"Dis-appointed"

 

Retirement has been going pretty well, thanks. Though I didn’t quite feel retired until after the November 2019 elections, when I won my West Lafayette district with 72% of the vote. The Democrats won 8 of 9 city council seats. That exceeded our expectations, even though the party’s “numbers guy” had said we might win them all. (We lost the ninth seat by five votes.) I will be council president again in 2020.

That job, plus babysitting granddaughter Rowan, has become my retirement gig. I also keep the house tidy.

Actually, the first two weeks of my retirement were exceptional!  My last Sunday service on August 4^th was remarkable in that so many of Good Shepherd’s alums traveled great distances to come and say “thanks”. I got to quote Kierkegaard once more, and reiterate why it was the church mounts a ministry in higher education. Gerry McCartney played folk hymns from our shared past. Carolyn Cooper snuck “Stairway to Heaven” in at communion.

The next weekend it was off to Chicago to see Molly’s bungalow renovations and the musical “Come From Away”. On the 18^th, Katy hosted a retirement party for me at the Lafayette Country Club and gave a heartfelt speech reflecting on the accident and intention of our 34 years in West Lafayette. It could serve as a primer on the meaning of community and its care, its maintenance. (Her text appears above on this blog page.)

Then things took a turn.

My retired University of Chicago colleague Sam Portaro had an excellent phrase for the fate of college work in the Episcopal Church, and perhaps in all of the old Protestant mainline; we have been "dis-appointed". 

Disappointed.

The church treasurer called to ask Katy and I if we had heard the news. What news, we asked? The Bishop had appointed Hilary Cooke to Good Shepherd. As the interim, I asked?  Nope, as chaplain.

Huh. That’s disappointing.

Hilary might have been a good choice, had she applied for the job, and if the search committee had picked her, and if the Bishop (perhaps even after nudging the search in her direction) approved her; that would have been swell.
 

BUT 

I was bitterly disappointed professionally that the Diocese of Indianapolis denied Good Shepherd the experience of developing a parish profile and running a national search for a new chaplain. A much weaker Good Shepherd was permitted that work 34 years ago. Three times over my last 18 months at Good Shepherd I had to have a "first" conversation on my retirement with some new member of diocesan staff. Each time I was told by this newest person that Good Shepherd would be treated "just like a parish". I assume this speech was not their own invention. The need for expediency at the end was a problem of the diocese's own making.

The condescension reported by the Good Shepherd leadership in this process is an embarrassment. The word "process" is a misnomer. That the parish was told it was to add $10,000 to Hilary's diocesan salary package, on top of recent program cuts, without any negotiation, is a misery. Add that to the aborting of the search process and this represents an organizational downgrade. Good Shepherd has lost any independence it might have had in selecting personnel or controlling its finances. Add to that Linda Johnson’s pressured early retirement at IU, and you have a general institutional downgrade of the higher education ministry.

New directions, usually cheaper directions, are anticipated in a declining church. But not without any consultation. With anybody. Ever. That’s disappointing. No wonder Sean Cox, my last diocesan transition officer, came to my final service, seemed nervous, said nothing, and left early. He knew. He has now left the diocese.

I was bitterly disappointed personally that I had to spend a Sunday morning and afternoon explaining to friends in texts or on the phone that in spite of the highly choreographed simultaneous announcement at Good Shepherd and St. John's of Hilary's appointment, no one (not Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, Hilary Cooke, Sean Cox, the search head Kevin Edmundson, or the senior warden Don Lynam) thought I should be given a heads up about this significant change in approach, whatever their instructions from the church bureaucracy. That's insulting.

Worse, I had to tell the senior warden to please not tell people that we will be going to St. John's for the next two years. Katy and I cannot attend a church that spent nearly a million dollars renovating their organ/worship space and simultaneously closed their food pantry. We will be Lutherans at Christmas.

The duplicity. The incompetence. The imperiousness. I said as much to Don Lynam (Senior Warden) and Bill Hughes (Chair of the Diocesan Higher Education Commission). I thought I might just be able to hand on what I had been given 34 years ago before some inevitable dis-appointment. I could not. No kindness. No grace. No apology.

On to my next life.  I still feel important. The pension checks come regularly. There was a Christmas bonus. The family is well. Katy is teaching at Purdue. But I am disappointed. Disappointed in the institution I matured in, though I know institutions can't love you. Disappointed in people I thought were friends.