tribute to a friend

i received a letter yesterday from one of my several friends who are exploring ordination--not any of the ones who have commented on this blog, and this post is in tribute to him.

it has been an odd week, in that a greater than usual number of my friends who are in the business, as it were, ordained ministers in various brands of the church, have talked to me about their discomfort with the church, questioning whether they can continue to work within it as they have been. none of them is questioning his or her own calling to priesthood, merely whether the church allows them to exercise it.

my immediately, if not spoken, reaction, is that the calling and imposition of episcopal hands is itself the empowerment and indeed necessitating--is that a word--to exercise it. but that's easy for me to say. i'm ordained in a branch of the church that follows without ever noticing it roland allen's idea of priesthood without remuneration. i can be as prophetic as i wish, and there is no loss of what we call "livelihood" to me or my family.

so, into this week comes my friend's letter, saying "that i do genuinely feel called to out of the idea of the joy of service. . . . but is the job ready for me?" the problem, you see, is that my friend is "a queer."

hence my post. i wrote to him of my experience when i resigned my charge in the united methodist church, which had decided not to ordained "practicing self-professing homosexuals." i knew i should be truthful, so although i had had no practice, i self-professed. the response was one of those bureaucratic horrors that eviscerates the power of the gospel to save this horrible broken world in which we live. i don't remember whether it was the district superintendent or the elder who was in charge of keeping everyone on the next page in the notebook with the checkmarks to fill out for full membership in the conference who answered, but the answer was, "gosh, dale, we don't care what you do, so long as no one knows."

i assumed that my ordained life was over. it was therefore an amazing surprise when i discovered a weird branch of the church whose discernment process was not based on either fear or current politics, but on what the spirit is speaking to the church (and what he had spoke to the church in the earliest days, before it got all entangled with the empire). as i began to go through enquiring about possible ordination, i was delighted and surprised that my phone would ring and it would be a bishop from somewhere or another who did not have a notebook with check mark blanks but with questions about my spiritual experiences and practices and understanding of the holy.

so, i told my friend, "the bigger question is not if the church is ready for you, but how it necessarily requires you. think of how the big shots in the temple thought they weren't ready for jesus. and of course they weren't."

and i am delighted to find someone who recognizes that the call to ordination is the call to the joy of service, and delighted that he has found that in a parish which serves.

and i want to make sure that i am not dishonest online. as i wrote to my friend, i am celebate, but it is to simplify my life, not because i think there is something worse about what i prefer to call homophilia than homosexuality. anyone who goes through the checkout lane of any grocery store in this country can see on the covers of the weeklies that heterosexuality is not necessarily a good thing, either. despite what television and people magazine say, there is more to life than sex.