- Is there life after Funerals?
When I retired from full time ministry, I told a couple of the Funeral Directors I worked with that I would be available to do 'trade funerals'. (Two things from that sentence: 'trade funerals' are funerals for people who don't have any connection to a church but think of themselves, however vaguely, as Christians; secondly, what used to be known as 'morticians' prefer to be called 'Funeral Directors'.) In my 35 years as a priest, I've decided most of them deserve that title. They do much more than 'mortuary service'--embalming, dressing, burying people's bodies. The really good Funeral Directors deal with a lot of pain in their work. They 'direct things' for people who, because of grief or shock or guilt, aren't up to 'directing' things for themselves. Death catches people unawares, even when the lead up to the death has been months, if not years, of fear and suffering.
“When people die it is like a bird flying into a window on a chill February morning.” That is a line from a poem I read in college. It was a poem written by a friend of mine about her friend who died in Viet Nam. (Lord, it's been so long ago—that war that formed my generation one way or another—and it is still as new as today for me.) Lila's poem seems universal to me though. She talked about the shock and disbelief that death brings. “When people die it's like bears are loose in the streets, gobbling up the children.” That's why who don't fret about it during most of their lives, want clergy at their funerals. And that's why, people need someone to 'direct' the funerals for them.
Any how I got a call just over two months after my retirement from Lou, a funeral director in Waterbury, telling me when this particular family with their particular needs came in, he knew I was the only person he would trust to do the service. Well, he had me hooked by appealing to my ego, which, a friend once told me, was 'as large as Montana'. So, I said 'yes', then Lou, that sneak, told me it was a service at the funeral home, during the wake, for a 16-year-old girl who had been raped and murdered by a friend of hers. That happened at the base of this enormous illuminated cross that soars above I-84 on the way to Waterbury. The cross is in a place called Holy Land. Holy Land was the creation of some overly-zealous Italian guy decades ago. He had the cross erected and then tried to recreate Israel in Connecticut. I've been up there before. The whole thing has fallen into ruins of Israel in the midst of a forest of sorts with paths through it going all the way up to the highest point in the area where the cross stands. A group of Filipino nuns now own the property, but it has become the hangout of teenagers from all over the area.
(An aside of import before more about Phoebe's wake. Lou, the guy who called me, is someone I've worked with a lot over the last two decades. His funeral home is well known and respected in the area and though it is 'an Italian funeral home', ethnicity being still important around Waterbury, many Episcopalians use it. One of my favorite people at St. John's was Nancy. She was a Warden, a remarkably active member, a generous and gentle woman and a dear friend. She used to make me egg salad and tuna salad sandwiches when I would go to her house for lunch. Some of the best of both I've ever eaten...that was Nancy's gift, to give only the best.
Lou was the funeral director who got the 'call' to collect Nancy's body from the hospital when she died. Her son and I were in her room when she passed through that wondrous and terrifying door to whatever comes next. She would be moved to the mortuary in the hospital, where Lou would pick up her body. But he came to the room instead and sat by her bed and wept, holding her dead hand. From that moment on I would trust him—as brusque and 'God Father Italian' as he appeared. “Hey, Father,” he would say over the phone when he called about a funeral, “I got one for you....” But I knew this: whoever cried at Nancy's deathbed was a friend of mine.)
So, when Lou called, I would have agreed to do the service even if he hadn't massaged my ego. 'Death', after all, is what priests' DO. In my years since ordination, I have officiated at well over half a thousand funerals. And sat by that many and more death beds. And been with many hundreds of families as one of the ones they loved was reaching out for the doorknob of that wondrous and terrifying door—the door all of us will open and enter sooner or later. God bless us. Really, God bless us....
*
There is an ancient Roman priest in Waterbury who is legend among the Funeral Directors of the city. One of them told me Fr. Spinelli performed over 200 funerals a year. In his 80's himself, he buried more people in a year than I buried in a decade. In my 35 years as a priest I've done over 500 funerals. Some of them were for people I never really knew who had families and friends who mourned them in ways I never experienced. And then there were several hundred who were members of my parish and friends of mine. And I tried to 'perform' (a terrible description of what I do at funerals, but not inaccurate) each one with the same focus and commitment as any other.
Funerals are vital and holy moments. Whenever we brush up against death, things get sacred in a hurry. Not nearly enough attention is paid, in my mind, to the importance of funerals in the training of priests. There is really nothing else, for a priest, besides the weekly observances of the breaking of bread for the community, that equals the obligation and opportunity of presiding at funerals.
We are rubbed raw with emotion when people die. (“When people die it's like a mad man is in charge of the power plant: Light/Dark/Light/Dark.... When people die.”) There is no other moment when it is so profoundly necessary for a priest to be present. Not to 'clear things up' or say something meaningful, but simply to sit by the bed of the dying or hold the hands of the living and shake your head slowly when asked 'the meaning' of it all. That's what people need in a time of seeming meaninglessness—someone to agree that is so, just so the mourning folks don't think they are crazy.
*
Unusually enough, Phoebe's funeral wasn't the worst one I ever attended. In fact, if such a thing is possible, the wake of that 16 year old child—victim of a boy she considered a 'friend'--was less troubling than many. Her paternal grandfather took the microphone and invited people to come up and tell “Phoebe stories”. And people did—former teachers, red-eyed friends, members of the family—and the stories somehow took much of the pain and shock and horror of her death out of the room. There was also a screen that was full of slides of her—it was a power point, I think, and in the pictures, Phoebe was full of life. Since she had been cremated, there was no coffin to draw attention to the reality of her death. I suppose Ibsen was right, there is no suffering that cannot be borne if we put it in a story and tell the story to each other.
The worst funeral I ever participated in was the service for Joan, a beautiful woman of 40-something in the first parish I served. Joan suffered from bone cancer—not a way I'd pick to die—and she did suffer from it. In the last days even the sheet on her hospital bed brought her pain. I knew dead was near so I visited her every morning for the last week or so. The last morning, I broke one of the few rules I have about what I do. I didn't go to the nurses' station to check on her condition but simply walked into her private room. The fact that the door was closed didn't surprise me since Joan had complained about the constant and sometimes disturbing sounds of the wing.
So, I walked in to find her naked on her bed, her feet tied together with gauze and her arms straight down at her sides. She was being prepared to go to the morgue in the basement. The nurse who was washing her turned to see me, shocked at first but recognizing me, she simply said, “less than an hour ago. She's finally at peace.”
I had to agree that Joan's face was uncreased by pain for the first time in a year. She looked serene and lovely. Finally at peace, indeed.
Joan's funeral was one of the “mixed funerals” I had at St. James in Charleston. Sometimes the deceased was the Episcopalian and the family were black Baptist or AME or something more fundamentalist than that. Joan had joined the Episcopal Church while in college to escape the harshness of her family's faith. But they insisted that the funeral should be in the funeral home and their 'preacher' would help me. I knew Joan wouldn't have wanted that but I was young them and not bold enough to stand up for the dead against the wishes of the grieving family.
The funeral director was a Baptist but he well understood the Episcopal Church's ways. So, just before the service he closed the coffin and helped two of the women from the church put the pall on. I had been talking with Preacher Jones for 10 minutes before that, agreeing that he could speak for a while and I would do the burial office from the Prayer Book. “And Preacher Jones,” I said in my harshest whisper, “the coffin remains closed....” (I had been to family funerals of some of the other members of St. James and seen how a closed coffin would be opened to let the congregation have one more look at the dead.) Preacher Jones, a retired coal miner with several fingertips missing, hadn't been within spitting distance of any seminary of any kind and didn't know the Episcopal practice any more than he knew how to speak Hindi. I was going to stay in control of the service.
“Yes sir, Father,” he told me, “just the way you want it....”
After the solemn, lovely tones of the liturgy and readings, Preacher Jones got up to begin his sermon. He started out softly, reminding people of 'Otto, the Orkin Man'--a popular ad campaign for a company who specialized in pest control...mostly termites. He was using Paul's image of the earthly body and the heavenly body--'tabernacles' in his King James language. He said that Joan's earthly tabernacle had been ravaged and that the doctors and treatments were like Otto's work on our houses when they were infested by termites. But her heavenly tabernacle would be perfect and in need of no cancer control. It was an interesting metaphor and I was thinking about how that was closer than I could come to describing the bodies we supposedly will have in the Kingdom. I drifted off a moment in the image and was propelled by to full alertness when I heard him say, in one of those low, rolling voices Black preachers are so good at: “I believe there are some here who have not had the privilege of viewing Sister Joan's earthly tabernacle one last time....”
I rose and touched his arm. “Preacher Jones,” I whispered, “don't go there....”
But by that time several people were moving down the aisle toward the coffin. Jumping away from me like a much younger man than he was, he snatched the pall and pulled it from Joan's coffin. The two ladies from St. James practically dived forward to grab it before it hit the floor. I couldn't get to him because was already surrounded by weeping and wailing mourners. The decent good order the BCP had brought to the room was gone, replaced by a frenzy of what posed as grief but seemed to me to be pure dramatics.
The funeral director was pushing forward to try to restore things to some sense of decency but Preacher Jones was pulling on the locked lid, jarring the casket around. Evan, the funeral director, looked at me with horror—he told me later that Joan's funeral convinced him that the Episcopal practice was, after all, the best way. I nodded to him and he opened the casket with the tool he used before Preacher Jones and the surge of people could knock it from its stand.
What happened then was a tempest of despair. One woman was actually keening and a large transvestite (I knew she was because her name was Robert) actually lifted Joan's body up and held her for a while, sobbing all the time. The storm stopped almost as suddenly as it began. Evan straightened Joan's clothing as best he could in a room full of people, quietly closed and secured the lid and with the help of the stricken women from St. James, restored the pall to its place.
Preacher Jones was worn out by then and after getting some “Amens” from the congregation, went back to his seat. I finished the service through tears of rage and failure. I had let Joan down at the end. She would have been horrified at such goings on. And I led her coffin to the waiting hearse, Even apologizing to me each step of the way.
After they shut the door on Joan's coffin, Preacher Jones stretched out his hand to me. “I can't go to the grave,” he said, “I'm sure you can handle it.”
Rather than reject his handshake I took his hand in mine and began to squeeze his finger nubs. He was in his 70's and I was barely 30 and in the best shape of my life. I squeezed until I saw tears in his eyes. Then I whispered, “Preacher Jones, you are one sick son of a bitch”, smiling to beat the band so the people around thought I was being gracious in a terrible situation. I finally released his hand and slapped him on the shoulder in a clerical way, but hard enough to make him stumble a bit.
That was the worse funeral I ever had a part in.
My first funeral was of Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie was 97 and lived with her two sisters, 93 and 87. She had been dying in the same hospital on the same day as the birth of my son. Labor was slow going and so I made several trips back and forth between labor hall and Miss Bessie's room. I had been telling her about what was going on downstairs, how my son was being born. I'm not sure she could hear me but I kept telling her since it was all I could think of to tell anybody at the time.
After my second visit to Miss Bessie, I was sitting in the room with Bern. Things were going nowhere and she was getting impatient. I wasn't sure things could get worse but they did. A nurse stuck her head in the room and said, in a confused and questioning voice, “your father is here?” We knew good and well neither of our fathers were anywhere near and caught the nurse’s confusion just as a voice said in a stage whisper: “Father in God...”
For reasons beyond all my comprehension, the bishop had decided to make a pastoral call to labor hall!
“Get his ass out of here,” Bern hissed at me, fire in her eyes.
He was apologetic when I steered him out into the hallway, but I don't think he understood why she wasn't grateful he had come. That taught me another rule for priestcraft—never go to the room of a woman in labor unless you're summons. There are places priests should never go....
While Josh was being delivered by C-section, Miss Bessie slipped away though that mysterious door to whatever comes next. Life and death mingled together, mixed up, passing like ships in the corridors of Charleston General Hospital.
Three days later, our son came home and Miss Bessie had her funeral. There was no moaning as she put out to sea. She had lived a great span of years and had only been sick for a week or so at the end. She was another of those skinny, unmarried women who seem to live so long. Might be a cautionary tale in there for women considering marriage.
The family plot was straight up a hill ten miles or so outside of Charleston. The only vehicle that could get there was a four-wheel-drive Ford pickup truck. The hearse carried Miss Bessie to the foot of the hill and two strong gravediggers transferred her to the back of the truck. I had intended to go up, but since the funeral director had to by law and the truck would hold only three passengers, I climbed up in the bed of that Ford and committed Miss Betsy to God and the earth. Then off she went, bouncing up and down on a rocky 45-degree angle.
Her sisters and a few others waited in the car while she was put in her grave near her people. One of the sisters, Miss Mable, said, “just two more trips to go....” I knew she meant for her and Miss Dorothy. But I left before either of them died. They were very thin and unmarried.
*
Once, shortly after we moved to New Haven, Josh and I were going somewhere in the VW bus. New Haven has several large and sprawling cemeteries within the city limits. By chance we passed two of them in a matter of minutes. Josh, barely 5 years old, said, “there sure are a lot of dead people living in New Haven.”
Mouths of babes and all that. I'm pretty agnostic about ghosts and communications with the Great Wherever, but every time I leave a room for a few moments, turning off the light, I say to myself, “Hello, Virgil!” My father was the world's champion at turning off lights. Since our children complain when they are visiting that our house is too dark, I must be channeling Virgil pretty well.
Lots of dead people live most places, it seems to me.
*
Once, after a funeral when the cremains were interred in St. John's Close, a young funeral director asked me if a person had to be a member to be buried there.
“No,” said knowing we had interred ashes of several folks from the Soup Kitchen because they had nowhere to rest.
He smiled broadly. “I have these cremains....”
Turns out his funeral home had a contract with the two hospitals in town to cremate unclaimed bodies. But after cremating them, they weren't sure what to do with them and the boxes were taking up most of a cabinet in a storage room.
“Most of them are babies,” he said.
“Babies?” I asked, “people left their babies bodies at the hospital?”
I was initially horrified until he explained that many of them were still births and premature, damaged children. Some people didn't have enough money to pay for burial and others were so upset and confused they simply signed the papers while in shock.
So, that All Saint's Day, at the end of the Eucharist, we took the cremains he had collected over the last few years out to the Close and buried them together. We put the names on the plaque in the church narthex (front hallway of the sanctuary for those who don't speak 'Episcopalian”). One or two were indigent adults but most were, as he told me, babies. Some of them didn't have first names so they were 'Baby Girl Smith' and 'Baby Boy Jones'. One I remember had the remarkable name “Baby Boy Bugalu”. Whenever I looked at the plaque, I always found his name and caressed it with my fingertip.
So, a tradition was born. Each All Saint's Day thereafter, ashes with nowhere to go found a resting place at St. John's. Other funeral directors found out about it and brought their unclaimed ashes as well. That little sacred rectangle of earth became home to the forgotten and left behind of the dead who lived in Waterbury.
I found out most everyone had the same initial reaction to the babies as I had—shock and a bit of anger toward the parents. I spent time, in writing and All Saints' sermons, explaining that we need to try to imagine the anguish people felt at losing a child and how anguished people often make strange decisions out of the fog of grief.
Then a member of the parish came to me and tearfully told me how she had lost a third semester baby while traveling in the south. It had been decades before and she was so drugged up by the hospital staff that it was well on the way home before she thought to ask what happened to the baby. Her husband, stricken and paralyzed with loss, had signed the body over to the hospital to depose of.
“I can only hope she went to some place like St. John's,” the woman told me, “and now I can finally grieve for that child I never knew.”
The second year a couple of people I didn't know showed up for the All Saint's Day interments. They approached me afterward. They both had the same story as the parishioner. In the case of these two they had both been young and unmarried when their babies were born dead. In fact, the two of them had discovered they shared the same secret, since almost no one else knew their stories. They were weeping too, mourning for those children who never lived and they abandoned in death. The service had been a form of absolution for them both and they weren't keeping the secret any more.
“My husband and my two teenagers don't know about what happened,” one of them told me. “Now I can tell them and I can finally be comforted for that awful loss.” That sounded like very 'good news' to me. A Gospel moment in the courtyard of a church.
*
Marty and Fran came to St. John's one Sunday and never left until they retired to Florida. Marty worked as a civilian for the State Police and Fran was an office worker somewhere. They were great—Marty was a big, grown-up kid who looked like the actor Fred Gwinn. Fran was feisty and ironic and funny. They were great fun to have around. They both were in late life second marriages and were always bringing visiting grandchildren to church. One of them had the first name Bradley, so he and I had more than a passing relationship. That I never knew which of them was the 'real' grandparent said a lot about their relationship.
They were two of those people who move to Florida because it is part of the thought that that's what people in Connecticut do when they retire. All their families were in New England, so they came back often, always stopping in for a Sunday 'hit' of St. John's funky parish life and worship. I liked them both immensely. Marty was one of those 'Corvette guys' who never outgrew his love for fast sports cars. He had a gizmo on his Buick or Oldsmobile or whatever it was--'American' for sure—that allowed him to turn on the motor from a distance. He'd leave the heater turned on in winter and the AC in summer and when he got to his car after breakfast it was either warm as toast or cool as sea breezes. I always coveted that feature.
On the way back to Florida from one of their swings north to see family, they wrecked and both were killed. Instantly, I pray. The car went through the medium, across 3 lanes of northbound traffic and through the guardrail on the northbound side and into a tree. Perhaps Marty, who was driving, had a heart attack or went to sleep. I can only hope Fran was asleep and didn't realize what was happening until it had happened. And it happened and they both died and the two families wanted a joint funeral at St. John's. It is a huge, Neo-Gothic church, and I had to figure out how to get two coffins in the transepts without blocking the center aisle or the steps to the altar for communion.
And we got it done. Children from each family spoke, we broke the bread and shared the wine and then went on a wondrous ride. Two hearses were necessary since, unlike bicycles, there are no hearses built for two. We buried Marty first, beside his first wife, who died before he met Fran. Then we wound our way down the Naugatuck Valley to Fran's family plot. I thought of them so much as 'together', it was hard for me to imagine them being separated by death and having two different resting places in the rocky, rich soil of Connecticut. But that's the way we did it. One funeral and two different interments. I only hope those two—who seemed so 'right' for each other, can find the other in the General Resurrection. (Though, honestly, I can't say I believe in such a thing....)
*
Mrs. Carter was from Barbuda, a little island in the Caribbean that, from the stories I've heard about it from her large extended family, is about as isolated and undeveloped as any island in the chain. She and her family have been in Connecticut for many years—all hard working, soft-spoken and physically striking. Her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and assorted other relatives came to church and sat near each other. The kids—boys in suits and girls in dresses with little hats and white gloves (imagine that!) sat through the services without coloring books or electronic gadgets or even stern looks from their parents. Every time someone told me they wanted to come to church but their children would misbehave, I wanted to say, “Consider the Barbudans”.
Once a new seminarian asked me in hushed tones, “why do all those Black people sit together?” She thought it had something to do with unwritten rules about race in the Parish.
“What would you think if 20 or 25 people sat in the same area and all had red hair?” I asked her.
Something came across her face that seemed like enlightenment. “A family,” she said, “...but so many....”
On Mrs. Carter's birthday, there were perhaps 75 or more family members in church with her. I sometimes thought there were more Barbudans in Waterbury than in Barbuda. And each of them was fiercely committed to her. She was truly the matriarch of that large and handsome clan. Two of her sons and their families were very involved. Between them and the assorted kids, we once turned over the entire service to honor her on some milestone birthday. All the readers, chalicists and acolytes were related to Mrs. Carter on that day.
She was a delightful and sunny person. “Fad-er Bradley”, she would say in her charming accent, “how are you today?” She always brought me something from her trips back to the island. One gift was a huge and perfect conch shell that is still in our back yard. Another time, because she knew I kept bottles of hot sauce around the church for my use, she brought me some hot sauce from her home. “Dis is not like your haht sauce, Fad-er Bradley,” she said, “use jist a drop or two.”
Well, I like hot sauce and thought she underestimated my taste for it. One morning I sprinkled it liberally on my scrambled eggs and spent much of the next hour or so drinking ice water and blowing my nose. I should have never doubted her wisdom.
Wise, that is what she seemed to be. She had worked long and hard for her children—mostly as an aide in a nursing home, I believe—and had found wisdom in her work and her years. Besides her immediate family, there were others she had unofficially adopted. People I knew to be her nieces or cousins all called her 'momma'. And as she lay dying, she waited for one of them to come before opening that mysterious door and passing through. I've never figured out how people know 'to wait', postponing death until some particular person shows up, but I've seen it enough to know it is so.
I visited her often during her last illness. The nursing home where she was wasting away was on my way home, if I went the long way. And I had seen her the afternoon before her death, surrounded, as always, by quiet, loving guardians from her family. It was a constantly changing assortment of people—many of them children and teens—who sat with her daily and, I suspect, around the clock—always with a CD of gospel music playing from the top of a chest of drawers. The morning of her death a daughter-in-law called and asked me to come again. I told her I'd be there in the afternoon but she insisted I come now. The niece she had been waiting on had come—Mrs. Carter never said that she was waiting on that particular relative, being in a semi-coma most of the last week, but her family knew it was the truth. Several of them had told me, “When she comes, momma will leave....”
When I arrived with my communion kit and oil to anoint Mrs. Carter, the family had filled the room and were spilling out into the hallway. It was 8 in the morning and some of the kids there were in school uniforms with back packs. The people parted for me, murmuring thanks and touching me softly. I never quite got used to the profound respect they treated me with and it was only with great urging that I ever got any of them to call me “Jim” instead of “Father Bradley”. I never even suggested it to Mrs. Carter: I was simply 'Fad-er Bradley' to her.
I said the prayers for the dying, noticing that people in the room were holding each other against what was to come, sobbing without sound, faces wet with tears. Then I realized I only had a dozen or so little wafers for communion. Since there was no room for me to move around, I passed the elements and told them to share. It was like loaves and fishes in Mrs. Carter's circle of love and the last person got as much bread to dip in the wine as the first. An hour or so later, she died.
Her funeral was one of the most elegant and lovely services I've ever known. It was a cold, cold day with spitting snow but when we got to the cemetery, everyone—dressed uniformly in black—stayed until the casket was lowered and the grave was completely full. At first family members tossed in handfuls of dirt and the little girls dropped flowers in the gaping hole. But finally, an end loader came and finished the job. The 150 or so people didn't seem willing to leave even then, touching and whispering, telling stories of Mrs. Carter, until they were chilled to the bone.
Having seen her finally buried, the grief lifted for the meal—an amazing collection of island dishes, the next better and more delicately seasoned than the one before. It was through Mrs. Carter and a reception after the funeral of one of her relatives that I first tasted goat. The thought was somehow revolting to me, but it was so well prepared that I loved it. I wouldn't dare try to cook goat though.
Several of her grandchildren were in the Chorister Academy at St. John's and I would talk to them before rehearsal. After her death, they told such sweet stories about Mrs. Carter. One of them, tall and beautiful, said, with whimsy instead of sadness, “I love her more each passing day.” I found that remarkable coming from a 13-year-old. And I knew it was true.
*
Gravesides are the last place people still have some connection to the one who has died. Most people walk away with the casket still above ground. Somehow the practice of filling in the grave seems a better final parting—not leaving such intimacy to strangers. It is at gravesides that the stark finality of death becomes finally undeniable. I remember helping fill the grave of my dear priest friend, Peter. He was deeply involved in environmental ministry and was a long-time chaplain at an exclusive private school. One way or another—as seminarian, part-time assistant, interim rector, assisting priest—Peter's altar had almost always been at St. John's. His wife and daughter were wonderful parts of the parish family and just before I retired, I baptized Peter's grandson. When his parents and godparents presented him and said, “we present Peter to receive the sacrament of baptism”, I nearly wept in joy and in the memory of my friend. I remembered much, in that moment, about Peter's life, but I also remember softly dropping evergreen boughs on his casket and then helping shovel in the dirt. Something healing in being part of that last gift to him.
Once, in one of the first few funerals I was part of at St. James in Charleston, Evan, the Baptist funeral director handed me a handful of rose petals. He intended me to scatter them on the casket at the words of committal.
“What's this?” I whispered, confused.
“For the casket,” he whispered back, confused himself by that point.
“I want dirt,” I told him.
“Dirt?” he asked, a little aghast.
“Dirt,” I repeated and he found me some.
It is sometimes remarkable to me that Christians have developed funeral practices that seek the lessen the finality of death when it is the finality itself that we need desperately to face head on to begin to heal.
*
When you have children, they are always babies in your heart. My children are both in their 30's. Josh has three children of his own and is a lawyer. Mimi works in Development for the American Ballet Theatre and is a woman. Mimi is a woman—graceful and lovely beyond her knowing...but she and the big-shot lawyer are still small children to me. And perhaps the hardest death to bear is the death of a child.
I'm making a list and checking it twice about things I want to check out when and if I get to the Kingdom of Heaven. I want to have a sit down with Yahweh and ask the Great God Almighty to clear up a few things I think were left hanging in Creation. At the top of the list is the question about dead babies.
Dead babies are hideous, awful, unspeakable, unfair, nasty, brutish and ugly. There should have been a default built into the system that never let children die before their parents. Something kinder was called for. Bern once gave me a pen and ink drawing that was of seven tombstones. Each had the names and dates on them. On either end of the stones are the parents. In between are five children. You notice, looking at the picture, that the parents lived to ripe old ages and all the children died in the first three years of life. That is a profoundly painful work of art. If I could, I'd take that with me through the mysterious door for my sit down with Yahweh. “What the hell was this about?” I'd ask God, and wait as long as necessary (it being eternity and all) for an answer.
There was a wonderful young couple at St. John's—let's call them Adam and Eve—who became members while engaged, got married there, remained very active and joyfully, and a year or so after their marriage, 'got pregnant'. It was something they'd longed for, hoped for, waited for. They were transformed by the promise of it all. They turned a room into a nursery and started painting, picked out names, began buying fuzzy toys (Eve) and sports equipment (Adam) for their coming child.
But when Eve went for her seven-month checkup, their world turned upside down and inside out.
The doctor seemed anxious during the examination. His tension was contagious: Adam and Eve caught it in about 10 seconds.
He asked Eve if she'd been spotting. Only a little, she told him, just from time to time.
Pain, he asked, had she had any pain? Indigestion for a week or so, she answered, her heart clutching into a fist.
No heart-beat. That was the issue, the problem, the reason for his questions and the death of joy for Adam and Eve.
Their baby was dead. Just like that, their world went from joy and light to the dark night of the soul. And, for medical reasons I do not comprehend, what Eve had to do was carry the baby to term and deliver it, dead as a doornail. She carried the damaged fetus two more months and gave birth to Death.
I'll leave all the excruciating ironies of that for you to sort through—I'm waiting until I get to ask God about it.
So, Adam and Eve lived their lives as if in a web of sorrow. They went to work. They prepared and ate meals. They tried to behave normally in an insane situation. And finally, mercifully, Eve went into labor and delivered her dead child after 10 hours of pain that did not lead to life.
I was there near the end (summons, not on my own). I waited with family from both sides. All this happened in a 'birthing room' of a major hospital. On the door of the room, the staff had put a painting of a black rose. The other doors had blue roses or pink roses on them. In a place of such expectation and possibility, there was this little island of pain—cold, damning pain.
A black rose.
In that 'birthing room', we took turns holding that dead baby—so perfect in every way except she could not, would not ever breathe or laugh or cry or live. And I baptized her, not even sure what I was doing theologically, not caring really, knowing only that it gave some tiny sliver of comfort to people as beaten down, exhausted and condemned to pain as anyone could be. I spoke her name—a name she would never hear or be known by or have nicknames derived from. And I know, from having been through it with both of my wife's pregnancies, what Adam and Eve did, before those horrendous weeks when she found out she was incubating death. They had played out their baby's life a thousand times. They had, in their minds, taken her to the baby-sitter and picked her up, listened and watched for her first words and steps. They had lived with her, through their imaginations—seen her through childhood diseases, off to school and even as the woman she would become giving them grandchildren. That's what expectant parents do—live out their child's life in their hearts, wondering how she'll react to Christmas, if she'll like cats or dogs, what her voice will sound like, if she'll be musical. There is seemingly no limit to the human mind's ability to project life into the future when a baby is coming.
(A related aside: no one I know—even me—takes miscarriages seriously enough. Couples who suffer miscarriages have done the same imaginative living out of their child's life as someone who gives birth to a dead baby. And yet I've never heard any clergy talk about the two in the same way or with the same seriousness. Since miscarriages are usually the result of injury to the mother or a damaged fetus, people don't seem to assume it was a 'baby'. But I believe the pain is the same as losing a child at birth or afterward. Hideous pain it must be. God better be reading up on what to tell me when I ask about all this....)
I was with Adam and Eve for several hours between the baptism and the funeral. I mostly said nothing and did nothing. There was nothing to say and even less to do. All that mattered was being there—and even that only mattered tangentially.
So, the day came. The service at the church was solemn and tearful. The long ride to a rural cemetery seemed to be without end. And as we stood in the snow beside that tiny little coffin, the temperature was in the teens and the wind-chill near zero. A bitter day for a bitter task.
It was then that I noticed the spray of flowers on the coffin. They were roses and baby-breath—red roses instead of black and the breath that baby would never draw. There was a ribbon amid the flowers that said: OUR LITTLE ANGLE.
The florist must have been dyslexic and reversed the E and L so that the message seemed to refer to a small geometrical shape rather than a celestial being. As I prayed the prayers at the grave, I prayed as well that I was the only one who had noticed the 'angle' on the ribbon. But as the short, freezing service drew to an end, I noticed Adam shaking his head and biting his lip. Then he nudged Eve with his elbow through their winter coats and nodded to the coffin. She saw it, realized what it meant and I committed their child to the earth while they choked back laughter.
A little later, at a relative's house near the cemetery, Adam and Eve and I drank alcohol and laughed out loud. They hadn't laughed since that awful day two months ago. They had gone through the motions of life, completed tasks, prepared and half-eaten dinners, laid down to sleep with Death in Eve's belly—but they hadn't laughed, they told me, not once, until then.
Laughter at a transposed 'e' and 'l' gave them back a bit of their lives. They went on. Moved to another state. Had a baby. They called me from a far-away hospital to tell me about Tilitha, their wonderous child. I noted without mentioning it that they had named her what Jesus called the little girl he raised from death. “Tilitha cum”, he said, and the dead lived. I can only imagine that was what they experienced—resurrection from the death of their baby.
Every week or so I drive my dog to the oldest cemetery in Cheshire and walk him like I walked the dog before him. There is a section of the graveyard I call 'the Peanut Gallery' because only children are buried there. Often, around the birth days on the stones and around holidays, I'll discover little gifts on those tiny graves. I've walked that path for almost two decades now. I've seen fresh graves, yet without a stone and the toys left on the just turned earth. Through the seasons I've seen turkeys at Thanksgiving, Jack-o-lanterns near Halloween, Christmas symbols, little crosses of palms and Easter eggs on those graves. I've seen it all. And I've seen, over the years, the Barbie doll in disarray, the tiny trucks rusting, the mouldering stuffed-animals. People do tend to get on with life. My favorite grave is of a teenage girl. (Is having a 'favorite grave' too macabre?) Her name matters not. Names, as important as they are, pale in the cosmic stillness of death. But on her gravestone is says this:
Caring, kind and fiercely free,
She moves on impatiently.
I especially fond of the present tense of “moves”. I'm not at all sure what I think about the mysterious door we all approach, but I'm glad they didn't put 'moved on'. It leaves the whole question of death up in the air a bit—dynamic and full of possibilities.
And I think the words are a wonderful way to say good-bye to a dead daughter. I'm half in love with that 16-year-old. She'd be nearing 40 now on this side of the Door. Who know where she moves on the other side.
Fred, an intern who will be a wonderful priest, and I did the weirdest thing I remember doing in a long time just a few months before I retired. “Uncle Jimmy” had died. I was out of town and wasn't at his deathbed but I knew his nephew, a gracious, generous man who lives on the Jersey Shore, had wanted me to be sure to give his 'uncle', who, in fact, was more like his father than his uncle, last rites.
Jimmy was this tiny little man who had a girlfriend who was in a nursing home. He went to see her every day on the bus and then took the bus back to town and stopped by St. John's to sit in the nave and pray. Then he'd go to the Elk's Club and have a nip or two before going home. And once a month he'd stop by the church office and write a check for his 'dues'. Lots of the older folks, mostly union members when the brass mills were working, called their contributions, 'dues'. I'd catch him in the church from time to time and give him communion. Wade, his nephew, an organist at his church in New Jersey, was glad to know all that.
Since I needed to anoint Jimmy, Fred and I went across the street to the funeral home and one of the funeral directors let us in to the embalming room where Jimmy was laid out. There was a woman there too, large, quite young, I thought, and, like Jimmy, covered by a sheet with her head on a little notched support. So, I anointed Jimmy, touching his room temperature forehead and asked God to see him through the door into whatever comes next.
When I told Wade about that, apologizing for not having done it before Jimmy died, he simply smiled and thanked me. How gracious people are—Jimmy dead and Wade living.
For the living and the dead, there might just be life after funerals after all.
7. Two Priests (Jack and Snork)
Every priest needs a mentor. Every priest needs a guide through the labyrinth that is 'being a priest' and 'doing priestcraft'.
Every denomination—even a small, mostly irrelevant one like the Episcopal Church—has two identities, is bipolar and schizophrenic. There is the troublesome, canon or doctrine bound, low-level toxin of the 'Institution'. All institutions, is seems to me, are ultimately and fatally flawed. But the 'good twin' is the 'Community' that is the church—IS the church in the most vital and enlivening and astonishing way imaginable.
Every priest needs to learn about 'the Institution' and develop strategies to deal with it...or strategies on how Not to deal with it. The Institutional Church is politics writ large because of the church's habit of claiming not to be political! It's politics in the end and a priest must develop a political sense that allows him/her to navigate the treacherous waters and cross the long, unrelenting desert of the Institutional Church without being maimed, impaired or killed. The politics of the church must be acknowledged and dealt with so the priest might be able to be present fully to the Community—the very harbinger of the Kingdom.
My choice has been—mostly learned from Snork but reaffirmed decades later by Jack—to simply be who I am and do what I do but always cover my back in some ingratiating way. That sounds all to manipulative as I think about it, but it is a decision of 'manipulating' the Institution rather than being manipulated by the Institution. The Institution itself is very seductive. It is possible to convince yourself that you are being a 'team player' and 'going with the flow' of the Institution and that the Institution is basically benign. Just as the Church protests too much about not being political, you seldom find anyone in the hierarchy who will fess up to the manipulative nature of the beast. 'Going with the flow', it seems to me, puts one in high risk of being caught in the powerful undercurrent of the Institution's inertia. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. And bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. The Institutional Church, remarkably, is both nailed down tight and careening along at a break-neck speed. Failure to recognize that either gets you stuck or run over.
Three examples come to mind in this overly long aside. All three of the examples have to do with bishops. Bishops have a choice to make that will shape their whole episcopate: either 'become' the Institution or acknowledge its power and move around it.
When I was a baby priest, I called my bishop (a good man) to ask his permission to do something I knew to be coloring outside the lines. He stopped me before I could frame the question.
“Jim, is this about something you really feel compelled to do?” he asked.
“Yes, Bishop,” I said.
“Then I'm giving you some advice. Don't ask me beforehand.” He paused to let me get the wisdom of that. “Then apologize like hell and claim ignorance when I have to slap your hand. It won't get you out of having your hand slapped, but I'll still love you for the outrageous nature of your apology.”
That was a man who had a strategy for dealing with the Institutional Inertia of the Church.
One of the best bishops I ever met was as unsuited for the job as a person could be. He was a parish priest through and through who had been a last minute compromise candidate in a contentious and divisive election. To his amazement he was elected.
He told me once about a particularly thorny question that came early in his bishopric. It confounded him so much he went to the office of the Diocesan Archdeacon, a man who had served several bishops, to ask for his advice.
“What can I do about this?” he asked the politically savvy Archdeacon.
Then the man smiled slyly at him and said, “Anything you damn well please. That's why we call you 'Bishop'.”
So, until he retired, that's what that Bishop did in most every occasion. His strategy became 'using' the Inertia of the Institution to forward his best intentions.
Both those men were what I call the 'extinct bishops' of a much different generation. They came to understand their power rather than 'becoming' their office. Giants and Ogres once graced the seats in the House of Bishops. The Giants (like my two friends) did much good. The Ogres
did much damage. I think the Institutional Church recognized and deplored the damage of the Ogres so much that they turned the office into a CEO rather than the Servant of the servants of God. They prevented much damage in doing so, but they also made it harder and harder for bishops—and by extention, priests—to do remarkable kinds of good.
Finally, a friend of mine was elected bishop. He was someone I supported and worked for (trying to ingratiate myself to the Powers that BE). We had agreed about most issues, including what was wrong with the 'corporate model' of the Church. We both, I knew, recognized that the Church's grace and healing power came from the Community Model.
So, we were having lunch—on me (ingratiate when you can, I say)--when I asked him when he planned to do something that B.C. (Before Consecration) we had been allies about. There was a long pause. Then he took a deep breathe and said, “Things look different from this side of the desk, Jim....”
I took a bite of salad and sip of wine to let him explain all that more clearly, in small words I might understand. When he didn't, I said, impolitely and without political ac-cumin, “There's no f*ck*ng desk here, bishop. We're two friends in a restaurant.”
The rest of the meal did not go well.
Jack and Snork would have never said that to a bishop. It's not just that 'they knew better', its simply that they would have known no good would come of it. Jack and Snork taught me to avoid 'no good will come of it' situations adroitly. I was not the best of students. No fault could be found with the teachers at all.
Both Jack and Snork swam below the surface of the rough seas of the Institutional Church. They had internal radar detectors that warned them of the church's speed traps. Both did mostly what they wanted to do, with great grace and no need for acknowledgment, but gave wide berth to potential pitfalls. They were both, in their own ways, more radical and nontraditional than I ever dreamed of being—and I dreamed, beloved, oh I dreamed!--yet they pulled it off without drawing attention to themselves, covertly, burrowing beneath, going under or over but never straight through. One bishop I served with called me his 'young Turk'. But he always knew where I was and what I was up to. I was on his screen and seldom confounded him. Jack and Snork were 'Turks' beyond compare, but they were secret Turks, undercover Turks, wise old Turks, worn smooth by life. The older I got, the more I became like them. At least that is my hope and my prayer.
The first time I petitioned to be elected a Deputy to the church's General Convention, I came in ninth of the nine candidates. I was sitting alone, nursing my wounds in the break after the election results had been announced, when Jack came by and said, “I'm surprised you got that many votes.” He smiled his crooked smile and sat next to me. “You should have come in tenth out of nine....”
He was chuckling at my disappointment. I decided to give him the silent treatment but though Jack was never very talkative, he kept on talking in spite of my ignoring him.
“Look down there on the floor,” he said. We were in the balcony. I dutifully looked. “You see all the people who got elected clerical deputies?”
In fact I could—two men and two women. He was tweaking my curiosity just a bit.
“What do they all have in common?” Jack asked.
Well, not much. Two were my age, one younger, one older. One was bald, one was blond, one had brown hair, two were heavy, two skinny, all white, of course. All parish priests...what else? Then it hit me, they all had on dark pinstriped suits—one of the women's suit had a skirt—and they all had on big, shiny clerical collars and pressed black shirts.
I looked at him. He was still chuckling. I had on sandals, jeans, an open collar shirt and a tan jacket none the better for wear.
I finally smiled.
“You'll never 'fit in' the way the church expects,” he said, growing solemn and wise. “But you could find ways to 'fit in' without compromising your strange sense of integrity. You have two approaches to the Institution of the Church: either you 'ignore', but not benignly, you aggressively ignore it, or, you pick fights with it.”
I was the one chuckling now. Jack had nailed me in ways I hadn't expected to be nailed. I didn't have any particular 'strategy' to get elected Deputy. I just thought they should see beneath the surface and want to elect me. I was being the ill-mannered, contentious kid who wondered why no one ever asked him to play. It worked to get the Institution to leave me alone, but there was no reason in heaven or on earth that they should reward me for being disagreeable.
Jack smiled and patted my leg. “I'm going to go 'play nice' with these folks,” he said, getting up, “You might consider joining me....”
So I did and watched him genuinely enjoy himself as he moved through crowds of people, stopping to chat or tell a joke. It wasn't nearly as painful as I had imagined. The next time—after kissing enough ecclesiastical babies and butts—I was elected to General Convention and was twice more since then. And, as Jack so gently taught me, the kissing up part wasn't unpleasant at all. I discovered most Episcopalians in Connecticut are hale fellows and gals well met, by in large. I'm a better person and better priest for learning that from Jack.
Snork and Jack both worked with and ministered to the margins of society before it be came de rigor for the church to do that. Long before Presiding Bishop Browning declared 'there are no outcasts' in the Episcopal Church, Snork was working with runaways, street people, drug abusers and hippies. Jack had a vibrant ministry to gay and lesbian folks a couple of decades before GLBT were four letters the church recognized. As the part time Rector of Trinity Church in Waterbury—the most Anglo-Catholic parish in the area—Jack invited and nurtured gay folk in remarkable ways. He was their 'pastor' and 'priest' and a quiet advocate for inclusion in the life of the church.
While I was at St. John's, a chapter of Integrity was founded. Integrity is a group for GLBT Episcopalians and their friends. I asked Jack to be the first chaplain to the group—a role I wanted but knew I couldn't play since it became clear that my inviting Integrity to St. John's caused a remarkable fire-storm in the parish. I dutifully and proudly announced I had welcomed the chapter to use the sanctuary and library for their meetings and let it be known that I would be glad to have conversations with anyone with questions. This was in the early 1990's and I was naïve enough to think no one would raise an eyebrow about the whole thing. How silly of me. (One of my character flaws is that I think of myself as 'the norm' in society. I am genuinely astonished when people disagree with my theology or politics.) So I wasn't prepared for the what was truly only four people, but four people with much mischief in mind.
It saddens me to tell you that the Gang of Four could be as destructive as they were. After all, they were just four aging white men, but I quickly learned that four aging, homophobic white men could do a lot of damage to a parish community. Give them credit, two of them were former wardens and did have some reputational power (very important power in a parish). The other two were the masterminds, however; one not even a member of the parish and the second one only marginal. The first move was when the marginal member—someone whose face I knew from the back row at 8 a.m. Eucharists but only learned his name when an usher told me he was upset. So I called him and he came in to talk, or rather, to rage at me. I had some experience with dealing with irrational people, but this was beyond my ken. He called me names, threatened my career and personal well-being, told me how much 'fecal matter' a sexually active gay man ingested in a year and described sexual acts I had neither heard of or imagined (and were, finally, none of my business). That meeting, which ended with me walking out of my office, leaving him there, and going to a local bar, convinced me that I should never meet with any of the group without a witness. I called Jack.
Jack told me he could have warned me if he had known I was going to be so stupid as to meet with someone like that alone. (Of course, Jack didn't call me 'stupid'...something along the lines of 'marginally mistaken'...something Jack-like and kind. But I never faced any of them in person without Jack, sitting like a Buddha in the corner of the room. He always wore a black suit and clericals when he was the silent witness to the escalating attacks on me by the Gang of Four. And early on he told me something very Yoda-like: “Fight not in the shadows...” Jack said.
So I dragged the whole mess out into the middle of the room, into the light of day and parish meetings and sermons and articles in the newsletter. Whatever they did, I made immediately public. Like when they started calling people in the parish directory to ask if they knew that the Rector was letting fagots and perverts use the church. One of the first people in the A's in the directory was a member of the vestry who was a lesbian. She hung up on whoever called and came to find me. She became a firm ally in what was to come. They also, in the C's called a woman whose brother had just died of AIDS to convince her to take up their cause against queers. They didn't 'know' who they were calling, of course.
Through it all, Jack stood by me at every meeting, his 'reputational power' and the volume of his silence radiating trust and safety to all who were confused and confounded by the conflict. The vestry, god bless them, endorsed my decision to invite Integrity to use the church. Not everyone was convinced it was a good idea, considering the conflict it had caused and considering that my predecessor as Rector had 9 years of conflict that had damaged the parish deeply. But the vestry knew that Episcopal Canon Law gives exclusive right of 'building use' to the Rector. And I was the Rector, though the four and whoever sympathized with them were hoping 'not for long....'
Jack gave me a tee-shirt he had made that said on the front: “I'M THE RECTOR, THAT'S WHY!”
Bless his heart.
After several public meeting, Jack silently by my side, where the better angels of the parish were given voice, things began to go away, at least until I found out that the Four had contacted a notorious anti-Gay priest in Pittsburgh for advice on how to rid themselves of me. That's when I called my bishop (the one at the time was no champion of gay folks but was a strict interpreter of Canon Law and the integrity (no pun intended) of diocesan lines. With his permission I invoked the disciplinary rubric on page 409 of the Book of Common Prayer—the part about denying communion to those who “have done wrong to their neighbors and are a scandal to the other members of the congregation”--telling the Four I would refuse to give them the host unless they ceased and desisted what they had been doing. Within a month or two, two of them died and one moved to Florida. The fourth member of the Gang—bless his heart—repented and became, once more a wonderful member of the community, going out of his way, I heard, to welcome gay folk to St. John's.
All Jack told me after all that was this: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Jack could get away with saying stuff like that.
There was a remarkable gay couple at St. John's while Jack was a member of the parish. They had met in high school and had been faithful to each other for over four decades. Neither had ever had another lover. They had come to St. John's as volunteers for Bill H., who had AIDS. At first they dropped Bill at the door and went for breakfast. Then, when Bill needed more attention, they would take him to his pew and then wait for him in the parish library. Finally, they started sitting with him and when they realized the deep affection of the congregation for Bill, the two of them became members themselves.
They had asked me to give their home a house blessing and wondered if I could throw in a blessing for their 'marriage' as well. This was years before same sex marriage became the law of Connecticut and I knew I would be on dangerous ground. So I talked with Jack. Jack was glad to come along and bless the couples' rings and relationship, using words that sounded quite true to the formula of the Book of Common Prayer.
I asked Jack if he thought I should have done it myself.
“No,” he said. “You're still beholden to the church and could get in unnecessary trouble.” Then he smiled and winked. “I'm just an old retired fart, what can the bishop do to me?”
Now I'm just an old retired fart, the way Jack was then. If I could only be a percentage as gracious and bold and wise as he was—that would be a state devoutly to be desired.
Both Jack and Snork had five children. One of Jack and Marge's kids died in childhood and another was severely mentally handicapped. Snork's five—3 girls and 2 boys—are, I suspect, still alive and well. The difference was Jack had Marge to help him raise the kids and Snork raised his children primarily by himself. Divorce, even so short a time ago as the 1970's was still suspect when you were an Episcopal priest. So Snork wasn't going to become a cardinal rector anywhere—not that he wanted to and not that he would have if he'd been happily married. Snork had this 'white Afro' of sandy red hair. Jack was a red-head too—though when I met him, white haired as he was, I asked, “how did all your kids get red hair?” He snorted. “What color hair do you think I was born with—white?”
Snork's children were always omnipresent. When I first met him one daughter was in her late adolescence and the others spaced above her. The three daughters were all lovely and not a little seductive. It was an odd home to grow up in since Snork was constantly inviting people he found wandering on the earth to come and sleep there. Mostly the visitors just smoked dope and hung out at Snork's house but sometimes they ripped him off, carrying away electronic equipment and whatever else they could sell. One guy really cleaned him out but some of us ran him to ground and got Snork's stuff back. Snork, of course, wouldn't turn the guy in and he was still welcome beneath Snork's roof. As you might imagine, the guy cleaned Snork out again and disappeared.
I was trying to get Snork to explain why he would let the fox back in the henhouse. He bobbed around the way he always did—one mass of nervous energy—and said, “Well, obviously I didn't think he'd do it again....” And then laughed, wondering if I knew anyone with a used stereo and some records for sale.
That was just Snork. It wasn't so much that he was foolish about human nature—though he certainly was—it was more that he was unable to think bad about anyone. Sometimes he could disarm really shady characters by treating them as if they were paragon's of virtue. But just as often, he got ripped off. However, he never seemed more than momentarily put out and was usually sure that he'd been robbed for some higher, purer more exalted reason than simple human greed.
One of Snork's gifts was to allow most of the people around him the opportunity to worry about him and try to keep him safe from his own good nature. Like the time he started a bible study group and had it invaded by fundamentalists. There only seemed to be two kinds of 'Christians' around the campus those days—semi-believing counter cultural types and raving charismatics. At least it seemed that way to me. Trinity, the parish church, had become very conservative so Snork, who was partially paid by Trinity, was always treading softly around there. Not only did he look radical, he was radical. But he was also a loving, kind man, which covered a multitude of his liberal sins. Things eventually got so bad that a group broke away from Trinity and formed St. Thomas a Beckett, with Snork as their vicar. But that was later—what Snork tried to do when I was around was offer alternatives to the conservatives...like his Bible study.
I didn't attend when he started the group but within a week or so he called me and said I had to start coming. After two years at Harvard Divinity School, I wasn't in the mood for Bible study but Snork explained he'd lost control and wanted me to 'kick some ass' for him. Which I dutifully did, out of love for him but also because kicking charismatics' asses was a load of fun. It took about two more sessions—marked by much yelling and accusations of my being a heretic at best and a hater of the baby Jesus at worst—I cleared out the right wing folks.
I told Snork afterward that he could have just canceled the study group or driven away the bible thumpers who were confusing a handful of undergrads who really wanted to know more about God—Snork's sweet and loving God.
He shook his hair heavy head. “I just couldn't do that,” is all he said.
At first I thought it was about not offending the folks at Trinity's right wing sensibilities. But, on second thought, it was simply that Snork did not have the capacity to shout down or offend anyone, ever. He was as gentle a man as I ever knew. And his gentleness soothed and healed those around him much as, years later, Jack's quiet presence had done so much to stop the bleeding over gays at St. John's.
Gentle men—both of them. Would that I could emulate them more fully.
Just before my 25th birthday, my mother had a massive stroke from which she never recovered. She was 63—the age I am as I sit writing this—so the memory is fresh and damp upon me these days. My father had called in the middle of the night, frightened and irrational. I promised I'd leave at daybreak to drive home. It was a 5 ½ hour trip and I was so shaken I wasn't convinced I could do it. My wife was in school and had a performance so she couldn't come with me. I woke Snork up to ask him to think gentle thoughts for me as I drove. Instead, he insisted on meeting me at Trinity Church at 5:30 the next morning.
He was unlocking the chapel door when I arrived. I lived only a few blocks from the church but my hands were shaking as I drove over to the parking lot. Snork wordlessly embraced me and half-led, half-carried me into the dark chapel. He told me to sit and that he'd be right back. I sat in the early morning light in that Gothic chapel, smelling the stone and the candles' wax, listening to the profound silence of such buildings, waiting, hardly thinking at all, frightened but settled. But there was no way I could make that drive to Bluefield. I started thinking of someone I might ask to drive me or, having Snork take me to the Airport in Pittsburgh or the Morgantown bus station.
Then he was back, decked out in full Eucharistic vestments over his jeans and sandals. I'd never seen Snork wear a chasuble before. He even had on one of those useless, anachronistic manaples no one ever wore. Before I knew what was happening, he had started staying the words of the Communion service from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer—words so solemn and beautiful that I stood as he prayed. He gave me communion and anointed me with healing oil. Then he embraced me at the altar rail and said, softly, “I think you can do the drive now....”
And I did.
I drove home and fed my mother vanilla ice cream out of little cups with a wooden spoon though she didn't know who I was or what I was doing. And my Aunt Elise came in one morning and watched me feed my mother ice cream and then wished me a Happy Birthday—my 25th—and then I stood by my mother's bed with my dad a few days later and was with my mom as she died, something I shall never forget or stop being thankful for the honor of that moment.
All because Snork gave me communion and anointed me.
(What I learned from that and never forgot was that about the only thing priests have to offer that makes any sense or difference at all is the sacraments. And in my life as a priest I have always remembered that when anyone was broken or pained or confounded, what I could give—perhaps the only thing I could give—was sacraments. So over the years I've taken hundreds of people into a chapel somewhere and given them communion and anointed them and forgiven them whatever horrid sins they had committed or imagined and washed them in the blood of the Lamb through the remarkable and profound objective reality of the bread and wine and oil and confession. All that I learned from Snork and relearned a dozen times in two dozen ways from Jack.
Both of them knew fair well the power and reality of the sacraments. And they taught that to me....God bless their hearts....)
Jack was the resident 'confessor' of St. John's during my time there, those 20 plus years. People were always disappearing into the chapel with him when I wasn't looking and he would hear their tales of woe and forgive them, whether they really needed it or not (of course 'they' thought they needed it and Jack gave forgiveness freely, completely, wondrously....) and give them the bread and wine with a few well placed words and anoint them with that oh so holy oil. What a privilege it was to sit at their knees and learn such mysteries....
Snork dropped dead at 63—the same age as my mother, the same age I am as I write this. He was in the bookstore at West Virginia University, having just bought something (I wish I knew what so I could read it for him) and almost to the front door. He had remarried and didn't take his heart medicine because it inhibited his sex drive. His second wife was quite a bit younger than he was. The choices we make in this life are strange and wondrous. I can't blame him at all for his.
Jorge and I drove down to Morgantown from the northeast corridore together to Snork's funeral. I had temporarily left the full-time priesthood and was considering never returning. However, I'd been to a workshop called Making A Difference and had gotten my priesthood back all new. One of the distinctions of the workshop—which I have led now for 15 years or more all over the country and in Ireland several times—is the distinction between what we call 'the superstition IS' and 'occurring', or, as we called it then, 'showing up'. The distinction is that if you live in an IS world there are few possibilities. But choosing to live in an 'occurring' or 'showing up' world, life can be full of new ways of being. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that is enough to tell you because I was explaining all that to Jorge somewhere in Pennsylvania and he, driving, said to me: “Let me get this straight...what you're saying is Snork showed up dead?”
Both Jorge and I, two of the half-dozen priests who went to seminary because they knew Snork, said some words at his funeral. I have no idea what I said all these years later. But I know that I said something about how he taught me to be a priest. That I know I said. And it was true, even if I was a slow learner.
A group of us went through Snork's books and stuff. His new wife wanted us to take things. One of the things I took was a round paper plate full of names. Apparently, making this up but it has no other explanation, Snork would take a plate from coffee hour at St. Thomas a Becket and write down the names of everyone who had been there and date the plate with a magic marker. How amazing to me that he could do that—know who had been at the Eucharistic and write them all down afterward. I can't even begin to imagine the concentration and attention that would require. There are 72 names on the paper plate. It is dated, simply, Advent II 1985. That's all—72 souls remembered for having received the Body and Blood. That's all...and more than enough.
Jack loved jokes, bad jokes, really bad jokes. Like this, one he told me: Two old guys in a nursing home. One tells the other, “I don't know how old I am.” The second guy says, “wheel yourself out in the lobby and drop your pants and I'll tell you how old you are.” So they both go in their chairs into the lobby and the first guy takes off his pants. After all the upset and screams of visitors, the two of them are taken back to their room. “You're 87,” the second guy tells the one who dropped his pants. “How did you know?” the first guy asks. “You told me last week,” the second guy says.
On about any level, that is a bad joke. But Jack loved them. He loved to laugh and to hear jokes and tell them. Bad jokes. Really bad jokes.
And everyone who knew him laughed just as hard as he did, not because the jokes were funny, but because Jack—that dear man—told them. Perhaps we will all be judged, not on the quality of our jokes, but on whether everyone laughs with us simply because laughing with us—like laughing with Jack—was healing and pure and good. Like that.
Healing, pure, good...words I associate with my connections to Snork and Jack. And, oh yes, holy....
Jack died with dignity and peace, just the way he had planned it. At his funeral, it was my honor to preach. This is what I said:
October 17, 2009—Jack Parker's Memorial Service
Years ago, I went on a day trip with three men who I love like uncles and mentors and dear, dear friends. Jack Parker, Bill Penny and David Pritchard and I drove up into the heart of New England. I remember we went to a place called 'The Cathedral of the Pines' and we also went to see Jack's mountain—the one he loved and had climbed time and time again and where some of his ashes will be scattered by his remarkable family. We had a great lunch at some place one of them new and somehow got back before it was too late for such a motley crew to be out without getting into mischief!
A friend of mine told me that there are only two plots in all of literature. One is, “a stranger arrives in town”. The other is, “someone sets out on a journey.”
I have memories of sharing part of the journey that is life with Jack Parker.
Memories like that are precious, rare, wondrous and, finally, holy.
Holy.
I've ONLY know Jack Parker for 20 years or so. I say 'only' because I know some of you have known him much longer than that—his children, his family that he loved so fiercely...and others. But knowing him for two decades was a beautiful gift to me from God. And if I had to choose a word to describe that gift it would be this--'holy'.
Holy.
I've never known anyone who loved a bad, corny joke as much as Jack.
Most of the jokes Jack loved began something like this: “A rabbi and a priest and a Baptist minister went into a bar...” Or, like this: “Three elderly men were sitting on the front porch of the nursing home....” Or, like this, “A man was trying to sell a talking dog....”
You get the point. Jack would start laughing half-way through telling the joke and anyone who was listening would start laughing with him, entranced by Jack's laugh, caught up in his story, not caring at all how the joke turned out—it would turn out bad and corny—but thankful and joyous to be sharing a laugh with Jack.
There is a word for sharing a laugh with Jack. The word is 'holy'.
Holy.
There is a word that occurs to me for anything, anytime, 'shared with Jack'.
The word is 'holy'.
Ok, he was not St. Francis of Assisi. Not quite. But he was, for me, a 'holy' man. Truly, really, without fear of contradiction, Jack was 'holy'. No kidding. I'm not exaggerating. Not at all.
He taught me so many things. Knowing Jack was like post-doctoral work in kindness and love and long-suffering and generosity of spirit and joy. Knowing Jack was like a seminar in prayerfulness. He was a priest to be admired, a man to be emulated, a quick study in sweetness. It seems an odd word, perhaps, but Jack was a sweet, sweet man. I know you all know what I mean.
And learning these things from Jack was—have I mentioned this?--holy.
The words from Jesus in today's gospel are among the most beautiful and comforting in all of Scripture.
“Let not your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me...In my father's house are many rooms...If it were not so, would I have told you I go to prepare a place for you?”
The Greek word translated 'rooms' is mona. That word has many possible translations--'rooms', 'resting places', 'mansions' (as we used to say), and 'abodes'. That's the one I like: 'abodes'...places to be, space to 'abide' in the nearer presence of the God who loves us best of all.
The last time I saw Jack, I made him promise that he wouldn't die until I got home from a trip to the beach. He said he'd try, but he wasn't sure he could. It was the only promise he didn't keep to me. He had other plans, another place to abide.
That last time I saw Jack, I offered him communion. The sacrament was Jack's favorite food and drink, but that last time he said, 'no'.
“You've been a priest to me long enough,” he told me, with that crooked smile and twinkling eye he always had. “We're just two old friends saying goodbye....”
Jack taught us all so very much about 'living'. And he taught us how to die.
And it is time now—he would have wanted it this way—it's time for us to smile and remember and thank God for the journey and say 'good bye' to our old, dear friend....
“I fear no foe, with thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if thou abide with me.”
