Some years ago -- and I make the dating here deliberately vague, mainly to protect the guilty (and to hide, cravenly, from acrimony) -- I got sent off to do a series of speeches to clergy types in a metropolitan setting, for the purposes of holding a “retreat” (whatever that is, or was meant to be).
I knew no one in this group. A sputtering of preparatory and incongruous emails from two individuals set me ill at ease. The coordinator of the event filled me in on travel directions, scheduling details, and how many would be listening in on the presentations. He mentioned, oddly, that he was a “cassock-wearer,” which didn’t make much sense to me as, I thought, one just did such things as a matter of course during ecclesiastical affairs.
The other correspondent was of higher rank. His tone was also odd: it was downright “chummy,” with a dash of premature taking into confidences for which I was not prepared in my (then) jejune understandings: in my naivete, I could not return the chumminess with anything but trite obsequy.
He had grown, it seemed, rather weary of “cassock-wearers” to the point of disregarding them all as a bunch of “ephraimites.” “Oh,” I said, casting about in the empty recesses for a meaningful reply, “I see,” which was (and turned out to be even more so) an untruth.
I was to “say something about ministry in the real world”: I have learned over some years as a paid droner at sundry religious affairs that the words “ministry” and “real” and “world” are blessed with such wide latitude that they are cursed with utter rhetorical ennui.
I arrived late at the retreat center. It was big enough to hold several retreats at the same time. I had just completed a long, curved trajectory that permitted a last visit to my uncle, who would repose about a week later. I remember the deep, blue-bright snow glistening in the midwest plains under a winter sun: it was to become the most pleasant memory of that trip.
The conference center staff found me my room. It was the usual blank affair: two single beds, a cramped sink and toilet water-closet that mimicked some trailers I’ve seen, and a radiator under a desultory window.
I opened my Hours book and looked out at the sodium-blasted parking lot, and the curtain of smoke that eclipsed the stars.
I resisted the conclusion that I was in the wrong place.
For some reason that still escapes me, I put on my anteri and riassa and pectoral cross in the next gray morning, rather thick with that inimitable mix of smog and chilling drizzle, and set off to find my audience.
They were clustered around the omelette stand in the cafeteria. There was one cassock-wearer, whom I took to be one of my email correspondents.
The rest were festooned in clergy shirts and polo shirts, some black, some gray, some (of the latter sort) were green and blue. Some looked like they had been interrupted in the back nine.
Some looked positively assertive in their non-clergy attire.
I think they all saw me. None approached. The temper of my presentation, unbeknownst to me, had been set.
I sat down uninvited by the cassock-wearer. I decided not to eat for two reasons. One was that riassa-sleeves make for perilous gestation. The other was that stomach acid was seeping up my esophagus, and I needed omeprazole or calcium bicarbonate or, better, both.
“Hullo,” I offered. “Glory to Jesus Christ.”
He was polite and hospitable. Certainly not gregarious. I should confess here that I continue to need a bit of that, owing to my upbringing in a low church society that had gobs of elbow-rubbing and high-fives all around.
There was little of that here, or, more likely, the esprit de corps that did exist subsisted in higher and more evolved forms.
The coordinator led me to a corporate-style boardroom which was to be the theatre of my speeches. My audience perched, corporate-style, on overstuffed swivel-chairs around the board table.
My ill-disciplined thoughts were running awry. “This is the problem with churchmen nowadays” (who says ‘nowadays’ in their thoughts? -- Ed. note) “their tables are so unconvivial.”
In three speeches I did my usual schtick and spiel. I usually entertain my audiences with a melange drawn from a few main headings (or “propositions,” if you’d prefer):
Resolved, that Holy Tradition is the only comprehensive sustenance of true human knowledge.
That the human psyche (and society) decays when human behavior transgresses created order.
That the Church of Holy Tradition realizes love in prayer, and realizes prayer in dogma.
That love nurtures human and all life, even in the face of decay.
That ministry is predicated on fidelity.
That God's Will is a good will, and that for now, many things happen that are not His Will.
So, for rhetoric’s sake, I tell a few anecdotes and do a little exegesis. I visit doctrine once in a while and mention some patristic passages, like, say, Irenaeus and Justin, Gregory (take your pick) and of course Maximus.
Although they had already defined me as an ephraimite by my attire, I didn’t even mention a single starets.
Things weren’t going all that bad until the frightening Q and A, penultimate to the peroration. I cannot recall the question that inspired my tomfoolery: perhaps, as I now suspect, it was one of those “baiting” queries that are bound to get simpletons in trouble. But I remember clearly my rising cadence, increasing stridence and volume (a dangerous moment for every preacher), a self-pleasing sense of eloquence and rhyme and extemporaneous diction.
For some reason, I whirled down on this period: “And our chief danger is our tendency toward liberal doctrine, which, I am sure, will disable us from the very humanitarian impulse from which such liberality arises.”
I have regretted my lack of clarity ever since. In “liberal,” I meant only the digression from Tradition, in doctrine and in moral teaching. I meant to complain only about the experimental obfuscations of Trinitarian theology and Christology, in favor of a contemporary acceptance of any and all religious narrative(s).
I meant only to register my disagreement with avant garde attempts to modify the old ecclesiastical interdicts against infanticide and violations of traditional anthropology. I meant to denounce the celebrity cult of ollie-ollie-in-free sex and the academically unfit conflation of liberation with sinkhole causes célèbres like female ordination and marriage re-definitions.
It seemed, in this particular jurisdiction, that one cannot bridge the trite dichotomies -- that one cannot be conservative without being right-wing ... that one cannot possibly be conservative and be socialist at the same time, or at least distributist ... that the higher-ranking clergy cared mainly for rubrics and proper courtesies, and shrugged, old-worldly, at "interesting" activities and associations ... that one cannot be humanitarian and pledged to the social Gospel without being Left, and eventually liable to hum the internationale. (But that last resort is only for the brave and honest of the Left: in this board room, the golf club saved the comrades from the sickle, as is its wont.)
(Perhaps this jurisdiction is not the only one.)
I fear -- in fact, I am convinced -- that in registering my conventional protests against these “liberal” revolts against Holy Tradition, I invited my audience to dismiss me not only as an ephraimite but also as a fundamentalist.
Since I complained about liberal belief and morals, then I must also -- in the minds of my interlocutors -- be complaining about liberal politics and thus must be “right wing.”
Or, as my higher-ranked emailer must have been thinking, not interested in "ministry in the real world."
Not in the right place.
It is, because of my obtuse rhetoric, my fault alone that I left the metrop with the polo-shirted retinue still thinking that I was just another neo-con convert trying to smudge their episcopalian entrance into the mainline stream of American religious defunctory.
Neocon I certainly am not: I rather like the idea of the rich getting taxed more. You may disagree and God bless you for it.
And probably I am not fundamentalist either, I thought, soon after I left the corporate bored-room with check in hand -- the check that was handed me with a “thank you but don’t let the door hit you on the way out” grim sort of look.
The higher ranking email correspondent followed me out, at least, and sighed: “I wish they would have at least engaged with you.”
I laugh at my younger self: "engaged with" is only a term reserved for military units. It is commonplace corporate-speak, in its penchant for military-language for festooning itself with more manliness than it actually possesses.
He actually meant, or should have meant, to say "I wish they would have come right out and argued with you." Or "debated you." Or "fought you." Instead of "So long, fare well, auf wiedersehen, goodbye ... adieu, we'll do, a post-mortem on you-ou."
And it was then, in my sullen obtuseness, that I finally figured out something was amiss.
I was feeling much like a fish does after sitting in the fridge for too many days, as I was packing my things in that cinder-block room.
The door announced a visitor.
It was the youngest participant in the congregation: clergy-shirted, white-tabbed and all that, to my relief. He offered to help me carry out my luggage and boxes (I always come equipped with handouts and too many books).
He was happy about the lectures, mostly in agreement, actually.
God sets friends, unlooked for, in even the direst of places.
He has kept in touch, off and on. A few weeks later, the emailing cassock-wearing coordinator requested, rather tersely, the texts of my presentations. This is usually a bad sign, but I sent the skeletal remains anyways.
After this correspondence, complete radio silence. No one is amused by a conservative sneak attack.
No, I’m not fundamentalist either, I thought again as I headed back on the long drive home, back to my olive-rooted bed, back to my little Ithaca.
Though you wouldn’t know it. In the midwest snows, we had spoken softly, my aunt and dying uncle and I. Now they were fundamentalists for sure, but the gentle type who just wanted everyone to know Jesus and be saved. In their humble enthusiasm they had sent some money to Jim and Tammy once upon a time: and in their disappointment had never lost hope.
Despite their heterodoxy, they had given away, at the very least, a tithe of their treasure to God's work in the world. It may have been a widow's mite, compared to the largesse I saw represented in the boardroom the next day, but ... well, you know the implications and the rest of the tale.
Aunt and Uncle asked me, nervously (as any evangelical would be nervous with an Orthodox priest for a nephew), what I was going to do at this retreat I was traveling to.
I looked at my frail uncle, oxygen tube in his nose in his easy chair in which he had, for years, urged the Cubbies to keep trying despite how things worked out every year. Here was a man who really believed the Bible, “yes that’s the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God ...”
I told my aunt and uncle that I was going to talk to a group of priests. That I was going to "share" how important it was to conserve the truth of real Christianity, because that was the only way "to minister to the real world."
A world where people were dying.
A world that Christ loved, and sent His Church to make it live.
