Dear Readers,
I’m officiating at a wedding tomorrow, and St. David’s has two more weddings coming up in the next three months, a high number for us. Even more unusual for us: all three couples are twentysomethings entering their first marriages. Makes me wonder if Gen Z is bucking the trend set by Millennials and Gen X of delaying marriage? Probably not: probably just a blip in my tiny corner of God’s kingdom due to COVID cancellations; but these three blessed events have me ruminating.
Back when I was discerning ministry, I briefly wondered if I could become a hospice chaplain but decided I couldn’t bear “all death all the time” and needed weddings and baptisms to balance the dying parts of life. Fourteen years in, I’ve learned it never “balances.” (I’m also grateful that I chose parish ministry, or that it chose me/God called me to it.)
One unsubstantiated yet common phenomenon for pastors is going to a new church and then “everybody dies.” Sometimes it feels like people were waiting for the new pastor to show up; or, in my case as a brand-new deacon years ago, the rector had just left the country and his ordained-for-one-week assistant was suddenly in charge, and several people died.
Stepping into a stranger’s nightmare is something most pastors have trained for through “Clinical Pastoral Education.” My CPE took place in a hospital. When serving as chaplain on call I would be summoned to every death, and my regular assignments were oncology and hospice. I found this time in my life excruciating but learned how to enter a room with a family in crisis. Sometimes the person was someone I had spent time with before their death, but the longest I had known any of them was about a month.
We can’t train in advance for growing to love people in a church for a decade or more and then watch them slow down, grow frail, stop recognizing us. Deaths don’t get easier the longer I am a parish priest: they get harder. I’ve also found that deaths of elderly people aren’t “easier” than other deaths. None are easy. As my dear friend Dale once commented after serving the same church for years, losing parishioners now means losing friends.
When my parents died after years of sickness and growing frail, I thought, “at least I won’t have to go through that again for a long time.” I was wrong. I experience the same pain as I watch parishioners whom I love age. The pandemic coupled with my cancers meant not seeing some people for a year or more, and now seeing them again I’m struck by changes that weren’t as visible when seeing them once a week.
We talk about the tragedy of dying young, but as I grow older I have yet to find a “good” time for a person to die. Engaged couples talk about growing old together, and while that is beautiful, it can be terrible, too. Twenty years ago my mom needed back surgery that was going to change her life so she couldn’t do some things she loved anymore. Before her surgery, she and my father held each other and cried. A few months later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and within a few years, he became even frailer than she was. I will never forget that moment before their lives changed as they held each other and wept, both saying, “I feel worse for you.” Growing old together is beautiful and terrible. The “expected” way, the longed-for way of finding a partner who will grow old with us, is not an easy way.
Still: I love weddings and baptisms. The eyes of children coming up for the children’s sermon, excited to show me their sparkly shoes. Talking about deep issues with teenagers. Watching young adults grow into leadership roles and offer new ideas. And I love celebrating anniversaries of fifty and sixty years and seventy years. More, please.
Blessings, Elizabeth
What I’m Reading:
In my last issue I was on a fiction kick. The past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in memoir and nonfiction.
Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford: I’m reading this one now after hearing an interview with the author. I found her story compelling then, but reading the book I am horrified to learn that this crime and cover-up took place at an Episcopal school. Reading a chapter about her mother as a priest, her experience with church and her personal theology devastated me.
Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu: A woman takes home a blue chair she finds on the street and ruminates on her life and relationship with her parents. Especially poignant for me because like me, she had two mothers in addition to a father.
When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivors Journey Into the Realities of Gun Violence by Taylor Schumann: I picked this up because this writer is represented by the same agent who represents my work. I am impressed that she is willing to be an activist in the midst of a community that largely disagrees with her. St. David’s peeps: I donated my copy to the church library, so you can read it there. (CCPL doesn’t have it.)
Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours by Sarah Sentilles: A breathtaking memoir about foster care.
Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America’s Prisons by Elizabeth Greenwood: A book about couples who met while one was incarcerated. Fascinating aspect of mass incarceration genre.
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff. Loved this one because she was starting her first job after college around the same time I did.
Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Survival and Courage by Anne Lamott. Wanted to see what she had to say about late-in-life marriage but was most taken by her description of Sunday School with teenagers.
What I’m Writing:
David and Nathan and Building a Temple
And here’s an old essay about a wedding and a baptism from Modern Loss four years ago: This Funeral Changed How I Feel About Weddings
Wow! How has it been this long? You are such a great pastor. I remember when you visited my son in the hospital, and he wasn’t even a parishioner, but someone from another nearby parish who came to youth group. I love reading what you have to say, and considering how you think. So glad you publish
This is so relevant even to lay people (and non-church people), although I recognize that a clergyperson witnesses all that life and death and transition in multiple and intensified ways that others of us don't necessarily (unless we're in a medical or hospice-related field, which I'm not). I like the broad/long view you have developed over the years about appreciating everything from the baptisms to the old-age events and transitions.