A Letter to a Twentieth Century Minister from a Twenty-First Century Minister

A Letter to a Twentieth Century Minister from a Twenty-First Century Minister

Delivered at the One Hundred & Seventh Gathering of the Fraters of the Wayside Inn, January 2012

Carolyn Patierno
Minister
All Soul’s Unitarian Universalist Congregation
New London, CT

January 2012

Dear Friend,

Across time I write to you and yet; I imagine you sitting with me in the Old Kitchen in the glow of candlelight in the still of winter. There is so much to share. I’ll start with these words written by Frater Rudy Nemser in the dedication of his poetry book:

“My colleagues in ministry sustain and encourage me in the struggles of our common labor. I cannot imagine this journey to which I have given my life without such graceful companions.” (Consider the Impatiens!)

Friend, I offer you my gratitude because I count you as graceful companion – you and all of the ministers who have stood in the circle of our tradition in the 20th century, yes, but also in the 19th and 18th centuries and even those courageous colleagues of previous centuries. I claim you all and hold you in my heart as we sing: “What they dreamed be ours to do. Hope their hopes and seal them true.”

In solitary moments – and there are many of those – I feel your companionship. I imagine you as Rilke and me, the young poet. The elder wisely advised the younger to “Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” I had not anticipated this solitude and so in the first years of my ministry, I experienced it only as a deep loneliness. Surrounded by people, most of whom we love, who could imagine such an odd isolation? Only now, 10 years in, do I understand something about singing out with the pain that solitude causes.

You are one of the few people who know of what I speak. The world that I inhabit may have little resemblance to the one you inhabited while offering your ministry, but the heart of the ministry does not change, after all. Here is the scene I imagine …

It is early Sunday morning at the church and you are gathering strength in your solitude. You take in the season’s particular light and look out into the silent sanctuary that seems to anticipate the holy deluge. Soon enough, it will be filled with sounds of congregational life: music, prayer, and the joy and suffering held in the hearts of those we serve.

What will the day bring, you wonder. Who will stumble in from a broken life looking foremost to the minister for the balm they seek?

“Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me on. Let me stand. I am tired. I am weak. I am worn.”

That’s the hymn that I sing … the one that brings me strength in those early morning hours. What hymn did you sing, I wonder.

My prayer is inspired by the wisdom preached by a colleague in 1965:

Dear God, Keep me from the pitfalls of self-delusion. May the respect accorded to me be matched by an inner reality worthy of said respect. Amen. (adapted from a sermon preached by Frater Gordon McKeeman on the 20th anniversary of his ordination.)

I hold my colleagues in my heart as I pray.

I feel you walking with me these early Sunday mornings. But perhaps as the service begins we come to a fork in the road, as the pendulum tends swing in our movement. What would you think of the robust singing, sometimes in languages other than English; the sound of drums that move us to sway and clap with joy; the riotous passing of the peace; the lengths of silence; and a different kind of sermon? Perhaps I need not fret. In its 14th printing in 1953, the Introduction of Hymns of the Spirit included this assurance: “In a word, the aim has been to present a set of services which shall have, so far as possible, the dignity and beauty which has characterized the traditional worship of the church, but which shall express in language familiar to the modern man the religious point of view which he holds.” I hope that you would recognize the dignity and beauty that this Commission described. I also hope that the service would bring you peace and uplift and perhaps some modicum of meaning.

Now, although I stand with you at this fork in the road, said fork in no way implies a dramatic shift in our humanity for our nature remains both sublime and ridiculous. Everything around us may change but for better and for worse, here we are: loyal to our primate heritage.

I hope that you will forgive my sharing a big chunk of someone else’s writing right about now. I read Annie Dilliard’s For the Time Being as I was writing this letter and these two paragraphs jumped out at me.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful and self-aware: a people who scheme, promote, deceive and conquer: who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available in everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

There is no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was the day the Red Sea parted. … There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha’s bo tree. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said, “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter … or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. … In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture.

Purity’s time is always now.

Well, I just love that. As my time is not pure, neither was yours although there are plenty of people who will wax poetic about previous centuries’ purity. Many of them seem to run for public office.

Anyway.

Dilliard’s idea strikes me deeply. My first Sunday in the pulpit was September 16, 2001. The years that followed were colored by that week’s tragedy therefore, so was my ministry.

But the turn of the last century saw one of the most brutal wars in human history, one that walked directly into the next war. World Wars, for the love of God, and as the 20th century rolled out, one war followed the next.

In this way, alas, the circumstances of our ministry remain the same – as well as our religious responsibility to remind: there is no running from misery and death; we are just as likely to feel God’s love as our forebears were; and that purity’s time is now. Now. Always now.

Yet here are the things that I imagine have made our individual experiences of ministry somewhat different. I’ll paint them in broad strokes.

As I write, there are strewn around me tools of the vocation we claim: hymnal, prayer book, poetry, journal. And there’s also a laptop. And a cell phone.

While it is true that when I can’t recall the date the Cambridge Platform was written, for example, the lapse in memory is tended to in seconds. And boom: there it is – 1648. But inevitably, in the midst of that “quick search” something else will catch my attention and there it is: life in the Age of Distraction. We are the trapeze artist flying through the air with the greatest of ease … and dis-ease. We swing toward and then grab hold of new information but lo! we are instantly seduced by the man who holds out his arms to swing us in an entirely different direction. Sure, it’s fun but how much do we retain before we let go and drop down to rest in the net below? Like most things, technology is both a blessing and a curse that we can hardly imagine living without.

So, there’s that.

Thankfully, we have become wiser in the staking of healthy boundaries between ourselves and those we serve. I must say I have heard stories that have made my toes curl. Here’s one of them but I must also confess that this one did make me laugh.

There was a congregation that was in ministerial search. The candidate would be the congregation’s first female minister and overall, the congregation was feeling pride an excitement in that possibility. However, one of the congregation’s matriarchs, a woman in her mid-80s at the time, felt differently. I happened to be standing next to her when the overwhelmingly successful vote was announced and received with the congregation’s hoots and hollers – save one matriarch. To my surprise, she was disappointed and freely told me so. “Why?” I asked incredulously. To which she explained with some pride and wistfulness that she had slept with all of the previous ministers. I’m not sure that that was exactly true, but I have a feeling that it was true enough.

How did you handle such things, I wonder? There had to have been at least a sliver of consciousness of what a bloody mess these affairs leave in their wake both for the (mostly) women involved and for the congregation. Did you talk about these things when you gathered? How did the emergence of female clergy affect these attitudes?

For that matter, how did women’s emergence affect so many things? One Frater once told me that once there were women in the room, the competitive edge began to fade. He said this with a sense of relief. But I have participated in a spelling bee or two and find that there is little evidence of truth in the claim.

And then there’s the movement’s work to ally oppression in all corners of the human landscape. I hope and think we have learned from mistakes made mid-century. Time and commitment will tell.

Now I move toward this letter’s closing feeling assured that we are and were each of us the right ministers for the centuries in which we served, centuries that are equally flawed and beautiful and through which we hold onto a tenacious hope. In the words that conclude many a service in the 20th & 21st centuries:

“May the truth that makes us free, and the hope that never dies, and the love that casts out fear, lead us forward together, until the dayspring breaks and the shadows flee away.” Hymns of the Spirit

Blessings manifold and diverse, Dear Friend,

Carolyn

Selected Bibliography:

Dieffenbach, Albert C. Funeral Selections, personal collection: circa 1950.
Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. Vintage Books: 1999.
McKeeman, Gordon B. Kept Afloat by a Millstone: A Selection of Sermons. Unitarian Universalist Church of Akron: 2000.
Nemser, Rudolph. Consider the Impatiens! Unitarian Universalist Church of Cherry Hill: 1996.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Vintage Books: 1986.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2004.
Unitarian & Universalist Commissions on Hymns & Services. Hymns of the Spirit. 14th Printing. Beacon Press: 1953.