Reconnecting

Earlier in August, I had a week of electronics failures. It happened as I was beginning a week as Minister of the Week to the Family and Friends Conference (week two) at Ferry Beach Camp and Conference Center in Saco, Maine. My iBook began to freeze after a few minutes of work. Fortunately for me, my Musicians of the Week during the conference were Carol Thompson and Chuck Scheffreen--Church aka "The Mac Doctor." So Chuck spent a couple of days saving what he could off my increasingly frigid laptop, and then transferred everything onto a used PowerBook that is now mine. (Hurrah! Thank you!)

As the computer mess began to be resolved, my cell phone decided to die. Neither of the two rechargers that I have would fit into the phone (!?!) and so it gradually went to sleep. When I went to the Cingular Store (oops--AT&T Wireless Store; why did they trade a perfectly modern and fresh and even clever name for a corporate stamp?), they told me there was nothing that could be done . . .

So I bought a new phone, got a new contract, and began rebuilding my phonebook . . . that I had never committed to paper anywhere. (I am pulling my frequesntly called numbers from an old bill.)

One "contact" that I lost for a couple of weeks was my friend Elissa Leone. Now this was particularly unfortunate because Elissa is someone that I would regularly call when I was driving any distance. Having the new phone, with a bluetooth earset and all, was a perfect opportunity to call Elissa on the 750 mile drive back to Flint (which needed to be acomplished in one drive through if I were going to be able to get to church on Sunday morning in time to preach!). But I didn't have Elissa's number, I didn't have time to find it in my being reconstructed laptop contact file (eventually I located that and found her numbers) and I was n the road earlier than I had originally planned (Whoopee!) but without having stopped to get that number . . . So I missed a golden opportunity to connect with her and hear about her life.

Elissa is a chaplain of the hospice/nursing home/residential facility type. She does her ministry in the spaces where free-market health care, human aging and illness and corporate culture collide. This is not a ministry that is not defined by the space she works in (not a sanctuary) nor by the people she serves (patients, their families, staff, volunteers, etc.) nor even by a routine (study time, prayer and devotions, preaching preparation, office hours, calling hours NOT). No, this is a ministry that is discovered in the doing: providing some direct pastoral care, coaching social workers on her team, training volunteers to do pastoral work, documenting for other professionals the work she is doing and encouraging people to look at their clients as multidimensional persons, not as "living gangli[a] of irreconcilable antagonisms" (Ralph Rackstraw, from HMS Pinafore, of course).

Anyway, one of the parties in Elissa's life is her Committee on Church and Ministry, the instrument of the United Church of Christ that holds her In-Care as she prepares for ordination as a Minister of the United Church of Christ. (I was ordained a minister of the UCC in Rhode Island before seeking dual standing/plural fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association.) The Church and Ministry folk meet with a potential candidate, place them "In-Care" and assign them an adviser, and then follow a person's progress through seminary and whatever professional development must happen. The candidate prepares a fifteen page (or so) paper that shares their esential understanding of Christian theology and the polity and history of the United Church of Christ, and their own life story as it evidences their perceived call to ministry. The Church and Ministry Committee, when satisfied, will name a person "ordainable, pending call," and when the candidate is called to a ministry of Word and Sacrament, the committee will convene an ecclesiastical council, at which point a vote is taken by ministers and lay people to ordain the candidate.

The process is not a brief one, but its intentions are clear: to assure a learned clergy that can speak for the United Church of Christ in general and for a particular community; that is connected and accountable to the whole church and the ministerial tradition; and to test that the person's sense of vocation is shared by the church (and not--my great fear during the process--an expressionof some deep pathology of mine!).

Elissa has been about this work and this proces for quite some time. She was well into the second year of her classes at Andover Newton, where we were students together--when she realized that finishing her Master of Divinity at ANTS would be difficult due to the scheduling of classes; so she transferred to Meadville Lombard in Chicago (I helped her move) and to do her last year. It was, ironically, in the move from a United Church of Christ seminary to a Unitarian Universalist seminary that she began to decide to change her ordination plans from the UUA to the UCC. (I like that. I think this UUA/UCC dance is part of what connects me to Elissa.) Anyway, after finishing in Chicago, she came back to Comnnecticut (I think I helped her move then, too) to find work and to be with her mother. Since her mom died early in the summer a year ago, Elissa might be free to move again--once she is ordained.

What a joy it was that Elissa called me on Friday evening, and we were able to reconnect this weekend. She sounds so much happier than she has in a while. (New job, new challenges, but far less bureaucratic/corporate culture interfering with her ministry--so far!) It was wonderful for me to hear her voice, to try to encourage her and to listen to how she is doing.

I know that she has some anxiety about her upcoming meeting with the Church and Minsitry Committee of her UCC association. This is normal, in my experience. I remember that I showed up twice expecting that all my "ducks" were "in a row" when I saw my committee, only to discover that a letter from a church had not arrived, or that the composition of the committe had changed since the last annual meeting, and so there were people who needed to get to know me a little better brfore they could approve my ordination--which was, characteristically, to a non-traditional ministry. (I had a vital public ministry to a non-UCC congregation that, in the eyes of the UCC, did not require ordination; and linked that with a part-time sacramental ministry to an Alzheimer's center in the name of a small UCC congregation with a part-time minister and a Board that had a hard time getting a letter written, it seems.)

The process toward ordination took a couple of years longer than I thought it should; but when it finally was approved, when my ecclesiastical council was finally convened and when the date of my ordination was set--December 1, World AIDS Day, and the first Sunday of Advent that year!--it felt as if the stars were finally in alignment.

People considering ministry are often frustrated after talking to me. I encourage people to do something else, if they can. I ask that they not confuse going to seminary for their own spiritual fulfillment with using gradute school to prepare to minister to a world that desperately needs people willing to act in the name of God and the Universe and the Other. I ask them if they are prepared for the inevitable politics of human institutions, like the church. And I wonder whether they might be willing to see that seminary and ordination might simply be a wrong choice for them, and if they have an "exit strategy" for getting out of the process if they discover that it is the wrong choice or the wrong time. ("Can you hold your head high in church and say, 'I learned something about myself . . .'")

For Elissa, of course, I don't think it is the wrong choice. It may be that her Committee will put her through another hoop or two--ask for a re-write of parts of her paper, for example--but I think that she should persevere. "Back in the day" we might have mock interviews with a few trusted colleagues reading her paper and her resume and asking questions of her. I've encouraged her to be in touch with her adviser for some real time before her next Committee visit; to speak to members of the Committee with whom wshe has relationships to get their best wisdom about what the Committee needs to come out with the desired outcome, a date for an ecclesiastical council, and a process for drawing up a covenant with her agency that will keep her in a relationship of accountability back to the UCC.

The fullest outcome I seek, of course, is Elissa's happiness. She is a good chaplain, centered, interested, compassionate; she knows her work (Is it Charlie King who asserts "our life is more than our work, and our work is more than our job"?) and has the capacity to do it; she exhibits deep faith. And, in my opinion, she should be "set aside" through ordination to the vocation of pastoral ministry. I want to be there when she celebrates communion in the name of the church universal and in the company of many witnesses.

Sun is bright, the air is clear. Oops, the grass needs mowing.

Good morning.