A story I wrote for Bern for Christmas

 

     The Life of Riley

 

                 (A story of Christmas)

 

                                for Bern

                                    Christmas 2008

 

 

          It was snowing. Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke—and before him, Uncle Bob—had told Riley that it almost never snowed in Charlotte, but she didn’t know, being only six. And her name wasn’t “Riley” anymore, Aunt Jane told her it was “Sarah Ann”. Her name had been “Riley” once upon a time, she remembered that and she remembered the last time she saw it snow.

 

          The last time she’d seen it snow was when she was just barely four. She was standing on the front porch of a house in a place called “Riley”, just like her name, though her mommy and daddy laughed when she said that and told her the place she lived was ‘Raleigh’ and not to forget it.

 

          “If you’re ever lost and need help,” her mommy told her over and over, “tell someone that your name is Riley and you live in Raleigh.” Her mommy also told her the name of the street where she lived and her last name, but Riley—Sarah Ann—had long ago forgotten all that. She tried to remember when it started to snow in Charlotte. “My name is Riley and I live in Raleigh,” she said to herself, but she couldn’t remember the rest, not even her last name since her name now was Sarah Ann Smith and she lived in Charlotte with Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke.

 

          The last thing she remembered from that previous snow was watching her mommy walk to a car, all dressed in white like the snow with a blue raincoat around her shoulders, and her daddy wearing brown and walking to a big brown truck. Riley—Sarah Ann—had learned her colors early and she always remembered that, especially on that morning in December when it started snowing, unusually, in Charlotte, where she was Sarah Ann and lived with Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke. She couldn’t even remember her parents’ faces anymore and she hadn’t seen them in a long, long time.

 

          “What are you doing Sarah?” Uncle Luke said from behind her. She had her knees on the couch and her face pressed against the apartment’s living room window, watching it snow. Uncle Luke’s voice—like Uncle Bob’s before him—was coarse and nearly angry.

 

          Sarah slid down on the couch, turning away from the wonder of snow. “Nothing,” she said, softly. “It’s snowing.”

 

          Sarah glanced up when he didn’t respond. He was rubbing his eyes. Uncle Luke was very big and dressed in a white tee-shirt, stained under the arms and a pair of shorts. His face was covered with the stubble of beard that she had felt on her cheeks before. Uncle Luke had never hurt her in the way Uncle Bob had but he had rubbed his rough face against her face when it was bedtime. She remembered how Aunt Jane had screamed and turned all red and beat Uncle Bob with her fists when she found him hurting her. She remembered the policemen coming and taking Uncle Bob away. She should have told the policemen she was Riley and lived in Raleigh, but she hurt too much and couldn’t think straight.

 

          She could have told the people in the hospital, all dressed in white, like her mother as she disappeared into the snow, that she was Riley and lived in Raleigh but they were all too busy and too grownup to understand. And she was too scared to talk. She’d been only five, she reminded herself and not a big girl of six yet. So Aunt Jane took her out of the hospital, still in her gown, telling her to be quiet, and they’d gone to a motel again. Then they moved and sometime after that Uncle Luke came to live with them. Uncle Luke never hurt her but he was usually either mean or angry and only sometimes gentle and always smelled of something smoky sweet—like the soda Aunt Jane loved in the big brown bottles.

 

          “Jane needs you to help with breakfast,” Uncle Luke finally said. “Go help her.”

 

          Sarah knew how to do that. She was always helpful to Aunt Jane, ever since that snowy morning long ago when Jane told her, “come on, let’s take a ride.”

 

          Sarah…Riley…had enjoyed rides with Aunt Jane. Sometimes they went to the park where there were swings to swing on and other kids to play with. Sometimes they went to the store where she sat in a cart looking at Aunt Jane while they went up and down the aisles getting things to eat and hearing people tell Aunt Jane what a lovely daughter she had. Sometimes Aunt Jane took her to Uncle Bob’s apartment and Riley could watch TV while Aunt Jane and Uncle Bob were in the bedroom crying and making other noises.

 

          But that day, the day her daddy walked to a big truck and her mommy went to the car, Aunt Jane had taken her to Uncle Bob’s and after a lot of yelling, the three of them drove a long way and stayed in a motel for days and then had an apartment in Charlotte. That’s when her name changed to Sarah Ann and Aunt Jane told her the awful things that had happened to her mommy and daddy.

 

          “Your daddy went to prison,” Aunt Jane told her, though Riley didn’t know what that meant. “You go to prison in a big truck. And your mommy went with him. They’ll never come back. You’re going to live with me now….”

 

          Riley cried for days and days and always asked for her mommy and daddy and her dog, but Aunt Jane told her not to cry, she’d see them in heaven and her name was Sarah Ann now.

 

          “But I’m Riley from Raleigh,” she told Aunt Jane over and over, through a river of tears and an ocean of fear.

 

          “No more, darlin’,” Aunt Jane said softly. “Now you are Sarah Ann and you live with me…..”

 

          It took a long time—Riley didn’t understand much about time then, but it was three months before she stopped asking for her mommy and daddy and began to hope she’d see them in heaven, wherever that was, and that she now lived with Aunt Jane and her name was Sarah Ann.

 

          She wasn’t unhappy, though such a thought as “unhappiness” hadn’t occurred to her yet. Aunt Jane loved her and took care of her and though Uncle Bob had been mean, Uncle Luke was just angry—and sometimes, gentle. So time passed and she became Sarah Ann. Until that unexpected Charlotte snow.

 

                                                          ***

 Christmas was coming and Lt. Don Marks of the Raleigh Police Department was feeling anxious. A week before Christmas, two years before, Riley Hope Nole had gone missing. Her parents, Joe and Mary Nole had come home and found the house empty except for their dog Annie, a mutt they’d adopted, who had defecated all over the house and was almost catatonic when they found her hiding behind the Christmas tree.

 

The parents claimed they had left for work, leaving Riley in the care of their baby-sitter, a thirty-something female named Jane, who Mrs. Nole had met at the gym and who, the parents said, “loved Riley like her own.” Jane Jones—the name the Noles’ knew her by—turned up on no voting lists, in no phone books, no public records of any kind, not even on the membership list of the health club. Joe and Mary had left their child in the care of a ‘non-person’, and since they paid her under the table, there were no Social Security or tax traces to follow.

 

Lt. Marks’ superiors had suspected that the parents were involved in the case of the missing child. So, Don Marks had interviewed, vetted, investigated and hounded Joe and Mary Nole for months. They became the scourge of central North Carolina. Everyone believed they had somehow killed their only child. But there was no physical evidence and no motive, so, after endless weeks of media coverage, the case had become cold and the parents—damaged greatly—had returned to whatever ‘normal life’ might be after losing a child.

 

Don Marks remembered the last question he ever asked them out of thousands of questions. He was sitting in their home. The Christmas tree—almost bare of needles--was still up well into March. He noticed a tiny crèche on the mantelpiece of their simple house. Joseph was dressed in brown and had a brown scarf on his head. Mary was dressed in white with a blue cloak. He didn’t even know why he noticed that, but the house seemed so empty, even with unopened presents beneath the unlit tree, that he noticed the two little figures around a tiny manger.

 

          “I need to ask you one more time,” Lt. Marks said, still staring at the crèche, “is there any reason I shouldn’t believe you had something to do with your daughter’s disappearance?”

 

          Joe Nole, smiled sadly and said softly, “do you have children, Lieutenant?” Mary was holding a small dog. She had told him, as she had a dozen times before, that Annie missed Riley most of all.

 

          Marks nodded. He had a baby son, he told them, and a daughter, just the age of Riley. Marcia and Riley might have been born the same week in the same hospital for all he knew.

 

          Joe motioned toward the gifts unopened. “Would you have done this for your child if you meant her harm?”

 

          Lt. Marks sat for a long time in the chair across from the couch where Riley’s parents were. For all his training and for his police skepticism, he had no answer to the brightly wrapped presents, three months late.

 

Lt. Marks himself had never suspected them. And he had spent every free moment since the case was officially closed trying to track down a health club member, baby-sitter named Jane Jones—to no avail. He turned up a similar case in Roanoke, Virginia—a baby-sitter named Sarah Ann Wilson, who had a criminal record and a hospital record of losing 4 children to miscarriage, had taken a young girl. But police were called to a fast food restaurant near the North Carolina border that very night because the girl had started screaming and running to patrons. By the time the squad car arrived, Sarah Ann Wilson was gone, never to be heard of again.

As Christmas drew near, Don Mark’s thoughts turned to the Nole family and little Riley, wherever she was, and to his own children, their growing excitement about the presents that would be under the tree. He knew hundreds of copy shop photos of Riley were going up all over the state, put up by friends and relatives of Joe and Mary Nole. Christmas caused them to spring into action, searching for their lost daughter. So Lt. Marks booted up his computer, as he had so many times before, and started searches—“Sarah Ann Jones”, “Jane Wilson”, “Ann Wilson”…every configuration he could imagine—knowing it would lead to naught.

 

                                      ***

 

Riley never went anywhere without Aunt Jane or Uncle Luke. One of them was always home with her. They kept Sarah Ann isolated from the world. Riley thought she should be in school, but whenever she asked, Aunt Jane told her she was too smart for school. Aunt Jane did read to her every night and tried to teach her numbers from time to time. But Riley thought there must be something more.

 

One day, about a week before that unusual snow, Aunt Jane had taken Sarah on a ride in the car—a special treat. A few blocks from the house, Riley had noticed a display in front of a church. There was the statue of a man, dressed in a brown robe, and another statue of a woman all in white with a blue cape around her. Both the statues were leaning toward a baby in some strange bed.

 

“Who is that?” Riley/Sarah asked.

 

Aunt Jane sniffed and stared at her for a minute. “That’s called a crèche, it’s Mary and Joseph and their baby.”

 

Riley had never heard that word or that story—at least not since her father and mother went to prison, or heaven, and she had been living with Aunt Jane. But as they drove on, Riley began to remember. Something like that had been in her house when she lived with her mommy and daddy. A man dressed in brown, a woman in white with a blue cloth around her shoulders, a little baby. She tried with all her heart to remember…but she couldn’t, not all of it, only flashes—a crèche (such a funny word) somewhere up high, lights, a mommy and daddy, a dog licking her face, bright boxes around a tree. But she was Riley from Raleigh then and everything was different now.

 

                                      ***

 

There was Christmas with Aunt Jane—a tiny artificial tree on a table, some lights in the window, a real meal at the table and a teddy bear wrapped in colorful paper for Sarah. Uncle Luke gave her some candy—something red and white striped, since Sarah knew her colors and there was brown liquid in the glasses that Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke were drinking. It was very nice, Sarah had thought…not ‘thought’ so much as simply ‘felt’ what she experienced as ‘safe’—but it didn’t last.

 

Aunt Jane and Uncle Luke were yelling at each other and Sarah grabbed her teddy bear, who she had named ‘Annie”, and ran to the hall closet to shut herself inside. In the dark, she covered her ears with her hands and shut her eyes as tight as she could—she’d done this before and knew how to do it—but the yelling got louder and she heard something break and for some reason she remembered the man in brown and the woman in white and blue. She struggled with the closet door knob and the front door, then, holding ‘Annie’ under her arm, she ran down the two fights of steps and out into the chill night. She thought she remembered which way to go. If she could only get to those people—that man in brown and woman in white and blue—then the yelling would stop and the fear would go away and something else would be true. Jane and Luke didn’t even notice she was gone until Jane was pressing a wet dishtowel against her eye and Luke was picking up the broken plates from the floor.

 

Suddenly it began to snow. Sarah didn’t know what snow felt like on your face, your eyelids, your tongue. She stopped running about a block from the place where the man and woman were waiting. She began spinning—wearing only jeans and a thin shirt in the cold. She was holding her face up to the sky, feeling the snow, tasting it, spinning and spinning out beyond the sidewalk into the street….

 

 

                                      ***

 

Lt. Don Marks’ cell phone was ringing in the middle of dessert at his Christmas dinner with his family—his wife and two children, his brother-in-law, his father and mother and a distant cousin who happened to be in town. He considered another bite of apple pie but answered his phone instead.

 

“Lt. Marks?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“John Matthews from the Charlotte Police Department,” the voice said. “Sorry to interrupt your holiday, but I think you’d want to know about this….”

 

“What?” Lt. Marks asked.

 

“We have a young girl in hospital here, grazed by a car but doing fine. She didn’t have on a coat and we found a toy bear near her. No one has come to claim her and she keeps saying, ‘I’m Riley and I live in Raleigh’. She looks like the girl on the posters. I knew you’d want to know.”

 

Don Marks—a tough, world-weary cop, was suddenly weeping—tears and surprise and joy from deep inside himself. His wife was beside him now, a look of love and concern on her face. Don handed her the phone and said, between sobs, “get the details….And I have to go now….” But before he left he hugged his children so tightly they squealed.

 

                                        ***

 

When Sarah woke up, the sun was shining through the window of the hospital room. It was the day after Christmas, though Sarah didn’t think of that. She pulled her bear close before she looked around. A woman in white was standing by her bed—where other women in white had stood—with a man dressed in brown. Mary Nole volunteered to do the Christmas shift at the hospital in Raleigh where she worked and Joe, her husband, delivered for UPS on Christmas day. Neither of them wanted to be home without their daughter in an empty, painful, haunted house and neither had bothered to change clothes once they heard from Lt. Marks.

 

In the background, near the door, was a man in a suit who was standing very still. He was as big as Uncle Luke, but not as scary. He seemed to be wiping tears from his face.

 

“Who’s that man?” Sarah asked. “Is he okay?”

 

“That’s a policeman,” her mother said. “His name is Detective Marks. He’s been looking for you for a long time. He’s very happy. That’s why he’s crying.”

 

“Are you my mommy?” Sarah asked.

 

“Oh, yes, my love, I am,” Mary answered.

 

Sarah seemed calm beyond belief. “And you,” she asked the man, “are you my daddy?”

 

Joseph Nole simply bent over his daughter to hold her.

 

When he pulled away at last, Riley said, “I’ve seen you on TV. ‘What can Brown do for you?’”

 

“Anything,” he told her. “Anything….”

          “Do we still have a dog? Was Annie her name?” Riley asked.

 

          “Oh yes,” Joseph and Mary said together, looking at each other as they did. “And she misses you so,” Riley’s mother said. “We’ll see her soon. She’ll be so happy.” And Riley smiled.

 

          “I named my bear ‘Annie’,” she said, holding the Teddy up for all to see. Lt. Marks came over to the bed to admire the stuffed animal.

 

          Then she asked, “Is this heaven?” 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas, my Love, Merry Christmas….Love JIM  

 

 

 

I may have posted this before...but it's time again.

 

The Joy of Irrelevancy

          So, in the midst of the sermon for his ordination I said, “Michael, never forget, you are being ordained into an almost irrelevant office in an irrelevant institution.”

          I said that for two reasons: first, I believe it, and, secondly, it seemed to me it was important for him to hear. He is an astonishing priest and man whose true gifts will shine through most clearly if he can ‘hang loose’ about his role and his relative importance in the scheme of things.

          I learned after the service that the bishop didn’t appreciate my insight into what Michael needed to hear and didn’t agree with my analysis of the church. He didn’t appreciate my ‘diminishing’ the church in a sermon to 400 people—most of whom have a vested interest in the relevancy of the church.

          I must agree that it was perhaps not the most appropriate setting for pointing out the church’s irrelevancy, but it does need pointed out.  The American Heritage Dictionary (2006) defines ‘relevant’ as “pertinent to the matter at hand.” The Merriam Webster Dictionary of Law (1996) clears up for all us Law and Order junkies what is meant when one of the attorneys objects by saying “relevancy, your Honor.” Something is ‘relevant’, according to that dictionary by “having significant and demonstrable bearing on facts or issues.”

          I would content, by either of those definitions of ‘relevant’ that the Main Line Churches are woefully irrelevant these days. Not much about the church is ‘pertinent’ to any of the matters at hand in our lives and culture and doesn’t have any ‘significant and demonstrable bearing’ on the issues that consume us. Almost no one I know pauses when considering the matters at hand each day and asks, “wonder what the Episcopal Church has to say that would be pertinent here?” It has not always been so. For 17 centuries or so—from the Council of Nicea until relatively recently—the church was so enmeshed with Western culture that you couldn’t turn around without bumping into both its pertinence and relevancy. I’m not scholarly enough to pinpoint when that began to unravel. Certainly the Renaissance got the ball rolling, but the church wasn’t dislodged from her role all at once. The horrors of two World Wars and the world-wide depression in between them certainly greased the skids. But, if you ask me, the true death knell of Christendom in the US came with the construction of the Interstate Highway System and the explosion of the mass media.

          Before you think I’m crazy, let me point out that no less a figure than Stanley Howerwas traces the “end of Christendom” to a particular Sunday evening in his home town of Greenville, South Carolina, when the movie theatre was open for the first time during the hours of evening church services. (Resident Aliens) The explosion of mass media—movies, TV and now the Internet, for God’s sake—replaced most of the entertainment value of Main Line Churches. As late as the early 20th Century, churches were still the center of social life and leisure time (what little of that there was) activities as well as being the formative influence on morals and ideas. The rise of mass media gave the lie to that relevancy. And the Interstates freed people to travel much longer distances to do things than ever before. There are plenty of people still living who remember the time when only a few people on the block…or in the whole town!...had automobiles. (When those people talk about that simpler place and time, they tend to say ‘automobiles’ rather than ‘cars’.) President Eisenhower’s vision of a nation connected together by four lane highways created a booming construction-driven economy, transformed Detroit into the shining city on a hill, put engineers into a whole new class of workers and made possible “the Sunday drive” right past the church and out to the lake.

          There were, it seems to me, two models for the church in the height of her relevancy—the village church and the cathedral. Like Orthodox Jews to this day, most everyone used to walk to church…which insured the church they attended was in walking distance. And in a village before radio and, more malignantly, TV, the church was the center of civic, social and political life. And since the village church was so central to life, generation upon generation of heterosexual couples met and married in ‘their’ church. It was a very different world than the one that immerged after WW II.

          The cathedral model was the village church writ large. Commerce tended to flourish on the cathedral grounds. All those European cathedrals aren’t in the center of cities because they bought the land—the cities grew up around them. There are two equivalents to the cathedral model today—shopping malls and Mega-churches. You can spend a day in a shopping mall—do your banking in the branch there, have meals in the many eating establishments, do some shopping, find interactive experiences for your children, get your hair cut and styled as well as a pedicure and manicure, visit the day spa, see the cars that are always on display in the walk areas, get your exercise, see displays by civic groups, get a drink, go to a movie, visit the health care satellite hospitals have established, get a tattoo, buy insurance—there is actually no reason to leave a shopping mall for most any needs. I keep waiting for some evangelical group to put in chapels.

          The other cathedral clone is the Mega-churches that have sprung up in the suburbs of most all medium sized and large cities. One way Interstates made most Main Line Churches irrelevant is if the church was built before the Interstates were, there is insufficient parking. Mega-churches work “because” of the highways and are islands of holiness in a sea of asphalt. One of the things the folks at places like Willow Creek have done is perfected the art of parking. Sports arenas could learn a lot about how to get cars in and out of a venue efficiently from the Mega-church people. Mega churches also mimic shopping malls by having food courts, gyms, child-care, ‘Christian’ schools, video game rooms and worship that is more like Broadway or Los Vegas than like Canterbury. Mega-churches and sect-like fundamentalist churches are the only ‘churches’ that have figured out how to remain relevant. Mega-churches do it by making themselves indispensable and competing successfully with the larger culture. The Fundamentalists do it by mind control. If I were a betting man I would wager the latter will collapse into irrelevancy before the former.

 

          Mind control—control of any kind—is something that is becoming harder and harder in our culture. Jimmie Carter once said on the PBS show Speaking of Faith that fundamentalism was the creation of what he called ‘dominant males’. My wife would call them ‘male mutants”—a term, not of endearment, which includes all the men (and some women) on the planet. Those dominant males, according to Jimmie Carter, believe that what they think is what God thinks. “That’s a difficult position to argue with,” he said, in his soft, sweet accent.

          It seems to me that the church, for most of history—at least from the 4^th century until the Interstates—had that opinion of itself: what they believed is what God believed. Interestingly enough, the Protestant Reformation took that little caveat with them when they left the Whore of Babylon behind. Church has been based on ‘absolute Truth’—something I’ve admitted I don’t believe in—and used that cudgel to batter people into line for century after century.

          There are people my age, for example, who were told by their Roman Catholic priests that simply entering a non-Roman church was a mortal sin. I ponder what the percentage of people born since 1977 who believe that there is a whit of difference between different denominations would be. One of the costs of irrelevancy is that the denominations have, for the most part, lost their ‘bite’, their ‘scent’, their particular ‘flavor’. Like politicians and Episcopal bishops, denominations, scrambling to stay ‘relevant’ gave up what made them distinct and real. I went to a Methodist wedding some years ago and watched an altar boy with gloves on, along with a red cassock and snow white surplice, come out to light the candles on the altar. When he finished, he did what we Episcopalians call a ‘profound bow’—from the waist, all the way down until he looked like the number 7. Holy moley! The Methodist Church I knew as an adolescent would have fallen to the ground if 1. there had been an altar boy; 2. he had been wearing gloves; 3. there had been candles on the altar; or 4, anyone had reverenced the ‘table’ in front of the pulpit. What has happened to Methodists? They probably drink now too.

 

          Shortly after I came to St. John’s, I was in the church on a Saturday morning by myself. I was fussing and obsessing about something or other for the Sunday services. Today, I could never find myself alone at St. John’s on a Saturday morning. The ‘Saturday School’ for the Hispanic congregation would be there, the MEEP group (an unfortunate acronym for an adult training program the diocese runs) would be there, Knit One/Purl Two (the Prayer Shawl group) would be there, and any of a dozen or so periodic Saturday meetings and events would be going on. But back then, I could have the whole building to myself.

          I had the doors locked but heard the doorbell from the parking lot. When I opened the door I was confronted with twenty or so Hispanic folks, all dressed up, with a baby in an ornate gown. Many of them were weeping, but one young man, who spoke idiomatic English, told me what their story was. They had scheduled the baby’s baptism at the huge Roman Catholic basilica on the other side of the Green and shown up on schedule. The parents had been through six weeks of baptismal training prior to the private baptism. But when the priest arrived, he asked who the god-parents were. Two women and a man raised their hands.

          “Are you Roman Catholics?” he asked.

          Two were, but one of the god-mothers was a member of an Evangelical Spanish-speaking church. The priest announced he would not do the baptism and turned on his heel and disappeared in the direction of the Rectory.

          “We just want somewhere to pray for a while,” the young man told me. “Our hearts are broken.”

          I ushered them into the sanctuary, turned on some lights and told them to take as long as they wanted. Then I went back to my fussing and obsessing for a while. Suddenly, something else occurred to me. I went back and found the young man who had been the family’s spokesperson. I asked him if they’d like for me to baptize the baby.

          “When?” he asked.

          “Right now,” I said.

          After a short burst of Spanish among the group, he turned to me and have me the thumbs up sign. I gathered water and oil, wine and bread, lit the Pascal Candle, baptized little Maria and shared the Body and Blood with her family.

          I haven’t seen them since, but, to me, that doesn’t matter. That sacrament mattered and made a difference, just don’t ask me what….

                  

          A decade or so ago, I was sitting in the nave of St. John’s being interviewed by a local reporter about some issue or another. Her skin was copy paper white, she had red hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose below her blue eyes (I have a real weakness for freckles). She was 20 something and when the interview was over she looked around the church and said to me, “This is different from Jewish, right?”

          So, two generations ago—maybe even one—Colleen would have been worrying about the plight of her immortal soul, having spent an hour in a non-Roman church talking to an Episcopal ‘priest’. But all she wanted to know was whether Episcopalians were different from Jews.

          I asked her about her family. Her oh-so-Irish father had married at 16 and divorced at 19. When he married Colleen’s mother it had to be by a justice of the peace. His family disowned him and his church excommunicated him (part of the death throes of the church’s relevancy). So, understandably, he was a tad pissed off about things. So Colleen and her brother, Sean (for goodness sake!) had never darkened the door of a church—except when she came to interview me.

          Obviously, she’d never been baptized. I asked her if she’d like to be.

          “What would it matter?” she asked. “What would it mean?”

          I told her I truly believed it would both matter and mean something, I just wasn’t sure what.

          After I showed her the astonishing baptismal font with some terribly interesting iconography carved into it’s marble (a pelican piercing her breast to feed her young on her blood and a stag and evergreen tree along with an Agnus Dei and a descending dove) she was interested in the symbol and myth of it all.

          “When would we do it?” she asked.

          “I’d prefer a Sunday morning,” I told her, “but most any time would work for me—but we need witnesses….”

          She left really considering the possibility, but when I didn’t hear from her for a while I called the newspaper and discovered she had taken and job in Arizona and moved there. Oh those Interstate highways….

 

          Which brings us, inexorably, to marriages. This subject has gotten horribly complicated by the longing and demand of gay and lesbian couples to be ‘married’ in the church, just like real people. (That’s the point, isn’t it, that the church doesn’t take GLBT folks seriously, like they’re ‘real’? The church tends to extend, for the most part, a modicum of hospitality to the GLBT community—oh, let’s be honest here, to the GL community—the church no more knows what to extend to bi-sexual and transgendered folks than the church would know what to do with a woodchuck who got elected bishop. Though the wood chuck could chuck wood, what on earth would the BT folks of the GLBT community do? Horrors!) But I’ll save that conversation for later. What I want to write about now is heterosexual marriage and how the church has made itself irrelevant to that particular institution…which isn’t doing so well on the relevancy scale itself!

          When I was a young priest and feeling relevant, I had a multitude of thoughts about “Christian marriage”. I felt that “Christian marriage” was reserved for people who had proved both their “Christian” commitment and their heart-felt desire to wrap their marriage in Christianity in a way that would guard and protect them until death did them part. Or something like that was what I thought. Since then, since admitting that Christianity is irrelevant, at least so far as the church of Christ is concerned, I’ve moved to a different place about “marrying people”.

          That’s what they usually say—mostly the bride though the groom seems to make first contact more often than in the past—they say: “will you ‘marry us’.” And the first time I meet with a couple I assure them that I will NOT be ‘marrying them’. So far as I can see, the church doesn’t ‘marry’ people. If the church did, indeed, ‘marry people’ they wouldn’t need a marriage license from the courthouse. Additionally, so far as I can see, the state doesn’t ‘marry’ people either—the state provides a license for marriage that, once signed by a functionary and processed in the courthouse, provides them with certain specific legal rights. What actually happens, it seems to me, in a marriage is that two people ‘marry’ each other. And by the time they’re sitting in the library of St. John’s talking to me, they’re already, in my mind, ‘married’.

          “Nobody,” I tell those, usually nervous couples—nervous because they think the church is going to try to batter them in some way—“wakes up one morning and decides to go see an Episcopal priest about ‘getting’ married.” Long before that happens, I tell them, they have made some decisions and some promises to each other—hopefully not right after especially good sex or a round of bar hopping—that have bonded them together in a way that indicates they fully intend to spend the rest of their natural lives together. What they come to me about is exactly what the good old Book of Common Prayer says it is—‘the Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage’. That implies—and I’m an old English major and understand the language’s nuances quite well—is that the “Marriage” has already occurred and what we’re going to gather to do is celebrate that reality and have me, as the representative of an irrelevant institution, “bless” it.

          Then I go on to explain what I think a ‘blessing’ is. I tell them that where I come from, when the family is gathered around the dinner table full of entirely too much food to possibly be consumed at one sitting, someone will say, “Who’d like to say the blessing?” And whatever whoever steps into that breach says is something like this: “Thank you, God, for this food and for those who prepared it and for those we share it with.” And everyone says “Amen” and digs in.

          That truly is what I think I do in a marriage ceremony: I say a heart-felt “thank you” to God for the two people, their love, their commitment, their longing, their promises and vows, their dewy-eyed optimism, their ‘good intentions’, their hopes and fears and wonderings. And I ask God to guard them like the apple of his/her eye and hide them under the shadow of her/his wing. Lord knows, given the way things are these days, they need that protection. And since that’s what I do, I assume that is what the sacrament of marriage (excuse me, Episcopal Purists, “sacramental rite”!) is about. That and that only and that—thanksgiving and blessing and prayers for protection—is sacrament enough…more than enough. That’s the outward and visible act—the inward and spiritual grace part is up to God. I’m delighted to divide up the responsibility in that way.

          I’m also delighted when people come to ‘get married’ at St. John’s. Again, there are two reasons. I truly believe in the objective reality of sacraments and I think anyone who wants such a reality from an otherwise irrelevant institution deserves to receive it. Inclusion is not a ‘privilege’, it’s a birthright as a child of God. And the folks who come for the sacrament are delighted that it is freely given and not tied up in a Byzantine complexity of rules and canon law and inhospitality. Many of the folks whose marriages I bless are Roman Catholics with a divorce or two in their history. Some of them have gone the long, lonely road of annulment to no fulfillment. Most of them have been insulted in one way or another by the priest who may have baptized them and told they are ‘unworthy’ in some profound way. Then they come to me and I’m delighted to see them and will bend over backwards to provide sacramental support to their relationship. It’s one of the things I do to make an irrelevant institution matter and make a difference in people’s lives.

          That’s the thing that I want to leave you with at this point: being ‘irrelevant’ isn’t so bad a thing. It doesn’t mean we can’t ‘matter’ profoundly and make miraculous differences in people’s lives. In fact, being irrelevant might just make it possible for the church to play those roles. What we don’t get to do is control and manipulate people in every part of their lives. What we don’t get to do is to use the Sacraments—which belong, by the way, in my way of thinking, to God and the People of God—as forms of reward and punishment, keeping everyone in their place. The church has a remarkable and wondrous opportunity to ‘get out of the way’ between God and God’s children and contribute to both by bringing instruments of Grace into the lives of those who God loves.

          I always ask people who come to St. John’s thinking I’ll “marry” them and then learn what I will truly do—I ask them why they chose to call me. I tell them there is no wrong answer because I know they expect the church to ask trick questions and then assault them when they answer incorrectly. A perfectly good answer is this: “it’s a pretty place”. That answer works for me because St. John’s is a remarkably pretty place and a place such a holy moment should happen in. But the answer I like most is that they attended a wedding at St. John’s in the past and their friends who got married told them that St. John’s was a place of Grace and Hospitality. That’s the answer this old irrelevancy likes to hear.

          (A closing shot: one of those crippled couples—beaten up by the Roman Catholic church and denied the sacrament of marriage—had their celebration and blessing at St. John’s about 12 years ago. I expect about 1/3 of that kind of couple to hang around in some way and about 1/3 to come back for the sacrament of baptism and about 1/3 never to be heard from again. I’ll take those odds. The wife lost her job at a RC school for being married in an Episcopal Church after a divorce. God help us! This couple disappeared for several years and then—true to my accounting—came back to have Wyatt baptized. Then they disappeared again. But the husband came back—God know why (well, of course, God knows why…)—and started playing guitar for the 8 a.m. service. He’s served on the vestry and his wife and son came more and more.

          Evangelism is a long-range enterprise for an irrelevant institution. We must be this: Inclusive, Open, Hospitable and Patient.