When Jesus healed the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, he first asked him:”What would you like me to do for you?” Such a dumb question! Wasn’t it obvious? Yes, of course, yet Jesus never flaunted his healing gifts, nor did he assume. He did not suffer from personal “messianism”—being a Messiah before being a kind human being.
Scene LXV. Gloucester-ISM?
Dick and I had moved from Connecticut to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1997. We were ready for a new experience, a new place that had no biases about our divorce/remarriage story. We felt branded. A Connecticut man had even called us “church criminals.” He was a victim of serious mental illness, but we felt the sting of criticism. I tried to laugh it off, but I admit that a new location had promise—the geographic cure. I didn’t want to feel my own self-doubt.
Dick, whose heritage was Italian, was excited that this new location would be spectacularly Italian—full of great pasta, wonderful sea waters, beaches, and liberal Democrats. Well, the sea-beaches and the pasta were abundant, but the politics was distinctly mixed and local/eccentric—Sicilian, thus not really Italian. Or was it? We’d wondered about the isolationism of an island. Gloucester was not really an island. Or was it? Jokes abounded about people never “crossing the bridge”—off island.
We arrived after a sad, teary, and strenuous move, as all moves are, on a fog-bound, cold and dreary February day. We had booked a motel for one night, because the moving van would not arrive until the next day. Where would we find a restaurant for dinner? All we really needed at this point was wine anyway. The motel owner gave us a few ideas, recommending Schooners on the road that runs along the harbor. The owners were friendly and welcoming, and I never—ever before or since—tasted shrimp cocktail like this one. The owner told us his recipe for cooking fresh shrimp was “a secret”—apparently his alone. Nevertheless, Schooners, although it changed names a few times in the ten years we lived in Gloucester, became our restaurant of choice on most Sunday evenings.
We discovered quickly that if you weren’t from Gloucester you were, well, not from Gloucester, not a Glawsta girl or guy. How naive we were to imagine that the parish would be different. I mean, we did know what an Episcopal church was. That, it turned out, was about all we knew. The congregation had at its center a group of folks who had left a neighboring parish that split over what brand of Christianity was right and true. They had come to St. John’s to evangelize the parish with its brand of Christianity—conservative, leaning fundamentalist/ biblical literalist.
Dick’s first sermon articulated two versions of Christianity—one he thought true to the gospel of Christ and the other, not so much. The next week he preached on a story from the Old Testament, and after church I overheard an angry young man, comment to another parishioner: “Is he even allowed to preach from the OLD Testament?” Someone else said: “What about HER?” A man looked down on me one Sunday and, with a challenging tone, asked: “Do you believe Jesus was divine?” I can’t remember if I said a little prayer or not, but my answer came back firm and true: “Of course I do. You don’t think I’d be praying all these prayers to just any old guy, do you?”
Much of this talk was underground, but you know how stuff leaks out. An older parishioner, herself not a Gloucesterian, adopted us and invited us for sumptuous dinners. I felt hopeful. None of this was their fault; nor was it ours. It was about differences, assumptions, and enough grit to make choices—not from right/wrong or good/bad stances, but from what we all called God’s Grace—also humor. The first Easter that I preached I opened with my best Boston accent: “It’s Eastah in Glostah!” We laughed together.
Yes, I prayed for us and for the parish. God was good enough and big enough to listen without judgment, at least judgment that I felt. Dick stayed steady, got to know people, as did I. He opened his door to any and all parishioners. The place began to breathe, and the dissatisfied people either left by choice or found ways to adjust. We spent ten amazing years in dear old Gloucester where we grew to know and love many good people—Gloucesterians!
Scene LXVI. Healing Mentors
Finding mentors in your journey through life enriches your soul. These are people who, let’s say, know the ropes of spiritual struggle and the tossing and turning of both joy and strife. They are people who pray and people who have experienced hurt personally and institutionally, often because they have bucked the system and its rules. These are they who rise above the temptation of ISMism.
I will not forget the time I sat on the front steps of the church with Sereda, an aging old “salt” originally from Nova Scotia. She found home in her parish church. She had studied theology in a correspondence course from Oral Roberts University and was very proud of this work, for which she had a certificate. She was talking vigorously to me about how she did NOT approve of women as priests. I cringed internally but listened. She then grinned at me and said, while patting my knee reassuringly: “But the Bible tells me (see Luke 2:36) that the old woman Anna hung out in the temple, praying every day, and actually bore witness to the child Jesus as the savior when his parents brought him to be presented at the Temple. She was a prophet! So I guess if an old woman like that could speak in Church, other women could too.” We laughed. I felt warmed. Sereda was my first mentor on Gloucester.
* * * *
The Rev. Elmore McKee was an Episcopal priest who had been defrocked because of his divorce at a time when clergy divorce was, well, more than frowned upon in the Church. I was living in Connecticut, attending Yale Divinity School, and struggling myself with the Church’s rejection. It was the late 1970’s. My application to be ordained had been turned down twice. I was doing field work in ministry at the Episcopal parish in Avon. The rector there, the Rev. Philip Stowell, suggested I make a time to talk with Elmore McKee. I did.
Elmore McKee had no political clout, but he sure was able to give me large doses of heart. He was kind and gentle. I poured my story, my tearful pain, my shame, into his listening ears. In his presence I felt consecrated. I could even glimpse his own pain, although he never talked directly about it. He knew what such rejection felt like. Elmore had remarried and occasionally interrupted our sessions to tend to his wife who had some form of dementia. He was remarkably loving and attentive to her presence in the next room. “Are you all right, my darling?” Elmore’s deposition was the Church’s loss.
Elmore talked a lot to me about the value and wonder of lay ministry, imagining I suppose that he would encourage me in ministry, should I never be ordained. He went on so much I once asked him whether there was any room for priests in his definition of ministers of the Church. We laughed, although he, I bet, couldn’t imagine that I might try again after the diocese elected a new bishop. Elmore died the year after I was ordained priest in 1988. He had been a “priest” to me.
Ironically, Phil Stowell ended up divorced, as did I, as had Elmore, as did the bishop who had rejected my application. The Episcopal Church, in time, unstiffened its moral and ecclesial spine, on this issue.
* * * *
Madeleine L’Engle, author and spiritual director, was equally priestly to me. She was impatient with the Church’s resistance to women’s ordination. She was confident I would be ordained. She was more vocal than Elmore, and very rigid about no divorce, except maybe for adultery. She did allow for divorce, but only in situations where it was inevitable, or nearly necessary.
Madeleine told me to talk to women I respected, six of whom were divorced and six of whom had stayed in long-term marriages. She was intent on making sure I understood what a “rough” process divorce could be. Just before I was to graduate from seminary in 1982, Madeleine wrote to me with a suggestion. “It might help a lot to talk with people who have gone through what you are about to go through what you are about to go through.”
I took her suggestion to heart and found enough women—itself not an easy task—whose experience might help me and who were willing to talk. I listened carefully to each woman. Each experience on either side was very different, and all decisions had been extraordinarily difficult for many reasons. To summarize my findings: I discovered that the women who had divorced could not imagine themselves growing old and needful with their present spouse. The women who stayed in the marriage could see themselves growing old and needful with their present spouse, with whom there was enough mutual trust.
As I moved through the ordination process once again, I heeded Madeleine’s final commandment: “Now my dear,” she said in the fullness of her certitude. “When you get ordained, and you will, do not become a little man.”
* * * *
The Rev. Pierre Wolff, an Episcopal priest, formerly a Roman Catholic priest and a Jesuit, was the spiritual director who guided me through several messy processes: divorce, rejections, shame, and falling in love with Jesus. He knew about grief and hard choices. Pierre “divorced” his Roman Catholic Church, principally because of the way they treated and perceived women—institutional sexism. He left his first religion, and he left his first country, France. He never left Jesus though. Eventually, Pierre married a former nun, and I officiated as priest at their 1988 marriage, a mere six months after I was ordained priest. The marriage preparation counseling was hilarious. Now I was his authority figure when he still felt like mine. Still, I felt honored to be chosen, and I think in the homily, I referenced the hazards of divorce and recovery from divorce—with God’s grace.
Pierre didn’t know a thing about boundaries, but then neither did I back then. I suppose we learned together. Of the many things Pierre taught me about Jesus and Scripture and prayer, I remember his frequent spiritual refrain—what he would always say when things felt overwhelming: “Doucement, cherie.” Take it easy. I say it all the time to myself. Pierre died in 2018 and I preached at his funeral.
As I stood over my prepared and prayed-over text, I muttered to myself, doucement cherie, and began my thank-you-note homily, this way: “Dear Pierre. . .”
