The Archangel Mariah

(Since I can't figure out how the copy a document to my blog, I decided to type in a chapter of what I'm working on about the church and being a parish priest.)

The questions that drives people in seminary crazy is this: "Why do you want to be a priest?"

There are several reasons that question so bedevils those studying for holy orders. First of all, everyone and their cousin has asked you that ever since the first moment you imagined it might be a possibility--you being a priest and all. Parish priests, parish discernment committees, bishops, commissions on ministry, standing committees, admission committees, seminary professors, strangers you meet at cocktail parties--there is no end to the people wanting to know why you want to be a priest.

A second reason is that a call to be a priest is primarily that: a Call from God to you. It's a deeply personal and profoundly important event or series of events. There is, even in his era of 'tell all', some needs for privacy. If what God has to say to you in your heart of hearts isn't one of those things you have a right to keep to yourself, then what is?

But finally, the most prominent reason nobody in seminary wants to answer that question is that, on the deepest level, you don't have a clue! For most of the priests I know--not all, certainly, but most--the 'call to priesthood' was as complex as a jet engine. There are lots of parts to it, most of which can't be extricated or distinguished from the parts right next to them or at the other end of the whole contraption. I doubt that there are many people who can explain all the intricacies of a jet engine. The same is true, it seems to me, about a call to ordination.

I once witnessed one of my seminary classmates lose it when asked the question. We were at some reception or another at Virginia Seminary and a well-meaning, sincere woman was talking with him and asked, "Why do you want to be a priest?"

He took a gulp of sherry and said: "One night I was sleeping naked with my window open during a thunderstorm. (Being southern he said 'necked' instead of 'naked') "And lightening came in my window, struck me on the genitals and didn't kill me....It was either become a priest or move to Tibet."

I swear this really happened.

Once the woman recovered from apoplexy, she said, in a gentle Tidewater accent, "I imagine that doesn't happen often."

"Only once to me," my friend said, looking around for more sherry.

Another friend, Scott, when he was a seminarian at Yale working with me at St. Paul's, New Haven, told me he was about to lose this mind with the Standing Committee of the Diocese of West Virginia.

"No matter how many times I try to tell them," he said, "or how many different ways...they still ask me why I want to be a priest."

"Why don't you tell them you want to be magic ?" I asked.

Scott laughed. "Are you crazy?" he said.

"Who knows," I told him, "it might shut them up."

After I preached at his ordination, Scott gave e a wondrous pen and ink sketch he'd based on 'being magic'. It's on a shelf in this little office where I'm writing. I still love it, two decades later.

I don't have to resort to tales of lightening storms or to the very clever longing to be magic. I know why I decided to be a priest. The sky didn't open up. I didn't hear God's voice speaking to me out loud and in English. It was simpler and yet more marvelous than any of that.

I was visited by the Archangel Mariah.
*
Mariah was the only member of St. Gabrial's Mission, the campus ministry at West Virginia University back in the 60's and 70's, who was older than 35, besides our priest Snork Roberts. Mariah was 82.

St. Gabrial's had a ministry of hosting international students in the basement of Trinity Church on Friday nights for games and food and companionship. Mariah was the source of that ministry. That's one reason she came to St. Gabe's. The other reason is she wanted to be with young people. She couldn't stand stuffiness in any guise. The three-piece suits and women in hats at Trinity's services were to much for her. She preferred the company of college students and week-end hippies.

I strain to remember her over more than 35 years of memories. She was a tiny woman--no more than 5'2" and most likely weighed about 90 pounds fully-clothed and soaking wet. She had wild gray hair that she wore tied back as best she could. And there was her face: her eyes were an indescribable color--green, blue, gray in different lights--and practically lost in the most remarkable set of smile wrinkles I've ever seen. Mariah smiled and laughed so much that she tended to look a tad Asian--there were slits for her eyes to shine through. She had all her own teeth and showed them off smiling and laughing. Her face, in spite of her age, was actually 'girlish', elfin, like the face of a loris or lemur--some exotic animal whose name begins with an 'l'.

Mariah's passion (what Joseph Campbell would have called her 'bliss') was the international students at WVU. Every Friday night you could find her in Trinity's undercroft playing cards and listening, playing backgammon and listening, playing some obscure board game and listening. Always playing. Always listening to the young people from faraway places with strange sounding names. WVU had a remarkable engineering program so their were hundreds of students from developing countries studying in the part of the middle of no where called Morgantown, West Virginia. One of the informal courses they all had to study was Culture Shock. In the late 1960's there were no ethnic enclaves in Morgantown, unless you considered Rednecks or Fraternity Brats ethnic groups. Those students from Africa, Asia, Central Europe and the Middle East had no contacts with their homelands besides each other. No internet back then and international calls were still ridiculously expensive. It wasn't like living in New York or DC. Morgantown was referred to by many of the students--many of whom, like me, were from the sticks to begin with--as 'MorganHole'.

At that time there wasn't much in Morgantown for anyone, much less people thousands of miles from home. And nobody much was interested in the well-being of those foreign students except Mariah. Mariah was interested in them with a vengence.

She welcomed them into Trinity's basement, into her home and into her vast, expansive heart. She got them to write home for recipes and tried to reproduce them as best she could from the local Kroger's selection of food and spices. She learned enough of each of their languages so she could greet each of them as they would be greeted at home. She matched them up with people at the University and in town--all of whom she seemed to know--who might have some faint connection or interest in Afghanistan or Bulgaria or Korea or where ever they were from. She was a one woman network of 'connections for those folks so far from home, those strangers in a strange land. t

There was something almost Biblical in her commitment to the strangers in our midst. She would welcome them all and do any and every thing possible to make them a little less anxious about finding themselves plunked down in such a place as Morgantown. Mariah was sometimes the victim of those she befriended. Being from a different culture and far from home doesn't make everyone trustworthy. If there is a lesson to be learned from working with any minority group--racial, cultural, economic, etc.--it is this: People, so far as I've been able to discern, are, in the end, 'just People'. We all share the same deep-down 'being of human beings'. The international students Mariah dedicated her energy to were no different than the outsiders and oddballs of the student body that Snork loved and cared for--some of them will rip you off big time!

The Lord only knows how much money Mariah parceled out to foreign students. And surely only the Lord knows how much of that money could have just as well been tossed off the bridge that crossed Cheat Lake outside of town. But she never fretted about it. That what she told me when I spoke to her after seeing $100 or so pass from her hand to the hand of a Nigerian I knew loved to gamble.

"Never mind," Mariah told me, "I'll just let God sort it all out...."

At one level that is ultimate foolishness. On another, deeper level, it may just be one of the best ways possible to live a life. And that, above all, was what Mariah was good at--living a wonderful life.

After I finished my MTS from Harvard Divinity School, I worked as a Social Worker. Bern and I lived on the third floor of a house down a charming brick street in Morgantown. During our time there, the home base for St. Gabrial's Wednesday evening Eucharists was the attic of that house, accessible only from our apartment We would gather up there--20 or 30 of us--and celebrate the holy mysteries seated on the unpainted floor. When we passed the peace there was always the danger of getting a concussion from smacking your noggin on the exposed joints and beams. It was a dimly lit, uncomfortable space, but it served quite nicely as the upper room of St. Gabe's.

It was after one of those outrageously informal communions that Mariah, who I had already determined was a saint (St. Mariah of the Nations) revealed herself as an Archangel, at least. After Mass--if I can dream of calling our attic worship that--we would all retreat down the stairs to the apartment where Bern and I lived. There was lots of food. People brought cookies and brownies (often with a special ingredient) cheese and bread, fruit both fresh and dried, nuts and seeds and we'd have some feasting. Plus there was always a lot of wine. Some of the St. Gabe's regulars would go down to the front porch to smoke a joint--not normal, I suppose, for most Episcopal coffee hours.

I was in the kitchen with Mariah. She'd managed to get me there alone by some miracle since people tended to clump around her wherever she was. There was something about how well she tended to listen to whatever nonsense you had to say that made her a people magnet. But we were alone in the kitchen when she said to me, balancing her wine glass and a handful of cheese with remarkable grace for somewhere her age, "When are you going back to seminary and getting ordained?"

I was three glasses of wine and a trip to the porch past whatever state of sober grace the Body and Blood of Christ had provided me up in the attic. I was then, as I am to some extent today, a 'smart ass'. Ironic and Sardonic were my two middle names in those days. I can still be depended upon to lower or deflate whatever serious conversation I come upon. "Nothing serious or sacred' has been my motto most of my life. I never realized how annoying that can be until my son demonstrated, in his teen years, a genetic predisposition to that same world view.

So, in my cups, you might say, I replied in a typical smart-ass way.

"My dear Mariah," I said, "I'll go back to seminary and get ordained when I get a personal message from God Almighty."

She smiled that smile that made her eyes almost disappear and, after a healthy drink of what I assure you was bad wine--we drank only that vintage in those days--said words that changed my life forever.

"Jim," she said, "who the hell do you think sent me and told me what to say?"

Never, before or after, did such a word as 'hell' pass through Mariah's sainted lips. She was never even mildly profane. I stared at her, suddenly as sober as a Morman or a Muslim--or both at the same time.

She finished her cheese, put her wine glass in the sink and embraced me. I held her like a fragile bird. She kissed my cheek and whispered in my ear, "Well, you've gotten your message...."

She left me alone in my kitchen with dry ice in my veins and some large mammal's paw clutching my heart. I found it hard to breathe. Two trips to the porch and a full juice glass of the Wild Turkey I kept hidden under the sink on Wednesday nights changed nothing.

I called the bishop the next morning. Only after I had an appointment scheduled with him could I tell Bern what had happened and breathe naturally again.
*
When Mariah died a few months later, I was one of her pallbearers. She was light as air for us to carry--three international students and three members of St. Gabe's. Archangels don't weigh much. The are mostly feathers and Spirit. She was buried from Trinity Church. Snork did the service and did her prould in his homily of thanksgiving for so rare a soul. I was registered for seminary by then. Bern was up in New York acting in an off Broadway show. We would meet up in Alexandria in September. Mariah's granddaughter, Clara, who was a member of St. Gabe's as well, embraced me at the reception following the funeral. It was in the basement of Trinity where Mariah had spent so many Friday nights. Many of the foreign students brought ethnic food. Clara told me Mariah asked about me on the day she died. She wanted to know if Clara knew anything about me and seminary. I'd left my admission letter with Snork and he showed it to Clara. I tried to call Mariah but she was too ill to speak on the phone, but Clara told her the news.

Clara told me Mariah smiled they eye disappearing smile when she heard. She smiled through great pain.

"You tell Jim I told him so," she said to Clara and Clara passed that on to me.

Her last words to me: "I told you so."

That works. That will do nicely.


(Ok, that took a long time. Can't anyone out there tell me how to copy a word document into a blog???)