Archive
of Letters to My Friends:
The
Pierced People
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The
Pierced People
May
2002
By
the Rev. Jon Rieley-Goddard
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The
Reverend took this pic from the courtyard
at The Cathedral of Hope.
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Dear
friends,
When my father died, I flew to California
with my wife, the
Reverend. We attended the
funeral with the rest of the family. I wore
my white cleric’s collar and black clergy shirt,
and I sat with the people, seeking to be ministered
to. My brother, the eldest, read a scripture.
I sat with the people in silence. When bad things
happen, we are forced to make choices.
The collar? I could have worn
a tie, and would have fit right in, but I wanted
to honor a precious memory, from the time several
years prior, when I had attended my grandmother’s
funeral. I wanted to claim what I had won through
hard work and my father’s blessing.
“You’ll do that someday,”
my father had said to me as we filed out of
the chapel behind grandma’s coffin.
“No,” he said, “you’ll conduct
services just like this.”
I was about a year from making
a big change, of going from being a copy editor
on a daily newspaper to being a seminary student.
I had already been turned down by one seminary
and was planning a huge trip out East to visit
four Presbyterian seminaries. Each day I would
have an anxiety attack over the audacity of
my plans, and each day I would cling to my growing
sense of call like a man overboard. I saw a
bumper sticker yesterday that describes how
I viewed myself at the time:
My
father was a man of few words, which made the
ones he spoke that much more important. His mother,
a Lithuanian emigrant who left the Old Country
at the age of 14 to be a domestic in Canada, was
similarly constructed. The words she spoke in
her thick accent were sometimes barbed and direct.
Once, when I had come home from university for
a week’s visit, full of heartache and fear from
problems in my personal life, she had told me,
“You haven’t suffered a teaspoonful yet.”
I was quite sure that I had
been choking down a reservoir’s worth of misery,
but she had been right. She may not have studied
at a university, but she knew someone who was
playing the victim when she saw him.
Cathy and I attended
a workshop a few weeks ago in Pittsburgh, at
East Liberty Presbyterian Church, which calls
itself The Cathedral of Hope. Both of us serve
churches that average 30 to 40 persons at Sunday
worship. East Liberty church could fit West
Avenue Presbyterian Church inside the vaulted
sanctuary and have room left for a Starbucks
in the back. It might strain a bit to swallow
up the three stories of Pierce Avenue church,
but not much.
So why did two pastors
caught up in urban ministry in small churches
pay lots of money to learn about how a big and
rich church had become bigger and richer? I
went because I go where the
Reverend goes, as often as I
can, and she went, as is so often the case,
because she could see possibilities where I
only felt an angry sort of envy.
My good friend John
Lentz told me, while I was still in seminary,
and had been married to Cathy for about a year,
“When that woman tells you something, you better
believe it.”
So there we were,
the Reverend
and the
Pastor, wandering around in
this massive church complex that the millions
of the Mellon family had built in 1938. I grew
up in a small Presbyterian congregation; Cathy
grew up in a large Presbyterian congregation.
Both of us know and love the small church. I
seriously wondered what we could possibly learn
at such a huge place that could be transported
to our current small settings. I trust the
Reverend, though, and so I went,
grumbling like those good people who had wandered
in the wilderness for 40 years.
The thing that I got
from attending the workshop at East Liberty
had to do with a special ministry that the church
does every Wednesday night. In an attempt to
live out the theme of Diversity,
which fuels the whole idea of The
Cathedral of Hope, there is
a sung prayer service every Wednesday night
that draws on a different community than the
well-heeled, typical Presbyterian persons whom
one would expect to worship there at 11 a.m.
on Sundays.
Cathy and I call these
other people the Pierced
People, and we have been interested
in them for a long time. In fact, we believe
that a church or denomination that can shed
its blinders and stop fighting over who can
and who can’t serve the Body of Christ would
explode in growth and vitality by simply embracing
these other sorts of people, who are hanging
back because they fear that they won't be welcome
or accepted. And our time at East Liberty showed
us what such an explosion would look like and
sound like and feel like.
We liked what we saw
and heard and felt.
Each mealtime, the
Reverend and I would sit on
the edges of the tables set up for the people
attending the workshop. After a few meals, we
found that we were sitting alone. What also
happened was that a rainbow of people who were
volunteering in the kitchen would see the empty
seats on the edge of things and would sit with
us to eat their meal when they were done in
the kitchen:
* An elderly woman
who had joined the church 9 years before and
was not, to
be honest, in favor of what
was going on.
* An elderly man who
worked as an usher. Deaf as a post, focused
on his work.
* A woman going through
a sex change and her/his partner.
* A pleasant older
woman, mother of four children who live in four
different American cities; she had been attending
East Liberty for just a little while.
* A young woman who
had been a cab driver for the past 14 years.
Cathy asked them all,
as they one by one graced us with their fellowship,
why they had started attending East Liberty
church and not some other.
The answers boiled
down to one theme:
I feel welcome here;
and it doesn’t seem to matter who I am, what
I do, and where I’ve been or am going, or what
my sexual orientation is, or how much money
I don’t have.
They were Pierced
People, followers of the One
who was pierced in the side, as he hung on a
Cross. They were people who have had a lot more
than a teaspoonful of suffering. They live in
a neighborhood of Pittsburgh that pulses with
life, with danger, and with the faceless fact
of urban indifference. They felt welcome at
that massive church. Many of them had gone to
the Wednesday night sung prayer services and
had entered the life of the congregation through
that door.
The Rev. Gail Ransom
is the minister who is responsible for these
Wednesday night services. She had been scheduled
to give a talk during the first day of the workshop,
but she was not able to, because her mother
had died overnight after being in a coma for
a week. She swapped times with another presenter
and talked to us on Wednesday night, leading
a special sung prayer vigil that had tremendous
power for us.
What had even more
power for me was her witness.
Where I had donned
my collar and sat in silence with the people,
seeking to be ministered to, on the occasion
of my father’s death, she had decided to go
ahead with her participation in the workshop.
More importantly, she was determined to be present
on Wednesday night for the regular, weekly service
of sung prayer. She explained to us that she
needed to be present for herself because, one,
she believed in what she was participating in,
and, two, she needed what that weekly service
could give her, and, three, she believed in
the premise that there must be no interruption
in the weekly gathering of the community at
prayer.
It has been said that
a lawyer who represents himself in a court case
has a fool for a client. I have said the same
of ministers who won’t shed the priestly role
but personally bury their dead instead of assuming
the role of grieving person.
Gail Ransom was simple
in her grief, and eloquent in her explanation.
She spoke even of her mother’s last breath without
tears. Her witness told me as much or more than
her presentation did about the ministry that
she so deeply believes in -- and her presentation
was flawless.
Each one of us is
different, and we are forced to make choices
when bad things happen. I will always remember
this colleague’s choices, with awe and respect,
and I will treasure the experience of accompanying
my wife, the Reverend,
on this journey among the rich and well-endowed.
They call it The
Cathedral of Hope. For good
reason.
Blessings
and peace to you,
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