un-numbered chapter

(This is actually a chapter I wrote when my friend and editor, Ann, asked me why Bern didn't figure more prominently in my memories of priesthood. Here's why.)

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 Ken. 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 49 years and have been married

43 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. Some of the most 'holy' moments of my life were watching Bern on stage, seeing the wonder of her talent and the depth of her gift, knowing that remarkable talent was the person I loved. “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 me?”

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 engaged to 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 (and sometimes their 4 year old sister) 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 was, for a while, considering leaving Group. It wasn't satisfying her the way it has for over two decades. It wasn't what she needs or wanted or longed for in terms of support and listening and simply 'being there' with her. And I was horrified. It was 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 had was 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 44 years. Jesus Christ, four decades and four 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 over a decade or more, 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—43 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.

As I write

As I write (and no matter what the blog says, I'm writing on Eastern Daylight time, not Pacific Daylight Time, which is where I'm stuck in a three hour hole) Josh and Cathy and our three granddaughters and Laura, their rescue pit bull are an hour or more away, coming toward us.

Bern had made these three fairy houses for the girls. They are already down at the back of our back yard in shade (or darkness now) and she either made or bought all these things to go with them, so they can make a fairy garden for the house.

I wish I could take a picture of it all and send it to you--but that's beyond my technical skill. It is simply amazing. Bern, in case you don't know, was, for 14 years, the coordinator of the Children's Co-Op in New Haven--a day care where parents did all the work and Bern, we, coordinated them!

So she is amazing with children. She always invents amazing stuff for the girls when they arrive. I think they'll be down at the end of the yard much of the time they're here--it's just magical, what Bern has created for them.

I look so forward with some time with m;y son and his wife, as well as the girls. They're both about to be 40--Cathy already is, Josh in August. Both my parents were dead when I was 40. I wish I'd had time to spend with them as a really grown up person.

Being with our children is magical. They can be both our 'babies' and grown ups with stuff to teach us. I like that...I like that a lot.

Happy 4th of July, if I don't get back in the next couple of granddaughter days....

Chapter 9

9. Some People (ii)

LITTLE SAINT JASON

When I was at St. Paul’s in New Haven, one of my neighbors stopped me on the street and asked, “Do you do baptisms?” She and her husband lived in a handsome brownstone on the park—they were a “Yale couple”, she was Vice-President of something and he was a professor of economics. They were the ultimate “yuppies”—a term that still meant something in the 80’s. She was tall, immaculately dressed for success and quite beautiful, blonde and willowy. But she wore her hair pulled back severely and horned rimmed glasses she may or may not have needed. (I met several women who worked in big jobs for Yale who wore clear glass in unflattering frames. One actually told me it was to tell people, “I may be pretty, but I’m smart….”) She was wearing a pale gray, pinstripe suit and a pink blouse buttoned to the neck with one of those floppy little ties that are bow-ties on estrogen. But her shoes, I remember noticing (she was beautiful, after all!) were extremely high heels with almost no visible means of keeping them on her feet. Really sexy, out of character shoes....She hadn’t given in to the corporate image ultimately…her shoes were fiercely feminine.

I allowed that I had been known to “do” baptisms from time to time and she invited me to come ‘around to our house tonight for a drink…5:30 suit you?'

I was fascinated. I knew Donna and her husband, Phil, from the park. Our daughter was about their son’s age—5 maybe—and they sometimes chased each other in the park while everyone around Wooster Square let their dogs off lead to run and poop. But I’d never been invited to their house before. I could hardly wait.

When we’d settled in with our drinks (scotch for Phil, a Manhattan for Donna and white wine for me) I was offered hors devours more exotic than either of them should have time to make before my arrival and we did Wooster Square small talk. Phil, even taller than Donna and nearly as good looking, was a New Haven clone of “Mr. Chips”—casually elegant and tweedy and yet a little awkward all at the same time. He obviously needed his glasses—in fact had two pair with those bands that hold them like long necklaces around your neck. One for distance and one for reading, I imagined, wondering if it were vanity or drama that prevented him from just getting bifocals—but then, I’m always hard on people who ‘come from money’. Their house made no secret that one—perhaps both of them—came from money. Everything was understated but expensive from the rugs to the lamps to the properly worn leather couch and chairs to the antique table I sat my glass on and then picked up in horror and looked around for a coaster.

“Go ahead and set it there,” Donna said. “It was my grandmother’s so it’s really old.” The people who come from “real money” are casual about such things, those who got rich on their own are much less relaxed about glass rings on a table worth thousands. After some small talk about the weather (a pleasant September, better than last year) and the neighborhood (“did you know the Mason’s moved to Europe—Mark’s doing a post-doc in France”) we finally got down to business.

“We don’t come to church,” Phil began, showing his humility, “but we are Episcopalians….We were married in the Cathedral in Chicago. And both our parents are serious Episcopalians and they’re all coming out for Thanksgiving….”

Little Jason hadn’t been baptized (“our fault,” Donna said, “totally”—as if it could have been Jason’s fault or the fault of Sarah, their AKC standard poodle) and there was going to be hell to pay to Grand-pop and Grand-mom and Granny and Gramps come turkey day. Before they began to grovel, which they would have, I told them I’d be delighted to baptize Jason, which I was. And we started talking about dates and times, settling on the Sunday after Thanksgiving when the grandparents on both sides could be there. All I asked them to do was come to church a few times, just so they’d be familiar with the racially and socially diverse parish of St. Paul’s and to let me talk with them…and Jason…about baptism for a few hours soon.

They were overjoyed, called Jason down with his nanny, a 20 something au per from France who was teaching Jason French as well as looking after him and taking some classes from Yale on their dime. (I thought I had maybe underestimated the money they came from!) I knew Jason of course, and he knew me as “Mimi’s dad” and we talked briefly about coming to church and talking about baptism. Later mom and dad and Jason spent several hours with me. Phil, of course, and Donna to only a slightly lesser degree, knew the ins and outs of liturgy and church history and the rich myriad of symbols that made up baptism. Jason asked some of those classic kid questions: “will the water be cold or hot?” “Will I have to say anything?” “Will Jesus be there?”

I told them, at some point, that baptism, to my theology, was admission to communion and Jason should receive communion with them on his baptismal day. Donna was a bit horrified: “But he isn’t old enough to ‘understand’ it,” she said. I thought for a moment and replied, “If ‘understanding’ it is a prerequisite, then I shouldn’t receive it either….” It was a hard sell but Jason won the day: “I want to, Mommy,” he said to Donna and the deal was made.

True to their word, Donna, Phil and Jason became fixtures on the third row near the pulpit. From time to time Brigitte would come with them and all of them fit in just fine—a little better dressed than most, but open and friendly and involved. During that time I came, once more, face to face with my devotion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that “the rich are not like you and me.” I’ve never quite felt comfortable around the moneyed of the world—certainly both a character flaw and a disadvantage for rapid advancement in the Episcopal Church! Donna and Phil were ‘just like me’—we had many of the same interests and opinions. And Jason was ‘just a kid’ dressed in clothes from Barney’s instead of Sears. I came to like them a lot, which prepared me to like their parents as well. Jason’s two grandfathers were cut from the same mold—successful, keen and most likely ruthless Mid-Western business men who never the less possessed the shy, inviting charm of people from the center of the country. The grandmothers were different—Donna’s mom was an older version of her: stylish, lovely, cultured. But Phil’s mother was like someone Garrison Keiler would make up and put in Lake Woebegone. She was a tad over-weight with a broad, smiling face, gray hair in a bun and simple clothing. She would have been very comfortable in an apron puttering around the house.

They were all delighted that Jason, as his paternal grandmother put it, “was finally getting dunked.” And on the day of the baptism they were all radiant and joyful. The baptism went fine—Jason answered loudly when I asked him if he desired to be baptized and stepped up on the little stool I’d dug out to lean his head over the font with perfect grace. But the real grace came when the family, led by Jason, came up to receive communion. Jason received the wafer and carefully, precisely dipped it half-way into the wine before consuming it. Then he said, “thank you” to the chalicist and started back to his seat between the lines of people waiting for the rail.

He stopped beside the first person he passed and said, politely, “I just got the Body of Christ.” That person nodded slightly but tried to remain solemn, just the way we should be on the way to the greatest party ever thrown! So, Jason was a little louder with the next person and louder still with the one after that. By then, the lack of response began to confuse and annoy him and he started pulling on pants legs and skirts: “I just got the Body of Christ!” he said to each person he passed. Donna’s father got to him first and picked him up, looking back embarrassingly at me. Jason was trying to get free from his grandfather’s embrace…there were lots more people to tell about what had just occurred.

I stopped the service right there, asking the organist to stop playing and pointing to Jason in the arms of his grandfather.

“Do you hear what he’s telling you?” I said, softly. “Can you begin to understand what waits for you up here? Jason understands and he’s telling you to run to this table because the mystery and wonder here is more than you imagine…more than you can imagine….”

For months after that, I was told, people going back from communion would lean over and whisper to their friends, “Guess what I just got?” And for a while the spirit of Jason’s understanding astonished us all.

(I had wondered if having Jason ‘dunked’ would be the end of the family’s church going. I wouldn’t have been upset if it had, since the sacrament was valid and real and ‘objective’. But they kept coming for a few months until Donna was offered a position in the President’s office at Northwestern and Phil was asked to teach at the University of Chicago. The jobs were so good they were leaving at the end of first semester. I was sad to see them go, but it gave me a little rush to know that someone had used Yale as a ‘stepping stone’ to what they really wanted!

I went down the day they moved and watched the movers carefully empty the house of beautiful, valuable things. Donna, so unlike her, was dressed in faded jeans and one of Phil’s J. Crew white shirts. Her hair was a mess and she had on neither makeup nor glasses. She hugged me and told me I could find Phil and Jason and the dog and the nanny over in the park. Before I went to say good-bye to them, she said, “did we tell you that Jason’s favorite game now is playing priest? He baptizes G. I. Joe daily and gives us communion ever so often. He wears one of Phil’s tee-shirts and puts one of his ties around his neck. It’s really very sweet.” She said it was ‘sweet’ but she looked worried.

“It’s just a phase,” I told her, “like me.”

“You’re in a ‘phase’?” asked, smiling.

“Yeal,” I said, “but mine came late and has stayed for a while.”

Then I went to find my friends and say goodbye.)

BUTTERFLY (God bless him…)

I’ve changed people’s names up to now, but there is no way to do that with Butterfly. I considered calling him “Moth” or “Bumblebee” or “Hummingbird”, but none of those or any other would do justice to who and what he was. He was Butterfly—I’ll change his ‘real’ name to Michael Caruso from what it was…but that (or his ‘real’ name) does not do him justice. He was Butterfly. He signed his ‘art work’ Papillon, which was his misspelling of the French for Butterfly—“Papillion”. So even he couldn’t come up with a name that worked besides the one he was: Butterfly.

He was 6’6” tall and probably weighed 150 pounds—10 pounds of which was the jewelry he wore around his neck and in his ears. He told me he had a total of 27 earrings, 13 on the right ear and 14 on the left. I never counted, I simply took his word for it. And most of the earrings were of—you guessed it—butterflies. He also wore dozens of ring bracelets on each arm and a ring on every finger of both hands, including his thumb. And bling around his neck before ‘bling’ was the word for it—countless chains and necklaces. And all of that, like his earrings, had a definite theme: butterflies. I cannot imagine where he found so much bad jewelry with butterflies on it. I know he didn’t buy it on E-Bay since he had neither a computer nor money. But over the years of his life, he had found all this stuff and covered himself with it. There is a scene in a novel by George MacDonald, a writer who was a friend of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, where a character is completely enveloped by a flock (is that the right term?) of Monarch butterflies. Every inch of his body is, for a moment or two, covered by butterflies. I’m sorry I never found that passage and shared it with the Papillion I knew. He would have danced around the room—all arms and legs and jewelry—with delight and wonder just reading about an event like that. He WAS Butterfly.

He was long since a character around down-town Waterbury before I arrived. Eccentric doesn’t do the job in describing him. Neither does odd, odd-ball, unconventional, unusual, peculiar, strange or weird, which were the synonyms my computer’s thesaurus gave me for ‘eccentric’. I won’t even bother going to Roget’s. Every word there will apply but not describe. He usually wore a Mohawk which revealed a huge gash on the back of his head.

“Where’d you get that scar, Butterfly?” I asked.

“When I was in prison,” he said, “I sort of incited a riot.”

“Where were you in prison?”

“Cal-i-for-ni-a. ‘California there I was, til I got arrested by the fuzz….’ He danced around my office where we were talking.

“What were you in prison for?”

“Weed, Reefer. Possession is the devil’s workshop….” He showed my how to inhale and hold it while offering me his imaginary joint. The ones he’s had earlier weren’t imaginary. I could smell it across the room.

“That’s ‘an idle mind’,” I told him.

“What is?” He continued smoking his non-existence marijuana.

“And idle mind is the devil’s workshop….”

“I had one of them too,” he cackled, moving again. He was hopelessly ADD, he couldn’t sit still for a minute. “It was the 60’s, man….”

“How long did you serve?” I asked.

“Eight years.”

I was astonished. “Eight years for possession of marijuana? In California? In the 60’s? Everyone would have been in prision….”

Butterfly smiled at me and shook his head, “I possessed 50 acres,” he said.

And he was as flamboyantly homosexual as anyone I ever met. Gay and lesbian folks I knew gave him wide berth. He wore skin tight clothes, his shirt open to the navel (“so you can see my jewelry,” he told me when I asked him why he didn’t button his shirt at least a little) and always had glitter all over his face and head and chest. He wore lots of eyeliner and mascara but drew the line at lip-stick. “Only faggots wear lipstick,” he told me once, letting me in on his make-up philosophy, “and I’m not a faggot—I’m a god-damn screaming queer….”

Did I leave out the tattoos? Dozens and dozens of tattoos on every part of his body you could see—and during the summer, when he wore short shorts, there was lots of skin to see. Most all of them were, you probably guessed, butterflies. When I asked him why he became “Butterfly” he grew serious for one of the few times I knew him and started talking in a soft, almost dreamy voice, unlike his usually rapid staccato falsetto. “When I was a boy,” he told me, “I knew ‘something was wrong’ with me. Everyone said it when they thought I couldn’t hear them. I was strange and freakish and didn’t do well in school and didn’t have any friends. I used to wonder what I’d ‘rather’ be than me. Then one day, I watched a butterfly out in the yard for about an hour. It didn’t go in a straight line. It was so beautiful. It could flit and it could soar. After a while it came and landed on my face and it’s little feet were sticky and so tiny, like eyelashes. I was in love.”

I sat in his silence, fascinated and not a little moved by his story. After a few moments he leaped up from the couch where he was sitting and started dancing around my office. “It’s the flitting part I like best!”

A remarkable thing was how many people were genuinely fond of Butterfly. There was something childlike below the weirdness—something playful and touching and inviting. The two women who ran the Council of Churches—a tough old swamp Yankee and the sweet, rural wife of the American Baptist minister in town both adored him. So did the nun—street smart and savvy—who was the director of the social service agency housed across the street from St. John’s in the First Congregational Church. So did most of the members of the parish—he actually was a communicant though his attention deficit kept him from sitting through a whole service. The oddest couple of his relationships was with Allie, a conservative Republican in her early 30’s who was a member of the American Rifle Association and carried a little snub-nose 38 in her purse at all times. Allie and Butterfly were always talking after church and one day, when Allie had told me she was pregnant, Butterfly came running up to me with her in tow. He embraced her—she was short and her head barely reached his nipples, which of course you could see because his shirt was unbuttoned—“Allie’s got a bun in the oven!” Butterfly announced loudly. “I’m going to be a fairy god-mother….” They looked at each other with genuine devotion and then he pressed her face against his bling.

It’s not that Butterfly wasn’t a problem. He was stoned entirely too much and so promiscuous that it made my eyes ache. I actually feared for him because he’d take about any man he found home. And he had a temper. His primary adversary was Justine, the local shopping cart lady, who hung out at most of the downtown churches the way Butterfly did. She’s a whole story in herself, but they were like the proverbial oil and water. I’d throw both of them off the property for a day or two with regularity. They couldn’t be near each other without fighting about something. Once, during a Tuesday morning Eucharist with the Clericus group, I heard them out in the hall way screaming like banshees at each other with remarkable combinations of profanity. I was half way through the prayer of consecration, but the din was so disturbing that I thought one of them might kill the other. To tell the truth, at that moment, I wished they were the gingham dog and calico cat and would simply tear each other to pieces.

I took off the stole I was wearing, dropped it around one of the other priest’s neck and went to scold the children. I was on them like stink on…well, you know. I got between them and screamed them into silence. “Why has God sent the two of you to me?” I yelled. They looked at me as if I were an alien from a distant galaxy. Then I banished them from the building for two days and went back to receive the sacrament I had only half-blessed.

But the real story—the story that intrigues, delights and haunts me to this day—was Butterfly and Millicent. Millicent was an elderly woman who lived in one of the less fancy “rest homes” that dot any city the size of Waterbury. We, somehow, as a culture, have to warehouse the elderly to keep them safe from others and themselves. Some ‘homes’ do it with a modicum of grace and care, in spite of crushing numbers and limited resources, but most don’t. Millicent’s ‘rest home’ was in the latter category. Once I met her, I visited her with some regularity, especially after Butterfly’s murder. And it was Butterfly who introduced us.

I pulled into the parking lot and noticed that Butterfly and an elderly woman who was dressed rather stylishly—1950’s stylishly, but stylishly none the less—were standing on the street near the entrance to the parking lot. I got out of my car and went to say hello. Butterfly was puffing as hard as he could on a joint while Millicent waited for him to finish toking up. Butterfly, always the gentleman, said, holding his breath, “Millicent, this is Fr. Jim. Jim this is Millicent Randolph.” That was quite a feat to say on an inhale and Millicent and I shook hands.

“Butterfly has told me about you,” she said, in an accent that hinted of Back Bay Boston. “He’s taking me to the A.A. meeting in your church this morning.”

I turned and saw Butterfly knock the ash off his joint and eat what was left.

“You’re going to an A.A. meeting?” I asked him with as much judgment as I could muster.

He swallowed and smiled. “It’s ‘Alcoholics Anonymous,” he said, taking Millicent’s thin arm and leading her a bit unstably toward the church door.

Over time I learned a great deal about Millicent. She actually was an aristocrat of sorts—not from Boston but Manhattan, though she’d gone to school at Vassar and picked up a Boston accent and a Boston Brahman to boot. They lived in Greenwich, summered on Nantucket and had a ‘little place’ in Miami Beach. But one of their perfect three children was murdered while attending Columbia—he was 19—and Millicent fell completely, totally, absolutely apart. By the time her therapy and her taste for scotch and her profound depression began to lift, even a bit, her husband had divorced her, her daughters given up on her, her friends abandoned her and her own family disowned her. She finally encountered her Higher Power in the basement of an Episcopal Church somewhere in south-west Connecticut and dragged herself back to ‘who she’d been’ (“though stronger”, she told me) but by then her body had betrayed her as well. And having used up all her own money, she’d ended up, through a social worker at a rehab center in Fairfield County, at the ‘rest home’ in Waterbury.

“I was in a fog,” she told me, long after that meeting on West Main Street while Butterfly fortified himself for the A.A. meeting, “that lasted almost 15 years.” Her son had been one of those ‘oops’ children when she was 36 and her daughters were 11 and 9. So the fog set in when she was 54 and didn’t lift until she was 69 going on 85, penniless, forsaken, extremely ill.

“How did you meet Butterfly?” I asked her shortly after meeting her. She was sitting in the church, waiting for Butterfly to smoke some dope before walking her the three blocks back to the home.

She smiled and looked her age instead of a decade older. “He volunteers at the home,” she told me. He picks up people’s prescriptions from the drug store and goes to get folks some fast food when they want it and brings around newspapers each morning.

I shook my head. Like a diamond, Butterfly had many facets.

She took a deep breath. “This church is very beautiful,” she said. “Butterfly told me to ask you if you’d do my funeral here when the time comes?”

I nodded and mumbled, “of course.”

Then she continued, “He wants to be buried from here too. He told me. Don’t forget since I doubt he’s told you.”

Nodding more I told her I wouldn’t forget. But then, in the end, I after all, I had to scramble hard to keep my promise.

Butterfly and Millicent became an ‘item’. He began to bring her to church—she’d grown up High Church at St. Thomas’ in New York City and had to get used to our less formal ways. But she always had something insightful to say about the sermon and Butterfly, flitting around, unable to sit still, would make sure he was there to help her up to communion. She became the den-mother of a quite unruly A.A. meeting. Most of the people who came were court ordered and just wanted their paper signed. But she adopted them all—having only dead and estranged children of her own—and kept a discipline and insured that the crowd noise at the break was at a minimum. And Butterfly saw to her every need and every whim (though Millicent didn’t have many ‘whims’ any more—she was down to ‘needs’ and nothing else).

I feel like the author of John’s Gospel: “there are many more stories about Butterfly than are written here….” Just a couple left.

One day, the week before he was murdered, Butterfly simply opened the door of my office and came in. I was with a woman who believed her child was on drugs and her husband was having an affair. I was looking through my Rolodex to find the numbers of a psychologist and a drug hot-line for her to call. I had been present to her pain but she needed a real ‘professional’. She was sitting on the couch, wiping her eyes, when Butterfly butted in, waving a piece of paper and shouting, “I passed! I passed! I don’t have AIDS!”

The woman jumped and looked horrified that such a creature had intruded on her pain and suffering with such a message. Butterfly didn’t ‘work’ for the uninitiated. His charm was an acquired taste. I threw him unceremoniously out of my office and told him to wait on me in the library downstairs. He turned, just like a 10 year old showing you their report card and being rejected, would have turned. He shut the door softly behind himself and I started writing phone numbers on the back of my calling card.

I was furious with him. When I went into the library he was sitting working on one of his ‘art works’. What he did was trace characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and then surround them with leaves and flowers and rainbows and stars and color them in with Crayons and glue stick them to a piece of cardboard. He always signed them “Papillon” (sic) and gave them to people as if they were Picassos or Rembrandts, which, in the last analysis, they were. I’m looking at one he did for my wife as I write this. I keep it near the desk where I work. Her name, BERN is outlined in green, colored yellow and the two little balloons in the B are hearts colored red. Practically everyone I knew in those days had a Papillon original and most people kept them somewhere in sight.

But I wasn’t thinking of that the last afternoon I ever saw him. I was thinking of how inappropriate and intrusive he had been, how he had crossed a line and shattered a boundary, how he had fucked up big-time.

“Aren’t you happy I don’t have AIDS?” he asked, as if nothing had happened 10 minutes before, as innocent as a child…which was the truth.

“I’m very happy for you,” I said, trying not to let my anger show, “and for me…since I’ll have you around to drive me crazy for a long time.” He laughed at that, but I continued, doing my lamentable duty as the “authority” in his life, trying to do “what was best for him”, wanting to “teach him a lesson.”

“Butterfly, you can’t come barging into my office whenever you want,” I said, watching him flinch and twitch, wanting to get up and move but knowing I would disapprove. “You really fucked up today. You’re banned from the church for four days.”

He was about to burst into tears, as he sometimes did. But when he wiped his face with his forearm, he was reminded that he was wearing a black leather jacket, some sizes too large. Then he smiled and got up, coming over to show me the jacket.

“It’s my new boyfriend’s,” he told me, “isn’t it delicious.”

“Where’d you meet this new boyfriend,” I asked, touching the leather. It was delicious. I wished I had one.

“Library Park,” he said, dancing away, his head leaned back, a child with a new crush. “He’s from Brooklyn. Just got into town last night. I got the test for him. He’s really fab-u-lous….”

“He’s really big,” I said, referring to the jacket.

“Oh, I’ll find that out tonight!” Butterfly said, moving toward the door, swishing as hard as a skinny, 6’5” man could swish. “I’ll let you know.” Then he stopped and counted on his fingers. “This is Tuesday,” he told me, “four days will be Sunday. See you then….” Then he was gone.

“Be careful, Butterfly,” I called after him. But I don’t think he heard me. And I didn’t see him Sunday because on Saturday night at some time, his new boyfriend stabbed him to death with the large pair of scissors Butterfly had to cut the cardboard so he could glue stick his art work to it.

And Sunday was Palm Sunday, the first day of the octave that includes Holy Week and Easter—the holiest week of the Christian Year. A police officer who knew Butterfly (didn’t they all?) came by the church about 9 a.m., after the early service, to find me and tell me that Butterfly had been murdered and the murderer was in custody.

I found words in spite of my shock and horror and gathering shame about my last encounter with my friend. “Why did he kill him? Do you know?”

The police officer looked back through his little notebook. “One of the detectives told me it had something to do with Butterfly wearing his leather jacket without asking….”

*****

Everything got very confusing after that. Holy Week at St. John’s was filled with mourning and passion—not just for our Lord, but for our dear friend, Butterfly. Everything was suffused with his murder. Every homily for 7 days mentioned him. I’m sure it was his ‘corpus’ and not Jesus’ that people saw on the cross that year. But his corpse was up in Farmington, at the State Police Forensic lab. I can only wonder what the technicians and pathologists thought of Butterfly’s body—the piercings, the Mohawk, the tattoos, his great height and tiny weight. The scar and metal plate in his head from a prison riot in California decades ago. And the stab wounds, examined, excised, analyzed three ways to Palm Sunday—did they find ‘trace evidence’ of cardboard in the wound from the scissors? What did they make of that?

I couldn’t get a straight answer from the police or the coroner or the prosecuting attorneys office about where Butterfly’s body was or when it could be buried. I burned up the phone lines days past Easter and got nothing helpful back. But I must have been on a lot of those pink “Someone called when you were out” slips, because a local mortician called me to let me know he had Butterfly’s murdered and filleted body and was going to bury him—via his brother’s instructions (His Brother—I had no idea Butterfly had family!) in a pauper’s grave on Friday morning at 9 a.m. I wasn’t familiar with the particular cemetery so the funeral director promised me he’s have someone meet me at the gate at 8:55 a.m. to bring me to the grave. I was there at 8:40, coffee and newspaper to fill the time. At 9 a.m. I started driving around the huge cemetery and saw no one, anywhere. I went to the office that was just opening. I told my story and the cemetery director, a huge Irish man with Spencer Tracy eyebrows and a whisky voice explained to me that contrary to cemetery rules, the grave had been opened the previous afternoon and the funeral director had disposed of the body at 8 a.m. and paid a half-hour of overtime to have the grave filled before 9.

I was so beside myself that Spencer Tracy drove me out to Butterfly’s newly filled grave and I sobbed the burial office over it. On the way back to his office, I asked the cemetery director why, o why, would the mortician have misled me so?

He waited until he got back to the office and we were out of his car to answer. “This was a ‘state burial’,” he told me. “I would venture that paying overtime to have the grave filled was less expensive than a real coffin.”

The concept of a ‘real coffin’ had never occurred to me. What would an ‘unreal coffin’ be?

“He was buried in a very large cardboard box,” the man told me, very aware of how upset I was, “that’s my best guess….And he didn’t want you to see that….”

“He was my friend…,” I said, about to start blabbering.

The man rubbed his thumb against his forefinger and said, sadly, I think, “not to the funeral director.”

When I was back to the church I called a funeral director I trusted implicitly and blabbered out the story. “He didn’t break any laws,” he told me, “but he lied to a priest and was certainly unethical. You could call the State Board about him. Lots of paperwork, not much results. I don’t know what to tell you—he was a bad man….But then, I knew that….”

I called the funeral director who had planted poor Butterfly without my presence. “I told you 8 a.m.,” he said, butter not only not melting in his mouth but becoming chilled. “And he was just a bum.” I hung up. All else was futile. Before I hung up I did get a phone number in Rhode Island for Butterfly’s brother and told him I was planning a memorial service the Wednesday of the next week and invited him to come. He was startled and stunned. “Will anyone come?” he asked.

“Oh, my goodness, yes,” I told him. I’m not sure he believed me but, God bless his heart, he did come.

Three hundred people showed up for Butterfly’s memorial service. No kidding, three hundred people showed up. Instead of a homily, there was a microphone down in the center aisle and people were invited to speak. I lost count at 19 because Justine, Butterfly’s nemesis, came to the microphone and said, in the 5 year old language she has, “I love Butterfly. Fly, Butterfly.” Then she kissed her hand and blew it toward the ceiling of the church. (She also rambled on in ways no one understood for a few more minutes before I went down and stopped her gently.) Butterfly’s brother, who obviously remembered the little boy who had no friends and was weird and got put in prison and beaten there, but didn’t know—had no way to imagine—that his brother was so profoundly loved dissolved into tears and sobs to the extent that I considered calling 911.

It was Millicent who spoke last. After she spoke there was nothing else to say. Something like this was her eulogy for Butterfly: “He became my son—not the son I lost, but the son I never deserved. No one—no one—ever cared for me with more compassion and love and joy that Butterfly. He was a good boy—the best boy ever. I’m not sure how to live without him….”

After talking to his brother at the reception that people had organized in the library—though the library was too small and the food ran out, but the people in the soup kitchen brought in more and more and more because they loved Butterfly too—I took Justine to Butterfly’s grave. Butterfly’s brother told me over and over, “I never knew, I couldn’t have imagined….” He was referring to the love he had witnessed for his deranged, odd, weird, eccentric, crazy brother. Who could have known? Who could have imagined?

I have a dog—well, not actually a ‘dog’ because he’s a Puli—who is hell on wheels to ride in a car with. Unless I strap him down with this gadget I bought at a pet store, he is all over me: barking at the key until I turn it, barking at the gear shift until I engage it, barking at the gas petal until I push it. Then he puts his paw on my arm, as if to direct me where to go—one of his walking places or another. I actually believe he could drive if his legs could reach the brake and he had a thumb to turn the key and change the gears. Well, that was a dim reflection of what it was like to take Justine the 12 miles or so to Butterfly’s grave. At that point in her life—and she’s exactly my age—she was much like a child raised by wolves in France. Since then a couple in the parish have unofficially adopted her and tamed her (to some extent) and transformed her into something rare and wondrous. That’s a story in itself. But on the day of Butterfly’s memorial service, she was like a Puli in my front seat. I belted her in but she kept yelling and reaching over to touch the windshield wipers and the steering wheel and the gear shift. And because there are so many graveyards in a place like Connecticut, she kept seeing them and hollering, “Butterfly? Butterfly?”

Once we got there and I showed her where he was buried, she wept and mumbled something that must have been ‘good-bye’ and was calmer on the way home.

(A few months later I was sitting by Millicent’s death bed. One of her daughters was there and the other was flying in from Oregon the next day. She would have her funeral at St. John’s but the daughters would take her ashes back to Greenwich to bury beside their father, who, rich as Midas, had thrown an embolism two years before and passed through that wondrous, mysterious, terrifying door. After Butterfly’s death, Millicent had called her daughters and, since grace abounds when you least expect it, they had ‘come home’ to their mother. Some sad stories have happy endings, thank the Lord.

I had given communion to Millicent and her daughter—no wine for Millicent, she was through with Demon Rum in all its manifestations. And, with Millicent’s permission, I had said the prayers for the dying. “Surely I am,” she told me when I hesitantly asked, “why not?” I was thinking it might be time for me to leave when Millicent’s daughter took my hand and her mother’s and said, in that upper-class accent she shared with Millicent, “Jim, you must tell me about Butterfly, my mother’s son by another mother.”

I smiled that she knew enough street language to say it that way. The afternoon was just beginning. I had nothing but time.

“You better get a chair,” I told her, “this might take a while.”

Millicent was drifting off to sleep as I began, but her daughter was on the edge of her chair, drinking it all in.

Sometimes you get lucky and things turn out like that….)

COLONEL TED AND THE GANG

Colonel Ted wasn’t the first person I met at St. James in Charleston—he was the second. The first person was an elderly, gangly black man with the improbable name of Israel Goldman. When Bern and I got off the plane in Charleston, there he was waiting at the gate. He introduced himself and added, “it always throws people who’ve never met me when I show up for an appointment.” He was soft spoken and polite, telling Bern she looked ‘radiant’ rather than mentioning she was obviously pregnant and not mentioning the length of my hair or my full beard. Though I objected, he insisted on carrying the one bag we’d brought for a two day visit, though he was probably 75. He walked slowly, as many tall, thin men seem to do.

“Colonel Ted will meet us at the door with his car,” he told us, “he didn’t want you to have to walk far.” Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “and besides, Ted really resents having to pay for parking.”

Israel carried his hat in his hand until we were outside and then placed it jauntily on his head. He was wearing what seemed to be a hand-tailored suit, a blindingly white shirt and school tie of some kind. “Grambling,” he said suddenly, “my alma mater.” I nodded and smiled. “I saw you looking at it, wondering,” he added. I nodded some more, wondering if he could read minds. “Here’s the Colonel,” Israel said, smiling, “probably burned up more gas than the parking meter would have been.”

The biggest Cadillac I’d ever seen pulled up to the curb and Colonel Ted exploded from the driver’s seat, moving quickly around the car to shake my hand and hug Bern. If Israel was laid-back and non-demonstrative, the Colonel was an extreme in the other way. He talked fast, moved fast and was about the size of three Michelin tires with thin legs in Bermuda shorts and a bowling ball shaped head. They were Mutt and Jeff, Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, except they were African Americans. Israel’s skin was the color of coffee with cream and Ted’s was a light tan. I had grown up in a culture where all “Negroes” supposed looked alike because white people didn’t see them very well. But two men couldn’t have been more dissimilar in appearance and demeanor than the two they sent to pick us up for my “interview” at St. James.

It was an “interview” rather than an interview because I was convinced nothing would come of it. We’d spend a few hours with the members of the parish and sleep in a motel and then fly back home after attending church on Sunday and I would have fulfilled my promise to Bishop Atkinson. I was in the last couple of months at Virginia Seminary and had been offered a job as an assistant at a wonderful church in Chicago, which I wanted to accept. I called Bishop Atkinson to tell him the good news and after a half-hearted congratulations and an awkward silence, he told me that Bishop Campbell wouldn’t release me to leave the diocese. Had I paid close enough attention, I would have known that a seminarian ‘belonged’ to the diocese and bishop who had sponsored them in seminary. Had I been a little more astute about the ways of the church, I would have realized I should have called Bishop Campbell—the diocesan bishop—rather than the bishop coadjutor. Had I understood the ‘politics’ of such things in even a cursory way, I would have had the Bishop of Chicago call the Bishop of West Virginia to negotiate my release from my commitment to go and waltz with the diocese that brung me to the dance. But, of course, all those things were news to me. I thought I was a free agent rather than an indentured servant.

I handled it badly by getting angry with Bishop Atkinson (what is it they always do to the messengers?) and complained bitterly about not being allowed to do what I wanted. He listened patiently and promised to call me back right away. When he did, he had a deal—interview for one job in West Virginia and if I didn’t like it, he’d pull in all his chits and free me up to go to Chicago. So Bern and I flew to Charleston at St. James’ expense to do a little ‘play acting’ and say “thanks but no thanks” and begin our lives in the Windy City. On the way back to Alexandria, somewhere over Maryland at 30,000 feet, Bern said, “You’re going to say ‘yes’ aren’t you?” And I answered, “I’m afraid I am….”

That was because of Colonel Ted and the gang at St. James. They were people of such remarkable character that I simply wanted to be among them for a while. And, I must admit, I was fascinated by the profound paradoxes of the parish.

Ted drove down the long hill from the airport into the bowels of Charleston. I’d been there many times but I was surprised at how thrilled I was to the golden dome of the state capital shining in the late April sunlight, skeptic that I am about feelings of nostalgia, especially for ‘home’.

Bern told one of our friends the other day that she thought I could live anywhere. I had mentioned that Bern’s brother was going to move to Morgantown, West Virginia, where the three of us had gone to college. I’d said out loud that I would consider moving to Morgantown.

“Oh, you couldn’t live there now,” our friend suggested.

That’s when Bern said, “Jim could live anywhere.”

“He couldn’t live in Mississippi, I’d bet,” our friend said. “Oh yes, he could,” Bern replied. He ran through a list of places he and Bern could never live and she assured him about each suggestion that, “Jim could live there.” All this was terribly awkward since I was sitting with them on our deck, all of us drinking coffee, but they talked about me as if I were away—living in Mississippi, perhaps. The truth was, she was right.

“So he’d find something to like about anywhere he was?” our friend asked.

“No, that’s not it,” Bern told him, “he would end up ‘liking it’ without any reasons, ‘liking it’ just because he was there. In fact, he wouldn’t even need to ‘like it’, just him being there would be enough.”

“That’s really strange,” our friend observed.

“Isn’t it?” Bern replied.

“More coffee?” I asked, just to see if I was really there. They both said they would like another cup and I went off to make it.

It’s not like me to get attached to places or things. And I’m pretty satisfied wherever I am and with whatever I’ve got. So, seeing the gold dome of the capitol of West Virginia moved my heart, but not much more than seeing anything beautiful anywhere would. “Home”, for me, is truly where the heart is.

Ted and Israel and the two of us had lunch at a Shoney’s restaurant next to the motel where we’d be sleeping. Colonel Ted talked non-stop and Israel laughed ironically at some of the Colonel's unconscious mild profanities. Ted was called 'the Colonel' because he was one. He had beenn one of the highest ranking African-Americans in World War II. Of course, back then, he would have been called a 'Negro'. Ted never objected to that discription and few of the older members of St. James Church objected either. It was a generational thing for them—maybe, having grown up in the world they grew up in, “Negro” was a huge step up from 'colored' or worse. After 20 years as a soldier, Ted started working for the U.S. Postal Service, or whatever it was called back in the 50's. He worked there long enough to get a pension and finished his working life with the Veterans Adminstration. He was the only person I ever met who had three federal pensions.

Ted was the Senior Warden when I arrived. He'd been Senior Warden (the highest lay office in an Episcopal Church) for years before that. A small church like St. James hangs onto good people in high office. Ted, like several of the older members of St. James, was extremly light skinned. He once told me that 'back in the day'--before integration—he always carried a turban in his trunk so that when he and Susan wanted to stop for the night in the southern states they were assured a room. He'd put on his turban and speak broken English and registered without a problem. I remember asking him what he felt about having to do that. He drew a serious look on his broad face and said, “it was embarrassing, in a way....But lots better than sleeping in the car!” Then he laughed. Ted laughed a lot. He was a gentle, large, round man—about 5'10 and at least 270 pounds. His mouth was almost always twisted into a crooked grin He had seen enough of life and pain to know the best defense was a good offense. So, he spread laughter wherever he went.

Even though I'd grown up in a town that was half African-American, I didn't know much at all about Black folks—none of us White folks really do. And so Ted and the gang were my kind, patient, good-humored professors in the study of race. Ted more than anyone. For example, I remember that Ted and I were on the way to lunch at the Charleston VFW when the Veteran's Day Parade passed by. Ted and I stopped and watched it—him waving at some of the Vets as they passed by. When the parade had ended, he taught me a great lesson.

“You know one thing that makes us different, Jim?” he said. I must have shaken my head because he continued...though Ted didn't need response to keep talking. “When you watch a parade you can decide if you like the next band when you hear them coming around the corner. I have to wait until they are in view. If I see some black kids in the band, then I can enjoy the music.”

Ted was correct, although it came like a bolt of lightening to me. I could appreciate the music before I saw the band. Liberal that I am, I thought it was open-minded of me not to care about the racial makeup of the band. I attempted to tell him that—but for Ted it was a more complicated, marrow the bone issue. “Thought like a White Man,” he said, then laughed.

One thing I know for certain—something I learned from Ted and the Gang at St. James—no Black priest in a White congregation would have experienced the love and acceptance, patience and support I received from them. When my pregnant wife and I arrived at St. James, we made up 2/3 of the White membership of the parish. The other White member was married to a Black man. She was, by the way, the house cleaner for several of the Black members. Don't tell me Irony doesn't reign on earth....

Our family—both our children were born in Charleston—were accepted completely into the 'family' of St. James. I never ate in an many parishioner's homes in the other two parishes I served combined. We were wined and dined. And, to be honest, we had much more in common with most of the people at St. James—education, culture, tastes, opinions—than we didn't have in common. The one thing we did not share was race—skin color.

It's astonishing how skin color so dominates the psyches of people around the globe. My son has been to Taiwan a few times with his wife's Taiwanese parents. He tells me that island has some of the most beautiful beaches he's ever seen and that almost everyone on them are tourists. The Taiwanese middle and upper class carry umbrella in the sun. Lighter skin is valued. And consider the geishas of Japan: they powder their faces to typing paper white and are considered the embodiment of beauty and sensuality. The Hispanic congregation of St. John's in Waterbury are divided by many distinctions—nation of origin, accent, class, education—but many of them told me over the years that lighter skinned folks had advantages. Ironically enough, it seems only Caucasions seem to value darker skin. Until the last decade or so of skin-cancer fear, many white people tried to see how tan they could get in the summer. And even now, in the Era of Sun Block, there are products to artificially give your skin a brown glow. Blacks have a different view of skin color than White folks.

I learned, in my Black Studies with Ted, the saying aboout skin color among many African-Americans of a certain age and culture. “If you're light,” it goes, “your're alright. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, stay back.” The “Black is Beautiful” movement changed that for younger African-Americans, yet, as I learned from Professor Ted, skin color is an essential part of describing a Black person to another Black person who hasn't met them. There is as wide a range of distinctions in coloration to some blacks as there are Eskimo words for snow.

One distinction Ted taught me well is the distinction between 'African-Americans' and 'African-Africans'. Mind you, his opinions may have said more about his age and class than about what all Black people think of Africans. It came about when, for the third time, the Bishop had called me to see if someone at St. James would like to host a visiting African priest and his wife. The third time was the last straw for Ted.

“Tell him 'no!',” Ted told me, clearly exasperated by the request. “Nobody here wants to have Africans in their home....And when you tell the bishop that, remember to ask him for a damn Range Rover for St. James.”

Something I have found interesting about the Episcopal Church is how enamored we often are with African Anglicans. When I was a priest in West Virginia, some thirty years ago now, the struggling Diocese would go head over heels about a Bishop from Tanganyika but did next to nothing to involve African-Americans in the power structure of the church. That really burned the older members of St. James, especially after some deep pocket people around the state gave an African visitor a Land Rover the same year some mission church grants were reduced.

So I called the Bishop and suggested that there must be some White folks who would enjoy the exotic pleasure of hosting an African family for a week or two. The Bishop—a sweet and good man—was shocked that not all Black people would be ecstatic to have a chance to talk with someone from their Motherland. I patiently explained, using Ted's logic if not his profanities, that many of the folks at St. James found the African clerics arrogant and dismissive since their families had never been slaves in America. I also told him that families of the members of St. James had been in this country longer than the Irish side of my mother's family and that very few African-Americans, descended as they were from slaves, had no idea what part of Africa their ancestors came from. “Besides,” I relayed from Ted, giving him credit for this insight, “Africans don't understand our culture and smell funny.”

The Bishop was silent for a long time. He might have been considering what people would think of him if he dared comment on the odor of an African visitor. He thought, as Ted had taught me, 'just like a White Man.”

Just before we hung up, I made the request for a Range Rover, thinking he would be amused. I don't think he was.

Ted taught me many things. He taught me 'tolerance' wasn't the great and noble idea most White people thought it was.

“If you say you 'tolerate' me,” he said slowly, trying to get around my White-Think, “the implication is that tolerance is a choice you're making and you can take that choice back if you decide to. 'Tolerance' leaves White people in the dominant, oppressive position.” He waited until he decided I had somewhat dimly understood that subtlety before continuing. “Negroes...Black folk...don't want racial 'tolerance', we want equality.”

The little town where I grew up—Anawalt, WestVirginia—is in the southern most county of the state. Anawalt was roughly 50% Black. Yet I knew only a few of the Black people's names and some of the elders of their community called me 'Mister Jimmy'. There was no bad blood, for the most part, between the races. But we went to different schools and different churches and different beer joints. The Black folk were 'tolerated', and, in many ways appreciated for not making more demands—but there was no thought that they were equal. We had 'racial harmony', not 'racial equality'.Even when things appear to be just and fair, it is often the 'justice' and 'fairness' granted by the dominant and oppressive group.

Even today, I fear—God bless Ted's soul—even today.

(At the 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Anaheim, there were changes made to the calendar of feasts. One of the new commemorations was to honor the poet Langston Hughes and the writer, W.E.B. Du Bois. In one of the collects written for that Holy Day the term “Black folks” appeared.

Some White-Thinking deputies rose to amend the collect to say “African-American people” instead of “Black folks”. Never mind that DuBois' seminal work is called The Soul of Black Folks and never mind that “Black folks” is a term Black Folks use. To be politically correct, these White folks were trying to change the very language of the people being honored. It was a half-hour of madness...nobody listening to the string of Black deputies who rose to explain the reality and how it would be an offense to change 'Black folks'. Black folks couldn't even call themselves what they wanted unless White folks approved! Somewhere in that I heard Ted laughing and Israel chuckling and Harris fairly screaming with irony.)

Harris, by the way, was a vice-President of West Virginia State College, a historically Black college pretty much ruined by integration and white commuter students. Harris was a devout Episcopalian who would give me tips on liturgical details. Many Black Episcopal Churches are quite high-church...St. James was Anglo-Catholic as long as they could attract Black priests. But economics caught up with them and most every priest in the Diocese was White and attended Virginia Seminary, the Evil Twin of Anglo-Catholicism. I was the 3^rd White priest after an 80 year run of Black priests and I had attended Virginia Seminary!

So once Harris asked me politely and with much apology if I would mind 're-vesting' the altar after the Eucharist. I had no idea what he was talking about but agreed to do it if I could. It was after a Sunday service and I had left the chalice and paten on the alter with the purificator beside them. All Harris wanted me to do was wash the chalice and reassemble the whole mess with the burse and veil and whatever that little hard, square thing is called. That was easy.

“I'm on my way to High Church,” I told Harris the next Sunday after leaving the altar reassembled.

“Not in your lifetime,” he said.

Harris also told me once, “any Black man who isn't a Baptist or a Methodist has had some White man messing with his religion.”

I thought for a minute. “Your religion would probably be Muslim or Tribal if the slave traders had never messed with it.”

He smiled at me—he was one of the most charming men I ever met—“Ted may be wrong about you,” he said, “you don't think half like a White man.”

Since I was the priest of a Black Church, I was invited to join the Black Ministerial Group made up of the Black ministers of the Baptist, Methodist, AME and AME Zion churches. (A White priest of an Episcopal Church was more welcomed than the self-appointed, self-ordained Black preachers here and there around Charleston.) So I joined. They received me graciously and generously. I went to many of the monthly meetings but skipped the one when they all took a trip to Cincinnati together to buy suits and, from their jokes the month before the trip, to drink and smoke a bit.

I told Ted about the trip to Cincinnati that I turned down. Then I asked him if he thought I should have gone along for solidarity's sake. He was fairly falling over from laughter.

“Do you even own a suit?” he asked, gasping.

It was a Sunday so I looked down at my khaki colored suit and shook my head.

“No, Jim,” he said, “I mean a SUIT like those boys wear every day?”

Black or navy blue or pin-stripped costing over $100. No I didn't.

“You are such a White man,” he said, walking away to tell Israel or Harris or his wife Susan or Remitha about how I might have gone to Cincinnati with the Black Ministers to buy suits....He was snorting with delight.

Susan, by the way, was Ted's life. His Life, capital 'L'. There were two loves in his life: Susan and St. James. His devotion to both was beyond question. The way Ted looked at Susan made other women long for such looks from their husbands. To say he adored her would, I think, be drastically understating the reality.

Susan was, I believe, a year or two older than Ted (though one didn't ask such questions in the polite culture of St. James). For both of them in was a late-life second marriage. Ted never mentioned his first wife and their divorce. Susan was widowed and her son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters lived across the street from her and Ted. Peter, the son, was devoted to his mother only slightly less than Ted was. And Ted had a great relationship with the family, especially the youngest granddaughter, Emily. While her sister was beautiful and brilliant, Emily was large, plain and moderately retarded. She did very well in a caring community like St. James or the town of Institute where so many of the St. James gang lived. However, I didn't believe she'd ever be able to live on her own. She and Ted were magic: Emily would start shrieking with joy as soon as she saw him and his round face would light up. A full bird Colonel and a gangly, slightly out of control adolescent who would never be an 'adult' in a full way would play together like children. Ted would pretend she annoyed him sometimes, but that ruse was easily seen through.

Susan's son, Peter, was a kind but rather sardonic guy. I would sometimes get his jokes an hour later. But he was a faithful father to both is daughters and a doting son to Susan until one day he was driving from Institute to Charleston on the Interstate, pulled his car to the breakdown lane and died of a heart attack.

When I got to Ted and Susan's, I walked into a space of palpable grief. Susan rose from the chair where she was sitting and said, “Jim, oh Jim, did they tell you? My baby died....”

That was the moment that I realized what I should have known all along: the death of a child is the hardest death to take. It is monstrous and unnatural, so out of time and space as it should be, that to lose a 'baby', even one who is 60 years old as Peter was, is the unkindest cut of them all. That's also the day I recognized that the role of a priest at the time of death is simply to be present. There are, really, no words that are adequate, all aphorisms are devoid of integrity, nothing you can do makes a difference. All a priest can do is sit quietly and listen to the words and tears of the living and hold them in your heart and arms. That's what I did most of the rest of that day for Susan and Peter's little family.

Emily, not quite clear what had happened, was deeply disturbed by the enormous emotions flowing around her. So Ted took her for a long walk through the neighborhood, informing people along the way of Peter's death. By the end of the walk, after circling the campus of the college, Emily had become to bearer of the bad news. “She'd stop total strangers,” Ted told me later, “and grab their arms the way she does and say, 'daddy dead'.” He smiled, shook his head and pretended a gnat had flown in his eye and he had to get rid of it with his handkerchief. “It seemed to give her comfort,” he said, “that's the damnest thing....”

When people die, everyone has a story to tell. Henrich Ibsen said something like, there is no suffering so great that we cannot bear it if only we can put it in a story and tell a story about it. Emily's story was a simple one--'daddy dead'--and it got her through the next few days with less stress and more hope than any of the rest of us.

Could it have only been a year later when Susan called me in the early morning, apologized for disturbing me and asked if I could come. “Ted fell in the bathroom and I can't get him to wake up.” I called Clara, Peter's widow, and Harris and then rushed to my car. When I got there, just before the EMTs, Emily met me at the door. “Ted dead,” is all she said then she grabbed me and almost squeezed me in two with that wondrous strength so many retarded people have.

I could hear the ambulance coming in the distance, hurrying to the scene. They could have saved the siren; the Colonel had left the house. Ted dead....

The wake was going to be a problem. Neither of the two Black funeral homes were large enough for the crowds Susan knew to expect. And in one of those events I can only call 'inspired'--like the Spirit got entangled in the moment—I said, “Let's do the wake at the church....”

There was no question about it—it was perfect. Ted could lay in front of the altar where he often served as a chalicist, in the parish church he so loved and the ambiance would be already dignified and somber, unlike the way things get at funeral homes. When Harris and Scottie and Israel and young Mark, the next generation of leadership for St. James, heard that the mortician planned to drive Ted's body back and forth to Charleston between the wake and the funeral, they took things into their own hands.

So it was that Ted lay in state in that little A-frame church in a practically deserted part of north Charleston all through the night. And he was never alone. At first the men were dividing up the shifts, but the truth be known, I think that most of the stayed the whole night, sitting with their friend, telling stories about the Colonel, telling stories to keep away the chill of night and of death. Just as it should have been, the gang spend the night with Ted. The whole thing was gentle and sweet and lovey...just the way it should have been....

What almost dying feels like

So, I'm on the deck reading a book and Bern is out in the back yard working on things that I know nothing about because I am forbidden to work in the back yard (which is fine with me!) Bela is sleeping on the deck.

Bern has been moving from the back yard to the front yard and going through the gate that keeps Bela from going out front, where there's no fence. He can go in back at will because there are fences and wattle that Bern has made from tree limbs that keep him in.

The gate from the deck to the front yard opens inward, toward the deck. Bern and I have discussed this several times because the gate is sometimes a few inches open. My thought was that Bela could put his nose through the opening and turn his head and open the gate. Bern's argument was that he knows how to push but not to pull.

Well, yesterday, we found out I was right about that.

I turned around from my Adirondack chair to see where he was and the gate was open and he was gone.

(Here's what you need to know: we've had dozens of animals in our life together and Bern loves Bela more than she loved any of the others...perhaps as much as she loved them all put together. I have slight anxiety when I walk him because I don't want something to happen to him on my watch for fear she'll blame me.)

I leap from my seat and run...fly out to the front yard. (I really don't remember crossing the space except that I was holding my coffee container and threw it somewhere and haven't went to find it yet.) He was still in our lush front yard (Bern's handiwork) and I lunged for him and pinned him to the ground. I had no illusion of picking him up because he weighs 50 some pounds and I was on the ground and felt like I was dying.

What almost dying feels like is this: you have difficulty breathing, don't think you can move, know you can't pick up a 50-something pound Puli and can't think.

I yelled for Bern to come and get his leash. I was beside one of her blackberry bushes and it was puncturing my arm over and again. She finally heard me and came and went inside got his leash and led him away.

What almost dying feels like is thinking you can't get up from the ground and wondering how long it can take to get a leash.

Of course he could have gotten hit by a car. Of course that. But he is a very bad dog that would most likely bite a stranger and there were people in our neighbor's drive way I didn't recognize and then a whole SUV full of kids I didn't recognize pulled into the driveway.

I think Bela was as freaked by my having him pinned down in the blackberry bush as I was freaked for having pinned him down. He never tried to get away to bite one of those strange kids.

If he had, Animal Control would have come and took him away. They probably should--he's bitten at least three people and none of them turned him in. It's like living on borrowing time as careful as we are with him.

But Bern's heart would be broken if he were taken away and killed. So I  held him on the ground in the blackberry bush until she came and leashed him and took him away.

I laid there for a while, catching my breath and knowing what it felt like to almost die.