PeaceBang

You Know You’ve Been In (UU) Ministry A Decade When…

Tenth Anniversary Thoughts: The Invisible Work of Ministry

I just heard from a colleague whose tenth anniversary of ordination is this week, too. Congrats, Gidget!!

She said that her congregation is giving her a beautiful stole based on Psalm 139. It never occurred to me that my church should/would give me a gift for the anniversary of my ordination, but I find that I am feeling rather sad about carrying the import of the day by myself.

Who do you celebrate the anniversary of your ordination with?

After all, this congregation didn’t ordain me, so why would it particularly be on their radar? This is the end of my fifth year with them, which feels like a huge deal for me, but since their last settled minister was there for thirty-one years, a blip on the screen for them!

My mother expressed her amazement that a whole decade has gone by since that momentous occasion (I also graduated from Harvard Divinity School that week), but what’s she going to do? Plan a dinner party? Hardly.

So on Thursday, June 14, 2007, I will probably be at the State House witnessing for Marriage Equality. That feels like a good way to spend the tenth anniversary of my “revving.”
Maybe I will try to find a worship service somewhere that I can attend. That would be nice. After all, although this occasion was celebrated and solemnized between me and a specific UU congregation, the whole deal was really between me and God.

If it wasn’t so close to GA, it would have been fun to gather a bunch of colleagues together for drinks and to share war stories from the parish ministry. I would like very much to be asked to give my Odyssey. I admit that I do feel the desire to sit in a chair and hold court for awhile on what I’ve learned in the past decade. Maybe I’ll sit in a bar somewhere with a vodka gimlet and tell it to the bartender. Wouldn’t that be the most depressing thing of all time?
I can wear a huge picture hat with a veil. And smoke and cry.

I know that one of our congregations has a habit of listing ordination anniversaries in their prayer list for the month. I think that’s awesome. I think we need more of that. Ministry is lonely, hard work. We need to encourage our veterans as actively as we encourage our newbies. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Department of Ministry sent out an anniversary card on big numbers (10,20, 30, for instance) and invited the revs to record testimonials of accumulated wisdom learned in the parish? A kind of oral history archive? Since about 90% of the work of parish ministry is invisible and confidential, we have so few places to tell our stories.

I don’t know. I feel heavily burdened tonight by the ten years of human pain, secrets, scandals and ordinary disgraces, failures and fears that I have been entrusted to hold with my people. Worship and celebration, successes, joy and delight recedes in the background and a fog of darker memory rolls in. As meaningful and passionate as the parish ministry is, it is undeniably true that a vast portion of it is accompanying dearly beloveds through sorrow and suffering.

I am fatter and more tired than I was when I began. But also this: I cannot in my wildest imagination conjure any life more suited to the truth of who I am.

So I guess I’ll be thanking God for this alone on Thursday.

Out Of the Mouths of Babes

Shared by a mother at church yesterday:

“Is God that old man that loves me?”

- Minnie, 4-5 years old.

Is that a sermon just waiting to happen, or what??

Pride Theme: “Ask. Tell. Proud To Serve…”

I should add that the Pride Theme in Boston this year was controversial, because some saw it as a pro-military statement. As you can see from the website, it was not intended to be specifically about being out in the military but about g/l/b/t folk being out and integral in all walks of life. One woman was carrying a big sign that said, “Are you SURE your librarian is straight?” I thought that was great.

Still, I know of at least three people who stayed away out of protest, one grumbling that promoting “queer cannon fodder” was not his idea of Pride.

Please tell me I’m wrong about this, but I scanned the Boston Globe yesterday and didn’t see ONE WORD about Pride. I mean, heck, it was only attended by maybe tens of thousands of people, closing down downtown Boston for hours!! THAT’s not news!

And I must respectfully disagree with my dear friend Scott Wells about the “tacky” floats. I hope that Pride never becomes too staid and respectable. I hope it always maintains an element of heinie-shaking, outrageous, drag-queen striding, beads-throwing, raucous FABULOUSNESS. To me, the g/l/b/t community is our uptight, pornography-addicted, repressed, homophobic, misogynist society’s reminder that we are messy, flesh and blood BODIES. We are wild sexual beings who do not belong in categories and boxes, but in relationships and joyous, unapologetic incarnation of Who We Are!

Listen up: when I was a little girl and my parents were in the throes of an emotionally violent and miserable marriage, and my mother very much under the influence of some drug or another (mostly booze), my dad was an edgy workaholic maniac and my sister and brother and I were scared little ghosts in our house, do you know who it was that raised me? Inspired, inspiring, grounded, talented, loving, committed theatre and music homos who were there, day after day, providing a thrilling vision that I wanted to be part of, and who had the discipline, adult maturity and sense of responsibility that my OWN PARENTS LACKED. When my own parents were too unhealthy to show up for me, my music teachers were there EVERY day, sober, exacting and ready to work. My theatre director(s) was there EVERY night in the summer, guiding the cast and crew through weeks and weeks of rehearsals and into a triumphant opening night, giving us and the community the gift of fantastic theatre.

Yes, the gay boys in the theatre were flamboyant and yes, they were promiscuous — now that I think about it, why wouldn’t they be? Wouldn’t we ALL be, if society told us we were freaks and perverts and should never be LEGALLY or religiously allowed to marry and make a lifetime commitment? Think that little fact of broad societal disapproval might have anything to do with that? Dammit to hell!?

I hope the g/l/b/t community never, ever buttons up too much. When I see them out and out there — spiky-haired, bare-breasted women with fierce faces, gangly teens girls holding hands, boys in Speedos and Carmen Miranda headdresses doing the merengue on top a gaudy float, tranny babes teetering by on 6″ platforms, everything inside me hollers, “YES! YES! YES! TELL it! Bring it ON! Remind us all WHO WE ARE!”

My own two gay fathers, both serious classical musicians and life-long schoolteachers, would tsk at all the nonsense, but … the thing is, they’re just not as queer as I am.

Boston Pride: We’re Here, We’re Queer, I Think We’re Maybe Getting Used To It

I am becoming my mother.

Let me explain.

Shirley is notorious for getting wickedly lost on even the simplest outings, causing much ire and ridicule from her three obnoxious kinder. I think it’s high time I stopped teasing her, because I’m starting to get lost all the time myself.

Yesterday, for the umpteenth time, I phoned the director of my music ensemble to check in before a “gig” and learned that I was in the wrong part of town and at the wrong church. Oh, organized, together, moi!! Exhausted from teaching my intensive course all week and attending a special end of year board meeting the night before, I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 AM and primped for our 9:00 AM concert at (I thought) a Methodist church in the vicinity of Old South Church in downtown Boston.

Dumkopf. I don’t know what planet I was on when I read the e-mail explaining the day’s details, but let’s just say that the church was nowhere NEAR downtown. At least I got the hour wrong, too — and had enough time to hail a cab (leaving my car in a garage near the original, wrong site) and get to the Union United Methodist Church in plenty of time.

The worship service was terrific. The Rev. Troy Perry, founded of MCC, preached and I fell asleep to the lull of his voice — he just spoke way too fast for me to understand and keep up with. Before I fell asleep (sitting up like a horse), he sure did get in some good licks. I’m sorry I missed the rest.

There was lots of beautiful music by groups like Coro Allegro and Voices Rising and the Men’s Choir of the Union United Methodist Church. There were Episcopalian and Jewish and MCC and UCC and all kinds of faith traditions represented — all except Unitarian Universalists, who were having their own service over at Arlington Street Church. This made me sad.

After the service, I had to take another cab back to my car (we were not anywhere near public transit, and I was trying to beat the big parade and get out of Dodge), and that turned out to be kind of a wash on the practical level but really glorious on the human interaction level, because I had an amazing Haitian driver who asked me what was causing all the traffic back-ups, and I told him, and we had an amazing conversation about gay issues and sexuality and the church. I was wearing my collar, so he knew I was a pastor.

As we drove around in circles and running into parade barrier after barrier, this beautiful man who kept referring to me as “honey” and “sweetheart” told me the story of his own father, a Protestant pastor in Haiti. His father used to go to small villages– where he would be warmly welcomed as a representative of the Church — and find a particularly attractive young girl whom he would select to take with him to Port Au Prince for (so he claimed) an education and further opportunities. The people of the village, so vulnerable and so certain of the pastor’s benevolence, would enthusiastically send their daughters off with him. He would then keep the girl as a sexual captive until he tired of her or she got pregnant, and then abandon her in the city. It seems that the pastor’s evil scheme was discovered when one of his victims drowned her child in desperation.

“The church is an assembly of sick people,” the cab driver said. He said he hasn’t been in a church since he learned about his father. And just tonight at a party, a 60+ year old woman I’ve known for years described over beers that she found out in her adulthood that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Catholic priest who, when he tried to run off with her mother, was persuaded by the Jesuits to abandon her and come back to the Church.

When I got out of that cab, exchanging hugs and a kiss with the driver, I knew I couldn’t just leave the city. So I stood on the Beacon Street across from the UUA headquarters with two adorable engaged women from New Hampshire to watch the whole marvelous spectacle of gay, straight, black, white, Latino, male, female, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual, Out, Queer humanity parade by.

One young man pranced over to me and put a strand of gaudy beads around my neck, saying, “HERE you go, Father!”
Another lei’d me with a rainbow wreath, saying, “Here you go, VICAH!”
A group of men in soccer shorts trying to do some kind of stunt involving a kind of tricky cheerleader move messed up and blamed me, claiming that I made them nervous. We pointed at each other and laughed and yelled in mock accusation.
A cute young man zipped around distributing condoms and quite pointedly passed me by. “HEY!” I yelled. “Religious people aren’t allowed to be sexual???” He ran back to me without missing a beat and pressed three packages of condoms into my hands, grinning and holding his hand over his mouth in the classic “oops!” position. I accepted them in the spirit of hope that never dies, and a lot of laughter.

Please don’t tell me I’m perpetuating stereotypes by using words like “pranced.” Have you ever been to Pride? There’s a WHOLE lotta prancing and dancing, preening, strutting, vamping and shaking of booties going on. There were “Dykes on Bikes” and drag queens in feathered showgirl costumes, and PFLAG groups of proud parents and an old, eccentric woman carrying a sign that said, “My daughter is bisexual, so I’m TWICE as proud!”

One man held a sign that said, “I’m proud of my heterosexual parents!”

There were Montessori schools and local elementary schools marching behind banners, which reduced me to a mess of tears. The woman I was standing next to asked nicely, “Is this your first Pride?” “Nnnno,” I blubbered, “I just don’t remember seeing any school groups befo-(sob)-o-o-re!!”

Our governor, Deval Patrick, marched by and I cheered for him until I was hoarse. If you didn’t know, he has been working overtime to make sure that an anti-gay constitutional amendment isn’t made possible by a ballot initiative that our legislature is scheduled to vote on this coming Thursday. I love this man.

Unitarian Universalists were out in force, marching behind congregational banners and looking old and almost entirely very white and slightly tired. I was so proud to see the many banners, but wondered: where were our younger church members? We can’t expect the same people who marched for Civil Rights in the 50’s and 60’s to be the only ones carrying our banners today. I assume that some of the younger UUs were marching with other organizations. I hope so.

I saw tons of people that I know: my local Methodist colleague, an Episcopal priest buddy who popped in out of the crowd and threw herself into my arms, locking her legs around my waist and scaring the wits out of me. Stephanie, I’m sending you my chiropractor’s bill, you maniac! I saw ANTS seminarians (and laid stealth smooches on some of them), and other UU colleagues and various friends from various organizations and activist groups I’ve worked with over the years, and it was very moving to be there. I saw an old pagan acquaintance marching with the Queer Pagans. I met her about 12 years ago when she was just becoming “she” and had been thrown out of her house by her parents and was living with transsexual Wiccan friends of mine at their place in Somerville. Seeing her marching along looking healthy and safe and happy was amazing. I yelled her name but she didn’t hear me.

And when the two smiling men rode by in a convertible draped in a “JUST MARRIED” banner, I had to grab my soaked hankie again.

After the last float had gone by, I went to have some lunch at a pizza joint in the heart of downtown. When I walked in draped in beads and Pride stickers and a rainbow lei, still wearing my clerical collar, a group of five police officers sharing a pizza gave me a direct stare that bordered on the hostile. As I walked by them to order my sausage sub (no remarks, please — I know), I said in a totally casual tone, “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”

They sure did get interested in that pizza real fast.

P.S. A PeaceBang Kiss of Peace to Rev. Martin D. McLee of Union United Methodist Church.

Boston Pride 2007

There is so much to say, but I won’t have time until later tonight. Happy Pride!!

Prepare To Pray

I said to my students last week that becoming a minister means becoming one who is willing to pray with people when they ask you to. And they will ask you to. They don’t want to hear about your theology and whether or not you still subscribe to a traditional God, and they don’t care if you’re a Trinitarian or a Unitarian or any of that. If you have a “Rev.” before your name, you should be ready, willing and able to offer up prayers for folk. We all have to find our way to do it with integrity.

Today I was asked to give the invocation at an Eagle Scout induction. I went right from there to a rally for Marriage Equality and prayed there, too (they wanted me to speak but I have a funny way of making even the most general speech into prayer, or what I call “spiritual ranting”).
On Sunday morning I’ll be going over to the Firefighter’s Memorial and praying for the boys over there who didn’t re-invite a local priest to do it, “because we’re not all Catholic, and he was making a big religious thing out of it, and for most of us, our religion is love.” Sounds good to me; I’m happy to do it. Honored, in fact.

I’ve been asked to pray with people on buses, in hospitals, in prisons, on airplanes, in restaurants, at country clubs, over the phone, in conference halls, at Starbucks, on the beach, in backyards, hospitals, homes and classrooms. No one told me when I got ordained that I was being named an official “pray-er,” but given that I’m asked to do it so much, I’ve made it a point to make my peace with what’s happening when we pray together out loud. It’s coming more naturally, getting in my bloodstream some, and even changing the rhythms of how I think about things.

New priests and ministers, especially those doing your CPE residencies right now, I wish you peace and grace in your career as those who pray on behalf of others.

Here’s how it works for me: someone says, “Reverend, would you pray with me?” and I say “Of course” and then I have this terrible, swift knock-down-drag-out fight where my Intellectual Brainy Self pipes up and says, “Oh, excuse me, this is the dumbest irrational thing ev -” but before she can get that out of her mouth, my Spiritual Heart Self wacks her over the head with a baseball bat and stuffs her body in the pantry and locks it, and sweetly says, “I’m sorry, how can I help you?” Then I ask my Spiritual Heart Self to please provide some words and she says, “Darling, I’d be happy to.” And I try real hard to listen to what she’s dictating to me and if my Intellectual Brainy Self isn’t hollering too loud from the pantry, I can get a real fine prayer out of it.

For me, people asking me to pray for them or with them is pretty much equal to them saying, “Would you mind terribly believing in the power of love with me right now, out loud, I mean?” In my experience, it is only Unitarian Universalists in the act of corporate worship who, when they hear the word “prayer,” stiffen up in a communal sense of proactive offense and get out their mental thesauri so they can replace all the words you’re saying with the ones they prefer. Oi! Mi gente!

I love the story of the 90+ year old Unitarian woman who, when the hospital chaplain went in to visit with her and asked if he could pray with her, replied with her special twinkly charm, “No thank you, I’m a Unitarian.”

Sweet the Sound at Pride

Sweet the Sound will be singing at the Interfatih Pride Service on Saturday:

9:30am Pride Interfaith Service
At the Union United Methodist Church, 485 Columbus Avenue, Boston.
The guest speaker will be the Rev. Troy Perry, Founder of the Metropolitan Community Church.

PeaceBang will be there singing her little heart out.

Pelican’s Nest, Yachats, OR

I was going to go down to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival following General Assembly, but I envisioned myself driving down the almost-6 hours, hitting the brick wall of exhaustion, sitting in the theatre watching “The Tempest” in a blur, walking down the streets alone amidst the busy tourist crowd, and experiencing profound loneliness and possible anxiety that would lead to over-eating and over-shopping.

You get older, you get to know yourself better.

I used to be a terrific solo traveler. Nowadays, I want the quiet (or not-so quiet!) companionship of a friend with me. Or two friends. I want to eat meals with someone. I want to be able to turn to my traveling companion and say, “Wasn’t that show amazing?” I want to stroll down the streets and know that I’m meeting up with someone in a few hours — a fact that makes those moments of solitude all the sweeter.

Listen, I talked to God recently about why I haven’t even had the nibble of a husband for so long. I get this back:

“I HAVE WORK FOR YOU TO DO.”
Me: “Can’t I do all that work with a husband?”
God: “NO, CHILD. REMEMBER HOW YOU ALWAYS TOTALLY LOSE YOURSELF WITH ALL THE MEN YOU’VE EVER LOVED? WE CAN’T RISK THAT. WE DON’T HAVE THE TIME.”
Me: Well, since I’m obviously not going to be a Martin Luther King or an Albert Schweitzer or even a Barbara Brown Taylor, how about throwing me a bone now and then? Not to be crass or anything. Strictly an expression.”
God: “YOU ARE HAPPIEST AND BEST WHEN OBEDIENT TO MY CALL. RIGHT? YOU ARE AT YOUR BEST WHEN WORKING. STOP FIGHTING THIS.
Me: I think You stink.

So anyway, God and I decided that since I got the call to ministry while in Oregon (or specifically, while driving from Minnesota TO Oregon in 1993, on my way out to study Thoreau and the American Transcendentalists on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities), I should have a little retreat time out there this year. So I rented a little cottage called Pelican’s Nest in Yachats on the coast, and for four days following the craziness of GA, I will be breathing deeply, puttering around gently, and looking at this view:

And then I’ll drive up to Seattle. And buy more books.

Mean Girls

I have been noticing for at least a year now that while my male blogging colleagues (UU and other denominations) can be scathingly cruel and consistently snarky — including using gutter language — absolutely no one among their commenters chasistes them for being MEAN or potty-mouthed. And I mean ever. Their commenters roll at their feet showing their soft white bellies, in fact. All is enjoyment. What fun: the pastor is smacking down. Pull up a chair. Get a front row seat.

However, my commenters and I are regularly critiqued for being Un-Nice, and so I’m going to call that out for what it is: sexist expectations that female clergy should be at all times nurturing and sweetie pie-faced.

And that, sez this ample-bosomed, supportive Earth Mother, is pure b—–t.

(I’m a GIRL with pink bows in my hair, so you can spell it out for yourself)

But really? I saw what Sarah Silverman did to Paris Hilton on the MTV Awards the other night and it was one of the most unfunny, unnecessarily vicious bits I’ve ever seen. And to bust myself on my own sexism, it bothers me immensely more that Silverman is a woman eviscerating another woman. If a guy comic had done the same bit, it would have just been stupid and easy to dismiss as crass nonsense. Because it was a woman, the bit was shockingly cruel. So there we have it. We’re all children of mothers at some level of the biological experience; it’s hard-wired in us to need women to be sweet.