Real Men Pee Outside
I had a classmate in seminary who, for some quirky reason, wouldn't go
to the bathroom in someone else's house. So, I'd encounter him out in
the bushes around the 'garden apartments' we all lived in around
Alexandria. Once I watched him pee off a balcony.
For most of human history, there were no bathrooms inside. For much of the world, there still isn't.
Ponder,
I'd encourage you, that by the accident of your birth, you have had
indoor plumbing you're whole life when 99% of the people who have ever
lived and probably 75% of the people alive today, don't.
I used
to have to go to my grandmother's outhouse when I was there in
Conklintown. It had two seats though I never shared it. And, yes, there
were Sears catalogs there to, you know, do the paper work.
I've seen signs in bathrooms that said "The Business isn't finished until the paper work is done."
Ponder
this: most of the people on the planet don't ordinarily use toilet
paper. A big reason why many cultures find it vile if someone eats with
their left hand. Oh, by the way, a lot of the people on the planet don't
eat with forks and spoon and knives. They eat with their hands--or at
least the right hand.
Steve Arbogast, a seminarian I worked with,
spent several years in the bush in west Africa teaching. He told me the
worst part of his reentry into American culture was when he went into a
Super Stop and Shop and walked down the paper aisle. The shear amount
of toilet tissue sent him out of the store to his car. For his time in
Africa, toilet paper had been an instrument of barter better than
American dollars or Euros.
In the winter, walking from my
grandmother's house down to the 'two seater', you passed the strawberry
patch, the chicken coop and the storage shed. You don't want an outhouse
too close to your house after all. Cold nights the chickens and a
couple of ducks would be all assembled around the edges of the outhouse.
Decomposing human waste gives off heat, after all. So you'd have to
shoo them away with your feet even to go into the outhouse.
It might be appropriate to give thanks for whatever bathrooms you have in your house and for toilet paper.
And,
it is kind of manly to pee outside. I'd never pee off our deck...not
me...never...don't even think for a moment...even in the dark.....
The Archangel Mariah
The questions that drives people in seminary crazy is this: "Why do you want to be a priest?"
There
are several reasons that question so bedevils those studying for holy
orders. First of all, everyone and their cousin has asked you that ever
since the first moment you imagined it might be a possibility--you being
a priest and all. Parish priests, parish discernment committees,
bishops, commissions on ministry, standing committees, admission
committees, seminary professors, strangers you meet at cocktail
parties--there is no end to the people wanting to know why you want to
be a priest.
A second reason is that a call to be a priest is
primarily that: a Call from God to you. It's a deeply personal and
profoundly important event or series of events. There is, even in his
era of 'tell all', some needs for privacy. If what God has to say to you
in your heart of hearts isn't one of those things you have a right to
keep to yourself, then what is?
But finally, the most prominent
reason nobody in seminary wants to answer that question is that, on the
deepest level, you don't have a clue! For most of the priests I
know--not all, certainly, but most--the 'call to priesthood' was as
complex as a jet engine. There are lots of parts to it, most of which
can't be extricated or distinguished from the parts right next to them
or at the other end of the whole contraption. I doubt that there are
many people who can explain all the intricacies of a jet engine. The
same is true, it seems to me, about a call to ordination.
I once
witnessed one of my seminary classmates lose it when asked the question.
We were at some reception or another at Virginia Seminary and a
well-meaning, sincere woman was talking with him and asked, "Why do you
want to be a priest?"
He took a gulp of sherry and said: "One
night I was sleeping naked with my window open during a thunderstorm.
(Being southern he said 'necked' instead of 'naked') "And lightening
came in my window, struck me on the genitals and didn't kill me....It
was either become a priest or move to Tibet."
I swear this really happened.
Once the woman recovered from apoplexy, she said, in a gentle Tidewater accent, "I imagine that doesn't happen often."
"Only once to me," my friend said, looking around for more sherry.
Another
friend, Scott, when he was a seminarian at Yale working with me at St.
Paul's, New Haven, told me he was about to lose this mind with the
Standing Committee of the Diocese of West Virginia.
"No matter
how many times I try to tell them," he said, "or how many different
ways...they still ask me why I want to be a priest."
"Why don't you tell them you want to be
magic ?" I asked.
Scott laughed. "Are you crazy?" he said.
"Who knows," I told him, "it might shut them up."
After
I preached at his ordination, Scott gave e a wondrous pen and ink
sketch he'd based on 'being magic'. It's on a shelf in this little
office where I'm writing. I still love it, two decades later.
I
don't have to resort to tales of lightening storms or to the very clever
longing to be magic. I know why I decided to be a priest. The sky
didn't open up. I didn't hear God's voice speaking to me out loud and in
English. It was simpler and yet more marvelous than any of that.
I was visited by the Archangel Mariah.
*
Mariah
was the only member of St. Gabrial's Mission, the campus ministry at
West Virginia University back in the 60's and 70's, who was older than
35, besides our priest Snork Roberts. Mariah was 82.
St.
Gabrial's had a ministry of hosting international students in the
basement of Trinity Church on Friday nights for games and food and
companionship. Mariah was the source of that ministry. That's one reason
she came to St. Gabe's. The other reason is she wanted to be with young
people. She couldn't stand stuffiness in any guise. The three-piece
suits and women in hats at Trinity's services were to much for her. She
preferred the company of college students and week-end hippies.
I
strain to remember her over more than 35 years of memories. She was a
tiny woman--no more than 5'2" and most likely weighed about 90 pounds
fully-clothed and soaking wet. She had wild gray hair that she
wore
tied back as best she could. And there was her face: her eyes were an
indescribable color--green, blue, gray in different lights--and
practically lost in the most remarkable set of smile wrinkles I've ever
seen. Mariah smiled and laughed so much that she tended to look a tad
Asian--there were slits for her eyes to shine through. She had all her
own teeth and showed them off smiling and laughing. Her face, in spite
of her age, was actually 'girlish', elfin, like the face of a loris or
lemur--some exotic animal whose name begins with an 'l'.
Mariah's
passion (what Joseph Campbell would have called her 'bliss') was the
international students at WVU. Every Friday night you could find her in
Trinity's undercroft playing cards and listening, playing backgammon and
listening, playing some obscure board game and listening. Always
playing. Always listening to the young people from faraway places with
strange sounding names. WVU had a remarkable engineering program so
their were hundreds of students from developing countries studying in
the part of the middle of no where called Morgantown, West Virginia. One
of the informal courses they all had to study was Culture Shock. In the
late 1960's there were no ethnic enclaves in Morgantown, unless you
considered Rednecks or Fraternity Brats ethnic groups. Those students
from Africa, Asia, Central Europe and the Middle East had no contacts
with their homelands besides each other. No internet back then and
international calls were still ridiculously expensive. It wasn't like
living in New York or DC. Morgantown was referred to by many of the
students--many of whom, like me, were from the sticks to begin with--as
'MorganHole'.
At that time there wasn't much in Morgantown for
anyone, much less people thousands of miles from home. And nobody much
was interested in the well-being of those foreign students except
Mariah. Mariah was interested in them with a vengence.
She
welcomed them into Trinity's basement, into her home and into her vast,
expansive heart. She got them to write home for recipes and tried to
reproduce them as best she could from the local Kroger's selection of
food and spices. She learned enough of each of their languages so she
could greet each of them as they would be greeted at home. She matched
them up with people at the University and in town--all of whom she
seemed to know--who might have some faint connection or interest in
Afghanistan or Bulgaria or Korea or where ever they were from. She was a
one woman network of 'connections for those folks so far from home,
those strangers in a strange land.
tThere
was something almost Biblical in her commitment to the strangers in our
midst. She would welcome them all and do any and every thing possible
to make them a little less anxious about finding themselves plunked down
in such a place as Morgantown. Mariah was sometimes the victim of those
she befriended. Being from a different culture and far from home
doesn't make everyone trustworthy. If there is a lesson to be learned
from working with any minority group--racial, cultural, economic,
etc.--it is this: People, so far as I've been able to discern, are, in
the end, 'just People'. We all share the same deep-down 'being of human
beings'. The international students Mariah dedicated her energy to were
no different than the outsiders and oddballs of the student body that
Snork loved and cared for--some of them will rip you off big time!
The
Lord only knows how much money Mariah parceled out to foreign students.
And surely only the Lord knows how much of that money could have just
as well been tossed off the bridge that crossed Cheat Lake outside of
town. But she never fretted about it. That what she told me when I spoke
to her after seeing $100 or so pass from her hand to the hand of a
Nigerian I knew loved to gamble.
"Never mind," Mariah told me, "I'll just let God sort it all out...."
At
one level that is ultimate foolishness. On another, deeper level, it
may just be one of the best ways possible to live a life. And that,
above all, was what Mariah was good at--living a wonderful life.
After
I finished my MTS from Harvard Divinity School, I worked as a Social
Worker. Bern and I lived on the third floor of a house down a charming
brick street in Morgantown. During our time there, the home base for St.
Gabrial's Wednesday evening Eucharists was the attic of that house,
accessible only from our apartment We would gather up there--20 or 30 of
us--and celebrate the holy mysteries seated on the unpainted floor.
When we passed the peace there was always the danger of getting a
concussion from smacking your noggin on the exposed joints and beams. It
was a dimly lit, uncomfortable space, but it served quite nicely as the
upper room of St. Gabe's.
It was after one of those outrageously
informal communions that Mariah, who I had already determined was a
saint (St. Mariah of the Nations) revealed herself as an Archangel, at
least. After Mass--if I can dream of calling our attic worship that--we
would all retreat down the stairs to the apartment where Bern and I
lived. There was lots of food. People brought cookies and brownies
(often with a special ingredient) cheese and bread, fruit both fresh and
dried, nuts and seeds and we'd have some feasting. Plus there was
always a lot of wine. Some of the St. Gabe's regulars would go down to
the front porch to smoke a joint--not normal, I suppose, for most
Episcopal coffee hours.
I was in the kitchen with Mariah. She'd
managed to get me there alone by some miracle since people tended to
clump around her wherever she was. There was something about how well
she tended to listen to whatever nonsense you had to say that made her a
people magnet. But we were alone in the kitchen when she said to me,
balancing her wine glass and a handful of cheese with remarkable grace
for somewhere her age, "When are you going back to seminary and getting
ordained?"
I was three glasses of wine and a trip to the porch
past whatever state of sober grace the Body and Blood of Christ had
provided me up in the attic. I was then, as I am to some extent today, a
'smart ass'. Ironic and Sardonic were my two middle names in those
days. I can still be depended upon to lower or deflate whatever serious
conversation I come upon. "Nothing serious or sacred' has been my motto
most of my life. I never realized how annoying that can be until my son
demonstrated, in his teen years, a genetic predisposition to that same
world view.
So, in my cups, you might say, I replied in a typical smart-ass way.
"My dear Mariah," I said, "I'll go back to seminary and get ordained when I get a personal message from God Almighty."
She
smiled that smile that made her eyes almost disappear and, after a
healthy drink of what I assure you was bad wine--we drank only that
vintage in those days--said words that changed my life forever.
"Jim," she said, "who the hell do you think sent me and told me what to say?"
Never,
before or after, did such a word as 'hell' pass through Mariah's
sainted lips. She was never even mildly profane. I stared at her,
suddenly as sober as a Morman or a Muslim--or both at the same time.
She
finished her cheese, put her wine glass in the sink and embraced me. I
held her like a fragile bird. She kissed my cheek and whispered in my
ear, "Well, you've gotten your message...."
She left me alone in
my kitchen with dry ice in my veins and some large mammal's paw
clutching my heart. I found it hard to breathe. Two trips to the porch
and a full juice glass of the Wild Turkey I kept hidden under the sink
on Wednesday nights changed nothing.
I called the bishop the next
morning. Only after I had an appointment scheduled with him could I
tell Bern what had happened and breathe naturally again.
*
When
Mariah died a few months later, I was one of her pallbearers. She was
light as air for us to carry--three international students and three
members of St. Gabe's. Archangels don't weigh much. The are mostly
feathers and Spirit. She was buried from Trinity Church. Snork did the
service and did her prould in his homily of thanksgiving for so rare a
soul. I was registered for seminary by then. Bern was up in New York
acting in an off Broadway show. We would meet up in Alexandria in
September. Mariah's granddaughter, Clara, who was a member of St. Gabe's
as well, embraced me at the reception following the funeral. It was in
the basement of Trinity where Mariah had spent so many Friday nights.
Many of the foreign students brought ethnic food. Clara told me Mariah
asked about me on the day she died. She wanted to know if Clara knew
anything about me and seminary. I'd left my admission letter with Snork
and he showed it to Clara. I tried to call Mariah but she was too ill to
speak on the phone, but Clara told her the news.
Clara told me Mariah smiled they eye disappearing smile when she heard. She smiled through great pain.
"You tell Jim I told him so," she said to Clara and Clara passed that on to me.
Her last words to me: "I told you so."
That works. That will do nicely.
