By Chuck Peek
June is a big month for us. It marks our only granddaughter’s birthday as well as that of our favorite oldest grandson and his father, our son-in-law. The 19th marks the wedding date of my parents, also my aunt Margaret and uncle Art’s wedding date, also the wedding date of one of my all-time favorite parishioners, and our wedding as well. Oh, yes—it is also the month of a “lesser feast” called Father’s Day.
And for me, one more thing. On June 29 I will celebrate the beginning of a second year in a second half century of ordained ministry as a priest of the Episcopal Church.
As history unfolded, that has turned out to mean I was raised in one era of the church’s life, ordained and began my ministry in yet another era, and lived to see two more eras, including the current one. Since the future is but a series of present moments, the current one is what matters, marked as it is for all of us as the era that seems bent on exhausting our capacities for hope, for carefree and idle moments, for j’ne sais quoi.
I’d describe the four eras, each roughly set in years, in this way.
Era one for me was 1942-1961, or from the time I was baptized on Christmas Eve until I asked our Bishop if I could enter the ordination process. If C. S. Lewis was the reluctant Christian, I was the reluctant candidate—I felt called but was only reluctantly willing. I would call that era the last era of American Christendom before the Great Plains caught up with what had been going on increasingly in the world, probably for centuries but certainly since the Great War. The Great Plains was one of the last places on earth to get the news!
In hindsight, I’d characterize my first era as one in which what were actual weaknesses were instead felt to be strengths. For one example, WWII and the relief felt as it ended filled the churches. It was boom-time for religion, and we mistakenly thought it was a boom time for spirituality, for discipleship. My own denomination, small but mighty, found itself on the verge of 4-5 million members. New churches were being built to accommodate families with age-designated classrooms for “Sunday” School. There were no lack of vocations, programs, chaplaincies, ministries, and names on public institutions, such as Clarkson Hospital named for the pioneering bishop Robert Clarkson. (It was only an accident that one of my Friday Happy Hour buddies, Brent Bohlke, also to be ordained, looked like the giant portrait of Bishop Clarkson at the Cathedral.) And it was the last era in which a well-educated clergy would be valued by a society that valued learning, the last in which most people felt they should probably have membership in one church or another, and the last in which people tended to be loyal to the denomination in which they were raised.
This was all about to pass. It would, I believe, have passed eventually anyway, but its demise was spurred forward as the youth culture spurred on by surfers and Rock and Roll began to come of age. So much for our parents’ predictions that R&R would never last! The University Chapel I attended (sort of) in Lincoln had as its vicar a kind and quiet and learned man named Gil Armstrong, the last of many successive generations of the Armstrong family in which at least one Armstrong was ordained. Gil was later Chair of an English department in Jamestown, ND. His ministry was just another example of one often encountered in our church. One of the early Rectors of the first Nebraska parish where I was Rector was Dr. Robert Oliver—friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, Chancellor of the University of Kansas, and at last ascending to be Rector. The scholarly rectors. Versions of George Herbert!
When my dad became Rector of the new SMOC, he started a Bishop’s Study Group, and out of the dozen or so regulars (all men!), a large number went on to be ordained around the time I was. There would be no such group after us.
When the youth culture took its “don’t know much biology” turn, a decided turn for the worse, it also took on the Vietnam War and the lies our government told us to justify it and continue it, and it took on the hypocrisy of society’s sexual mores, and all that moved learning out of the center of a value system and replaced it with action. High time, too, we educated young men thought. Enough of this greatest generation nonsense—let us at the world and we’ll have it shaped up in no time. Our long hair and beards would mark the vanguard of a new day. More than sexual freedom, more than an end to war even, we embraced the Civil Rights Movement, thought it had mostly begun with us, and would be the chief arena in which the new day would dawn.
Only it didn’t. Re-reading now Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here, you can tell how keenly we felt that, despite a few rays of light, the new day had not come near to dawning.
It was not a bad era, in many ways a good one. In our church and many others, however, public causes became more important than personal morals and social action became more important than worship and prayer, and if all things were to be made new that must include the words we spoke and sang in church. We changed the look of our churches, revised the Book of Common Prayer, reexamined what kept denominations separate and divided. Things were set in motion but without much idea of where, if anywhere, they would lead.
Where, formerly, there had been too much emphasis on sin, we would put an emphasis on joy. Canons of the church would be down-played, charisma would be heralded. I’d date this era as running roughly 1962 to 1981. Yes, you guessed it: from JFK to just before Ronald Reagan ended the war on poverty which had been working and began the war on drugs, itself a coded label standing for the end of what we’d stood for the twenty years before, in the era of Engagement.
Now, both the old guard and the new had turned out to be lights that had failed. Era three, 1981-2008, followed, an era of searching and renewal. The discovery and embrace of other forms of spirituality, a wide-world made possible by technology, a global economy, new scientific discoveries about the universe, the sharper demands from all sides for greater equality making possible the election of Barak Obama—all took us back to the drawing board, back to seeing how to re-write the end of the story.
Since movements had failed and organizations had become suspect, each of us could be just as good a Christian outside of church as he or she could be in it. Organized (dread word) religion became a kind of mantra against an institution that had recently seemed less an organism (a body) than an organization. The numbers of people in the pew declined, the prospect that everyone who valued their reputation would at least join a church gave way to a mass exodus. The church didn’t seem much of an instrument of salvation, not for many even an ark of safe refuge. The old pattern, broken folks made whole who then healed other broken folks, continued in fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous, but was hard to see at work in the church.
Maybe then meaning could be found in Me Too or in Black Lives Matter—out on the streets in solidarity with those paying the biggest price for the old prejudices and new fascism. Maybe the new rising secular atheism was smarter, more wholesome, carried less baggage. Many became engaged in embracing the LGBTQIA community, the acronym getting longer and longer, and if church were not to be a place where they or we were welcome, we’d leave.
Christians would find themselves in one renewal movement after another, we would abandon even the newly revised prayer book for improvisational prayer and worship, we’d swim where the current seemed strong, and drop out when the current seemed to cease to flow. Many began to discover contemplative or centering prayer, sometimes as the only facet of religious life that seemed worth pursuing.
If there was a hymn book, it brought us the hymns of the Taize community. And for us Anglicans—the beloved communion held together by the quadrilateral of Bible, Prayer Book Worship, Orders of Ministry, and the principal sacraments—would begin to unravel over issues of race, gender, and class—issues separating the churches of the once colonized world from the world of the once (and sometimes still or at least would-be) colonizers, issues of damned if you do and damned if you don’t, of a plague on both your houses.
And so, as I got closer to the time of life to enjoy the fruits of one’s labors, the world once again broke in two (the phrase was Willa Cather’s in reference to just about a century before). We began experiencing increasing violence and bigotry, the unleashing of latent resentment and rudeness, viral pandemics that were the underbelly of a global world. Both the world and the church were entering the Era of Consequences, of paying the piper for our sins, sins of omission as much as commission.
In such an era, seen dawning in the mindless obstruction of President Obama’s every initiative and the backlash of his vilification before he even took office, a vilification temporarily transferred from Hillary Clinton, clearly the ground had shifted, a new era begun. What does it look like now that Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America has showed the ugly face of “Making American Great Again?
The churches had been to blame, so we left—did the world get any better? The atheists said all the ills of the world came from religion, we renounced religion, did the ills show any sign of being cured? Was there even a glimmer that would allow us to think things were going to get better? Had we expected in our delusion of progress that COVID and Ukraine and America’s gun violence pandemic and the rise of fake news would so dominate our lives? In what vacuum did all this arise, flourish, and dominate our lives?
And in the church—at least the church that has not bought into the much currently touted Gospel of Prosperity, the Gospel of according to June and Ward Cleaver, the gospel touted from mega-congregations and televangelism—the empty pews have not brought about the reformation that had been much needed. Instead, we seem to have lost the authority of the gospel, the passion of Pentecost, the serious reflection on both individuality and community that lie at the heart of the Holy Trinity.
An era of ideological divisions. Many only count as success a return to the post-WWII world, never dreaming of what a bubble it was, the church then like an over-inflated stock about to burst and bring on a recession. And then others, scattered and diminished, sure that what dominates our lives is not “the way” but not sure where the way is now to be found.
Many formerly main-line churches, including my own, have yet to discover how to be small but mighty, how to be both a close-knit community and a community capable of embracing difference and being once again a safe refuge for those displaced, maligned, and neglected. Somc congregations thrive while the denomination dwindles.
Looking at those eras, I’d say today that, in general, the difference between what it was like when I was raised and what it is like now can be summed up in a question Diane Butler Bass says she is often asked: Why do you remain a Christian? That question was pretty well unthinkable anywhere I lived in the first era of my Christian life, now it is commonplace, although I suspect Bass is asked that far more often than am I.
Her answer is “Jesus.” That’s the answer of our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry—being a part of the “Jesus Movement” on its way to building a beloved community. But still, it is not just any Jesus. Not everyone who chants “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom. And in particular, it is not any vague, ethereal Jesus who happens to make us feel good at the moment. It is the Jesus who takes us just where we are, leads us to God’s dream of us, and forgives us as we forgive others. It is Jesus as the embodiment of the God whose only definition in Christian scripture is “God Is Love.” That Jesus leads us in the adventure of learning to love all God creates and redeems, where the temptations become palpable and we have to choose between being forgiven and staying safe.
On the occasion of my ordination, June 29, 1971, I received a gift from former fellow grad student Denis Calandra. If there were any “beautiful people” in our cohort of friends, it would have been Denis and his wife, the former Jeanne McClaren. Talented, animated, attractive, and bright. We missed them when they left for Germany where Denis had landed a job on the somewhat dubious proposition that he was fluent in German. It didn’t matter—Denis was fluent enough in many other ways to make it work.
In some bookstore, Denis had run across a very old copy of the works of Duns Scotus, stopped at a porn shop for a newspaper that carried explicit photographs of lust in action, wrapped the book in the sheets from that newspaper, then wrapped the package again in plain brown paper, and sent the whole thing my way as an ordination gift. with the inscription “Heresy Wrapped in Lust.”
At the reception following the ordination in the clear view of, well, everyone, I opened that gift, the pornography shockingly spilling out of the brown wrapping! The reception was at St. Mark’s on the Campus (SMOC) in Lincoln, a campus presence that attracted folks connected to what was then called NU and some from Wesleyan University as well.
One housemother of a sorority looked a bit taken aback, another of a fraternity looked gleefully amused, and SMOC must have forgotten the incident because they invited me back as their Rector in the Interim for almost all of 2020. (Well, maybe they hadn’t forgotten…maybe they were prescient since that was the year of COVID.)
I read to them the inscription in Denis’s fine hand…“Heresy Wrapped in Lust”!
That’s interesting in itself because the heresy of which Duns Scotus was accused revolved around whether Mary, as a human woman, would have had to “contract” original sin, and so pass it on to her offspring. That is, his heresy was always wrapped in the concept of lust, if not the actual graphics!
Scotus knew well the times when the organized church tried to organize society to curb as much as possible the evils of Eve, of women, even of Mary, saved from all this only because of her own immaculate conception. Sadly, orthodoxy was often whatever shored up the power and privilege of the Empire. (For the background to the church’s views on Lust in Scotus’ time see Georges Duby’s The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, an expose of the evolution of Medieval ideas about the nature of women.)
Much as I admire G. K. Chesterton and the sense of it that he offers in his book Othodoxy, the case of Duns Scotus is a reminder that sometimes the whole of what we consider to be the orthodox world has to be tried and tested, has to be, in the terms of my good friend Fr. Jim Schmitt, discombobulated. What one day and age calls heresy turns out in another day to seem far preferable to the canonical order that orthodoxy established…whether it comes wrapped in brown paper or lust. My fourth era, then, may well be the Era of Discombobulation, an era when all the disconcerting elements of our current life are actually laying the foundations for renewal.
Having begun in an era where we mistook weaknesses for strengths, we may well be living in a time when we routinely mistake strengths for weaknesses. What is happening now may well be the answer to a prayer frequently offered in our church, the prayer that God will cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Could it be that is just what God is doing! Could it be we were onto something when we sang “God is working his purpose out”?
Christianity, truly taught and practiced and continually challenged and reformed, teaches us the art of holding on to hope in spite of everything.* It provides the discipline that allows us to live as we believe we ought to live no matter what, and to know that such a life may be the only true triumph this side of the grave. I have a great confidence that, when that is what people find in Christian communities, our obsessions with heresy and lust will fade away and our churches will again be “the salt of the earth,” “the body of Christ,” the place we find the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation…and be just as full as God wants them to be. And religion will be again what Cathe spoke of when she wrote that religion and art are the only sources of real happiness.
*[I’m indebted to a short article at 4 June Slate.com entitled “Tzebrokhnkayt: how and why we don’t give up,” written by Dahlia Lithwick, who entitled her original essay “Why Politics Is Both the Poison and the Cure”. This was sent me by Cynthia Caples; for several months before her retirement from the American Consulate in Shenyang, PRC, Cynthia was one of the principal reasons we didn’t give up.]
Kearney, Nebraska
June 2022
Next, who knows? Maybe a single July/August blog—taking time off to follow Hemingway to Sheridan, Wyoming, and Cooke City, Montana, and from there wave hello to our many good friends who at the same time will be in Oxford, Mississippi, for the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Summer will bring whatever it brings. Stay tuned.
capeek 