Episode Twenty: The Interview - Rev. Kathy Beasley

And I end Season Two with Rev. Kathy, a dynamic force of nature! In this longer interview, hear how in the midst of a hospital emergency praying with a stranger reminded her that miracles surround us, if only you have eyes to see them! (hmm..sounds like what this podcast is about!)

Transcript

There's this one story,

Any time our family gets together,

She revels in the story.

She told me to go into the room and like part my hair out and separate it and put it in like a couple of ponytails.

Well,

I was watching American Bandstand and the Jackson 5 just happened to be on American Bandstand.

And so they were rocking an Afro and I'm about five years too late because I didn't get a chance to really rock the fur.

So I picked out my hair into this gigantic Afro.

And I'm like dancing in the mirror,

Singing in the hairbrush,

You know,

Dancing around with Michael,

Doing the spins and the turns.

And I just happened to turn in such a way that I saw my sister's face in the mirror and she was mortified.

Like,

Oh my God,

How am I gonna get the hair undone from that?

I mean,

It was wider than I was wide.

Hi there,

I'm Reverend Kathy Beasley and I am the senior minister for the Central Florida Center for Spiritual Living.

I describe myself as an organizational transformer.

Yeah,

I just fix things that people don't know are broken or I'll point in directions that people didn't know that something could move.

So do you fix people's interiors,

Their interior cells as well?

No,

They have to do that.

I'm kind of like the interior decorator.

I show up and I suggest things.

I bring paint color swatches.

Like do you want farmhouse chic?

Are we going for New York industrial?

So I show up with suggestions and they get a chance to really do the work on a spiritual level.

What a great description.

I kind of love it.

I think we need more of you in the world.

I don't know.

You gotta be careful what you're asking for because any more than one of me in any one place at a time,

There gonna have to be some warning labels attached to that experience.

I definitely think you're probably a force to be reckoned with.

I have been told that.

I've been told by my friends that they never want to have to take a job that I've had because whatever the job description says,

I live in the mid rash of it.

Between the words,

Between the lines,

Between the expectations,

I live in that in between of the in between space.

And that's where I create from.

So some of my friends,

A lot of my friends are linear thinkers,

But the paper says,

And that's what they do.

I look to see what the paper says and I say,

So what?

And I find something else to do.

That is an incredible superpower.

That's what I'm told.

It's fun.

I'm sure everybody would love to follow up a superhero who has left a job.

I think my mom's role was on Sunday.

I don't care where you go,

But you got to go to church.

And so I was the only one of the four of us that really spent as much time in church.

And I grew up in a time before being a child alone in the world was dangerous.

So I could go out to the edge of our driveway.

My sister,

Her job was to see what church bus I got on.

And I would just stand in whatever looked interesting and slowed down.

I go to church with them for the day and they'd bring me back home and all was well.

So that's kind of how I learned about institutional realism.

I don't know if I was adventurous,

Inquisitive,

Yes.

And I think for me,

It really was a sense of curiosity.

And I didn't know it at the time.

I mean,

Church was church was church.

There's prayers,

There's music.

I hope there's some music.

And if you're there long enough,

There's some snacks.

And then you get a chance to come home and there's some food.

And the thing that was fascinating to me was to listen to all these different people from their map of the world talk about the activity of the divine.

And so being in no different places and hear different things and watch those processes unfold as a child was pretty cool.

And so it really allowed me an opportunity to grow up and become sort of a spiritual amalgam.

So when people ask me about my religious background,

I'll tell them that I'm Baptist-Methicostal.

And so with a side of new thought added into that.

I love the unity churches.

And I liked it because in the process of becoming a minister,

I kind of created my own underground internship.

So I made friends with people in other communities and they allowed me to come and study with their community for a period of time.

So that's how I got into a lot of the edgy effects of spirituality for me.

And what does it mean to own that edge?

And so for me,

I love going back to unity because unity uses the Bible and I'm also not confined or constricted by the Bible.

It's just there.

It's kind of there if you want it.

It's kind of like in the South,

If you go somewhere and you order breakfast,

Doesn't matter what you order,

It comes with a side of grits.

And so that's how the Bible is to me.

It's like a side of grits.

And I've had a chance to go to the Buddhist temple.

And I like it because I can be a tourist and a participant all at the same time.

Going to Jewish synagogue,

I can't really be the tourist I want to be because I just kind of want to stand in the middle of the room and look up at the ceiling and spin around in a circle like Mary Tyler Moore and throw my hat in the air.

And I don't feel as free in that environment,

But usually my friends that I'm with,

I can go,

What is that?

What's going on?

What are we doing?

What does it mean?

I'm going to need definitions later.

But for me,

It's just church in general.

I'm fascinated by what that 60 minutes in one room,

What that does for people,

To people and what it equips them to do in the world.

I grew up in Shreveport,

Louisiana,

And I grew up in the seventies and a church bus ministry.

I mean,

It really was a school bus painted a different color with the church name on it.

And in some cases it was just a white panel van with the multiple rows of seating and like a thicker thing on the outside.

My family structure growing up early was the United Methodist Church.

And I liked it for the same reasons that my uncle liked it.

And I go to church with him.

He liked it because you get out quick.

You're in and you're out and you got time to see the game.

Well,

I liked that because I was like,

Okay,

Cool.

And then when my sister married her husband,

He was Baptist.

And I like going to church with them because their church had drums.

So the music was good.

They had drums and a bass guitar.

And I was like,

Hey,

This is what I'm talking about.

And I also liked the community pieces of it because I could go to Sunday school.

I participated in a youth group.

I was at church more than I was at home certain times of the year.

And then my friends,

They were Pentecostal.

So you had to like go a long way out into the,

What we would call the country to go to church with them.

But I liked it because we would get to stop at Dairy Queen.

And I went to church with the same people I went to school with.

So it was really kind of neat.

And church was safe for me.

At school,

I was picked on because I was small.

But I could go to church with the same people who picked on me on Wednesday.

And they're not gonna bother me because their mom and dad is sitting like an arms length away and it allowed me to be creative and to laugh and to learn.

And that was the aspect that I really liked about it.

["The Blue Danube Waltz"] My wife got gravely ill and had to have several surgeries.

And it was scary because of course,

Who plans for that?

And so that was not a part of the care plan but that was what happened.

And I found myself sitting in an emergency room in Los Angeles,

Which I live in Florida.

And while I'm sitting there juggling,

You know,

How do I talk to our family about this?

How do I explain,

Oh my God,

I was supposed to go back to work later on this week?

You know,

Things like that.

And while I was sitting in that room in the midst of this swirl of emotion,

At the opposite end of the room for me was a gentleman sitting by himself.

It looked like he was either praying or having a very robust conversation with himself.

And I just felt compelled to literally step out of my own circumstance and go and sit next to him.

And we're the only two people in this big room.

And after I sat there for a minute,

I turned to him and I said,

My name is Kathy.

And he said,

Well,

I'm praying and I'm praying the rosary in Aramaic.

And I was like the language of Jesus.

And he said,

Oh,

You know this?

I said,

Not really.

I know about it.

And he said,

Are you familiar with the rosary?

And I said,

Yes.

He said,

I'm gonna pray it in Aramaic 10 times.

10 times.

And so we sat there praying.

And the thing that united us was we had a family member who was going through a very traumatic point in their lives.

And after I got done praying,

I thanked him for the opportunity to just kind of be in his energy.

And he told me a little bit about where he was from.

He was baptized in the Jordan River.

But just to sit in the midst of where I felt like I had nothing,

But it was more than enough to offer another person.

And that felt like a miracle to me.

Made it back to my end of the room.

And I sat there for a few minutes.

The surgeon came in and said that she's out of surgery and out of the woods for the moment.

And I'm like,

Well,

That was like,

Well,

That was your one job.

Cause I told you to bring her back to me.

But being able to step outside of everything I was thinking and feeling,

And to sit with another human being,

That's a miracle to me.

Today,

She is thriving,

She's healthy,

She's well.

She's here with me in Florida.

And in general,

Life is good.

So it really has been this trajectory and existing in the company of the miraculous.

And I have an appreciation for it because I can still remember the journey,

Remember the feelings,

Remember what the silence sounded like.

And today,

I mean,

I hear something rattling outside of my office because I know this like her out there putting the Christmas tree together,

Like wrapping presents on the down low,

Just things like that.

And I think about how grateful I am for that moment of noisy chaos in my life.

And that for me,

That's one of the greatest miracles I can say that I have witnessed with my own eyes.

That's so beautiful because I think some people,

Maybe more jaded or cynical people would have looked at a man in the corner,

Muttering and talking to himself and would have thought,

Oh,

There's just another mentally ill homeless person or,

Oh,

That person looks crazy,

I'm not going near them.

So I find it really astonishing that you were pulled in the other direction and you went toward rather than shying away from an encounter.

And that's so beautiful.

That's true because when I look back on it,

I never gave it a second thought.

I just saw,

It's almost like that for a moment,

You can see the soul of a person,

Can see what a person needs over who you think they are or they are not.

And it was just a flicker,

But something inside of me said,

Get up now and go pray.

This is what you do for a living.

And I don't know,

There I go down to pray with the stranger,

Praying the rosary in Aramaic.

I was like,

Oh,

And I didn't realize I knew the rosary.

I'd heard it,

I've probably written a paper about it,

But I had no idea that I knew it from memory until that moment that I needed it.

It was quite curious.

I didn't go into a Catholic church for the first time until I was in college and I went to church with my roommate and she said,

I'm Catholic.

And I was like,

Do I have to wear a dress?

And I was like,

Okay.

And do I have to put on some pantyhose?

I just wanna interject here that I'm glad that pantyhose almost don't exist anymore because I was a child when I was a child and my mom would make me dress up.

I had to wear pantyhose,

Which I thought were the biggest abomination I had ever experienced.

And I literally didn't understand them.

They made no sense.

They made my skin look this weird brown color that didn't match the rest of my body.

It was so strange.

I'm so glad they're gone.

And they were certainly not complimentary to the outfit.

So yeah.

And the fact that you could run them without ever leaving the house,

I was just like,

Okay,

Who invented this fragile torment?

Here's the other question.

Wasn't it so hot and humid and you had to put on pantyhose?

Yeah,

I had to put on pantyhose and I had shoulder length hair.

When you get your hair pressed in the South,

That's an experience because the humidity,

Which is nothing but moisture in the air,

Will cause your one straightened hair to begin to puff out a little bit and it would take an entirely different shape.

Pressing your hair is with the hot iron.

Is that right?

Hot iron and some sort of emollient,

Some sort of an old base,

Referred to it affectionately as grease.

And so you would use that to press and straighten and curl your hair.

I mean,

And I had a lot of hair and so that was a Saturday ordeal.

Yep,

I love my sister dearly because she had the task of washing,

Pressing,

Curling my hair.

And I was not always the most cooperative child in that process.

There's this one story.

Anytime our family gets together,

She revels in the story.

She told me to go into the room and like part my hair out and separate it and put it in like a couple of ponytails.

Well,

I was watching American Bandstand and the Jackson 5 just happened to be on American Bandstand.

And so they were rocking an Afro and I'm about five years too late because I didn't get a chance to really rock the fur.

So I picked out my hair into this gigantic Afro.

And I'm like dancing in the mirror,

Singing in the hairbrush,

Dancing around with Michael,

Doing the spins and the turns.

And I just happened to turn in such a way that I saw my sister's face in the mirror and she was mortified.

Like,

Oh my God,

How am I gonna get the hair undone from that?

Because I mean,

It was wider than I was wide.

And so needless to say,

She had to wash it again in order to get it in a way that was malleable.

And I never had the task of being able to go and part my hair out myself.

She always did it for me because I could not be trusted with the television and the hairbrush.

I look at my life as a woman,

I look at my life as a woman,

I look at my life as a woman,

I look at my life as a woman,

I look at my life as a woman,

I look at my life,

I think my life itself is a miracle.

When I look back at my life,

I can count the instances where I was so sick that the doctor didn't know what to do.

And my mom,

My aunt,

My grandmother,

They would just pray.

And so I believe that I exist on the answers to prayers long before I set one foot on the ground.

So for me,

My life itself is a miracle.

I think about the circumstances of my coming into being.

And at 40,

Here my mom has this child and I'm one of those,

I always said I wish I had the TV parents who doted on you.

My mom was a provider,

A loving provider,

But I couldn't like sit in the kitchen and like wax philosophical and ask her a thousand questions.

She said,

Why's the moon over there?

So she said to me one day,

She said,

Sweetie,

You have three questions a day.

Yeah,

Three questions a day.

And she said,

So I need you to think long and hard about what those three questions are gonna be.

So sometimes I would say something,

She says,

You really want,

It's almost like dealing with a genie in a bottle.

You really wanna use your wish for that?

And so I had to wait until I had these deep,

Meaningful,

Provocative questions to ask.

And she did not allow rollover minutes.

So it wasn't like I asked you two questions yesterday,

So today I should get four.

Nope,

That wasn't happening,

You get three.

That was just kind of how that worked.

But I think that my existence today as a healthy,

Self-aware,

Same gender loving woman of color and a spiritual being,

I think that's a miracle.

When I look back at all of the other realities that were presented to my soul and to wind up here,

Cause this is not anything that I ever thought I would be doing.

I didn't grow up with African-American women in the pulpit.

I grew up with women in the pulpit.

I mean,

You can even vacuum the pulpit in our church.

So the fact that this is what I do with my life,

It's like what you said about magic early on,

There's magic and miracles happening everywhere around us.

And some of us can see it.

And some of us just don't.

It's like in a fairytale,

There's always something going on in the fairytale that only a few people could see.

And everybody else has absolutely no awareness of it.

I can look around and see the simple miracles of grass growing,

Trying to figure out what causes the wind to blow.

Where were you five minutes ago and where are you gonna be five minutes from now?

That's all a miracle to me.

Thanks for listening to the end of season two,

Episode 20 of Bite Sized Blessings.

I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone who's made it this far and has listened to all 20 episodes.

Each has been crafted with love and a grateful heart for the stories that my interviewees have shared with me.

I'd also like to thank the Reverend Kathy Beasley for sharing her story today,

And also the creators of the music used,

Raphael Crux,

Kevin MacLeod,

Chilled Music,

Music L.

Files,

Sasha End,

And Alexander Nakarada.

For complete attribution,

Please go to the Bite Sized Blessings website at bitesizedblessings.

Com.

There you'll find links to change makers,

New and cool music,

And intriguing books I think will lift and inspire your spirit.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Reverend Kathy and see all the miracles that surround you.