Slow Fade - Retirement Year Three

 

The sign itself is more than a dozen years old. 

In 2006, the Episcopal Church, in a burst of energy, took over the old Church of Christ Scientist south of the West Lafayette high school. Dr. Jack Kelley decided we needed a presence at both ends of Good Shepherd's new street. So Jack went ahead and ordered two "Welcome" signs for the busy intersections of Meridian & Grant and Meridian & Northwestern. Today they look shabby.

The Lambeth Conference is taking place in England. A decennial assembly of bishops of the Anglican Communion, it was postponed by Covid from 2018. Lambeth started talking about sex in 1998. It is still talking about sex.

The Episcopal Church held its General Convention this summer in Baltimore. I have no idea what it did. I expect I would agree with whatever it did. But the news from the convention is that there is no news from the convention.

The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis left the Interchurch Center near Butler University to rent office space in downtown Indianapolis from Christ Church Cathedral. I am sure both parties benefited from the contraction. Our cathedral is next door to another iconic memorial, Monument Circle.

I wonder, three years out from my retirement (my last Sunday service at Good Shepherd was August 4, 2019) why this fade doesn't bother me more. It does bother me; it concerns me about as much as the Chicago White Sox's once promising team fading to .500 this season. Was it the injuries? Is Tony LaRussa too old to manage?

Part of the shrug is my being disappointed by the diocese at the end of my professional career. That ended any meaningful allegiance to the local institution. Another is the lack of political energy the church seems able to muster in the face of the rise of Christian nationalism. Without it, the church becomes a hobby, a therapy, a performance. Their righteous Jesus claims to save babies and runs for school board. Our non-binary Jesus is working on "they/them" pronouns and self-care. Which is nice; but then what? We leave 'tikkum olam", the repair of the world, to Jewish Democrats.

The Meridian St. signs are an embarrassment. They are public facing. They are faded. They are bent. They are metaphor. They point to a lack of energy or awareness in the church, as well as to a building down the street. Whatever.

 

 

Happy Fortieth Anniversary To Us !

"Whoever you are now, I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem. 

I whisper with my lips close to your ear . . . I love none better than you"

 

- To You

   Walt Whitman 

 

 

Randolph-Macon Woman's College-1980

Pretty cute, huh? 

 

Katy and I met because her sister Mary was a good Roman Catholic. That, and the Holy Cross Lynchburg rectory had a basement big enough to store student belongings over the summer. The rest is a really romantic story more than forty years long.

 

Bunder Home - June 26, 1982

 

If you'd like something salacious, something that could go between the glossy covers of romance fiction, I could tell it to you that way. If you prefer a lecture on cognitive restructuring, those are in print. 

 

" -Who wields a poem huger than the grave?

from only Whom shall time no refuge keep

though all the weird worlds must be opened?

)Love"

but if the living dance upon dead minds

ee cummings

Lexington, VA  Maury River 1983

But it's poetry really. All the intimacies of forty years. Magical. Silly. Remarkable. Desirable. Predictable. Unpleasant and unwelcome. Irretrievable. Comfortable. Spiritual. Kids. Grand-kids. If you put it out there like a history, it starts to seem a little common. Ordinary, with a few interesting and juicy bits, but still common. It feels better as a poem.

  

I sent this to Katy a long time ago and she said we should reread it on our 38th. anniversary.

 

 "Two lovers by a moss-frown spring:

They leaned soft cheeks together there,

Mingled the dark and sunny hair,

And heard the wooing thrushes sing.

O budding time !

O love's blest prime !

Two wedded from the portal stept:

The bells made happy carollings,

The air was soft as fanning wings,

White petals on the pathway slept.

O pure-eyed bride !

O tender pride !

Two faces o'er a cradle bent:

Two hands above the head were locked;

These pressed each other while they rocked,

Those watched a life that love had sent.

O solemn hour !

O hidden power !

Two parents by the evening fire:

The red light fell about their knees

On heads that rose by slow degrees

Like buds upon the lily spire.

O patient life !

O tender strife !

The two still sat together there,

The red shone about their knees;

But all the heads by slow degrees

Had gone and left that lonely pair.

O voyage fast !

O vanished past !

The red light shone upon the floor

And made the space between them wide:

They draw their chairs up side by side.

Their pale cheeks joined and said, "Once more !"

O memories !

O past that is !

Sweethearts Always 

George Eliot

Family Portrait 1988

I kept trying to work this song into my daughters wedding playlists. I don't think it ever made it. As an acknowledgment of the thought though, they took me to a "Florence and the Machine" concert on Northerly Island once on my birthday.

 

"This fantasy, this fallacy, this stumbling stone

Echoes in a city that's long overgrown

Your heart is the only place that I call home

Can I be returned? You can.

You can. We can. 

 

Just keep following 

The heartlines on your hand 

Just keep following 

The heartlines on your hand 

 

Keep it up. I know you can.  

Just keep following

The heartlines on your hand 

 

What a thing to do

What a thing to choose

But know, in some way, I'm there with you

Up against the wall on a Wednesday afternoon. 

Just keep following 

The heartlines on your hand 

Just keep following 

The heartlines on your hand 

Keep it up. I know you can.  

Just keep following

The heartlines on your hand 

'Cause I am."

 

Heartlines

- Florence Welch/Paul Epworth

Town & Gown - Mother's Day 2022

Pretty cute, huh?

Welcome Meredith !

 

 

My eldest daughter, Molly, has our newest grandchild, Meredith. Meredith Emily Palmer (5lbs 9oz) was born on March 16th. That was about a month early. Though as you can tell from the photo above, she's caught up! "Hey, did you know you can see EVERYTHING when you lift your head up?"

 

 She fits right in.

 

 

 

Rowan, Meredith, and Wilson

 

Poor Rowan never got her own blog post. I was still busy writing sermons when she was born.

 

But what I would say to Meredith applies to both my granddaughters. I have absolutely no anxiety about how your life will run. Only wonder. Your grandmother is beautiful and bright and talented; a woman of distinction ! Her daughters, your mothers, share those traits. So you will be well loved, well educated, and allowed a creativity that is increasingly sublimated in our culture to a desire for security and an expectation of production. That's lucky!

(Now, if you become accountants, that's okay too. Maybe you'll have cool hobbies :)

 

Molly apparently caught Andrew whispering to his baby daughter that she shouldn't worry about doing anything too practical with her life.

Amen.

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.

 

 

 

Shhh! Don't Wake the Mainline.

A recent AP News article noted that the 2020 election seemed to have passed by the mainline Protestant churches. “We don’t endorse or oppose a particular candidate, but we do try to uphold moral principles and values that are key to our faith,” said (Episcopal Presiding Bishop) Curry." 

How very 2016. 

Or 1856. This from the "Crusty Old Dean" Tom Ferguson

in 1856, the General Convention refused to say anything about the violence or about how slavery was tearing the country apart.  It issued the following statement: the Church has “nothing to do [with] party politics, with sectional disputes, with earthly distinctions, with the wealth, the splendor, and the ambition of the world.”

Would it have been okay to vote for Jefferson Davis? Many famous Episcopalians supported secession and slavery. Could we have opposed Chancellor Hitler by name? "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." Mussolini made Catholicism the official state religion.

True, the "mainline" has relatively so few members, that it is already largely politically irrelevant. (The AP also notes that the historic St. John's - Lafayette Square presidential photo op was the rare exception; it moved the Episcopal Church to outrage.) But how much worse does Donald Trump and the current incarnation of the Republican party have to be before what's left of the old Protestant church says "no". We all love to quote Bonhoeffer from "The Church and the Jewish Question". 

There are thus three possibilities for action that the church can take vis-à-vis the state: first (as we have said), questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does. Second is service to the victims of the state's actions. The church has an unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. "Let us work for the good of all." These are both ways in which the church, in its freedom, conducts itself in the interest of a free state. In times when the laws are changing (e.g. Gleichschaltung), the church may under no circumstances neglect either of these duties. The third possibility is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself.

Then satisfied, we stop.

I know of one exception to this general rule; Nadia Bolz-Weber, aka the Sarcastic Lutheran. She has endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket. 

As a woman of faith I am supporting the Biden Harris ticket because I believe it is foundationally patriotic to do so. It is to say, I will hold this country’s feet to the fire until we finally resemble in reality what we have always claimed to be in theory. I will not abandon this country to those who would wrap their bigoted self-interest in the flag and call it “God’s will”.

Amen.

I understand why a fragile church made even more so by the pandemic  would want to avoid conflict, to exercise self-care, to husband its resources, to stay clean and safe. Even my limited experience with politics tells me it is a mess. You can ask me about it sometime.

 

But  I wouldn't want to wake you.

How's Retirement ? (One year)

 

 

How's retirement? Better or worse than it was at six months? 

 

Better! Turns out the timing of my retirement was pretty good. It was so nice of everybody to stop going to work at just about the same time I did.

 

 

- COVID 19 has become the story of the last six months of retirement. My relative inactivity in retirement has contrasted with Katy's hyper-activity at Food Finders during the same period. God bless her. The churches may have been closed, but Jesus was still out there.

 - Because of the corona virus the City Council President has learned WebEx (city), GoToMeeting (county), and ZOOM (everybody else). I have learned to set the computer in just the right way so that my old campaign posters show in the background over my left shoulder. Resolution # 6-20 - "A Resolution Waiving Certain Procedures and Formalities During (a) Disaster Emergency Pursuant to I.C. 10-15-3-17 and Authorizing the President of the Common Council To Act For and On Behalf Of the Council If Required" gave me the power of a god.

-  "ZOOM" Church? It feels funny. Institutional religion? Well, I don't seem to miss it as much as I thought I would. Which is probably a good thing, since it is hard to imagine what will remain of mainline Protestantism after the pandemic. Want worship? Click the link for the Washington National Cathedral. Need a sermon? Pick a podcast. One town, one church, one parson, will disappear like your local post office under Trump. The Hamilton parody that went viral on YouTube is in perfect, precocious Anglicana style. But King George never came back. There is a plague destroying the poor. Black lives matter. The republic is run by a narcissist and the oligarchs. Do we need cute?
 

 

- Here's the place for cute. We have a new puppy; "Darby" (Derbyshire - Cavalier King Charles spaniels should have English names.) I love my wife, so I love our dog. (That's Copper Harbor, MI in the background.) We went to Eagle Harbor this summer, but I didn't have to work because St. Peter's was closed.

 

- I still babysit Rowan. Isn't she cute?


 

Wilting

Rev. - BBC - Season #1 Ep. 2 "Jesus is Awesome"

 

The Rev. Canon Jeremy Haselock is the retired vice-dean and and precentor of Norwich Cathedral. He is also a Chaplain to the Queen. (This introduction takes me to a level of Anglican esoterica from which I may never escape!)

Canon Haselock wrote in the Summer 2020 edition of The Anglican Digest :

" I adore our church. I see it wilting before my eyes, 

       failing to rise to the occasion, failing to realize there is an occasion to rise to,                 It has become obsessed with process, terrified by risk, incapable of hearing 

dissenting voices. It has become a bureaucracy . . . "

Wilting.

Canon Haselock is reflecting on the Church of England's response to covid-19 epidemic, but it also applies here. In spite of our attempts to resurrect the "Jesus movement", the Episcopal church is known more for our religious aesthetic and an emphasis on self-care. So, like museums, theaters, and gymnasiums, we are closed. 

I am embarrassed that we are non-essential. 

I agree, the church is not the building. But what if you wanted to go to a place made holy by decades of celebrated births, marriages, and deaths, a place consecrated much as the bread and wine is by, time after time after time, retelling the story and repeating the gestures of Jesus of Nazareth? What if you wanted to go there and pray for the plague to pass by your house, only to find that house locked up?

We have spent the last fifty years moving the Holy Eucharist to the center of the church's liturgical life. Did we mean that? If "Zoom" morning prayer and an on-line coffee hour is really sufficient to sustain a community, why open back up at all? Sell the building. Stay "virtual". Tell the clergy to go with "Webex" office hours. Let somebody else take homemade peach ice cream to a sheltered cancer patient.

The church could have redeemed itself by dramatically increasing the number of hours it opened its' food pantry, or hosted National Guard staffed mobile "pop-up pantries", as did the Church Women United here in town. The Episcopal church might have done that, if it hadn't earlier in the winter closed its pantry in search of a more "relational" model of helping the poor which unfortunately never materialized. Our local food bank moved an astonishing 990,000 lbs. of food out into a community where the April 4th. unemployment rate was up 7,748.3% from last year.

I grew up a Roman Catholic, regaled by largely apocryphal stories of priests rushing into burning buildings to save the Host, and inspired by the mostly true stories of Father Damien tending lepers and Mother Teresa feeding beggars. A website link to "Heart/Soul/Mind Yoga" is good. A prayer service on "Alexa" is handy. But isn't there somebody who sacrificed something for someone? 

Some churches will break now; will literally go broke. Our diocese has a large endowment, so it will probably just wilt. It will loan money to drooping congregations. College work is close to my heart. The Indiana University campus ministry sent out a letter looking to raise funds to cover a 55% reduction in its diocesan support, and recruiting new board members willing to work without interim leadership. That ministry will sag.

If you have never watched the BBC's Rev (Hulu, Prime, Britbox) with Tom Holland and Olivia Coleman, you have missed a fantastic satire of a particular church, a disappearing vocation, and a flagging institution which may not be long for this world. I wish the Rev. Adam Smallbone would have had a chance to deal with the pandemic. The response we picked cries out for parody.

 

The Rev. Peter Bunder Funeral Bulletin

What  did you do during your quarantine? My wife went off to work feeding the poor in 16 counties in north central Indiana. I decided to meditate on what would happen if, because my wife went off to feed the poor in 16 counties in north central Indiana, she brought the covid 19 virus home, and I died.

This is what I came up with; my funeral service bulletin. (Click on the content and it will get bigger.) My family was not particularly amused. As I do not  plan on dying tomorrow, I suspect there will be changes throughout the years. Some details will have to be filled in. (Should my daughters or their children read the lessons?) But on the whole, I am pleased with this forward looking memory. Here are some things that caught my eye.

I always loved that Mary Olson liturgical dance banner. I always thought Dr. Olson's story was an inspirational one. You have no idea how pleased with myself I was when I took Al Allen's Good Shepherd drawing and added a red door. Sharon Park's "mentoring community" was my gospel.

I hope she won't mind, but I would invite Bishop Cate lead the service. We were not close personal friends, but she was my bishop for twenty years and, with Tom Wood, a great benefactor of campus ministry. Credit is due her. You can thank the University of Toronto/University of St. Michael's College for the quotes on the inside left page. It was a great place to do theology. Some of you may remember when priests studied theology.

I never warmed to our standard liturgical expressions. I would like to thank Mike Bloy and John Van Brederode for showing me a way through the several pretensions of the Episcopal church.

Try and write your own obituary sometime! The Basilian Fathers motto is from Ps. 119,66. "Teach me good judgment and knowledge: for I believe your commandments." (KJV). I may be  giving my family short shrift in here. (Can you hear the chorus of "what's new"?) They can tell their stories at my wake. Obviously, they will write the definitive version. FYI: I put my will and the CPG's "Getting Organized After Losing a Loved One" in my far right bottom desk  drawer :)

NETFLIX "Prodigal Daughter"

This is a WONDERFUL episode. Makes me wish I was still doing "Friday School"!
NETFLIX "Easy" Prodigal Daughter (Season #2 Episode #6 2017) - IMDb - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7695360/   
If only this were just a parody of our history instead of local and contemporary.
"Does no one else think this is insane?" Salvation through a food pantry :)