think of them the way you think about them. That was my gift of grace, right? That my father understands my spiritual language. I can speak it to him and he can be consoled and he can tell a nurse “Just listen to my son. He's my mouthpiece. Let him speak for me, as he was getting more and more unable to speak for himself. 

That was a gift of grace for me to have him understand that all of this time I've been trying to speak to his condition. I haven't been berating him or telling him he's wrong. I've just been using different words for an experience that I feel that we share. 

That was a powerful thing to be able to share with him.

Judy Maurer  

So you spent a lot of time with him the last couple of months?

Darren Kenworthy  

Constantly. I was one of his primary caregivers for the entire time.  When he was in the hospital, I didn't stay overnight, but I was there for a decent chunk of every day. I also made sure that other people were there too. But you know, my mom would just get exhausted. Her grief is different than mine. She's also an older person and has only so much emotional and physical energy. So it was important for me to get there early in the morning so that my dad had a person there with him when the new nurses came on shift. 

Right after he got out of the hospital, for a couple of weeks, he was in a friend's house who was out of town. I didn't spend a lot of time there with him. I would go and visit every day. At that point, we didn't know how long he was going to live; it seemed like he might live up to it another year or so. But when he moved into the apartment across the street from us, he started to decline more quickly. After he had a stroke, I was basically nursing him during the day. We got a caregiver to come overnight because it was just too much. After he had the stroke, he needed a lot of help doing everything — all the basic bodily functions had to be attended to. 

I was just running out of gas. It had gone on for a couple months and my wife was like, Look, I need you, too. She's dealing with chronic COVID sequelae so she can't actually work. It's bad enough that she's been off work for a couple months. Doing both care for my father and trying to help her with that while my son is also going through everything he's going through. It's been a rough few months. But it's also been a time where I felt like I was held and guided.

Judy Maurer  

I can see that. How did you develop a spirituality different from your father?

Darren Kenworthy  

Well, of course, my mom. I've always said she's a deeply pious woman, which I think is true. Her father was a minister. Many of her family members are ministers. And, you know, she's 83, so was born in 1940. As a woman of a certain age yourself, you have a pretty good sense of how patriarchal society has been in the past. I mean, not that it isn't now, but it was a different story — not being able to get a checking account of your own. So having a father, who was a minister, introduced her to a spiritual language. He was a very ambitious man, not to say overbearing, but perhaps he was. 

In that society, discovering herself spiritually meant going away and discovering her own language to understand her spiritual experience. So, my first kind of awareness was of this duality of a man — my father — who disavowed all spiritual language and spiritual experience, in so many words, though, not in substance, on the one hand, and a woman who was deeply mystical in her approach, but also actively trying to disentangle her own experience of the Spirit from patriarchy, and the oppressive forms of society. 

So, those were the things I was working with. My father introduced me to noticing in nature and my mother introduced me to noticing in myself and other people — noticing feeling and emotion. She would just suggest to me little ways of meditating, even when I was very, very small, like, what if you just sat very quietly and tried to feel each part of your body? She constantly did self-noticing exercises with me. 

Judy Maurer  

Mindfulness! 

Darren Kenworthy  

Yes. I had a very powerful spiritual experience when I was maybe fifteen. We were at annual sessions with the youth group at camp in Idaho or Montana, up in the mountains. There was this enormous thunderstorm. For whatever reason, everybody else did some sort of big prayer circle in the big yurt but I just wasn't that interested. So I went for a run over this mountain pass where we'd taken a walk. I did it shirtless and shoeless in this thunderstorm. It was this experience where I had to be completely unaware of myself and aware of just my surroundings, because like, I'm running barefoot over rocks, in a thunderstorm. It just was this incredibly powerful, like outside-of-body, but also inside-of-body, experience in it. 

After that, I had this feeling of connection to the world around me that was different than it had been before. And I felt like oh! the world has some kind of meaning that's even deeper than I had realized, and I'm really interested in discovering what my part is in that because I felt really connected to it. It was like going from being in air to diving into water. Suddenly you can feel your surroundings and you're like, Oh, I'm part of this. I'm influencing it and being influenced by it. I'm in this current, and it moves me. I felt that in a way I hadn't before. Then I went to oh, I need to actively figure out what I'm supposed to do with being in this place that has all this indeterminacy. 

It's really hard to know how you're supposed to live, especially since I didn't have any prepackaged plan, right? Nobody had convinced me from a young age that this is THE one recipe for how you live a good life. There are all these different ways I could think of doing that. I was a pretty strong-willed person and had notions of my own about how to do that. 

So I started to read a lot of philosophy, like Eastern and Western philosophy. I read Hinduism and Buddhism, but I was also really interested in just the entire history of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks, up until modern sort of existential philosophy. 

When I went to college, that's what I studied. I was determined to come up with a really good way to figure out how do you live a good life? What's the thing that we're supposed to do here? I wanted to start at the beginning of that question, somehow. I thought that was a thing that was possible, so I could really get the right answer. It turned out it's not that simple, because unlike a stew, there's no recipe for life. You can't just figure it out once and write it down and do it that way, and have it always work. You have to continually ask the question because the answer changes. There might be something underneath — some deep movement of the Spirit in the world that can guide you. But it's not like a thing that you can write down once and have it always be true. At least that's not how I experienced it. 

So after college, I was like, I want to be a college professor and teach philosophy academically. I made all the moves to do that. I was applying for grad school. And I was like, Yeah, I don't think that I can actually authentically search for what I'm looking for as a person who's going around professing philosophy.  I have more work to do here. 

So I just got a job as a carpenter with a friend of mine. I worked as an itinerant carpenter for many years. I ended up traveling to Florida and Alaska, doing carpentry work. I ended up starting a company with this friend who's been a friend since childhood. We just worked as carpenters to figure out how to make a living, because that's also a thing you have to do. That was not a particularly spiritual, enlivening experience for me. I didn't approach it as a spiritual vocation. 

Returning to a sense of finding about what the important questions are was something that didn't really happen for me until I discovered my vocation: accompanying my wife and son as my primary work. 

Then I saw my son asking questions like, what the heck am I here for? What is going on around me? It really reawakened that desire in me to ask how can we ask those questions in a meaningful way and live into the answers, without creating a recipe that's going to end up getting us into more trouble? Because it's either dictatorial, or it creates a power structure that ends up oppressing people. 

I had never set aside the question of how to live a good life. But I encountered that question differently at that point, as having more immediacy and finding ways to name it in the present. I began to get away from trying to do that with a logical structure and moved toward concentrating on experiences that brought me into connection with other people, and discovering meaning in that. 

It was about moving away from just linguistic expression and logical structure generally, and moving deeper into an experience that concretely called me into this awareness of being in a world that has meaning beyond anything that I put on it. 

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