Pastrix

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

  On Sunday, September 11, 2011, my parishioners had gathered the prayers from the interfaith service and, later that evening, strung them up in our own worship space. Our congregation added prayers and laments of their own, but I didn’t read any of them. One had been quite enough.

  CHAPTER 15

  Ghosts in the Kingdom of Heaven

  The week Amy Winehouse died, I was trying to come up with a sermon for that Sunday when my ex-boyfriend sent me a Facebook friend request. I’d not heard from Ben for about seventeen years, and when I saw a friend request from him, I mostly was shocked that he, too, was not dead.

  In the spring of 1992, we had met on the third floor of York Street, the place where I had begun my recovery from alcoholism. On the second floor—the one for smokers—the walls, posters, linoleum, and even the chairs were tinged nicotine yellow, as though even the room itself had a poorly functioning liver. When I met Ben, I’d been a second-floor gal and sober for about six months. I had my own strategy for recovery: smoke a lot, eat sugar, sleep around, pray like hell, be an angry bitch, repeat. Or as I like to explain it: Be the exact same person I was before getting sober, just less fun and with more prayer. Apparently, especially important to keeping my personal recovery program going was maintaining all my old ideas about myself. The primary of which, as I mentioned earlier, was: I am an awesome tragic figure who will die young.

  We sometimes make decisions in our lives based either on who we want to be or who we think we will become if we have “the thing.” Cars we hope will make us look important, tattoos we hope will make us look edgy, cycling gear we hope will make us look athletic. People can be “the thing,” too. On some level I chose people like I chose a hairstyle or a scarf. They became accessories, hand picked on the basis of how they complemented my ideas of myself. Apparently, the accessory my badass “look” was missing in the spring of 1992 was a boyfriend who had recently spent half-a-dozen years in San Quentin Prison for armed robbery. Which is why at that point, when I was sitting on the second floor of York Street smoking my fourth Marlboro of the morning and I saw a tall, handsome man with a shaved head and inked arms heading up to the third floor, I thought, Might be time to quit smoking.

  At the time, I hated the idea of life without booze. But it had become clear that I was someone who “really shouldn’t drink.” So Ben provided me a way to still be a liquor-free alcoholic mess. With him I could have all the drama, self-loathing and badassness of my previous life (which of course wasn’t as badass as I thought it was), without the indignity of throwing up through my nose.

  Ben didn’t know how to treat a girlfriend other than to say, “Shave your fucking legs,” or to lay sweetly in my arms like a child who had his feelings hurt, there never seemed to be much in between. Which is what he was when he went to prison: a child. Now, barely an adult, he didn’t know how to be a man, since he had spent the prime years of his life meant for masculine development solely protecting himself. He would insult me and then ask if I had any bread scraps so he could feed the squirrels in the park. He worried they didn’t have enough food.

  I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that’s just different. So when, after dating for five weeks, he came to my house with a shiny handgun and asked if he could just leave it with me for a while, I hesitated before saying yes. We slept with it in under the mattress for one night, which provided me with enough discomfort to make me change my mind. At the time, I had dismissed this as a bourgeois backslide on my part, but now I know. The reason I couldn’t sleep with an illegal handgun under my mattress was that I wasn’t really that person. I was just wearing her clothes.

  Eventually we tried living in New York City together, where he thought becoming a bartender would be a good idea for a newly sober alcoholic. He lasted about a month before moving back to Denver, where he disappeared. I only lasted in New York a few months longer than that. When I moved home, I went to York Street looking for him, and someone said he had “gone out”; Ben was drinking again. That was the last I heard of him.

  So on a Monday morning, seventeen years later, it’s an understatement to say I was surprised to get a Facebook friend request from Ben. It was as if the last time I had seen him he’d been trapped inside a burning building. Finding out that he had come out alive, seventeen years later, was a happy surprise. I accepted the friend request, and within five minutes he had sent me a message saying he would be in town the next day and asking if we could meet for lunch.

  I wasn’t going to let my anxiety about meeting up with Ben change my plans for that day. So the next morning, like I do every Tuesday, I sat around a conference table with my husband and five other Lutheran pastors, as we discussed the lectionary text for the upcoming Sunday and hashed out what we thought might be preachable.

  These colleagues don’t match my outsides. No one on the street would look at me and then look at them and think, I bet those guys are good friends. And I’m fairly certain that I was the only one around the table that day who was about to go meet her ex-convict ex-boyfriend with whom she got sober when she was twenty-two. Yes, that would only be me. But it didn’t matter. I love these Lutheran pastors in their khakis and button-down shirts and actually have more important things than tattoos and chemical-abuse histories in common with them.

  Among the pastors who joined Matthew and me at the table that day was John Pederson, who is possibly the most well-read person I know. John’s been known to show up for text study with Nietzsche in his hand, but no Bible. Justin Nickel was there, too. He is the very young, neurotic, and dangerously intelligent little brother I never had. I don’t hesitate to call him one of the finest young theologians the Lutheran church has to offer. Next was Kevin Maly, a gay Lutheran pastor who is more insistent on the unyielding love and forgiveness of God than any other person I’ve ever met. He’s also brilliant. And then there’s Caitlin Trussell, who is the token noncynic of the group, and who has a hugely pastoral heart to match her big, big brain.

  I reached across the table for my second cup of light-brown church coffee while John read the Gospel text. It was a string of parables from Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to things like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree. The next parable was how the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. Then, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; upon finding one pearl of great value, he sold all that he had and bought it.

  Silence.

  After a few minutes John said, “Talking about kingdoms is weird since American democracy hates kings. So what do we make of that?”

  Good point. Maybe I could preach about tyranny. Of course, I’m not sure political tyranny is a pressing issue in people’s lives.

  Then Kevin suggests, “Maybe the cross on the hill is the pearl in the field, and that God cheats. God cheats the system by subverting what we think is valuable.”

  I don’t actually understand what this means but am too chicken to say so.

  John Pederson seems to get it though and adds, “That’s a Dickensian way to go… tell the truth, but tell it slant.” I’m always amazed at the quick wit and sharp intellect around the table. I think maybe these guys actually read books while I’m watching HBO.

  The conversation was great but I still had no idea what direction I’d go in with the sermon on Sunday and mostly I was distracted by the thought of seeing Ben.

  Ever since I became a pastor, I spend just about every Tuesday trying to console myself when I inevitably come up with absolutely nothing to preach to my people. I figure I can always suggest twelve minutes of lectio divina, a spiritual practice of silently meditating on the scripture. I always keep that in my back pocket. This may just be the week I’d need to pull it out.
/>   An hour later, I was sitting in the booth of a diner waiting for my ex-boyfriend to show up. Pete’s Kitchen never closes and had on occasion been the stage on which several dramas in my life had played. Twenty-two years earlier I had sat in the corner booth of this very diner many a three in the morning, jittery from cocaine and sloppy from booze, my best friend Jimmy usually next to me. Jimmy was loud and funny, the gay brother of my first boyfriend and for years my main partner in crime. We were baby alcoholics together, and then I got sober and he didn’t. Jimmy was found dead in his Reno apartment six months before this lunch with Ben, having quite literally drank himself to death. He took with him parts of my story not shared with anyone else, and I’ll never get those or Jimmy back. Regrettably, I had just been too busy since his death being a Lutheran pastor, of all things, to grieve him. What they don’t tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I’ve never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is.

  Now I was a couple decades older, but the menu at Pete’s Kitchen hadn’t changed: cheap steak and eggs, foamy pancakes, many things that require ketchup. They’d replaced the vinyl and added a covered patio, which now is where folks from House for All Sinners and Saints go for pancakes after we sing vespers (evening prayer) during Lent and Advent. Usually on those nights, as I sit with my parishioners, I don’t think about all the things that have happened to their pastor in that little ironic diner, but once in a while I do get slightly quiet. I don’t know if they notice, which is fine.

  My Diet Coke arrived at the table at the same time as Ben, snapping me out of my haze. He looked so much the same: like a younger version of Richard Gere, but with prison tattoos, including one of a teardrop, which I always thought best not to ask about. I gave him a hug that felt urgent, as if I had been waiting for him outside when he finally ran out of that burning building. I was surprised by the affection I felt.

  He talked about his kids and his health problems and the fact that he didn’t need to go to A.A. anymore. Oh, and he was living out of his van. This lunch ended up like several others I had had over the years with people from my past: with me feeling something like survivor’s guilt. Like we were at the same place in life at one point, but now I had everything and he had nothing and I had no explanation for that whatsoever. There’s just no way for me to easily trace how it is that I’ve gotten from there to here. Somehow I have a home and a husband, two beautiful and smart children, and a meaningful job I love; while he had three children in two different states whom he seldom saw, a bad heart, a broken back, and was living on disability.

  I felt awkward and tried to avoid telling him the details of my life, partly because I was certain when he left he’d say something belittling or insulting, just like he used to, to put me in my place. But before he stood up to leave, he looked across the table at me and said, “I’m glad you’re still alive, a lot of us aren’t. Um… is it OK if I visit your church this Sunday?”

  The rest of the week I struggled to write a sermon about the kingdom of heaven while feeling like the addict ghosts of my past were all standing drunk outside my mind’s window, whining, “Why can’t you just come out and play?” I just didn’t care about mustard seeds and shrubs and yeast and I couldn’t shut up my past long enough to write a sermon in my present. Every commentary and article I read about the parables offered me the same combination of obvious and useless: The kingdom of heaven starts out small and then gets big. So what? I couldn’t imagine anyone’s life was going to be changed by my preaching about how small mustard seeds are and how they then grow into big plants and that’s what the kingdom of heaven is like.

  By Saturday I was panicked. I thought obsessively about seeds and plants, straining for it to matter, which was especially hard since I loathe gardening. I don’t even like being outside. In fact, I hate being outside so much that when I go to a restaurant with my friends and the hostess asks if we’d like to sit on the outdoor patio I shoot dirty looks at everyone until they say no, inside please. I wish Jesus had used examples taken from posting on Facebook, going to the movies, and having relationships with tattoo artists, so that the meanings behind the examples would be a little fucking clearer to me, but no. He’s forever talking about seeds and vines and harvesting and plants and farmers.

  Finally I wrote something down about how much my husband, Matthew, hates juniper bushes, and I described his personal battle with them. And as soon as I wrote it I knew it was crap. I took a break and got on Facebook. After liking a few posts from my friends, I saw one that said simply, RIP Amy Winehouse.

  Damn.

  Amy Winehouse, the British soul singer and celebrity train wreck, dead. Immediately I thought again of the fellow addicts and alcoholics in my life who had died while I still lived. Of course, I especially remembered PJ. I mentioned earlier that in many ways, it was because of PJ—and specifically, his death—that I ended up being a pastor. It was long before I went to seminary and got ordained, but doing PJ’s funeral—as his only “religious” friend—was the first time I realized that God was calling me to be a pastor to my people.

  Now, PJ was dead and I was a pastor and I had to write a sermon that mattered. I thought about how, like Winehouse, PJ was found dead in his home. I laughed out loud at how great it would have been to call PJ himself and ask what he thought I should preach about, knowing he’d say something filthy and hilarious about things that are small but get bigger, none of which I could preach about but would make me laugh. But then, it felt like PJ actually took me up on it.

  I looked at the parables again: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that when it has grown becomes the greatest of all shrubs.” I wondered if maybe the size of the seed versus the size of the plant isn’t the point at all. Calling something the greatest of all shrubs is like saying someone is the smartest of all the idiots. Yet Jesus says that heaven’s kingdom is like shrubs and nets and yeast. It was the yeast part that made me think that PJ was telling me something. And, for just a moment, my seminary education paid off.

  I remembered that yeast was considered impure (like most of PJ’s thoughts, incidentally). We’re not talking about the little packets of Fleischmann’s you find at the supermarket; we’re talking big lumps of mold, which contaminate. There is a reason why first-century Jews were required to rid their entire house of yeast before celebrating some holy days; yeast was a ritual impurity.

  So then I began to consider that maybe the kingdom of heaven is found in the unclean and surprising and even the profane. At that, thoughts of my young messed-up self and lunch with my ex-convict ex-boyfriend and the death of Amy Winehouse and Jimmy dying in his apartment stopped being a distraction and became the source of my sermon. I thought back to two days after PJ was found dead. And it became the story I told in my sermon.

  PJ grew up in a nice Catholic family in a small farming town in Iowa. Not really sure how a darkly sardonic, filthy-minded comic genius came from them, but that’s another story for another time. Two days after PJ’s death, a group of my friends undertook what I can only describe as a mission of compassion: They entered the home of our dead friend and they cleared out all the pornography. Every Playboy and videotape. All of it. They wanted to spare PJ’s parents any more pain than they were already dealing with.

  That, I preached, is the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven on earth. That we might clear out the pornography from our dead friends’ homes before their nice, small-town parents come to settle their son’s affairs. It’s small, it’s surprising, and it’s a little profane, but it’s the real thing.

  I mistakenly had been thinking that the kingdom of heaven was something I should be able to find an illustration for on this side of my life. Things are better now. I’m Christian and I’m clean and sober, so surely any example I might have of the kingdom of heaven would not come from Ben or PJ or my young, messy self. Any preachable image of the ki
ngdom would surely come from gardening and being a mom and a pastor and an upstanding citizen. But that’s not what Jesus brings.

  Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I’d expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I’d moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, I’d assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that’s kind of an insult to God. It’s like saying, “You only exist when I recognize you.” The kingdom of heaven, which Jesus talked about all the time, is, as he said, here. At hand. It’s now. Wherever you are. In ways you’d never expect.

  CHAPTER 16

  Dirty Fingernails

  Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).

  —John 20:11-16

  The first public liturgy of House for All Sinners and Saints took place in April of 2008. It was the season of Easter, and as such, the eight people who started the church together each created a station of the resurrection: a poem, piece of art, or an action that helped us experience the different biblical accounts of when Jesus’ friends encountered him after he had been raised from the dead. I chose the story of Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb.