THE ANCHORITE

This morning lying in bed I kept hearing pit-pat sounds out on the lawn and concluded the forecasted rain -- much longed for -- had arrived. But when it grew light and I got up, I saw that the sound came from dropped leaves. Not all the poplars on the north side of the house have turned yellow, but mostly. The sunshine of fall, soon to end, combined with reading Lawrence Durrell’s intrigues in Egypt long ago ("Mountolive" at present, have put me into a strange mood.

So when my seminary asked for “dialogic” sermons and podcasts from the graduates who have churches, addressing the “crisis” that liberal religion (i.e. the UUA) is out-of-sync, shrinking, and irrelevant, I sent her the blog about becoming a writer instead of a minister. With predictable liberal generosity, she asked my permission to post my url in the next newsletter. I said, “sure,” but she may be overruled.

I’d intended to begin writing about the relationship between myself as an animal control officer and the neighborhood I was serving: SE Portland in the Seventies, half-hippie and half-snob, full of fascinating characters and half-seen forces. Reed College was close enough that if their officer was absent, I covered that area as well as mine. Running through the Reed campus was Johnson Creek, a troubled body of water that wandered on east through what some people said was the greatest number of unconvicted felons (white) in town as opposed to the greatest number of convicted felons (black) in NE, where I (white) grew up and my mother still lived. The houses way out in that SE corner of Portland were very modest indeed. The best South Dakota homesteading friends of my family had lived there since after WWII. So I was always highly conscious of the yin in the yang, the yang in the yin, the failure of bold generalizations.

But instead I find myself trying to understand why I ended up rejecting the community of religious liberals and the even more privileged and intense community of professional ministers. I ought to have been proud to be there, even though my mother always thought I was over-reaching and rejecting my roots. But then, in the end, her understanding of churches was controlled by status and mine was pretty much hitched to “learnedness.” When I first came into the UU fold, the Pacific Northwest District was packed with fiery, erudite, history-stoked, powerful men admired by their congregations and challenged by each other. They were indeed professional and used their status more or less wisely. Of course, sometimes they were wildly discombobulated by the changes of society. I once accidentally overheard Alan Glengyle Deale in his study being closely questioned by an earnest young mother who wished to know his thinking on the toilet training of two-year-olds. His main principle was not to know anything about it at all!

So I confess that I chose my seminary with the understanding that I would be seriously challenged academically -- and I was. But not by my seminary -- rather at the University of Chicago. The really useful classes about ministry came from the Catholics! Robert Schreiter had the only really effective approach to the culturally shaped spiritual that I found -- not succumbing to the merely supernatural or dogmatic, either one.

But I never found community there. My seminary class was minute: a sweetly conformist young man, an extremely sophisticated (NY Irish) and beautiful woman, a sort of suffering nun, a boisterous Jewish family man, and then (late) a handsome esotericist who claimed to truly understand Paul Ricoeur but whose truest devotion was high jazz. I didn’t stay friends with any of them. Nor did I attach to any professors in the way that an older student in the class behind me did, so that when the seminary threw him out for being outrageous and disobedient, the U of C Div School took him in. (His current fascination is a group that suggests the US itself somehow either caused or permitted the WTT towers catastrophe.) The writing class was good friends, but we didn’t socialize much. I was quite a bit older.

In my undergrad years I was part of an intense small theatre group that has remained in touch and sometimes close for nearly half a century. I had thought a church might be like repertory theatre and that ministers might be like English actors, moving from part to part smoothly. One for all and all for one.

They say that the surest way to lose one’s faith is to attend a good learned divinity school or seminary, and if one’s faith is based on dogma and inerrant bibles, that’s certainly true. As well, the institution will try to seize and keep one’s loyalty away from the denomination, which to some people is a parasite on the seminary!

But as I stepped into the actual ministry, partly because of the kind of initiation I had through my chaplaincy and internship, I found that I had entered a conspiracy of cutthroats and financial vampires. The person who invented a quirky way of approaching religion through science, the person who had a theory about worship elevating the Anglican Book of Common Prayer above the Bible, the person who clung to a medieval version of Unitarianism, and so on -- all insisted they were the only ones who had found the true way. They were not a bit different from the usual provincial Christian bossy eccentric.

These were mostly the older professionals. The younger ones, whom I met at denomination-sponsored conferences, were unapologetically into sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. (One of my classmates was outraged when he left a sizeable marijuana stash in the communal kitchen’s refrigerator freezer compartment and someone stole it.) What most of the professionals and wanna-be’s shared was a belief that being a minister would be a cushy life wherein they could spend time as they wished (except for Sunday morning) and everyone would admire them, simply for existing. The Devil could not have suggested anything better.

And I confess that I thought this was the minister’s life as well. In fact, I teetered a little more over to the life of the recluse wherein a person of virtue was left alone in a little cabin to ponder the nature of the universe. I soon found out that I too would be expected to have an opinion on toilet-training. (Maybe that’s why so many recent UU ministers are basically Moms.)

When I was in Saskatoon, we now and then planned retreats at a Benedictine monastery not far away. It reminded me very much of the Jesuit boarding schools for Indian children in the 19th century. The first time I arrived there, I had been instructed to ask for the Abbot. An old man in a battered straw hat was mowing the lawn. I asked him if he would direct me to the Abbot’s office. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “I AM the Abbot.” Well, you know, Alan Glengyle Deale’s most cherished task as the minister of the Rockford Church was mowing the vast church lawn -- but he had a riding mower.

Out behind this monastery was a little house for a woman who through great virtue had earned the right to be there alone, an anchorite. As a major sacrifice, she would sometimes come into the monastery and teach a class. Otherwise, her meals were taken to her and left at the door. No one supervised her except her God.

In the end it became clear to me that ministers were just like animal control officers -- they got about as much respect and cooperation as they earned in their community, a slow accumulation of good deeds and helpful thoughts. Just the same there was an authority from this that was quite powerful. The seminary community lacked it.

What I wonder is whether I have somehow cheated to come to this little house and live alone, just writing, or whether I’ve done enough in my life to earn it. No answer.