I have been stalling off a dreaded chore for weeks. That is, I was supposed to attend the upcoming synod of bishops of my church in Chicago next weekend. For several reasons I decided not to attend.
Money is very tight, I dislike travel, and why would anyone want to leave this lovely valley and go to Chicago? I informed his grace, the archbishop I wasn’t coming and he extracted a promise from me to write my thoughts on several subjects suitable for presentation to my peers, the bishops of our denomination.
When I began to write for The Lincoln County News many years ago, Judi Finn, the editor at the time, told me not to take it personally if I never got any feedback on my writing since most of the staff was already working on next week’s paper and the public wouldn’t bother.
Well, Judi was wrong. My partner, Robin, is astounded that whenever we go anywhere around here, people come right up to me and act like old friends. I think it is because I write as if to my good buddies in a spirit of sharing news and opinions. I am told that 8,000-10,000 folks read my column every week and with the reception I get in public, I guess it must be true.
Knowing that many of you readers are pastors and leaders and members of small churches, I am writing this week’s column to you all and to my bishops – my thoughts on preserving the influence of our local churches on our communities. To my bishops, I have served in our jurisdiction longer than any of you and I am writing to you as I write to my weekly audience – from the heart, with love and respect for all.
I started church at the King’s Mills Union Church. During my high school years I went to youth fellowship regularly and, under the influence of one particularly evangelical family, got my parents to send me to Providence Bible Institute, later moved to become Barrington College. We’re talking daily chapel services with rousing hymn singing, pipe organ, and jumping up and down with rythmn. Gospel harangues worthy of the best street preachers and evangelists. All was fine until I imprudently counseled with my student adviser concerning my gay tendencies.
It hit the fan. The entire college was called together to pray for my deliverance. I took to avoiding campus and going to the movies in Providence, where I met the Franciscan fathers and where I started to attend St. Peter and Paul Cathedral Church, a church with many priests, a large choir, and lots of altar boys. It was a whole new way of church for a country boy from the Newcastle-Alna Baptist Church.
I ended up being sheltered under the wing of Fr. Ed O’Brien, of St. Patrick’s in Newcastle. He sent me to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. I was in seventh heaven … until I once again ran into the Catholic teachings on homosexuality.
I ended up quitting on principle and going nowhere until I read in the Advocate that our jurisdiction accepted as equal all gay folks and yes, they could be clergy. Off I went. Bishop Hyde’s teachings on the gay lifestyle as morally defensible was way ahead of its time and I became a loyal follower and began a ministry as a deacon in Damariscotta.
That was many years ago and in another time. When I moved to Whitefield, it was as if to a foreign country. I built the underground house, and when Mom passed on the family house across the street was sold and I built the cathedral church.
I bought the large icons first, 12 of them, large and framed and very expensive. I bought them before I spent the money on the construction of the church. I then planned out and built a nice-sized country chapel surrounded on all sides with living quarters – a church with a place for several priests to live together in community.
This preserved the underground home for me through my old age and for my partner, Robin, who has taken on the mantle of caretaker and is now quite fussy about how the place looks. He was brought up a Baptist, sang in the choir, has no knowledge nor appreciation of Sacred Liturgy, but he loves the place – the river, the woods, the hunting possibilities.
He is presently organizing an area for tenters to come and share the place and use our swimming hole, which is already open to the neighbors anyway.
This leaves me now with the task of inspiring one of our priests to move here, set down roots, join in the homestead community effort, help build a congregation of good folks who love and miss the sacred liturgical services, and, above all, to somehow reach out to the new batch of kids who aren’t getting churched, who aren’t being taught spiritual values, who have not been taught of the terrific powers they possess as members of Christ’s sacred body of believers. Worse, they haven’t been taught to control the powers they are discovering about themselves all on their own.
I have a small group of faithful who support the church and whose offerings pay for the fire and liability insurance. I have had two heart attacks and a recent onset of seizures that nearly killed me. Happily, that week I was a column ahead and the readers never knew until I told them myself.
I am 73 and getting arthritis and pains in muscles I didn’t know I had! My faithful Robin takes good care of me, fusses over me as well as the machinery, and inspires me to get up and get at it every morning.
But I am restless about our church. Did I make a huge error in building a church with living quarters on tax-exempt property? I now am happy every morning that I wake up and am able to get up and get going.
I can’t rest now until I know that our church, the national church that is, appreciates what they have here. I saw in the town report that it is valued at $350,000, among the most valuable properties in the whole town of Whitefield.
When the property became tax-exempt as a nonprofit, it was written in the document that the national church has five years to install a new priest upon my demise or the title will revert to the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association, but the property can never be sold for profit.
I did that as a prod to the national church: that is you, my brother and sister bishops. You are the future of our church. You now have to promote our church as accepting of all, knowing that today so do most churches.
In fact, when his grace came from Indiana to consecrate the church, nearly all the folks from the local Baptist church showed up and helped us sing and celebrate.
We no longer can count on the fact that gay people are welcomed as equals to fill our churches. We clergy and believers have the obligation to make known among ordinary people the truths and way of life laid out for us all by our loving and totally supportive God, the Lord Jesus Christ. We need leadership that encourages sharing our personal lives, especially our spiritual lives, and how we keep going because of our faith in tomorrow.
I was driven to the hospital in Lewiston yesterday to visit a grand nephew who just had a medical incident startlingly similar to my own. On the ride over I was thinking of this article.
I was sorry to see, all the way over, churches converted to other uses, churches showing obvious neglect from their congregations, and just plain abandoned country churches with the grass grown up around them. These churches all once provided spiritual support to large groups of people and, for whatever reason, lost their influence, with the folks going to other churches.
I know as I visit the hospital and nursing home, and visit with my people and with a constant stream of young folks stopping by to visit Uncle, that folks still believe in God, but they don’t want to go to church to be with “them” as they can’t relate the religious life with the people they know as Christians. Damn! Ouch!
Culturally the church influenced civilians. I remember while in Providence the entire street full of folks would cross themselves as the Angelus Bell rang. Today, culturally, our young folks have super-extravagant, expensive, heavily produced religious shows that whip up the folks to levels that can’t be sustained in daily life. When these folks go to a local church to be with real people, what do they find? Will they find Jesus there or a group of polite, stand-offish folks? Maybe we should put up a sign: “Come on in, we will get you to Heaven?”
The sacred reading from Sunday stressed that God is with us, in us, and everything around us. There is nothing that exists without His upholding power. What we have to teach folks is that this power is available to all of us.
Our liturgical worship stresses over and over the majesty of God. His presence is palpable when the choir recites the Psalms. The mind calms itself when lost in the liturgy. One can actually feel His presence during the Communion, the breaking of the bread.
There was a time as a Fundy (fundamentalist) that I used to stand on Providence street corners and hand out salvation tracts to the good Catholic folks of the city. Now I find that folks come to me to visit, to see the place, to go swimming, to relax, and sooner or later the conversation eases around to what they want to know without having to ask the question. Make sense?
Folks come who want their marriages solemnized, who are having kid problems. Kids come who are having problems with their folks.
I hardly ever hear anything alarming, just folks hurting, folks wondering what went wrong, folks who don’t know how to say I am sorry. (You would be amazed how hard it is for some folks to admit they were wrong.)
My advice, for what it is worth as the senior cleric, is to be yourselves: be kind; be attentive to folks’ real questions; always show forth Jesus’ love and acceptance; lead; don’t condemn; believe what you say from the altar.
Be respectful of all as you celebrate the liturgy; speak the sacred words – don’t recite them. When folks see that an intelligent, aware person like you believes openly, it helps their wavering belief as well.
My years in retirement will be focused on you all, your parishes, your little study groups, your faithful few. If you touch one person’s heart in all your years of ministry it will still be worth it. Hang in there, my brothers and my sister.
Others have struggled to bring us into existence or resurrected a small branch; now you must keep it going, and to do that, you have to replace yourselves with more priests to spread your influence.
To my regular readers, I hope you can see what I am trying to do here, and I wish when you get the chance you would come to church on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. You are also welcome to just stop by and visit with us here in our little piece of Heaven at 625 Head Tide Rd., Whitefield. Blessings to all from your humble servant: Rt. Rev. Douglas C. Wright OCCA – or as most folks say, Doug.
This column will be read as a position paper to the Holy Synod of Bishops, The Orthodox Catholic Church of America, meeting in Chicago Saturday and Sunday.
(Doug Wright lives over Head Tide Hill in Whitefield.)