seminarians--ii

One of the great thing about all--most all--the seminarians I've so-called 'supervised' over the years is how many of them were funny.

(This is, if you've been reading this blog along, a continuing of my need to catalog things--like my blue clothes, my shoes, etc. I just need to look back and remember right now....)

And maybe, just maybe, they weren't all that funny. Maybe I just find most everything amusing. But I'm sticking with my original belief--I've worked with lots of funny people.

Once Michael, who was a seminarian or intern or someone I was supposedly 'supervising' was going to open the 8 a.m. service. Malinda, the associate Rector and Bob our all-star, indispensable head acolyte, sacristan, jack-of-all-trades who makes most everything liturgical 'work' were in the vesting room with Michael. (By the way, you would never call him "Mike" or "Mickey" or any of that--he was and is, Michael.) But Michael and Malinda and I had on lapel microphones but only Michael needed his turned on. "Wait a minute," he said as we were about to go out to the chancel, "I have to turn myself on...."

And Malinda, a very attractive 40 something woman, said, "I always find that's easier than having someone else do it."

Well, Michael lost it and was laughing so hard that we all went out without him and someone else opened the service.

Then there was John, from years and years ago, who knew we owned a house at some point in North Carolina. He had just been called to a church near Long Beach, where our house was and called me up, introducing himself as Delbert Dimwit or something, the fire marshall of Oak Island.

"Fr. Bradley," he said (me buying he was Delbert) "you own a home on Long Beach."

"Yes," I told him.

"Well," he said, "the gas company was doing some work on the lines down there" (all this in an exaggerated but convincing North Carolina accent--and John was from New Jersey) "and a fire broke out next to your house...."

I became hysterical and not understandable.

"Not to worry, Fr. Bradley," Delbert/John continued, "it is actually good news. The fire left an outline of the Last Supper and a profile of Ronald Reagan on the side of your house. The property value has gone way up...."

Even then I wasn't sure I was being sucked into something so he finally dropped into his Newark voice and told me who he was.

Another Michael and Malinda story. The first Sunday Michael was a deacon he was going to read the gospel. I bet Malinda he would kiss the book after he read it. Since Malinda and I are so broad/low church we found it astonishing that he would kiss the gospel. I always say, 'when you kiss the gospel you are kissing everyone who ever kissed it' and find it just too, too precious for my taste, though not a bad thing, I assure you.

We got the gospel book and realized it required turning the page to complete the reading. So Malinda got one of those yellow sticky pads, put on lipstick and made a big, honking lipstick mouth on the sticky and we put it on the second page of the gospel Michael would read and wrote, beneath it, KISS THIS!

As Bob--our all-star, in on the prank, carried the gospel book down, Malinda panicked and whispered to me "we have to tell him...."

Of course, I said, "No, no, we don't...."

Michael turned the page, didn't miss a word though Bob was chuckling visably, finished the gospel, turned back from the center aisle to catch our eyes and kissed that sticky note....

God bless them all.

I have more for Seminarians iii, ok?

seminarians

One of the privileges and honors and humbling experiences I've had as a priest in this branch of God's holy, catholic and apostolic church (whatever that means) is to 'supervise' seminarians.

I spent a while trying to remember who all I had 'supervised' and lost count several times. I think it is around 30 or so--a few less or a few more. And I loved and still love them all....

I have used punctuation (' and ') to set off the word and concept 'supervised' because I think there is nothing I have done that was, by definition, supervisory for those folks. Mostly what I've done is give them their head, let them loose and covered their asses when necessary.

Ironically, the one thing seminary education does not teach you is 'how to be a priest in a parish in the real world'.

One can learn a great deal worth learning in seminary, truly. You can learn scholarship about the Bible and learn theology and church history (though no one, including me, learned nearly enough about that in seminary) and you learn about the liturgy and pastoral care and all sorts of really important and necessary things. But you never, ever learn how to be a priest in a parish in the real world.

So, I took that on as my job, my purpose, my calling--to set them free and give them their head and cover their asses in the real world of being a priest. And one of the great things about having them around was that they kept me thinking theologically--because that was their job at the time--and kept me hoping for the future of the church with such wondrous creatures in it.

I'm pressed for time but I'll do "seminarians--cont." soon....God love them all, we are better people and a better church because of them....

shoes

Since I have been inventorying my clothes, I thought I'd add shoes--which are not blue.

Like most things, I have very few shoes. I have a pair of Berkinstock sandals I wear indoors in winter and always when spring comes. My current pair is tan and were a Xmas gift from my son and daughter-in-law in 2008. I checked the tread recently and think I can get another Spring/Summer/Fall out of them. I have a pair of Berkinstock clogs that are gray and many years old--I wore them one day recently in the snow and nearly fell down half-a-dozen times. They have no tread left at all and should be discarded. I have a pair of loafers I keep at church that are my burying/marrying shoes--just like my one suit that I keep at church.

At some one's funeral a member of the parish commented that I had on shoes. I told him the dead person was 'shoe worthy' and advised him to consider if he was 'shoe worthy'.

I also have some chunka boots, as we used to call them, that belonged to the Parish Administrator's father. After he died, she gave them to me and I've worn them ever since. I have one other pair of those green and tan over the ankle boots that I haven't worn since I got Marvin's shoes. They're at church too.

I guess I don't have as many shoes as most people. I used to have a pair of sneakers that I left in Anaheim after General Convention by mistake. I will get some when spring comes because I plan to walk a lot after I'm retired and lose enormous amounts of weight doing so.

This whole inventory of my clothes has something to do with my impending retirement, I know, I'm just not sure what.

I need to take inventory of my life as the end of April approaches. I think that's it. So I will ponder that.

How many clothes and shoes do you have? What color dominates? Can you ponder what all that means to you?

Just wondering.

One of the former Senators from Texas once said, "I have more guns than I need, but not as many as I want."

When I heard that I realized I was not like him....at least about guns.

I suppose I could say: "I don't have as many clothes and shoes as I need...but I have all that I want...."

I'm not sure what any of this means, but I will take it into my pondering and let you know if I come up with something....

Blue, blue, blue....

Just the other day I realized something I should have 'known'--you know what I mean? I realized a 'truth' that had, for God knows how long (I certainly don't, having no traffic with linear time) I should have known.

Almost every piece of clothing I own is some shade of blue.

Oh, I have a yellow rain jacket and two pairs of khaki pants--just two though--and some socks in other colors, and a couple (only a couple) of white, long sleeve shirts. But, for the most part, I dress in shades of blue that bleed into black.

I realized this because I was looking for a particular blue shirt the other day--a pull-over that didn't have ABT (American Ballet Theatre...my daughter's company) on the front. And what I found that made me a little crazy is about a dozen blue pull-overs...short-sheeved and long-sleeved--that weren't the one I wanted. Then I started looking at my closet and realized that almost every shirt I own is some shade of blue. (I do have two or three red short-sleeved shirts and some other tee shirts that aren't blue and a pullover that is gold because it is a WVU shirt someone gave me.) But what I wear is blue of some hue.

I don't own many clothes. I have a suit I keep at church that is my marrying and burying suit. It is basically brown but with blue lines running through it. Like lots of my clothes, I bought it at the consignment shop and was, now that I look back on it through these new blue eyes, attracted to it because of the blue threads....

I have two khaki pants and two pairs of, you've figured it out, right? BLUE jeans. That's really all the pants I have. And when a pair of them wears out or something, I go replace them with pants from Marshall's that match them as best I can. From what is clean and in my closet right now, I have about a dozen pull over shirts and 9 of them are some shade of blue or black...though 'black', as I think of it, doesn't really have 'shades'. Black is like pregnant--it's either black or not, it seems to me.

I have three white button up shirts, two are white and one is white with, of all things, salmon (or pink, if you want to be honest) stripes. I have three other long sleeve button up shirts that are all some shade of blue. (My summer shirts are in the other room now, but I bet if I went to see them there would be a couple of red polo shirts and one white one and all the rest would be blue of some kind and black.

So, I ask myself, when did this happen? When did I become an essentially 'blue' man?

I have four sweaters I wear. One is black, one is deep blue and the other two or lighter shades of blue. Go figure....

The thing is, if you had asked me, off-handedly, sometime last week, what colors I wore, I would have probably told you, "I wear a whole rainbow of colors--never the same two days in a row...." And I would have meant it.

Surprise, surprise....How truly unconscious I am about any number of things. Over the years I've filled my closet and drawers with 'blue' stuff--my pajamas bottoms are all blue except for one dark brown and one yellow Sponge Bob Square Pants that I got from Pauline when I was in the hospital after cancer surgery five or six years ago.

That's another thing I didn't know--I remember where I got most every piece of my scant number of clothes....Not hard since most were from the consignment shop or Marshall's....But something to ponder anyway.

I'm all blue....What color are you? Ponder that.....

Children

I was just out on my little 'smoking porch', well, smoking, if you must know. It is just off the sacristy and on West Main Street. It is the only place I allow myself to smoke at St. John's and though I do smoke there it is much less than when I could smoke out other doors.

It snowed last night and this morning and snowed like crazy here between 10:30 and 1:30. Then it started to rain. Welcome to southern New England's late winter....

I saw an Hispanic woman across the street with her two children--a boy and a girl--probably 3 and 5 or so. She took them up to the door of the apartment house, gently brushed the wetness off their hoods and led them inside.

I also saw a young white woman in pigtails, walking with her two children--and older boy, 10 or 11 or so and a little girl of 5. He had on boots but the girl didn't, so this woman, who was so young and vulnerable and thin, picked her up so her feet wouldn't get wet in the inches of slush. She carried her and they moved on.

I went to see my daughter in Brooklyn, NY on Saturday. She and her boyfriend, Tim, who we love, moved into a new apartment on South Elliott Place in Fort Green, a great neighborhood. Their new apartment is wondrous and they are wondrous. This only a few weeks after visiting my son and his family--Cathy, Morgan and Emma the twins and Tegan Hoyt, the baby--in Baltimore.

Both my children are in their 30's and successful in their lives. And when I see them or talk to them on the phone, I am like those two mothers with their little children I saw today in the snow and rain and slush.

I have walked with them through snow and rain and sleet and blistering heat and the wondrous warmth of Spring and early fall. I have held their hands and brushed away the flotsam and jetsam that the weather left on them. I have carried them through the slush and held them near me, feeling their warm and perfect breath on my face.


I know they are wondrous adults and live their own lives without me involved and yet I know them, when I see them, as children in a snow storm, a rain fall, a perfect day that I lifted into my arms and held and hugged and loved and kissed.


Children are like that, I think. They are always young in our hearts. They grow older and wiser and don't need me anymore, but what I know and see when I know and see them is the child they were, that gave meaning to my life, that made me matter, that were the only thing that mattered to me.


And still, that is true. Children get under your skin. That is just the way it is and the way it goes....


So, when I saw what I saw, I remembered who I am and who my children were....And it was wondrous....

Letting go....

Do you remember Sting's song that goes something like, "If you love somebody....let them go...."

Well, I don't remember the words exactly but I know what he means. Love can sometimes be confining and disabling. You must love only those who are free to love by having an option to walk away. Something like that.

I spent a while in the church today just bathing myself in the beauty of it all. I love this space and I must, some 79 days or so (which is what Bill told me, our evening sexton, who is apparently keeping track) do. {For an English major that was a crazy way to write a sentence...so it goes.}

I must 'let go', but not yet. For now I will cling with crazy enthusiasm to every precious moment of my time here. Letting go is something I'll think about later. I will, I know. But for now, it is the last thing in my mind.

I've asked the bishop elect, who I've know for decades, to come visit us one day before he is Bishop and I am gone. I hope to show him what a paradigm for urban ministry St. John's is and how vital it is for him to do what he can do to nurture and pastor this place through the long process of having a new Rector.

St. John's is remarkable and, in many ways, not repeated around the church. The parish exists, in a way, to do 'outreach'--which, I might say, is why the 'church' exists. And St. John's really does it. I should have done more to impress people about how important St. John's is to the city--both people in the larger church and in the city. But I didn't. I simply enjoyed and reveled in how astonishingly this parish has 'been church' in a way that matters.

My only fear in leaving--besides the fear of how well I can 'let go' and move on--is that my leaving might change the fabric and purpose of the parish. We--St. John's--have, like most urban churches, a great financial problem. However, what we DO and if we continue to DO that is more important than any other concern.

St. John's, I've often said, 'would have to be invented' if it didn't exist.

The easier and more productive way of proceeding, after I let go, would be to make sure it just keeps doing what it does and does it even better. That's why I invited Ian to visit--he's coming in early April--and why I pray those who have been with me on this journey for the last 20 years will realize the journey has just begun....

Letting go is hard, harder than I imagined....

who knows, maybe it's just me....

I'm reading a novel by Jane Haddam. She writes about a retired FBI agent named Gregor Demarkian, who lives in an Armenian enclave of Philadelphia. Jane Haddam isn't PD James or anything, but the Armenian stuff is interesting and Gregor is a cerebral kind of crime solver. However, I almost put it down because it's about a little town in the foothills of the Appalachians near Harrisburg PA that is divided over a school board that wants to make Intelligent Design an option to Evolution in the science curriculum. Even that is an interesting thing except that all the Christians in the book are total nut-cases, yelling at people who don't agree with them that they will burn in hell if they don't come to Jesus and school bullying is all about who is 'that kind of Christian' and everyone else. The 'everyone else', according to 'that kind of Christian' are called secular humanists or atheists though some of them are Methodists, for goodness sake.

So I decided to put the book aside and finish reading the parts of the Sunday NYT that take me almost until the next Sunday to finish. And what do I find in the Times Sunday magazine but a long article on how the Board of Education of the State of Texas has been taken over by fundamentalists who want to change the study of history to include such thoughts as that the US was intended to be a 'Christian nation' and that the separation of Church and state is an invalid interpretation.

Texas, I learned, is one of the few states to have state-wide curriculum decisions made by an 'elected' state Board of Education. So Texas is going to have some folks running things a little to the Right of Center--well, a LOT to the right of center!--so what? Here's 'what'--Texas, besides California, is the largest purchaser of public school text books in that multi-billion $ business. So, what Texas will tolerate in school books has a vast influence on what text book publishers provide. That's 'what'....Some 40 states will be effected by what Texas wants.

The difference between the Texas BofE folks and the folks in the Haddam novel is this--they are all very smart, highly educated and much more adept at dealing with the larger culture. One of them, who was the chairman until even Texas realized he was too fundamentalist Christian in his opinions, is a dentist for goodness sake. Some are lawyers and academics...but a majority of those who have a vote of the BofE are fundamentalists.

The writer of the article visited Liberty University's School of Law (the school founded by Jerry Fawell...) and was astonished that the goal of that law school is clearly to make sure the US is 'returned' to the status of a Christian Nation. I put 'returned' in quotes since most main stream historians don't believe a CHRISTIAN NATION (capped because of the myriad of implications from civil liberties to academic freedom to the right of non-Christians to worship or the right of non-religious people to be non-religious) was what the framers of the Constitution intended.

The framers were steeped in European Christianity, surely, and most of them--with the exception of Jefferson, for example--were practicing Christians. But because they were so familiar with the mess the mixture of religion and state had made over the centuries in Europe, they studiously avoided including religous (or Christian) language in the document. The word "God" does not occur in the Constitution...all that language about 'endued by their Creator with certain inalienable rights' is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. And, whenever the writers of the Constitution, including Jefferson who wrote the Declaration almost independently, refered to God in any context it was to a 'Creator', 'Prime Mover', 'Architect of Nature' and not to the Christian Trinity. The Constitution insures an absolute 'freedom' to practice religion but studiously avoids equating that to 'practicing ANY religion' as the basis of the State's functions. Go read it, I'm not making this up....The Constitution might have been, in my opinion, the first truly 'secular' document outlining the workings of government.

Maybe it's just me, but I am profoundly thankful that the Framers of the Constitution establish a division between Church and State. And I know that term was from Jefferson and doesn't itself appear in the Constitution. Imagine if the Anglicans had run the new nation! (Well, they practically did since a majority of the signees of the Constitution were Anglicans along with the first five presidents (absent Jefferson)...but nevermind...what a mess that would have been. A Senate made up of Bishops and such....Good grief, we can't even run a denomination efficiently, how would we run a nation?

At any rate, the folks on the Texas BofE and their allies at places like Liberty School of Law and several ultra-conservative 'think tanks' (I'll resist saying that 'untra-conservative think tanks' is an oxymoron....) believe that the prohibition in the Constitution about the 'establishment' of religion merely meant the Baptists or Congregationalist or Methodists couldn't be 'the State Church'...but the assumption was, those folks believe, that Christians and only Christians would run the whole thing along the line of Christian precepts.

One of the members of the Texas BofE through a fit when a Hindu said the opening prayer for the US Senate one day....Hey, I thought these guys liked 'prayer'! He said a Hindu doesn't believe in the 'real' God.

Here's the rub...who knows, maybe it's just me...but what scares me about the folks in the NYT magazine article is that they think they are the ones to decide what 'religion' and 'prayer' really are and, beyond that, who is really a Christian. Whoa, Nellie! I AM A CHRISTIAN, thank you very much, and I support the ban against enforced school prayer and crucifixes in court rooms and would support a ban against any other intrusion of any particular religion or any definition of who is 'religious' or not sneaking into a text book or a court room or any public place. Just so we're clear: I am a Christian, no matter what anyone else decides I am or am not.

So, I took up "Living Witness" the title of the book I put down. I'll finish it now because I need to learn how other people think and what they think of how I think....Know your enemy, is the phrase. I may not think of fundamentalist Christians as necessarily 'my enemy', but since I am, clearly, an 'enemy' to them, I don't have much choice.

I was driving my wife's truck today. It is covered with Obama bumper stickers. I was stopped at a stop light and the guy on my left tooted his horn and rolled down the window. "Did you really vote for Obama?" he asked.

"I did," I said proudly.

"Like how things are going?"

"I do," I said, knowing a stoplight is not a place to have a political discussion of any depth, "if people would let him do his job."

The guy gave me the finger and pulled out since people behind us were beeping and the light was green.

His truck costs a good four times more than Bern's.

Who knows, maybe it's just me. But I think I will start considering the importance of 'knowing my enemies'.

Something to ponder under my castor oil tree for sure....

Oh, and there's as little danger that I'll move to Texas as there is that I'll move to Armenia, in what ever form it exists today, though Gregor's Demarkian's people are interesting....