Happy Anniversary to me....

Yesterday was the anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. As of today, I 've been a priest for 37 years and one day. Astonishing....

I wouldn't even remember May 15 except that this remarkable man, Louie Crew, always sends me an email on my ordination anniversary. He also sends an email for my birthday. I would remember my birthday without Louie's email, but it warms my heart anyway.

Louie is a reasonably big deal in the Episcopal Church. He founded Integrity--a group for lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered Episcopalians 'and their friends'. The 'and their friends' piece is wondrous and vital. I was, for quite a few years when I served St. Paul's in New Haven and St. John's in Waterbury, the chaplain to an Integrity chapter. It was an honor and humbling as a straight priest to serve the LGBT community.

I once blessed a home of Ted and Lou, who met in high school and had been faithful to each other for over 40 years after that. They wanted me to bless them and their relationship as well. This was long before same sex marriages or even civil unions in Connecticut. My bishop at the time knew I was committed to same sex relationships and told me, after I visited him and told him I would bless a lesbian/gay couple if I asked to 'let him know' before the fact so he wouldn't 'read about it'. I called him about Ted and Lou and he 'inhibited' me (what a Medieval term!) from doing it. There was a retired priest who was a member of the parish I served who agreed to do the blessing of the union. "What are they going to do to me?" he said, "cancel my pension?" So we did it that way. I blessed the rooms of that home and Jack blessed Ted and Lou. One of the few things I regret in my 37 years as a priest is that I didn't bless the love and relationship of Ted and Lou.

My bishop now has allowed me to do gay/lesbian marriages since they are legal in Connecticut. The bishop before him allowed me to bless the marriage but not sign the marriage licence. So the same sex marriages I have done have all had a Justice of the Peace presence to sign the license. How humiliated I felt in those situations, not being able to say "you are married" to those couples. Now, at least in Connecticut. I can fully participate in the marriage of same-sex couples.

It has been a journey. And things are looking up and positive. More and more states are legalising marriage equality. Things might be just becoming right at last.

What you fall into...

Tonight we had the Cluster Council (if you're new to this blog, I am currently the Interim-Missioner-in-Charge of the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry--the IMIC of MACM for short. It's three churches in places like Higganum, Killingworth and Northford) and I realized my role for those three wondrous and lovely communities.

I am their Cheerleader.

I'm actually the perfect match for this ministry because I've more or less given up on the traditional model of doing church (a congregation led by a priest to minister to the needs of the congregation). And MACM, God love them, isn't that. They practice, more or less, for better and for worse, what is called Total Common Ministry. That means the Priest isn't 'the Boss' and doesn't have the final authority in the community--the laos (the 'People of God') play that role and the priest is around to do certain rites and rituals that our brand of Christianity has assigned to an ordained person.

So MACM is a different paradigm for being church. The laity is in charge and I hang around waiting until they need a priest. I really, really like that. It's what I've always wanted "church" to be. And, I have, in my own way, as much as I could, tried to live that out in the three remarkable churches I served before I retired: St. James in Charleston, West Virginia for five years; St. Paul's in New Haven, CT for 5 years and St. John's in Waterbury, CT for 21 years. The problem was, no matter how much I shared MY 'authority' I dared to share and delegate to the laity, it was still my authority....

It is often difficult for those locked into the Traditional Paradigm of  'doing church' to recognize or acknowledge the radical distinction between that paradigm and Total Common Ministry. And what I've realized in my two years of  'doing church' in the Cluster is that most of them are either so used to doing it this way that they don't realize how remarkably distinct it is OR they are unconsciously locked into the old paradigm and don't realize that what they do, day to day, is anything special.

But they do it--whether they take it as routine or don't even realize it. THEY DO IT!

And what I decided tonight is that my role in their midst is to be their Cheerleader and point out, in all times and all places, that what Total Common Ministry 'is' and 'means' is remarkably and distinctively different from what 'the old Church' does and looks like that they need to understand how they have an understanding of 'church' that is more 'community' than 'institution', more 'egalitarian' than a "hierarchy", more 'all for one' than 'one for all'.

I am so honored, humbled and gifted to have fallen into this mission and ministry it takes my breath away. So what I will do, from this day forward, is always and everywhere let St. James and St. Andrew's and Emmanuel know that their 'communities' are functioning much more like the 'early church' functioned than the 'dying church' is functioning.

They need to know that they are special and unique and living out what being 'followers of Christ' really means. Not to make them proud....no, not at all, but to make them humble and vulnerable so that they might lean into being the humble and vulnerable People of God in Higganum and Northford and Killingworth.

For that is what they are.

I see it and know it.

My role is to make sure they see it and know it as well.

not so suave as I imagined...

As worldly-wise, street-smart and with-it as I think I am, sometimes I can be an absolute dolt. As naive as the day is long. A babe in the woods. All that and more. A rear Rube....

In the last week I had received three letters from three different Hyundai dealers offering to buy my 2007 Elantra for up to $7850! All the letters told me, in one way or another, that they had a need for a larger inventory of 2007 and 2008 Hyundai's. So I spent a bit of the week pondering what on earth could cause a sudden demand for 2007/08 Elantra's. Had they come into fashion? Was Beyonce seen driving one? Did Kate Middleton tell a reporter she admired them?

Or was there a flaw in them so horrendous that Hyundai couldn't survive a public recall so dealers were asked to buy them up for enormous losses to avoid public humiliation for the company?

Or was a new action movie coming out with Tom Cruise and Matt Damon driving 2007 Hyundai's down the canals of Venice and Corporate knows there will be a big demand for them when the movie premiers?

Or did they suddenly realize that these Hyundai's are the best cars ever made (which I wouldn't disagree with giving that I love mine) and that they can sell them used for even more than they sold them new and do a double-dip  profit off 2007/08 Elantras?

Those are just some of the thoughts that went through my head this week while pondering why on earth three different dealerships would want to buy my little black Hyundai (which really loved the few days of rain because it washed off all the bird poop that had accumulated on the front hood and windshield and part of the roof because I park beneath the tree on the west end of our front porch.)

So my good friend, Fred, was coming to pick me up to go to Alice's wake (the wonderful woman I wrote about a few days ago in 'Spring is not a good time to die') who did, sadly die. Fred was an intern with me at St. John's in Waterbury the last two years or so before I retired and knew Alice from there.

I had one of the three letters in my pocket, having opened in on my porch while waiting for Fred, and since Fred is one of the people that knows more stuff than I can imagine, I thought I'd ask him about why these various Hyundai dealers were interested in buying my car.

So I told him about the letters and he looked at me with the combination of reasonableness and sadness that a person might look at a child who is about to know there is not Santa Claus.

Then he told me, kindly as he could, because Fred is kind as well as all knowing, "they don't want to buy your car. They want to sell you a new one so they've offered you outrageous prices so you'll come in and take a test drive and not feel cheated when they give you less than the letter said."

I must admit, from a few words into that explanation I suddenly realized the real reason for the letters and the fake checks. Fred, as usual, was right on correct. Of course they wanted me to come see them (even leaving a phone # and a name to set a time convenient for me to drop by) and surely the $7850 they were willing to give me for my car would go down when they saw the dents and dings and the 67.000 miles on the odometer, but when they told me they could put me in a 2013 Hyundai for only a tad more than I'm now paying a month--and let me drive the obviously superior machine...well, we might just make a deal....

My car is almost paid off, a month or two. So their computers must spit out that information to various Connecticut dealers who then make me offers to buy my car.

And for most of a week I was pondering "why would they want to buy my car?"

Here's the moral to this sad tale of naivete, Beloved: "Pondering" is one of the most important thing we thinking mammals can do. However, 'pondering' something that should have been as baldly obvious to me as it was to Fred (and later Bern when I told her this story--she even snickered a bit while I was telling it and snickering is a common and normal reaction to blind naivete) is not only a waste of good pondering-time, it makes you look like a Rube.

So, when you turn to pondering, make sure you aren't wasting valuable pondering-time on what, to someone with half a brain should have been as plain as the look on your face.....

Just fair warning and just me talkin'...or more correctly, 'typin'....

Mother's Day 2013

Shouldn't it be Mothers' Day? Probably.

If my mother were alive today she would be 102 years old. She was born on July 9, 1910. It's a little sobering to realize my mother would be over a century old if she had lived until now. Most likely because it reminds me that I am older than she was when she died. She died the day after my birthday when I was 25, that would be in 1972. She never met her grandchildren. Josh was born in 1975 and Mimi in 1978.

She had a hard life. Marion Cleo Jones Bradley was one of four girls and three boys born to Lina Manona Sadler Jones and Eli Jones. Two of the boys, Leon and Ernest, died in childhood. The Jones family were dirt poor during the Depression. My mother and her sisters would go to the slate dumps, where the trash from the coal mines was put and pick the slate for stuff that might burn. Elsie, her youngest sister, who is the only one still alive, wore boots to school for a while since she had no shoes. My grandmother ran a boarding house for a while, cooking and cleaning for single coal miners who needed some place to live. My Grandfather--mother's father--was sick from working in the mines and unable to work for much of his life.

Three of the Jones girls somehow went to college and became teachers. My mother was a teacher just after high school and took summer classes at Concord College in Concord, West Virginia and Bluefield State College in Bluefield until she had a Master's Degree. Aunt Georgia did much the same thing. Aunt Elise, the younger one, helped by her family had a proper college education. All of them taught all of their lives. My mother most often taught First Grade, imagine that. Mostly, during my growing up, at Pageton Elementary School. I went to school in Anawalt, where we lived. Pageton was about 8 miles away so my mother never taught me.

I'm not sure I remember the sound of my mother's voice since she's been dead 41 years. I have pictures that can remind me of  her face. She was a consummately pleasant and gentle woman. I don't believe she ever raised her voice to me in all my life. At least I don't remember it. We were common people with common interests: family, church, education, mostly that.

The thing I admire most about my mother and remember most fondly happened when I was quite young. She and I  went to the Pilgrim Holiness Church in Conklintown with my grandmother. My father waited out in the car because the Pilgrim Holiness people were too extreme for his Baptist tastes. And one Sunday, when I was 5 or 6, Preacher Peck asked for prayers for the sinner out in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and reading the Bluefiled Daily Telegraph.

My mother came to find me in the middle of the prayers since I was sitting with some small kid friends, took my hand and led me out of the church to the car where my father was, indeed, smoking and reading the paper. We drove away together and never went back.

I've defied authority a bit in my life and I like to think I got that from my mother. But I don't know.

This Mothers' Day I'm wondering what she would have made of my life after she died. I'm wondering if she would have loved our children and approved of my becoming an Episcopal priest. (We became Methodists after Preacher Peck's discretion  and she knew I became an Episcopalian, but she never knew I became a priest.) She expected me, logically, to become a teacher--but on the college level, not first grade. My parents were of the generation that believed each succeeding generation would 'move up' from them. And I truly wanted to fulfill her dream for me. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in American Literature and teach in some small liberal arts college and write the Great American Novel. But somewhere in there God got in the scrum and I got side-tracked.

One vendetta I will share. When Bern and I got married, I started growing a beard. I have it still. The first Christmas we came home from Cambridge, late into the night, and my father opened the door, embraced Bern and then me and saw may beard and wandered off, in his bedroom slippers, into the snow in tears, my mother welcomed us into the house and said, "Nevermind, Virgil will get over it....it's an interesting beard."

He came back, and, as Mother predicted, got over my beard and we had Christmas.

Happy Mothers' Day, Cleo. Wherever you are....

Turn about is fair play...

So, I told you about Bern losing last Wednesday. On the other hand there is my trip to Stop and Shop this afternoon.

I found a really close space, though the store was full of folks, and entered the left hand entrance. I got my food--though they were apparently out of Carmel Sea Salt Gelato, which is my all time favorite. And the Gelato was on sale two for one. So I got Pistachio and Coffee chocolate chip. Which are wondrous while falling short of Carmel Sea Salt.

I checked out and paid with Bern's Discover card, which we use to buy most everything since she pays it in full each month and gets money back a few times a year.

Then I went to the Customer Service counter to get a pack of cigarettes. Smoking I know is bad/bad/bad. But I like it and like the way my mouth tastes after a Marlboro Medium. So it goes.

I turned to leave the store and remembered, just before going out the door, that I should go out the door in the other direction and when almost there I realized I didn't have my glasses on. I thought I might have taken them off looking for Carmel Sea Salt Gelato, which took a while, so I parked my cart and went back to the frozen food place. Not there.

So I go to the aisle I checked out in. Not there.

Finally, I thought of the Customer Service counter and there they were.

So, I went to the car--out the right door this time.

(The problem with my glasses is that I see perfectly fine inside without them. I need them to drive, mostly. I lose them a couple of dozen times each day in our house, taking them off to read and cook and wash clothes and other inside stuff like that.  I used to ALWAYS need my glasses but I had two cataract operations 2 months apart about 12 years ago and they corrected my vision so I don't need glasses to, for example, be typing this. I tried graduated invisible bi-focals but they were more trouble than they were worth, so my glasses correct my distant vision and I mostly don't wear them inside.)

Problem was, I got to my car, put my groceries (including two delicious but NOT Carmel-Sea Salt Gelato) and searched my pockets in vain for my car keys. Back I go to the aisle I checked out from and no keys. "Ah-ha!" I think, laid them down to put my card through the gizmo where I paid for my Marlboro Mediums (calling cigarettes "Light" or "Medium" is just a way smokers have of justifying their addiction....) But there was a line of 7 people. I waited while people bought Lotto tickets and returned out of date stuff and finally walked to the front and said to the woman behind the counter--'car keys?' Without missing a beat she reached down and handed them to me.

Maybe I should drive myself to THE HOME, but I wouldn't know where my glasses or car keys were....

It is a privilege to grow old...but I'm reminded of an encounter with an old mountain woman in Fairmont, West Virginia when I was a social worker. "It's not a sin to be poor," she told me, "but it's a damned inconvenience..."

It is a privilege to age, but it is a damned inconvenience to always be looking for stuff....

If you're going to lose a day, pick Wednesday....

Late Thursday afternoon Bern asked me to go get her some cigarettes, which was only fair since I smoked some of them. But I really needed to go to Higganum for the book group so I said, innocently enough, "could you get some when you go out?"

Thursday is the night her women's group, called 'Group', meets.

"Where would I be going?" she asked, thinking I was just weaseling out of doing her a favor.

"Group," I said, pure as the driven slush (as Mae West used to say) since I was, in fact, involved in weaseling.

"It's Wednesday," she said.

"No, it's Thursday," I replied, instantly trying to figure out if I knew that for a fact since Bern is so often right about most anything that I tend to doubt myself instead of her when she says something like "it's Wednesday" when I was mostly sure it was Thursday.

Then I remembered talking to Bea on the phone and her saying, "see  you tonight" and if Bea expected to see me that night I must almost certainly be Thursday.

When I said, "No, it's Thursday", Bern gave me the look that says, "Oh Lordy, Lordy, is it time already for THE HOME?" I think she has a list of things somewhere that indicate it might just be time to put me in THE HOME. I've occasionally eyed the drawer of her little desk and thought I should look for the list in there, but have, unfortunately too much respect for her privacy to look in her drawer.

"It's Wednesday," she said again, with the kind of certainty that demolishes my certainty. Instead of arguing the point I went up to my computer which has a calendar on it with the day it is in orange. Low and behold, it was Thursday May 9 after all.

Bern was very distressed that somehow she had lost a day. There was no Group that night so maybe knowing that made her think it was Wednesday. That doesn't make sense, but losing a day doesn't make sense either.

It was all I could do to keep from going up to my desk upstairs and starting a READY FOR THE HOME list for Bern. The only entry would be "Lost a Day altogether" since she seems never to do things that indicate she might sometime require confinement, supervision and drugs.

But I didn't. I'll give her that one slip, though if you think about it, losing a day is a rather odd thing to do.

I did my best to make it alright and went to get her cigarettes before I left. This is what I told her, 'if you're going to lose a day, Wednesday would be the one to lose.'

Of all the days, it seems to me, Wednesday is the least vital and necessary. Not only is it the one that looks most likely  misspelled (I mean, a 'silent D', what's up with that?) but coming where it does, right in the middle of the week, if you lose it you still have two days to get things sorted out before Saturday. If you know what I mean.

So, my advise (and my advise and $2.15 will get you a coffee at Starbucks) is this: if you're into misplacing days of the week, Wednesday would be the easiest to let go.....

Talent Shows

I am a big fan of talent shows, going way back to my childhood. I was a big fan of American Idol until 'The Voice' came along. I love 'The Voice' a lot and seldom watch 'Idol' any more.

The Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry is having a talent show on May 18th at St. James, Higganum and I'm going to read some of my poetry.

I've been going through poems to decide what to read. I lost a lot when I retired from St. John's in Waterbury. There was a folder there that had poems in it that I no longer have access to. Oh my, so it goes. They just aren't stored anywhere on my computer. Alas and alack.

But I have some poems available. Quite a few, in fact. I wanted to share two with you that I won't be reading at the talent show because I decided to read others. So here they are:

Walking out of Shadows

This poem is about three things
(four really....)
a back porch, badly lit;
a deck in shadows;
and a Puli dog.
(The fourth thing comes at the end.)

My back porch is small,
4 feet by 6 feet or so,
and the light bulb,
surrounded by opaque plates,
is 40 watts at best.

The deck is larger--12 by 20, maybe,
and gets little illumination from the porch lifht.

The Puli dog is black as black can be.
So black that there are highlights
 of navy blue and even brown in his coat
in direct sunlight.

But at night, when the dog walks on the deck,
I cannot see him for the shadows
and he emerges suddenly 
from darkness into light.

Now, the fourth things--the crux of the matter--
how much is that like you and me, all of us,
in the most profound and deepest wasy,
wandering mostly in places we cannot be seen,
emerging, surprisingly,
into some dim light?
Only some of our hearts and souls
even viable at all?
jgb 



Winter dreams of mine 

I dream more than most people I talk with about dreams.
My Dream-Maker seems to go full tilt all night,
especially in winter when the wind wails
and whispers of sleet slide against the windows.

My dreams are not earth shattering, not prophecies
from a poet-god, nor are they full of advice.
Mostly, they are mundane--ordinary thing:
often I am building something, a gizmo I understand not,
other times I am walking through strange lands,
seeing things I do not comprehend...but never afraid.
I have no nightmares these days.

Sometimes I dream of sleeping in the bed with you.
I dream of waking and watching you sleep
and then dozing off again to dream of sleeping.
I dream of extremely hairy black dogs sitting on my head
and golden cats--like tiny lions--opening the door
to the room and falling asleep on my feet.

Just the other night, I dreamed I woke to  your saying
"can I have a drink of water?" and getting up to run
the water cold before filling the glass. Then I dreamed--
amazing as it is, that you brought me water and said,
'you won't remember this when you wake up....'

But I did remember and when I woke, I wore a Puli like a hat
and the cat by my feet stirred and leaped from the bed.
I heard you downstairs making coffee.

"Let the day begin!" I said, anxious to see you,
just as I slipped back under the winter covers
and slept, hoping to dream of getting up and joining you.

jgb