Like
an old shoe
Chaplain to the margins
This past Sunday, I attended church at St.
Richard’s parish, Winter Park. In itself, that’s not terribly remarkable. But
what was unusual about it was the fact it was the third Sunday in a row I’d
been in the pews, something that had not happened since I last served the
church in an official capacity as assistant chaplain at the Chapel of the
Resurrection at FSU during my doctoral work days.
To put this into persepctive, I moved to
Orlando from Tallahassee in 1997. Over the past 15 years I have occasionally
attended church, almost always at St. Richard’s, and have from time to time
actually officiated at services in a handful of parishes across the dioceses of
Central and Southwest Florida, generally under the auspices of the Franciscan
Third Order. More often, I have led services at gravesides, backyards, dining
room tables and at altars of churches outside ECUSA. When I was ordained I was
told I was going to serve those at the margins of the church. I simply had no
idea how far those margins stretched.
Watching others do what I was ordained to do
I’m pretty clear on why I’ve been essentially
a no-show at church here in Central Florida on any kind of regular basis. This
has long been a hostile diocese to LBGTQ people, leading the retrenchment
efforts within the national church against guaranteeing that all Episcopalians
have equal access to all the sacraments including ordination and marriage. While
St. Richard’s has long been a don’t-ask-don’t-tell
exception to that institutional homophobia, it has largely done so in terms of
silent tolerance.
What that has meant for this priest is being
confined to the pews and watching others officiate services, carrying out the
duties I was ordained to do as well but knowing that I could never live into
that ordination here. From the pew side, these services are a bittersweet
experience, a repeated dagger to the heart of rejection and judgment on the one
hand, the warm familiarity of an old shoe on the other. It’s a bit like having
a traditional Christmas dinner with one’s abusive family that one still loves
despite the history of abuse. Most of the time, it’s just been too much to
handle. As a result, my spot in the pew has remained cold most of the
time.
Coming back to church on even a semi-regular
basis signals that some of the deep hurts this diocese has inflicted upon me
and so many other people have largely scarred over. That has been accomplished
largely by avoiding the scene of the crime.
While I hold fond memories of my days at St. Luke’s Cathedral and its
once vibrant downtown ministry, I also know that place and that community no
longer exist. Perhaps I have finally worked through my grieving over that loss
even as the Ghosts of Cathedrals Past prevent me from returning to its ornate halls,
the chaplaincy to the well-to-do now guarded by iron fences and locked gates.
Like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, once one has lost the luxury of
naîveté, one’s innocent childhood is no longer available to them, the return
barred by angels with flaming swords guarding its gates.
My return to the pews also signals that I
have to a large degree come to grips with the disappointment and finally the
death of the many dreams held out by life in seminary and my experiences in the
magical parish of St. Phillips, San Jose, CA. In those days it seemed the
Christian tradition was emerging from its encrusted shell of power, prejudice
and an addiction to comfort, promising to offer the world what it needed – a
way to love our neighbors as ourselves, to embrace the outcast, to offer ordinary
people the tools they needed for a meaningful life here and now with the hope
of the presence of G-d in the hereafter. In short, it seemed to offer a means of
nothing less than actually transforming the world. Wrapped in the symbolic
universe of powerful music, lyrical liturgies and centuries of art and
intentionally engaging the ethical wrestling with the many concerns of the
world around us, the Episcopal Church offered a way of being fully human like
none other I had encountered. I left seminary hopeful, excited about living in
the world in a new way.
I find myself wistfully smiling as I write
these words. That life seems like a long time ago in a place far removed from
here. Things were a lot clearer then. There have been a lot of disappointments
and even more disillusionment between that place and here.
Thus I find it a little odd as I realized
last Sunday that I was in church for the third straight Sunday for the first
time in 15 years. I noted that to the priest on the way out the door and she
asked, “So, how does it feel?” I told her it felt pretty good. And it does. Sort
of. Why I am not sure though I have some ideas about it.
Actually, he brings me
The immediate occasion for my attendance is
at some level a relatively minor act of compassion. My long time friend
Charles, legally blind, evicted from public housing and only recently recovered
from being run over by a car in middle of the busy highway on which he now
lives, wanted to attend church and asked if I’d take him. It’s a bit of a pain
to drive up there to get him and take him home afterward, but it also insures
that I go to church as well. Perhaps it’s Charles who’s doing me the favor.
Charles will go just about anywhere I am
willing to take him, in part just to get out of the house, but his presence
with me in churches has long been a litmus test for the communities I have
visited with him. He tends to wear old, worn out clothing and sometimes is not
the most attentive to personal hygiene. If one didn’t know better, it’d be easy
to conclude he was homeless. And given his nearly complete reliance on others
at this point in his life, he effectively is. So how people respond to Charles
in the churches we visit tells me volumes about them, their character and their
religions. It also tells me whether I ever want to go back.
The folks at St. Richards are politely
tolerant if nothing else. And their response to Charles has been guardedly
welcoming. I find it amusing that many of them signal to me that they see my
bringing Charles as some kind of major kindness. An old friend from Cathedral
days recently said to me, “Thank you for bringing him.” Without thinking I
responded, “Actually, he brings me.” And, at least for the past three Sundays,
that has been partially true.
I hear my mother’s voice singing
But there’s more to it than that. In my
conversation with the energetic and engaging rector who is a fellow alumna of
my seminar in Berkeley, we talked a lot about the value of community. I find my
life in a time of upheaval these days. I’m not sure what I am called to be and
do at this point in my life as my sixth decade comes to an end. I also find the
communities of which I have been a part seem to be disintegrating before my
eyes, often painfully and angrily. I find myself craving grounding,
relationship, human contact. And, I’m beginning to feel that at St. Richards if
ever so tentatively.
I find my throat clutching and my eyes
tearing up as I sing old, familiar hymns that date back to my now 38 years of
being an Episcopalian, some going back even further to my childhood as a
Methodist. (The Wesleys were faithful Anglicans after all). I sometimes hear my
mother’s voice as we sing old Wesleyan hymns. And I feel a wave of sad
nostalgia sweep over me as the choir sings anthems whose bass line I once sang
in the choir of a Cathedral whose intentionally welcoming urban community has
long since gone away.
Interestingly, I also find myself doing a lot
less wrestling with the liturgy, the lessons and the sermons than I have in
more recent years. I have come to enjoy the familiarity of the liturgy even as
I can only make sense of it in symbolic terms and awareness of its historical
construction. While I have long since realized that atonement theology and the
Christology of its pronouncements were almost completely meaningless to me, I
continue to find the life and example of Jesus as the revelation of G_d to be
worth affirming. And I do believe that it is possible to hope for a life after
death with G-d (in the words of the Canadian United Church affirmation we use
at Integrity eucharists).
Compassion for the spiritual needs of others
I have also come to be more tolerant of the
spiritual needs of others around me that are expressed in common liturgical
worship. I know that many feel a need for the lessons from the lectionary to be
seen as somehow “the word of God” even as I recognize that while G-d’s voice
may be in those lessons, it’s one of many voices present in scripture, along
with its writers, editors and transmitters historically. While I never liked
the response “Here ends the reading” in my more Anglo-Catholic days, I find in
my old age that it really is more honest than responding with “the word of the
Lord.”
I also know that rehearsing the details of
the bargain in the Creed that many make each week– if one buys into the Trinitarian
theology package complete with its atonement construct one gets one free pass
directly into Heaven – is important for them. Never underestimate the ability
of existential anxiety to motivate people. And what could be more existentially
anxiety producing than fear that this life is the only one human beings get or,
worse, that an afterlife of suffering is possible if one doesn’t get the
formula right here and now?
While notions of arbitrary deities who
require agreement with particular human constructions of religion as a
condition of an artificial existential security – much less an afterlife - are probably not worthy of serious
consideration by thoughtful believers, fear can produce an awful lot of results
not otherwise indicated. One of the many gifts my Buddhist teacher in San Jose
gave me was the realization that in most cases where judgment is our first
instinct, compassion is more likely the appropriate response. “We all know what
it feels like to suffer,” she said, “which is why we should recognize the
suffering in the other with our compassion, not our judgment.”
Finally, I recognize the deep need almost all
of us feel for affirmation if not social respectability. Never underestimate
the desire for comfort as a motivation for human behavior. And few institutions
are more prone to focus on comfort than organized religion. Indeed, it is the
comfort of having a place to belong that at least in part has brought me back
to the pews at St. Richards.
Which is why the assertion that the rector at
St. Richard’s makes each week is refreshing – “We’re here to change our lives
and to change our world,” adding puckishly, “That’s all.” I’ve long since come
to believe that a religion which does not have the potential to transform
individual lives and the world in which we live is not a faith worth practicing.
How that happens is quite another story. And, frankly, while St. Richard’s is
not a particularly dynamic parish in this sense, it is clearly a stark contrast
to the parishes which dominate this diocese who weekly pound their parishioners
with moralistic, fear-driven drivel and the smug, self-righteous prayer of the
Pharisee giving thanks that G-d has not made them like other men.
Over the past couple of years I’ve taught a
couple of adult Sunday School classes at the parish and volunteered to lead a couple
of rounds of Stations of the Cross this past Lent. I’ve also agreed to preach
on the Feast of St. Francis this fall. There are some who would like to see me
become more active in parish life while I sense there are others who are at
best tentative about the presence of a well-educated, outspoken and openly gay
priest who is legally married to his husband of 38 years. Such figures tend to
be lightning rods.
A new breeze is blowing?
Frankly, I don’t see this diocese returning
to its former tolerance for gay priests anytime soon. The new bishop is his own
man and will not be guided by the mean-spirited moralism of his predecessor who
destroyed the Cathedral community I once loved and served. His deployment
officer recently was quoted as saying “A new breeze is blowing through this
diocese.” Time will tell what that means.
In the meantime, I am not holding my breath
that I’ll be licensed to function here. Indeed, I’m not sure I even want that.
I do know that my intuition was on target when I realized in seminary that I
never wanted to run a parish myself. I also know that the idealistic
alternative vision I entertained in seminary of being an engaged worker priest
may have been optimistic about my energies and my time management skills.
But I also know that my life is changing in
ways I never thought possible. I am more tolerant of beliefs and practices I
once found antithetical to true religion (always defined, of course, on my own
terms). I am more desirous of community and the occasional opportunity to serve
that community than I have been in the past. And I find that my arm’s length
reengagement of the church after a 15 year self-imposed exile might actually
provide a workable relationship. Perhaps this is a good example of the
rabbinical joke, “If you want to make G-d
laugh, tell G-d your plans. If you want to make G-d really laugh, tell G-d
G-d’s plans.”
One final thought. It does not hurt the
chances that I might reengage the Episcopal Church in a more substantial manner
that it has in its last two General Conventions accomplished things I never
thought possible. Last convention it apologized to LBGTQ people for the pain it
had caused them. This convention it approved a trial use of same-sex blessings
and removed discrimination against transgendered persons in the ordination track.
It has also expanded its Lesser Feasts and Fasts to include a wide range of
human exemplars worthy of our reverence and remembrance. Amazing.
This sounds like the Episcopal Church I
thought I had joined some 38 years ago – marked by a beautiful, lyrical and
mystical worship, devoted to community both within and without its walls and
dedicated to justice in the world around us. That is the church I knew as a
child I wished to join and which I once loved deeply and devotedly. That is the
church I once vowed to serve as priest. And perhaps it is a church I will
re-embrace and perhaps actually be able to serve once again. Time will tell.
**********************
Post
Scriptum Unus – I
celebrated the 17th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood
on June 22, the Feast of Saint Thomas More, patron saint of attorneys and
college professors, and, not coincidentally, also the Summer Solstice in honor
of my Celtic heritage. It has been an interesting 17 years as the chaplain to
the far flung margins. As I reflected on my nearly two decades of priesthood on
the anniversary of my ordination, it occurred to me that I actually like being
a priest. I have never been a conventional priest, confusing middle class mores
with the concerns of the divine. And I have never felt the need to be a
defender of the institution. Indeed, I see the failure to be critically aware
of its shortcomings and humbly willing to confront them honestly as a greater
liability to the tradition than any perceived threat from the outside.
Though I have been prevented from serving the
church in any systematic fashion since my return to Central Florida, I remain
grateful for everything the Episcopal Church has given me over the past nearly
four decades. And even as I sit in the pew watching others do what I, too, was
ordained to do but prevented from doing so by the ongoing legacy of homophobia
within the Christian tradition, I remain grateful to the bishop who took a
chance on me and ordained me priest 17 years ago. May you rest in peace,
Richard Schimpfky.
**********************
Post-Scriptum
Secondus – As
Mark Twain’s famous quip that rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated,
I find myself sheepishly smiling as I put the finishing touches on this blog
entry on Sunday four, having overslept this morning after a long weekend with my Dad and two nephews and thus absent from my pew
at St. Richards.
Next week…..
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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