GRACE IN SERVICE

Lately I’ve felt like an old woman at risk, at risk of becoming cynical and vicious about government, or even institutions of all kinds.  Then I began to have dreams about seminary.  The good parts.  And I rebuked myself for not using the resources I obviously have, both memories and tools.  I got to thinking about my cohort.

There were six people in my seminary class at Meadville.Lombard, admitted in 1978.  Three of us were female.  Two of we females stayed in ministry: Kathy Hurt (née Fuson) and Harris Riordan, but Harris transferred to Union Theological Seminary in New York after the first year.  Of the men, one had a long and prosperous career in a big church, two also had successful ministries, and one is now selling wine in Boston. (One was added mid-year.)  I was really thinking mostly about two women, both with long successful ministries.

The Reverend Doctor Kathy Hurt

Kathy Fuson Hurt recently showed up on the list of ministers changing status — she’s going to a different interim ministry.  Interims have become a practice for retired ministers who wish to commit year-by-year rather than for a long span.  When I googled her she had developed a beautiful website:  www. kathyhurt.com   That will explain her a bit more.  And then this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb0Q6qGIOgE  

When we were in seminary, we would get gigs for Sunday mornings, me preaching and she playing the piano.  One of my fond memories is driving in mid-winter to some obscure place and Kathy riding shotgun with the map.  I was skidding around and we were on a nearly deserted highway with a grassy, snow-laden midsection between directions.  I had just realized I was going the wrong way and made a reckless devil dive across the grass when I glanced sideways at Kathy.  She was solemnly and attentively turning the map according to our imaginary compass, carefully keeping us located without panic.

Kathy finished her thesis, good scholar that she was, and received the D.Min., while I struggled and argued and delayed until finally an intelligent new dean just gave the frustrated backlog of all we impossible people (there may have been a dozen) M.Div’s instead of doctorates and sent us on our way.  

Kathy’s way has been very difficult: depression bad enough to self-harm, attempt suicide and need to be hospitalized.  A marriage that didn’t work, another relationship that didn’t work, a son she says is a joy, and a sequence of churches where she was evidently successful on her own terms, which is gentle embracing.  She doesn’t deny or cover up, but makes it the core of her book called “The Dark Has Its Own Light.”  Her writing has a clarity and grace that reminds me of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea,” though it’s not like the content of that beloved book of thoughts based on seashells.

Over the years I’ve been aware of many people weighed down with depression, some of it no doubt due to lack of sunlight in this far north short-houred winter.  It can be a consequence of tragedy, which is often just ordinary life fully confronted — life IS tragic.  If you misplace joy, it can take you down.  I was cheered to hear about treatments in Calgary with very small injected doses of ketamine, which can relieve people that other drugs and electroshock don’t touch.  It’s a street drug, used by veterinarians to tranquillize horses and cats.  No one knows why it works.

In many ways, because M/L in those days attracted serious candidates, often with careers behind them, we learned more from each other than from the faculty.  Kathy’s ideas have stayed with me ever after and been highly useful.  She introduced us to Joseph Campbell, his “hero’s journey”; kenosis, the path of emptiness; and Abrams’ “The Mirror and the Lamp” literary theory.  “Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was typically understood as a mirror reflecting the real world in some kind of mimesis; whereas for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world.”  

These were ideas from Rice University professors.  Institutional religion in particular can be as much literary as theological.

The Reverend Harris Riordan and daughter

The other woman who stayed in ministry is Harris Riordan, long-term minister of the UU Fellowship of Boca Raton.  She looked exactly like Cher, but was still single as time went on, so she decided to apply to adopt a baby.  Her application was made in the morning and Fate gave her a baby girl that afternoon.  “Surprised by joy”, she had no baby things yet, but knowing Harris, I’m sure she was quick to acquire, improvise, and make a cradle of her arms.

In seminary Harris was the mistress of celebrations.  I particularly recall a riotous birthday supper in a fancy restaurant.  She had somehow found plastic finger rings that were tiny squirtguns.  Filled up in our table ice water, they got rid of the notion that all U of Chicago people were gray, stiff, and impersonal.

I don’t remember ever being in the rooms of these two women — maybe they were not housed on M/L property. We spent hours at the Agora drinking coffee and spinning yarns.  Because Harris left so soon, I had never heard her preach until I went to the recording on the website of the UU Fellowship of Boca Raton.  I didn’t find a video sermon, but there’s a sound recording of “Living a Life of Integrity”, based on the jackpine “which grows to any shape that suits the light, suits the winds, suits itself.” — Milton Acori)  (Go to uufbc.com  then “Welcome”, then “Who Are We?”, then “Recorded Sermons”)  This sermon is an example of something I haven’t heard for a long time: a scholarship-based historical and philosophical justification of UUism.  It’s as clear, warm, and useful as any I ever did hear.

These women have not had it easy.  Kathy’s congregation had a little posse of right wingers who camped in front of the church on Sunday mornings.  Harris helped confront those paranoid about Muslims and has recently had to cope with hurricanes.

So now I pull up my own socks and get back to work.  As we go along we pick up threads and weave them together.  We knit our socks as we go and wear them even as they get so long they become leggings.