Death of another classmate

I was the youngest member of my seminary class. Every last one of us are second-career clergy, and some of my classmates had already retired once, before pursuing a different vocation.


I remember the day that I realized that being the youngest meant I stood a good chance of grieving every one of their deaths, one by one. I just didn't expect that one of them would die at 42.



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D. Brent Russell was technically the graduating class behind me, rather than my class year. He was an interesting fellow...Strongly held opinions. High ecclesiology. And, unfortunately, intolerant of bullshit. It got him thrown out of a rather heavy-handed cultural immersion course that he was required to attend, and he had to go back for a second helping the next year.


We got to be friends over a series of loooong afternoons in the back workroom of the library. See, almost every student at the seminary in Austin is on a work-study program for financial aid. It becomes a kind of monastic service to the community. In between classes, you see people sweeping, cleaning, running video, shelving books, working for professors. My second year, I had the great privilege of being the student assistant to the Dean. That was way cool. Third year, though, I said that I was willing to let somebody else have that honor, and I moved to the library.


And so it was that, many afternoons, Brent and I sat in the workroom and talked about life, and classes, and the state of the church, and theology, and human sexuality, and liturgics, and... life. I was unhurriedly checking in and shelving periodicals, and he was unhurriedly fixing up old books, repairing spines, carefully gluing end panels back together. I asked him once where he got so good at that kind of thing, and he laughed.


Turns out he was a funeral director before coming to seminary. Didn't really surprise me, once I thought about it. That, of course, gave us material to talk about for at least a month. He never betrayed personal information, but he had stories that would make you laugh and weep, sometimes both in the same story.


He gave me a great gift one afternoon. I went out to his house, waved to his wife, sat down with him at his kitchen table, and for three or four hours talked about the nuts and bolts of the funeral industry from the funeral director's perspective. He had documents, tricks of the trade, perspectives on things I'd never thought about. It was advice I took to heart, and it's come in handy several times already.



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The thing I'll remember most is what we called each other. Not sure how it started... probably, it was because I said something to him in the middle of an argument like "okay, in twenty years when you're the Bishop of Texas, we can do it your way," and he responded with something not generally printable.

(Note to the non-clergy:Seminarians love to tease each other about things like that. Nobody in their right mind wants to be the bishop.)

The next day, I walked into the workroom, and called out, "Good afternoon, Your Grace!" Without missing a beat or even turning around, Brent responded, "Good afternoon, Your Eminence!" (which is the honorific for a Roman Catholic Cardinal, or an Archbishop, depending on your religious tradition.) I cracked up laughing, and somehow it stuck.



It became our ritual greeting:

Good afternoon, Your Grace.
Good afternoon, Your Eminence.



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Life moved on. I was ordained and hired and brought to San Antonio. Brent dropped out of the ordination process, finished his seminary degree anyway, and made some difficult and painful decisions about his family and his future. Then he decided to try his hand at being a chaplain, which is extremely difficult duty. I think he would have made a great priest, or a great chaplian, in the right circumstances.


And then came the brain aneurysm, a 'successful' repair surgery, the beginnings of rehab, and a sudden (and probably merciful) death. By the time I got the news, he was already gone.







Goodbye, Your Grace.



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A long blog silence

I think I've finally figured out why I haven't written in quite a while.

Most of you who have had face-to-face conversations with me know that I'm not exactly naturally shy or reserved. ("In love with the sound of my own voice" is more accurate.) In small groups, I have to be careful not to dominate the conversation. I have to constantly remind myself to stop and listen, really listen, to my wife and children, rather than jumping in before they even finish their sentences, and I'm not always successful at that.

But in a large group, I'm different. I want to choose my words carefully. I don't want to waste the time of a large group of people with an incomplete or rambling thought.

I've been a delegate to diocesan council in three different dioceses, covering at least twelve years. In all that time, I've never stood up to address the council, not even once. I've gone to clergy conference for three years, and I have yet to speak up at clergy conference. (sotto voce jokes not withstanding) I've attended city council meetings, meetings of concerned citizens about airport noise, and public forums, and only rarely, rarely, will I say anything.

The funny thing is that I tend to be one of those people who have to start talking about something complicated before I get it straight in my head. I almost always have a step in the sermon writing process where I go for a long walk, or take advantage of a long drive, or shut the door and pace around and around and talk to myself. If we have to make a decision quickly, I'll sometimes ask my wife "let me think out loud for a minute, okay?" and she knows that the first thing out of my mouth might not be the same as the last thing.

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A while ago, my friend Gordon Atkinson asked me to be a part of the network of bloggers for the Christian Century. (you've almost certainly noticed the link in the upper right corner of this page.) I had to think about it for a while to see if I wanted to be included, but finally accepted. I suddenly found myself in distinguished company, people who were faithful and far more articulate than I am and insightful and smart and funny. I read everything that anyone in the network wrote, for a while. Then the network grew and grew, and more and more voices were added, all of them worth reading. I kept reading. And the more I did that, the less I wrote.

Took me a while to recognize the same dynamic that happens when I'm in a room full of people. I realized that I was unconsciously weighing everything that was going on in my head to say against the wonderful stuff that was already being said, and deciding not to waste everyone's time on it. And then I got out of the habit of regular writing. And then life events happened, and I had a few crazy-busy weeks, and then all of a sudden it's been three months since I posted. And if it's been three months, then it's really no big deal if I let it stretch to four...

Take, for example, the subject of my most recent post. It was the middle of Lent, and we were building a labyrinth. Yes, we finished it. Yes, I started writing about it. I even have pictures. But the urgency wasn't there to post it. The people at my congregation already knew it was finished, and my friends who read this blog from several states (or countries) away couldn't come and walk it with us, and all those wonderful people in the bloggers network probably wouldn't care less... Same goes for my monthly articles for the parish newsletter, and sermon manuscripts.

This is silly, I know, but I haven't been consciously thinking about it. It took a day like today, when I was going to be doing something that got cancelled and then I was going to be really busy doing another important thing that's probably not going to happen either and I unexpectedly have a free day to sit back and take few deep breaths and look around to see what I've been neglecting that I shouldn't be.

I never promised to be prolific, but I won't be living in a cave again.

two thousand feet of rock

The rector of my parish has, literally, laid out a challenge for the congregation during this season. He has asked us to build a labyrinth.

My congregation's worship space, offices, and school sit on twelve acres on the north side of San Antonio. Four of those acres are completely undeveloped, mostly grassy field with a few trees. There are "long-term master plan" sorts of plans for the land, but those plans are years away from fruition.

In the meantime, Chuck wants us to turn the field into a place for prayer.

So, last weekend, three of the ministers of the church went out and staked out the outline of an 11-circuit labyrinth, and placed survey flags in the ground to mark the width of each path. The idea is that the members of the church will bring rocks to line the paths.

The more I think about it, the more I think it's a great idea. For those of you unfamiliar with San Antonio, it's dry, rocky country. There are stones everywhere. You can pick them up off the side of a highway. You can dig down in your front yard about three inches and hit one. When we were placing the survey flags, it was a 50-50 proposition whether there would be enough soil in the right place you wanted to plant the flag for it to stick. Half the time you would go to put the flag in the ground and would hit (you guessed it) rock.

The point is, everybody can participate. Maybe you don't have extra money for world missions or extra time to volunteer, but everybody can find a rock or two... or five, or ten.

My rough estimate of how much we'll need: a little over two thousand feet of rock.

If you're in San Antonio, come particiapte. Bring us a rock, 12 inches long (roughly the size of an american football), head out to the field on the southwest corner of our church grounds, and place your rock next to one of the survey flags.


Current count: 39 rocks.

stay tuned.

The Golden Compass review

I've been asked to renew my series (called "margin smudges" in our parish newsletter) in which I review and comment on books I'm reading, and specifically to start with Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. At the time of the request, I had neither seen the recently-released movie nor, more importantly, read the book on which it's based. Having now done so (thanks to a loaner copy from Betsy Rupe to get me started), I can with a little more integrity add my two cents to the reviews that have already been published.

The Golden Compass is the first of a three-volume work entitled His Dark Materials, and as such is only the opening to a longer story. It is remarkably well written and makes an enjoyable read. The characters are believable and real, and Pullman has great storytelling skill. The movie is also well done, and actually does the first novel some justice. The acting is superb, the CGI and special effects are seamless, and other than what I thought were a few poor casting decisions (Sir Ian McKellen as Iorek? Really?), it's a thoroughly enjoyable film.

As you've probably heard already, though, it's not the first book of the trilogy that's the problem; it's books two and three. Philip Pullman is an avowed atheist, and, as he told The Sydney Morning Herald point-blank in an interview, "My books are about killing God.” At the end of book three, his protagonists do just that (sort of).

The god that gets killed in Pullman's novel, though, bears almost no resemblance to the Living God we worship and serve. It's more the medieval concept of an old man with a long beard living in the sky who is out of touch with the world. He's described with weak limbs and rheumy eyes, a rather pathetic and almost pitiable figure.

Pullman's real target isn't God, exactly, but rather "the church." The overarching point he makes is that the church wants to control behavior, and thus robs humanity of our freedom and robs life of all beauty. Pullman is particularly savage in his criticism of the church's desire to control human sexuality. The exercise of sexual expression, for Pullman and his characters, is something to be celebrated, a way to grow and mature, to expand human consciousness. Thus puberty is the beginning of self-knowledge and intellectual curiosity. To quote Hanna Rosen's review in Atlantic Monthly, "To [Pullman], the loss of sexual innocence is not a tragedy; it’s the springboard to a productive and virtuous adulthood."

While many Christian writers have condemned the books and the movie, it may be surprising to note that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (and a formidable theologian), is an admirer of Pullman’s and a supporter of his books. Williams even spoke in favor of using the books as a text for religious education in England, for he contends that Pullman's negative portrayal of the church amounts to an attack on dogmatism and the oppressive abuse of religion, not on Christianity itself. (It’s interesting to note that the person and teaching of Jesus are not a part of Pullman’s construct called “The Authority.”)

It’s unfortunately true that there’s been plenty of oppression in the history of the church, and plenty of attempts to control human behavior, even going so far as abuse and violence, so Pullman’s argument finds an easy mark.

Where the rubber meets the road on this kind of review is: will I take my son to see the movie, and will I read the book to him (or let him read it himself)? And a close corollary is: do I think the children of the parish should read it?

My answer is entirely dependent on the maturity of the child. I’m all for engaging children with deep and meaningful questions about life, spirituality, and morality. But the main point of the book requires a certain level of maturity to grasp. Any child able to read with comprehension will understand that the books are firmly against “God” and “The Church.” I’d want to wait until the reader has sufficient maturity to be able to question how Pullman’s world and ours differ before tackling these stories.

To pre-pubescent children, much of the subtext about sexual expression may also be missed, which may be an argument for letting them read the books early, depending on how you look at it. The whole "heroine loses her virginity and thereby saves the whole multi-world universe from impending doom" ending seemed... pointedly overdone, and fairly ridiculous. I saw it coming from at least three hundred pages away and kinda hoped that particular train wreck wasn't going to happen. Alas.

I will, eventually, encourage my boys to read these books. But I’ll wait until I think they’re ready, and until I judge that I can engage them in the important conversations that the book begins.

$6000 per pound

The baby bills are starting to come in. Some of them are enormous. I'm keeping a running tally, and the current cost of bringing Zachary home from the hospital: approximately six thousand dollars a pound. That's just the hospital cost... individual bills for the physicians will arrive separately, or so they told me.


Several thoughts come to mind.


First, it really doesn't matter what the bill is; a child is priceless.


Second, it's odd to incur such a huge bill for services that I didn't deliberately choose to pay. Sure, you sign a waiver and agreement for treatment and all that legalese when you check in to the hospital. Then your wife is in labor and they want to give her IV drips of drugs you've never heard of, and then she eventually requires an emergency c-section (read: major abdominal surgery), and then they whisk the baby off to the NICU because he's not breathing properly and keep him there for four days, and meanwhile, your beloved's life is saved, not once, but twice, by an attentive nurse, OB, and anesthesiologist. Nowhere in this process do you say, or even think, "hey, wait a second, what's this going to cost?"


Third, I'm thankful we are insured. It's actually rather good insurance. There are a few ways that the church takes care of our clergy, and the insurance coverage is one of them. So my out of pocket cost will be a fraction of that. A surprisingly small fraction.


But what if I wasn't insured? I guess we might have tried to deliver the baby somewhere cheaper. (But if we hadn't been at a first-class medical facility, my wife and son would have died. No kidding.) Or we would have sucked it up and paid it ourselves, which would have exhausted all our savings, and we're people who are living privileged lives. There are plenty of people in America who don't have health insurance, can't afford it, or don't qualify. Gordon wrote about this recently, with more eloquence than I have at my disposal at the moment.


No matter how you look at it, the health care system in this country needs fixing. And what irks me is that this is an election year coming up. Which means we're going to hear a lot of hot air about health care and prescription drugs for seniors (because seniors vote in large numbers), and not a whole heck of lot about addressing the difficult issues of who's going to pay for it and overhauling the system. And then the new administration will take a while to settle in, and...

New Daddy Brain = no blog posts

There are some things in life that affect you whether or not you see them coming. The syndrome I cheerfully call "New Daddy Brain" falls into that category.

You know the symptoms: heavy-lidded eyes, rumpled clothing, coffee mug permanently attached to left hand (regardless of how hot or how empty the mug is), a tendency to wander into rooms and then look around in bemusement, wondering why you're there...

I pitched up to Bible study a couple of days ago without my Bible, which is usually considered an essential piece of equipment if you're the one leading the study. Hey, at least I've managed to remember to wear pants every day this week.

And it's not like there hasn't been material worthy of reflection in my life. Declining numbers in the church, comic strips, hospital experiences (mine and those of others), reflections on new babies, letters from loved ones... all of them flit past, then go get trapped somewhere in the cobwebs of my mind, possibly never to return. I'm aware that I've promised you, dear readers, a wrap-up to the Sabbath set of posts, and also some reflections on the trip to Tanzania. Stay tuned. I'm giving myself another half a week to climb far enough out of the fog to function without a coffee IV drip, and then I'll get to some of this backlog.

Here he is....

Home from the hospital!