Manifesto

I've been haunted by a story a heard the other day, about someone (name and identifying details withheld to protect the innocent) who had been a professional musician before being ordained as an Episcopal priest, who gave up playing his instrument of choice when he took up ministry. Something about the story got a hold on me, or me on it, as if I knew there was something there to be learned and  perhaps spoken aloud. And when I tried to wrestle and write about it, what came out had the force of a manifesto, more or less as follows.

I want to say in the name of all that is holy, do not forsake these things you may do (like playing a musical instrument, gardening, painting, cooking, etc.) that are life-giving for you, that keep you connected to the wild, living, untamable life-force, to "Whatever it is that's out there and in here," as someone I know chooses to call this. That's what I want to say.

And again in the name of all that is holy, please do not confuse all that is "religious" for all that is holy. I see now how thoroughly and terribly I mistook what's religious (and even more narrowly, what's Christian) for what's holy and sacred, and in the process did grave injury to my own self and my creative energies and inclinations, not to mention those of others.

I suppose the story of the priest who gave up music-making reminded me a bit of myself. For most of my life I've been a poet of sorts, at least I've been an occasional writer of poems. I took poetry workshops in college, even won a poetry prize, and carried on writing poems in seminary, though really, it's possible I kept writing in seminary largely because of the inspiration and encouragement of someone who loved both me and my inclination to write poems.

By the time I got to seminary I had already shown a troubling (though I thought entirely "holy") inclination to ditch my allegiances to activities and even writers who weren't explicitly "Christian," as if truth couldn't come to me and the world through such channels. Never mind that I loved the works of these writers, poets, musicians, etc. For whatever sad combination of reasons--immaturity, a slightly stoic New England upbringing, and the overly heavy influence of some conservative, somewhat Calvinist Christian colleagues whose judgments I feared--it didn't occur to me to trust what I loved, to pay attention to what gave me delight. As if sacrifice and suffering and seriousness were the only reliable tools for discernment. (Yuck! Heaven help us!)

About ten years out of seminary, an encounter with the person who had inspired and encouraged my poetry shook me at my core. Acting from instinct, I did my best to write about this encounter, and without ever deciding to, I started to write a poem. And the act of writing a poem got my attention.

"Oh..." I found myself musing. "I used to do this; I used to write poems on a regular basis."

I didn't remember stopping writing poetry in any sort of intentional or official way, but I knew it had been a long time since I'd written any. Naturally I wondered what had happened and went looking back in my journals. Here's what I found:

Ordination had happened. Parish ministry had happened. Writing sermons and directing my creative energies toward church stuff happened. By the time I had been out of seminary for about a year and had been ordained and employed in parish ministry, I had stopped writing poems. I didn't mean to stop; I just kind of stopped.

I had allowed one of my most personal of creative outlets to dry up from neglect and non-use. In so doing I had also lost one of the best ways I had had (though I may not have put it this way at the time) for staying in touch with a voice that was truly mine, authentic to me and most certainly not shaped in any particular way or toward any particular topic or occasion that was required of me, like preaching a sermon, writing a newsletter, leading a discussion or teaching Sunday School.

And what I would say now, from the vantage point of another fifteen years, and from the place of freedom gained by renouncing my ordination and stepping well out of church life, is that in giving up that creative outlet I had also given up one of my best and most open channels between me and "all that is holy;" between me and the great creative force that infuses, animates, and sustains the universe and everything in it; between me and "whatever it is that's out there and in here," within me and within you and between us, too. (Though it leads to a huge new topic, one might even say this was for me a way of "prayer" though it didn't seem to bear much resemblance to all the ways I had thought I should pray and had tried--and basically failed--to pray.)

Somewhere in the days of my musing on the story of the priest-musician, I happened to have a conversation with Raye Tibbitts about this, which resulted in her asking me to be a guest blogger on Gatehouse.

"Sure!" I said.

"By December 1st?" she asked. "Sure!" I said (it seemed so far away at the time).

As the date drew nearer, my recollection of our conversation grew vaguer and vaguer, so that I honestly began to wonder what on earth I could have possibly said that Raye found so intriguing. All I could remember was the Episcopal priest who had given up his music-making.

That, and my new understanding of "the unforgivable sin." What? Have I lost it? Why would I care about "the unforgivable sin"?

As I talked to Raye ("ranted" may be a more accurate verb) about this whole matter of recognizing the "holiness" of all forms of creative activity (and really, all of life) and of reclaiming the word "holy" from the religious sphere, I spun off a sudden new insight into a not-so-favorite Bible verse, in which Jesus is reported to have said: '"Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin'--for [his critics] had said, 'He has an unclean spirit.'" (Mark 3:29-3-)

Of all the "blasphemies" against the "Holy Spirit" (a.k.a. great creative force, Life, and other wide inclusive names), the one I've come to see as "unforgivable" is that of so narrowly defining and trying to limit what is holy that one overlooks, undervalues, squelches, and and dams up the flow of the creative force through each of us. And what's unforgivable about this is that every time we undervalue, demean, and refuse to play along with this creative force, not only do we harm ourselves, but also something of great potential value is lost. Something that wants to be expressed through us is left unexpressed, perhaps forever--"an eternal sin."

I'm not talking only about "creative works of art" although it's easy to see how this operates in that sphere. I'm talking also about whole lives and the capacity each of us has to live more fully, more creatively and authentically, not as someone else but as ourselves. That, it seems to me, is the holiest obligation each of us has for the time that we're here. (Not to the exclusion of things like compassion, and justice, and kindness, mind you, but those "virtues" get expressed through you in your own way.)

I will end with a very short, favorite story and a favorite quote. The story is of Rabbi Zusya (a long ago rabbi), who nearing death, declared to his beloved students, "When I stand before God, God will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' God will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

And the quote, from Howard Thurman, a 20th century theologian: "Do not ask what the world needs; ask what makes you come alive and go do it. For what the world needs is people who are fully alive."

Upside-down and Inside-out: part 3

OK, so I may have overpainted the serious and boring self-portrait at the end of my last post. That's certainly not the whole of who I was.

But religiously speaking, a "scared escapee from life" who also happened to love to sing hymns and was drawn to the aesthetics of Episcopal liturgies--that's pretty accurate.

And my "deal" with God to protect me from heartbreak if I stayed away from intimate relationships and sex--well, let's just say that was more the ideal in my head than the reality in practice. The reality involved some pretty confused and confusing romantic relationships--some of them more or less platonic, some of them half-platonic (i.e., from my side of the table, not from the male side), and some of them more or less non-platonic except that sex was a contested arena, a kind of battleground, both within myself and with a male partner in those days.

Suffice it to say that this was not the most healthy or wholesome way to approach ordination to the priesthood. And how did that even come into the picture?

Well, let's see . . . . I was a new "convert", a religious devotee, as I've said. And I was a comparative literature major with no clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life as I approached my graduation from college in December of 1976. I believe it was during the summer of 1976, just before my final semester of college, that the Episcopal Church voted to allow women to be ordained to the priesthood.

There I was, a new Episcopalian wondering what to do with my life, when that news about women's ordination reached me, and a light bulb went on. Hmmm. . .  could it be? could this be my path? That's how my "vocation" started--not from any experience of active engagement in ministry, not from any significant involvement in the life of the Church apart from worship. Just an idea, a question, a maybe.

I thought about ordination for a couple of years while I pursued odd jobs--nine months as a cook on a schooner between Maine and the Virgin Islands; a summer at Mystic Seaport (during which, for the first time in my life I actually stood in front of large groups of people speaking fluently and entertainingly--not about the Gospel but about aspects of maritime history--and was surprised that I actually enjoyed myself!); and then a year as a prep school evangelist (which, in contrast to the work at Mystic Seaport, I did not enjoy at all).

When I look back at who I was and how green and naive I was when I entered seminary and first approached the ordination process in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, I am astonished that I made it through the selection process. I believe it was only because the Church's discernment process at that time was rather loose and lacking in rigor (and also rather still functioning as the "old boys' network" now having to figure out what to do with women).

There was still plenty of confusion, mixed messages, and what might, at least in retrospect, seem like warning signals that I did my best to ignore.

The discernment committee suggested that I do a year's internship in a church (five years in a non-church job might have been more appropriate!), because, they judged, that I was "too sweet and inexperience, at least in appearance". While the bishop in charge of the ordination process told me to "go on being your own sweet self"!

Meanwhile, when the shrink I saw for a mandatory evaluation concluded that I "had issues with death, sex, and authority," I figured I was cooked. But the bishop, who would later ordain me, only replied: "Welcome to the group."

While I am reasonably clear that I probably never had an honest vocation to ordained ministry in the church, I don't regret the years that I spent engaged in that life. For better or worse, that was the path that I chose to travel, and there's no point wishing it were different. I believe I did my best--even if much of the time I felt I had no clue what that meant!--I know I made a positive difference for a number of people and was blessed by being part of the lives of many.

Some days I marvel and am glad that I didn't leave a worse trail of damage behind me. God knows there was enough!

Much of the "damage", if that's the right word for it, was internal to me and carried largely in private, in a near-constant interior hunch that there was something wrong with me because I just couldn't seem to make the priesthood "fit" or make myself fit the priesthood, assuming that it was through some failing on my part that I just didn't feel cut out for it.

Rather than wonder if there had been something lacking or unclear in the discernment process, I bore that sense of unfitness like a shameful wound, blaming myself for being inadequate in one way or another (too introverted, too insecure, too self-centered--you get the idea), all because I believed I was under the holiest of obligations to fulfill the commitment I had made to God, the Church, and a couple hundred assorted parishioners, and everyone else I chose to lump into the picture.

What never seemed to enter the conversation and never occurred to me to ask was what kind of holy obligation I owed to myself. 

And for most of those years I found it hard to affirm, not for others but for myself, that the holiest obligation each of us has (whether understood as being an obligation to God or to the world or simply to ourselves) is to be as fully and wholly and unabashedly ourselves as possible. To express fully and robustly the unique and unrepeatable version of life that we are and that we have been given to embody and to carry forth.

Still, I can say that I received many, many gifts through my years as a priest in the Church, for which I will always be grateful. Without my ordination, I would not have met, fallen in love with, and married David, and that means too that without my ordination there would be no Bekah or Anna in the world. And the absence of those realities is just plain unthinkable!

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Perhaps you noticed that I didn't say I thought that "God was calling me" to leave my ordination behind. And perhaps you may be wondering something like: Did I believe "God" was calling me to renounce my ordination, the way I had once believed God was calling me to be ordained? Or, did I believe it was "just my soul" talking?

To which I have three answers:

First, that would depend on what you mean by the word "God"--which is a lot like Bill Clinton saying, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." But that's another topic for another day.

Second, I believe that what you probably mean by "God" and what I mean by my "soul" (and everyone else's soul too, for that matter) are actually so interconnected and so similar in their make-up as to be almost indistinguishable from one another, at least when we are reasonably healthy and doing our best to pay close attention. And there are times when getting tripped up in definitions and distinctions, wondering where "God" ends and your own soul begins, is just another delaying tactic of the ego, one that I am very familiar with!

And third, I have to confess that in the year or two leading up to my  decision to renounce my ordination I had kind of taken a vacation from God, or at least from the whole idea of "God". I had finally given myself the total, absolute freedom and privilege of not worrying about God.

This was a liberation and an unburdening of immense proportions, one I had entertained off and on but, as you can imagine, found difficult to consider seriously while I was still actively practicing ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. Still, "taking a vacation from God" is putting things a bit more low-key and casual than it felt at the beginning.

Coming Out Party

Yesterday was a little bit like a coming out party for me. With the generous help of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Luke,  I hosted an "event"in the cathedral's parish hall. I called it "Upside-down and Inside-out: Stories from a Mid-Life Journey," and about thirty-five people were there!

And that's what it was--some of the stories (there are so many more!) from my journey out of Episcopal parish ministry, through the process of getting clearer within myself to my decision to renounce my ordination as a priest. What's quirky about my journey, and what had the "coming out" quality for me, was that I really had to give myself permission to take a vacation from God, to start living my life without concern for the idea of God, in order to hear my soul.

One of the things I love about writing is that when it "works", I learn things in the process of writing that I didn't know, or at least didn't know quite so clearly, when I started. Or I find better, more compelling language for understanding myself and my life and hopefully for helping others to connect to their own lives, too.

One particular gift that came to me in preparing to tell these stories was to see that "cutting myself loose" from God and letting God go on without me and me without God was much much more than a theological experiment or project, if you will. It was, and is, about life, about being human, and especially about being myself from the inside out, trusting my own unfolding relationship with my soul in conversation with the life around me. As the "Two Books" story reminds me when I get fuzzy, it all boiled down to a choice between "death in holy orders" and "living free".

"The Two Books", c. Sukie Curtis, 2009

Another gift was the realization that, not unlike the way so many women learn to put other people's needs and wants before their own and sometimes do not even acknowledge that they have any needs or wants at all (a lesson that I witness again and again spending time with my ninety-year-old mother!), I was doing exactly the same thing. Only my list of "more important" claims included not only my children, and David, but also God and the Episcopal Church! My ordination had all the fancy language signaling a "holy obligation". But what never occurred to me to ask was what kind of holy obligation I owed to myself.

Over the years since leaving my ordination behind, I have come to believe more and more that each of us has a truly holy obligation, a sacred duty, to be fiercely committed to (which also means taking responsibility for--sorry!) our own happiness, our own deep, soul-level happiness.

That's not a simple process. It takes commitment, diligence, awareness, attention, patience with the learning curve, courage in the face of pressure to "revert". And it brings with it much joy and freedom and lightness of heart!

I got asked some good questions at the end of my talking, and in retrospect I wish I had allowed more time for letting that conversation unfold some more. Maybe I'll bring some of those questions and some written comments into the blog for an expanded conversation.

And while I'm at it, I might as well post the text of what I spoke in the blog too. It was pretty long, so that  will take care of several days' posts, and might actually help me to get back in the swing of blogging!

Let's hear it for coming out parties! And thank you to everyone who came to St. Luke's yesterday! And to David for lots of support and tactical assistance.