A couple of Sundays ago I was back in Orlando's Cathedral of St.
Luke. It was a strange experience. A return to one of my old stomping grounds,
there were many aspects of it that were very familiar. And yet, as has been the
case for a long time now, I felt very little inside upon my return there,
almost as if it was my first time there, as if no personal history existed in
that place at all.
I don’t go to the Cathedral these days unless it is absolutely
necessary. The necessity this time was the funeral for a dear friend who had
been the cathedral organist and musician for years. The previous time I had
been there was for the ordination of a fellow parishioner from St. Richard to
the diaconate. Prior to that, it was the Pulse vigil and the funeral for one of
its victims that brought me back for the first time in 20 years.
The Cathedral was my home parish for the eight years I
spent in Orlando prior to heading off to Berkeley for seminary. But I have
avoided it like the plague since returning to this city. And there are good
reasons for that.
A Hobson’s Choice, A Change of Character
When I returned to Orlando after six years absence for
seminary and grad school, I knew things were very different there. The impact from
the regime change in the bishop’s office just down the street was inescapable.
That was already occurring as I left for the west coast.
The Cathedral I had
left had been a vibrant urban parish with ministries to the homeless and
interfaith work with the three other liturgical traditions within a three block
radius. It was a welcoming parish with a diverse congregation. The Cathedral I encountered was a very different place.
The tenor of the preaching had become shrill and angry and
a series of exoduses of former parishioners occurred in its wake. The homeless
were the first to go, required to move off cathedral property for their coffee
and donuts. A parish that once had a reputation for being tolerant of LBGTQ
people, it suddenly had become a bastion of homophobia confused for revealed
religion. After a series of stormy town hall meetings, its Chapter was given
the ultimatum by its well-heeled old-timers: It’s either the gays or us (translation:
our money). It’s not terribly difficult to predict how that decision went. And
shortly thereafter, the beloved dean who had been the epicenter of that
controversy followed the dispossessed out the doors of the Cathedral never to
return.
My final visit to the Cathedral 20 years previously had told
me everything I needed to know about the character of a parish that had devolved
into something intolerable during my six year absence. I had just moved back to
town from Tallahassee, was teaching full time at Valencia and working on my dissertation.
I went as a favor to a long-time friend I knew from Cathedral days past, a
legally blind man who lived in section 8 housing and was often mistaken for a
homeless person.
He needed someone to accompany him to the funeral of a
former dean of the cathedral. “He was nice to me, little brother,” he had said.
And so I agreed to take him.
About 20 minutes into the requiem service, he said he
needed to go to the bathroom and would be right back. I was certain that this
man knew the premises well given his years there as a parishioner. But after
about 20 minutes when he did not return, I grew anxious. Had he gotten lost
somewhere? Had he stepped into the street and gotten hit by a car he never saw
coming?
I turned around to look for him and spotted him in the
narthex, pressed up against the glass divide which separates it from the main
church. It’s where noisy babies are dispatched during services. My friend looked
like a dog in the window of a puppy store, watching the service but unable to
escape his cage.
I went out to get him and asked why he hadn’t returned.
“That man wouldn’t let me come in,” he said. The usher – translation:
guard – who had presumed him to be a homeless person and barred his
entry – simply shrugged.
My friend had long been my canary in the mine shaft whom I
took with me to new churches. I watched how people treated him. If they respected
his dignity, I’d consider returning. If not, I would never return. That night I
promised myself as I left the cathedral in a simmering rage that I would never
darken its doors again. The Cathedral and I had said everything we needed to
say to one another. I would not return.
And I didn’t for 20 years.
Margaret Mead Mode
But things change.
I did return to Cathedral 20 years later. Of the four times
I have been to the Cathedral, all within the last two years, three were for
funerals. This time, like the times before, it felt odd to be in that familiar
but now alien space.
Sometimes when I am deeply troubled, I drop into a
dissociative mode, observing what is happening around me as if an
anthropologist investigating a recently “discovered” tribe. I call it Margaret
Meade Mode. It helps me get through. And I was decidedly there during this
funeral.
So, what did I observe?
First, I must give credit to the many people who
participated in the music making that day. From the stringed ensemble to the
soloists to the choir, swollen with old members who had returned home to bid
their former teacher and choirmaster goodbye, the music was simply glorious. I
had forgotten what it sounds like to have that much indoor space filled with beautiful
sound. It was truly magnificent.
I think Ben would have been proud.
Second, I observed that the structure of the Cathedral was
well maintained and still as beautiful as I remembered from my days there as a
choir member, lector and subdeacon. The flags from Florida’s 450 year history
which had been displayed from the clerestory above the two story concrete
pillars towering over the nave are now removed. My guess is that they came down
in deference to the objection to the Confederate battle flag that was included
among them. Whatever else one might say about St. Luke’s, its ultimate concern
is always social respectability.
But for the most part, it was still the same massive,
beautiful structure I remembered.
In days gone by, I would have said there was a sense of the
holy there. Sacred spaces become so from years of worshippers engaging in
rites, praying and singing. A Liberal Catholic Church priest who is a friend of
mine describes this as being “magnetized by the sacred.” This is, no doubt, still
true of the Cathedral despite itself.
But this day, something else struck me.
More than anything else, this was a set for a giant drama.
The costuming was tasteful. The movements were clearly rehearsed and well
regulated. The pageantry was well executed. The attendees certainly got their
money’s worth.
Perhaps that’s what cathedrals are best at. They do, after
all, contain the thrones of bishops complete with their crowns borrowed from
the Roman Empire and their attendants with fancy titles (Archdeacons, no less!)
who stand by their side to meet their every command. And cathedrals have,
historically, also been the sites for the crowning of kings and emperors. Given
that history, this royally appointed space in the center of a thriving city of
2.5 million souls does a good job of living up to its expectable persona.
But something else struck me as I watched this service
unfold. It’s hard to put my finger on it but if I had to come up with a word it
would be self-possession. The actors in this drama appeared not only to
be fully aware of their roles (and thus their relative importance vis-Ã -vis one
another), they also appeared to be highly concerned that everyone else should note
this as well.
As I thought back on my own time at the Cathedral, I
remember thinking that what we were doing there was important, perhaps a little
more important than the mere services taking place out in the provinces around
us. After all, we were “the Ca-THE-dral.”
Time and distance has given me a sense of how pretentious
that was as well as time to reflect on my own perceived needs to participate in
such thinking.
With self-possession comes a concern for status. One of the
great losses to the Cathedral parish in its devolution has been its loss of
self-understanding as an inner-city parish connected to a highly diverse
community. In its place has come a sense of mission as the chaplaincy to the
well-to-do, the movers and the shakers.
There were very few people of color present at the funeral with
the exception of the decedent’s husband’s unacknowledged family. There were no
homeless people sitting next to bank presidents as was the case in days of
Cathedrals past. This congregation appeared to be the upper middle-class white
elites at prayer.
When I read my gut about what I was feeling, it came back
with ugly words: smarmy, smug, self-righteous, patronizing, condescending -
words so ugly I began to immediately do a second gut check to see how much
of this was projection on my part.
Either way, it felt pretty oppressive.
Ridding Themselves of the Disconfirming Other
Given the direction the Cathedral has taken, I can well see
how it could have cut off the many folks it did to begin this new course.
Homeless people are evidence of the failures of the same market fundamentalist
system that produced the wealth of the elites. LBGTQ people are a liability to
fragile, straight white male clergy who feel a desperate need for the
affirmation of toxically patriarchal male peers increasingly confined to the Southern
Hemisphere. People of color are always “welcome” but rarely feel so once there
and don’t stay. And those parishioners who dared raise objections to the
exclusions that resulted from this change in direction soon felt the need to
make their exodus as well.
By then, they, too, knew what it meant to be rejected,
first hand.
It’s a lot easier to be a cohesive ideological tribe when
all the disconfirming
others are removed.
Purges and inquisitions always reveal the insecurities of the excluders.
For a very long time I was hurt by that rejection. It is
one of many encounters with institutional religion that has made me unable to ever
fully trust the church. There is a reason that I tell people that when I stand
inside the church it is never far from the exits.
But more than my own rejection, I was angry about the
people there I had come to know and love who had been hurt. Some went to other
parishes. Some to other churches entirely. Many – beginning with my beloved
husband who was for years in charge of one of the smoothest operations of young
acolytes I’ve ever seen - simply walked away from institutional religion altogether.
The Cathedral had been the last chance many of them were
willing to give organized religion. And the betrayal they felt from a church
they had dared to trust was simply too much to bear.
I often come away from encountering these former fellow
parishioners in the supermarkets or on the street with a broken heart. Of all
the hurts I endured in this meltdown, this is the one I have had to work
hardest to forgive – a work that continues today.
It is those beautiful, trusting souls lost to the church for
which it will be required to account in the end.
And Yet….
Over time, I thought about that meltdown less and less. Gradually
the pain ebbed nearly completely away. It helped that I was three time zones
away for most of that time. What came in the place of that aching heart was
a numbness and a commitment to simply avoid the place.
Little wonder I had such a sense of disconnection as I sat
in that pew in the Cathedral for only the fourth time in 22 years.
This day, I listened to a dean selling salvation schema, filling
the air with theological vagaries, casting about for anything other than
talking about the actual life of the dear friend we were supposedly there to
honor. Clearly he was avoiding the elephant in the room - that the deceased was
married to another man in a service that could never have taken place in this very
cathedral he had served for two decades with distinction.
But amidst that sadness and irritation, I began to hear
that small still voice which often comes to me at the most unpredictable times.
The timing of this one was truly amazing.
It suddenly dawned on me that amidst the anger and the pain
I was recalling there is much about my experience there for which I am grateful. I learned to sing and speak in liturgical settings there. I learned
how to serve at the altar and at the communion rail there. In the days before
the Institute for Christian Studies became a finishing school for fundamentalists
who wanted to become deacons, it was a respectable regional theological school.
I completed two years of thoughtful study there that made my first year of
seminary a breeze.
More than that, I met people at that place who changed my
life and gave me a chance to begin discovering and claiming who I truly was.
For that, I will always be grateful. And I will always cherish those
friendships that have managed to survive the devolution of a vibrant parish
into this self-possessed chaplaincy for the movers and shakers.
I came across this poster on Facebook last week
that stopped me dead in my tracks. I am at a point in life where I am seeking
to own up to my past, to embrace my Shadow, to integrate it as best I can. That
includes owning the deep grief that for a long time I have confused with anger.
For this heavily right brain mystic, this gave me an image
to work with.
I have come to see my time at the Cathedral as a necessary
stage in my life development. It was never meant to be a permanent location,
just a stop along my life journey. I grew enormously from my time spent there. Trying
to hold onto it even as the wheel of life changed brought suffering, much as
the Buddha has taught us will happen.
I made an awful lot of mistakes there as well. But I also learned
from them. And I have the scars to show for it.
The Cathedral was decidedly one of the stages of my life as
a caterpillar. It was a clumsy time, a time of naivete and self-deception, a
time when I sought my sense of self value from others, not yet confident enough
in my own story to believe in myself. But that time, now, is one of many chapters
of a much longer story and I accept it for what it was. And now, on the other
side of that time, as painfully as it ended, I am grateful.
I just pray that one day the Cathedral itself will once
again emerge as a butterfly.
Writing Goodbyes to Let Go
That doesn’t mean I hold any warmth for the Cathedral - at
least not in its current state - nor do I intend to spend much time there. It
is what it is and I accept that even as I largely find what it is intolerable.
Fortunately, our paths do not need to cross often.
The Cathedral I knew and loved is gone. Funerals are a good
time to mourn the passing of loved ones, to celebrate the times of joy and
opportunities for growth they provided, and to simply leave the rest at the
door of the narthex. That includes the eight years of life at this Cathedral I
remembered this day with sadness and yet with gratitude. In many ways, for me it was the funeral for the Cathedral that once was.
For those of us who pray through our writing, it is in
writing of our pain that we heal; it is in writing of our sorrows that we work
through our forgiveness; and it is through writing our goodbyes that we come to
let go.
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
hcoverston.orlando@gmail.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 worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston 2019
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