Going on the way...rejoicing

One of the main things I’ve written about in this space over the last year has been reflecting on my New Pennsylvania Life—not so new, now, having passed the year mark more than a month ago. In March of 2017 I left my parish where I’d served for 11 ½ years to move here, where my husband started as rector of St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Lebanon, just south of Pittsburgh. I’ve been surprised at what a homecoming it has been; more than 20 years ago when I left my hometown, Erie, 120 miles north of here, I never thought I’d be back. It turns out I really like Pennsylvania.

Part of the plan was to have some time to adjust before getting into a parish.  Maybe a month or two. It’s been 14.  But worth the wait:  I’m excited to share that I’m now the recommended candidate for St John Lutheran (ELCA) in Carnegie, PA (5 miles southwest of the city of Pittsburgh, 5 miles northwest of where I live).  This means that after I meet everyone and lead the service next week, the congregation will have a vote and decide whether to call me as their pastor.      

I was in college and not paying a ton of attention when the 1999-2000 “Agreement of Full Communion-A Call to Common Mission” was adopted.  For more than a hundred years, various configurations of Lutherans and Anglicans had been in conversation, trying to live out Jesus’ instruction “to be One, as I and the Father are One.”   The places we are One are many more than the places where we differ. Our liturgies are very similar, we already shared music, prayer, and theologies of the Eucharist.  The ELCA explains the meaning of full communion this way:

Full communion is when two denominations develop a relationship based on a common confessing of the Christian faith and a mutual recognition of Baptism and sharing of the Lord’s Supper. This does not mean the two denominations merge; rather, in reaching agreements, denominations also respect differences. These denominations worship together, may exchange clergy and also share a commitment to evangelism, witness and service in the world. Each entity agrees that even with differences, there is nothing that is church-dividing.  

The ELCA has full communion relationships with other denominations, as well: The Presbyterian Chruch (USA), United Church of Christ, The Episcopal Church, The Moravian Church, the United Methodist Church and, of course, member churches of the Lutheran World Federation.     The Episcopal Church, meanwhile, is in full communion with all the Provinces of the Anglican Communion, the Old Catholic Churches of Europe, the United churches of the Indian subcontinent, the Mar Thoma Church, the Moravian Church, and the Church of Sweden. The Episcopal Church is also currently in dialogue with the United Methodist Church. We all love: Jesus, the sacraments, the creeds, the Bible. 

I went to an Episcopal seminary that regularly used the Lutheran Book of Worship, and when I planned liturgy at my Episcopal Church I routinely pirated Lutheran Eucharistic prayers for our use.  I held open office hours along with a Lutheran pastor and a rabbi in my parish in Massachusetts.  I went to a Lutheran preaching Bible study for 10 years. My mom grew up Lutheran, in Sweden, and I cannot say how many ancient churches I visited growing up.  I even spent 2 months working at a Lutheran Church when their pastor broke his neck. When I met Donna, the parish secretary from St John, she remarked that the lines between denominations now are more like dotted lines than solid ones.  I have been fortunate to observe for a long time how right she is.

I’ve always explained the Episcopal Church as being about being “close to the ground.” It started over political conflict of King Henry VIII, and while his marital difficulties perhaps were not the first, best, most stellar reason to start a whole new branch of Christendom, the principle of local governance, worship in your own language, and celebrating the sacraments are a pretty good outcome. But those are not uniquely Anglican/Episcopal—Lutherans are right there, too.  

When I read the pieces I’ve written on here about what not being in a parish has taught me about parish ministry, the idea that most stands out is grace. Grace, grace, grace. Totally free, unearned, impossible to comprehend or plan for, grace.  Which, as it happens, is basically the central tenet of Lutheran spirituality. You cannot do anything, ever, at all, to earn God’s love.  There’s no point at which you’ll arrive as being the maximum quality Christian that then puts to shame your previous efforts and gives you the keys to the kingdom. It will never happen.  This is not contrary to anything in the Episcopal Church. But it is not the loudest note we play, either.   Martin Luther says “God doesn't love us because of our worth, we are of worth because God loves us.” That’s it; it’s just love.  Just grace.

The other thing that’s been powerful about this time is how aware I am of my call to parish ministry. It’s been great to have time to write for my town magazine and do a different kind of work. It’s really fun to invite kids over in the middle of the day when school is off to watch movies. (I am also very aware of what a privilege it is to have been able to spend a year unemployed and not have it be financially ruinous) But I’m not called to be a stay at home parent. I’m not called to be a magazine columnist (though I hope to keep doing projects once in a while).  I’m glad I got to do those things, and I’ve had the sense to have fun this year. I’m also not called to be a chaplain, or the director of a churchy organization. Baptizing, burying, and being-with. Preaching and teaching. And those are not confined by denominational lines, either.

So send out extra prayers the weekend of April 28—there will be time for the congregation to meet me and my family that Saturday, and Sunday I lead the service and preach. The passage from Acts is one of my favorites; a Ethiopian eunuch meets Philip on the road, reading Scripture.   Philip interprets Isaiah and teaches him about Jesus.  The eunuch says, “Look! Here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Nothing. "He went on his way rejoicing." What is to prevent us all from receiving God’s grace? Nothing. We go on our way rejoicing.

St John Evangelical Lutheran Church

 Carnegie, PA

Openness and Gratitude

I’ve wrestled a lot in this space about all the things that have shifted over the last period of time since leaving my parish of 11 ½ years and moving closer to home. It’s been a grace-filled time in so many ways. One way is how experiences I had in parish ministry have stayed with me—the conversation that seemed totally routine at the time, the random funeral for a community member—just more evidence of how we are shaped by our world as much as we shape it.  Coming closer to the holidays this year, my thanksgivings have been many.  I’ve been thinking… more of this piece at Grow Christians.

The Soft Animal of My Priesthood: Yet another thing that being out of a parish is teaching me about parish ministry

So, friends, now it’s going on five months out of parish ministry after having left my congregation of 11 1/2 years. Yes, there are possibilities, yes, ecclesiastical wheels turn, yes, there are churches that will need a priest and I'm a priest who needs a church. Having had this extra time, though, I’m continuing to interrogate what that means: how not “having a church” helps me understand what it is to have one, what it means to be ordained in the first place.

When I was in college, as part of my gender studies degree I read feminist psychology about the gendered nature of self-perception. Rather than as isolated individuals, women (I’m just leaving right on the floor here the fact that “woman” is a complicated category and acknowledging the work I’m remembering relies on some conventional stereotypes and antiquated assumptions) often perceive their identity and place in the world relationally.  Not as self-over-and-against the world, but as self understood through relationships with other people. This is presumed to be a good thing: the rugged individual who prioritizes (um) *him*self does not always tend to place care for others at the center of their lives.  But it also cuts the other way: it’s great to be connected to others.  If, though, someone is defined only through others to whom they are connected, the strength and self-differentiation of that individual perhaps does not make them the fiercest bear in the room.

As a priest, I experienced this relational understanding a lot—not so much in terms of how I understood myself as an individual, but how I understood myself as a priest. Being a priest was relational: identified with that particular parish.  This is not how the Episcopal/Anglican tradition views ordination: it’s seen as an “ontological change,” a change in who you are, period.  You can be home with your kids or working as a pastry chef or at a homeless shelter, but you’re still a priest. It’s not a role grounded in a permanent identity, not a temporary task. But what does it mean without a church? 

The church still has invested in me the power to, as the ordination rite says, “to preach, to declare God's forgiveness to penitent sinners, to pronounce God's blessing, [and] to share in the administration of Holy Baptism and in the celebration of the mysteries of Christ's Body and Blood.”  “I’m not a parish priest right now, with baptisms and communion to celebrate—that’s the only kind of priest I’d ever been. 

I was most powerfully struck by this recently at Wild Goose Festival, which my family has attended for the last five summers.   The festival is themed on music, art, spirituality, and justice, with speakers and readings and performances on assorted related themes. It attracts a variety of religious impulses but is generally progressive and Christian.    There’s a lot of mud (you camp) and feral children roam in packs demanding money for lemonade and ice cream. It's heavenly. 

Beer and Hymns, Wild Goose (just beer, and hymns. that's it.)

Every other time I’ve gone to Wild Goose I’ve done so on my church’s dime as “continuing education.” The parish funded the trip both in terms of time off from my usual work and money for gas and the ticket to get in.  As a result, my experience there was filtered through the lens of my perception of responsibility to my parish: looking for shiny things to bring home. Continuing education time is part of the standard clergy contract—you couldn’t use it to go shopping in Jamaica, but there are no set expectations for how robust a “payoff” it is to the congregation. Still, there’s some sense that you ought to carry away something useful, like ideas for children’s education or profound spiritual experience or social justice insight. 

Being at Wild Goose without a parish behind me, I realized I wasn’t constantly packaging my experience for the consumption of others.  I was just…there. And I was aware of how pleasant—holy, even!— it was just to be there. Ironically, I wrote a blog post about the holiness of thereness three years ago (here) and continue to learn my own lesson. This year at Wild Goose, I didn’t go looking for the next genius thing. I went to workshops led by my friends.  Hours spent on the state of public education or protest poetry could have been relevant enough to parish ministry, but not to have to ask the question in the first place made me realize how heavy a burden it had become to be manufacturing those tiny parcels of insight in the back of my mind.

Newsflash: I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to prove how clever or worthy I was. I didn’t have to spin straw into gold. My job as a priest was also in the other part in the ordination rite: “to love and serve the people among whom you work, caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor.”  Just love. To point to where we and God are connected. To be connected myself.   My understanding of priesthood evidently needed less relationality between me and the people and more relationality between all of us and God.  Being a priest isn’t about standing in front and saying smart things. When it feels like it is, it’s time to try being a priest in a different way.  This time away is inviting me into that other space.

My experience of being a priest at Wild Goose Festival without a congregation helped me to have a sense for how I was still a priest even without a congregation. This view of having been a priest having “my” people—I even did it in the last paragraph there without thinking—it too easily slips into carrying a ridiculous burden that deadens the clergy and infantilizes the congregation.  It’s like church architecture that puts the altar at the front of the church and the priest behind it; everyone’s looking at you.  You’re there, and you might as well pray from there so everyone can see. The older practice of having everyone face forward and the congregation see the back of the priest isn’t better, necessarily, but it’s crucial to remember that being in front isn’t the point. 

Crucially, too, I also realize how much I relied on that identity and that congregation to tell me who I was.  My priesthood is more than that particular context, and my personhood is more than as a working parish priest.  Having been more creaturely these last months (a la Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese poem,below,  allowing the soft animal of my body to love what it loves) I’m also aware that I’m more than the kid sleepovers and setting up house and landing in a new community and (having moved to a Trump state) political protests I’ve been part of.  More than the suburban lawn I have to go mow now, too. 

(And, because it is impossible to read it too many times, here’s Oliver's whole poem)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

--Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese” in Dream Work, 1986,

 [Gratuitous photograph of children running hand in hand toward Lake Erie, August 2017]

Different Words, Same Page

“How was it to read the responses instead of leading the service?”

My mother asked me this question after church on Easter, having sat with me in church for the first time since—when? College?  A long time. Until this year, she’s always had to come and watch our kids during Holy Week, a marathon of leading services Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday--most days two services, most services preaching.  I responded in somewhat adolescent fashion, replying dismissively that they were all words on a page. Who cares that I’m almost 40?  I didn’t want to talk about it.

Even feeling a bit less testy now, I still stand by that. Strictly speaking, liturgy does in large part come down to words on the page.  It’s a particular kind of speech that works because it’s repeated, and it’s a particular kind of speech because it relies on a whole raft of shared assumptions and referents. (My MDiv thesis was on this—I am doing my best not to go on and on and on here). Liturgies work because others have performed them, and others before them, too. Words and actions both come together. Words are actions. There’s an elasticity to it: an outdoor church service whose congregation is experiencing homelessness feels different from an indoor service with incense, four choirs, and an organ. It would be wrong to claim that one of those groups of people was comprised of lower-quality Christians or that the prayers of one were heard by God any more effectively than the other.  Bread, wine, words.   Call and response.  Priest and people. You might prefer one liturgical context or language to another, but it’s the same action. And you have to have both priest and people for sacraments.  

Person at altar, person in pew. Call, response. Neither works without the other. If anything, what was remarkable about last week’s services was how not-different the liturgies in themselves felt.  I got a little teary thinking about my old parish (similarly to my experience a few weeks ago I wrote about here), but I didn’t feel out of place or lost. Holy week still felt…holy.  3 years ago I wrote a post in this space about performance artist Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present comparing her immersion in her work with being a priest.  I still stand by that piece*, but I also think that a lot of what felt holy was actually the anxiety and adrenaline rush that ensues when an introvert has to stand in front of people four days in a row. That realization doesn’t make it less “spiritual,” but I wonder if I’ll be able to go a bit easier on myself in the future. Maybe I’ll be able to say my parts and the congregation can say theirs, and I’ll understand a bit more clearly about how it’s shared.  There were all kinds of conflicts during the Reformation about how, exactly, bread and wine become body and blood: was it saying the words of Jesus, or praying the Holy Spirit on the elements, or the priest, or the people—my favorite answer then, and still, was Richard Hooker’s—it happens when the people say Amen. So be it, and it is.

I quote—probably too often—a line I heard in a Martin Smith book about how God has called some people to be clergy because God does not trust them to be lay people. As someone whose return to the church of her childhood came in tandem with an experience of a call to the priesthood, that resonates a lot. I never did get myself organized enough to join a church as a young adult until I was thinking of going to seminary, and then I was all in.

Now into my second month of not working in a parish I’m also aware how God is, also, entrusting me with the this experience, too.  When it was announced on Maundy Thursday that no one had signed up for the 12am-1am slot in the overnight vigil remembering Jesus and his disciples in the garden before the crucifixion, I could say yes to my ten year old when he wanted me to take him. Did I ever take the uncomfortable hours when I was leading holy week in my parish?  Nope. Would I again? If I’m in parish ministry, probably not.  But I will always be grateful to be the parent of a kid who is comfortable enough in church to take a nap under an organ console.  And if not for this time, I wouldn’t have been there for it.

So yes, during Holy Week, I said the words on the page.  

Mostly. (I will always substitute expansive language when it refers to God as “he,” no matter what it says) I got my feet washed and prayed at the cross. I got drenched with the holy water of Baptism at the vigil and got wax on my clothes.  I got to hear sermons, instead of write them!   And, with Richard Hooker in the 16^th Century, I took some time to worry less about how God was present in what I was doing and just to be grateful that God was. 

Photo: Paul Barker

                                      Adah getting her feet washed at the outdoor kids' service.

*PS--A version of my Abramovic post was included in the book There’s a Woman in the Pulpit, a lovely collection of work by women clergy edited by Martha Spong. Get it here!