“How about this,” I suggested to Rick the first time we met for coffee and about ten minutes after my latest spiritual heart transplant. “Hang out at House for All Sinners and Saints and just be Rick Strandlof. You’re a mess, so I plan to love you, to try to keep you honest, and to keep an eye on you, but seriously, Rick,” I warned, “you’ve got to take the edge off that crazy. Go get some help.”
He agreed to this. We now call it “the Plan.”
So for the first time in his adult life he is just being Rick Strandlof. But being Rick Strandlof is more painful than being Rick Duncan or Rick Gold because the real Rick has a history of childhood neglect, mental illness, and alcohol abuse.
“It hurts a little, being loved for who I really am,” he told me recently. Rick has been sober now for six months, he is getting help for his manic depression, and recently moved indoors. He is also one of the loudest people I’ve ever met and is so spastically hyperactive that I often wonder if he’s lying about taking his medication. He could be lying about everything, but that’s true of everybody. All I know for sure is that he’s still unbelievably helpful at every church function and that he is loved and wanted at House for All.
In the fall of 2011, during the Occupy Denver actions, he organized and oversaw all of the food distribution at the hub of the local protests. “Distributing food at Occupy Denver is awesome!” Rick chirped to me over the phone. “Everyone is fed. It’s doesn’t matter if you are a homeless guy who is scamming and doesn’t even care about Occupy or a lawyer on a lunch break.” He pauses. “The only place I’ve ever really seen that is at communion.” As we hung up, I tried to pretend that I wasn’t crying.
CHAPTER 19
Beer & Hymns
We weren’t really able to sing over the sounds of the crowded Irish pub that night, but we sang within it, through it, like a sacred countermelody to chaos. House for All’s quarterly Beer & Hymns (or in Rick Strandlof’s and my case, Diet Coke & Hymns) event had ended moments earlier but, oddly, rather than going home, we began to sing evening prayers, called vespers. Singing vespers in a bar is something even we had never done, but it was July 20, 2012, and nineteen hours earlier and nine miles east of us, a gunman had walked into a midnight showing of a Batman movie and opened fire, killing twelve people and injuring dozens more. Some of our friends had been in that theater. Not shot, but injured all the same, in ways no one who had not been there would ever fully realize.
Beer & Hymns takes place every few months; we generally cram as many people as we can into the basement of a bar and belt out old hymns, pint glasses raised high, and for months it had been scheduled for that night. For a moment, after the shooting, I had considered canceling it. But that idea passed quickly. Instead I posted on Facebook that that night we would still gather to sing praises to God, for, as the funeral mass says, “even as we go to the grave still we make our song alleluia.”
Besides, people need to be together when tragedy happens. We may not know what to say or what to do, but we just have to share space with other people. And if we are going to share space together in public, hours after a massacre happened just a few miles away, then what better thing can we do than sing hymns to God? So rather than cancel Beer & Hymns we occupied it. There was an appropriately less-raucous feeling to the event than normal, but there was something new in the air, too. I saw it in the determined way that Jim and Stuart and Amy were lifting their pint glasses as we sang: “It is well, it is well with my soul.”
It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung. But then I knew. It was defiance.
Two days later, we gathered for our weekly Eucharist on Sunday, July 22, which happens to be the Feast Day of Saint Mary Magdalene, my patroness. Again, I considered canceling our celebration of this saint, going instead with the regularly assigned readings for the day. But then I reread the resurrection account from John 20, and I knew that Mary Magdalene could help me preach about death and resurrection, just as she had countless times before.
My former bishop Allan Bjornberg once said that the greatest spiritual practice isn’t yoga or praying the hours or living in intentional poverty, although these are all beautiful in their own way. The greatest spiritual practice is just showing up. And Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of just showing up. Showing up, to me, means being present to what is real, what is actually happening. Mary Magdalene didn’t necessarily know what to say or what to do or even what to think when she encountered the risen Jesus. But none of that was nearly as important as the fact that she was present and attentive to him.
Seven years ago, I got a tattoo of Mary Magdalene on my forearm when I realized that I, as unlikely a woman as any, was called to be a preacher of the Gospel. Beginning when I first told my parents about my calling, the tattoo has often made me feel empowered to borrow Mary’s voice and her ability to show up. Mary was the very first to proclaim, in the midst of loss and sorrow, that death had been defeated. And on that Friday of the shooting, I needed her badly. Mary would not have shied away from naming the darkness and despair of an event like the movie theater massacre. She was familiar with darkness, after all.
Luke tells us that it was from Mary Magdalene that Jesus cast out seven demons. Then, having been freed from her demons, she followed Jesus and, as the text tells us, she supported the ministry from her own pocketbook. In the end it was Mary Magdalene who did not deny Jesus, nor betray Jesus, nor hightail it out when things got rough, but with just a couple of other faithful women, she stood at the cross. And after Jesus died, it was Mary who came to his tomb while it was still dark. She stood there and wept. She did not recognize the resurrected Christ until he spoke her name, but she turned at the sound of it. And it was her, a deeply faithful and deeply flawed woman, whom Jesus chose to be the first witness of his resurrection and to whom he commanded to go and tell everyone else about it.
If Saint Mary Magdalene had been the “pastrix” of my congregation, she would not have shied away from the news of innocent people slaughtered while it was still dark. She would have showed up and named the event from two days prior exactly what it was: horrific, evil, senseless violence without a shred of anything redemptive about it. And that was what I had decided to do.
Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events. Those platitudes are tempting, but they’re nothing but luxuries for people who’ve never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them). But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death—ideas present in so much of postmodernity. Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.
What Mary would do is show up and remind us that despite the violence and fear, it’s still always worth it to love God and to love people. And always, always, it is worth it to sing alleluia in defiance of the devil, who surely hates the sound of it.
On the Sunday after the massacre, I stood before our congregation, grasping the music stand, which holds my sermon notes, and I looked at my now slightly faded tattoo of Mary Magdalene. In the image, she stands tall with one hand in a gesture of openness and the other with a raised finger as if to say, Shut up, because I have to tell you something. For not the first time nor the last, I borrowed her voice.
I preached about how two nights earlier, when we sang hymns to God at the bar, it had sounded like a people who simply would not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices. It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty—because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.
This is the resurrected God to whom we sing. A God who didn’t say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone. Because this is
a God who shows up: in the violence of the cross, in the darkness of a garden before dawn, in the gardener, in a movie theater, in the basement of a bar.
And then, in the middle of my sermon, surprising even myself, I did not speak the Trisagion, which is from the Good Friday liturgy: “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal have mercy upon us.” This time, I sang it. My voice was not totally certain when out of it came, “Holy God,” but as I sang the familiar chant from Good Friday, others joined in, “Holy and Mighty.” And by the time I sang, “Holy and Immortal,” half of the room was singing with me, which was a blessing, since my voice cracked with emotion through “Have mercy upon us.” And after the service, during open space, I wept.
Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.
Moments later, as I served my parishioners the Eucharist, I looked each person in the eye and said, “Child of God, the body of Christ, broken for you.”
After the service, I stood at the door of the church, where I station myself each week after liturgy so I can catch people when they leave. The hand of a visitor reached out to mine and then turned my wrist.
“So that’s Mary Magdalene?” the wrist turner asked, as she took in the tattoo that covers my right forearm, elbow to wrist.
“Yep,” I told the visitor, trying to not appear annoyed at being touched by a stranger.
“Why did you choose her?” she asked, with a slightly disapproving tone (although I could have just imagined that part).
“I guess so I could remind myself that I have the authority to do this,” I gestured to the mob of people, my people, milling about. They were laughing, finishing off the bread and wine from communion, passing around a new baby; others were stacking chairs, some with the slight annoyance of people working while everyone else is milling/laughing/baby passing.
I saw John and Maria, a quirky hipster couple, holding hands; they met at HFASS, and a year earlier I’d performed their wedding and now it was their new baby being passed around. I saw Aaron the tall, geeky engineer laughing with Jamie the cantor. I saw Rick Strandlof putting away chairs and making everyone laugh. I saw Krista the six-foot-tall, redheaded daughter of a Lutheran bishop embracing Stuart the drag queen, and it dawned on me then that none of these people would have known each other were it not for the church I started out of my living room and my own desire to be a part of a community.
The day before, I baked the communion bread. Adding the molasses is always the best part. It turns everything caramely brown, and I watched as the stickiness of it was lost in the dough. Twenty minutes later my kids and I tore into the extra loaf, popping bites into our mouths before the butter we slathered on it had a chance to melt fully. It was chewy and filling and not even a little bit dry and sandy, as the bread I had once tried baking at the Humboldt House. Lots of things had changed since then, the least of which was my inability to bake bread.
This is my spiritual community, where messy, beautiful people come as they are to gather around a story and a table—where truth and molassesy bread are shared—and it is simply the thing I was meant to do.
Once, a seminary student asked to shadow me for two days to see what my life as a pastor was like. At the end, he said, “Oh my gosh, you’re basically a person for a living.” I get to be a person for a living. A person who every morning thinks about her quirky little church and prays, Oh God, it’s so beautiful. Help me not fuck it up.
The visitor at the door of the church had moved on to my other tattoos: Lazarus raised from the grave and, on the other arm, images of the liturgical year. And for a moment I was back in my parents’ living room almost seven years earlier, trying not to scratch at the brand-new tattoo of Mary Magdalene as I nervously told them I was going to be a Lutheran pastor.
Without realizing it, I was scratching again at the now less vibrant tattoo of Mary Magdalene, and the church visitor asked if it still itched.
“Uh, only spiritually,” I answered, not even really sure what that meant. But I kept scratching, while the alleluias rang through my head.
Acknowledgments
To Greg Campbell. I didn’t manage to make you a Lutheran. But you may have managed to make me a writer.
To my agent Greg Daniel who gets me and fights for me and sometimes even tells me what I need (but do not want) to hear.
To Nicci Jordan Hubert who I’m pretty sure God sent to be my editor.
To my “little brother” Justin Nickel who makes me feel smarter just by being around him and who has given me some of the confidence needed to write this book.
To my friends and fellow writers Sara Miles, Paul Fromberg, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Rachel Held Evans, Lauren Winner, Enuma Okoro, Kae Evenson, Rachel Swan, Melissa Febos, Shane Hipps, Frank Schaeffer, Brian McLaren, and Phyllis Tickle who pick up the phone when I call. Please don’t ever let other people know how needy I can be.
To my pastoral colleagues John Pederson, Caitlin Trussell, Jim Gonia, Kevin Maly, Jodi Hogue, Jodi-Renee Adams, Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, Jerry Herships, and Heather Haginduff who always show me Jesus.
To Jane Vennard for her wise direction.
To Courtney Perry for the amazing photos.
To Wendy and all the great folks at Jericho for risking so much by believing in me and in this book.
To Pomegranate Place, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and Jenny Morgan & Kristy Jordon for spaces to write.
To my extended family Barbara & David Lehr, Gary & Elizabeth Bolz, and Tom & Lois Weber for your kindness and support, and to my husband Matthew, daughter Harper and son Judah for loving me even though you really know me.
To the beautiful and broken people of House for all Sinners and Saints—thank you for letting me be your pastor and allowing me to tell your stories. It is an honor and a privilege. You make me want to be Christian and that’s saying a lot.
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Praise
“This is an astonishing book… contagious, honest, captivating… a rare gift… I realize that I’m gushing, but that’s what you do when a book inspires and moves and touches you like this one does.”
—Rob Bell, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About God and Love Wins
“For anyone who is Christian, interested in Christianity, anti-Christian (or anti-Religion), I recommend this book.”
—Gordon Gano, lead singer, Violent Femmes
“Nadia Bolz-Weber is what you’d get if you mixed the DNA of Louis C.K., Joey Ramone, and St. Paul. She is by far my favorite tatted-up, cranky pastor ever. Follow her. Not just on Twitter, but wherever her unique mind takes you. What I’m trying to say is: Buy this book.”
—A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically
“Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber speaks the truth of our humanity that we too often want to deny. She declares the radical power of God’s grace for Jesus’ sake that we so often water down rather than daily be drowned in it. Yes, read at your own risk.”
—Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, ELCA
“Funny, raw, and packed with truth, this book is offensive in all the right ways… This book reminded me of why I am a Christian, and I wept with gratitude when I finished it.”
—Rachel Held Evans, blogger, author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood
“Nadia has written a wonderful, rule-breaking, stereotype-sma
shing book that succeeds as a memoir, as a sermon on love, and as a welcome home ‘letter’ to the rejected. With this book, Nadia will become America’s pastor to those alienated from religion but who still crave transcendent purpose and meaning in their lives.”
—Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God
“Brilliant and hilarious… With this powerful book, Nadia claims the prophetic voice of the apostle to the apostles. And, like Mary Magdalene, she carries the good news of resurrection to the world.”
—Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread, Jesus Freak, and the forthcoming City of God
“This book is Mere Christianity for an altogether new kind of Christianity that’s also blessedly ancient. I couldn’t turn pages fast enough and yet regretted the book’s hastening end.”
—Jason Byassee, senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church and fellow in Theology & Leadership at Duke Divinity School
1. Hermaphrodite is often seen as a derogatory term. But it is how Kelly refers to herself.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Fall 2005
Chapter 1: The Rowing Team
Chapter 2: God’s Aunt
Chapter 3: Albion Babylon
Pastrix Page 15