Clergy Unfettered    


Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook


By Harry T. Cook
1/17/14

This is a story about clergy -- clergy who have shed the fetters of full-time ministry, having retired from pulpits, ambos, bimahs and altars. They are disillusioned with the stasis of organized religion, its self-absorbed hierarchies and the gauze of general irrelevance that renders too much of the institution of none effect.

 

In many ways, I share the same disillusionment. Here's how I discovered the company I have in that state of things:

 

In 2005, when Bishop John S. Spong invited me to be a guest columnist for his widely read blog, it occurred to my wife that I could write a blog of my own. I had for some years in the 1980s and '90s written a weekly column on ethics and public policy for the Detroit Free Press, thus I would be no stranger to the work involved. To the mysteries of the online I thing, however, I was a total stranger. My wife turned an expert hand to all that and got me going.

 

I began my online essays with an audience of about 100 addresses, but the number has grown exponentially to include readers all across the United States and Canada, in Australia, Africa, Great Britain and France.

 

Because it is obvious from the mug shot that appears with each essay that I am an ordained person, the word spread among that sorority/fraternity so that some indeterminate number of clergy became readers: Roman and Anglican priests, Protestant ministers of several denominational sorts, and here and there a rabbi.

 

Here's what has come to light about that slice of the circulation pie. A good many of my clergy colleagues are, as I am, retired from the daily and weekly fray of leading congregations, of being telephoned at all hours of the day and night, of presiding at weddings and funerals and performing the thousand and one tasks thought by those who don't have to do them to be essential to the office and ministry of a clergyperson.

 

Given that religion in America is as free-market a thing as devout followers of Ayn Rand could want, each congregational leader is pretty much on his or her own to make a go of it. The key is to attract and keep a congregation that can be motivated to financial generosity. The bigger the congregation, the fuller the collection plate.

 

"Ay'," as the great Dane said, "There's the rub." In the context of a free-market world, institutional religion has to sell itself and its wares to a laity that is hopelessly illiterate about religion's scripture and history and which has been conditioned to believe things that in a rational setting would be seen to be as silly as they are. Nevertheless, religious authorities over the centuries have declared belief in them to be, as the infamous 39 Articles of the English Reformation put it, "necessary to salvation."

 

So comes along a priest, minister or rabbi who has pursued scholarship in religious texts and history and knows that a good deal of what the institution officially teaches is, to be frank, bunkum. He or she has a choice to make: the truth about things such as it might be known is told, or bunkum rules the day.

 

In too many cases, bunkum becomes the weekly offering from the pulpit as the already comfortable are comforted. In others, the comfortable are afflicted with the real thing, then comes trouble. If you are as eminent as were Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson and Episcopal Bishop James Pike* in their day, for example, you can get away with it. If you are not, your day may be prematurely shortened.

 

This is what has so confounded many clergy over the years. Now retirement -- with Social Security and Medicare and decent pensions -- has enabled them to claim the truth that sets them free.

 

And the truth is that catechisms and creeds are, at best, shots in the dark as to what might actually be reasonable propositions, and, at worst, pious untruths. A good many clergy readers of this series have openly confessed disappointment in themselves for not pursuing the scholarship for which their graduate seminary educations equipped them and then going on to lace their sermons and homilies with the fruits of their scholarship.

 

It was bad enough, said one colleague, that he "caught unshirted hell" for participating in the April 1965 Selma march. "What? On top of that, I was going to come back and say to my congregation that it was doubtful that Jesus had been resurrected? That would have been suicide."

 

I respect such colleagues, many of whom I will never know beyond their e-mail responses to these essays. We are sisters and brothers -- survivors even.

 

More, though, do I have the utmost respect for such clergy as my own pastor, who soldiers on day by day and night by night visiting with the sick, commiserating with the dying and their eventual survivors. He is the priest of not one but two parishes, trying to merge them into one community. He manages it all whilst being his unfailingly genuine self.

 

His homilies are gems of simple honesty, totally understandable and applicable to the varied lives his parishioners go on to live week after week. He himself goes on through vacation-less months and years with zero bravado, asking only that his people do what they can and be what they are in the hope that it all counts for something.

 

The man shames my own acquired cynicism about one of the strangest ways to live a life.

 

 

*In the 1960s, both Bishops Robinson and Pike published books that called into question the rationality of orthodox beliefs. Robinson's best-known book was Honest to God and Pike's If This Be Heresy.

 


Copyright 2014 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

Readers Write 
Essay 1/10/14: Not So Fast With the Past                    

Cynthia Chase, Laurel, MD:  
I stopped laughing when I read about how the bishop closed that church, and all I could think of was that line from the Advent hymn: "Those who set at naught and sold him, pierced, and nailed him to the tree" . . . unfortunately, it sounds like they, instead of "deeply wailing," are laughing all the way to the bank. Shame on them. Shame. 

Forrest Watkins, Roanoke, VA:  
I know all about bishops and their imperial ways. You had it absolutely right about keeping tradition as the basis for social action. It makes what gets done almost unassailable, as it is anyway, but appearances count for a lot. Thanks for your commentary. It seems to me that you were pretty easy on that bishop.

Peter Lawson, Valley Ford, CA:

Your essay on the small church you brought to life is but one more tale of woe for the church. The one thing I remember most from leading the Senior Retreat in 1967 at Virginia Theological Seminary was the stories of psychological and spiritual abuse some of those guys suffered from their bishops. Some 40 years ago when Barbara Tuchman was asked what she thought was the chief problem in America, she shot back with, "Stupidity in high places."

 

Euni Rose, Southfield, MI:  

The one thing that stood out for me was the part about the music being changed to more folk music. I am dismayed and disheartened because Reform Judaism has moved away from the majestic, spiritual music to 90% congregational singing. As a wonderful person said to me, "it's happy-crappy!" I no longer attend services because they do nothing to lift my spirit.

 

Leslie Gordon, Winchester, MA:

If you interpret the Bible the way you interpret [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, no wonder people have been after you for heresy. I think those last lines in Gatsby are pure nonsense. This last essay, too.

 

Fred Fenton, Concord, CA:  

You make an important point about church reforms that began with the liturgy rather than the real work of the people of God, to "visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction." Although a social activist, I supported liturgical reforms with misplaced enthusiasm for what was "new." I now see the wiser course of action for the Episcopal Church would have been to retain traditional language, restore the shape of the liturgy, and carry our banners into the world of poverty and need. How encouraging it is to see a conservative Pope Francis reduce the trappings of his office and redirect the energy of his flock away from divisive issues into acts of service to the poor.

 

Selma Jackson, Chicago, IL:  

I remember Malcolm Boyd at his most active. You couldn't have found a priest more committed to radical justice than Fr. Boyd, and yet his liturgies were almost mystical in nature. As for that bishop, fie on him.

 

Blayney Colmore, La Jolla, CA:
You and I had somewhat different odysseys, though members of the same guild. I was ordained into the old Yankee, New England, Episcopal Church, deeply suspicious of (Irish/Italian) Catholicism, more like the Congregational Church. Not until I became rector of a parish in Southern California, where the Spanish influence was heavy (though largely unconscious) did I experience sacramental, liturgical worship. It freaked me out at first. My first Eucharist -- we did at least one a day -- I looked at the vestments laid out in the sacristy and admitted to the altar guild lady that I had never worn them. She smiled, told me to stand still, and dressed me, reassuring me that I would soon get used to them. She was right. If the church has any reason for continuing to exist, it is to do the Eucharist, in which the possibilities for life while facing the certainty of death are affirmed and celebrated. All the movements I'd previously joined for racial and economic justice, antiwar, came into focus in ways they never had before. The combination of Catholic liturgy and hunger for justice is powerful. It does require surrendering claims to "understand" exactly what to make of worship, and simply be embraced by the mystery. It makes the flat word-centered worship I grew up in unpalatable. Nor does it provide the passion required for questioning and refusing to bless injustice.

 

John Bennison, Walnut Creek, CA:
I'm struck by your refrain, "... if the church was to become the personification of the gospel." Having lived through many of the chapters of your historical reflection on the Western church myself, I can appreciate your enumeration and summation. And, in our decades of personal ministry, we can both look back to what was nothing less than a certain golden era in a certain time and place, when everything just clicked; often only with our conscious recognition of it in hindsight. I regard it as a sweet memory, for which one can be grateful, but that's about it. As Thomas Wolfe penned, you can't go home again; which I believe is true if home is fixity in time and place. No faith community asks for its own demise, but as with any living thing, there is a life cycle to it. As for the institutional hierarchy prematurely closing the doors on the place that was once your home, it's been long apparent the gospel has never done very well beating back against the currents of what any regime would simply consider sound business practices.


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