A beautifully written autobiography that rings true.
Quotes:
This is not the life I planned or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me—that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human—seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.
Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again.
“If we don’t leave the city, I’m going to die sooner than I have to.”
As one of four priests in a big downtown parish, I was engaged in work so meaningful that there was no place to stop.
The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is.
If I had been born in another time and place, I might have headed to a convent or to a small beehive-shaped hut made of stone on a holy island. I might even have found a shaman to lead me deeper into the mysteries. In my own time and place, I was not aware of so many options. When I put my strong sense of the Divine Presence together with my irresistible urge to help hurt things, seminary kept coming up as the next stop on my map.
being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.
“Think hard before you do this,” one said to me when I told him I wanted to be ordained. “Right now, you have the broadest ministry imaginable. As a layperson, you can serve God no matter what you do for a living, and you can reach out to people who will never set foot inside a church. Once you are ordained, that is going to change. Every layer of responsibility you add is going to narrow your ministry, so think hard before you choose a smaller box.”
Sometimes, when people were busy adoring me or despising me, I got the distinct impression that it was not about me at all. I reminded them of someone else who was no longer around but who had made such a large dent in their lives that they were still trying to work it out.
“Eating forbidden fruit makes many jams,” read one church sign. “Give Satan an inch and he will become your ruler,” read another.
Because this is a love story, it is difficult to say what went wrong between the Church and me. On the one hand, it was the best of parish ministry that did me in.
On the other hand, there was a definite hardening taking place, not only at Grace-Calvary but at every church I knew. The presenting issue was human sexuality. While the Episcopal Church had gladly received the ministry of gay and lesbian people for as long as anyone could remember, it had done so without blessing the “gay and lesbian” part. The unspoken deal was that the ministry could continue as long as the sexuality stayed under cover.
As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
Because church people tend to think they should not fight, most of them are really bad at it.
Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs.
The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy…” “Behold the Lamb of God…” “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…”
If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?
By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.
Remember the Sabbath, the rabbis say, and you fulfill all of Torah.
A man standing in line with me at a grocery store in Atlanta once asked me if I were headed to a costume party as a cross-dressing priest.
In Clarkesville, the collar had a more sobering effect, especially among church members. When people saw it in public, they shifted from normal gear into the most reverent gear they could find.
“The people you think love you don’t love you as much as you think they love you,” Frank said to me, “and the people you think hate you don’t hate you as much as you think they hate you.”
my soul did not operate on a solar calendar. My soul operated on a lunar calendar, coming up at a different time every night and never looking the same way two nights in a row.
As Christians, we were especially vulnerable, since our faith turned on the story of a divine human being.
We needed a different way of being together before God, shaped more like a circle than a pyramid. We needed to ditch the sheep paradigm. We needed to take turns filling in for Jesus, understanding that none of us was equal to the task to which all of us had been called. We needed to share the power.
The second thing that happened when I lost my power was that I got a taste of the spiritual poverty that is central to the Christ path.
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Gradually I remembered what I had known all along, which is that church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in this world. By offering people a place where they may engage the steady practice of listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments, church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up—not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread, and grocery store wine. That way, when they leave church, they no more leave God than God leaves them. They simply carry what they have learned into the wide, wide world, where there is a crying need for people who will recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God.
Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedom to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.
He was so immersed in the life of the Church, he said, that he occasionally forgot that the life of faith was not always the same thing.
I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty.
It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.”
Once I understood that the gospel writers had not told me the whole truth about the Pharisees, I wondered what else they had not told me. Once I noticed that Luke said things about Paul that Paul denied, I wondered what other quarrels Luke had hidden from my view.
I felt like someone who had strolled into the feeding of the five thousand on a casual walk around the lake.
A priest is a priest, no matter where she happens to be. Her job is to recognize the holiness in things and hold them up to God. Her job is to speak in ways that help other people recognize the holiness in things too.
My priesthood was not what I did but who I was. In this new light, nothing was wasted. All that had gone before was blessing, and all yet to come was more.
the central truth of the Christian gospel: life springs from death, not only at the last but also in the many little deaths along the way. When everything you count on for protection has failed, the Divine Presence does not fail. The hands are still there—not promising to rescue, not promising to intervene—promising only to hold you no matter how far you fall.
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