On October 4th

I posted a blog called '43 and counting'. It was the day before the 43rd anniversary of my marriage to Bern Pisano.

That blog has been visited some 300 times. I have a small blog. 100 views a day is a cause for celebration. No blog ever has had 300 views. Something about that insight into our life as two people who've known each other 49 years and been married 43 of those somehow got a lot of views.

So, since tonight at book group in Higganum (where we're reading chapters of stuff I've written since I retired) we looked at the chapter called "The Pastor's Wife", I'll share that as well with you after I tell you how people tonight told me they admired Bern and my 'marriages' and I'm moved to know that. It's just what we've done and do, with almost 5 decades of relationship and over 4 decades of many marriages (always to each other!)

So, here's the chapter of my work in progress.....

THE PASTOR'S WIFE

When I was at Virginia Theological Seminary, my wife wasn't too thrilled. I had, after all, promised her in solemn oaths that I would never be ordained. She married me in September after my first year at Harvard Divinity School and moved to Cambridge with me. But I was simply getting a two year degree...I had no intention of ever getting an M.Div. (the three year degree required for ordination). I promised her faithfully that after that second year I'd be applying for graduate studies in American Literature. I promised her with all the oaths I could muster.

There were lots of married seminarians in my class at Virginia Seminary and all of them were married to women. The three female seminarians in my class were all single. This was before the ordination of women was legal in the Episcopal Church and the women were just going to be ready when it came, as we all knew it would. Since all the spouses were wives, some of the faculty wives (only one woman taught at VTS and she too was single) sponsored a support group called “Coterie”. Miriam-Webster defines coterie as “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with an unifying interest or purpose.” VTS's “Coterie” was rather 'exclusive' in that the only people welcome were women who would, sooner or later, be married to Episcopal priests. And that reality, I suppose, was the 'unifying interest or purpose.”

Bern went exactly once and left early. She was still fuming when she got home to our apartment. “Those women are crazy. I think half of them want to be priests and are living vicariously through their husbands. The other half are too busy imagining all the bad things that might happen that they're paralyzed.”

“What kind of bad things?” I asked, suddenly assaulted by anonymous fears of bad things myself.

“Oh, here's an example,” she told me, barely keeping her disgust under control, “one woman asked, 'what do you do on your son's fourth birthday when you husband tells you he has to go visit someone who is sick after he promised to be at the party?'”

I stayed quiet since I knew all about breaking promises.

“It gets better, then she says, 'and when you ask him not to go he tells you he's doing the Lord's work.'”

“Do they have children?” I asked.

“No!” she said, “She's imagining that too....”

“So what did the group tell her?”

“Lots of crap about 'the sacrifices of a clergy wife' and stuff like that.” She paused, suddenly smiling, “but I told her what to do.”

I waited, knowing I didn't have to prompt her.

“I told her to tell the asshole that when he gets back he can sleep with the Lord from now on.” Then she chuckled.

*

Bern and I met in Latin class when I was 17 and she was 14. I had this wild idea that I wanted to go to Shimer College in Chicago, a “Great Books” school, and I needed at least a year of a foreign language to apply. So, I was a Senior in a class made up mostly of Freshmen and Bern was one of them.

There couldn't have been a more unlikely pairing. I was from Anawalt, a little town with a Junior High School, that was almost totally populated by people from the British Isles with one or two syllable names. Bern was from Filbert, a coal camp made up of first, second and third generations of European immigrants—Italian, Hungarian, Polish, even Spanish. Bern's mother was a first generation Hungarian-American and her father had come from Italy as an adolescent with his father. My parents were as white bread as they come. She, of course, was Roman Catholic while my family was a whole group of rather evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants.

Add this to that: not one non-Italian had ever married into Bern's paternal family and not one non-Hungarian had ever married into her maternal family. Needless to say, no Roman Catholic or even slightly ethnic person had married into either side of my family save one. And that was the exception that proved the Rule: Never Marry Outside Your Kind. My cousin, Marlin Pugh, married an Italian, Roman Catholic girl. The family lore was that the marriage didn't last until the reception, they broke it off in the car leaving the wedding! That may be apocryphal, but it was deeply believed in my family. “No Italians and no Roman Catholics” could have been my family's motto. In addition, imagine the consternation of Bern's family that I was not only an Anglo-Saxon protestant, I was enrolled in a Divinity School!

“What chance do they have?” must have been a question asked a lot within both our families.

So, Bern and I have known each other for some 48 years and have been married

42 of those years. I'd like to attribute that to the power and endurance of our love and commitment, but in large measure it is a reflection of our stubbornness and our flexibility and our intention to prove our families wrong! I've often told people “I've been married four or five times, just always to the same woman....”

Looking back neither of us can recognize those two near-children (20 and 23) we were in our wedding album. (Our first wedding bands were inscribed Amo, Amas, Amat. The whole romantic thing of meeting in Latin class and all. Mercifully, in one of our marriages iterations, we picked out our own rings and gave them to ourselves.) There are times we don't quite understand how we survived the ups and downs, good times and bad times of all these years. And how we survived the advent of two children, their growing up, their turning out even better than we could have hoped for is, for the most part, a mystery to us. Finally, how Bern endured being married to a priest is (excuse the phrase) a holy mystery to us both.

*

Bern was not cut out to be “a clergy wife”. Luckily, I was not cut out to have one!

During my final year of seminary, the two Bishops of West Virginia came to have dinner with the seminarians from their diocese. They did this every year, but always at a restaurant so it was easy to leave right after dessert due to some commitment or another, true or imaginary. But that year, George P., one of my classmates, decided we should have dinner at his apartment, bishops and all. He even called to ask me if Bern could bring 'chips and dips' and to tell me his wife was already 'soaking the meat' (I kid you not....) Bern knew enough to know that in most Western societies, bishops were on a social level with minor royalty and oil barons. So she scoffed at 'chips and dip' and made some exotic Italian-Hungarian hors'devours which impressed both the bishops, all the wives from Coterie who thought Bern was a crazy woman and most of all, the other husbands who were used to 'chips and dip' for a dinner party.

Just as dinner was over and Bishop Campbell had had a Scotch or four, he announced that he wanted to talk “with the wives”.

My chest restricted and my bowels loosened when he said that. “Oh, my God,” I thought, “what will she say?”

Two or three wives went before Bern, chattering about how 'since WE'VE been in seminary...” and how excited they were about “OUR future ministry...” my anxiety grew exponentially. Finally, it was Bern's turn.

“Well, Bernadine,” Bishop Campbell said, slurring just a bit—bishops back then could hold their liquor, our vanilla bishops of today scarcely drink at all--”how has it been since you and Jim were in seminary?”

I needed my heart shocked back into beating even before she spoke. Nothing good could come of her answer.

“Well, Bishop Campbell,” she began. I noted she had gone into her 'stage presence'--Bern was a drama major and a professional actress. In fact, she supported us during our two years in Alexandria doing summer stock and dinner theater. “The truth is,” she continued, like a character from Lovers and Other Strangers, a show she was in twice and once directed, “we aren't in seminary. I'm not in seminary at all. Jim is in seminary and I'm terribly unhappy....”

The oxygen in the room was sucked out by the other wives and the bishops. I, myself, couldn't breathe so I didn't contribute to the vacuum. Bishop Campbell, buzzed as he was, immediately went into 'pastoral mode'.

“Oh, Bern,” he said, softly, “what can I do?”

“You can't do anything, bishop,” she said, forcing a tear out of her eye, something I'd seen her do on stage, “it's up to me to leave my marriage....Maybe we could talk after everyone has gone home....”

I glanced around at the faces of the people in the room. It was like being at Mount Rushmore times five. Twenty faces frozen in stone.

The bishop put down his drink and started to reach toward Bern. Luckily he wasn't able to touch her because I swear to God she would have ripped off his arm and beaten him silly with it.

She suddenly laughed. The walls shook with the sound.

“Just kidding,” she said, “just a joke on you all....Jim and I are fine, really....”

Bishop Campbell needed another drink and the party broke up shortly thereafter with strained 'good-byes' all around.

In the car, half-way back to our apartment, I said, “some performance....”

She smiled at me. “Think he'll remember me?” she asked coyly.

*

The next day, I ate lunch with the two bishops—Campbell and Atkinson—in the refectory at Virginia Seminary. As I was getting up to take my tray to the window, Bishop Campbell asked me this: “Jim, who will have the honor of receiving Bern into the Episcopal Church, Bishop Atkinson or I?”

I decided that Bern's notion of not catering to bishops was the best course. “You know,” I said, “I wouldn't hold my breath on that one,” and scurried away.

While I was at Virginia Seminary, I had a field work job at Christ Church, Capitol Hill in DC. It was a great church, made up mostly of people who were on the staffs of some House Member or Senator and weren't really from DC. Very laid back and liberal, so Bern had no trouble attending from time to time. But her harsh, ethnic Roman Catholic upbringing wouldn't let her come to communion. She and another recovering RC would go outside during communion and have a cigarette.

By the time we arrived at St. James in Charleston, she could bring herself to the rail, but didn't receive the wine since she never had be able to. But then, when I was Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven, she gave me a surprise gift like none I've ever had. There was a New Haven wide Confirmation and Reception Service (New Haven, like most cities, has too many Episcopal Churches but nobody can agree on which ones are the 'too many' ones). Totally unbeknownst to me, Bern had gone to Bishop John Burgess—a retired Bishop who was a member of St. Paul's and the first Black Diocesan Bishop the church had known—and asked him to prepare her for 'reception'. The Episcopal Church, being bigger-hearted than most denominations, recognizes that if someone has been 'confirmed' in another church, we don't make them do it again, we 'receive them', as the words go, 'into this branch of the holy, catholic church.'

I was sitting up in the chancel at the Episcopal Church at Yale with the other priests, watching with little interest in who was coming forward to Bishop Walmsley to be confirmed or received besides the 6 people I presented. Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bishop Burgess and Bern walking toward the front and was dragged to my feet to go stand beside her as she was received. I think I kissed her on the mouth in front of all those Episcopalians when it was over.

She pulled her head around to my ear and whispered, “I only did this for YOU, don't ever forget that.”

And I never have. But 'doing it FOR me' made it the most precious of acts. So dear to me, so supportive of me. Over and over during all the years, she did things 'for me' that made my life and ministry wondrous and rich.

***

That's how, for me, Bern was the perfect Pastor's wife by being the anti-Pastor's wife.

She simply had no interest in 'the church' in any way that didn't affect me or, later, our son and daughter. If anything 'the church' did threatened me or would be threatening to our children, Bern was the Mama Bear ravaging the offending beast. In other words, she was concerned when she thought the politics or culture of the church was draining me of my energy and commitment or putting our son and daughter into roles and situations they did not need to fulfill.

Being a PK--”preacher's kid”--shines a bright spotlight on a child. Luckily, I served three remarkable parishes that, most of the time, didn't put either Bern or our children into untenable positions. Those three congregations were, by Episcopal...or any other...standards, remarkably laid back about the role of the priest's wife or children. At St. James in Charleston, West Virginia, Bern and Josh and Mimi were not only related to me but ¾ of the white people, besides me, in the community. Hard not to stand out at those odds. But the folks at St. James gave all three of them more than enough room to be in the background. God bless those good and holy folks for that.

St. Paul's in New Haven was sold to me as “an activist parish”. Actually, it wasn't. Instead, it was a parish of 'activists'--people deeply involved in the social issues of the city and the world. The parish itself did rather traditional things—a clothing closet, a food pantry, high powered Church School, broad church worship, adult education, support groups—that gave a congregation weighed down and wearied by battling the forces of darkness in their lives, a chance to simply serve and be comforted and healed to go back into the world. No one at St. Paul's had the energy to expect much of Bern besides being part of the Tribe and sharing the road.

Even St. John's in Waterbury, the most 'traditional' of the three churches I served in my career (though they would be horrified to know anyone thought of them as 'traditional'!) put no pressure on the Rector's wife to be anyone other than who she was, which was a mother of two children who grew from adolescents to full adults in the almost 22 years I was there and the best reader of all the good readers who read the lessons on Sunday. (The girl was an actress, after all....) Bern would help out with pageants and train readers and organize the nursery because, at that time she was the coordinator of the Cooperative Child Day Center in New Haven—the only paid employee who trained parents to care for their children on a rota. Other than that, she and the kids (singing the hymns in harmony!) and then she alone would sit in the fourth row under the balcony on the pulpit side of the church most every Sunday I was serving there. Oh, and she and I would host a New Year's Day open house for the parish each year at which we served food she prepared that dazzled the people who came and she charmed them as well—merely to make things easier for me, I assure you.

When I retired from St. John's, Bern breathed a long and deserved sigh of relief and 'retired from church'.

I have a part-time job working with three small churches in Connecticut these days. Bern asked me a few weeks ago, “Do you wish I'd go to church with you?”

I looked at her like the crazy woman she was sounding like. “Would you come if I wished you did?”

She frowned. “No,” she told me.

“Then why on earth would I wish it?” I asked. And we both had a good laugh.

*

Here's what made Bern the perfect 'pastor's wife' for me: she simply didn't care about church. Let me clear that up. She cared profoundly about me and my role and what I was going through in all these years as a priest. She simply wasn't invested in the whole melodrama and wasn't concerned about her place in it.

Most of the 'wives' at Virginia Seminary would say stuff like 'since WE came to seminary'. There was never any doubt in Bern's mind or mine that “I came to seminary”, she came along for the ride and had a life that had nothing at all to do with the seminary experience. That was the way she was during my years as a priest. I was the priest, she just happened to be married to me and would participate in the life on the parish I was serving to the extent she wanted to and enjoyed. Beyond that, she just wasn't 'attached' to what I was up to in my ministry.

(This brings up an interesting distinction between 'involvement' and 'attachment'. I am a Buddhist in my belief in the holy necessity of 'detachment'. We are, Jesus told us, 'to be IN the world, but not OF the world'. Christians need to practice 'detachment' more and more. The way I illustrate this to folks is to take a soft cover book that folds easily and insert a separate piece of paper. Then I fold the book, with the paper in it and notice that “involved” means, literally, “in the volutions”--”in the folds”. So it is obvious that the free piece of paper can be “involved” without being attached. That's the way I seek to live in the church—involved but not attached. The church is a big part of my life, but it is NOT 'my life'. I am an aging white man who is a husband, a father, a grandfather and a friend who just happens to be an Episcopal priest. My greatest guide and mentor for that has, for over four decades, been Bern, my wife.)

*

Once I was preaching and the Assistant Rector, Mary Ann Logue, came up behind me and pulled on my alb. I was totally confused by that. I wasn't sure if it were a joke or a prank, but when I looked in her eyes I knew it was something serious. The Senior Warden was there as well and he led me toward the vesting room telling me Bern was on the way to the hospital and I should go and meet her there. My son, Josh, happened to be an acolyte that day and when I heard about Bern, I forgot all about him. I've been told he vaulted the altar rail and caught up with me!

Josh and I had come to church but Bern wasn't feeling well so she and Mimi stayed home. As Josh and I were about to leave for the hospital, I suddenly remembered Mimi must be home alone. She was 10 or 11, not nearly old enough to be at home worrying about her mother all by herself. I went back into the church to ask a woman Mimi knew well to go to our house in Cheshire to be with her. Then Josh and I drove like crazy people to St. Mary's hospital and beat Bern's ambulance to the emergency room by 10 minutes or so. It had been Mimi, bless her, who called the church repeatedly until someone went to pick up.

It was kidney stones, which must be one of those things you never ever want to experience. Bern was in such pain that she could hardly see that Josh and I were there. When she realized who we were, she said only one word...”Mimi....” And I told her, hoping she could hear through the agony, that someone was already with her and would bring her to us.

I relate all this to make a couple of points about my wife of all these years. First of all, she is better with pain than anyone I know—so seeing her suffer like that convinced me that kidney stones must be off the pain scale. And, in the midst of all that pain, nothing mattered to her like our children. I think that's a 'mom thing'. Studies have shown that when asked who they would save from the train tracks, men normally would save their wives before their children. Women—No Way! The kids get saved, the old man is mashed to bits by the locomotive! It's just a reality men have to accept. Bern was a mom for the Guinness Book of records. She really was. And still is.

It's one of the many things I love about her.

So she made it clear to me that she would be a mama lion to keep our kids from being eaten alive by the church.

Interesting, Mimi, who was a dutiful 'Priest's kid' and got confirmed and all that, doesn't go to church at all and is in a long term relationship with the son of Latin Rite Roman Catholics. Tim doesn't go to church at all except when he's here and he goes with me. Josh, on the other hand, married a Taiwanese-American who has no religious background at all and he goes to the Episcopal Cathedral in Baltimore with my twin granddaughters almost ever Sunday—because Cathy makes him....Go figure 'church DNA”.

*

There is an acting theory that Bern told me about that describes the process that goes into a play. The actor's job, according to this theory, is “to make the strange familiar and then, make the familiar strange.”

Here's how it works: an actor is handed a script she's never seen before. The first job is to make those strange words and stage movements so 'familiar' that she deliver her lines and move about the stage almost as second nature. Then comes the really hard part—those oh, so 'familiar' words and movements must be done and said in such a way that the audience truly believes it is the first time those words have been spoken or that stage traversed. The 'familiar' must be made 'strange' and new to the audience. When the knock comes at the door, the audience must be convinced that the actor 'doesn't know' who it is though the scene has been rehearsed a hundred times. That is the difference between 'being in a play' and acting.

I've adapted that theory to liturgy and preaching. The oh, so familiar words of the liturgy must be made new and fresh and strange by the priest presiding over the sacraments. It's even more important in preaching—the words of scripture must first be made 'familiar' and understood by the preacher. Then, through the story telling and imagination, the 'familiarity' of the passage must be made to be new and engaging and provocatively 'strange' in the sermon. I've always believed every seminary should have an actor on the faculty to teach courses like 'the Drama of Ritual' and 'the Interpretation of Preaching'. Imagine how Richard Burton would have celebrated the Eucharist and then imagine Meryl Streep doing a baptism. Everyone would have their own style, but church would be more interesting if some acting skills were learned by priests!

*

One of the problems I have always had in terms of 'evangelism' (whatever that means) is that I really don't believe the church has a 'franchise' on God. Instead of the “revealed” religion of the Jews and the Christians, I am convinced God is everywhere, seeking us out, nudging us to 'unconceal' the Holy in the mundane. When someone tells me that they commune with God in nature or in music or dance, I quite honestly believe them. Bern is like that. She may have 'retired' from church, but she is close to the Holy. You see, she is a gardener.

For over 20 years she has been transforming and creating our back and front yards. She is constantly tinkering with the plants and the rocks and shells we bring back each September from North Carolina and the layout of things. I am of no help in all that. I'm not allowed to mess with “the gardens”. She does all the mowing with her push mower. She is the one who gets dirty every day. I sit up on the back deck and marvel at her creation. She is in touch with the earth, with the soil, the humus that is the root word for “human”. If we come from earth and return to it, as the burial office tells us, it might be a vitally profound and holy thing to be intimate with the soil.

Me, I sit up on the deck. The God of Israel is a sky god, one met on mountain tops. The Goddess that was so much a part of most primal religion, is an earth god, Gaius, the Earth herself. Much of the struggle the church has had to fully include women is caused by the fact that sky gods are male and the earth is female. The church did all it could to obliterate the Goddess, but she will not go away. Yahweh worship, Father worship, is elevated, wrapped in the clouds, reaching always upward, always tamed. Goddess worship goes down, communes with our Mother, stays close to the earth, is organic and wild. I would wish we could bring the Father-god and Mother-god into harmony and celebrate them together, worship them both. But the church (even though we speak of the Church as “she”) is afraid of the mystery and power of the Mother—just as most hierarchies are masculine and fear the feminine. Carl Jung would suggest we must bring our feminine and masculine sides into harmony to be Whole. But the church has not yet accepted that as a need. Time is running out for the church. Instead of Gender roles, the church needs to be a community where all gifts, all natures are welcomed and nurtured.

***

Here's something Bern taught me and taught me fair well. “You always get what you get!”

She was the Co-ordinator of the “Children's Co-op Child Care Center” in New Haven for 14 years. What she did, as the only paid person, was teach parents how to care for their children. Each parent had to put in 4 hour turns each week and prepare snacks and lunch on a rota. Bern showed them what it meant to really 'care' for their children. Most of them were white-collar professionals—lawyers and professors and graduate students and such—people who could schedule themselves so that they could be at the Co-op in the middle of the day. So, a privileged group, but a concept that I think deserves adopting. Child Care Centers at major corporations where professionals like Bern could oversee the child care the parents of the children gave. What a wondrous concept—parents who work actually being able to give child care to their children too! I've asked her to write it all down and send it around to select folks, but she never has.

Being with children brings out the odd notion of 'fairness'. My granddaughters' are already experts in what is 'fair'. One's cookie is a quarter ounce bigger than another and they'll be screaming about 'fair' at the top of their lungs. But the awful and sobering truth is—Life Isn't Fair. It just isn't and never will be unless the Kingdom of Heaven has a way to let everyone get what they want. Because, obviously, 'fair' has to do with 'what I want', not with some objective moral equation.

So, whenever Bern would distribute musical instruments or crayons or whatever else she passed to the kids at the Co-op, one kid would say (probably more than one, most likely all of them) “I wanted the kazoo...” or “I wanted yellow...” or “How come Anna got the good one...?”

So Bern developed a mantra, a chant, an incantation to make what was 'unfair' right or just or, at least conceivable to those kids between 2 and 5. This is what she would sing to them:

“Sometimes you get what you want, and sometimes you get what you don't want, but you always GET what you GET....”

And the kid who 'wanted' the kazoo said, “I GOT a tambourine!” And the kid who 'wanted' yellow would say, “I GOT green!” And all would be well, all would be well and all manner of things would be well.

I can't think of a better way of facing life as it is—unfair and random—than celebrating that we always 'get what we GET'. That's just the way things are. That is simply the way to live into and lean against Life as it comes towards us. I don't always get what I want. I often get what I don't want. But, always, always, forever and a day, I get what I get. Like that. Period. Full stop.

***

For over a quarter of century, Bern has been a member of Group. Group meets every Thursday, no matter what. It is never more than six women who gather to talk. They celebrate birthdays together and sometimes do Feminist rituals. The group began long before Bern joined it. Originally, it was a group of women who figured out how to work on their cars and give each other vaginal exams. They moved beyond that to become a support group extraordinaire. Every Thursday for 30 years or more. Imagine that. Some of the group have moved away—Diane to Nevis, of all places. And one of them died, sending them into a year or so of dealing with death, especially since she had been kicked out before she died....

Three of the current five members have been in for 25 years or more. Two are founding members. Bern is the other. They have been there for each other for all these years, through family crises, personal meltdowns, inconsequential upsets, the ordinariness of life. Just like that. There for each other through thick and thin, good times and bad times, in sickness and in health, for better or worse, like that. Like a group marriage. It has been remarkable to me--”Group”, which is all we call it—something I envy and wish for in my own life, something I seek and search for, something precious and invaluable.

And Bern is considering leaving Group. It isn't satisfying her the way it has for over two decades. It isn't what she needs or wants or longs for in terms of support and listening and simply 'being there' with her. And I am horrified. It is difficult for me to imagine life—my life and Bern's—without Group. Thursday nights would never be the same. (Let me be selfish—I enjoy a night alone. Often, since they go out to eat from time to time, I get to eat things I love that Bern won't take part in: lamb chops, for one, and Angel Hair with peas and salty, Italian ham in a cream sauce. But, deep down, the worry I have is that Bern's leaving group will cut her off from her last social group.

We've always been different that way. I have many friends and a gazillion acquaintances. I am an extravert with lots of contacts. The truth is, I have only a handful of truly deep friends, some of whom I only see a couple of times a year. But I have so many folks to interact with, to be with. Bern is an extreme introvert who, since she no longer goes to a church, has only our immediate family and Group in her life. I'm sure she would be alright if she only had me and our family and our three (count 'em) friends, because our dog hates everyone but John and Sherry and Jack and our kids and consorts and our grandchildren. But it scares me.

It might send us into a new marriage—and we've already leaned into and embraces five or six marriages. I like this iteration of 'who we be' as a couple and don't want to recreate our relationship again. Though I would, God knows, just to be with her.

***

There is a question I ask folks coming to me to be married that is the most important question I could possibly ask such folks. “Tell me,” I say, “why you want to be married. There is only one wrong answer.”

The wrong answer that many of them give is this: “we're in love”.

If they say they are in love and want to get married, I tell them we have some work to do. I tell them, as painful and awful as it may be, 'that Love will come and go. It simply will. And a marriage has to be built on something larger, more expansive, more enduring than love.' It's a terrible thing to tell people in love, but it needs to be said. “Love” is an emotion. It comes and goes and is not in our control. Not at all.

Many times, in marriage homilies, I tell them about me and Bern. I tell them that there are times when I can't wait to be home just to look at her, just to bask in her presence, just to love her. And then I tell them about waking up before she does and seeing the pillow creases on her face and the drool coming out of her mouth and hearing her cat-like snores. And then I ask myself, “where am I and who is this? What am I doing here?”

Marriage isn't about 'love', not really. Love is an emotion. You can't stay angry for ever. And you can't sustain love all the time. What is needed is something firmer, more solid, something like commitment, something like 'saying so', something like your word, something that endures and transcends the 'feeling', the 'emotion' we call love. Emotions are ephemeral and passing. They come and go and we neither make them come or make them go. In a real sense, we don't have emotions. Emotions have us. Unbidden, uncontrollable, beyond our beck and call, 'love', and all emotions are distinct, have an integrity that is separate from our volition, have a life of there own.

“Don't be angry,” is a nonsensical thing to say. “Don't be sad” or “don't be anxious” are equally insane things to say. You would never do it—never say to a person full of joy—but even saying “don't be happy” would be astonishingly crazy to say to someone who was full of happiness. If we could decide and control emotions, being a human being would be something remarkably different than what it is.

What we can control and be responsible for is something like commitment. We can choose each day, each moment, each nano-second, to 'be committed' and be present and responsible for being our word, our promise, our vow to stand by this particular relationship, this marriage, no matter what, whatever the circumstances are. We can choose a reality that truly endures 'for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health'.

Why ever we chose to do that, Bern and I have been married for almost 42 years. Jesus Christ, four decades and two years with the same woman when there are so many other women around! And men for her. But it's not always been the same marriage. There have been a few, it just happens that they've always included Bern and me.

She was 20 and I was 23 the first time--children. That lasted as long as we could ignor the reality that we didn't really know each other. We were stubborn and committed, so it was when we moved from Cambridge to Morgantown and lived in a trailer and I didn't have a job that we were married in a mutual sharing of disappointment and doubt. Then, with her in college and me actually making money as a social worker, we forged a new marriage, living in a house, not a mobile home, wondering what came next. Then she went to New York to act and I stayed in Morgantown, waiting to go back to seminary. I'm not sure we were “married” in any real way then, but when she came back to me and our Puli dog in Alexandria, we forged a new commitment, riskier and less clear than even the risky and unclear ones before. She left me for a while then and came back and Bern got pregnant and that began the longest marriage of our many marriages. Josh and then Mimi came into our lives and though we moved from Charleston, WV to New Haven, CT to Cheshire, CT, we had the 'marriage of children' for a long time.

Even that's not true. I had an affair when the kids were rather young—10 and 7—and Bern and I separated for 6 months or so and I was disgraced and shunned by the church and our friends. But somehow, out of commitment to our children and out of a deep and abiding commitment to each other, we not only survived, we thrived, in yet another marriage—the post betrayal marriage.

Some people were horrified that we had 'reconciled' and some were deleriously happy. The truth was, and we told everyone who would listen, we weren't 'reconciled', we had 'transformed' our marriage. While we were apart, Bern had (outside all her natural inclinations) had gone to an EST weekend and then convinced me to go to one as well. She thought it would give us a shared 'language' to end our marriage in a respectful and responsible way. Instead, it gave us a vocabulary and language to not only save our marriage, but transform it and re-create it in a wondrous way.

That lasted until both the children left home. Then we looked at each other and wondered, 'what next?'

Since then—for a decade or so, we've been in the latest marriage—and hopefully the last. We are aging white people with a reasonable income and a wondrous house and a dog and cat and bird and who knows how many years to live together. And, so far as I can tell, we both accept and adore all that.

At night, in our bed, both of us reading books, I'll turn to her and say, “good-night, Woman”. And she'll kiss my hand and I'll kiss hers and she'll say, “good night, Man.” We are “Man” and “Woman” because we are not mother and father or husband and wife anymore. We are Man and Woman to our dog and our cat. And we are, I believe, Man and Woman to each other. We have reached the point, over all these years, over all the pain and all the joy, over all the boredom and all the excitement, over all the dullness and all the wonder of being together this long—42 years is over 500 months, over 2000 weeks, more days and hours and minutes you can imagine. And still we're here—Bern and me.

The Pastor's wife and the Priest.

Just roles we've played, like many other roles. Newlyweds, parents, grandparents, seniors, people growing older. Together.

In the end, though I'm still a priest, Bern isn't the Pastor's wife. And our kids aren't PK's. And in this, hopefully last marriage, alone with our dog and cat and bird, we are the Man and the Woman.

To each other, most of all.

That is probably what we were meant to be all along.

It fits.

It feels right.

I am 'the Man”. Bern (love of all my life) is 'the Woman”.

And so it goes.

The last marriage we will have. And, believe me, though all the other marriages to the Pastor's wife have had their ups and down and their wonders and their pains, this one—the last one—the one where we are not stock caricatures it is the best, I'm not kidding, simply and truly and without a doubt, the best marriage we've ever had.....

The MAN and the WOMAN, and those animals we love. That simple, that basic, that vital, that near the bone.

That's where we are and where we will be. 'Til death do us part.

I'm not only OK with that, I couldn't imagine anything better. Nothing.

No thing at all.

Being with her, being with Bern....That's more than all I could hope for. Really.

healing works

I did a workshop this morning on 'the healing ministry' at Our Lady of Mount Calvary in Farmington about healing: in the gospels and in person.

It was a great and open group. I've done two other workshops there and it has always been a great experience. Sr. Ann and the other Passionists nuns are wondrous. Over the years I've come to believe that some of the best people on the planet are nuns in orders. I told Ann about the Passionists nuns I met in Queens a few months ago at a Making a Difference Workshop I helped lead there. Two of them were from the Philippians and one from Kenya--all young women on fire for Christ (not the Church) and about to set off for far flung ministries (ministering to people who live on a trash dump in South America and folks displaced by war in the Middle East). Amazing what nuns do and stand for and 'be' in the world.

We talked a lot today about the healing stories of the gospel and then, after I did a meditation on the encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman in Matthew, we anointed each other and prayed for all our healing. It was a breathless experience. Deeply moving.

Everyone there except me and an Episcopal priest and Deacon from Rhode Island, were Roman Catholic women. I love doing things at Mount Calvary because it demonstrates to me that Roman laypeople (and nuns) aren't weighed down by the Vatican and dogma.

They're great.'

That's good for me to be reminded of, really.

Google Our Lady of Mount Calvary in Farmington. It's a wondrous place and their programs have some real gems, though much of their work is with RC congregations, from time to time there is someone like...well, me...doing something there.

Cold enough for you?

My maternal grandmother, Lina Manona Sadler Jones, used to tell all 16 of the first cousins who were her grandchildren that you could tell how cold and bad the winter was going to be by seeing how bushy the tails of squirrels were in late September.

I'd been delighted over the last week or so, living in a place awash with squirrels, that most of them looked scrawny and their tails even more so. A mild winter was what I was wishing for.

Then, this afternoon, a creature was down in our back yard.

"What is that thing?" Bern asked, "it's moving too slow for a squirrel."

Then it popped out of one of the plants that are so abundant in our back yards and I realized it was a squirrel that was about as big as a cocker spaniel with a tail the size of a normal squirrel--not a squirrel's tail...a whole squirrel.

So I started thinking about taking up my neighbor Mark (who shares our double wide drive way) about investing in a snow blower. Mark is about 40 and a volunteer fire fighter so he could handle the machine. Maybe he could teach Bern or his high school senior daughter to use it too.

I used to hate the cold and love the heat. People would say to me on a 90 F./90 degree humidity day, "hot enough for you?" And I'd answer, "not nearly hot enough...and how about some more humidity?"

I really did love the heat when I was younger. But I'm not younger any more and actually probably tolerate the cold a bit more than I tolerate the heat.

I'm a spring and autumn guy now--summer and winter, I just put up with because I live in a place that has four seasons.

"My life sucks...race you to the dining hall...."

I've been doing this writing lately--since I retired--about my ministry and life and people I've known. I wouldn't call it a 'memoir' though that's probably what it is, but I enjoy writing it. I shared one of the 'chapters' on yesterday's blog. And the Cluster of churches where I work very-part-time is using some of the chapters for their book group. We've done it before and it's been really lively and helpful to hear people talk about my writing and, well, just talk.

Conversation is where possibility dwells. People just talkin'....

So, I want to have a, granted, one-sided conversation about the chapter I want to write soon. It will be called "My life sucks...race you to the dining hall...." And it will be about, of all things, Junior High Camp in the Diocese of West Virginia at a camp called Peterkin.

(New Englanders, I find, are unclear about 'junior high' because most places in New England have 'Middle School'. Here's the difference, 'junior high' divides up the hormone driven, no activity in the cerebral cortex, absolutely out of control adolescences of our society differently. "Junior High" is grades 7-9. And then you go to High School for 3 years. "Middle School" sends 9th graders into the teeth of the storm that is High School. Ninth graders are much more like 8th graders than they are like 10th graders. They belong with kids 13 and 14, not kids 16-18. 9th grade for kids in 'junior high' let's them experience being the top of the pile, the cream of the crop, the oldest kids among kids who are like them. Fifteen year old kids are so different from 18 year old kids that they should, by law, never know each other unless they are siblings. The only year of human development, it seems to me, that is a larger gap than between 15 and 16 is the gap between birth and being a year old. Babies can't talk or walk or think in any way we understand. When a kid is a year old, he/she is so different from a baby as a lizard from an amoeba.  My experience is that the difference between being 15 and being 16 is almost that profound. So, I think 15 year old kids fit much better with 13 and 14 year old kids than they ever could with kids 16-18. That's what I believe.)

And my proof is my experience for 5 years with Junior High Camp in West Virginia.

I was the Clergy Leader of Junior High Camp for the last two years I was a part of it. Until then, I was a member of the Clergy staff. And I learned about 13-15 year old kids more than I ever taught them.

16 year old's are, in my experience of having lived with two, cock-sure they're right, self-confident to a fault and believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are much smarter than their parents.

Kids below that--13-15--are completely at sea, self-conscious to an adorable fault, and, rightly or wrongly, assume adults know most everything and they know nothing.

Vulnerable, that's the word I'd use. Vulnerable and scared and longing to be older.

My title for the chapter I intend to write about Junior High Camp is a direct quote from a 15 year old girl who was so vulnerable and broken and adrift. We were talking about her parent's divorce and her older brother druggie and how awful her life was as we strolled from the chapel at Peterkin to the dining hall for lunch. "My life sucks," she told me after a recitation of the horrors of being her. Then, in the same breath, she said, "race you to the dining hall" and took off running.

She beat me.

As sucky as her life was, I saw her 7 years ago at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. She was a clergy deputy from some mid-western place--Kansas or Nebraska or some other state I've only flown over. She was an Episcopal priest. Somehow that fragile, frightened, damaged young girl was now a wondrous and competent and accomplished priest. And when we talked one night over dinner and some wine, she told me her experience at Peterkin had changed her life, helped her be well and stay well and become strong.

Kids between 13 and 15 often have experiences that form them for the rest of their journey. In what I want to write, I want to ponder how a church camp might, just maybe, provide the space and time for that formation.

I would have never worked on the Peterkin Senior High Camp staff. I don't get that age, not at all. I didn't 'get' Josh and Mimi between 16 and 18. I was awash in the flotsam and jetsam their wake floated onto my shore. But in their early teens I saw the vulnerability, the fragility, the longings of their life, how they were pondering 'who to be' and 'how to be that'.

The kids at Junior High camp prepared me for having children their age. One of the best ages ever--unless it's you who are that age.....

book group

The three Cluster churches have a book group that meets many Thursdays. For the second time, they are kind enough to read some stuff I've been writing since I retired from full time ministry. We did 6 chapters 6 months or so ago. We're doing five more (or six maybe) this time. I thought I'd share them with you too. Comments, suggestions, thoughts--email me at Padrejgb@aol.com with message line "WRITINGS" so I'll be sure to look.

Thanks.

In the Beginning

I never intended to become an Episcopal priest and spend the best years of my life in parish ministry. What I intended was to earn a Ph.D. in American Literature from some reasonably prestigious university and then teach contemporary literature at some small liberal arts college while I wrote the Great American Novel. Well, the road to priesthood is paved with such intentions.

John Stasny, was my favorite professor in college—I took seven of his classes in my eight semesters so it could be said that I minored in Mr. Stasny. At any rate, he and Manfred Otto Meitzen, head of the Religion Department (who later died in a motorcycle accident in Branson, Missouri) came to me in my senior year and told me they had recommended me for a 'trial year in seminary' to be paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. All I had to do was go through some interviews and tell the Rockefeller people over and again that I didn't want to go to seminary.

“I don't want to go to seminary,” I told them, “I'm waiting to hear from the University of Virginia and Iowa for graduate school.”

“That's perfect!” Mr Stasny said. (Although he was a tenured professor at WVU, he didn't have a doctorate. I once asked him why and he answered, “Bradley, who on earth would test me?” I had to agree.)

“How's that 'perfect'?” I asked. “I don't want to go to seminary. It's never crossed my mind....”

“Perfect,” said Dr. Meitzen, “just tell the committee that over and over.”

So, just to please these two men I admired greatly, I went to Pittsburgh to be interviewed. I told the committee in a dozen ways and inside out/upside down a dozen more that I most certainly DIDN'T want to go to seminary.

“Great,” they all said, over and again, “that's just perfect!”

So I became a Rockefeller Fellow and went to Harvard Divinity School on the Rockefeller's money, stayed another year and got a degree—an MTS, 'Master of Theological Studies', which, along with $3.75 will get you a small coffee at Starbucks.

Remitha Spurlock, one of the most holy people I ever knew, who was a member of the first parish I served—St. James in Charleston, West Virginia—often said, “God works is mischievous ways.” And so God does—along with the Rockefeller foundation.

You know, after reading the chapter about the Archangel Mariah, why I went back to finish a professional degree and became a priest. But I blame John Stasny and Manfred Otto Meitzen for pointing me toward that all-wrong trip to Harvard Divinity School, where I'd get bitten (as I imagine they thought I might) by the Theology-bug and change all my plans.

I landed at Harvard at the best time ever: 1969. Hell's bells, things were a poppin' in those heady days! In my four semesters, three of them were cut short by a student strike, a faculty strike and a combined student/faculty strike. I was immersed in the chaos I love and thrive in. Ask anyone who knows me—I do best in chaos. And if it doesn't exist, I will find a way to create it.

I was friends with a law student at Harvard named Helen Anderson. She later became a writer about 'law and women' and occasionally had a column in the The New York Times. But in those weird times in the late 60's and early 70's, Helen was a drama queen. The day the National Guard was called out to protect the ROTC building—Harvard had ROTC, amazing—Helen came to my room in Divinity Hall to tell me, “the Revolution is starting and I have nothing to wear!”

I was once down at the Boston Common with Helen and Don, my best friend at Harvard. Helen got a run in her panty hose. Nothing would do

her but go to Jordan Marsh to buy new ones. The young clerk asked her what shade she wanted and Helen said, “how many shades are there?”

“Two hundred and twenty four,” the clerk responded and Helen burst into tears.

“I can't cope with that much pressure,” she cried and headed for the Ladies' Room. Don made the decision for her and got burnt cinnamon, if my memory serves me. Once we delivered them to the bathroom and Helen put them on, it was if nothing had happened. We went to ride the Swan Boats.

I'll try in these musings and reflections and memories to share some thoughts about parish ministry and 'the Church'(that wondrous and schizophrenic institution) but most of what I will write will be about the people who served me more faithfully and well than I ever served them. People are, after all, the real raw material of parish ministry—much of the rest is window dressing and smoke and mirrors. To quote The Rev. Wil B. Dunn, the parson in the comic strip Kudzu, “human relations is my field....”

For the last decade or so of my full-time ministry, I decided not to have an office. I did most all the writing and study I needed to do at home or sitting in the parish library with the door open. I know I probably annoyed the office staff no end by hanging around on the first floor so much, but it seemed to me that what I was 'for' was to be present to the daily swirl of activity of that very busy urban parish. Hundreds of people came through the church doors everyday—the soup kitchen was feeding 300+ a day when I retired, the Choristers were there two afternoons a week, a dance group used the building twice a week, someone was always trying out the McManis Organ, people wandered off the street to take a look and I was usually there to give them a tour of the remarkable building, lots of local groups used our rooms for meetings, and parish members who just popped in always saw me wandering around. That was a good thing. Being around people suited me much more than being in an office doing something that probably, in the cosmic scheme of things, was pretty unnecessary.

I once asked the son of a very active Episcopal lay woman what his mom did all the time. “She looks for meetings to go to,” he told me. He was six, I remember.

I think lots of church folks, especially clergy, 'look for meetings to go to' to demonstrate how busy they are. Meetings were, of course, a part of my life, but I didn't 'look for' them. Instead, what I did, at least in the last decade of my full-time ministry was 'hang around'. It suited me rather well, I believe.

Divinity Hall, where I lived for a year, was next door to the Semitic Museum. Harvard, in its infinite wisdom, had leased an office in that building to the CIA for recruiting purposes. Remember—this was 1969—the SDS or even more radical group, found out about the CIA office and tried to blow up the Semitic Museum one night. There were a whole host of firetrucks and other emergency vehicles out on the street and I wanted to see what was going on. There was Dr. G. E. Wright, an Old Testament scholar, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk holding some relic that had been damaged. He was weeping.

G. E. Wright was a renowned person in his field. He was one of the best teachers at Harvard and known far and wide, along with Professor Von Radt from Germany, as a leading light in Old Testament studies. He was also renowned for saying in his lectures: “there are two ways to study the Old Testament. The Von Radt way and the Wright way....” That was always greeted with laughter and applause.

And there he was, sitting on the curb, weeping over the lost documents and artifacts from the explosion, which, by the way, didn't damage the CIA offices at all. In that moment, there on Divinity Avenue, I realized the value of 'the past'. Until that moment I believed stuff in museums and rare book collections was nothing more than 'old stuff'. But seeing this world-wide wide acknowledged, aging man, weeping over the loss of 'old stuff' convinced me forever of the value of history and the 'stuff' history created. And I respected Dr. Wright a great deal from that moment forward.

One of the theology professors at Harvard was Richard Reinhold Niebuhr—son of Richard and nephew of Reinhold. Ralph McGill, another theologian, once commented about Dr. Niebuhr: “what was the boy going to do after all? Drive a cab in San Francisco? Theology is the family business.” (Dr. McGill had, in fact, driven a San Francisco cab for a few year, a vocation he said was a perfect prelude to a life spent talking about God.)

Niebuhr as a strange character to us all. He was a quintessential absent-minded professor. Once he wandered into the lecture hall carrying an armful of fat books, spead them all out, rearranged the order they were in, turned to a particular page in each one, stared at them for a while and drew on the chalk board in wild, cruel, looping lines until he had created what looked like a deformed tornado. He stared at that for a while, at the same time cocking his head to listen to a bird outside the open window singing to the perfect Spring day.

“The Void,” he said, not bothering to look at the 75 or so students sitting in tiers behind him. And then, almost to himself, he repeated, “the Void...” In a moment, he drew a stick figure of a man in the midst of the funnel cloud. He stepped back and said, reverently, it seemed to me, “Homo religiosis.”

He listened to the bird again, closed and gathered his books and left, perhaps to go to his study, perhaps to walk around in the warm April sun. We never figured out whether he just forgot he had a lecture to give or if the bird's song has mesmerized him.

I was walking back to Divinity Hall with my friends Don and Cal, still stunned by what we had witnessed.

“You could ever make this stuff up,” Don said.

Cal asked, “what did that French phrase mean?”

You couldn't have made Cal up either.

Cal was dozing beside me in a New Testament lecture by Dean Kristor Stendahl, at that time, the once and future bishop of Sweden. When Stendahl got started talking about the Holy Spirit, he said, “Jesus promised his followers to send the Paraclete.”

Cal woke up and shook my arm.

“Did he say 'parakeet'?” Cal whispered, ready to write something down.

Another time, in a Stendahl lecture, the Dean said, “within two decades of the crucifixion, the apostles began to peter out.”

He paused for all of us to moan.

“Wasn't that a-Paul-ing,” he asked.

Of all the brilliant, odd folks at Harvard, Frank Cross took the cake. He was an Old Testament scholar who, someone once said, probably dreamed in Hebrew. He made Niebuhr seem focused and alert. The story went like this: one morning Frank Cross got in his car, was thinking about Isaiah or Numbers or something, forgot to shut the driver's side door and tore it off on the tree beside his driveway. The next morning, in his rental car, he did the very same thing. The morning after that, the legend said, he had the tree cut down.

Then there was Rabbi Katenstein who taught a course called “The Life Cycle in Christian Worship”. All the students were Christians of various hues, 16 different hues among 17 students. All semester we brought in examples of how our particular cult of Christianity celebrated certain aspects of the 'life cycle'--birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death, burial, like that. I was the only Episcopalian in the class and thanked the little baby Jesus and whatever God might be for the Book of Common Prayer—1928--because it had all things, even a service for the purifying of women after child birth—something the Rabbi went nuts about in joy. His job, it occurred to me much later, was to teach us Christians how Jewish we really were. Almost every liturgy or ritual we brought up in that class was an opportunity for Rabbi Katzenstein to let us know the Jewish/Jesus roots of all our fanfare and celebrations.

It stunned me. I began, half way through the class to wonder why I hadn't had a bar-mitzvah, since obviously, as a Christian, I was a Jew as well. That class served me well when I invited a Muslim group to make their mosque in a building St. John's, Waterbury owned. Rabbi Katzenstein taught me, in no uncertain terms, that, not only are the hues of Christians not that important, the distinctions between Faiths were not that significant either. God/Yahweh/Ala, thank him for that.

(I just realized, writing this, that all of these great people who taught me so well are probably dead or old, old men. It was nearly 40 years ago and they were all in their 50's when I knew them—except for Dr. Meitzen, who ended his stay on earth outside the Country Music Capitol of the Universe. I'll always hope he had seen some shows before he and his wife died on that motorcycle, rather than thinking they were on their way to see Dolly and George and Garth when they died. It's difficult for me to think of the them as any older than they were when they taught me wondrous things about theology and life. Generations come and go and leave behind valuable things. G.E. Wright, sobbing in front of the Semitic Museum knew that only too keenly. And, as I age, I value the wisdom and the kookiness of those marvelous people more each day.

After my visitation from the Archangel Mariah, I went to Virginia Seminary for two yeas, which meant I had four years of theological education instead of the normal three for ordination. Both EDS I Cambridge and GTS in New York City agreed that I could come for only one more year. They were willing to accept all my credits from Harvard. Virginia Seminary was not so open. I needed two years of field work in a parish to meet their graduation requirements. I made me so angry that I decided to go there and make their lives miserable for two years. Which I did. Well, perhaps not 'miserable', but I kept them on their toes.

That's an exaggeration. VTS is bigger and stronger and has more integrity than you can imagine. I may have annoyed the seminary around the edges, but it hardly made a dent. The truth is, I look back on those two years with gratitude and appreciation. Who I was when I showed up in Alexandria was angry, arrogant, self-centered and profoundly ironic. Whan I left, I was a little less of all that and ready to be a priest. What formed me at Virginia Seminary was the incredible faculty and their commitment to 'making priests'. Virginia never claimed to be a 'graduate school of Theology'. It was a training ground for parish priests. That's what VTS claimed to do, what they did, and what they did quite well.

So, here are some people from VTS:

Charlie Price

Charlie taught several things, but he excelled at Liturgics. He began each year of the year long 'Introduction to Liturgy' by handing out what he called “Forty Beastly Questions”. Then he taught to the questions. It was a remarkable approach. We spent two semesters wrestling with the questions Charlie posed.

I remember one that we labored over mightily: What is necessary for baptism to be valid?

The point to this question, as with all the questions, was to struggle with liturgical issues in a way we never had before. 'Baptism', for all of us, I suspect, was a ritual performed in a parish church by a priest after dutifully training and informing the parents and godparents of the child (and speaking seriously with the occasional adult candidate) about the meaning of the sacrament, the history of 'washing' in Jewish practice, the role of parents and god-parents and how to 'speak loudly' when answering the questions asked of them from the Book of Common Prayer.

Charlie wanted us to get way, way past that image to the very nuts and bolts of baptism: “what is necessary?”

“Water and oil,” we said, thinking we'd figured it our, “and a priest and witnesses.”

“Well,” he told us, “what about the baptisms in blood on battlefields over the centuries? Are they invalid?”

Some of us were through at that juncture. Charilie's questions never had a 'right' answer, he just wanted us to arrive at an answer we could live with.

But some others of us had to admit we found all that 'battlefield baptism' rather romantic and didn't want to give it up. So, for those of us, the most obvious answer, “water and oil”, didn't work.

“So, how about a priest?” we asked Charlie.

“Read the rubrics,” he told us. (Rubrics are the little instructions in the Prayer Book. They're called 'rubrics' because in early editions of the BCP, they were written in red. Rubrics and Canons are what govern the Episcopal Church. Another piece of Charlie-Wisdom was this: “never unknowingly break a canon.” He knew that most of us would break more than one along the way—but we should know what we were doing and be able to answer for it if ever asked.)

Well, in the rubrics about baptism, it is clear that a deacon can administer baptism with the sealing in oil to be done later by a priest or bishop. And, in emergencies, any 'baptized person' may do the ritual, if the person recovers, the rest of the service should be done by a priest, omitting the administration of water. So a priest isn't necessary. Any baptized person can baptize.

“So”, we raced back to Charlie to say, feeling proud, “all that is necessary is a Christian and the words of baptism.”

He told us to go think about it some more. Would God—the God Charlie knew and loved and we were learning about—would THAT God deny baptism to on of God's beloved children simply because a baptized Christian wasn't present?

That divided the house of those still inquiring about the 'right answer', just as Charlie intended. Some held out from that point on for the need of a baptized Christian for baptism to occur. A few of us were more open to the possibility that Charlie's God, more expansive than ours by a long short, would let a heathen baptize someone in extremis. Charlie had taken away almost everything that made us comfortable with the sacrament—water, priests, oil, Christians. What was left.

“The words said,” we told him, the few of us, fairly panting that's we'd at last solved his puzzle. “You need the words, 'in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” We were so delighted to give him the answer.

He smiled and laughed—Charlie was a great one for smiling and laughing. Then he said words to the three of us I think I will never forget and pray to remember always. “So, you're telling me that the Great God Almighty who spread out the universe and created all things, the God who lives and moves and has being in our midst, would deny baptism to someone who desired it because the only person there with him was a deaf-mute Muslim?”

That was the last straw for one of our trio. All the others had already answered the question for themselves in a way they could live with—which was the point of the whole exercise I later understood. Charlie just wanted us to realize we'd 'come down' where we'd 'come down' for a reason. He forced us to look at familiar things so critically, so analytically, that we'd always know 'why' we believed what we believed. But the two of us sought him out at lunch in the Refectory one day.

“OK,” one of us said, “what if the only thing necessary for baptism to be valid is the 'intention' to be baptized?”

He stopped his fork half-way to his mouth.

“We are now way beyond doctrine and dogma and practice,” he said. “We're beyond ritual and rubrics. We in dangerous territory. The Enemy is near.” Then he took a bite. Charlie could say stuff like that and not sound silly.

As he was chewing, I felt we were on the edge of a precipice, looking over a sheer cliff, nothing below us, nothing to keep us from jumping off.

“I'm not saying 'this is the right answer', there being no right answer,not really. The two of us were hanging on every word. “But what if, just what if—and I'm not saying I believe this in any way,” he said, growing as somber, save one other time, that I'd ever seen him, “what if the intention is God's alone?”

My friend and I left Charlie to finish his lunch. Oddly, we never talked about his response to our question. It would have been frivolous and vain to have discussed it and analyzed it and a betrayer to have told others about it. But I know I've pondered Charlie's strange words ever since. They are always in the background of my considerations about theology and God.

“Jump,” the Buddhist masters say, “and the net will find you....”

Charlie gave us 39 other 'beastly questions' and I only realized decades later that the purpose of the questions was not the 'answers' but the 'inquiry' the questions set in motion. And I realized that by then, Charlie's God had become my God—a God that prefers the struggle to the resolution, the wrestling to the winning, the deep wonderings of paradox to certainty and clarity. For that realization, I am forever grateful.

We also did a liturgics practicum with Charlie—we called it 'play church'. We baptized baby dolls, anointed each other for healing, did marriage services for each other (and since there were 15 men and one woman in my section, we participated in same-sex unions long before our time!) buried shoe boxes and had mock Eucharists. When I was distributing the wafers once, Charlie stuck out his tongue at me. Having grown up in the Pilgrim Holiness Church and the mountain Methodist Church where we hardly ever had communion (and when we did it was sitting in our pews with our little personal crouton and a tiny plastic cup of grape juice) I was startled at his tongue and started laughing.

“Put the wafer on my tongue,” he told me. “Try not to make finger contact with my tongue and then move on....”

The first parish I served was a Black parish. Black Episcopalians tend toward 'high church' where receiving the wafer on you tongue is the norm. So Charlie saved me from enormous embarrassment and endless explanations when, on my first Sunday at St. James, fully half of those coming to communion stuck out their tongues at me.

Just one more thing I have to thank God and Charlie for....

Finally, Charlie probably kept me from getting expelled from VTS even though I graduated second in my class. My assigned adviser was Reginald Fuller, a renowned New Testament scholar who actually co-wrote one of the best books I ever read, The Book of the Acts of God, with G. E. Wright, who we last saw on the sidewalk outside the Semitic Museum at Harvard. But I hadn't had any classes from Dr. Fuller, though I'd met once morning a week with him and his other advisees at his house for worship. Once, he celebrated communion with us in the living room wearing full Eucharistic vestments. Odd, I thought.

He was the shining light of the few Anglo-Catholic students. One morning a week, chapel was the responsibility of students. The high church students convinced Reggie to celebrate a 'high mass', with incense and bells, chanting and bowing. Back in that day, such carryings-on were not tolerated by the low church folks at VTS. Several students and more than one faculty member walked out rather than be present at such Popish Nonsense. I'd never seen such a thing and stayed throughout, mesmerized by the smoke wafting around the chapel, by the eerie cadence of the chanting, by the exaggerated manual acts of Dr. Fuller.

Anyway, he didn't know me well. He didn't understand my ironic kind of charm. He didn't know I was a serious student whose quips and sardonic way of talking simply announced the seriousness with which I too, my calling by the Archangel Mariah and, I hoped, Charlie's God. Besides, it was my job to make the idyllic life on the 'holy hill' in Alexandria a little more interesting....

Dr. Fuller stopped me in the hallway of Aspinwall Hall, the main building at VTS about half-way through the last semester of my senior year.

“Mr. Bradley,” he said in his Oxbridge accent, “we need to make an appointment to discuss the ordinal.”

I knew fair well that was British-speak for 'the ordination service', something taken very seriously by a seminary committed to producing parish priests. But what I said was flip, ironic, smart-assed and, in the end, stupid.

“The Baltimore Ordinal?” I asked, much to the amusement of the students in the hall around us. I always intended to 'amuse' and poke fun at most everything. I succeeded rather well with all save Dr. Fuller, who turned on his heel, redness rising in his face, and made his way to the Dean's office to describe, in what I am sure was flawless English, my impertinence. Not to mention my arrogance and frivolousness. All of which, I must humbly admit these many years later, was 'on spot', as Reggie would have said. And, as I would have said, 'true'.

To graduate from VTS you had to, obviously, have enough credits and not have committed a felony offense. In addition, you had to have your adviser 'sign off' that you were fit to be a priest. Well, my little, inappropriate joke about the Baltimore Ordinal had hardened Dr. Fuller's heart. He would not approve me for graduation—and, therefore, ordination—without an apology, which, in my Young Turk days of trying to prove to Virginia Seminary that they were fools for making me study two years instead of one, I was not willing to give.

During all this, and after pleas from the Dean to apologize, which I refused--”the man has to know how to take a joke,” I remember saying—I contacted double pneumonia and was in Alexandria Hospital, a few blocks from the campus. Incidentally, I had two room-mates in succession at the hospital die on consecutive nights. The psychiatrist came to see me to make sure I wasn't freaking out and took my request to not have any other room-mates seriously. So, for over a week, I laid in bed, had treatments, sucked up gallons of antibiotic laced saline through an IV and wondered if I would graduate.

All my classmates decided to try out their hospital visitation skills until I put in a request not to allow anyone in except my wife. However, Charlie Price charmed his way through the insulation I thought I had and came to my bedside.

After asking about my health and recovery, Charlie said: “Jim, I hope and pray that some day you will come to a moment, a principle, some issue or another that you will be willing to risk your career, your priesthood for. I really hope that.”

Then, after a pause, he added, “Jim this silly fight with Dr. Fuller is NOT that moment....Apologize, get a new adviser and move on.”

He was absolutely right. So, I did apologize, got a new adviser, graduated and was ordained.

So much I owe to Charlie Price. So much. Even more than that.

Looking back, I feel like an utter fool about the whole Reggie-Gate thing. That is an appropriate feeling since I really, really was a fool.

Mary Ann Mixx

Dr. Mixx as the only woman professor at VTS when I was thee. She was a New Testament scholar and, from all accounts, a superior one. Her presence on campus was an oddity to us all—the only female and, save one other, the only un-ordained professor. Once, sitting at the same table at lunch with her and hearing other students discussing Romans, I got on my “I Hate Paul!” rant. Everyone was initally aghast, first that I would 'hate Paul' and, probably more importantly, that I didn't know Paul was one of Dr. Mixx's passions.

I saw her in a hallway a few days later and apologized for my hatred of Paul. I didn't repent it, please notice, but apologized for whatever might have offended her about it. (I wasn't quite the total pain-in-the-ass I claim to have been at VTS!) She waved my apology away, and, instead of saying what most of the professors said when accosted by a student in a hallway: “Well....” while looking at their wrist watch. Instead of that, Dr. Mixx said, “you have any plans for winter term?”

Winter Term was a two week mini-semester after Christmas and before the Spring semester began. There were tedious classes that met every single day for two weeks, too much information too fast, and too much library time all at once for students who had come, long before, to live in Academic time...semesters, not two weeks. I hated the winter term.

“I haven't decided yet,” I told her, delaying as usual, making decisions about classes, or anything, for that matter.

“Do a reading course with me,” she said, “on Paul's letters.”

A 'reading course' was the last refuge of people who didn't really want to go to class. Like me. My heart lept up....

“You want to make me love Paul?” I asked, always suspicious of the motives of people smarter than me.

She laughed. “I don't care one way or the other how you feel about Paul,” she said, still chuckling. “I just thought it would be fun for both of us....”

I was stunned. A VTS professor making a suggestion on the basis of 'fun'! How could I turn that down.

“Me too,” I told her, “I'm always up for some fun.”

Here's what she asked me to do: A. read all Paul's letters and give her a list of the things he said that I hated and have a conversation with her about my list; B. Put the letters in chronological order instead of the order in the New Testament, read them that way, and write a paper about what I learned from the exercise.

The truth is, I only had a faint notion of the reality that Paul's letters aren't in chronological order. So that was a valuable research exercise. What shifted for me as I read Paul in the order of writing was that most of the stuff I hated came in the earlier letters when Paul was harsh and judgmental and boastful. Read in the order in which they were written, I noticed a softening, a mellowing of Paul that I hadn't been able to notice before. As he aged and became certain of what he initially believed (that Jesus was coming back on next Tuesday if not next Monday and that he, Paul would be there to greet him) his tone shifted subtilely. There was more ambiguity, more openness, a new found ability to hedge his bets. That later Paul wasn't the monster I had always experienced.

I still hated him, I told Dr. Mixx in our conversations and my final paper—but not for the same reasons as before. Then, as now, 35 years later, I am sad that Christianity is more “Pauline” than “Jesus-like”. Over the centuries, Paul's thought has insinuated itself into the fabric of the faith and altered the all-embracing, never met a stranger kind of faith Jesus sought to pass along. The church is fussy and strict and patronizing in ways obvious and not so obvious. We are wed to doctrine and swayed by dogma that doesn't have much at all to do with the “suffer the little children to come unto me” attitude of Jesus. When compassion bumps head with canon law, guess which side almost always wins? But what I did learn profoundly is that I need to give Paul a bit more of a pass on things. I considered, back then, what if the letters I have written in my life were all that people knew of who I was and what my trust was in? What I consider now—much more frightening—is what if all that people knew about me was gleaned from going over the e-mails I have written rather than from knowing me face to face?

Horrors! So though I don't yet adore Paul, I cut him a break. And for that I am always grateful to Mary Ann Mixx.

Interestingly enough, something that got me in hot water with the Dean, before the Reggie Fuller Fiasco, was an article I wrote for the “Ambo”, the student newspaper, using the front door of Aspenwall Hall as a metaphor for what was lacking at Virginia Seminary. That door was ten feet tall and solid oak and took a strong person to open. I wrote in my article that it was a “Pauline Door”--a door that represented the rigor and narrowness of Paul. I called for a “Petrine Seminary”, one based on the acknowledged frailties and weaknesses of Peter—the one who doubted, the one who ran away, the one who betrayed. I simply identified more with Peter than Paul.

I got a note in my little mail box in the coffee room to come see the Dean. I went straight to his office and his secretary showed me in. It was morning so he offered tea or coffee. I was wishing it was late afternoon because everything that happened in late afternoon at VTS involved an offer of sherry.

I sat down, sipping my coffee (having fussed with sugar and cream while he fussed with lemon and cream for his tea) and when we were both adequately seen to, the Dean spoke.

“Jim,” he said in his oh-so-sophisticated Tidewater accent (if you aren't familiar with the Tidewater Accent—coastal Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina—you don't understand that it is exactly the accent a Dean of Virginia Seminary should have). “Jim, I am very distressed with your criticism of me in the last issue of the Ambo,” is what he said. His accent made my name sound like “gi-um” and both 'distressed' and “criticism” seemed to have gained a syllable as well. But it is a mesmerizing sound, soothing and soft and sophisticated in the way that mint juleps and magnolias and the architecture of Monticello is sophisticated.

“Dean,” I said in an accent that he would recognize as Appalachian, coal-miner son, trailer-trash, hillbilly, “I wasn't criticizing you, I was criticizing the Seminary.”

He took a delicate sip of his tea. Then he said words, though in one of the most delightful of all American accents, that chilled me to the bones and sinews.

“Jim,” he said slowly, “I AM Virginia Seminary.” Then he went on to explain how such a seeming impossibility could be so.

The accent was lulling me into sleep or compliance. It was like the 'Turkish taffy' the White Witch offered the children who went to Narnia. I was a stranger in a strange land. I put my almost full cup of coffee down on the little table between our two wing chairs. I reached over, interrupting him, to shake his hand.

“Dean,” I said, standing up, moving toward the door of his office, “I'll never do it again. I promise you that.”

Something I know to the depths of my being is this: never try to reason or argue with a man who thinks he's a seminary or any other major institution, for that matter.

David Scott

Speaking of 'reading courses', I wanted to have one for the last semester of my Senior year. I didn't want to take four classes, as was expected and required. I even had a topic. I wanted to write a paper about the theology of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. I took my ideas to the usual suspects—the people I thought would buy into my getting out of a class. None of them wanted any part of it, more I think, because they only vaguely knew who Kurt Vonnegut was than because they didn't think it might be an interesting topic. Finally, I asked David Scott, one of the most conservative of the members of the faculty. And much to my surprise (probably his too) he agreed although he didn't even 'vaguely' know who Kurt Vonnegut was!

So David read five of Vonnegut's novels just so he could talk with me about the writer's 'theology'. Then he read my rather lengthy final paper. I wish I had a copy of it except I almost certainly remember it as more insightful, ground-breaking and brilliant than it actually was....

Here's the thing: a teacher who is willing to read five novels he would have never otherwise read in order to teach and evaluate a student's work—well, I don't know what is more committed to education than that. Reminds me of the character from the Canterbury Tales who would 'gladly learn and gladly teach'. Though we didn't agree on much of anything (besides, eventually, that Vonnegut was a very theological writer!), David Scott won my heart.

(Once in an ethics class, David suggested that masturbation could lead to loss of fine motor skills and most every student in the room dropped their pencils. Even though that actually happened, David had my heart. And God bless his....)

Fighting with Fitz

Fitzsimmons Allison was even more conservative than David Scott. When he left VTS it was to become Rector of St. James in Manhattan, the quintessential 'low church' of New York City. Then he became Bishop of South Carolina. If you know anything about the Episcopal Church, you realize being Bishop of South Carolina is theologically akin to being a bishop in the Global South. South Carolina rather redefines 'conservative' in the Episcopal Church. Fitz was the only other member of the staff besides the Dean who objected to my comparison of the front door of Aspenwall Hall and the theology of St. Paul to my preference for a door that would open easily and the theology to be derived from the accounts of Peter in the gospels.

We began to exchange opinions in the pages of the Ambo. I still have, somewhere, copies of what I wrote and what Fitz wrote in reply and what I wrote in reply to his reply and what he wrote in reply to my reply to his reply. Just like the previous sentence, all of our writings were rather discombobulated and not very interesting. It certainly wasn't up to what a debate between Calvin and Luther might have been like! It was a smart-ass student and an equally, though better educated, smart-ass professor throwing bricks at each others' glass houses. I'm too embarrassed about how lame my words and arguments were to even share them with you. I'm sure, from the perspective of all these years, Fitz would feel the same.

What our disagreement boiled down to was a vastly different view of 'human nature'. But isn't that always so in debates between the right and the left, conservatives and liberals, or, as we now call them in the Episcopal Church—Orthodox and Progressive. I was (and am) of the theological persuasion that we human beings are created in the image and likeness of God and just a little lower than the angels. Fitz contended that the whole point of the 'Fall' was true and human beings, not bound by rules, doctrine and dogma were not much above odious little vermin. I exaggerate both our positions, but you get the point.

I had suggested that a seminary with a 'high view' of human nature—which, coming from a Pilgrim Holiness background, I considered 'distinctly Anglican'--wouldn't need grades because everyone, for the love of learning and enlightened self-interest, would work just as hard without the threat of grades. Fitz contended that just because some people might indeed 'not need grades', the flotsam and jetsam of the student body wouldn't do anything but mess around and not study if there weren't grades to keep them in line.

Well, you can see from that little exchange that our debate wasn't a dialog of Plato. We eventually agreed to disagree, but I look back and thank him both for arguing with me and giving me credit by considering me a worthy opponent for argument.

I still believe I'm right about the being of human beings. Given all the considerations and pains and suffering of life, most people are better than we could otherwise expect them to be. Fits eventually left the Episcopal Church to be part of the movement associated with the ultra-orthodox theology of the Anglican Communion's Global South. So, true to form, he still believed he was right too.

What his gift to me was is the knowledge that people of vastly different views CAN agree to disagree and respect each other in the midst of their disagreements. There's not enough of that around these days in the church, or, for that matter, in the country or in the world. Respecting the integrity of you avowed opponent changes the playing field, makes it a place of honor rather than bitterness and unrequited anger.

As I said, there's not enough of that around these days, anywhere.

Jess, dear Jess

Jess Trotter was the dearest man you can ever imagine—probably more 'dear' than you have imagined or could imagine. He was a deeply spiritual Christian, a social activist of no mean repute and a father or grandfather figure to us all. He was my field work colloquium leader. Field work (which I did for two years at Christ Church, Capitol Hill) was a major part of the theological education at VTS when I was there. I pray it still is. Field work—actually being present to a real life parish or a ministry setting while in seminary—is the anchor that holds a theological education to this world and keeps the students from drifting off into an oh, so fascinating alternative reality of 'God Talk' devoid of what is so in the actual world. In my time as a parish priest, I have supervised 21 seminarians in their field work. Although those 21 young men and women taught me much more than I ever could have taught them about anything, I was responsible for grounding them in the 'real world' of church while they were still comfortably and safely ensconced in the womb that is a Seminary.

There is a great deal I could tell you about Jess. He was a priest and a man who had known great personal suffering. And unlike most suffering—which is mindless and nonsensical—the suffering Jess knew actually was salvific, actually made him a better man, a better priest, a better friend and guide. But beyond all that, he was as wise as a Buddhist Master, as learn-ed as a medieval scholastic, as kind as a loving mother, as gentle as a spring breeze in Alexandria, Virginia. Jess was a mentor, friend and brother to all the seminarians who fell under his spell. I would have sailed the North Atlantic in February if he told me to. I would even go into Washington D.C. And sit on the steps of St. Paul's K Street for two hours and look every person who passed in the eyes if he told me to.

Actually, it was that last thing—sitting on K Street, making eye contact with every person who passed that he suggested to me that I do. “And when you look at them,” he instructed me, “say to yourself these words, 'that is the One Christ died for', and if you can, begin to believe it.”

It is astonishing to me that I have had eleven years of education beyond high school. Eleven years of study, four degrees, and I all of that, the most valuable and useful lesson I learned took place in a two hour span, sitting on some steps of a church on K Street in Washington, D. C. on a May afternoon when I looked hundreds of people in the eye—members of Congress perhaps, federal workers, lawyers and doctors, clerks and secretaries, an insurance agent, several police officers, military folks in uniform, a mail carrier, delivery people, students, children, street people, illegal aliens, drug dealers, a prostitute or two I imagine, people black and brown and white and Asian, people who worked in the embassies around the city, harried mothers, people cheating on their spouses, the unemployed, the elderly, the infirm, people on crutches and in wheel chairs, rich people and poor people, people with every hue of hair and curl and people with no hair at all, a veritable panoply of the wanderers on the earth that is the human race. And each one I saw, I told myself, “this is the one, the very one, for whom Christ died.” I said that so many times, with such hope that I would believe it, that I came to understand the deeper Truth Jess was teaching in his gentle, unassuming way—each face I saw was, in a way beyond all believing, a Face of God.

I owe so many people—many of whom I haven't mentioned—so much from those years at Harvard and VTS. So many to whom I owe so much. But none more probably or more profoundly than I owe Jess.

To this day, like it or not (and often I don't like it!) I cannot look another human being in the eye and not say “This is the One—the very One—for whom Christ died”. And, because I realized what the point of the exercise was, finally, I know each face I see is, without doubt, one of the myriad faces of God, Charlie's God and Jess' God.