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.