Читать книгу All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders - Cordell Strug - Страница 8

The beginning of my service as a pastor was most notable for the mere arrival at the place I was to serve. It had, now that I think of it, something of what missionaries in the nineteenth century must have experienced, setting out from Europe to places that weren’t exactly terra incognita but were certainly remote, home to strange customs and the human strangeness that grows in isolation, places but sparingly connected to the greater world, places easier to settle in than to return from, places they had never been anywhere near. Also, to further the comparison: in the year I began, cell phones and computers were not nearly as common as they now are. We owned neither.

There’s a vivid and indelible memory that comes to me helplessly when I think back to starting out: our little family of four, plus an old beagle who would die in a year, are traveling in two rented trucks, with all our worldly goods, towing our car. It’s December 7, 1982, and the temperature is twenty below zero. All our houseplants will freeze and die on this trip. I am in one truck with our daughter; my wife is with our son and the dog in the other. It’s about 8:30 at night, we’ve been driving north from Minneapolis, Minnesota all day, and we’ve just turned off Interstate 29 in North Dakota, to head east into Minnesota again. We have never seen the town we are heading for, not even in pictures. A Chicago boy, I have never been this far north or west. As I look out the window of the truck, I think I have never seen country so flat, so barren, so sparsely settled. The tiny towns are six miles or more apart. Even the yard lights on the farms are rare, and the farms themselves are mostly dark, because—I will learn— there are few farmers left. I have never seen night so complete or the night sky so clear and filled with stars. We know we will be meeting some Lutherans at journey’s end, but that’s about all we know.

It came about this way:

I had wanted to do something else with my life, but it hadn’t worked out. With a doctorate in philosophy, I had ended up working as a pipefitter. Through college, five years of grad school, and a year of teaching at Purdue University, all I wanted, and worked for, was to be a philosophy teacher. Having to let that go was bitter and, during that time, it was the Lutheran church we belonged to that gave me something to live by.

I found there that egalitarianism that should be the center of Christian life but often is not, that sense that there are no real distinctions but all are equal before God. At that time, this meant a great deal to me, and I’ve never forgotten it. My spouse and I became very involved in the church, its educational programs, its music and worship. Making one of those human recalculations of opportunity and desire, I thought I could be at least some of what I wanted to be by working in the church as a pastor.

My spouse and I attended seminary together, and we were both ordained in the old Lutheran Church in America, one of those ephemeral yet sharply defined stages in the long Lutheran story of uniting and dividing. I’ve told people over the years that she’s the real pastor. They always think I’m kidding, but I’m not. She fits more easily and happily into the role and always saw herself as an active church worker. I wanted to do something else, and being a pastor was really not an all-consuming identity for me. This probably saved me a lot of grief over the years. (A friend of mine, another pastor, remarked to me once that “we are all afraid if we stopped being pastors we’d never go to church.” I couldn’t imagine saying that. The church offered life; being a pastor was just a job.)

But the difficulties of life reappeared, as they will, when we graduated from seminary. We were a clergy couple and, though the LCA had been ordaining women for a decade, no one quite knew what to do with that inevitable consequence: ministers who are not only married, but married to one another.

In those days, you were supposed to enter your service through your home synod, but our bishop claimed to be unable to place a couple with so many advanced degrees and suggested we explore some remote synod that was always looking for personnel: somewhere like the Red River Valley Synod, which ran along the Canadian border in northwest Minnesota and the Dakotas. So we did.

The bishop of that synod, Harold Lohr, had been an infantry officer in World War II, and, after that, a nuclear chemist. Not much on this earth made Harold Lohr feel unable to act. He said he’d place us but it would take time. Be patient.

To make life more interesting, the housing and part-time job we had while going to seminary was terminated, and we became nomads. Having graduated in June, we were still looking for work in November, patience getting a little worn.

Finally, one night, the bishop called us after 11:00.

“Got a Minnesota map?”

We did.

“Get it out. Find the Twin Cities. Now go straight up the map until you hit Canada, then turn left and go until you hit North Dakota. Mind going that far north?”

Nope.

“Good. That’s where you’re going. I’m just sending you, we’re not even going to have an interview. When can you get there?”

Our son had broken his elbow the winter before, and we had an appointment with a pediatric orthopedist in Minneapolis on December 7.

“Mind driving all day?”

Nope.

“I’ll tell them you’ll be there that night—could be late, but you’ll be there. They’ll be waiting with the keys to the parsonage. Sound good?”

It did.

Even at the time, this would have counted as a fairly unusual arrangement. Pastoral candidates today, filling out pages and pages of self-description and self-evaluation, receiving in turn thick packets of congregational self-studies, able to study websites and take virtual tours of churches, meeting for at least one interview, then usually another with an extensive Q&A, must find this process appallingly primitive, almost criminally negligent, stupefyingly simple, dangerously vulnerable to all the disasters all those elaborate studies are supposed to prevent.

But the parish was having unusual troubles. It had been vacant for fourteen months. The former pastor had had a complete breakdown in the wake of a terrible tragedy in his family. In those days, when there was a vacancy, the parish was served by a vice-pastor, usually the nearest LCA pastor, appointed immediately by the bishop. That pastor would preside at one communion service per month, chair the council meetings, make calls on the seriously ill, perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The congregation would have to arrange everything else: the education ministry, other visitation, speakers on the other Sundays. The parish we were being sent to was a two-point parish, two congregations in two towns twelve miles apart. The vice-pastor served a church fifteen miles west of them.

Thus, for fourteen months, that pastor had been doing services at three churches, meeting with three church councils, and—most notably —presiding at funerals in three communities. This county, at that time, had the highest death rate in the state of Minnesota. During those fourteen months, besides the normal cycle of parish deaths, four council members at one of the churches died.

They had interviewed some candidates, but very few people wanted to serve in such an isolated area. They offered the call to a single woman they interviewed, but she turned them down. I think this shocked them a little because they felt they were doing her a favor by calling her. (One council member told me, a few years later, that some of the questions at her interview were pretty abusive. One of them was: “Are we going to see you walking around the lake in a bikini holding a can of beer?” If you probe the assumptions behind that question, you’ll understand a lot about rural life at that time.)

The vice-pastor told the bishop he was on the point of having a breakdown himself. So the bishop presented his offer to the parish: he had a clergy couple he wanted to place; he would send them without interview or discussion; they would serve together and be paid as one pastor; after six months, the couple or the parish could terminate the relationship, no questions asked; on the other hand, if both the couple and the parish were willing, the parish would issue a formal call.

They agreed and we were on our way.

Those remote highways in Minnesota can be lonely roads. I remember the relief I felt when we finally reached the town our smaller church was in. We turned north, heading for the smaller town that held—in a nice touch of symmetry—the larger church and the parsonage. I got a jolt when we made the turn and saw a mileage sign: Canada, 30 miles. The sign also listed: Eidsvold, 6 miles. When we went through Eidsvold, I thought I had never seen a town that small that rated a mention on a sign. My next thought was: we’re going to a town that didn’t make the sign.

It came upon us quickly. Crossing a small river, we were in it, with a lovely new church building on our right. I drove right by it because I knew we were going to an older church and assumed that couldn’t be it. But it was: the old building had burned down ten years before: this was its very attractive successor.

We circled the block, parked in the church lot, and there they all were, coming out the door: the complete councils of both churches, some of them up well past their bedtimes, waiting to welcome us and get us settled for the night. We had never seen each other before. More strikingly, we had never been in contact during that long day. We came with the faith they would be there. They waited with the faith we would make it. It probably wasn’t a bad way to meet.

We were glad to be starting. Having been unemployed, without housing, we were glad to have a job and a home. The parish called us formally after only a couple months. We served there almost sixteen years.

But we left behind everything and everyone we knew. All four of our parents, still alive when we went, died while we served up there and we missed every death. I barely made it to my mother’s funeral: I took the first flight out of the Grand Forks airport after it had been closed for an ice storm; the eighty-mile drive to get there was over solid ice. We might see our families once every other year.

And then, after those sixteen years, we left all those things and all those people we knew there, and started up again in another unknown place. By that time, we had grandchildren, but they lived so far away we were lucky to see them once a year.

I think of waking up that first morning, after the long drive across that frozen landscape. We were in sleeping bags, on the floor of the parsonage, and the furnace was roaring. Congregation members would be arriving to unload our trucks.

We got dressed and wandered here and there, exploring the house.

The only people we knew within hundreds of miles were each other. I remember, then, getting one of those lurches of the spirit, when you suddenly want to draw back from something you can really no longer avoid, like freaking out on the high board in a swimming pool. I heard car doors slamming, voices.

From the living room window, I could see people approaching the front door, others walking up the driveway to the side door. More cars were pulling up to the curb. My wife was in the kitchen, I think. The kids were upstairs.

I turned away from the window, cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, “All hands stand by to repel boarders!”

I heard my son laugh.

I had always hoped I would find some occasion in life to use that line, and I guess I found it that morning.

I think there was some part of me that meant it, that wanted to go back to something familiar somewhere, that wanted us to repel those friendly, helpful boarders, get back in our rented trucks and get away.

But we were up against that decisive fact in the lives of earthly creatures: we had nowhere else to go.

So we opened the doors, and let them in, and began weaving together the words and deeds that would be our life together, the only life we had.