I don't think of myself as vain--but I'm sure I am since I don't like to see the thinness of my hair when it is this long and the gap down the part shows a lot more scalp than I would like to imagine I have.
As long as it is, and I've always liked long hair, since college I think, it has been much longer. Somewhere I have a sketch of myself drawn by Snork Roberts, who was the Episcopal Chaplain to West Virginia University when I lived there after college and after my master's degree from Harvard. We came back to Morgantown so Bern could finish her degree in drama that got delayed by our getting married and living in Cambridge for the second year of my study there.
Snork was a mentor to be valued beyond compare to me and an artist of some talent. In that sketch, I have on sunglasses and have a bandanna around my head and my hair, much fuller back then and able to wave at great length, was cascading around my shoulders. I didn't have a beard but I had a Fu Manchu mustache that was quite the rage in those heady days of the early 70's of the last century. I looked like a proper hippie, but here's the truth, I never was a hippie--I was always a 'week-end hippie', I was either in school or working during the week--but on weekends I was known to have a joint or two and drink more Boone's Farm Apple Wine than was advisable.
Odd how these Virginia Wolfian connections get made. I was writing about my hair and my angst about hair loss and somehow ended up at Snork. There is a chapter in the writing I've been doing since I retired about Snork and another priest--Jack Parker--who were two of the lights of my life.
I'll try to paste it here if I have the good sense to know how (so, don't bet on it!!!)
7.
Two Priests (Jack and Snork)
Every priest needs
a mentor. Every priest needs a guide through the labyrinth that is
'being a priest' and 'doing priestcraft'.
Every
denomination—even a small, mostly irrelevant one like the Episcopal
Church—has two identities, is bipolar and schizophrenic. There is
the troublesome, canon or doctrine bound, low-level toxin of the
'Institution'. All institutions, is seems to me, are ultimately and
fatally flawed. But the 'good twin' is the 'Community' that is the
church—IS the church in the most vital and enlivening and
astonishing way imaginable.
Every
priest needs to learn about 'the Institution' and develop strategies
to deal with it...or strategies on how
Not to deal with it.
The Institutional Church is politics writ large because of the
church's habit of claiming not to be political! It's politics in the
end and a priest must develop a political sense that allows him/her
to navigate the treacherous waters and cross the long, unrelenting
desert of the Institutional Church without being maimed, impaired or
killed. The politics of the church must be acknowledged and dealt
with so the priest might be able to be present fully to the
Community—the very harbinger of the Kingdom.
My choice has
been—mostly learned from Snork but reaffirmed decades later by
Jack—to simply be who I am and do what I do but always cover my
back in some ingratiating way. That sounds all to manipulative as I
think about it, but it is a decision of 'manipulating' the
Institution rather than being manipulated by the Institution. The
Institution itself is very seductive. It is possible to convince
yourself that you are being a 'team player' and 'going with the flow'
of the Institution and that the Institution is basically benign. Just
as the Church protests too much about not being political, you seldom
find anyone in the hierarchy who will fess up to the manipulative
nature of the beast. 'Going with the flow', it seems to me, puts one
in high risk of being caught in the powerful undercurrent of the
Institution's inertia. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. And
bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. The Institutional Church,
remarkably, is both nailed down tight and careening along at a
break-neck speed. Failure to recognize that either gets you stuck or
run over.
Three examples come
to mind in this overly long aside. All three of the examples have to
do with bishops. Bishops have a choice to make that will shape their
whole episcopate: either 'become' the Institution or acknowledge its
power and move around it.
When I was a baby
priest, I called my bishop (a good man) to ask his permission to do
something I knew to be coloring outside the lines. He stopped me
before I could frame the question.
“Jim, is this
about something you really feel compelled to do?” he asked.
“Yes, Bishop,”
I said.
“Then I'm giving
you some advice. Don't ask me beforehand.” He paused to let me get
the wisdom of that. “Then apologize like hell and claim ignorance
when I have to slap your hand. It won't get you out of having your
hand slapped, but I'll still love you for the outrageous nature of
your apology.”
That was a man who
had a strategy for dealing with the Institutional Inertia of the
Church.
One of the best
bishops I ever met was as unsuited for the job as a person could be.
He was a parish priest through and through who had been a last minute
compromise candidate in a contentious and divisive election. To his
amazement he was elected.
He told me once
about a particularly thorny question that came early in his
bishopric. It confounded him so much he went to the office of the
Diocesan Archdeacon, a man who had served several bishops, to ask for
his advice.
“What can I do
about this?” he asked the politically savvy Archdeacon.
Then the man smiled
slyly at him and said, “Anything you damn well please. That's why
we call you 'Bishop'.”
So, until he
retired, that's what that Bishop did in most every occasion. His
strategy became 'using' the Inertia of the Institution to forward his
best intentions.
Both those men were
what I call the 'extinct bishops' of a much different generation.
They came to understand their power rather than 'becoming' their
office. Giants and Ogres once graced the seats in the House of
Bishops. The Giants (like my two friends) did much good. The Ogres
did much damage. I
think the Institutional Church recognized and deplored the damage of
the Ogres so much that they turned the office into a CEO rather than
the Minister to the ministers of God. They prevented much damage in
doing so, but they also made it harder and harder for bishops—and
by extention, priests—to do remarkable kinds of good.
Finally, a friend
of mine was elected bishop. He was someone I supported and worked for
(trying to ingratiate myself to the Powers that BE). We had agreed
about most issues, including what was wrong with the 'corporate
model' of the Church. We both, I knew, recognized that the Church's
grace and healing power came from the Community Model.
So,
we were having lunch—on me (ingratiate when you can, I say)--when I
asked him when he planned to do something that B.C. (Before
Consecration)
we had been allies about. There was a long pause. Then he took a deep
breathe and said, “Things look different from this side of the
desk, Jim....”
I took a bite of
salad and sip of wine to let him explain all that more clearly, in
small words I might understand. When he didn't, I said, impolitely
and without political ac-cumin, “There's no f*ck*ng desk here,
bishop. We're two friends in a restaurant.”
The rest of the
meal did not go well.
Jack and Snork
would have never said that to a bishop. It's not just that 'they knew
better', its simply that they would have known no good would come of
it. Jack and Snork taught me to avoid 'no good will come of it'
situations adroitly. I was not the best of students. No fault could
be found with the teachers at all.
Both Jack and Snork
swam below the surface of the rough seas of the Institutional Church.
They had internal radar detectors that warned them of the church's
speed traps. Both did mostly what they wanted to do, with great grace
and no need for acknowledgment, but gave wide berth to potential
pitfalls. They were both, in their own ways, more radical and
nontraditional than I ever dreamed of being—and I dreamed, beloved,
oh I dreamed!--yet they pulled it off without drawing attention to
themselves, covertly, burrowing beneath, going under or over but
never straight through. One bishop I served with called me his 'young
Turk'. But he always knew where I was and what I was up to. I was on
his screen and seldom confounded him. Jack and Snork were 'Turks'
beyond compare, but they were secret Turks, undercover Turks, wise
old Turks, worn smooth by life. The older I got, the more I became
like them. At least that is my hope and my prayer.
Snork's chaplaincy
to West Virginia University consisted of being all over the campus
talking with people, being in his office talking with people, sitting
in the coffee house known as “The Last Resort” talking with
people, and at other times, talking with people. Late in my ministry
someone asked me exactly what I did each day. I thought for a moment
and said, “I walk around a lot and talk with people—and hope that
I listen more than I talk.” Snork taught me that the real tools of
priestcraft are speaking and listening—hopefully listening more
than you talk.
Snork was a
consummate listener. From time to time, at the house church we called
St. Gabrial's, he would even listen to the words of consecration at
the Eucharist. There were 30 or so of us, all under thirty except for
Snork and the Arch-Angel Miriah (who I wrote about a few chapters
ago) and most of us were new to the Episcopal Church. So, at the
Wednesday night Eucharist, Snork would ask if anyone had a birthday
that week. Whenever someone did, Snork let them celebrate the
Eucharist while he did what he called, 'the manual acts'--elevation
the bread and wine, making the sign of the cross at appropriate
times, breaking the bread (always home-baked) at the end. We thought
nothing of it though it violated more Canon Laws than you can
imagine! What did we know? Snork was the priest and he said it was
perfectly alright.
Here's a startling
thing, out of those 30 odd people, 5 of us went on to become
Episcopal priests, including Jorge and me and the first woman ever
ordained in WV. We each had our own reasons, but I can't help but
think that having once said those magic and mysterious and holy words
that point to the living reality of Christ in bread and wine, you
can't get it out of your system and want to say them over and again.
An unorthodox form of discernment, surely, but one that seemed to be
very effective....
The first time I
petitioned to be elected a Deputy to the church's General Convention,
I came in ninth of the nine candidates. I was sitting alone, nursing
my wounds in the break after the election results had been announced,
when Jack came by and said, “I'm surprised you got that many
votes.” He smiled his crooked smile and sat next to me. “You
should have come in tenth out of nine....”
He was chuckling at
my disappointment. I decided to give him the silent treatment but
though Jack was never very talkative, he kept on talking in spite of
my ignoring him.
“Look down there
on the floor,” he said. We were in the balcony. I dutifully looked.
“You see all the people who got elected clerical deputies?”
In fact I could—two
men and two women. He was tweaking my curiosity just a bit.
“What do they all
have in common?” Jack asked.
Well, not much. Two
were my age, one younger, one older. One was bald, one was blond, one
had brown hair, two were heavy, two skinny, all white, of course. All
parish priests...what else? Then it hit me, they all had on dark
pinstriped suits—one of the women's suit had a skirt—and they all
had on big, shiny clerical collars and pressed black shirts.
I looked at him. He
was still chuckling. I had on sandals, jeans, an open collar shirt
and a tan jacket none the better for wear.
I finally smiled.
“You'll never
'fit in' the way the church expects,” he said, growing solemn and
wise. “But you could find ways to 'fit in' without compromising
your strange sense of integrity. You have two approaches to the
Institution of the Church: either you 'ignore', but not benignly, you
aggressively ignore it, or, you pick fights with it.”
I was the one
chuckling now. Jack had nailed me in ways I hadn't expected to be
nailed. I didn't have any particular 'strategy' to get elected
Deputy. I just thought they should see beneath the surface and want
to elect me. I was being the ill-mannered, contentious kid who
wondered why no one ever asked him to play. It worked to get the
Institution to leave me alone, but there was no reason in heaven or
on earth that they should reward me for being disagreeable.
Jack smiled and
patted my leg. “I'm going to go 'play nice' with these folks,” he
said, getting up, “You might consider joining me....”
So I did and
watched him genuinely enjoy himself as he moved through crowds of
people, stopping to chat or tell a joke. It wasn't nearly as painful
as I had imagined. The next time—after kissing enough
ecclesiastical babies and butts—I was elected to General Convention
and have been twice more since then. And, as Jack so gently taught
me, the kissing up part wasn't unpleasant at all. I discovered most
Episcopalians in Connecticut are hale fellows and gals well met, by
in large. I'm a better person and better priest for learning that
from Jack.
Snork
and Jack both worked with and ministered to the margins of society
before it be came de
rigor for
the church to do that. Long before Presiding Bishop Browning declared
'they're are no outcasts' in the Episcopal Church, Snork was working
with runaways, street people, drug abusers and hippies. Jack had a
vibrant ministry to gay and lesbian folks a couple of decades before
GLBT
were four letters the church recognized. As the part time Rector of
Trinity Church in Waterbury—the most Anglo-Catholic parish in the
area—Jack invited and nurtured gay folk in remarkable ways. He was
their 'pastor' and 'priest' and a quiet advocate for inclusion in the
life of the church.
While I was at St.
John's, a chapter of Integrity was founded. Integrity is a group for
GLBT Episcopalians and their friends. I asked Jack to be the first
chaplain to the group—a role I wanted but knew I couldn't play
since it became clear that my inviting Integrity to St. John's caused
a remarkable fire-storm in the parish. I dutifully and proudly
announced I had welcomed the chapter to use the sanctuary and library
for their meetings and let it be known that I would be glad to have
conversations with anyone with questions. This was in the early
1990's and I was naïve enough to think no one would raise an eyebrow
about the whole thing. How silly of me. (One of my character flaws is
that I think of myself as 'the norm' in society. I am genuinely
astonished when people disagree with my theology or politics.) So I
wasn't prepared for the what was truly only four people, but four
people with much mischief in mind.
It saddens me to
tell you that the Gang of Four could be as destructive as they were.
After all, they were just four aging white men, but I quickly learned
that four aging, homophobic white men could do a lot of damage to a
parish community. Give them credit, two of them were former wardens
and did have some reputational power (very important power in a
parish). The other two were the masterminds, however; one not even a
member of the parish and the second one only marginal. The first move
was when the marginal member—someone whose face I knew from the
back row at 8 a.m. Eucharists but only learned his name when an usher
told me he was upset. So I called him and he came in to talk, or
rather, to rage at me. I had some experience with dealing with
irrational people, but this was beyond my ken. He called me names,
threatened my career and personal well-being, told me how much 'fecal
matter' a sexually active gay man ingested in a year and described
sexual acts I had neither heard of or imagined. That meeting, which
ended with me walking out of my office, leaving him there, and going
to a local bar, convinced me that I should never meet with any of the
group without a witness. I called Jack.
Jack told me he
could have warned me if he had known I was going to be so stupid as
to meet with someone like that alone. (Of course, Jack didn't call me
'stupid'...something along the lines of 'marginally
mistaken'...something Jack-like and kind.) But I never faced any of
them in person without Jack, sitting like a Buddha in the corner of
the room. He always wore a black suit and clericals when he was the
silent witness to the escalating attacks on me by the Gang of Four.
And early on he told me something very Buddha like: “Fight not in
the shadows...” Jack said.
So I dragged the
whole mess out into the middle of the room, into the light of day and
parish meetings and sermons and articles in the newsletter. Whatever
they did, I made immediately public. Like when they started calling
people in the parish directory to ask if they knew that the Rector
was letting fagots and perverts use the church. One of the first
people in the A's in the directory was a member of the vestry who was
a lesbian. She hung up on whoever called and came to find me. She
became a firm ally in what was to come. They also, in the C's called
a woman whose brother had just died of AIDS to convince her to take
up their cause against queers. They didn't 'know' who they were
calling, of course.
Through it all,
Jack stood by me at every meeting, his 'reputational power' and the
volume of his silence radiating trust and safety to all who were
confused and confounded by the conflict. The vestry, god bless them,
endorsed my decision to invite Integrity to use the church. Not
everyone was convinced it was a good idea, considering the conflict
it had caused and considering that my predecessor as Rector had 9
years of conflict that had damaged the parish deeply. But the vestry
knew that Episcopal Canon Law gives exclusive right of 'building use'
to the Rector. And I was the Rector, though the four and whoever
sympathized with them were hoping 'not for long....'
Jack gave me a
tee-shirt he had made that said on the front: “I'M THE RECTOR,
THAT'S WHY!”
Bless his heart.
After
several public meeting, Jack silently by my side, where the better
angels of the parish were given voice, things began to go away, at
least until I found out that the Four had contacted a notorious
anti-Gay priest in Pittsburgh for advice on how to rid themselves of
me. That's when I called my bishop (the one at the time was no
champion of gay folks but was a strict interpreter of Canon Law and
the integrity—no pun intended—of diocesan lines.) With his
permission I invoked the disciplinary rubric on page 409 of the Book
of Common Prayer—the part about denying communion to those who
“have
done wrong to their neighbors and are a scandal to the other members
of the congregation”--telling
the Four I would refuse to give them the host unless they ceased and
desisted what they had been doing. Within a month or two, two of them
died and one moved to Florida. The fourth member of the Gang—bless
his heart—repented and became, once more a wonderful member of the
community, going out of his way, I heard, to welcome gay folk to St.
John's.
All Jack told me
after all that was this: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Jack could get away with saying stuff like that.
There was a
remarkable gay couple at St. John's while Jack was a member of the
parish. They had met in high school and had been faithful to each
other for over four decades. Neither had ever had another lover. They
had come to St. John's as volunteers for Bill H., who had AIDS. At
first they dropped Bill at the door and went for breakfast. Then,
when Bill needed more attention, they would take him to his pew and
then wait for him in the parish library. Finally, they started
sitting with him and when they realized the deep affection of the
congregation for Bill, the two of them became members themselves.
They had asked me
to give their home a house blessing and wondered if I could throw in
a blessing for their 'marriage' as well. This was years before same
sex marriage became the law of Connecticut and I knew I would be on
dangerous ground. So I talked with Jack. Jack was glad to come along
and bless the couples' rings and relationship, using words that
sounded quite true to the formula of the Book of Common Prayer.
I asked Jack if he
thought I should have done it myself.
“No,” he said.
“You're still beholden to the church and could get in unnecessary
trouble.” Then he smiled and winked. “I'm just an old retired
fart, what can the bishop do to me?”
Now I'm just an old
retired fart, the way Jack was then. If I could only be a percentage
as gracious and bold and wise as he was—that would be a state
devoutly to be desired.
Both Jack and Snork
had five children. One of Jack and Marge's kids died in childhood and
another was severely mentally handicapped. Snork's five—3 girls and
2 boys—were, and I suspect, still are alive and well. The
difference was Jack had Marge to help him raise the kids and Snork
raised his children primarily by himself. Divorce, even so short a
time ago as the 1970's was still suspect when you were an Episcopal
priest. So Snork wasn't going to become a cardinal rector
anywhere—not that he wanted to and not that he would have if he'd
been happily married. Snork had this 'white Afro' of sandy red hair.
Jack was a red-head too—though when I met him, white haired as he
was, I asked, “how did all your kids get red hair?” He snorted.
“What color hair do you think I was born with—white?”
Snork's children
were always omnipresent. When I first met him one daughter was in her
late adolescence and the others spaced above her. The three daughters
were all lovely and not a little seductive. It was an odd home to
grow up in since Snork was constantly inviting people he found
wandering on the earth to come and sleep there. Mostly the visitors
just smoked dope and hung out at Snork's house but sometimes they
ripped him off, carrying away electronic equipment and whatever else
they could sell. One guy really cleaned him out but some of us ran
him to ground and got Snork's stuff back. Snork, of course, wouldn't
turn the guy in and he was still welcome beneath Snork's roof. As you
might imagine, the guy cleaned Snork out again and disappeared.
I was trying to get
Snork to explain why he would let the fox back in the henhouse. He
bobbed around the way he always did—one mass of nervous energy—and
said, “Well, obviously I didn't think he'd do it again....” And
then laughed, wondering if I knew anyone with a used stereo and some
records for sale.
That was just
Snork. It wasn't so much that he was foolish about human
nature—though he certainly was—it was more that he was unable to
think bad about anyone. Sometimes he could disarm really shady
characters by treating them as if they were paragon's of virtue. But
just as often, he got ripped off. However, he never seemed more than
momentarily put out and was usually sure that he'd been robbed for
some higher, purer more exalted reason than simple human greed.
One of Snork's
gifts was to allow most of the people around him the opportunity to
worry about him and try to keep him safe from his own good nature.
Like the time he started a bible study group and had it invaded by
fundamentalists. There only seemed to be two kinds of 'Christians'
around the campus those days—semi-believing counter cultural types
and raving charismatics. At least it seemed that way to me. Trinity,
the parish church, had become very conservative so Snork, who was
partially paid by Trinity, was always treading softly around there.
Not only did he look radical, he was, but he was also a loving, kind
man, which covered a multitude of his liberal sins. Things eventually
got so bad that a group broke away from Trinity and formed St. Thomas
a Beckett, with Snork as their vicar. But that was later—what Snork
tried to do was offer alternatives to the conservatives...like his
Bible study.
I didn't attend
when he started the group but within a week or so he called me and
said I had to start coming. After two years at Harvard Divinity
School, I wasn't in the mood for Bible study but Snork explained he'd
lost control and wanted me to 'kick some ass' for him. Which I
dutifully did, out of love for him but also because kicking
charismatics' asses was a load of fun. It took about two more
sessions—marked by much yelling and accusations of my being a
heretic at best and a hater of the baby Jesus at worst—I cleared
out the right wing folks.
I told Snork
afterward that he could have just canceled the study group or driven
away the bible thumpers who were confusing a handful of undergrads
who really wanted to know more about God—Snork's sweet and loving
God.
He shook his hair
heavy head. “I just couldn't do that,” is all he said.
At first I thought
it was about not offending the folks at Trinity's right wing
sensibilities. But, on second thought, it was simply that Snork did
not have the capacity to shout down or offend anyone, ever. He was as
gentle a man as I ever knew. And his gentleness soothed and healed
those around him much as, years later, Jack's quiet presence had done
so much to stop the bleeding over gays at St. John's.
Gentle men—both
of them. Would that I could emulate them more fully.
Just
before my 25th
birthday, my mother had a massive stroke from which she never
recovered. She was 63—the age I am as I sit writing this—so the
memory is fresh and damp upon me these days. My father had called in
the middle of the night, frightened and irrational. I promised I'd
leave at daybreak to drive home. It was a 5 ½ hour trip and I was so
shaken I wasn't convinced I could do it. My wife was in school and
had a performance so she couldn't come with me. I woke Snork up to
ask him to think gentle thoughts for me as I drove. Instead, he
insisted on meeting me at Trinity Church at 5:30 the next morning.
He was unlocking
the chapel door when I arrived. I lived only a few blocks from the
church but my hands were shaking as I drove over to the parking lot.
Snork wordlessly embraced me and half-led, half-carried me into the
dark chapel. He told me to sit and that he'd be right back. I sat in
the early morning light in that Gothic chapel, smelling the stone and
the candles' wax, listening to the profound silence of such
buildings, waiting, hardly thinking at all, frightened but settled.
But there was no way I could make that drive to Bluefield. I started
thinking of someone I might ask to drive me or, having Snork take me
to the Airport in Pittsburgh or the Morgantown bus station.
Then he was back,
decked out in full Eucharistic vestments over his jeans and sandals.
I'd never seen Snork wear a chasuble before. He even had on one of
those useless, anachronistic manaples no one ever wore. Before I knew
what was happening, he had started staying the words of the Communion
service from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer—words so solemn and
beautiful that I stood as he prayed. He gave me communion and
anointed me with healing oil. Then he embraced me at the altar rail
and said, softly, “I think you can do the drive now....”
And I did.
I drove home and
fed my mother vanilla ice cream out of little cups with a wooden
spoon though she didn't know who I was or what I was doing. And my
Aunt Elise came in one morning and watched me feed my mother ice
cream and then wished me a Happy Birthday—my 25th—and then I
stood by my mother's bed with my dad a few days later and was with my
mom as she died, something I shall never forget or stop being
thankful for the honor of that moment.
All because Snork
gave me communion and anointed me.
(What
I learned from that and never forgot was that about the only thing
priests have to offer that makes any sense or difference at all is
the sacraments. And in my life as a priest I have always remembered
that when anyone was broken or pained or confounded, what I could
give—perhaps the only thing I could give—was sacraments. So over
the years I've taken hundreds of people into a chapel somewhere and
given them communion and anointed them and forgiven them whatever
horrid sins they had committed or imagined and washed them in the
blood of the Lamb through the remarkable and profound objective
reality of the bread and wine and oil and confession. All that I
learned from Snork and relearned a dozen times in two dozen ways from
Jack.
Both of them
knew fair well the power and reality of the sacraments. And they
taught that to me....God bless their hearts....)
Jack was the
resident 'confessor' of St. John's during my time there, those 20
plus years. People were always disappearing into the chapel with him
when I wasn't looking and he would hear their tales of woe and
forgive them, whether they really needed it or not (of course 'they'
thought they needed it and Jack gave forgiveness freely, completely,
wondrously....) and give them the bread and wine with a few well
placed words and anoint them with that oh so holy oil. What a
privilege it was to sit at their knees and learn such mysteries....
Snork dropped dead
at 63—the same age as my mother, the same age I am as I write this.
He was in the bookstore at West Virginia University, having just
bought something (I wish I knew what so I could read it for him) and
almost to the front door. He had remarried and didn't take his heart
medicine because it inhibited his sex drive. His second wife was
quite a bit younger than he was. The choices we make in this life are
strange and wondrous. I can't blame him at all for his.
Jorge
and I drove down to Morgantown from the northeast corridore together
to Snork's funeral. I had temporarily left the full-time priesthood
and was considering never returning. However, I'd been to a workshop
called Making A Difference and had gotten my priesthood back all new.
One of the distinctions of the workshop—which I have led now for 15
years or more all over the country and in Ireland several times—is
the distinction between what we call 'the superstition IS' and
'occurring', or, as we called it then, 'showing up'. The distinction
is that if you live in an IS world there are few possibilities. But
choosing to live in an 'occurring' or 'showing up' world, life can be
full of new ways of being. It's a bit more complicated than that, but
that is enough to tell you because I was explaining all that to Jorge
somewhere in Pennsylvania and he, driving, said to me: “Let me get
this straight...what you're saying is Snork showed
up
dead?”
Both Jorge and I,
two of the half-dozen priests who went to seminary because they knew
Snork, said some words at his funeral. I have no idea what I said all
these years later. But I know that I said something about how he
taught me to be a priest. That I know I said. And it was true, even
if I was a slow learner.
A
group of us went through Snork's books and stuff. His new wife wanted
us to take things. One of the things I took was a round paper plate
full of names. Apparently, making this up but it has no other
explanation, Snork would take a plate from coffee hour at St. Thomas
a Becket and write down the names of everyone who had been there and
date the plate with a magic marker. How amazing to me that he could
do that—know who had been at the Eucharistic and write them all
down afterward. I can't even begin to imagine the concentration and
attention that would require. There are 72 names on the paper plate.
It is dated, simply, Advent
II 1985.
That's all—72 souls remembered for having received the Body and
Blood. That's all...and more than enough.
Jack
loved jokes, bad jokes, really bad jokes. Like this, one he told me:
Two
old guys in a nursing home. One tells the other, “I don't know how
old I am.” The second guy says, “wheel yourself out in the lobby
and drop your pants and I'll tell you how old you are.” So they
both go in their chairs into the lobby and the first guy takes off
his pants. After all the upset and screams of visitors, the two of
them are taken back to their room. “You're 87,” the second guy
tells the one who dropped his pants. “How did you know?” the
first guy asks. “You told me last week,” the second guy says.
On
about any level, that is a bad joke. But Jack loved them. He loved to
laugh and to hear jokes and tell them. Bad jokes. Really bad jokes.
And everyone who
knew him laughed just as hard as he did, not because the jokes were
funny, but because Jack—that dear man—told them. Perhaps we will
all be judged, not on the quality of our jokes, but on whether
everyone laughs with us simply because laughing with us—like
laughing with Jack—was healing and pure and good. Like that.
Healing, pure,
good...words I associate with my connections to Snork and Jack. And,
oh yes, holy....
Jack died with
dignity and peace, just the way he had planned it. At his funeral, it
was my honor to preach. This is what I said:
October
17, 2009—Jack Parker's Memorial Service
Years
ago, I went on a day trip with three men who I love like uncles and
mentors and dear, dear friends. Jack Parker, Bill Penny and David
Pritchard and I drove up into the heart of New England. I remember we
went to a place called 'The Cathedral of the Pines' and we also went
to see Jack's mountain—the one he loved and had climbed time and
time again and where some of his ashes will be scattered by his
remarkable family. We had a great lunch at some place one of them new
and somehow got back before it was too late for such a motley crew to
be out without getting into mischief!
A
friend of mine told me that there are only two plots in all of
literature. One is, “a stranger arrives in town”. The other is,
“someone sets out on a journey.”
I
have memories of sharing part of the journey that is life with Jack
Parker.
Memories
like that are precious, rare, wondrous and, finally, holy.
Holy.
I've
ONLY know Jack Parker for 20 years or so. I say 'only' because I know
some of you have known him much longer than that—his children, his
family that he loved so fiercely...and others. But knowing him for
two decades was a beautiful gift to me from God. And if I had to
choose a word to describe that gift it would be this--'holy'.
Holy.
I've
never known anyone who loved a bad, corny joke as much as Jack.
Most
of the jokes Jack loved began something like this: “A rabbi and a
priest and a Baptist minister went into a bar...” Or, like this:
“Three elderly men were sitting on the front porch of the nursing
home....” Or, like this, “A man was trying to sell a talking
dog....”
You
get the point. Jack would start laughing half-way through telling the
joke and anyone who was listening would start laughing with him,
entranced by Jack's laugh, caught up in his story, not caring at all
how the joke turned out—it would turn out bad and corny—but
thankful and joyous to be sharing a laugh with Jack.
There
is a word for sharing
a laugh with Jack.
The word is 'holy'.
Holy.
There
is a word that occurs to me for anything, anytime, 'shared with
Jack'.
The
word is 'holy'.
Ok,
he was not St. Francis of Assisi. Not quite. But he was, for me, a
'holy' man. Truly, really, without fear of contradiction, Jack was
'holy'. No kidding. I'm not exaggerating. Not at all.
He
taught me so many things. Knowing Jack was like post-doctoral work in
kindness and love and long-suffering and generosity of spirit and
joy. Knowing Jack was like a seminar in prayerfulness. He was a
priest to be admired, a man to be emulated, a quick study in
sweetness. It seems an odd word, perhaps, but Jack was a sweet, sweet
man. I know you all know what I mean.
And
learning these things from Jack was—have I mentioned this?--holy.
The
words from Jesus in today's gospel are among the most beautiful and
comforting in all of Scripture.
“Let
not your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me...In
my father's house are many rooms...If it were not so, would I have
told you I go to prepare a place for you?”
The
Greek word translated 'rooms' is mona.
That word has many possible translations--'rooms', 'resting places',
'mansions' (as we used to say), and 'abodes'. That's the one I like:
'abodes'...places to be, space to 'abide' in the nearer presence of
the God who loves us best of all.
The
last time I saw Jack, I made him promise that he wouldn't die until I
got home from a trip to the beach. He said he'd try, but he wasn't
sure he could. It was the only promise he didn't keep to me. He had
other plans, another place to abide.
That
last time I saw Jack, I offered him communion. The sacrament was
Jack's favorite food and drink, but that last time he said, 'no'.
“You've
been a priest to me long enough,” he told me, with that crooked
smile and twinkling eye he always had. “We're just two old friends
saying goodbye....”
Jack
taught us all so very much about 'living'. And he taught us how to
die.
And
it is time now—he would have wanted it this way—it's time for us
to smile and remember and thank God for the journey and say 'good
bye' to our old, dear friend....
“I
fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless;
Ills
have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where
is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I
triumph still, if thou abide with me.”
May their souls and the souls of all the departed, rest in peace....
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