10 Years, and counting

My church marked the 10th Anniversary of my ordination a couple of weeks ago. I was especially pleased that we invited Dean Stevens to come from Boston to present a concert. Dean invited two young musicians, Chloe and Chris, from Milan, Michigan to share in the concert. And then Dean stayed over to perform at our Sunday morning service.

The weekend of his visit was one of the rainiest we've had, and Dean made the choice not to drive to Grand Rapids and Indiana to visit family and friends, but rather to stay at my home, to practice and read and stare out the window.

One great gift Dean gave me was the observation that I live in a beautiful home. He shared that he could see the rooms where work was still being done, the rooms where work hasn't even started, and the mismatched furniture. Still, what a grand yard! What a relaxing library! What joy to have a pretty good piano in the living room! What a place to put your feet up and enjoy a book!

Of course, what he says is true. I don't look at my place and see its charm. Rather I'm weighed down by its expense, I'm sometimes immobilized by the thought of its declining value, and I so wish that the _____ (kitchen, living room, bathroom, you fill in the blank) could be finished. Cheaply. Soon.

I purchased a beautiful glass mezuzah when I was in Fort Lauderdale for UUA General Assembly in June. I finally got it up on the doorpost. I know that I'm appropriating someone else's culture, but I think it is the resident culture of the home I am only beginning to be owned by, and I mean it to honor the Golden family, not to dishonor Judaism. It has two scrolls in it, one traditional Hebrew scroll and another with the UU principles. It pleases me.

  

My friend Jack came to visit, and gave me a hand in putting up new curtains in the living room and sun room. They're somewhat sheer linens with a simple silkscreened pattern that is very Scandinavian. I need to get some more attractive rods, and raised them 10 inches or so . . . but they make it feel, more and more, like it is my house.

My dear friend Elissa showed up this weekend and spent a day helping me get my recyclables to the recycling center. We put up another coat of faux Venetian plaster, in a less red color, and I am so pleased. With just a little more of a skim coat, a good dry, cure and burnishing, the kitchen will be ready to be declared "done," at least for my living. (For selling, some day, it will need to be neutered, beiged, toned down!) But I'm close, I'm close.

The furniture has largely been rearranged. I have a new bed (from IKEA) that I enjoy. I need to figure out the dining room. But hey, it is a beautiful house, a great place to relax, a wonderful place to live, a supportive place to be. 

Promises to Keep

I slept in the day after Easter, rather wiped out, and then rushed around a bit yesterday. So finally I am up and about . . . and thinking about this profession, this full-time, called and settled ministry that sometimes unsettles me.

I have been thinking about the ordination promises I made years ago. Standing before the church that raised me, the Committee on Church and Ministry that held me "in care" during seminary, and with colleagues in the United Church of Christ and other traditions, I was asked these questions, and I gave these responses:

David Carl Olson, before God and this congregation, we ask you:

Are you persuaded that God has called you to be an ordained minister of the church of Jesus Christ, and are you ready with the help of God to enter this ministry and to serve faithfully in it?

(I am.)

Do you, with the church throughout the world, hear the word of God in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and do you accept the word of God as the rule of Christian faith and practice?

(I do.)

Do you promised to be diligent in your private prayers and in reading the scriptures, as well as in the public duties of your office?

(I do, relying on God's grace.)

Will you be zealous in maintaining both truth of the gospel and the peace of the church, speaking the truth in love?

(I will, relying on God's grace.)

Will you be faithful in preaching and teaching the gospel, in administering the sacraments and rites of the church, and in exercising pastoral care and leadership?

(I will, relying on God's grace.)

Will you keep silent all confidences shared with you?

(I will, relying on God's grace.)

Will you regard all people with equal love and concern and undertake to minister impartially to needs of all?

(I will, relying on God's grace.)

Do you accept the faith and order of the United Church of Christ and will you, as an ordained minister in this communion, ecumenically reach out to all who are in Christ and show Christian love to people of other faiths and people of no faith?

(I do and I will, relying on God's grace.)

These promises I call to mind virtually every day. I think that's part of being called to ministry. I may need to interpret them through my own skeptical, liberal, modern lenses, yet still, I hold to them, use them to bind me to a people and to a purpose.

Rev. Alma Faith Crawford preached at my service of ordination, and Rev. Raymond Bradley, Jr. prayed. My Dad presented me with a stole, and my sister Donna a robe that she designed and sewed, and for which the whole family found a variety of buttons. When I robe, when I put on my stole, when I preach, when I pray, all of them are present to me in a vital way; and I think of my promises.

Happy that Easter has come, and that spring will find Flint very soon.

Good afternoon.

Screenplay and Children's Book

There's a screenplay inside of me waiting to get out.

I could say the same about any number of writing projects. The lecture series I'm preparing that I wish could be a book. The play for children that I wrote twenty years ago that my brother Paul and I need to make into a picture book. (Could it be finished for 2012, the centenary of the "Bread and Roses" strike?) The memoirs of living in a bicultural, bilingual couple, and being immersed in a "foreign" family. The performance art piece on breaking up and losing a great mother-in-law.

I love going to the movies, and it was while watching "Dan in Real Life" that I thought about this idea for a screenplay based on my grieving group experience a decade ago. The screenplay, if merely recapitulating that experience, would, I think, be bound by its time, nostalgic, quaint and untrue.

The experience of the grieving group was nothing if not deeply true. All the men in it were men who had lost their partners to AIDS. All had tested negative for HIV. Each, upon entering the group, was a mess. Most, but not all, left healing.

My screenplay would conflate the year of telling my own story--and the story of losing Leonel--again and again with the story of my year of discernment about going to seminary. That year of discernment was one of overcoming my breakup from Dan, that is, Dan completely surprising me by leaving me to pursue, and later marry, Doris. I visited several ministers that I respect and decided that the only way I could discover whether seminary would work for me (or not!) was to step into the water and wade right in. I decided that six weeks was the amount I needed to tolerate to intuit with any degree of certainty whether my fascination with seminary indicated a "Call" from God (or the Universe), or whether it was just some pathology of mine that sought attention.

I have imagined conflating that story of recover and discernment with my year of being in a purposeful group of men. The group was a place to tell my story--our story, Leonel's and mine--over and over until it lost its power to entirely derail me. The group was simple, with just a couple of rules. Every time a new person joined, he told his story. Every time you heard someone's story, you'd tell your story. We expected to be in the group for about a year, being with one another during all the anniversaries (first Christmas alone, your own first birthday since his death, and his birthday without him around, the anniversary of his final decline and death . . .). We'd listen and jostle and challenge and laugh. And we'd give at least two weeks notice before leaving, so we could say "thank you:" to the group, and each other, and then goodbye.

Jane was the facilitator of our group. She was a social worker who didn't know some of the psycho jargon of the seminary ("CPE," for example--Clinical Pastoral Education), but who really knew people. She speculated that she must have been a gay man in a previous life, she was so in sympathy and synch with our group. She seldom spoke, and whenever she did, it was exactly the right thing.

Jane was confrontive with me in a very helpful way. She'd hear some comment, usually something self-disparaging, and ask a question about something I had said three weeks earlier that she thought might have some relevance to my own words or mood. And she was always right.

There is a screenplay inside of me, and it wants to be let out. I wonder what it will take for me to get to a place in my ministry where I can sense that doing that writing is, indeed, ministry. That it could be helpful for other people and for me. I wonder what it might look like (feel like, sound like) to set aside serious time to do my writing as I let the church and its people run its own affairs?

I think I've been working under the understanding (misunderstanding?) that this won't happen until I am in a larger church, and I am trying to grow that larger church now. Clearly this morning scribbling feels like part of my process of testing myself about my abilities as a writer and, especially, my ability to set aside time to work on the craft.

Time is rushing by, it seems, both this morning (I need to be on the road in 15 minutes, and I haven't showered!) and in my ministry and life. Could I get that children's book done (and marketed) by 2012? Will my lecture/sermon for Des Moines be as polished as I'd like it to be by W. E. B. DuBois's birthday? Might I get that performance piece finished--and performed by someone else, I think--in even a semi-public reading?

Or should I just go back to school with its structure?

Blue sky this morning, beautiful, clear. Haven't looked at the weather reports. The radio went on (went off?) in the other room and I am ignoring it rather well. The shower calls.

Good morning.

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.