Hi Wilson !

I have a grandson.

By now most of you know that Wilson Reid Gilhooly was born on November 15th. to my daughter Emily and her husband Matt. Here Wilson is figuring out how to use eyeballs.

This is the first male baby and family member I have ever known. I have two younger sisters. Katy and I have two daughters. Then came wonderful Rowan our granddaughter. 

Now Wilson. 

A boy child with 25% of my DNA. What to make of him? Changing boy diapers is more complicated than changing girl diapers, I've discovered.

But is there anything I can teach him, in a grandfatherly sort of way, about being a man?

At 70, I suspect I am not going to have much of an influence on his life. I can't take him fishing. I really don't know how to do the outdoors. I could take him to church; though I'm not sure how impressive that would be to, say, a seven year old.

George Bean at St. John's Lynchburg once advertised me to Episcopal bishops as a "man's man". That was the first and only time I have ever been called a "man's man." (I supposed he was speaking in code to his colleagues, suggesting I wasn't gay, and so improving my employability in the early 80's.)

A family friend has said I am  "a good father for daughters." I worked my way through graduate school as a night watchman in a woman's dormitory. I served at two women's colleges as a Roman Catholic priest. Those were important moments. As an Episcopal priest I worked at the then all male Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University, but those didn't make as much of an impression.

Maybe since even Kroger lists "gender fluid/non-binary" as survey categories, this shouldn't be a question.

But around the time Wilson was born Robert Bly died. I own a copy of his Iron John - A Book About Men. I had parishoners who went off into the woods and banged on drums. "I want men to be better fathers than their own fathers were," Bly wrote. His second wife was a Jungian therapist, and Bly, the poet, anti-war activist, constructed a "mythopoetic"  world of initiation and imitation which borrowed from the Grimm brothers.

My copy was a Christmas gift from the Rev. Nancy Tiederman in 1990 and was inscribed "to a dear male friend and sensitive fellow".

The same month Wilson was born Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog" came to Netflix. The title is biblical; from Psalm 22, 21: "rescue my soul from the sword, my loneliness from the grip of the dog." The anti-hero among the dysfunctional men in the tale is Phil, the obvious dog from the title. Yet he too is so lonely. By now you have probably seen the movie and have your own analysis. If only he and they had better fathers than their own.

Maybe I will leave Wilson something. I could bequeath him my copy of Walt Whitman's  "Leaves of Grass", with the hope he will see what it means to be a bright romantic. "Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God's name." (Song of Myself #48)

I could give him my copy of my candidate for the Great American Novel, Moby DIck.  There WIlson would learn the force and beauty and horror of Old Testament America, the dark romanticism of biblical kings and bastard slaves. We are, says Ishmael, " a crew chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals. . . reckless and mediocre". We will chase Job's whale, the white whale, with our godly technology in hand, and be led by mad men to death.   An unlikely man is resurrected to tell all.

Though, for his first Christmas this year, I'm giving Wilson a "Paw Patrol" t-shirt. He'll look good in it. (Rowan loves that series. She likes Skye, but always imitates Marshall, who, whenever he tumbles over something in Adventure Bay, gets up and says with a sigh, "I'm okay".) Remember Wilson, "No job's too big, no pup's too small - Paw Patrol".  I'll have Rowan remind you.

For this Christmas, Wilson has given me these memories and this meditation. 

Thanks Emily and Matt. Thanks Wilson.

 

The End of The Sabbatical - Retirement Year Two

"For must not someone of us say something about God, about eternal life, about the majesty of grace in our sanctified being; must not someone of us speak of sin, the judgement and the mercy of God" - Karl Rahner

St. Peter's - Eagle Harbor, Michigan

My counselor thought I should take a sabbatical from organized religion. So I did.  

I had been "dis-appointed" by the performance of the Episcopal church and my friends at Good Shepherd as I headed out the door. (Which is a nice way of saying I was angry and depressed and feeling old.) So she said, "look, you've never been a big fan of the institution. If you were, you wouldn't have left the priesthood. So just take a sabbatical from all that and then see how you feel."

Given COVID, that wasn't too hard.  I wasn't a fan of ZOOM church. In 2020 there was no need for my old fashioned summer supply work at St.Peter's in Eagle Harbor. So for 18 months I was "spiritual without being religious." But in the spring of 2021 there was the usual letter from the senior warden lining up clergy for the season.

My heart was strangely warmed.

St Peter's has a funny, ad-hoc organization.
 

In 1945 the Protestant Episcopal Church restarted services in the Keweenaw in the Knights of Pythias school house in Eagle Harbor. The Very Rev. William Burritt, who was based in Calumet, began inviting clergy from other churches to take some of the Sunday services there during the summer. The worshipers wanted a church. The Norwegian Methodists in Calumet weren't using theirs. So, they traded it to Bishop Herman Page of the Diocese of Northern Michigan for a donated dollar.

Another dollar leased a lot in Eagle Harbor from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. The building was trucked to a little rise where Michigan #26 turns east along the harbor beach. St. Peter's-by-the-Sea would become a community chapel serving various faiths, with an Episcopal communion service at 9:00 am and an interdenominational service at 11:00 am.

So it is today. Lutherans and Episcopalians run the place using Episcopal and Lutheran clergy for the 9:00am BCP service. (The president of Finlandia College is a Lutheran pastor and he was up next this year.) A second worship service follows at 10:30 am using the UCC "New Century Hymnal" for the ritual. This one has hymns and an organist. There are about 15 people at each service, with a coffee hour in between. The Bishop visits once a year.

You're not so much appointed to St. Peter's as you audition. You don't so much apply for the job; you're recruited into it. Indy's Canon Sue Reid left for Seattle and her weeks there came open. Retired Reverends Rick Draper and Sherry Mattson thought I ought to succeed her. The folks liked me. I moved from one week in the season to two.

It's not hard work. Mostly its a vacation for Katy and I. (If you squint, Katy is in the middle of the photo below of Great Sand Bay.) Plus the dog. And sometimes our daughter. And her husband.

It's old fashioned. People of some means in the '50's with real leisure time scrounged up a couple of dollars (literally) and built a church. They kept it running. Maybe out of habit. Probably because of intertwined family histories. Perhaps a beautiful place just makes it easier to believe in God and calls for worship. A place where someone will collect wild flowers and put them in hammered copper vases every Sunday morning.

It's bottom up. Let's find someone to talk about God. Let's find someone to break bread and maybe bake something. We'll leave the basement hall open for the AA meeting. 

That's it. Forget the incense. Forget the funny clothes. Forget the complaints about colonialism in the hymnal and the undisciplined use of pronouns. Forget about every year's ambitious plan to remake a national church.

I have been "officially" made a priest twice in my life. So, I like Bishops; the servants of the servants of God. But I was trained in an era when your theological education insisted that you see that ministry began as pastoral care. Before there was an office, there was a function. 

You weren't assigned a position by the monarch. You weren't appointed to an office. You were called to meet a need. A community needs you to do, in some particular time and place, what you cannot not do.

"To the full extent of my power, because I am a priest, I wish from now on to be the first to become conscious of all that the world loves, pursues, and suffers; I want to be the first to seek, to sympathize, and to suffer; the first to open myself out and sacrifice myself - to become more widely human and more nobly of the earth than any of the world's servants - Teilhard de Chardin

Here are the keys. (They are in a bowl in the priest's cottage.) Open the church up. Gather the people. (St. Peter's has a church bell rescued from an old copper mine school that gets rung each Sunday.) Tell the story. (Tell the story of Jesus and tell the story of this place.) Break the bread. Feed the many. (The last few years the gospel assigned had me preaching on miraculous feedings from a few loaves and fishes.) All of us would like you to do that because we asked around and we think you would be good at that here.

The end of the sabbatical.

I will address a Lutheran adult forum in the fall on the topic of local politics. My thanks to an old campus ministry colleague for the invitation.  I was asked to take a summer Sunday service this year at Our Savior Lutheran. I would have loved to, and I really appreciated the pastor's invitation!  But I was already committed to take a couple of services at Eagle Harbor; services, which it turns out, were to mark the end of my sabbatical.