Читать книгу Interrupted by God - Tracey Lind - Страница 9

Thirty-five years ago I sat in a classroom with fifty other adolescents watching the movie Let My People Go. It was the first documentary of the Holocaust, and I’ll always be haunted by the memory of emaciated corpses being pushed down a slide in the Warsaw Ghetto. At the end of the film, a young rabbi tried to elicit responses from a stunned and silent class of usually loud and obnoxious ninth graders. I’ll never forget the moment when he looked at me, the only kid with a non-Jewish parent, and said: “Tracey, you don’t look Jewish. You could have passed. What would you have done? Would you have died for your faith or denied it?” I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know what it meant to pass. I didn’t know what it meant to die for one’s faith. I didn’t really know what my faith was. I only knew that I was angry, embarrassed, confused, and alone. So I just stared back at him and finally said, “I don’t know.”

That accusatory statement, “You could have passed,” followed by the probing question, “What would you have done?” has haunted me all the days of my life. It has permeated my dreams; it has kept me awake; it has stood with me in the pulpit; and it has influenced every major life decision I have made. And just when I think I have put the accusation to rest and answered the question, it reemerges as a beast from the deep recesses of the ocean called my unconscious. This question, “will I pass or will I claim who I am and what I believe regardless of its cost, even to death?” is the angel with whom I wrestle, causing me to walk with a limp. It is the burning bush in front of which I stand barefooted, the slow burning flame that keeps alive my passion but does not consume my spirit. Whenever I travel into the wilderness of my soul, I am tempted to avoid this question’s pain and confusion. It remains the blinding flash of light that forces me to my knees when I try to run away.

The question of passing or claiming one’s faith, even to the point of death, is for me The Question. It is what Buddhism calls my koan. Phyllis Trible, one of my favorite seminary professors, used to say that we all need a myth to guide our lives; and that if we don’t claim a myth, one will claim us. I think everyone needs both a myth and a question. In fact, I believe that everyone has a myth and a question; we just don’t always choose to acknowledge and explore these truths in our conscious self.

To pass has many implications. Passing can be as simple and as seemingly innocent as allowing a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic remark to go unnoticed. It can mean worshipping a homeless man on Sunday and walking by without seeing dozens of homeless men, women, and children during the rest of the week. Passing can cause one to hide in all kinds of closets for all kinds of reasons. Passing can simply mean taking the easy way out, even at the cost of one’s soul.

To live and die for one’s faith—now that is another matter. That’s true discipleship. That’s the stuff that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and the other great prophets and disciples of the ages are made of. Dying for one’s faith is having the courage to really live a life worth living.

For two years, I slept in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s old room at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. I used to lie awake at night wondering what Bonhoeffer would have been thinking about when he couldn’t sleep—whether to return to his native land and confront the evil of Nazi Germany or stay and teach in the safety of the academy. Bonhoeffer chose the former, and it cost him his life. I still don’t know if I have that kind of courage; nor do I know if that sort of action is my calling. What I do know is that Bonhoeffer’s witness has deeply influenced my vocation, and has on more than one occasion called me to account for my decisions and actions in this world.

There is a famous rabbinical saying: “Consider three things and you will not fall into the grip of sin. Know where you come from, to where you are going, and before whom you are destined to be judged and called to account.”¹ Knowing one’s history, one’s story, and one’s God is incredibly important. Without this knowledge, we are lost—both individually and collectively. Our ancestors in faith knew their God and their story; the Bible is their recorded history.

Each of us has a sacred story, much of which is inherited through ancestry and birthright. It is a byproduct of our race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class. It is planted and cultivated in the landscape and geography of our birth and upbringing. It is engraved in our soul and frequently lost in our memory. Sometimes, to my family’s chagrin and my church’s discomfort, I have set about the task of searching out, retrieving, claiming, speaking, and discerning the life-giving truth of my story.

Much of life-giving or gospel truth is about transforming contradiction into paradox—like water into wine, brokenness into wholeness, scarcity into abundance, the last into the first, and death into life. Paradox makes sense of things that don’t make sense and holds divergent things in tension. Turning contradiction into paradox is choosing both/and rather than either/or, seeing shades of gray instead of black and white. My life is one big contradiction seeking to become a paradox. In many ways, I think the American story itself—all sorts and conditions of people coming to this land on many ships but being in the same boat now—is a contradiction trying to become a paradox. It is both our blessing and our curse. And I know it well, since I personify the American story.

My mother’s family came from England. To the best of our knowledge, her ancestors arrived in Jamestown during the seventeenth century, settled in the upcountry of Virginia, and eventually moved west to southern Ohio in the late eighteenth century. My mother was born in a place called Greasy Ridge, Ohio—a hamlet located twenty miles north of the Ohio River. She was the youngest of seven children born to Noah and Minnie Heffner, two of the hardest working coal miners and farmers you’d ever want to meet. My mother was raised in the Methodist tradition; her grandfather and great-grandfather served as lay leaders of a little backwoods church called Locust Grove. My mother hated those mountains; she hated the poverty, ignorance, superstition, and old-time religion of rural Appalachia. At the age of fifteen, having graduated from a one-room school, determined to make a better life, my mother left the mountains for good and moved north to the city.

My father’s ancestors were Austrian-German Jews who came to this country with the great wave of nineteenth-century immigration. One of my great grandfathers was a cigar roller and reputed Torah scholar who lived out his years in America on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When I toured Ellis Island, I could see his face in the photos of Jacob Riis. My other great grandfather peddled his way to Zanesville, Ohio, where he settled and raised up six sons to become successful merchants in a booming town through which the Old National Road passed, only decades later to be bypassed by the interstate.

Wealth and poverty became a paradoxical symbol in my family. At the dinner table, my father used to recall how his mother had to let go some of the household help during the Great Depression. My mother would sit silent and never speak of the real poverty she knew during those painful years when her father couldn’t find work in the mines. To this day, when I view the Farm Service Administration photos of that era, I can’t help but look for the faces of my mountain ancestors.

My parents met shortly after World War II. He was a young businessman, and she was a nurse. They fell in love on their first date and married six weeks later. Unfortunately, since he was Jewish and she was Christian, no clergy would perform the wedding. So they eloped and were married by a judge, and for their honeymoon, my mother accompanied her new husband on a business trip to Cleveland. Upon hearing of the marriage, my mother’s family, who had never known any Jews, was upset and unable to welcome my father. My father’s family received the young couple, so my mother agreed to raise her children in the Jewish community, without completely letting go of her basic Christian teachings and customs.

The way my parents raised my younger brother and me religiously was really very simple. They taught us to say our prayers at night: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take.” They taught us the Great Commandment, otherwise known as the Golden Rule: “Love God with all your heart, soul, and might, and love your neighbor as yourself.” They sent us to Sunday school at the Reform Temple where we would learn about God without all the superstition and myth about Jesus. We attended synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and we would celebrate an amalgamation of other religious holidays. To this day, I joke about lighting Hanukkah candles under the Christmas tree and finding Easter eggs at the Passover Seder. In sixth grade, I was sent to a private girls’ school where we went to daily chapel, a simplified version of Morning Prayer, Episcopal-Presbyterian style.

I think of myself as half Jewish and half Christian, and I consider my rich heritage a mixed blessing. As a child, I wanted to be a preacher—I just wasn’t sure whether I should be a rabbi or a minister. Since my mother wasn’t Jewish, I wasn’t considered a real Jew, so I didn’t think I could be a rabbi—and anyway, I assumed I could never learn Hebrew. When I imagined becoming a minister, I couldn’t figure out how to do that either—you see, I wasn’t baptized, so I wasn’t a real Christian, and I didn’t want to be baptized because I had learned somewhere (an untruth, I now believe) that the Nazis baptized Jewish babies and then sent them to the gas chambers. Anyhow, I was a girl, and back then girls couldn’t be ordained either as rabbis or ministers. But I loved being in the house of God, and I loved playing “Saturday-go-to-temple” and “Sunday-go-to-church.” I still remember setting up the chairs in our family room, putting my stuffed toys and dolls in straight rows, and preaching to the silent, appreciative, and complacent congregation of inanimate worshippers.

By the time I was in ninth grade, I was sitting through daily chapel at school, confirmation classes at the Temple, and playing my guitar for the weekly folk mass at the local Episcopal Church. No wonder I couldn’t answer The Question asked by the rabbi that day. I really didn’t know who I was. On Sundays while everyone was kneeling for communion at the altar rail, I was singing Gordon Lightfoot’s words: “I’m standing at the doorway, my hat held in my hand, not knowing where to sit, not knowing where to stand . . .”² It took a long, long time for me to figure out where to sit and where to stand. And there are still days when I feel like a rabbi in a clerical collar.

Jesus, in the Book of Thomas the Contender, says: “whoever has known himself [or herself] has simultaneously come to know the depth of all things.”³ In a lifelong effort to answer The Question, I have spent a lot of time, energy, and money getting to know the depths of myself and making connections to the world around me.

I never made the connection between my birthday and history until I walked into the Martin Luther King Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. And there before my eyes, as big as life itself, was the front page of the New York Times, dated May 17, 1954, with a headline that boldly proclaimed: “BROWN VS. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION.” I have always felt that the complexity of racial justice was implanted in my soul and grafted into my unconscious, and in that moment I knew why. I came into this world on a decisive day in the life of the civil rights movement, and I have spent my entire life in the midst of that struggle.

Like lots of suburbanites, I never knew many people of color. In fact, I knew very few people of any ethnicity other than WASP or Jew. What I did know was that the maids and gardeners who were black did not have last names we remembered (or even knew), and that it was best to stick to your own kind (even if your own kind was not purebred). I also knew the anger and rage in my father’s face when the race riots found their way to our city, and his inner city furniture warehouse suffered smoke damage from a nearby fire. When I was in fifth grade, the public schools in Columbus, Ohio, were integrated, and I was sent to private school. My parents insist this was a coincidence, but I believe there is no such thing as coincidence; it is just God (or the devil) at work unbeknownst to us. So off I went to receive an excellent education in an even more pristine, privileged, and guarded community of affluence and homogeneity. As I entered the hallowed halls of the Columbus School for Girls, The Question—that haunting question of passing or claiming myself—was lurking in the wings.

In the summer of 1970, something happened that changed the vocational direction of my life. While my friends were off at summer camp, Europe, and Outward Bound, my parents insisted that I get a job—volunteer or paid, it didn’t matter. So I went to work with a big, angry attitude as a volunteer teacher’s aid in a new program called Head Start. I was assigned to the Ohio Avenue School, where I spent two months accompanying a wonderful group of “underprivileged” preschoolers through their daily routine. I would prepare their snack, ready them for naptime, read to them, and play with them. And sometimes, I would make home visits with their teacher to see how and where my young friends really lived. On those field trips, I saw firsthand the pain of the poor, and I learned about the struggles of raising children in urban poverty.

It was also the summer I got my driver’s license and a car. With wheels came the newfound freedom to explore beyond the boundaries of my neighborhood and to go where I wanted. I drove through communities that my parents said were not safe, trying to see and experience the danger for myself. I drove to the Ohio State University campus, getting involved in the antiwar and student rights movement. I drove through the foothills of the Appalachians, touching roots I still had not yet discovered. That summer changed my life. My eyes were opened; my sense of exploration and adventure was awakened; my awareness of poverty, racism, and oppression was provoked; and my passion to work for justice was born.

As the passion and anger of the sixties brewed and boiled over, so did my own passion and anger. How could there be such extremes of wealth and poverty in our nation? How could there be such hatred and fear among blacks and whites? How could women be told to stay in the kitchen? How could young men be sent to fight in a war that shouldn’t be? How could I go back to school and act like nothing had happened?

The decade of the seventies was an endless, exhausting, but exhilarating marathon of running away from all that I had known to a world beyond myself. I did a lot of hard growing up in a very short time. At eighteen, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and I responded to the news by jumping into an ill-advised marriage. Less than two years later, the marriage was dissolved, and I returned home, a prodigal daughter, to be with my father, who died a year later. By the age of twenty-one, I felt older than my years, and I was angry with God for letting “bad things happen to good people.”⁴

As a young adult, perhaps to compensate for my rebellious nature, I had a strong need to achieve, excel, and prove myself worthy of The Question. By the time I graduated from college, I had organized and directed a landlord/tenant agency and coordinated the development of a neighborhood revitalization program. Following college, I went to graduate school to study community planning, and for a few years I worked in a variety of community institutions, ranging from the United Way to the Girl Scouts. All the time I still was angry with God, but God was quietly watching over me—guiding me through every mess I got myself into without intruding into my fierce independence and self-determination.

During my early twenties, I also began coming to terms with my sexuality, realizing that I was a lesbian. It’s hard to understand the coming out process if you’re not gay. I liken the journey of coming out to a second adolescence with particular rites of passage that often include falling in and out of love, and sometimes looking for love in the wrong places. Fortunately, with support and acceptance from friends and family, I sorted out my sexual identity issues, and those confusing years actually have made me a more responsive and compassionate pastor to young adults and their families. By the time I rounded the quarter century mark, things were finally beginning to make sense, but The Question was becoming more complicated as the issue of passing took on new significance and meaning.

At the age of twenty-five, I found my way to Boston, where I lived The Question of faith and started getting some answers. Along the way, I decided it was safe to be baptized—I was finally convinced I wouldn’t be sent to the gas chamber, and I wanted to belong. Moreover, I wanted to be an ordained minister. After years of struggle, I felt pushed in the direction of seminary, and every door seemed to open without a key.

My first semester at Union Theological Seminary in New York City was a wrestling match with God. Exhausted from taking on someone bigger and stronger than me, I found myself walking down Forty-second Street one day in January asking God to let me go. And then it happened. Suddenly, a voice called out to me from within me saying, “I’m not going to let go of you.” “What do you want with me?” I asked. “I want your life,” the voice answered. “Why me?” I responded. “Why not?” the voice replied. At this point, I realized that something was happening and I needed to stop and pay attention to this voice. I went into a nearby McDonald’s restaurant, ordered my usual cheeseburger, fries, and coke and began frantically scribbling down a conversation with this voice from within. The voice called me by name, identified itself as God, confronted me with my own issues and private wounds, contradicted my theology, answered lots of questions, called me to the ordained priesthood, and reassured me when I protested. The voice said, “I brought you to New York for a reason, to look beyond yourself and those like you. . . . I want you to celebrate my Eucharist. . . . You must feed my people. . . . You will guide people to come to me through this and other acts. . . . You will help people to love each other and me. . . . You’ve changed; why can’t others. . . . It’s a loving revolution, so be my hands and my mouth, not your own.”

In the course of the conversation, I questioned why the voice was talking with me, and it responded, “Because you’ve been asking for it.” It was true. I had been asking, begging, even challenging God to be clear with me, to help me answer The Question. And here I was—on a cold January afternoon, sitting in a McDonald’s restaurant on Forty-second Street in Manhattan, having this private conversation with a voice. At the end of our time together, I asked, “If you’re inside of me, then how can you be God?” The voice replied in words I’ll never forget, “What’s so special about me is that I’m inside of anyone and everyone who wants to know me. And, if the world would hear me and follow me, my kingdom would come.” With that comment, the conversation ended. I got up and walked home in quiet amazement, wondering if I had really spoken with almighty God. Like Mary, I kept silent and treasured these words, pondering them in my heart.

A few days later, one of my professors, Dorothee Soelle, told our class that faith is a two-way street: it is both a gift from God and our decision to accept the gift. I didn’t know if I had talked with God, but in a letter to a friend I wrote, “If I don’t accept the voice of God on faith now, I don’t think I’ll ever get a more direct message.” The Question was finally beginning to be actively addressed.

From the moment I left the McDonald’s, I was determined to follow the voice wherever it would lead me. It led me to a summer internship at Trinity Church on Wall Street. It took me to Bronx Youth Ministry and St. Margaret’s Church in the South Bronx where I was sponsored for ordination. Following graduation from seminary, it invited me home to the suburbs to begin my ordained ministry at Christ Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey. It then called me to become Rector of St. Paul’s Church in Paterson, New Jersey.

For over a decade, I had the privilege of serving a community of “all sorts and conditions” of people who gather for worship, service, and witness in a glorious historic landmark church located in a poor neighborhood in one of our nation’s old industrial cities. During my twelve-year tenure, the congregation became incredibly diverse. We were black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. We were native born and newcomers from many lands. We were young, old, and in-between. We were gay and straight, married and single, bisexual, and even transgendered. Some of us dressed up for church; others came in blue jeans. Some members of our church had beautiful homes in lovely neighborhoods; others lived on the streets. A number in our company had large investment portfolios; but most of us got by from paycheck to paycheck or welfare check to welfare check. Many of us took freedom and citizenship for granted; but some knew all too well its precious price. There were those among us who worked in the judicial system; and there were others who had done time in the system. We had students and their teachers, employers and their employees, doctors and their patients all sitting in the same pews. St. Paul’s became a living testament that “the things which divide us from each other may be overcome in the oneness of God.”⁵

At St. Paul’s Church, God frequently interrupted me with glimpses of the holy from the edge. Over the course of my time as pastor of that old church, I met the Risen Christ over and over again. S/he wandered in and out of our sanctuary, shelter, food pantry, and even my office day and night, sometimes in disguises that I found disturbing and threatening, and on other occasions, humorous and inviting. The work was hard but rewarding; the pain of the community was great, but so was its joy.

People ask me why I stayed at St. Paul’s so long. My answer is simple. I hadn’t been called to leave, and how could I leave when Christ was lurking in the shadows bidding me to remain? As the larger church and society became more polarized over issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and creed, St. Paul’s Church remained a community of faith where we had the opportunity to make a difference, to demonstrate that we could live together in all of our diversity because God had bid each of us welcome and called us to build a better world.

When I was ordained, my bishop and hero Paul Moore said to our deaconate class: “All you have to do is love them, really love them. That’s all you have to do.” It was the best and most challenging advice I ever received. Love in the public context of the church is never easy, especially if you’re gay or lesbian. How does one obey Jesus’ command to love those who hate you, especially when those who hate you say, “We love you and that’s why we want to save you from your sin.”

I learned the lesson of “love the sinner but hate the sin” the hard way in the fall of 1995 when once again I was confronted with The Question of claiming myself or passing. I am a lesbian who is not called to a vocation of celibacy but has been called to the vocation of ordained ministry. Remarkable as it might seem, somehow, some way, my sexuality about which I’ve been relatively open (everything is relative) since I was in my early twenties, did not get in the way of my ordination process or parochial ministry. I always handled it with discretion, but I was always truthful and honest about it, answering questions when asked and volunteering information when it seemed appropriate. I guess I was lucky, or perhaps God simply had another idea in mind.

My friend and fellow Union alumnus Barry Stopfel wasn’t so fortunate. His ordination became a subject of debate within the Episcopal Church, and his ordaining bishop Walter Righter became the subject of the second heresy trial in our denomination. I knew that this trial was not just about Barry or Walter. Rather, it was about all of us who were gay and lesbian, and all those who stand in solidarity with us. In the words of singer-songwriter Holly Near, “It could have been me, but instead it was you.”⁶

For many years, I had said that if on a given Sunday, everyone who was gay or lesbian could turn purple in church, the issue would be over. When the threat of a heresy trial became a reality, I realized this vision of purple was not going to be the case. God was not going to do our labor of liberation for us. No, God was calling us to do our own work. In my humble opinion, it was time for all of us gay and lesbian clergy who were in positions of power and relative security in the church to come and make public witness about being gay, being Christian, and being called by God to be full participants in the church.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ commands us to pick up our crosses and carry them. The cross of being denied full inclusion and open participation in church and society because one is gay or lesbian is, was, and will be for some time to come, I presume, a cross to bear, and I could not allow anyone else to carry it alone. Because St. Paul’s is a church that welcomes and affirms the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered community, the Vestry (the elected governing body of the congregation) determined it was also the parish’s cross to bear. Together, we decided that we would be as public as we needed to be to stand with Barry, Walter, and the Diocese of Newark during the course of the heresy trial.

Shortly after making this decision, as fate would have it, I read an essay by lawyer and Episcopal layman William Stringfellow. The essay, entitled, “Living Humanly in the Midst of Death,” is about why people resisted the Nazis. It captures what I believe to be the essence of resistance to oppression: “To exist, under Nazism, in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence [and] collaboration—to covet ‘safety’ or ‘security’ on the conditions prescribed by the state—caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, [and] constituted a form of death. Resistance was the only stance worthy of a human being, as much in responsibility to oneself as to all other humans, as the famous commandment mentions.”⁷ Stringfellow argued that while resisting oppression ensured risk and peril, nonresistance or acquiescence “involved the certitude of death—of moral death, of the death to one’s humanity, of the death to sanity and conscience, of the death that possesses humans profoundly ungrateful for their own lives and for the lives of others . . .”⁸

For the first time, I had words to express what I knew in my heart. To exist in a homophobic society in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence, and collaboration; to hide in our closets for fear of being caught, rejected, fired, abused, disowned, disinherited, ridiculed, and despised; to covet “safety” or “security” on the conditions prescribed by the state or the church causes moral insanity and the death of one’s soul. To come out, to state honestly and clearly who one is and who one loves is not to flaunt one’s sexuality, but rather, to be faithful to one’s integrity, to choose freedom over oppression, and to claim life in the midst of death.

On October 15, 1995, I broke a pact I had made with God, the world, and myself when I came out in the pulpit. The unspoken bargain I had made went something like this: if I had to be gay in this society, then I would be the very best gay person I could be, and I would never do anything to embarrass anybody or make anyone feel uncomfortable about my sexuality. The heresy trial caused me to realize that this was a pact with the devil, not with God. So in a crowded sanctuary, in front of newspaper reporters and television cameras, I spoke aloud from our ten-foot-high pulpit the truth of my life. I turned myself purple on that Sunday morning, finally answering The Question. I’ll never forget the closing words of my sermon: “And now, to answer your question, God: No, I will not pass! Yes, I am ready and willing to claim who I am and to live and die for my faith!” And the people responded with thunderous applause and a loud Amen!

As Dean of Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, I live in the center of the institutional church. As a priest and pastor, I carry the keys to unlock and open the church doors so that the stranger passing by may enter. I preach the word of God so that those who listen may know the good news of God’s justice, love, and mercy for all creation. I stand at God’s table and make Christ known in the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the wine so that God’s hungry people may be fed. And I pronounce God’s blessing upon those who seek it so that they may experience the gift of God’s creative love.

It would be very easy to exclude people: to make some feel welcome and others not, to feed some and turn others away, to bless some and curse others. Like any human being charged with such a daunting task and awesome responsibility, I run that risk each and every day.

Whenever I am tempted to lock up God’s house, to gate God’s table, or to refuse God’s blessing, I am confronted with The Question. The memory of my own exclusion, separation, and alienation, and that of my ancestors in flesh, faith, and spirit jolts me. These memories, painful as they may be, remind me of Jesus’ mission in this world: to bring the love of God to those who seek it; to show the way to God to those who want to follow; and to extend the covenant of promise and salvation to all God’s people.

A long time ago, I was asked a question I could not answer: would you have died for your faith or denied it by passing? I have struggled with this question ever since. It has shaped my life and directed my ministry. It grounds my theology and informs my ethics, provoking me to listen to the voices from the edge and pay attention to the fringe. It is at the heart of this book. Thirty-five years later, The Question still holds me accountable. I hope it always will. In the life, death, and resurrection that surrounds me everyday, I am beginning to glimpse my answer.