The End of a Long Journey

 

Last  week I was officially licensed to exercise my priestly ministry in the Diocese of Central Florida. It was one of the more unexpected events to occur in my life. I am delighted to have my path paved for ongoing ministry at St. Richard’s parish in Winter Park. But, more than that I am relieved that after 35 years, this long journey is over.

“The Most Interesting Stuff I’d Ever Studied“

In 1989, I began to take courses at the Institute for Christian Studies at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in Orlando where I was then a parishioner. My friend, Bob Vanderau, the canon liturgist at the cathedral, had encouraged me to just check out the courses and see what I thought. Having already spent eight years in higher education to secure a B.A. in History and a law degree from the University of Florida, I thought, what the heck, this couldn’t be too hard and perhaps it would prove interesting. So I enrolled.

This would be a classic example of the rabbinical maxim:

“If you want to make G_d laugh, tell G-d your plans.”

I came home from my very first class at the ICS and told my husband, “This is the most interesting stuff I’ve ever studied.” I was hooked. Little did I know what that would mean.

In the following months as I began to work through the courses on scripture, ethics, history, spirituality, psychology, I began to notice a rumbling in my soul. Something inside me said, “You should pursue ordained ministry.”  I just laughed. Me, a deacon, much less a priest? Seriously. You are talking to the world’s oldest frat boy, the public defender who raises hell in the courtroom on behalf of his juvie clients and raises even more hell on the weekends as the party animal. You’ve got to be kidding.

But the feeling was undeterred. If anything it grew stronger. And I began to think maybe I could accommodate this sense of calling by becoming a deacon. I could be ordained, preach on occasion, assist at the altar, and engage a ministry described as having one foot in the world and one foot in the church. I wouldn’t have to leave home for seminary. And I could continue my law practice and my teaching at the local state college.

Then everything began to change.

A new bishop was elected in the Diocese of Central Florida. He was a product of the charismatic movement, fundamentalist in theology, a leader of the anti-LGBTQ faction in the church. Years later he would leave the Episcopal Church over gay marriage. But everything would change here in 1990 with his election by one vote on the 13^th ballot.

I knew that deacons served directly under bishops. So I knew immediately that I would never be able to trust a man whose theology and politics were so inimical to my own. There was little room in his world for a man like me. And I knew I could never work under a man I would never be able to respect. So I figured, OK, I was off the hook.

A Calling That Wouldn’t Go Away

Again, “if you want to make G-d laugh….”

I found that my sense of calling to ministry did not go away with these changes. If anything, it had intensified. People began to say to me, “Harry, had you ever thought you might be called to be a priest?,” a question that made me want to run screaming from the room. And yet, it never went away.

 

Moreover, the episcopal election was not the only change that was occurring in my life. It came at a point when I had realized my time in the practice of law had expired. I had beat my head against the brick wall of what was oxymoronically called the juvenile justice system and after four years of banging, the wall had not budged even as my head had become bloody. I had thought perhaps that I could escape by slipping into a full-time slot at the community college teaching U.S. Government. But I was running out of options that would allow me to maintain the status quo in my life.

In August of 1990, I went to Europe with Andy and my family. The first night we were in Rome, I slipped out of the hotel. I walked down to the colonnade surrounding St. Peter’s Square and, careful to avoid the ubiquitous pigeon guano, sat on the concrete curb and closed my eyes. I said, “St. Peter, I am lost. I feel I may be called to be a priest. I think I want to be a part of the Rock. Help me.” After a moment, I heard a deep, stern voice solemnly respond: “You will be a part of the Rock. And the Rock will crush you.”

In retrospect, I am clear that truer words were never spoken. I did become a part of this institution whose tradition sees Simon Peter, the Rock, as its foundation. And over time, that  Rock would indeed crush me, repeatedly.

Exactly the Place I Needed to Be

I would come home from Europe, gather references from the clergy on the cathedral staff, and apply at five Episcopal seminaries. I knew the Diocese of Central Florida would never send an openly gay, partnered man to seminary. So I applied on my own and would be admitted to all five seminaries (General in NYC, Sewanee in TN, Yale in CN, EDS in Cambridge and CDSP in Berkeley). Now came the hard part – choosing a seminary and finding funding.

 

I would choose CDSP for two reasons. One, I knew I needed to be out of the Deep South and off the East Coast. I knew that I would discover something different on the West Coast. And my intuition proved right on the money. My life would completely change as a result of that move.

 

My husband and I decided together where we’d go over lengthy evening walks. I knew he wanted to be on the West Coast. This was a man who had faithfully served the Episcopal Church for years as the head of the acolyte guild at the Cathedral, a serene presence made for the altar, able to get the young acolytes to behave when no one else could. But when the Cathedral voted to fire its dean after he had permitted the Orlando Gay Chorus to sing there on World AIDS Sunday, he came home from the meeting heartbroken and said, “That’s it. I’m done.” The Rock had crushed him.

 

Andy occasionally humors me by accompanying me to services from time to time. But he began down a path strongly informed by Buddhism after the Cathedral meltdown. We knew we would find the Buddhists in California. And we would sit in a sangha in San Jose for three years while I was a seminarian. Our bhikkhuni, the nun who was our teacher, honored me by attending my diaconal ordination. I told her that what she had taught me had made me a better Christian. She said, “Then go live out the precepts you have learned.”

CDSP ended up being precisely the place I needed to be. Then a member of the Graduate Theological Union, I was able to take classes with all the member schools ranging from Unitarian to American Baptist along with three Roman Catholic orders. I also took courses with the Judaic Studies department, the Orthodox Catholic school, Matthew Fox’s Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality in Oakland and a couple of classes at UC Berkeley down the street. This interfaith milieu was made for a non-dogmatic student like me.

 

It also became the place where I discovered the spirituality and culture of Latin America. I would initially travel to study Spanish in Mexico. This was  followed by two visits to El Salvador at the end of its civil war as a ceasefire observer and international elections observer with the World Council of Churches. I would ultimately spend a summer in a village in the countryside of Panama. These experiences would change my life forever.

Lost Faith? In G_d, No. In the Church…

Still, I struggled with the idea and the process of being ordained.

Because I was not sent to a seminary by a diocese, I would have to find a diocese willing to accept me into the process for ordination. That meant first finding a parish willing to sponsor me.

I quickly found a parish in San Jose that would become my spiritual home. St. Philip’s was an intentionally multicultural parish 50 miles south of Berkeley. The Gospel was read in up to five languages on a given Sunday. I learned much from the American Indian congregation there as well as the Latin American and Laotian congregations. And within months, they had agreed to sponsor me for ordination.

That meant I had to go to meet Bishop Richard Shimpfky to be approved for entry into his diocese. I later found out he had a long running battle with John Howe, the anti-gay bishop of Central Florida, and was only too happy to accept me to stick it in Howe’s eye. But I never felt I was a pawn. Shimpfky believed in justice and saw my ordination as a step in that direction for the church. And so I would ultimately become the second openly gay priest to be ordained in the Diocese of El Camino Real.

Right up to the day of my ordination to the transitional diaconate I wrestled with my soul over whether I should go through with it. I was clear that I was called to be a priest and that I wasn’t getting out of that calling. But I still had two major reservations. One was institutional, the other internal.

In the recent film The Conclave, the Cardinal-Dean charged with conducting the election of a new Pope in the College of Cardinals is asked by a colleague, who notices he is deeply perturbed, whether he has lost his faith. The Cardinal-Dean said, “In God, no. In the church….” leaving that sentence dangling.

I get that. I have always known the church was a human institution subject to the same flaws with which individual humans wrestle. But I have also long held deep reservations about men with few checks on their power, reservations which deepened in my time as a teacher and attorney. My experiences with the Diocese of Central Florida had reinforced those fears in a big way. Becoming subject to the authority of an institution that routinely demonstrated it was untrustworthy was not something I was anxious to do.

The other doubts I faced were internal. For those of us who have been told all our lives that we were inferior, that we were substantively defective if not evil, it has meant a life-long struggle to find our worth and believe in our own value. The idea I could ever be good enough to be a priest has, for most of my priesthood, never been anything of which I was confident. And there are days when I still wrestle with those demons.

 

But I would be ordained. And now I was faced with the question of how I would respond.

 

I had  completed an internship in my parish in San Jose rather than taking the ordinary path of what was called Field Education, a mentored attachment to a parish for the time one was in seminary. Being on-site, full-time and learning how to operate a parish was priceless, but not in the way the seminary had presumed it would work. I knew two things by the end of my time at St. Philips: One, I was definitely called to be a priest, and two, I was definitely NOT called to be a rector of a parish or a vicar of a mission.

I had come to grips with my lack of managerial skills during my internship. I had gifts to offer the church from liturgical planning and preaching to counseling, teaching and spiritual guidance. But I knew by the end of that internship that I would be crazy to take on the operations of a parish or mission and that a parish would be crazy to place me in such a position. And I had learned enough from my experience in law that I knew I needed to trust my gut on such realizations.

Returning Home to Complete My Education

I had also come to seminary planning to complete my education with a doctoral program. I saw it as living into my best and highest use of my talents, a completion of who I was as a person. I had hoped to be admitted to a doctoral program at the GTU in religion and society. But, like my first stab at the LSAT, my first application to law school and my first sitting for the Florida Bar, my first application at the GTU was not successful. I discovered that the admissions process gave preference to women doctoral applicants and that three of the four candidates admitted on my first application process were women. While it was a policy I agreed with, given the dearth of women doctorates, it was clear I probably needed to look elsewhere.

I discovered that Florida State had just begun a doctoral program in religion. And the news that both of my parents had now been diagnosed with cancer and begun treatment created an impetus to go home. I was admitted to FSU and moved to Tallahassee a mere three months after my priestly ordination. Thereafter began the next chapter in the long process of coming home to Central Florida as a priest.

 

The Chapel of the Resurrection at FSU, the Diocese of Florida’s student chaplaincy, was directly across the street from the Religion Department. When the chaplain there asked me to serve at the chapel, I tentatively agreed, fearing the diocese would reject me given my sexuality. But the diocesan canon to the ordinary simply asked how long I’d be at FSU, what I was studying there and if I wanted to serve at the Chapel. The next two years in Tallahassee would become my first parochial experience after ordination.  

When I moved back to Orlando, I was certain that I would not serve the church again in my lifetime. I had been hired to be the chaplain at the student ministry at the University of South Florida in Tampa. But after hiring me, the bishop in Southwest Florida consulted his counterpart in Orlando, John Howe. I was asked to take that Sunday’s service at the chapel and I did so only to get a phone message from Tampa later that week saying don’t come back. Once again I had been stabbed in the back by the very men with power I had always distrusted.

I said at the time, I’m done. And, once again: “If you want to make G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans.”

The Canary in the Coal Mine

For the next 16 years, my connection with the Episcopal Church was essentially non-existent. I was resigned to the belief that my service to the church was over and turned my attention to university teaching. I was not terribly interested in even being present in an Episcopal Church during that winter of the soul. Then two things changed.

First, a new rector was elected to serve St. Richard’s parish in Winter Park. Alison Harrity, a fellow Florida native, had been a year behind me at CDSP.  She had encouraged me to attend the parish even if nothing else than for the community it could provide me. I told her I’d think about it.

 Then, my dear friend Charles Miller, a legally blind man evicted from his Section 8 housing in the neighborhood downtown where we first lived, moved out to a condo not far from the parish. I knew Charles needed interaction with other human beings. And so I asked him if I took him to St. Richards would he go. He was more than willing. And we began attending there together. 

I watched the way people looked at Charles, a man with mismatched clothes from charity that appeared to the average person to be a homeless man. He didn’t always smell very good, either, another aspect of long-time poverty and disability. But, like a canary in the mine shaft, I watched how people at St. Richards treated him. And when I asked him after a month if he wanted to continue to attend, he said, “Oh yes, little brother, these people are so nice to me.”

So I became a regular in the pews at St. Richards. That continued after Charles disappeared into the bowels of Florida’s elderly care system and died alone a year later.

 

In October 2013, Alison asked if I’d preach and co-celebrate at the Feast of St. Francis/Blessing of the Animals. As a Franciscan, I was delighted to do so. Alison said, “I need you and I can’t wait for them to get their act together” and thus I began to preach and celebrate on occasion at St. Richards.

But that still presented a problem. I was a priest in the Episcopal Church but I was not licensed to function in the Diocese of Central Florida. Ordinarily clergy in my position simply applied for licensing and begin their ministry thereafter. But the diocese had become even more inveterately homophobic during my absence and its local canons prohibited people like me from serving there. Thus I couldn’t even apply. Until recently.

With a new canon enacted by the national church’s General Convention, diocesan canons could no longer prevent partnered LGBTQ clergy from functioning there. I was one of several unlicensed priests serving our parish. Alison drafted a rewritten application for licensure omitting the homophobic language and asked all of us to apply for licensing. All but one of us did so and all who applied have now been approved.

The Gift of Being a Priest

So as of November 19, I am licensed to exercise my ministry in the Diocese of Central Florida even as I retain my canonical residency in the Diocese of El Camino Real on the central California coast (think Big Sur). Thirty Five years after I began my journey to serve G_d in G_d’s church here in Orlando, that has finally become a reality. If you’d asked me at any point during that journey, I would have said it was impossible.

In these 35 years since I began this journey, I have faced multiple rejections and betrayals by those with power over me even as I refused to take no for an answer. I applied to seminary on my own, took out $60K in loans to cover my schooling (which I paid off just months before I retired), and moved across the country twice. In all the years I have served the church, except for five Sundays of substitute pay and a handful of funerals, I’ve never been paid for my services. Yet I have devotedly served a church, always at my own expense, which has at times made my life a living hell. And 35 years later, I have come home to serve it once again. 

Do I still have apprehensions about men with power over me in institutions that have historically been instruments of injustice? Absolutely. But my recent meeting with my new supervising bishop, Justin Holcombe gave me some hope. He asked me a question I’d never been asked before: What is your favorite part of being a priest?

I did not hesitate to answer. The Eucharist that we share is my favorite part. The magic happens on both sides of the altar rail. I love the fact our prayer involves our whole bodies. We have to get up, move down the aisles to the altar rail where we stand or kneel shoulder to shoulder. There is an unavoidable sense of oneness there that sweeps over me every time I engage that sacrament.

 

But the magic is even more intense on the other side of the rail. I love being able to distribute the elements to my parishioners, to look into their faces and experience our oneness. I scan the faces of the elderly, how they differ from the last time I saw them, wondering how far some are from the time we will have to say goodbye to these souls we love so dearly. I also love giving the elements to children, getting down to look them in the face, handing them the bread and saying to them, “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. OK, now say Amen.” Most do. And I work on those who are at first reluctant over time until they do. I want them to feel valued, to engage this magical moment.

It is that privilege that makes all the trouble worthwhile for this unorthodox priest. Much as I like to argue, these days I largely avoid the incessant squabbles with those who feel the need to have their theological understandings affirmed. None of us have the answers. None of us have credible claims to absolute truth no matter what self-serving language we use to describe our understandings. I don’t need the affirmations of others to hold my understandings, which could always change. Nor do they need mine.

But with my licensing, I have come to a place of peace, willing to work under another bishop who is willing to work with me. Whatever this unhealthy diocese might see as imperative is going to have to go on without me. I’m just happy to serve my parish.

So Peter was right. I did become a part of the Rock. And the Rock has crushed me, repeatedly, just as he promised. But I am still here. And this week my way has been made a bit easier. For that, on this week of Thanksgiving, I am deeply grateful.

 

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 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.

 Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

 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, 2024

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