So the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) came together last week in Minneapolis for our biannual assembly to handle the business, worship, prayer, and policy decisions dealing with our 11,000 congregations and agencies and mission endeavors and such as that. A lot of important–even profound–work gets done there, but what grabbed the headlines (such as they were) was the decision to revise our policies to provide for the ordination/rostering of homosexual clergy in faithful and monogamous relationships at the direction of the needs of the mission in each of our sixty-five synods, as we call it, ‘the local option.’
There are times when I’m so proud to be a pastor of the ELCA I could just shit (other times, of course, not no much), and this is one of them. So I bounced into the pulpit on Sunday and spent the last third of the sermon talking about it being one of those fools who rush in where angels fear to tread, explaining to the B’monters–who’d been hammered by a nasty fight over it a few years back–that what you’re afraid to speak of gains power and holds you in bondage. I told ‘em I was pleased with the outcome, and had worked as I could to help bring it about (nothing particularly startling there, since I’d shot my mouth off about it at our local synod assemblies over the years). Said I figured my gay friends over at Grace with whom I worked for four years would be having a big celebration, feeling, perhaps, like orphans finally invited to the table (a reference to earlier in the sermon talkin’ about the spiritual meaning of food ‘n Jesus). I didn’t bother ballyhooing the divinely incarnated justice of the decision ’cause there are people sittin’ out there who believe that the decision will take us straight to hell, and nothing good is served by taunting them.
Besides, as impressive as that victory was, it was made possible by an even more impressive (to my mind) decision beforehand which won’t make the headlines, to wit, first, the public admission that ‘this church’ is not of one mind on the matter and no position can claim the absolute will of God; and, second, that we’ll pledge ourselves to learn to live together with respect for our profound differences beyond the immediate policy decisions made. Once this passed with a 75% majority the way was cleared for debate and discernment on the current social statement on sexuality–which passed with exactly the 2/3 required of it, and then the policy decisions, passing with 55% the simple majority needed. I am in awe of our Presiding Bishop Mark ’stop it ‘n pray’ Hanson and all the leaders and ecclesiastical apparatchiks who have shepherded this thing for the last decade and a half, not to mention a deep respect for the work done by the glbt folks themselves, who know the steep price of justice.
‘Course, we ain’t the only denomination–or religion, for that matter–to be ravaged by the question. But I’m thinking that we might be unique in framing the issue not in the usual zero sum morality of winners and losers which devolves into slap ‘em down power politics, but framing it rather in terms of ‘moral hospitality’ (that’d be a keeneism), with the ultimate question being not so much ‘how shall we live?’ as ‘how shall we live together?’ And we said ‘we shall learn to live together with humility and respect.’ And that’s very, very cool ’cause ‘organized religion’ doesn’t exactly have a reputation for moral humility. But wow. Here you’ve got the 4.5 million member Body of Christ actually tryin’ to live like Jesus. And I are one of ‘em, singin’ ‘proud to be a luth-er-an’ to a country western guitar with a be-woppity-bop rhythm section.
I was chagrined to discover on the drive home that the be-woppity-bops were not an aural imagination, but a physical sensation playing out in my chest. Every so often the be-woppity-bops would break out in a riff. I spent 100 miles thinkin’ dude what the hell is that? And, too bad I left my nitro at home; where, eventually, the darling and I discussed ye olde hospital run (conveniently, three miles). But I figured they’d keep me over night, and I wanted to grill chicken. Besides, the be-woppity-bops were an unfamiliar thing to me and I figured if they were angina related they’d go away after some nitro hits. Which, natch, they didn’t, so that by 8:30 I was sitting in the exam room reacting to the er doc’s report: ‘goddamn it. I hate it when I’m right.’ Being hospitalized just pisses me off.
Cardio Wiz Nirm who has attended to the matters of my heart since they first popped up in 1988 popped in the next morning to announce that stress tests were useless, let’s just do an angioplasty and I’ll fix what I can while I’m in there. Sounds good to me. We’re gabbin’ and he says, “I just do not understand how you can still be alive,” which, while not a particularly comforting thing to hear from your cardiologist, does lead to a brief discussion about God. He’s a Sikh from India; says it must be God keeping me alive. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘God working through you. So don’t fuck it up.’ CW never quite knows what to do with me, ’specially given the holy men stereotypes of his tradition; it’s an experience in religious cognitive dissonance.
When you go into the hospital as a heart patient who also smokes you get in addition to the forms and needles and other gadgets and shit to run the gauntlet of moral approbation. Everybody dressed in scrubs–which nowadays includes the guy with the mop–feels not only a right but a perfect duty to scold. I’m tryin’ to find out what’s happenin’ with my body while fending off comments like ‘don’t you know what that stuff does to you? how can you still do it?’ Because when I hold that cigarette between my fingers straight up in the air, it’s my way of telling you to fuck off. ‘Course you can’t say that when they’re shaving your groin; you just gotta hope that when she lifts your leg to shave down there you fart.
It gets worse if somebody lets the cat out of the bag about you being a pastor and then, say, announces it to everybody in the cath lab holding area (what confidentiality, eh?). Thus the jive nurse shaving me hollers to Eunice, the senior white-haired nurse with a bun and librarian’s glasses at the tip of her nose watching the ekg on the other side of the bed, “My my my my my Eunice, this man say he a preacher. Now how can you be a preacher and smoke? How can you pray to God? I know, my husband’s a preacher. . . .” Eunice grumbles about the waste of some procedure and I jump on that, thinking to shift attention, ‘yeah, that’s why health care costs so much, eh?’
That backfires, in that she goes off on the real costs of health care being those people that use the emergency room for their doctor’s office when they got free clinics they could just as easily go to, and I know ’cause I used to work in an emergency room, and blah, blah, blah, until I managed to end it by announcing that I’d been treated at Ben Taub (county hospital for indigents among others) and earned her wonder. From there she wanted to know how I felt about what the Lutherans did about homosexuality, and I gave her two thumbs up with a big grin saying I’m real happy about it, and suddenly she had work in another area to tend to.
Then I was glad when they said unto me, ‘let us go into the lab of the cath.’
The heart cath lab and its procedures are familiar to me, so there’s no big sweat in that, except for when he stabs me with the xylocaine needle in the groin which sends me into a howl, Jesus. CW tells me the next day ‘there’s so much scar tissue there that it’s hard to get through.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you use the other side, which is still virginal?’ ‘Eh,’ with a shrug, ‘decided to save it for the next time.’ He only goes as far in the procedure as the pictures, then consults behind a window with the technologic fixers, one of whom returns with him and is introduced as I thought Dr. Ahmadinajab but on second listening was Dr. Almondine. Eventually a buddy of his also showed up, and the two of them worked on me like a couple of teenagers working on an engine: ‘Hand me the hockey stick, wouldja?’ ‘Right. Gimme the whisker.’ Technical names for medical instruments, I learned upon inquiry. Here’s the deal: they were putting a stent in another stent I’d received some years back, now plugging. And while it is a marvelous thing what they do, I’m pretty sure stents inside stents is not the sign of an improving condition.
The paralyzing terror doesn’t strike until I get home. As I said, while in the hospital I’m angry, even if outwardly polite (in the Keene sense). Thus a hospital mantra comes by way of Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gently into the night; Rage, rage against the dimming of the light.’
It’s a different story, however, when you’re home and alone and thinkin’ about what just happened. In the silence you can hear the soft confident chuckle of death like a leaf rustling in the forest night.
Matchmaker Don threw a clot while out walking one night a few weeks back so ended up in the hospital via ambulance with a pulmonary embolism. I went by to comfort him and welcome him into the club of those who’ve been tapped on the shoulder by a smirking death, with invocation by t.s. eliot, “I have seen the eternal footman hold my cloak and snicker. And in short, I have been afraid.” You gotta learn how to live with the snicker, buddy. You gotta learn how to tell ‘im, fuck you. Seelsorge is my business.
And yes it means yet another engagement with the balrog of tobacco, having already warned the darling about the edginess and sullenness which accompany the effort for awhile. I’ve been through this before–I gotta be left alone. Because every inquiry well meaning or not, every prayer I hear about it or encouragement I receive just enflames that bastard ever more brightly and I gotta tackle ‘im again.
It’s a drag, but I’d rather dance my life to a tune other than the be-woppity-bops.
Larry
