Where Did The Time Go?
This is Dr. Park’s farewell homily, offered on the occasion of her retirement from fulltime ministry in the Church. The lectionary readings assigned for this last Sunday before the Feast of All Saints include an historical reference in the Letter to the Hebrews about how the Law of Moses made space for “priests subject to weakness – including age”, a curious encounter between Jesus and a blind man in Mark’s gospel, and a “happily ever after” ending to Job’s story.
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Transcript
“For, it pleased the Lord to choose those who were weak to be ordained priests.”
“Take heart! Get up! The Lord is calling you!”
“Crow and Weasel” is a coming-of-age story set in the ancient mythic past, a time when animals and humans spoke the same language. It’s about two young men from a northern plains tribe who set out on a very particular mission: to travel farther than any of their ancestors had ever gone before. Along the journey, they meet a badger, who tells Crow and Weasel the importance of something called “story medicine.”
The badger said, “I would ask you to remember only this one thing: The stories that people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give your stories away where they are needed. You see,” said the badger, “sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves. It’s how they stay alive”
In a way, the story I leave you with today was written years ago. It was the day before I was scheduled to meet with the committee in the Diocese of Virginia that was my last gate to get through in the hazing that is designed for those persons who imagine they want to be priests. At this point in my discernment, my children were grown and long gone from our home to homes of their own. I had not told them the timeline of where I was in the process. Mainly because I had been through the process once before and been told no. So, I wasn’t comfortable bringing them into every minute of the drama. Children watching a parent try and fail at something in life rates on the discomfort scale up there with watching a parent date. The Spirit, however, had other plans.
My oldest son called that morning to chat. My children and I have received the great gift of being in relationship with each other, not just related to each other. Each of them has their super power, for sure. But Josh’s superpower is that he has always been able to read me like none of the others. After a few moments he said, “What’s really going on, Mom? I can hear it in your voice. You aren’t breathing.” And so I told him about the upcoming committee interview. He listened quietly for a while. Then very gently he asked, “Would you be interested in a visualization, a story prompt, that might help reduce your anxiety?”
“Try imagining,” he began “that instead of being evaluated to become a priest, that you are at the end of a long and exciting career as a priest, that it was the most wonderful, the most interesting years of your life. That you have been invited to come meet with these people to talk about it.”
And, so here we are. Now, it is the end of an incredible career, one that has been rich beyond my imagination and here we are together and I get to say goodbye and thank you for these years.
First, and foremost, thank you for the story medicine you shared with me. This medicine not only healed many deep wounds, but it worked to make me a priest. In the same way that, over the course of years, my children made me a mother and my husband has made me a wife. Because such deep transformation happens over time, all stories like these will continue to be written. I am confident that, however many chapters remain, in God’s time, everything will fall into place interestingly, and perhaps, like Job, I shall live to see 100.
The day I drove here to pray in person with Stuart about his invitation to join him, I stopped at the Jimmy Johns off EE Butler to get directions. “I’m looking for Grace,” I said. “It’s a few streets over and it covers the whole block. You can’t miss it.”
Well, Grace covers more than a block. Grace fills every inch of this city. There hasn’t been a single moment in this past decade that I have not been proud to call myself one of your priests. Of course, I almost never went out in public apart from Stuart, and because everyone knows Stuart, I got to ride on his coattails most of the time. It usually opened doors for me. One time it backfired. It was on a morning we were meeting the other local Gainesville clergy at Longstreet for breakfast. When Stuart reached the checkout ahead of me, the woman looked up and, noticing his collar said, “Oh, are you clergy? Clergy eat free!”
I came right after him, dressed identically to him, and she said “Morning, ma’am. That’ll be $8.50.”
One of my proudest moments was being part of the panel moderated by Dr. Martha Nesbitt here at Grace, opened to the whole community in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s affirmation of the marriage amendment act from the Obergefell vs. Hodges’ case. Clergy representatives from several denominations were invited here to Grace to respond to questions about faith and practice in public life, and offer brief descriptions about their particular denominational position. A parishioner brought her daughters with her, young women who had grown up in the Church. One of them told her mom afterward how proud she had been to see her Church hosting such a forum, and a female priest speaking amongst a panel of male clergy, a privilege that Stuart offered me early on and often so that the community could see and hear a female priest.
Stuart has brought me along with him on virtually every aspect of parish ministry. We may actually be the proof of prior lives since neither of us can remember how or when we met. His generosity as a rector is beyond compare. Our partnership has afforded me a rare treat; that is, the chance to do some of the hardest work imaginable alongside someone who gets me. One tragic winter’s evening, we went out together to make a death notification call to several folks, after standing behind a crime scene tape to say last rites. I had had surgery earlier that morning to reset a broken arm, so Stuart brought along a blanket for me to curl up in while we rode around town in the winter cold. He wasn’t insensitive to my situation; after all, he brought a blanket. He was actually being incredibly thoughtful. He knew we needed to do that together. And, that it couldn’t wait. I will forever be grateful to him for treating me as a colleague and a true partner. That is one of his super powers. Jack recognized that early on when we talked about coming here and he encouraged me to say yes, observing that it wouldn’t be often that I would get to work alongside someone whose company I truly enjoyed.
The irony was not lost on me last year when Brandon joined us — he, who was just beginning his public priesthood in the season that I was ending mine. The truth is, he has been a godsend to us, my soul’s guide in this transition that I was clueless to make. I don’t believe that Stuart and I could have untangled ourselves by ourselves. Brandon’s quiet, non-anxious, compassionate presence for both of us has given me enough daylight to see that as scary as it is to think about not being here every day, there is no reason that that should eclipse the deep gratitude I feel about all that we have shared. And that it’s ok not to know exactly what’s going to happen next.
A piece of advice I received in seminary was “When you get into parish ministry, don’t let them give you children or women’s ministries.” And so I fought against both when I was first ordained. I understand the caution. It’s like priests who start out working at diocesan summer camp, and no one can imagine them without a guitar and a jeep, even when they go gray and are not safe to drive a lawnmower, much less a jeep. And so I fought against the stereotype of a woman priest working with women and children in my first two assignments.
Then, I came here. And I got to be chaplain to the preschool and hear the word of God, poignant, piercing, coming out of the mouths of children. Later, Jack and I, along with some of the other teachers, ended up taking 17 high schoolers to Scotland on pilgrimage. What an amazing experience. Being more the age of their grandmothers than their mothers allowed for much easier conversations between us. Like a visualization of sorts, the young people approached their conversations with me with an expectation that they would be loved for no good reason, heard, and encouraged, which opened the door for that, and for much more. And there was good reason to love every one of them. Not having any real training in leading youth, other than being a parent which we all know comes with zero training, I think we had fun.
Only time will tell whether anything we did was truly beneficial to those kids. But, I know we shared some good story medicine along the way, and now those kids are in the military, marketing, medical school, graduate school, statistical engineering fields, and studying life in its natural habitat. Pilgrimages truly are jumping off places for so much life.
And then the women, the sisterhood. I’d like to claim responsibility for thinking up the women’s retreat, but it was Cheryl Kelley’s idea. We worked together on the design on the basis that, secretly, we each knew of an ideal location outside of Asheville, North Carolina, a spot that it turned out she and I had both visited as young women when each of us used to be part of the Presbyterian Church.
Thus, the Montreat Winter Women’s Retreat was born and has flourished by the grace of the Holy Spirit, well known now around the county as a safe place for women from every denomination and faith.
As it has been since my childhood, I consider it a pilgrimage of sorts to now return to that place, moving finally into our sanctuary just up the mountainside from Montreat. Yes; in spite of Hurricane Helene, it is still a sanctuary. It is a sacred place where since the storm arrived has allowed me to see the Holy Spirit at work in so many more ways than I’d thought possible. In many ways the disaster response to Helene has restored the sense of what it means to be community that Covid almost destroyed.
True, it is not exactly a serene place at the moment; but, then, neither is Israel and yet people still feel a strange energy pulsing through the stones that make up the western wall of the second Temple. Every religion has its own “western wall” with stones that give off divine energy. So, it is for me with the mountains of western North Carolina.
From the top of our street I can see the church steeple on the road leading up to Lake Susan, and every time I see it I picture the Assembly Inn filled with women, wine, music, and stories — like the man said: Grace all over the place.
Which is where I will leave this, where it began, and where I say goodbye for now to the people I cannot imagine life without. It is a very odd thing, a painful thing, to step away from something life giving. It goes against our innate need to bond with people we love. But in certain circumstances, like this, it is a necessary thing for the continued wellbeing of the community and to open space for nurturing the next season for all of us. A season where we will all need to learn more about how to hear and how to tell stories.
As for me, I promise to take care of the stories you have shared with me as the treasures that they are. Because I can honestly say that, more times than you can imagine, they fed my soul and kept me going.
So, we – Jack and I — thank you for everything. St. Paul — in his opening salutation to the Thessalonians — says it best: “I give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing.” Pray for Jack and for me, as we will pray for you.
Amen.