Close to Home, Close to Tears

I performed a Memorial Service last night in Byron, Michigan followed by a reception at the Eagles Aerie in Durand. On the drive home to Flint, I burst into tears and realized that I have been living into what I asked for when I moved to Flint. It feels so hard.

Unitarian Universalism, in my experience, is clearly localized in upper middle class and suburban culture. We joke sometime about an "M.A." as the price of admission to membership in our churches. We say we expect a learned ministry (although we really don't have much of one, anymore, but rather a professionally prepared clergy), and yet are satisfied that our members are often smarter than our ministers.

When it was clear to me that it was time for me to leave Community Church of Boston, I met with a leading colleague in Boston who looked with me at the list of congregations that were in search. He read a list of eight wealthy suburban congregations in eastern Massachusetts, and said he thought I could use my public position as President of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization and frequent supportive spokesperson of the janitors union in their struggles as a way to become minister of one of these powerful pulpits. I rejected that notion outright. Not that I don't want to have a meaningful ministry among people with resources; but there are plenty of well-prepared ministers who can serve in those locations.

I come from a working-class family, my Dad a maintenance man in a vinyl factory and later a sheet-metal rolling mill, my mom working in the home until all the kids were in school, and then working restaurant and clerical jobs often on a part-time basis. I was the first person in my family among all my cousins to go to college, and even now I am in a minority among my cousins.

Still, this upper middle class liberal religion has been lifesaving for me. In Unitarian Universalism I have found a place to be the free-thinker that I am; to live openly my homosexuality and radical politics; to find friends who care deeply for the earth and for the people who live closest to the earth, those who, because of their economic resources, have fewer options than the wealthy to move to other places, to avoid the poisoning of the earth and the commodification of our food and our lives.

I came to Flint to pursue a multi-class and multi-cultural Unitarian Universalism. I came to be in a place where there might be the possibility of leading a racially-diverse community. I came here to be able to sit with working-class families in their joy and grief, to accompany them in their experience of injustice, to offer them a broad and liberal way out of circumstances and thinking that might have been straitened by the relentless attacks of our economic system on working people, families and communities.

Here I was, after sitting in the simple home of a grieving man who had lost his partner of 25 years and who wanted, in his grief, not to be bombarded with anti-gay messages; here I was with his sister who had watched her brother struggle for many years and finally to die only weeks after his 50th birthday; here I was trying to speak a truth about the tremendous value of worthy lives that might be considered less significant than those lives of the wealthy, educated, powerful.

I asked for this ministry, and here it is. And yet the truth that I don't experience in my everyday life is that a working class life is a familied life, a communal life; to find myself without a family here, without much of a community beyond my employment here, is difficult, lonely.

And so a drive last night with many tears.

The morning is bright, snow is steady and beautiful, just at freezing and pretty "even." I'm leaving later this morning to see the first showing of "Semi Pro" in Flint at noon. Looking forward to THAT! (And yet, I'll be doing this alone. Hmm.)

Good morning.

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.