Mieke looks at me sympathetically. “It’s not easy,” she says. “You’re sure you’re not a lesbian?”
I consider a moment, thinking about boobs.
“I…can’t quite get there.”
She nods, accepting my shortcomings.
“Pastor Phil is really encouraging me to go forward for ordination,” I tell her. “I just…”
“You’re afraid you’ll never get married if you get ordained.”
“Yeah. Is that crazy?”
“Based on the evidence, it doesn’t seem crazy.”
“I want both,” I tell her.
“Me too,” she says, shaking her head helplessly. “Here’s to pastor life,” she offers.
Under the red-striped awning, we clink our mimosa glasses, and toast our solitary futures.
* * *
One night that spring, our church reaches an important milestone. At the end of worship, the floors freshly mopped and smelling of cleaning solvent, Charlotte says, “Hey, does anyone want to get a drink?”
I’ve been waiting for someone else to suggest it. Here they are, I think, not just coming to church, but wanting to hang out with people from church! We find a spot in the back of a bar around the corner and are delighted to discover that Irish traditional musicians hold a session each Sunday night. Beers are ordered all around, and I sit, shining a bit with sweat from the dish doing and brimming with warm joy. These people like each other. They want to drink beer and talk about theology or joke about things entirely untheological. They want to be friends.
In the coming weeks, we settle into habits. A small core of folks always stays behind to finish up the details of cleanup—recording attendance in the welcome book Rachel made, counting the modest offering of crumpled bills. Napkins and tablecloths go into a bag that Rachel drops off at a twenty-four-hour laundry place on the way to the bar. But at some point the laundromat closes; I begin strapping the bag of laundry to the back of my bike after church and wheeling it along to the bar, so I can toss it in the washing machine after pedaling to my building on the Upper West Side at the end of the night. After drinks, I turn on my bike lights, make my way across Manhattan on Ninth Street until I burst out onto the Hudson, and follow the river all the way home.
In a year or so we’ll strike out, with Pastor Phil’s encouragement, into the next stage of our life as a church: a nomadic period in which we’ll move across the East River to Brooklyn, to the fellowship hall of a crumbling Episcopal church on the corner of Fourth Ave and Pacific. Four weeks later we’ll learn that the building has more deferred maintenance than anyone realized, and will soon be condemned. And so we’ll move right back out and worship in a congregants’ apartment for a while, then find a space as renters at a friendly Zen center, where we’ll all take off our shoes for Dinner Church.
Despite my fears, I’ll become a pastor. The bishop will ordain me with Daniel’s, Donald’s, Pastor Phil’s, and so many others’ hands laying heavy on my shoulders and head. The next day, I’m installed as the Pastor of St. Lydia’s in the Zen center, by two bishops wearing miters and socked feet as we all sit cross-legged on meditation cushions, holding bowls of soup.
We’ll lose our office space three different times, once just before Holy Week, causing me to burst into exhausted tears. We’ll jam into congregants’ apartments for community meetings and go over our budget and giving goals, handing out pledge cards Rachel has hand-stamped with spoons and forks. Rachel will start the Enough for Everyone Community Garden in a vacant lot, and we’ll grow our own vegetables in raised beds set on centuries of rubble and broken glass.
All that is ahead of us. But from that first spring, here is what I remember: riding home along the river with the laundry strapped to my bike, and coming over the crest of the hill to discover the cherry trees have burst into bloom along the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin. In the night they look ghostly under the streetlamps, boats gently bobbing on the waves.
Each week the same homeless man sleeps on a bench beneath the petaled trees. Sometimes I have leftovers from church—curried chickpeas and a hunk of our communion bread in a clean yogurt container—so I stop and set it next to him as an offering. Then I climb back on my bike and ride home, against the tide of the mighty river, as the petals fall and cover him while he sleeps.
II
ENOUGH
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
—WENDELL BERRY
“Come, one and all!”
Charlotte summons us, declaring her invitation to the night wind. It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re standing at Fourth Avenue and Union Street between an Exxon station and an overflowing sidewalk garbage can. Beside us, traffic barrels along the avenue, taxis bearing down on their horns.
“Come, shepherds and sheep!” Charlotte yells over the din. “Come, kings and sages and magi. Come, all who are wise and all who are foolish. Come!”
Our ragtag band (accordion, guitar, and trombone) pipes up, careening through the melody of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” We toot along as fifteen or so brave congregants lift their voices in exultation and two drunk guys tumble out of a corner dive bar, shouting expletives, lurching at each other aggressively.
Behind us, a semitruck pulls into the gas station, misses the sharp turn, and backs up, engine roaring into reverse. Next to me, a congregant is pulling extra hats and gloves out of her bag, already shivering. The semi lets out a great belch of black smoke from its muffler.
It’s possible this was a bad idea.
* * *
—
We dreamed up the St. Lydia’s Christmas Eve Pageant Parade because we can’t be in our usual space on Christmas. A few weeks ago, I pitched the parade to Rachel and our interns as a festive spectacle, marching across Brooklyn in our makeshift costumes, singing carols.
A few years into our scrappy church project, St. Lydia’s has moved across the Brooklyn Bridge and landed at the Zen center. We’ve grown, stabilized, and even attracted Ezra and Zachary, two seminarians who want to learn from the chaos of church planting. Zachary is a dreamy student at Union Theological Seminary—a multi-instrumentalist from a multiracial family, with tight coils of hair and a five o’clock shadow. Ezra, who often has a slim book of poetry tucked under his arm or in his pocket, has a shaved head, a growing beard, and a heaviness in his countenance.
At his first Dinner Church service, he asked to speak to me during cleanup.
“I just wanted to let you know that things have become a little crazy in my life,” he told me, rubbing a hand along a crease in his forehead. “My wife just asked for a divorce. Last week.” He started his internship anyway, doing his best to hold things steady for himself and his two small daughters.
Ezra likes the idea of the pageant parade. “Joseph and Mary wandered,” he offered when I brought it up. “They were pilgrims when they looked for room at the inn.” Maybe he empathized, in the midst of his own destabilizing experience.
“Everyone’s gonna be freezing” was Rachel’s comment. “And grumpy.” So we decided to end our procession at a warm pub with snacks and beer. Problem solved! Maybe we’d even pick up some neighbors as we went—people stopping for a few minutes to listen to the story or even join in on a carol.
All through Advent, I had preached about the fundamentally disorienting promise of God’s incarnation. The story of Christmas is not about Mary and Joseph taking an idyllic journey through the desert on the back of a donkey, I told the congregation, but of life coming apart at the seams. Mary is a young woman from a poor town who has a good thing going: someone wants to marry her. A woman in that time was entirely dependent on either her family or her husband for income and security. Without them, she’d end up out in front of a gate somewhere, begging for sp
are coins, or mooching off an uncle or cousin for the rest of her life. But Mary was set. She had cut a path toward a secure future. And then God showed up and threw everything off course with a totally worn-out cliché: becoming a teenage mother. Saying yes to God meant risking everything. The meager living she and her husband would earn, their new life together, the possibility for better things. When Mary says yes, she abandons everything for God.
“This is a story of disorientation,” I preached as December deepened, “not a cozy tale of a baby in a manger.” The Christmas Eve Pageant Parade seemed like an opportunity to travel the streets as Mary and Joseph did, and make our Christmas just a touch less comfortable.
That was the vision. But now, desperately looping carols over the idling of semis as my congregants shuffle their feet to stay warm, I experience a sudden hit of terror. It’s possible we’ve gone too far. The temperature plummeted yesterday and everyone is already freezing. Commuters are rushing out of the subway stop across the street, brushing by our ragtag band without a second glance as they pop their coat collars up against the wind, and scuttle home. No one is curious.
Well, I think, launching into the melody of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” if a lack of comfort is what we wanted, we’ve got it.
* * *
—
Charlotte (who stuck around despite the meager attendance at her first service) rehearses the crowd, teaching us to baa and moo like barnyard animals. She enlists Ezra’s elder daughter, Anna, to carry a star on a stick. James, a British sociologist who always looks doleful, is positioned behind Ula’s wheelchair, wearing a dish towel on his head, ready to push her along. Ula sports a battered Santa hat.
Jason, an engineer, has constructed a towering angel puppet by hinging together two long cardboard mailing tubes and affixing white satin fabric and silver spray-painted wings. He stands at the edge of the crowd, pulsing the cardboard tubes on their hinges. The angel flaps like a gentle, looming bird.
I hand around glass vigil candles, the kind you place on outdoor shrines. Each congregant is supposed to carry one in our procession, creating a beautiful scene as we follow our path through Brooklyn. But as soon as I have mine lit, it’s whipped out by the wind. Everyone else is having the same problem, standing in huddles, hands cupped around the flames. Finally we give up. My congregants look at me, defeated.
Okay, I think. It is what it is. Let’s start.
Charlotte beckons us along Union, and off we go. We stagger along, plunging into the relative darkness of a more industrial corner of Brooklyn. By day the area exhibits medium-level grit and grime—nothing out of the ordinary for New York City. By night, however, it looks like the set of a true crime show. James pushes Ula’s wheelchair stalwartly over shattered glass and crushed beer cans.
“Glo-o-o-o-o-ooooo-o-o-o-o-ooooo-o-o-o-o-ooooo-RIA,” we sing, fighting to join our voices as the wind picks up and whips them away. Ezra’s younger daughter, Isla, three years old and wearing angel wings over her winter coat, buries her head in her father’s neck as he carries her.
“Daddy,” I hear her say, “I’m so cold!”
This is the moment when I know I’ve made a terrible mistake. Oh God, I think. I’ve ruined Christmas.
* * *
—
We grind to a halt on the corner of Bond and Butler, across from the brick public housing units called the Gowanus Houses. They’re kitty-corner from my new apartment, where I’ve moved to be closer to St. Lydia’s. I walk these blocks all the time, and find them friendly and connected. Neighbors stop to chat with one another on the sidewalk. Men hold forth in front of the bodegas, calling out to friends passing by or giving a dog a scratch behind the ears.
Tonight, though, the bodegas are closed up. The stoops are empty, and I notice only a few scattered windows lit in the apartment buildings. It seems almost everyone has gone away for Christmas, headed to see family someplace else. The feeling left behind, like a residue, isn’t so cheerful. The neighborhood is in a different mood tonight, thick and desolate. We’re standing there on the corner in tinsel halos and spray-painted wings. Suddenly I feel incredibly naïve. I chose a route that would take us by the Gowanus Houses because we are all one neighborhood, and all part of God’s story. But standing on the emptied sidewalk, I feel like a stranger. Our story feels flimsy next to the reality of this block. It seems terribly presumptuous for us to tell it here, when we walk these blocks but don’t live on them.
On that street corner, Charlotte tells the story of the angel who visits Mary to inform her that she’ll bear the child of God.
“Most favored one, the angel called her,” Charlotte says, “and Mary wondered how it was that she, young, poor, and knocked up, was favored.”
Charlotte tells us about Mary’s song of revolution—of the new creation being knit together in her womb. The powerful have been brought down from their thrones, she sings, and the rich are sent away empty. She tears down the empire with her words.
I wonder what our jovial, well-fed church has to say about the hungry being filled or the powerful being torn from their thrones. What can we claim to understand about this story? What can we say that the teenage girl on the sixth floor of the houses hasn’t already lived?
Mary’s song is my favorite passage in the Bible. I return to her words; they remind me what it means to be Christian. But standing here, I’m not sure if this story belongs to me.
Most highly favored lady, we sing, and turn our faces north. I wonder if I’m the only one who’s shaken.
* * *
—
The next stop is outside the Brooklyn Inn, a bar on Hoyt Street. I thought carefully about the route, even walked it a few times to make sure it was the right distance. It’s just a few blocks, really, from the corner of Union over to Bergen and Smith Street. Fifteen minutes, maybe? What I didn’t calculate, however, was the pace of a small herd of grown-ups, multiple children, and a person in a wheelchair shuffling down the sidewalk, stopping at every crossing to wait for the walk signal, while singing. It feels like we’ve been out here for hours.
At least this part will be cheerful, I think as we approach the friendly striped awning of the bar. Multicolored Christmas lights glow inside. I often stop here for a drink with friends, and it’s always a mellow crowd. We process up to the corner and hold position outside, lustily singing “We Three Kings.”
On the second verse, a band of drunken, bearded men assemble in the doorway and begin to leer at us. “Merrrrry Christmas,” they crow, beer sloshing out of their pint glasses.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” we all say, suddenly aware that we’re wearing dish towels.
“We’re telling the Christmas story,” Charlotte tells them, and launches into the bit about the star rising in the east.
“I don’t give a FUCK about fucking CHRISTMAS!” one of them exclaims belligerently, pointing a finger at us, punctuating his statement with a swig of his beer.
“And they knelt down and paid him homage!” Charlotte shouts to us through a forced grin, “and then they went down the street to the next stop. Merry Christmas!” She shuffles us down the block, men crowing behind us.
This is a nightmare, I think, cheeks burning behind my scarf.
* * *
—
At our final station, the corner of Smith Street, the script instructs us to place our candles together in a makeshift shrine, as if in front of the manger.
I envisioned this as a quiet moment at the end of our sojourn. We would sing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” one of my all-time favorite Christmas carols. “What can I give him?” the hymn asks. “Give him my heart,” comes the answer. I’ve written a prayer for Charlotte to read as the hymn concludes. “We bring you our hearts. Our whole life, which you know better than even we do. We bring you the fullness of who we are.” It will be beautiful.
As our parade gathers toget
her and the guitar begins to play, I flit from person to person, relighting our candles for this climactic moment. We place them on the pavement. They all immediately go out. Huddled together, more for warmth than for anything else, we begin the hymn. “In the bleak midwinter,” we sing, “frosty wind made moan….Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.”
“We bring you our hearts,” Charlotte begins, teeth audibly chattering. I’m too cold to think about anything but my frozen fingers and toes. Passengers emerge from the Bergen Street subway station and lift their hoods against the wind, ignoring us with the practiced skill of longtime New Yorkers. No one stops to sing a carol.
* * *
—
Warming up in the bar afterward, I laugh and chat with congregants while an oily feeling of humiliation settles in my gut. “Merry Christmas,” I chortle, hugging someone who’s off to a party at a friend’s house. Anna is dancing around, tapping everyone on the head with her star on a stick. Isla chases after her. I watch them, smiling, but part of me wants to crawl under the table.
By now I’ve befriended the discomfort of my role as a pastor. It’s gotten no easier, as a thirty-something Brooklynite, to confess that you believe in God and invite people to sit around a table, take hands, and pray. This is really dumb, a voice whispers in your mind. Nobody believes in God anymore. It’s like sidling along a diving board at thirteen while everyone watches your half-naked, prepubescent body and waits for you to jump.
For All Who Hunger Page 6