Tend
the fire,
Tell
the story,
Pass
the wine
(Memories
of Priesthood)
by
Jim Bradley
“Farther
along we'll know all about it,
Farther
along, we'll understand why;
Cheer
up, don't worry, live in the sunshine,
We'll
understand it all by and by.”
--W.B.Stevens
(refrain
to a mountain hymn)
“...nothing
could more surely convince me
of
God's unending mercy than the
continued
existence on earth of the
church.”
--Annie
Dillard, Holy
the Firm
“...Then
the well spoke to me.
It said: Abundance is scooped from abundance,
yet abundance remains.”
--Anne
Sexton
- The Archangel Mariah
The
one question 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 since the
first moment you imagined it might be a possibility—your being a
priest and all. There is no end to the people wanting to know why you
want to be a priest—those already parish priests, discernment
groups, bishops, commissions on ministry, standing committees,
admission committees, seminary professors, strangers you meet at
cocktail parties, on and on....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 a priest is, primarily that: an invitation from God to
you. It's a deeply personal and profoundly important event or series
of events. There is, even in this era of “tell all”, some needs
for privacy. If what God has to suggest 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 either 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 go live in Tibet.”
I swear this really happened.
Once the woman recovered from apoplexy, she said, in a gentle
Tidewater Virginia accent, “I imagine tat doesn't happen often.”
“Only once to me,” my friend said, looking around for more
sherry.
My friend, Scott, when he was a seminarian at Yale and working with
me at St. Paul's, New Haven, told me he was about to lose his mind
with the Standing Committee in the Diocese of West Virginia.
“No matter how many times I tell the,” he said, “or how many
different ways, they ask me again.”
“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 me a wondrous pen and
ink sketch based on 'being magic'. It's here in my little office with
me. I still love it, two decades later.
I don't have to resort to tales of lightening storms or the longing
to be magic. I know why I decided to be a priest. The sky didn't open
up. I didn't hear God speak 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 late 60's and early
70's who was older than 35 besides Snork, the priest. Mariah was in
her late-70's back then. 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 was that she wanted to be around young people. She couldn't
stand stuffiness in any guise. The three-piece suits and women in
hats at Trinity's services were too much for her. She preferred the
company of college students and week-end hippies.
I strain to remember her over 40 years of memories. She was a tiny
woman—no more than 5'2” and most likely 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—blue, green, hazel in different light—and
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 small spaces 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 a lemure—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 card games and
listening, playing backgammon and listening, playing some American
board game and listening. She was always listening to the young
people from far away places with strange sounding names. WVU had a
remarkable Engineering program so there were hundreds of students,
mostly young men, from Third World Countries studying in the part of
the middle of Nowhere called Morgantown, West Virginia. One of the
informal courses they were forced to study on their own was Culture
Shock 101. In the '70's there were no ethnic enclaves in Morgantown,
unless you consider Rednecks and Sorority Girls ethnic groups. Those
students from Africa, Asia, central Europe and the Middle East had no
contact with their homelands besides each other. There was no
Internet back then and international phone calls were still
ridiculously expensive. It wasn't like living in New York or DC.
Morgantown was referred to by many of the students at WVU—many of
whom, like me, were from the sticks to begin with—as “Morgan-Hole”.
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 foods and spices. She tried to learn enough of their
languages so she could greet each of them as they would be greeted at
home. She matched them up with people and the University and in
town—all of whom she seemed to know—who might have some faint
connection to or interest in Afghanistan or Bulgaria or Korea or
wherever they were from. She was a one woman network of 'connections'
for those folks so far from home, those strangers in a oh so strange
land.
There was something biblical in her commitment to the strangers in
her midst. She would welcome them all and do any and everything
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 someone trustworthy. If there is a lesson
to be learned from working with any minority group—racial, cultural
or economic—it is this: People, so far as I've been able to
discern, are, in the end, 'just People', heir to the same foibles and
frailties, world-wide. We all share the same deep-down 'being of
human beings'. The international students Mariah dedicated her energy
to were so different than the outsiders and oddballs Snork, our
Chaplain, loved and cared for—that is, 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 of the bridge over Cheat Lake. But she
never fretted about it. That's 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.”
On 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 wondrously
and well. I've never had the courage to live letting God 'sort it all
out', but it certainly worked for Mariah.
While I was working as a social worker, Bern and I lived in the
third floor apartment of a three story 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 through 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
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. After Mass—if I can
dream of calling our attic worship that!--we would all retreat down
the stairs to our apartment. There was always food. People brought
cooking and brownies (often with a special ingredient) cheese and
home-baked bread, fruit both dried and fresh, nuts and seeds and we'd
have some feasting. Plus, there was always a lot of wine. Some of St.
Gabe's regulars would go down on 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 intently she listened
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
plastic wine glass and a handful of cheese with remarkable grace.
Then she said, “When are you going back to seminary and get
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 given me up in
the attic. I was then, as I am to some extent today, a 'smart ass'.
Ironic and Sardonic were my middle names in those days. I can still
be depended upon to lower or deflate whatever serious conversation I
come upon. “Nothing is 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 typically 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 not good wine (we drank only
that vintage in those days) said words that changed my life forever.
“Jim,” she said, “who in 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 Mormon 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, “You've got your message....”
She left me 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 with him could I tell Bern what insanity I was up to and
breathe properly again.
Mariah died a few months later. I was one of her pallbearers. She
was as light as air for us to carry—three international students
and three members of St. Gabrial's carried her. Archangels don't
weight much. They are mostly feathers and Spirit. She was buried from
Trinity Church. Snork did the service and did her proud in his homily
of thanksgiving for so rare a soul. I had just been accepted to
Virginia Seminary. Bern was 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 Church where Mariah had spent so many Friday
nights. Many of the foreign students brought ethic food. Clara told
me Mariah had asked about me on the day she died. I'd left my
acceptance letter in Snork's office and he'd shown it to Clara. I
hadn't tried to call when it came since Mariah was in the Intensive
Care Unit. Her so full and generous heart had simply worn out from so
much loving.
So it was Clara that told Mariah I was accepted at VTS. Clara said
her grandmother smiled that eye disappearing smile when she heard.
She smiled through her great weakness.
“You tell Jim,” she whispered to Clara, “that I told him
so....”
Her last words for me: “I told you so.”
That works for me. That will do nicely.
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