Book Excerpt: “An Honorable Man”

Some of you know - and the rest of you know now! - that I’m working on a book, tentatively titled Five Years In Paradise, that is part memoir (with names and details changed to protect, yadda yadda), part commentary on the lot of female pastors, and part expose of the good, bad and ugly that is mainline protestant church culture today.  The book is in progress and will be for awhile yet.  But to whet your appetites, here’s an excerpt, which is also probably going to change several times, but the core of it is fairly together. 

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“An Honorable Man”

 

He was an honorable man.  He was crowding ninety when I met him:  stooped, wizened, with a shock of thinning white hair, bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and watery-blue eyes large and pale behind coke-bottle glasses.  Reverend Brutus, the beloved “Minister Emeritus” of Paradise Christian.  New preachers inherit these precious church heirlooms, from time to time.  Sometimes, they can be trouble.  But not Reverend Brutus.  He was a help, and a blessing, and I was glad to have him.  After a long and fruitful career in ministry, at Paradise and elsewhere, Reverend Brutus was now widowed, living with his son, quietly worshipping at Paradise, and, as he put it, “fully and gladly retired”.  He never got in my way or crowded my turf.  He was quite careful not to do so.  He was publicly and privately supportive of me and my ministry. 

He was an honorable man.  Living, as all ministers do, with the fire-in-the-bones that is the urge to minister, no matter how ”fully retired”, he banked that fire in helpful, unobtrusive ways.  He would ride along with me sometimes to nursing homes and hospitals.  He would send people cards, sometimes with little gifts in them.  He was always ready to share his wisdom, experience, stories, and jokes.  And on those rare, blessed occasions when he did read scripture for us, he would transform before our very eyes.  The quaver would leave his voice.  The stooped back and shoulders would straighten.  He would enter the text and bring it back alive for us, and there would be, in and around him, an echo of the old flash and fire that had made him so formidable, once upon a time.  He was everything a church’s Elder-Statesman should be. 

He was an honorable man.  And, as Elisha looked to Elijah and Timothy looked to Paul, I began to look to Reverend Brutus.  He not only knew ministry; he knew my church! He’d served it for many years, guided it through stormy seas, loved it as I now loved it, and ultimately, chosen it for his final waystation this side of Life.  He was invaluable to me as I sorted out the tangled lumps and threads of church:  who had just lost loved ones, who expected to be visited more often, and so forth.  He told me stories of his own ups and downs as a minister.  He gave me copies of his old sermons and newsletter columns by which I saw firsthand how an old-school “cat herder” did the trick. 

 

He was an honorable man.  A mentor.  A grandfather in the faith, who over five years had won more of my love – and admiration – and trust – than he or I quite realized.  That, in the end, was our downfall. 

 

+

Friday morning, eleven o’clock, June thirteenth.   After a long and difficult week, atop a long and difficult spring of a long and difficult year - that critical, embattled ”fifth year” that few pastors at Paradise Christian had managed to make it past…the telephone rang.  I didn’t know whom to expect on the other end.  Someone selling curriculum? A hospital call? routine business? Or the latest salvo from that group of pastor-killers every church seems to have, the group in and around Paradise Christian that I’d simply come to call “the Posse”?

 

It was the Posse, all right. 

With their latest stealth weapon.   

 

“This is Reverend Brutus, Pastor, and I have something to say to you, and you’re not going to like it.”

 

(??)

 

“I love this church, and I hate to see it keep going downhill.” 

 

(So do I, I said.)

 

“I hate to see a dozen-and-more good upstanding people say they won’t come back to this church as long as you’re here.”

 

(I’m sorry for that too, but you know why they won’t, and that can’t be helped, I said.)

 

“Well, anyway, you’re completely wrong for this church.  You’re too laid-back.  Your family is hippies.  Your brother and his wife have tattoos.  You let your daughter wear jeans to light the altar candles!”

 

(da…huh…what??)

 

“I think you’re the problem at this church.  I don’t think you’re any kind of good minister for us here.  I supported your ministry when you came.  But I can’t support it any longer.” 

 

“If you’re wise, you’ll take my advice and quit before you’re forced out.  That’s all I have to say.  Goodbye.”

 

+

 

Any of a dozen things might occur to a reader at this point that occurred to me later…but not right then. 

 

He was an honorable man.  My mentor.  My grandfather in the faith.  I had an emotional connection to him that I did not have to others in the church, and it was that connection the Posse was counting on, and…to their credit…it worked. 

 

Because it never occurred to me, as I hung up the phone, to consider all the usual things a minister considers when blindsided…that Reverend Brutus might be having a bad day, that he must be listening to the wrong people, or even that he might, at his great age, finally be “slipping”, or perhaps a combination of all of the above. 

It never occurred to me to do the obvious thing, like set up a time to talk further with him about his concerns. 

I didn’t even register the curious fact that Reverend Brutus, always so meticulously ethical, was breaking the Ministers’ Code with a sledgehammer, by directly interfering in my ministry in this full-frontal, hot-poker-through-the-chest manner.  

In retrospect, it wasn’t Reverend Brutus’ style…at all.  The Posse was all over this one, and behind the Posse, the satanic spirit they so unwittingly served. 

But in those stunned moments in my office, all I could think, over and over in my head like a skipping CD, was, “I must be a Bad Minister.  Reverend Brutus said so.  I’m killing this church.  Reverend Brutus said so.  I have to leave.  Reverend Brutus said so.” 

 

Like a small child assuming she must have been bad or else Daddy wouldn’t've thrown her against the wall, I assumed - emotionally and uncritically – that Reverend Brutus must be right and I must be all, terribly, wrong.    Leave Paradise Christian? And more than that! In those first moments after the phone call, I was ready to leave ministry.  I was ready to leave Christianity, altogether, as I was obviously such a miserable failure that even Jesus couldn’t love me anymore. 

 

Sanity returned, bit by bit; but even a “fully retired” Reverend does not always realize how awfully his or her words still weigh on the ears and hearts and spirits of others.  What if Paul had told Timothy, “You’re no kind of pastor at all”? What if Elijah had told Elisha, “The problems in the kingdom are all your fault, and we’ll all be better off if you leave”?  What if your own mother or father rejected you, or your pastor shamed you by name from the pulpit? -That’s how it felt.  Like being run through from behind when you thought you had all your foes in your sights, only to turn in surprise and pain and see the sword in the hand of your most trusted ally.  Rational thought and second thoughts are equally impossible at such moments.  Even ministers break. 

 

Et tu, Brute? then fall, Caesar.

 

With Reverend Brutus’ words still burning and skewering through me, I made two phone calls – one to my husband, one to the Bishop, and then, I started typing.  My resignation letter.  I wouldn’t leave Christianity, and I wouldn’t leave ministry – not permanently, at least – but I would leave for awhile, and I would certainly be leaving Paradise Christian. Why? many reasons, many indeed. I’d've gone anyway, at year’s end, with or without this final straw.  But Reverend Brutus’ call bumped my timetable up by several months.  Brutus must be right, I thought.  Brutus is an honorable man. 

 

 

—End of Excerpt—

 

  

post-chapter note:  Like Shakespeare’s Brutus, the Reverend stood up and admitted to what he’d done, even though I’d resolved never to speak of it to anyone.  Like Shakespeare’s Brutus, the Reverend bore the ensuing backlash honorably and alone, while the Posse, ever predictable, hung back in the shadows and let him bear it for them.  Unlike Shakespeare’s Brutus, I am happy to say, the Reverend’s story ends a bit less tragically.  -Before I left Paradise, he apologized and we were reconciled.  He worships still at Paradise Christian.  He is an honorable man. 

Tags: church, ministry