8.
THE SWAN LADY AND ST. RAGE
(This chapter
came from some notes and thoughts I put down on paper about the
events of May 15, 2007. I know that because I actually dated the
notes—quite organized for me! Funny thing is that there are two
completely different endings. I'm not sure why I did that or which I
wrote first. But I've had no success trying to put them together, so
I'll simply put the second one after the first one and you can take
your pick....)
I went to see my
urologist today down in Greenwich. I can never get there on time
since whenever I drive toward New York City I become a traffic
magnet. It doesn’t matter which way I go—and there are really
only two ways: I-95 and the Merritt Parkway—I’m like the fine
lady from Bambury Cross except “I will have traffic wherever I
go….” The trip down was uneventful, or, more precisely, eventful
only in ‘where’ the traffic jams were; however, the way back I
saw the Swan Lady and St. Rage.
The Swan Lady was
just passed Exit 9 on I-95. She had parked on the side of the road
and was walking near the so-called slow lane against traffic. The
‘slow lane’ at that point (my magnetism having been worn low by a
complete Urological exam, ‘nuf said) was going about 55 or 60 and I
thought the lady must be crazy, walking so slowly, so near to
speeding cars, carrying a brown blanket. Then I saw why, as traffic
was slowing down for her. She was walking slowly toward a swan that
was standing beside of the north lanes of Interstate 95, seeming to
consider crossing over. I was two lanes over and thought about
pulling over to see if I could help but couldn’t get across. So I
sped up to Exit 10, got off and circled back to Exit 9. By the time
I’d done all that—only a few minutes—both the Swan and her
savior (I pray) were gone.
I thought about it
all the way home. The swan looked confused rather than frightened,
like he didn’t know what had happened to the water he’d been in
before he leaped a barrier and ended up in the break-down lane. Since
there are swans in Cheshire and in Hamden, I was fully aware of their
reputation as being aggressive and touchy. And they are huge
creatures, when you think about how much bigger they are than other
birds. And I believe they need a good run to get themselves air bourn
so there was no way he had enough runway to cross the Interstate in
flight. I thought about Watership Downs and how the rabbits
would sit beside the newly constructed roadway and ponder what it all
meant. And I thought about the time I hit a wild turkey that flew in
front of my car on the Merritt when the kids were young and what a
holy mess that was how we all screamed and then cried most the way
home. I even thought of Sandra Milchin, the only child of the only
Doctor in the town where I grew up. I hadn’t thought of her for
decades. She had been killed at 18 when she swerved her car on a
mountain road to avoid hitting a dog and hit a tree instead. Dr.
Milchin never got over it and lived to be very old, still practicing
into his 80’s, continuing to save lives until he died in a
consulting room while stitching up a lacerated knee. How many lives
he saved, I thought, and he had no way to save the one that mattered
most.
Then there was the
time I was with my cousin Marlin, driving to Grand maw Jones’ house
when the traffic suddenly stopped. I was 8, maybe 9, and Marlin was
maybe Sandra Belcher’s age. He got out and stood on the hood of his
car to see if he could figure out why traffic had stopped where there
was mostly no traffic at all . He shouted something, reached over to
where I was sitting and took a hunting knife out of the glove
compartment. “Stay here,” he said, running down the side of the
road passed the stopped cars. Of course I didn’t and got there just
in time to see the deer someone had hit and terribly wounded have its
throat slit by my cousin, Marlin. I was close enough when it happened
to be sprayed by arterial deer blood and see the look of thanksgiving
in the suffering animal’s eyes as he looked up at Marlin. (OK, I
know that is a remarkably unjustified anthropomorphism—to see
‘thankfulness’ in the eye of a young buck deer—but I was there
and that’s what I saw.)
Where I grew up,
surrounded by mountains and two lane roads through ‘nowhere’, the
people who taught driver’s education always made a big deal about
not trying to miss things that run out in the road in front of you,
not even to slow down. And they always told the story of Sandra
Milchin and the sadness in her father’s eyes all of his days. But
it doesn’t do much good. I think it is almost an automatic instinct
of human beings to try to avoid hitting creatures who run in front of
their cars. Dogs and cats are obviously animals most everyone would
swerve for, given how much they are a part of our lives and how we
know someone would be waiting for them to come home as darkness fell.
But most everyone, I believe, tries to avoid hitting squirrels and
rabbits and chipmunks and raccoons and possums as well. OK, may not
possums since they are such nasty and scary creatures.
The woman I’m
married to was a Swan Lady once. She was on a Merritt Parkway
entrance ramp and saw a swan casually strolling up the side of the
ramp as if it was going to hitch-hike to Hartford. She stopped and
got out, over the screams of my son—“Don’t get out! You’re
going to get killed!” And since it was an entrance ramp and not a
busy eight-lane highway like where the Swan Lady today was walking
slowly, holding her blanket, Bern was able to get the people coming
on behind her to stop—especially since she’d parked right in the
middle of the ramp! Any way, the swan that day was saved to do
something equally suicidal another time. I can only hope the Swan
Lady of I-95 was as successful. When I got back, as I said, she was
gone and so was the swan. Since I didn’t see swan parts strewn all
over the road, I can will imagine the best.
(Here’s how
she was moving—softly, one foot carefully in front of the
other—like a dancer during the slow movement of the ballet. Or,
perhaps more descriptively, since she was holding the blanket in two
hands in front of her, she was moving like a matador approaching the
wounded bull, standing still, looking dazed. Though that’s not a
good metaphor since the matador is using the cape to hide his sword
and she was, obviously, simply wanting to use it to shoo the
dazed-looking bird back over the barrier to the water on the other
side. She was thin and small—not unlike a dancer—and about 60
with closely cropped black and gray hair. The look on her face as I
saw it passing by, was a look of total concentration, great patience
and a restrained sense of urgency. She was, in the brief moments I
saw her, beautiful.)
That instinct of
humans to try to avoid hitting creatures in the road is one of the
prime pieces of evidence I would give for the basic, primal,
marrow-deep ‘goodness’ of our species should I be the defense
attorney before the Throne of God. Though one could argue that this
particular instinct is born, not of compassion but of the instinct to
avoid any kind of collision, I maintain that it demonstrates (as so
few of our actions do) that we have some sense of unity with and
responsibility for the rest of creation. I know that when I avoid
rear-ending another car or the driver behind me stops before hitting
me, my reaction is a feeling of relief that I am safe. But when I
look in the rear view mirror and see the squirrel I did everything
short of running into someone’s yard to avoid hitting is sitting on
the sidewalk looking nonplussed, my feeling is the relief of knowing
I did no damage, I did not kill another creature.
Though our basic
goodness is proven to my satisfaction, it is obvious from the amount
of road kill everywhere that our actions do not always live up to our
intentions. Just like everything else in life, I suspect. Road kill
affects me deeply. A dead dog or cat almost stops my heart, but a
raccoon gives me pause. I’ve often thought that I would, if I were
very rich, endow some organization that would drive little hybrid
vehicles painted bright yellow with a black band of mourning across
the hood. Everyone would know this was the “Road-Kill Patrol”, a
group utterly dedicated to giving a decent final disposition to the
creatures along side the highway who died for our sins of speeding
along in lethal weapons. Burial or cremation should be the fate of
those creatures, not to lay in the sun and bloat and be constantly
run over again until there is not much left of them than the
proverbial greasy spot in the road.
I think about
Road-Kill a lot, probably because there is always so much of it
around. I even wrote a poem about it once.
THE
SKUNK AND THE KITTY
On
my way out, up the hill to where I go,
I
passed a patch of road
where
a skunk and a black cat
were
both dead—road kill.
My
car window was open
on
an uncharacteristically warm
January
morning—foggy and strange.
So
I carried the skunk smell with me
all
the way to where I was going.
Something
about the smell of skunk,
millennia
in development,
whether
as evolution or God’s plan:
skunks
have an odor to peal paint,
leave
you hyperventilating
and
just a little nauseous—
more
than a little if smelled before breakfast.
I
though all day, where I was,
about
those two creatures—
dead
as doornails and splayed on the road.
The
cat was someone’s friend and companion.
The
skunk was a marvel of defense mechanism—
a
mother/father of small defense mechanisms.
Both
were deserving of a better fate
than
to swell and burst and decay on a state highway.
I
prayed for them at noon prayers—
silently,
of course, lest I seem to animistic in my faith.
The
skunk and the kitty—both black,
both
dead,
both
nameless to me
(though
the cat surely had one,
and
who can say about skunks?)
so
I couldn’t pray for them by name.
Going
back down the hill,
from
where I’d been to where I live,
I
noticed the cat was gone—
claimed,
perhaps by some human who loved her,
given
a proper burial, mourned, missed.
Appropriate
funereal rites, as bifit her.
The
skunk was there still—
torn
to pieces by the tires
of
SUV’s, Buicks, foreign cars, UPS trucks.
His
odor was less on the way back,
but,
God bless him, still potent.
And
I wondered—heretic and pagan
that
I truly am—
whether
he died for our smells….
jgb—1/30/09
***
When I was almost
home, still pondering the impenetrable mysteries of road-kill, of
human goodness, of the Swan Lady’s courage and beauty, all that
stuff—I passed a laundry with a sign, about 20 feet high with those
letter’s you wedge on it like letters on your holder playing
Scrabble. There was a ‘special’ on sweaters, which struck me as
odd since it was 80 degrees or so. Then I thought maybe people get
sweaters cleaned in May and put them in plastic boxes under beds to
sleep until the first chill spell in October. I never think that far
ahead and there’s no room under the futon I sleep on for
boxes—plastic or otherwise. I am destined by my lack of forethought
and sleeping furniture to pay full price for cleaning my sweaters
next fall when it seems I need them and they are 6 months dirty.
But below that was
what caused me much consternation. In big, red, capital letters at
the bottom of the sign, it said ST RAGE. I drove for 10 miles trying
to remember if I’d ever heard of St. Rage and wondering why on
earth that was on the sign. I often see signs in front of businesses
with some vaguely religious aphorism on them. Further south, down in
Dixie, businesses don’t hesitate to put “JESUS SAVES!” on signs
out front. But this is New England, the land of closely guarded and
mostly hidden faith: and St. Rage, for goodness sake. Who could that
be?
When I got home I
was about to ‘Google’ St. Rage when I noticed on the internet
that Jerry Falwell, of all people, had died. I’m proud that I
didn’t say “good riddance”, but I must admit I have more
feelings about the deaths of road kill than immediately gripped me
from reading about Jerry’s demise. And it was just while I was
examining my conscience and beginning to feel like a terrible person
(doesn’t each man’s death diminish me, after all?) when what
should jump into my head but the letter ‘O’ that completed the
true message of St. Rage. I whispered a little prayer for the soul of
my brother Jerry and decided to start writing.
(First Ending)
The church should
be like the Swan Lady, like the Road Kill Patrol, not like St. Rage.
The church should
walk with great and graceful care on the edge of every highway,
guarding those in danger. It is, after all, the edges and margins of
life where the church is needed—and you can never imagine all the
places that might be. But anywhere that the relentless speed and
impatience and lack of compassion of the culture creates road-kill.
The church must not so much seek to “fix” or “change” all
that as to simply be with the marginalized, the forgotten, the
misbegotten, the despised, the lost, the lonely, the abused and
rejected and left out. Since there is not much the post-Christendom
church can do or
change, we are enabled to find an identity and authenticity
that does not involve the support of the culture and approval of
conventional wisdom. It is a chance—this dance of the church…like
the slow, calm, fearless dance of the Swan Lady—that the church
neglects at our own peril. There is a ‘relevancy’ that does not
include sitting in the seats of power and driving the society. There
is an integrity not of ‘doing’ or ‘changing’ or ‘having’:
the integrity of ‘being’, simply being, with the ones Jesus
called “the least of these.” While the culture races on—intent
on doing and having—the church must dance the ‘dance of being’
on the verge, in the breakdown lane with the frightened and
bewildered swans of our society, willing to risk our lives with them,
just to be where we are called to be and to dance….
My Uncle Russell,
my father’s older brother, was surely one of the worst drivers who
ever lived. He had the terrifying habit of driving by straddling the
center line of the torturously twisted two lane mountain roads. Once,
after a near miss when riding with him in whatever Ford pick-up he
owned at the time, I asked him why he didn’t experiment with
driving in the right lane. He looked at me, taking his ubiquitous
unfiltered Camel out of his mouth, not even pretending to be watching
the road or driving with both hands. “If you’re in the middle,”
he said, laughing, “you can dodge things both ways.” What he
forgot was being in the middle also meant you could get hit in either
direction.
The church, it
seems to me, has a remarkable opportunity and rare possibility at
this moment in time, to choose the breakdown lane rather than the
middle of the road. The Main Line churches have chosen “Hobson’s
choice” since the demise of Christendom. While Evangelicals have
emerged from the under-class of the American religious culture to
stake out a clear and unambiguous position and actually skew the
political landscape of the US, we Episcopalians have rolled along in
Uncle Russell’s old pick-up down the middle of the road, seeking to
be ‘all things to all people’ and dodge things in both
directions. The Episcopal church tends to be a pastel blue in the
Blue states and pink in the Red states—a tertum quid—neither
fish nor fowl. Never was that more obvious to me as on the day the
House of Bishops voted at the 2003 General Convention in Minneapolis
to ‘consent’ to the election of Gene Robinson as bishop of New
Hampshire—the first open and partnered gay bishop. Since only the
diocesan bishops have a vote in those instances, there were only 109
or so votes to be counted. And I know from my own experience and from
what other bishops told me that he got at least 17-20 fewer votes
than he would have gotten. Bishops who would have voted in the roll
call in favor of Gene ‘counted the votes’ and knew he could win
without them taking a stand. One of them, an old friend of mine was
fetchingly honest when I asked him why he voted ‘no’. “I have
to go home, Jim,” he told me. He is a bishop in a very Red state.
So over a dozen
bishops of the church chose not to ‘do the right thing’ because
they had to drive in the middle of the road back home. That puts a
whole new meaning on discretion being the better part of valor—and
not a good meaning either. And lots of those who ‘did the right
thing’ had some ‘splaining to do and put some remarkable spin on
their votes. Since I was one of the clerical Deputies to the GC2003,
I attended the series of forums held back home after the GC. All of
them had at least a couple of hundred people in attendance. The same
kind of forums, held prior to General Convention, attracted between
12 and 40 people. What astonished me was how enraged the most vocal
of those people were. They quoted Paul and Leviticus endlessly,
reading the passages to the bishops and deputies (in the King James
Version most often) as if we were unaware of those parts of the
Bible. They were red-faced and shaking with anger and indignation. At
one point in one of the worst and most contentious forum, I turned to
the lay deputy sitting beside me and said, “When did we tell these
people they should read the Bible? And where the fuck did they get
the King James Version?” In spite of how much my language offended
him, the broke into laughter that he tried to stifle by sucking on
his bottle of spring water.
Here’s the thing
(although I applaud him for taking the heat) my bishop, just at the
moment of the sea-change in the life of the Episcopal Church, tried
to swerve into the middle of the road and eventually got smashed up
from both directions. He carefully explained the canonical
requirements for an election of a bishop and found the New Hampshire
vote stayed respectfully within those church laws. He further
reminded people of the assumed autonomy of dioceses and that only
once in the history of the Episcopal Church had the bishops ‘denied
consent’ to an election, that occurring in the chaos following the
deep divisions of the Civil War. So, he told people calmly, he had
little choice in approving the election of a “faggot' as
bishop. (People actually used ‘that f-word’ in the forums!)
What I was praying
for—even though the Swan Lady metaphor wasn’t part of my thinking
back then—was for the bishop to park in the breakdown lane of what
was an especially dangerous high way. I wanted him to get out of his
car, take a brown blanket from his trunk, and, risking his own life,
be somebody willing to walk against traffic. I wanted him to move
with grace and beauty toward that confounded swan on the verge. I
wanted him to say, “I voted for Gene Robinson because I truly
believe it was the right thing to do. I voted for him, not because
his election was ‘valid’, but because gay and lesbian folk are,
honest to God, as loved by the Almighty as anyone in this room and
they should be involved in this church on all levels. The way you
read the Bible isn’t the way I read it. So, get over
yourselves. They’re queer, they’re here, get used to it!
Next question….”
Giving him the
benefit of the doubt, I believe he probably thinks he tried to say
that. But he was trying so hard to be the reconciler, to ‘build
bridges’ and keep ‘everyone at the table’—which I know he
sees as his job—that there was not ‘clarity’ about where he
truly was in the whole matter. For the Episcopal Church to be like
the Swan Lady, we have to BE somewhere and stand there and take the
grief that will come. People will leave parishes if we, as a church,
choose to ‘be’ with those in the breakdown lane. Parishes will
leave dioceses. There will even be some dioceses that will leave the
Episcopal Church. And the Anglican Communion will most likely throw
us out with the trash. But, it seems to me, we have to become more
irrelevant in the eyes of the culture before we find an ontological
relevance…a relevance of ‘being’, not doing or having. I, for
one (just me talkin’) believe all those losses—lamentable,
painful and mourned as they should be—are most likely necessary
before the Episcopal Church can lay claim to a new relevance and a
new role in the world.
(Second
Ending)
The church should be
like the Swan Lady, like the Road Kill Patrol, not like St. Rage.
The church should
walk with great and graceful care on the edge of every highway,
guarding those in danger. It is, after all, the edges and margins of
life where the church is needed—and you can never imagine all the
places that might be. Years ago a parishioner said to me, “What we
need is a ministry to the apparently well.” That has haunted
me all these years. What she was saying is that even though she was
bright enough and together enough to ‘appear’ whole and well,
there was within her a stunned and frightened swan standing beside 8
lanes of speeding traffic, wondering how to cross. The church rewards
obvious dysfunction with some minimal attention. Those in the
hospital get visited regularly, communion gets delivered, hands get
laid upon their heads. But once they’re discharged and
home—apparently well—the church moves on to the next ‘critical
situation’. The church is good in emergency, for the most part. I
know my way around ER’s with great efficiency. I know how to sit by
the death bed and bring a ‘non-anxious presence’ to those I’m
sitting with and, hopefully, to the dying. I know how to walk with
people through the maze of details after a death and to provide a
funeral that is full of grace and comfort. But after that, when life
begins anew, I don’t follow through very well unless the ‘apparent
recovery’ of those months of mourning breaks out into something
critical again. I am adroit at preparing couples for marriage and
parents for baptism and the liturgies we do at St. John’s for those
events are so good that we get ‘follow up’ business from people,
not members of the church, who came to them. “Why do you want to
get married here? Why do you want your child baptized here?” Those
two questions, the first I ask when someone outside the parish comes
for sacraments, are, more often than not, answered by: “Well, I
came to a wedding/baptism at your church and….” I am extremely
hospitable to those requests and more often than not prove my
adroitness at preparation and grace as a liturgist once more. But do
I have a system to follow up afterwards—even in the weakest of
ways…a note, a call, even a form letter a month or two after the
ritual? Not really. They have joined the ranks of the ‘apparently
whole and well’ and the church moves on looking for new adventures,
fresh meat. And who is more like a frightened swan than the newly
married and those with babies that they have no idea how to care for?
If this time off to
think and reflect and write does nothing else, it is going to prompt
me to get people together to talk about how the church can be a swan
lady for even the apparently well. When I went to get my blood
test after my Urological exam, the young woman who found me in her
computer said, excitedly, “You’re an Episcopal priest!”
Computers know everything, it seems. Her daughter, whose picture she
showed me, was baptized in an Episcopal church down there in
Fairfield County. She launched into a description of abused
perpetuated on her family by the Roman Catholic Church having to do
with sacraments. I went along with the flow and told her horror
stories from my experience. We had a fine old time bashing the Roman
church for not treating people well—which is on the same level as
bashing a skunk for stinking or road-kill for being dead. But when I
asked her if she went to church regularly, she told me she didn’t
and with a far-away look in her eyes said, “when we showed up a few
weeks after the baptism, it was like they didn’t know who we were.”
Of course not, they had been dosed with a sacrament and were now
‘apparently well’ and able to fend for themselves.
Now that I think of
it, churches like the Episcopal Church do by night what the Romans
aren’t ashamed to do in full light. They ignore people who come
seeking the sacraments without having ‘proved’ themselves worthy.
We welcome the sacrament-seekers and ignore them after they’ve been
‘done’. Everyone, no matter how ‘apparently well’ has a
confused and terrified swan within them. The church needs to be more
like the Swan Lady and be with them before they walk into traffic.
We’re much better as the Road Kill Patrol. We’ll pick up the
remains after some other church has run them over and nurse them back
into an illusion of support and of being loved by the church. But
that’s not enough, not by half. We give them the first thing they
came after then leave them by the side of the road again, not
realizing the first thing was simply the ‘first thing’ they were
seeking and we need to keep them close so they’ll feel free to ask
when the “second thing” and the third occurs to them. The only
question—the question that requires real focus and commitment and
true compassion—is this: How to do that?
Maybe that’s
where St. Rage needs to come in…St. Rage is the patron saint of
‘following through’. I’ve been blessed the last few years by
being surrounded by other staff people who are gifted in following
through and dedicated to details. I’ve always been a ‘forest’
kind of guy rather than a ‘tree’ man. I can make the profound
public statement about the social issue of the day—but I don’t
follow through and ‘do’ anything about it. I can speak eloquently
about the ‘goals’ of this or that project, yet I stop there and
don’t provide the structure to get to the goals.
I
don’t have the statistics in front of me, but I can hazard a guess
that in my two decades at St. John’s I was a part of 500 funerals,
200 weddings and probably more baptisms than funerals. The number of
people I’ve touched in those 1200 or so liturgies—the people
intimately involved and the collateral folks as well—is staggering
and embarrassing to me. And, if I might be the opposite of
embarrassed for a moment, I’ve done a surpassingly good job in all
those events. It’s what I’m good at. What I’m lacking is how to
follow up and stay in touch and complete the deal—be a priest to
people after the fact of the liturgy. Maybe others do it well, but
I’m just guessing that this is an area—because of our ‘critical
care’ model for the church—that isn’t done well all that often.
And I’m not talking about ‘results’—about so many people in
church we’d have to add a service or two though the building seats
600 comfortable or so much money in the pledges and plate that we’d
have to have an armored car come pick it up each Monday. What I’m
talking about is ‘what the church should do’ to BE the church. We
must figure out how to minister with power and meaning to the
‘apparently well’. Until we do that with the same impeccability
that we do liturgy, we are falling short of our role in people’s
lives.
The Lord be with
you. (And also with you.) Let us pray: St. Rage, hear our prayer and
rage out against the church when we seek only the public and heroic
ministries and betray the needs of those internal swans within all of
us. Guide us to be Swan Ladies to the obvious and to the hidden. Lead
us by the dangerous paths beside the roadway. Give us the blanket of
love and hospitality and in all things let us live on the margins and
meet people there. Amen.
(Hand written
addendum to second ending)
There is another
way of imagining St. Rage that should not be a model for the church
today. St. Rage has done enough to damage us already. I won’t even
bother to list even a few of the atrocities of the church against the
children of God from the distant past—they are well rehearsed and
mostly ignored by Christians today. I want to start more recently,
like with the rise of the late Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority.
When I was reading the news report of his death on America On Line
there was one of those annoying polls to take about what you would
remember most about Rev. Falwell. (I just went back to AOL to try to
make sure I had the categories and results right, I discovered that
the story—though still there after some looking—no longer had the
poll as part of it. It has been over 24 hours, after all—yesterday’s
news!) But since I always take those polls just to see how out of
step I might be with the AOL nation, I remember with some accuracy,
the questions and the results. The poll asked you to click on the
following choices of your memory of Jerry:
0 Controversial stands
0 Building a congregation
0 Political influence
0 other
“Other” was my
choice since I hate and despise what Jerry Falwell did and stood for.
He initially claimed that the events of 9/11 were the judgment of God
on America for homosexuality and feminism and something else I can’t
remember—bunny rabbits, perhaps. He both built and stoked the fire
of hatred for gay and lesbian people that has pervaded this nation
for almost 20 years. He supported any military action in the Middle
East because he wanted Armageddon to happen so Jesus would come
again. He laid landmines under most of the progressive social agenda.
He did not encourage killing doctors who preformed abortions, but he
never said it was wrong either. He started the ‘creationist’
nonsense that was accepted, in the first debate among Republican
presidential candidates by at least three—maybe five—of them as
the God’s truth. And he founded a ‘university’ based on the
opinions of his church, which must have made challenging young minds
to think about things they’ve never imagined could be true (what a
college education should, most likely do) pretty improbable.
The interesting
thing was the result of the AOL poll. As nearly as I can remember it
was this:
Other—47 %
Controversial stands—35%
Political influence—13%
Building a congregation—5%
I may have gotten
the percentages a bit wrong—but I know that was the order of the
results. And I’m betting, not even knowing who in the hell votes on
these polls, that most of the people who voted for “other” had
something scathing to say about the good pastor. And that the fact
that he built a congregation of a dozen friends and family meeting in
a body repair shop, or somewhere, into a world-wide religious
institution involving millions of donors and hundred-of-millions of
donations, plus a TV channel and a University didn’t strike many
people as what to remember him for is, in an ironic way, informing.
Jerry Falwell was a
devotee of St. Rage. He set people against each other in dozens of
ways. He cowered Republican politicians into kneeling at his altar
and kissing his ring. He brought millions to the voting booths by
appealing to their fear and anger rather than their better angels. He
created an atmosphere of religiosity that many who never sent him a
penny got caught up in—we’re right, those other people are wrong,
fuck ‘em. But, by God (some ‘god’, certainly not the one I love
and who loves me), Jerry took a stand and dared anyone to counter it.
And he ‘did’ things and ‘changed’ things and ‘had’ things
in abundance. Which is the golden ring that Episcopalians and other
Main Line churches so covet.
But we are not the
devotees of St. Rage—at least, not most of us. Archbishop Akinola
and Bishop Minns and those who foam with hatred and
self-righteousness wear his medallion.
But not us, not if
we are able to comprehend that our role is to be the Swan Lady for
the dispossessed and the Road Kill Patrol for those ground under foot
by our culture and society. Not us, if we are courageous enough to be
‘irrelevant’ and embrace the possibilities not being relevant
contains. Not us, if we can only find it within us and invite God to
sustain us in practicing a ministry of “being” rather than
doing/changing/having. Not us, if we would rather dance on the
margins than ride down the middle of the road, avoiding some things
in either direction but smashed into irrelevancy both ways.
Nobody much cares
which choice we make—except God and the least of these, God’s
family….
