The Plague

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  

                                                                                                      --Voltaire

Holy Week in the Pacific Northwest is blessed with Dogwood and Cherry blossoms.  In the sunlight a mist evaporates from the Firs and Pines.  It remains that April is the cruelest month.  This year it came with a global pandemic.  The American outbreak started a few miles from our home and blocks away from our church.   One of our musicians plays piano at Life Care Center of Kirkland where recently two thirds of the residents and forty-seven workers fell ill.  Thirty-five residents died.

Quarantines and state mandated social distancing have restricted church ministries to the Internet.  On Monday, email from the director of lay readers at the church increased my sense of isolation:

   

Good morning,

It is Holy Week and Fr. Michael is planning our Good Friday service and vigil.

It is planned to read the Passion of Christ, with members of the Lector ministry taking part.  Fr. Michael has volunteered to read Pontius Pilate and asks that a woman volunteer to read the words of Jesus. Deacon Missy will be the narrator. It will be recorded in advance from the distance of our homes to be played back on Friday.

Please reply to me by Tuesday of your willingness to participate. I will notify you of the record date and time when I learn of it.

My reaction was immediate, “What is he thinking?”

My wife tried to keep her sense of humor, “Can we get a man who identifies as a woman to read Mary Magdalen?”

“Mary doesn’t appear in the Passion Narrative,” I said.

“It must have been sexism by the authors of the Gospels.  Give her some lines.”

She went back to what she was doing.  I continued to think about it.  This is The Screwtape Letters: Satan hacking our thinking and we can’t discuss it without hurting or offending people.

St. John’s Episcopal Church has been the locus and community of our lives for years.  Part of the Diocese of Olympia, the ethos is that of left-coast political culture, but friendly.  We have hung on, tenuously at times, against condescension that exudes from the hierarchy where gender politics are not subtle.  At a recent diocesan convention, the delegates were instructed to add preferred gender pronouns to their name tags. 

When we were invited to join St. John’s, lawsuits were raging in various parts of the country against churches trying to leave the Episcopal Church USA with their property.  We didn’t join, but we sing in the choir, serve on an Education Committee, and participate as lay readers and occasional contributors to the Prayers of the People.   When the lawsuits began, we stopped contributing financially to the church.  I came to the Episcopal Church as a cantor and choir section leader in another parish where my musical training was remunerated.  Maybe our musical contributions are worth something.

I knew there was nothing I could do and sent the following reply to the email.

My shock at Fr. Michael's request that a woman portray Jesus in this reading of the Passion narrative was followed by anger and now by profound grief.  Diane and I have maintained participation at St. John's against consistent political and ideological advocacy that alienates and often offends us.  The gender ideology pervasive in the Episcopal Church may err on the side of inclusion.  This is probably a good thing, but to make Holy Week into another bit of propaganda for "progressive" ideology against the Incarnation is more than we can bear.  We love St. John's people, but this seems to be it.

There were people at St. John’s who expected us to leave when the church married a lesbian couple five years ago.  When my wife and I agreed to sing at the ceremony, one of the brides called me on the phone, evidently to inquire whether we had any compunctions about it. 

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because we love you, Lee.”

We’re still friends.  These women had been living together for many years before it became legal to get married.  Leona’s bank account was hacked, and Leila didn’t have access as domestic partner.  They decided to get married for estate reasons.  Lee is a member of the church and the choir.  Leila wanted nothing to do with the church, but she was persuaded in discussion with our organist and his partner to invite God’s blessing on their union.

The response to my email was anticlimactic, several chirpy replies from women who offered to read.

Our deacon replied:

Thank you, Donna, for leading this new ministry of recorded worship with all its challenges. Looking forward to proclaiming the Gospel in a new and unique way.

Peace of the Lord, Missy
Deacon, St. John's Episcopal Church, Kirkland, WA

Reconciliation is not just part of the Gospel; reconciliation is the Gospel.
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

The quote from the Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t help my state of mind.  After fifteen years at St. John’s, most of our friends are members.  I’m old enough to retire, but I continue to work from my home office.  My wife retired during the last recession, and, often enough, feels isolated.  Her sisters live far away.  Her parents, my parents, and my sister are deceased.

We have considered leaving the left coast for lighter traffic and more congenial politics.  The question of finding another church always has been part of the discussion.  Other conservative friends have commented that a move could put any of us in a situation of being more liberal than our neighbors instead of more conservative.  The music in most conservative churches sends us running for the parking lot.

Resignation to finding another church is depressing, but Diane is irrepressible.  She has been a dynamic presence and joy every day of our thirty-five-year marriage. 

Fr. Michael’s response to my email included a conciliatory effort:

I hear your anger and pain and I'm sorry that my request was the cause of that pain.  I made the request not to advance a cause but because I wanted to experience of the fullness of Christ's humanity.

I think he means what he says.  What, to me, is unnecessary accent on an already dominant cultural consensus is, for Fr. Michael, an interest in the feminine character of God.  My argument isn’t with him.  It’s with incessant attempts to modulate gender.  We now have a neutered hymnal.  A former deacon said he thinks it is time to rewrite the creeds.  My experience of feminine character in the deity is every day with my wife. 

None of this is academic at St. John’s church.  We have gay parishioners, and several members have transgender or gay children, now adults or adolescents.  The issue of women’s ordination is past disputing.  We’ve had women celebrants of the Eucharist.  A woman reading Jesus’s words in the Passion narrative is similar enough to a woman priest reciting the words of institution in the Eucharist.  Consensus is that it’s wrong to question the injustice of keeping women clergy from full participation.  Liturgical churches have a bit of a problem with it.  I can abstract the words of institution from a woman celebrant, so why not in the Passion narrative?

For years I have attended a men’s study group where the conversation rambles.  It is one opportunity to opine conspicuously against the Episcopal hierarchy.  Most of the guys are not interested in confrontation.  Apparently, they are not aggrieved by sermons about social justice that are mainly identity politics.  Our bishop has an itinerant shame show featuring his claim to be a “recovering racist”.  When we have had a priest in attendance for our discussions, we hear often about white male privilege.

One morning during the study, our former priest averred that the reason homosexuality is condemned in the Hebrew Bible is because it puts a man in the subjugated, penetrated status of a woman.   I replied that people recoil at contemplation of homosexual intercourse without any sense of violation of male privilege.  He wouldn’t consider it and bolstered his argument by claiming that Roman conquests included the ultimate humiliation of Sodomizing soldiers of the defeated armies.  So it’s about male domination, one way or another.  I didn’t point out that his claim required us to believe there were battalions in the Roman army who could get it up for this triumphant humiliation of their foes.  Several of the men in our study group are Marines, veterans of the Vietnam War, one of them a colonel, two others retired officers.  None of them objected to this line of bull.

We’re in a stage of the sexual revolution where people accept nonsense as an inevitable part of the Zeitgeist.  In another session of our study, I raised the issue of medical professionals assisting children with gender dysphoria in discovery of their authentic selves.  For the identity problems of adolescence, they too often administer drugs to prevent the onset of puberty and, often enough, encourage surgical “sexual reassignment”.   Sex change is impossible, undeniably.  Medical atrocities, unfortunately, are not.  There are people convinced they should be amputees who seek surgery to remove an arm or a leg.  It’s clearly pathological, but to refer to transgenderism as pathology is anathema.  We’re coerced into the doctrine of sexual fluidity, and it would be difficult to find anybody who questions it in the hierarchies of mainline Protestant churches.

I thought we might be able to have a civil discussion of the issue of the woman Jesus-reader at the men’s study group, and I sent the following email to members of the group.

Gentlemen, 

Today I ran into something in the current Episcopal ethos that is beyond what I can affirm.  You'll find correspondence following that includes Fr. Michael's request to have a woman portray Jesus in the reading of the Passion narrative.  I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was stunned.  The Incarnation of Jesus is gender specific.  Human gender is binary.  To promulgate fluid gender ideology against the formal order God has created is idolatry.  My convictions count for little in the Episcopal church.  Diane and I have been alienated for years, but we have generally felt that inclusion of all people is important. The culture has reached a stage of madness about gender that somebody has to object.  I'm interested in discussing it if anybody has the guts.

I got a reply from the meeting organizer that we could have the discussion.  He also sent his contrasting view:

Mike,

I'd be happy to have some discussion in the meeting tomorrow.  I am giving you fair warning about what my arguments will be.

I have often argued that in modern times we should read the words in the Declaration of Independence as "all people are created equal...."  If we get past that, then we can discuss:

1) What chance that position had in 100 A.D.  Or in 1000 B.C.

2) What chance the Apostles would have had if the Messiah, Mary's child, had been a woman.

Our faith came out of a male dominated era and out of an older male dominated religion.   What in our church’s beliefs would fail if Jesus had been a woman?  I am not talking about Roman Catholic traditions that give us only male priests and only male popes.  Those clearly were to protect the guys in power and further the male dominance in society.

My argument is that it makes no difference to the basic doctrines of Christianity whether Christ was male or female.

Peace and Health,

Bob

Our rector responded later in the day:

Hello all,

I took today to rest and write, but I received a text suggesting that it might be useful for me to attend tomorrow's Bible Study given Mike’s email.

I’d love to talk about it at tomorrow’s Bible Study.  I’m not interested in debating, so much as our listening and reasoning with each other.  I have no expectation that I’ll change your mind or that you’ll change mine.

But we will each be changed by the act of reasoning together this question of the ultimate significance of God coming to us as a man?  I hope so.   We’ll talk tomorrow morning if the group wants to explore this question.  And I am also available to speak to you and Diane about my decision to ask a woman to read Jesus part and my motivation behind it.

Thank you for having the guts to express yourself so honestly!

Blessings and grace,

Michael+

This was enough to keep me awake the night before the study thinking about whether I had anything to add beyond my correspondence.  Are my anger and grief only a reaction to being overpowered by the church hierarchy?  Episcopal polity is a throw-back to British aristocracy.  The church that is now hypercritical of patriarchy is itself an oligarchy.

Of course, my wife and I were discussing our impasse.  Her perspective, beyond my reaction to the female reader as propaganda for current gender madness, is that of facts against mythological reading of the gospels.  Whether God could be incarnated as a woman, whether the deity is male, female, both, or neither, it remains that the Incarnation on which Christianity is based is gender specific.  Jesus was a man who was crucified in a conspiracy of the religious establishment and by complicity of the Romans.  For a woman to read Jesus’s lines takes the Passion narrative out of history.
 

We both remember the account by an interim priest of a Gallup poll whether priests thought the resurrection of Jesus was historical or not.  George Gallup was an Episcopalian who researched the theology of his co-religionists.  On this take, he found that only 40% of priests professed faith in the resurrection.

“So,” Diane says, “having a woman read Jesus, our church joins the camp of the metaphorical gospel.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so”, I replied.  “Father Michael says he expects Jesus to ‘show up’ in difficult ministerial situations he encounters.  It could be a spiritualized theology, but he entered the priesthood after a personal crisis.  Why would he leave a successful business career for something he thinks is a myth?”

She insists, “Jesus existed and was crucified.  If you believe any of this and the resurrection, you can't re-assign his gender.  Do you want to make Mother Teresa male for some reason?  It’s difficult enough to believe in God against the holocaust.”  She didn’t have to mention the present epidemic. 

So, what am I going to do with a discussion at the study group?  Even if I can make sense to a few men who understand me, it could create controversy.  Fr. Michael’s previous church was the remains of a parish decimated by now familiar disputes in which the majority left rather than submit to episcopal oversight.  The church building apparently defaulted to the diocese, or, maybe, the members were involved in lawsuits.  Fr. Michael was sent to pick up the pieces.  He’s only been here a matter of months.  Discussions among people who selected him indicated they were looking for a unifying presence, not a militant.  We had a feminist associate for a while who hectored people to a degree that even some of the women told her to lighten up.  St. John’s parish isn’t militant.

As far as we know, nobody at St. John’s has contracted the virus, but we’re complying with the governor’s attempts to control it.  The men’s study is being conducted online.  I joined the meeting and waited as faces popped up on my computer monitor.  A few guys needed a minute to get used to the technology.  There were cordial greetings.  I could see Fr. Michael’s face among others on the screen.

The meeting organizer asked, “Are you on, Mike?”  Bob is the one who had earlier sent his arguments for debate.

“Yes, I’m here.”

I don’t know who raised the issue of my request for a discussion, but somebody asked whether we should have it.

I said, “I have my opinions, but I’m willing listen.  Some feminization of Christianity is inherent in The Sermon on the Mount.  Men have to resist male assertiveness to follow Jesus.” 

We had been reading 1^st and 2^nd Samuel, the power struggles between Saul and David.  I had commented on the striking contrast between Jesus’ ministry and David’s conquests.  Jesus didn’t have power or influence. 

“This stuff goes way back.  Men have never known quite what is required of them. Origen castrated himself, becoming literally a eunuch for the kingdom of God.  Bridal mysticism is a misconstrued metaphor in which the individual believer, instead of the church, is seen as the bride of Christ…”  I realized this was going nowhere.  “But that’s tangential.  We simply have a problem when a woman reads Jesus in the Passion narrative.  It cuts the backbone out of the church’s proclamation.  How is anybody supposed to believe this is historical if we revise it to current proclivities?”

I guess it was Fr. Michael who interrupted me.  Nobody except the meeting organizer, had yet agreed to this discussion.  “How many want to have the discussion Mike has requested?

Two men said they would prefer to have the formerly scheduled study in the book of Samuel.  These guys probably aren’t indifferent.  Maybe only a few of them read my email.  I’ve wondered how many understand my rants.

But it stung.  “If nobody is willing to spend half an hour on this, I don’t think I belong here.  Let’s call it…”

Somebody said ok.  There was an uncomfortable pause as I looked for the button to leave the meeting and pushed it.

Many times, it is nice to have a job.  Today it helped me forget this unpleasant Lenten experience.  I spent the time working on technical articles in review.  The sun was shining in my office.
 

By 3:00 o’clock I was ready for some exercise.  Diane and I are learning how much time and expense it takes to stay healthy around seventy years of age.  We consult various therapists, take supplements.  Late in the day, I lift weights and run.  Recently, I persuaded Diane to join me at our Nautilus machine on the idea that strength training is important for bone density.

In the garage we do our various repetitions.  While I’m on the bench press, Diane shadow boxes karate chops that I showed her from a martial arts class I had in high school.  Then it’s her turn on the machine.  I can forget just about anything when she smiles at me.

She has remarkable strength in the leg press.  A walk with her can be a marathon, while she smiles, speed-walking, seemingly without effort.

She has been telling me that things are going to be fine, and she is persuasive, as I was saying about the feminine aspects of the deity… .

When we’re finished with the machine, I head outside, and she rolls down the garage door behind me.  I run up an S-curve beyond our cul-de-sac with increasing focus as the incline of the hill steepens. 

In the next few days two guys from the study group emailed me expressing their sympathies about the aborted discussion.  One of them left his former church when he couldn’t deal with it any longer.  He thinks the pendulum will swing back after a while.   But nobody in his former church seemed even to notice his departure after 45 years of membership.

I got a message from our deacon:

Dear Mike and Diane,

I hope you will take Father Michael's invitation to discuss your view on his choice of reader for Jesus in the Passion Narrative. You may not agree with his action, but I pray you can come to the table to discuss it. At the Heavenly Banquet there will be all sorts of people, and I am sure we will all be surprised. Until then let us Love One Another as God asks us to do. 

Peace of the Lord dear Brother- and Sister-in-Christ.

The Rev. Michelle "Missy"
Deacon, St. John's Episcopal Church

Reconciliation is not just part of the Gospel; reconciliation is the Gospel.
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Fr. Michael had conveyed that this discussion could be set sometime after Easter and others may attend.  I got the message, second-hand, that other conversations were to be discouraged.  In the interim, I am left to contemplate how a woman Jesus-reader would help me to experience God in human Incarnation.  As I mentioned, my wife is pretty good along this line.  My mother was a woman of incarnate goodness and love. 

I don’t want further indoctrination.  In marriage counselling with my former wife, a psychologist had enumerated my offenses of male privilege to explain why my wife was drunk every day.  Being relieved of the rhetoric we’re hearing in church should be fine.  So many clergy want to be prophets of social justice.  If any of them have read beyond the hierarchy’s echo chambers, they seem yet oblivious to the unintended consequences of Great Society largess.  Hebrew prophets decried oppression of workers and neglect of fatherless children.  After fifty years subsidizing dysfunctional behaviors in this country, there are more non-working, substance-abusing fathers, more fatherless children, and hopelessly dependent mothers than ever, both in urban and rural areas.  Along with the welfare state, a much-vaunted sexual revolution has destroyed families and bequeathed to us a church that venerates homosexuals in some analogue of martyrs in the 3^rd century.  Somebody has to talk back... .

It’s Good Friday, and my wife wants to join the vigil service tonight online.  I said I’d rather forget the whole thing.  High tech church is difficult enough without controversy.

Now, she has returned from a shopping trip under the Governor’s precautions.  In the driveway she opens the back of her SUV to unload bags of bark for the Azaleas.

“How was the line at Home Depot?”

“Pretty bad, six-foot intervals, halfway around the building.”

I unload bags of bark.  It must have been a bit of a heft for her, getting forty-pound bags into a shopping cart.  She can’t understand how it doesn’t bring people to their senses when gender ideology puts transgender men into competition in women’s sports.  Women fought for Title 9 scholarships, funding, and venues that are being taken away because most people can’t buck ideological cant.

Another writer, an online friend, put me into state of mind to defend my church despite its liaison with madness.  Brenda Renee, in a recent story, relates sexual abuse by men with power in her Evangelical church.  Beyond the heinous assault of male pronouns for God that offend feminists, Brenda, every year, has to contend with memories of an Easter eve struggle that ended in rape, then attending church the next day where her assailant was present, having to pretend to celebrate the resurrection. 

The ensuing years haven’t changed much about denominations of the church in which women make coffee and take care of children, but are excluded from serious discussions and church polity.  This is patriarchy of the sort that our rector seems to be trying to get past. 

Brenda doesn’t consider herself a feminist.  She didn’t believe the accusations against Kavanaugh.  Now, in fact, she wants to know why I have put up with politically correct nostrums in the Episcopal Church for so long?  A bit defensively, I asked her, “So, how and why, after the abuse and sexism conveyed in your essay are you still in your church?  A woman of your intellect shouldn’t put up with it?"

She explained that the theology is sound even in that backwater.  My problem is that in our church—our former church—the hierarchy has decreed that it is hetero-sexism to believe there are two genders and that various sexual preferences are pathological. Current dogma has it that people adapt from a spectrum of sexual orientations.  But, outside of Jean Genet’s novels, not everything that exists is natural. 

When Diane read Brenda’s essay, she was shaken, depressed.  I can agree with some of the ranting in every forum about male privilege.  Brenda recovered, has a good marriage, children and grandchildren, but Easter always reflects trauma from when she was maybe sixteen.   Having never met her beyond online discussions, even from a thousand miles away, I can tell she is attractive.  Give a man an inch and it can make him into an abuser.  

The new consensus isn’t entirely wrong.  The problem isn’t feminism or gay liberation.  Homosexuals have been hitting on me since I was sixteen years old, but they take no for an answer.  The two women married in our church have made the best of their situation.   Leona prayed regularly for me when I was suffering with atrial fibrillation.  Doing research while Lee was praying, Diane found the cure: I was deficient in magnesium and iodine.  Supplementation solved it two years ago with no recurrence!  Where is the church that is better than what we are leaving?   As a church musician, I've seen it all.

We watched Easter at St. John’s online at 9:00 AM.  The Lord is risen indeed.   A nearby Catholic Church has another webcast at 11:00 AM.  I was confirmed in the Catholic Church before musical employments took me elsewhere.  We opted for the Episcopal Church because Diane wasn’t enthusiastic about the Romans.  Sex scandals were raging.

At 11:00 AM we watched the Easter broadcast from St. Jude’s.  The music was upbeat, not to say jive.  Bishop Mueggenborg was making the rounds, Woodinville at 8:30, St Jude’s at 11:00.  His sermon was an analogy based on the account of the angel who sat upon the stone rolled away from the tomb of the risen Jesus, a vision of God’s removal of obstacles.  God rolls them away and frees us to live as Jesus lives, bringing God’s presence into the world.

After the webcast we were in my office, the technology hub in our house.  Diane has been getting vocal coaching online since the quarantine.  We found old hardware that has been unused for some years in the attic and spent an hour trying to set it up. 

There was no more discussion of the Catholic Church.  Then I was taken by surprise when Diane said, “In our relationship there are times when we need to find our separate ways.”  I thought she was going to propose one of her marathon walks.  “This conference that Fr. Michael wants to have…  I don’t want to tell our friends that their children are sick.”

I said, “You can tell them that you object to the female Jesus-reader because it makes the story metaphorical.  I think the rampant gender ideology it is worth arguing.”

“I can’t tell good people the way they live is wrong.  What about Nanette’s son who has felt all his life that he is a woman in a man’s body?”

“Did he have the surgery?”

“Yes, as an adult.  He made his own choice.  Do you think Leona and Leila should have lived like nuns?”

“People have to make the best of things,” I said.  “We love them.  We accommodate, in some cases provide therapy.”

“Homosexuality has always existed.  If it’s dysfunctional, why didn’t it devolve?”

“Lots of things exist that are abnormal, pathologies, but now psychotherapy is becoming illegal.  It’s important enough to me to take the heat.”

“But I want to support you.”

“Explain your perspective to Fr. Michael and to whomever shows up at this conference.  I’ll tell them mine.  Is this a result of our option at the Catholic Church?”

“You know I have other problems with the Catholic Church.  I suppose we can go there, but they won’t let me take communion.”

“Some priests are ok with it.  I discussed it at Blessed Sacrament, while I was in Bill’s choir.”

“I know, ‘the real presence’”

“That’s all there is to it.  At the level of the metaphysical, the bread becomes the body.”

Why should it be difficult to simply transplant ourselves in the Catholic Church?  Monday morning dawns on our discontent.  I can go back to work, but Diane must fight the feeling of loss and impending condemnation if we have this conference with the rector and our friends in the parish.  Martyrs died rather than burn incense to Caesar.  Here we are on the verge of complicity with an odious Roman edict: “some sex is disordered”. 

The taunt of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?” is postmodern.  Ideology reduces to power.  The world and its creatures are only matter in chaotic recombination.  Some nihilist artist will soon paint or create a drama in which the Mother of God is transgender.  We cannot acknowledge normative form because this entails that some things are malformed.

“You’ve been telling me things will be alright,” I said.  “Do I have to convince you now?”

She answered, “Things will be what they will be… .”

“Hard to argue with that.”

“Things will be said… .”

“No doubt, they’re already being said.  My email went to a lot of people.”

So let it go.  But go.  Little is to be gained by controversy.  Nobody is going to die because St. John’s church garbles the gospel.  There are casualties of intellectual dishonesty about gender, but the suicide rate is about as high among transgender people with or without “gender reassignment”.   It's preferable to avoid moralistic rhetoric on either side of LGBT disputes.

People are dying as we wait for medical authorities and government to lift or sustain the quarantines that have put millions out of work, many of whom were already living paycheck to paycheck.  More than twenty million Americans are newly unemployed.  How long can the quarantine mandates continue?   When they are removed, will epidemic caseloads overwhelm the hospitals?  Computer-generated projections have been wrong.  Even when available, testing is inconclusive.  Disputes about our options are as much politics as science.  What is truth?