Doing and Being

I'm a priest, and I love my job. In fact, I can't imagine myself being anything else other than a priest in the Episcopal church. I get to write, learn, teach, talk, celebrate Eucharist, baptize, marry, listen, laugh, strategize, preach, pray, sing, dream, solve problems, share meals and cups of coffee, and read my favorite book. I love these things; I also do things I don't particularly love to do, but I understand that they are part and parcel to the work.

And while not all of this comes easily, everything I've mentioned here is something that can be done. You can learn to do almost anything, even if it turns out you aren't particularly good at it. We all can't be good at everything, that's why we need each other, I get it. The hardest part of my job though, the one that keeps me up at night, the one that makes me feel like a colossal failure, is not anything that has to do with doing, but rather with being.

In the last two weeks, I've been having a series of really hard conversations. The kind of conversations where there's nothing really to say, nothing to do, nothing to offer. The kind of conversations that are about true injustice in the world, about the death of immediate family members, about ruined hopes, about utterly justified fears. These conversations are raw with emotion, and raw with hard truth. Together, we stare at the ugliness.

I won't tell them it will be all right, because often, it won't be. I won't tell them that when they get to the other side, they'll be stronger, better, transformed, because I don't know that. I won't tell them that "God won't give them more than they can handle" because that's bullshit. First of all, did God really make that happen? Really? and secondly, I've seen people break. That platitude is just not true. In the moment, sitting with them in the church, or on a late night phone call, the only thing I can do is be. More specifically, be with them. Be with them, and promise that right now, the God who suffered knows, and is suffering with them. Small comfort in the face of such big tragedy. But it's all I've got.

Honestly, it sucks. It makes me feel helpless. But I wouldn't be anywhere else.

Forty Years

The Rev. Allison Cheek after the first public celebration of the Eucharist by a woman
Nov. 10, 1974 at St. Stephen's and the Incarnation, NW DC
Photo by the Washington Post

Today is a big deal, at least for me, anyway. Today is a big deal, because forty years ago, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church, the Philadelphia Eleven, were ordained at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, PA. They were irregularly ordained, which means they were ordained outside of church law, which only caught up with them two years later. These women, and the male bishops who ordained them, risked their vocations (and, I'm assuming for the bishops, their pensions) in order to live out what they believed to be true -- that God does not discriminate by gender when God calls someone into the sacramental priesthood, and that God was calling each of these women to serve God as a priest in God's church. It's beautiful, and it's true.

I love these stories, these stories about the first women priests in the church. I love hearing about them, I love to read about them. (If you are interested, Grace in Motion by the Rev. Dr. Judith Maxwell McDaniel is a great place to start.) I love these stories because I feel like they are my stories, and because even though I was born eleven years after the Philadelphia Eleven, and even though I began to seek ordination thirty-one years after the Philadelphia Eleven, I was told, when I began my process, that my priest would not be supporting me for ordination because I was a woman, and he did not believe that woman should be priests. This set off a series of chain reactions in my process.

It took me nine years to be ordained to the priesthood.

There are many things I could say about that experience, but what I'm thinking about today is the enormity of the courage, effort, prayer, persistence, tenacity and sheer grit it takes to make a change toward justice in an unjust system. Women and their male allies had been fighting for decades before 1974 to see this change happen, and when women finally were ordained, they had to find jobs that would hire them, deal with belittling, sexual assault, physical violence, death threats, the never-ending balance between family expectations and work, and not to mention the nearly inevitable sacking after becoming pregnant, at least in the early days. I've heard these stories from some of the women who have experienced them.

What astounds me now is how easy it was for all of those decades to be flippantly dismissed with a few offhanded words from one person in authority.  But do you know what? That didn't stop the Eleven. It didn't stop women from becoming professors and deans of schools or cathedrals, from raising families while running churches, from serving the poor or the sick, or from becoming authors and world-renowned preachers and not least, bishops. And with their help, it didn't stop me.

So, today is a big deal. I'm so grateful for those women, and all that they've done, and continue to do. I can't wait to see what the next forty years has in store.

On Being Inexperienced

While working at my “day job” on Sunday, I heard a hit-it-out-of-the-park sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson, who is the bishop-in-residence at St. Thomas Episcopal Parish, Dupont Circle. Sermons are by nature ephemeral events, written in a week and forgotten by the next. But the mark of an effective sermon is a sermon that you think about the way home on Sunday, over breakfast on Monday, and while you lie awake at night on Tuesday. For me, this was one of those sermons. Because I heard that sermon, I will never gloss over Psalm 27 again.

This sermon reflected Bishop Gene’s real experience of grace despite true persecution. (The man probably still gets death threats. He certainly still deals with a lot of hateful BS.) Somehow, he’s come through all of it made stronger in faith and in personhood, and when he was preaching about Psalm 27, you could tell. The image I saw was that of the blacksmith shop: impurities rising to the surface of the metal and being burned and hammered away in the intense heat. There was pain, but there was strength. 

The sermon inspired me. And if I’m being totally honest, the sermon also made me despair. Bishop Gene is a 20-year-old port compared to my Welch’s Grape Juice. I just felt very young, and very small, and very much that compared to people who have been in ministry for decades or have innately better talents than myself, I have no idea whatsoever what I’m doing. I don’t know jack about starting a new community of faith like I long to start on H Street. And yet, here I am. So, exhausted from a long and emotional day on Sunday, I wallowed for most of Monday morning, because for some reason self-pity seemed like a better idea than actually doing something to actualize a goal. I will admit that I do have a weakness for theatrical disconsolateness. And so I found myself dramatically lying on the floor sighing (for the record, I only do this in front of the dog and sometimes Husband who just rolls his eyes, but yes, it does make me feel better) when from somewhere in the cobwebs of the attic of my mind a memory surfaced.

I was sitting in the basement of the Capuchin Monastery at Catholic University, in the makeshift office of the shoestring non-profit TASSC (Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition), huddled around a space heater with a retired full-time volunteer who lived with some local peace activists. There was something in his demeanor that made me instantly like him, but as I got to know him better, I found a wellspring of integrity despite his failing eyesight and shuffling gait. He was in terrible shape, but his mind was sharp as a tack and he was very, very wise. A leader in the Civil Rights Movement who taught the first integrated class at the University of Alabama, he left teaching after being granted tenure to work for immigration rights in the American Southwest, and he had stories like you would not believe. TASSC was the kind of place where stories were valued, and so I heard many of them. And Wise Friend was gracious enough to listen to me and my I’m-a-22-year-old problems. 

One day at TASSC, I was chatting with a survivor, and I said something really inconsiderate. Painfully inconsiderate. I just wasn’t watching my words, and they flew out of my mouth and hung in the air, and the survivor just gaped at me. I fumbled around for an apology, but even now I cringe at the memory. I was on the verge of tears when I told Wise Friend about it. He chuckled, and then looked at me with utter compassion and said, “That’s the thing about experience, Becky. By definition, you don’t have it until after you need it. Cut yourself a break.”

Oh yeah. So I thought about Wise Friend, decided to cut myself a break, got up off of the floor, and actually did some work, trusting that my willingness could somehow be transformed into experience.

Part One of this essay series can be found here.

How I got to H Street, Part I: On the Insanity of "Calling"

A "calling" is a funny thing. The first funny thing about a "calling" is the term itself; it's the Christian terminology for the idea of a vocation,* but vocation with fangs. I say with fangs, because if it's a calling, it won't leave you alone, it will keep you up at night, it will go away for a little while and then come back with a later and say, at first very sweetly, "Listen. Stop running. You know you were created to do this." If you keep ignoring it, then it gets a little louder. And a little louder. Until one day, you can't ignore it anymore, and you say, "FINE." And despite the pain that comes with change, you wonder why you hadn't been doing it all along.

Everyone has a calling; I believe that firmly, because I've seen what happens when people follow a calling. Callings aren't just for the professionally religious, but are, at heart, a human experience. Some people get their callings young; some people get them when they are middle-aged; some people only find them at the completion of their lives. To believe that people are called to a purpose is audacious because it implies 1) that there is an order to the universe, albeit a creative, creating one and 2) that you were intentionally created the way that you are, because 3) your presence is a gift to the world. To believe in these three premises, and then to believe that what you do really matters, is insane. But I believe it anyway. I believe it because I've seen, in others, a calling that brings love and joy to the world like a ticker tape parade. I believe it because I've seen, in others, a calling that brings love and joy to the world in the quiet of a conversation, a healing touch, an imparted inspiration.

I make no claims about my own ability to bring love or joy in any capacity, but what I can claim is that callings are crazy, and sometimes not at all what you think it would be. I know, because it happened to me. If you would have asked me, going into seminary, what my calling was, I would have told you it was probably not in a church, it was probably going to be in an academic setting. As such, I took New Testament Greek for the whole year. As such, I decided that I would start taking upper-level New Testament classes my first semester of seminary. As such, I took an entire semester class on the letter to the Galatians, reading hundreds of pages weekly on six chapters of scripture. As such, swimming in the Greek and the historicity and the apocalyptic antinomies and the Hebrew Scripture references, my mind was opened in a way it wasn't before. As such, for the first time in a very long time, my tiny black raisin heart (atrophied by intellectualizing everything I touched) cracked open. Just a little bit. But it was enough to let that little bit of a whisper of something new come in.

And so, by the time I graduated, taking more and more Scripture and translation classes, thinking that they were still the answer to my calling, yet every single one nudging me more into a new way to be, my calling had shifted. I had been called, at least for the foreseeable future, into a new adventure that was not more school. I couldn't just read Paul anymore to read Paul, and I couldn't study the Gospels just to study the Gospels, and to sound knowledgeable about theory. What Paul had to say, what the Gospels had to say, is radical and life changing and nothing at all like the namby-pamby Precious Moments pious BS that gets marketed to well-meaning middle America. It's also not merely an intellectual exercise in the history of thought. It's way more than that, and I had been caught up with it.

*Side etymology note: vocation actually comes from the Latin vocare, 'to call,' so this whole thing is more wrapped up in tautology than I had originally intended, but the definition stands.