Maggie's Farm

Then there are those WASPs like myself, Ivy educated for college and seminary. On merit, got the highest scholarship of any in my class (my school had the odd habit of giving aid based on academic and spiritual aptitude not just financial need) years of supervised clinical pastoral training, missionary work, youth ministry and chaplaincy and where did it get me? Not ordained, because my diocese had ordained so many homosexuals and mid-life crisis guys and felt that I was one woman too many...I remember at the time rather irately exclaiming that as a married mother, it was unlikely that I would be a menace to any kids in my parish, but this was brushed aside. As I write this, men on staff of local churches facing jail for child molesting, embezzling parish funds...

So many years of training and work in the ministry and I have to work in a secular job now and count myself lucky to teach Sunday School and occasionally read the lesson while the less-educated clergy waffle from the pulpit about sports and popular movies....

The lessson I draw from my experience is that people are, for some reason, antagoinized by a Christian minister who is also an intellectual, and highly trained. Mediocrity is more appealing. But, tho the institutional church has no use for me as a professional minister, I've always been affectionately dubbed the office chaplain, teenagers ask me to lead their Bible Studies, and everywhere you are, people need loving care...Every Christian is a minister, regardless of job title....

But it gets my goat when those two charlatans grandstand. And do what they can to stir up hate and resentment, instead of seeking reconciliation and common ground. I bet I have spent more years loving and educating and taking care of black children from the city than they have...I've sat with them in labor, when they are facing jail, prayed with them when parents died, rejoiced when they get into college, debated theology with abused kids who find God the Father intimidating because Daddy treated them like a "ho" rather than a daughter to be protected...I've discussed Mary and the Holy Ghost with a group of pregnant teenagers who were kicked out of their houses by irate parents. I've exclaimed to my supervisors that I felt like a Christian going to the lions leading retreats on abstinence for institutionalized teens who are there because of pregnancy, waywardness, whatever. I've probably changed few if any lives, never made the papers, and no politician has ever had the slightest use for me. Ordained or not, the real work of ministers is about love's slow erosion of the walls around our hearts, the wearing down of sin and sickness and despair and anger with the message of God's redemptive love. You don't become a reverend or minister to others to make a name for yourself, but to raise the light of God's good news, dispel a few more shadows, expand the reach of light and love. What was that old phrase about so shines a good deed in a wicked world? At any rate, my beloved grandmother raised us that we'd burn in hell if we didn't do everything in our power to reach out to lovable and unlovable alike as Christ did to us.

Here endeth my rant from total obscurity.