I've spent the last two weeks on study leave from my position in Flint. The first week was when I was Minister of the Week at the Lifespan Religious Education Conference on Star Island, and after I completed my opening worship, it was pretty light lifting. I got a chance to read, to plan my final services of worship in Flint, and to hear the Theme Talks presented by Meg Barnhouse with incredible music by her partner Kiya Heartwood. (These will be available as MP3 files on the Star RE Week website, I'm told.) I was happy to help the Senior High Youth prepare a very effective evening worship service, and to provide a "summing up" reflection to a story shared in the closing night Family Worship.
The second week, I was Minister of the Week at Ferry Beach, where two conferences shared the space, the Northeast UU Choral Festival, a week of choral singing and workshops, music sharing and experimentation; and GAYLA XXI, the venerable week of spirituality and fun for gay and bisexual men. I preached each and every morning, led grace before dinner and conducted a Spirit Circle on the Beach after dinner. This is a bit of work! But it is a joy that these conferences leave space for some authentic worship. Each morning there is a 45-minute service, a full sermon, one or more anthems, prepared preludes and postludes, and spirited congregational singing. A "normal" Ferry Beach morning chapel is of the 15-20 minute variety--something that I have been happy to provide; but the fuller worship is so much more satisfying for me, and corresponds, I think, to my gifts.
In each setting, the Minster has a cottage for the minster and their family. At Ferry Beach, it is humble and adequate for a couple in a queen sized bed and two kids in bunkbeds. (Private full bath with hot and cold running water and a shower!) There is a place in which to provide pastoral care, and the only challenge for me was to get the bed I slept in out of the room I was doing pastoral care in.
On Star, the Parsonage is a two-story stone cottage with accommodations for four in two bedrooms upstairs, and two in the first floor bedroom. Having a private bath is great, but there is no running hot water on Star, and all showers are allowed every other day (an improvement from the past!) in the Underworld shower rooms. But the Parsonage has a beautiful wood paneled sitting room with secretary and antiques, artwork on the walls, a small library in a built-in on the staircase, and a (not functioning at this time) fireplace.
The accommodations are magnificent. For me, however, they bring up that great problem I face again and again--what to do when, on family time, I'm the only family member. This is feeling like the most heartbreaking facet of my current life--to be without a "significant other (or others)" with whom to share myself. It means that I constantly feel as if I'm facing the world and its challenges "on my own," and, of course, that is so antithetical to my theology, world view, etc. We face the world in communities. But my lived experience--of challenges, yes, but also of joys, of moments of intimacy, of all the times when I'm mad/sad/glad/scared, all of it, it feels as if I am on my own. I buy a big house and wait for someone to move in. I sit in the Minister's Cottage or the Stone Parsonage and wonder where my immediate family is . . . and I am left only to wonder.
I'm back in Flint, now, ready to embrace the routine of the next three weeks of sermon preparation. I also need to be about the work of ending things, turning over tasks and procedures, filing final reports and holding a few hands.
I hope I can find the right people to be holding my hands in the next 35 days. This next step is the right step for me, but I also am also so deeply aware of how much I love my congregation in Flint, and how hard it is feeling to say goodbye. And I want not to tear the fabric of our affection as I move away.
It is quiet here, and I am quiet, too, and ready for the work.
