Pastoring Alone, Together

I am staring down the end of my fifteen years of ministry up on the hilltop at the Church of the Nativity. As one is want to do on such occasions, I find myself ruminating about the past and fondly remembering the challenges and the joys.

I came across this article in the New York Times titled "writing alone, together" the other day, and it hit me that this would be the perfect title for this blog post dancing around in my head. A complete extrovert, I knew that coming to serve a church on a hilltop in Marin would be a challenge. And it has been. It has been challenging to be the only full-time employee and for the majority of the hours each day, the only person in the church. I have amazing volunteers who come in faithfully each and every morning from ten until noon, and they can tell you how much I appreciate their companionship and ministry.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate that people come and go from the hilltop, and it is my pleasure, and by extension our pleasure, to greet and welcome them. From au pairs with their toddlers coming to use the playground, to artists painting a landscape, from hikers with their dogs, to homeless people seeking help, all are welcome in this place, as the hymn we sang this morning testifies.

Still, selfishly, I had to learn, the hard way, that in order not to find myself isolated and lonely, I needed to either get people to the hilltop or get off the hilltop myself. Many of my introvert colleagues would be envious, but I find too much alone time depressing and downright lonely. So I have found a way to cobble together errands and home visits, coffee with colleagues, lunch at the church with our Marin Clergy, skype calls with colleagues around the world. And this cobbling together has made all the difference.

As the transition happens at Nativity and the congregations of St. Francis, Redeemer, St. Paul's and Nativity intentionally discern what kind of future they might have together, the phrase "pastoring alone, together" keeps coming to mind. There is something powerful, when doing one's own work and ministry, to know that there are others doing the same thing, even if not in the same location. Frankly, the idea of a "pastors' hive", like a writers' hive, is a very appealing notion and one not unknown to clergy on large staffs of churches. Or call it a collective, a collective of pastors where everyone is working on their own work and in doing so together, lending energy, and encouragement and support to the mutual endeavor.

As I go about my newest spiritual practice, creating Morning and (now) Evening Prayer images on Instagram as part of my prayer life (see the newest photo box at the top right of this blog!), I am reminded of that continuity of prayer which connects us all the time. And I am reminded of George Herbert's words, last verse of one of my favorite hymns, to the tune of General Seminary:

Seven whole days, not one in seven, I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven, I can raise thee.
Small it is in this poor sort to enroll thee;
e'en eternity's too short to extol thee.

The hilltop is still challenging for me, but the years here have done wonders for my understanding of a life of prayer. Thanks be to God's economy, who gives us what we need and who does not waste anything, not one single thing.

Down by the creek, at Nativity

a rowing epiphany for a Friday

Universe Stained Glass at Grace Cathedral

Yesterday at practice Coach saw me erging and said "Stace, open up!"  I explained that my core strength is lacking and that I could not swing back farther without ending up ass-over-teakettle and that would be a very undignified look for a member of the clergy (ok, I just thought that last bit to myself.)

Coach scowled.

We got out on the water and were rowing "feet out" for almost the entire practice. For non-rowers, this means that instead of securing your feet to the boat via the pair of shoes intended for that purpose, the rower simply places her feet on the top of the shoes and thus has to row properly in order to not fly ass-over-kettle into the rower behind her.

This was the rowing epiphany which led me to a spiritual epiphany: to  row properly, to open up, row a full stroke very well, you have to trust that the physics of both "pushing" and "pulling" at the same time are going to help you achieve your goal.

It is completely counter-intuitive...our rational brain tells us that everything should be pulling or pushing in harmony. To row perfect, our bodies in motion understand:  one must push and pull at the same time. We let our bodies practice even when it seems wrong to our rational mind. We let our bodies do their work to our highest potential.

This is not unlike the spiritual epiphany which students of all the great religions and spiritual movements learn. That things that often seem opposite are often the source of our greatest learnings.

To be truly strong one must understand complete weakness.  To be able to walk in the light, one must also understand what it is to walk in the dark. To know the heights of joy, one also must understand the depths of grief. In deeply knowing isolation, one also comes to know the depths and power of love.

Einstein stained glass, Grace Cathedral

my patron saint - Catherine of Siena

I remember being asked very early in my ordination process who I considered my patron saints. This very low church Protestant girl did not have an answer! Since then, I have gained several, but none more important than Catherine of Siena, whose feast day is celebrated today, April 29.

Catherine was her mother's 24th child of her mother (who herself deserves sainthood) and spent her life working within the church to reform it. She corresponded and counseled various popes, and was known as a mediator and bridgebuilder.

A modern icon of Catherine shows her holding a sailing ship on her shoulder, a symbol of the bloated and dominating church of her time. The story of her death is likewise compelling; she was meditating before a mosaic of Peter's fishing boat when the boat left the mosaic and landing on her shoulder, crushed her. What a way to go!

She was both a mystic and an intensely practical woman. She spoke truth to the powers and also dedicated herself to the renewal of the church.

In 1990 I visited Siena and took this picture of her monastic cell. When my friend Alexa and I came upon the rooms, we were directed in by a grumpy, long-suffering nun who was no doubt wondering what she had done to deserve such a ministry: pointing loud tourists to a monastic enclosure. But I do remember the visit fondly, and give thanks for Catherine and ask her prayers today...for myself and for all those dedicated to the reform and renewal of the church.

favorite contemplations

While I savor the last Holy Week I will celebrate with the Nativity community, I also am aware that there are other things around the ol' hilltop that I have been contemplating deeply for the last fifteen years. One is the view out to the ocean, out the Lucas Valley, off the stunning hilltop that has stood as a sentinel to the Valley for eons. I never tire of the sunsets and of finding the cross in my camera's viewfinder.

The other is St. Vincent's Field....(my name for it at least) which is on my short drive from church to home. The field is ever-changing with the seasons and still is always the same, and I have been known to careen off 101 to my favorite spot both in the early mornings and in the evening as the sun goes down.

These pictures were both taken the evening of the rare "blood moon" in April 2014. I offer them as a Holy Week contemplation as we consider the sacrifices we are called to make for others.

worship and justice

I am re-reading Crossan and Borg's Last Week and pondering the place of worship and of justice in the church and how they are inextricably tied one to another. Borg and Crossan say "...God is a God of justice and righteousness and when worship substitutes for justice, God rejects God's temple - or, for us today, God's church."

It is not lost on me that I, along with most of my clergy colleagues, are more concerned with worship bulletins and at the many liturgies we lead during this Holy Week, than, it seems, with most anything else. Everything in Holy Week other than church seems to go out the window. But, as Crossan and Borg would say, we do this at our own peril.

I took the photograph below two years ago when I visited Grahamtown, South Africa. I know as well as anyone that often, unconscious details often convey intense meaning to the other: the locked front door of the church on Sunday morning, for example.  In this very Anglican Cathedral I found this beautiful artwork which appeared to have been stuffed in a corner, out of sight, at the very back of the Cathedral. And I found that very disturbing, since its proper place would be up front and visible. It was a case of worship trumping justice to this outsider's eye, and so today it comes back to me.

Please pray for the church this Holy Week, that we might always remember the primary place of justice.

Why the Monday of Holy Week will always matter to me.

According to the Western rite, Easter "is always the first Sunday after the full moon that falls on or after March 21. It cannot occur before March 22 or after April 25."  This year, Orthodox Easter happens to also fall on April 20. There is also a movement to change Easter from "a movable feast" to a "fixed feast" for all Christians, but the likelihood of agreement on that is, well, the dream of a lifetime.

For now, we simply live with a movable feast called Easter, the Sunday of the Resurrection. That means that Holy Week (the week starting with Palm Sunday and concluding with Easter) is also movable. And for me, the Monday of Holy Week will always have an important place in my heart, since it is the day my mother died in 2004.  The actual date was April 5 that year, but like today, April 14, 2014, it was the Monday of Holy Week.  Mom/Madge, I am praying for you today, please pray for us.

The work day started at 9 am at church, where some parishioners and I were working on Holy Week stuff. I received a call from my mother's caregivers, distraught that they had found her collapsed when they went to her home. I could hear the sirens of the paramedics in the background, confusion reigned. A few minutes later, my aunt Gerry called and said she was on the way to meet Mom at the hospital. I got into my car and started driving to Santa Cruz, after alerting my brother Peter.

The day began to take on that surreal no-time quality when everything slows down and speeds up at once. I got into San Francisco and was at the corner of 25th and Fulton when the ER doctor called to report that Madge had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrage, and what did I want them to do. Thank God Mom and I had talked, and I knew what to say. And I asked the doctor please not to call me again, no matter what. I could only drive so fast to Santa Cruz.

I arrived to find Aunt Gerry and Madge there. The staff took us to a quiet room where Madge could be cared for compassionately. The hospital chaplain came. We talked to her, prayed, cried, sat quietly. We told her Peter was coming, and he did, around six in the evening. And after we had talked to her for about five minutes, she took her last breath in and was gone. And I knew that she was finally at peace, that the struggle had ended. That she was in some way (that I surely do not understand this side of the grave) with Bill, as my dream several days before had foretold.

The rest of the week was a blur. Amazing friends and colleagues appeared and took all the services at Nativity. On Easter Day, with Madge's ashes under the altar, I presided at the Great Thanksgiving on the Sunday of the Resurrection. Which was absolutely perfect.

My mother's last years were hard and I don't have a lot of good pictures of her from that time. I combed through my albums and found this one I love. It was taken at my apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco circa 1984. She was in the prime of her second career as a decorator and outdoor furniture consultant. Mom, on this Monday of Holy Week, rest in peace.

Sudden Hearing Loss- a first post

On January 18, 2008, I woke up in the morning and realized that I had lost most of the hearing in my right ear.  I was just 49 years old.  I also noticed upon waking a loud buzzing noise which I later came to understand is called tinnitus (I say TIN-u-tus, others say tin-EYE-tis...take your pick  ;)

Over the next three days, I essentially experienced a seventy-two hour panic attack. I snapped my fingers near my ears over and over again - testing -, asked myself if I might be having a psychiatric breakdown, wondered if all of this could be a bad dream. I went to a otolaryngologist (the medical doctor we also call an ENT), had audiology exams and a brain MRI to rule out a brain tumor. I was eventually diagnosed with sudden sensoneurial hearing loss.  It is also known as sudden deafness. It happens mostly to people between the ages of 40 and 60, and usually only happens in one ear. The cruel trick is that it can feel as if both ears are going out, hence more and more panic. Because it is classified as a medical emergency AND there is no real understanding of its causes, sudden hearing loss also creates anxiety and panic in the doctors and professionals who treat it; they feel helpless to help their patients.

I was sent to the top doc in the San Francisco Bay Area. I thank him.  And I thank the amazing friends, pastors, family and various professionals who helped me through this time. It has been the biggest personal challenge of my life. I believe it also may turn out to be my largest life lesson (and greatest joy? We shall see!).

I haven't written much  about this before, but today is the day. This morning I found an article in the New York Times about hearing devices, and the article spurs me to ponder out loud a little bit. Why have I not written about it? For a variety of reasons, but chiefly because hearing loss is viewed as something that mostly happens to old people. It is therefore (especially for us very self-conscious Babyboomers) viewed as embarrassing in some way, a sign of aging. That my own hearing loss has absolutely nothing to do with aging perhaps places me in a position to advocate for others. Whatever the cause, hearing loss isolates a person, causes communication to break down just at the time a person needs increased support and connection. We have a lot of work to do.

So the article above makes complete sense to me: I predict that soon, hearing aids themselves, not just the amplification devices the article talks about, will begin to be camouflaged as Bluetooth devices. Our vanity as a generation could be a whole separate series of blog posts. For now, though, the article stirs me to reflect on my own hearing loss.

Six years later and I am becoming a bit more sanguine about what was at the time an outright emergency.  It was a time in my life of enormous stress; it was also the time of my menopause. I have a close friend with the same condition and we debate about what has caused it. Stress? Hormonal changes? There are cases to be made and she and I intend to keep researching. It turns out that the medical profession does not know what causes sudden hearing loss. There are lots of theories, there is no consensus. My doc at UCSF sits back on his stool,shrugs his shoulders and says "we really do not know what causes it."  That is a very hard thing for an expert to admit, but it helped me when he did. For me, hearing honest news is better than pretending. It leads me to a place of eventual acceptance and healing rather than a place of discouragement and shame.

There is a lot I will say in the future, but today is the day to "come out" and admit publicly that I have some pretty severe hearing loss in my right ear. I continue to work on understanding this condition and am trying some different new approaches.  In the meantime, I position myself to sit so that I can hear, I try and practice asking people to repeat themselves when I don't understand, and I am becoming an advocate for hearing loss help. Oh, and I am wrangling to purchase another hearing aid (I had one but lost it after three years when I traveled to South Africa.). The one I need will cost $2,800 (which is 50% of the "list price"). All I can say is that I am glad I only need one!

 I will leave you with one startling factoid...do you want to know why our dear elders most walk around with outdated and old-fashioned hearing aids, if they have the devices at all? It is because Medicare does not cover ANY of the cost of the devices, not one cent. And most insurance is the same: nothing. We've got to change this, for them and for the rest of us.

Since January 18, 2008, people have been saying to me "there is something you don't want to hear, something you are trying to tune out. " I actually believe that there is something I am supposed to be listening for and seeing in a different way. Six long years later I am still looking and listening. And I expect to see and hear. And that is the best news of all.