Are You Persuaded?: In and Out of Being a Bishop

Introduction

My journey in faith has not been in a straight line. Indeed, I had to move outside Christianity to come back and embrace not only Christianity but the church. To return to the church, I had to leave the church. Thus, my wife and I went to India. In Poona I visited the childhood home of Meher Baba and then St. Francis’ small chapel, the Portiuncula, just below Assisi. Both places gave me a deep experience of the divine presence and caused radical reorientation. They enlarged my faith and propelled me to reinvestigate the church.

I knew I wanted to be a priest when I was in elementary school, but as an adolescent, I wasn’t convinced that the church was wide enough or deep enough. However, in midlife, I realized that there is a point in which one’s time is short, and, therefore, if one is going to pursue one’s dream, the moment is the present. Thus, I went through the process of discernment to be an Episcopal priest and was sent to The School of Theology, known as Sewanee, in Tennessee.

There I discovered what it meant to be on the other side of the altar as well as how wide the church is. The Seminary had students who were liberal and conservative, low church and high church, spiritually oriented and politically oriented, plus introverted and extroverted. My time there helped me realize that there’s some truth that The Episcopal Church is indeed the church of all sorts as well as reaffirming my call to the priesthood.

After seminary I was fortunate to serve in a friendly parish outside Nashville, Tennessee. My wife loved her job, my kids liked their schools, and we had a wonderful house. The people of St. Paul’s, Franklin were creative, dedicated, and fun. However, my restlessness returned, and I felt called to move to a new city to serve as the rector of St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church in Athens, Georgia.

In some ways I felt this period was the best fit for my gifts and the church’s need. I kept rediscovering the truth that we live our lives forward and understand them backward. My return to the church did not come from an intellectual understanding of the gospels but rather experiences that convinced me that God was not an intellectual concept nor a winsome belief that no truly intelligent person could believe, but was a holy presence alive wherever we are. Indeed, most of the changes in my life have come from the heart center and not the head center. We moved to Athens, Georgia so I could be the rector of a medium-size church not because it made sense to leave Nashville, but because something about the people and their faith beckoned me.

While at St. Gregory the Great, I was elected to be a deputy at The Episcopal Church’s General Convention in Minneapolis in 2004. I loved meeting people I had only read about, yet I became somewhat disillusioned by the governing process. Convention is an ecclesial House of Representatives and Senate. The bishops are the Senate, and the elected lay people and clergy are the House of Representatives. Despite a full agenda, the primary focus was whether to affirm The Rev. Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire. The process was messy because he is an openly gay man, and yet, as W.B. Yeats wrote, A terrible beauty was born.³

I was comfortable at St. Gregory’s and felt we were doing good work. I liked the congregation, and they liked me. In spite of that, I agreed to be on the ballot to be the bishop of Western North Carolina. This was partly because the headquarters are in Asheville, North Carolina where I grew up. I wasn’t interested in going to another parish; I was interested in doing something different. Part of my story is a restlessness. I was surprised to be elected, and it was only afterward that I discovered what that meant for me and my wife, Jo, and our two children.

When I was ordained a bishop, the question that caused me to pause, even with the congregation sitting behind me and the ordaining bishop standing in front of me, was, Are you persuaded that God has called you to the office of bishop? After a lengthy process of being evaluated and questioned and finally elected by representatives of the parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina, I realized that even as I was persuaded, I really didn’t know what this meant, or indeed how the church institution worked, or if I had the essential qualities.

In ordination the church points to an ontological change. However, the change I experienced was the wide range of expectations suddenly placed on me. I wasn’t any wiser as a bishop than I was as a priest or layperson, but I instantly became the mayor, the police, the counselor, the financial guru, and the garbage man. Of course, I was still just me.

Being a bishop meant being included in events in the church which I had never considered. I traveled extensively and, therefore, became an important person to American Airlines. I was so surprised when I retired that they no longer seemed to care about me at all. I traveled to India, England, Scotland, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, as well as the east and west coasts of the United States. I was sincerely honored to be in this position even as I often wondered how and why I got there.

Perhaps the highlight of my episcopacy was to vote for Michael Curry and Katharine Jefferts Schori as consecutive Presiding Bishops. Both broke barriers, a man of color and a woman, and both brought amazing gifts to the church. It was an enormous privilege to be part of these two events, especially as I was on the committee that counted the votes in Bishop Katharine’s election.

While the workload was massive, the people of The Diocese of Western North Carolina were always kind and helpful. The foundation of most of my encounters with the laity and the clergy was a desire to live into what God was calling us to do and to be. Indeed, one of my regrets was being too busy to connect with the laity and clergy at a deeper level.

However, there was the other side to this office. I found myself doing too many things in too many different places. In addition, while I have certain gifts, it seldom seemed as if I was called to use them. I kept having to rely on my non-dominant hand. In the short term, this pushed me to grow, but in the long term it was exhausting. Perhaps if I had said no more often, I would have found a doable pace, but that has never been my strong suit.

After twelve years, I decided I could no longer be the active bishop of The Episcopal Church in Western North Carolina. It wasn’t the people; they were wonderful. I was just tired and had little enthusiasm for what needed to be done. Yes, I was honored to have served in this office, but I could feel that the institution was taking away my ability to be the person I was born to be. I was less creative and too often weary.

This book points to my next step. After retiring, I taught at Wake Forest Divinity School for three years and rediscovered my enthusiasm for engaging with people about ideas concerning our souls and our connection to the divine source. Do I miss being the diocesan bishop? Not often. Admittedly, it’s been a challenge to sit in the pews and be content with the worship as it is and not as I think it could or should be. In truth, I had to recall my true calling from my baptism: To seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.⁴ I had to deal with not representing an institution which is both freeing and isolating. After teaching at Wake Forest, I did return to being active as an assistant bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, but it’s hard to compare that with my previous calling. I was an assistant and not the final authority. In addition, this was all during COVID-19.

I don’t know what the future holds in terms of me and the church. I go to a wonderful parish every Sunday and occasionally preach. I am a Spiritual Director and counsel various folks, and I have been teaching a class back at Wake Forest Divinity School. However, I find that it’s better for my soul if I am no longer in charge. I am more in the moment because I am not trying to make anything work out, except my dog’s barking, which seems to be a long-range endeavor.

Am I still persuaded? Well, not to be active as bishop, but I am always persuaded that when God calls us and asks us, Can you serve in this way? the answer, even with a long pause, is Yes. Then we see what happens and sometimes understand what God has in mind. As the Psalmist says, Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. Even when I have been lost and wondered why I was chosen to fill a certain office, I try to remember that I am not in charge. On my best days I am an instrument for God and Christ in the Holy Spirit, but even on my worst days, I still say Yes to what the Spirit sometimes faintly whispers in my soul. Because I am now in my seventh decade of life, I realize I don’t have time to wrestle with being persuaded. Instead, when the Holy Spirit whispers in our hearts, those who seek to be faithful even knowing our limitations and the inconvenience, must say, Yes. In the end, to be faithful is to be persuaded because God’s persuasion enables us to be faithful and to grow.

3

. Yeats, Easter 1916,

177

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4

. The Book of Common Prayer,

305

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1

Tourist or Pilgrim

He who seeks to know the ground on which we stand and its as yet inviolate treasure is doomed to go abroad through the world.

—Elizabeth Sewell, Signs and Cities

I walked into the room and ran into the wall. Not a figurative one but a plaster pink one. The pink room was so small I could almost touch both walls. What was this room for—laundry?

One lamp hung down from the ceiling. There was no furniture just bare pink walls and a concrete floor painted white. I walked in and had to turn to my left because there was nowhere else to go.

At the end of the room, maybe fifteen feet away, I saw a stone about the size of a brain cemented into the floor. It stuck up maybe four inches. I couldn’t tell what kind of rock it was because like so much of the ground in India, it was grayish brown. I took one step toward it, then another, then one more.

No one else was in the room. For a moment, I wondered, Why am I here? What could go on? What could happen in a place so small?

Above the stone, there was a kind of altar with pink and white flowers roped into a garland and candles—not our Christian votive candles but tall ones like those for the Lady of Guadalupe. A small round ceramic dome held two sticks with plumes of incense twirling toward the ceiling. The smoke burned my eyes and caught in my throat.

What was I doing in Pune, India, in a pink closet, staring at a rock?

That question made me turn away. This was foolish. My parents’ objection, You are abandoning your roots, came back with a whoosh. That old refrain of I can’t do anything right, was the counter whisper that sucked me dry.

But here I was. I decided not to look at the smallness of the room or the garish candles or the stone or the pink or anything. I decided to close my eyes and breathe. To close out the voices in my head, I repeated Peace, peace, peace with every in and out of my breath. Over and over. Peace, peace, peace.

A crooked road had led me to this place. The 1970s were my religious wandering period. I liked the idea of church in a nostalgic way, but I couldn’t get there on Sundays. It was too much like my father’s world. Too button down; too linear; too stiff. Yet, I struggled to find something else.

That something else began when I was a sophomore in college. I was sitting in the living room of the Beta House at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reading my Shakespeare, when Jack Johnson, a fraternity brother from Winston-Salem, came up to me and out of the blue said, I don’t need this book anymore. Why don’t you take it?

I stared at him because I didn’t really know him. I knew he was an English major, but he was a senior and quiet and kept to himself—like me. He stood in front of me with a Question Authority button on his black T-shirt, holding a brown paperback in his hand.

Sure. Thanks. The book cover showed an older man with a wide grin making an okay sign with his fingers. I wondered if Jack thought I was the only one weird enough to want to read this. The book was The Everything and the Nothing by Meher Baba. It turned out to be similar to Hinduism—reincarnation, the world is illusion, there is an alternate reality where we are one.

I was in this in-between place. I was an English major, but I was taking more religion classes than literature. Sometimes I would go to the empty Episcopal Church to sit and think late at night and stare at the altar lit by one lone light and long to feel something, but I couldn’t bear to sit through Sunday morning services. I was a seeker without a map.

After I read the book, I asked Jack about it. I don’t know he said. I found it at the Intimate Bookshop. But I heard that there is actually a center for Meher Baba in Myrtle Beach. As I read, I found that Meher Baba died in 1969 and kept silent for the last forty-four years of his life.

Let me get this right. Myrtle Beach—Pavilion, Gay Dolphin, Arcade, and a spiritual center?

I didn’t think about this too much for a while, but one weekend in 1970 when my family was at Pawleys Island, I drove north on Highway 17 through the ticky-tacky long section of amusement rides, sunglasses stores, restaurants with waiting lines of elderly couples and parents with squirming children, and miniature golf courses on every corner to a stretch of Highway 17 that was an empty two-lane road. I turned onto a side street and came to a brick ranch house where Kitty Davy, one of the leaders of the Meher Spiritual Center, lived.

Kitty was an eighty-year-old English woman. She asked me in for tea. It was June and hot. I walked into her office wondering what I could say to someone that old and that unique. After all, this woman left London to live in nowhere India for decades. The top of Kitty’s head came to my chin. To see me, she crooked her head to the left and looked up. Her smile covered her face. She reached her hands up to me and patted my cheeks as if I were a schoolboy. I couldn’t believe how large her hands were for such a small woman.

Sit down, sit down, she said. I sat down in a blue vinyl chair facing her across her desk. I was looking for Lipton or maybe Twinings, but we were served chai—strong, sweet, thick—and Pepperidge Farm cookies. I drank and ate and looked at her hairline because I was too timid to look her in the eyes. Kitty talked a bit about how she met this master in the 1930s and how she had lived in India. Finally, she wore down and appeared to look all the way through me. What brings you here?

What had brought me here? I couldn’t say. I blurted, Meher Baba. How do you know he’s the one?

Well, she said in her lilting voice. Well. Because when I was with Baba, I knew what it was to be alive.

I wanted that. More than anything I wanted to know what it was to be alive and to be connected to the source. I wrote in my journal, Holy One, come to me without a name. Touch me with what is real and true. I didn’t know the Holy One’s name, but my need was so great, I didn’t care about the name. I knew that too much of the time I felt frozen inside. I would go anywhere to get thawed out.

I read Meher Baba’s books and occasionally went to the Center in Myrtle Beach during the ’70s. For me, most of this decade was a kind of spiritual walkabout. I affirmed all kinds of universal principles, but the church felt too small for the universal God.

In the late ’70s I was back on the outskirts of the church—not going on Sunday but sometimes going to a Friday morning Eucharist after I volunteered at a homeless shelter all night. I knew I wanted to be fed, but I wasn’t sure about the baggage. A stripped-down service—no sermon, no coffee hour, no questions—just the bread and the prayers were all I could handle. I could not find the deep water but was weary of swimming in the shallow end.

In 1981 I was still primarily untethered, ungrounded, and unanimated. I was in a PhD program without really knowing why. I had quit my high school teaching job because I was going through the motions, not because I was called to something else. I was just in between. Not clear about career, unresolved with family, drifting in spirit. I wanted an experience. I yearned to believe in something, anything, but could not commit with all my heart. Church felt like a Rotary Club meeting, but everything else felt made up. I could not find solid ground.

I realized that graduate school gave me a month off around Christmas. I said to my wife, Jo, How about going to India? and called a travel agent. I wanted to see about Meher Baba for myself. As I was talking to the woman on the phone, she said, There’s a return flight that goes from Bombay to Rome to New York. I knew Jo had to get home because she had a real job, but there’s freedom to being a perpetual student. Can you get off the plane in Rome? I asked. We decided to go together to India, but I would get off on the way back.

And here we were. Pune, India. The first night in the hotel I couldn’t sleep. First the noises never stopped. Muslim calls to prayer, strange sharp bird calls, low rumbling diesel trucks, and the piercing chirps of horns on the motorcycle bumblebees that carried two people in a carriage. The whole room was white tile. It was like being in a big bathroom. The only light was a single bulb. The toilet was a hole in the floor. It took a long consultation for me to figure out how this worked. That night I wrote, I am scared I will slide off the world. This is the land where anything is possible.

When we went down for breakfast, our waiter, a short man whose dark Indian skin contrasted with his bright, starched, white uniform, brought us chai and then disappeared. Moments later we heard an Indian version of the theme song from Goldfinger sounding from the ceiling. It was his gesture to make us feel at home. He returned expectant, but I couldn’t eat. I was too wired and too everything.

That morning we went sightseeing in Pune from the safe distance of our taxi, but the distance didn’t feel safe enough. I saw women cooking over fires next to tin shacks and men squatting in the field for their morning constitutional. Children with haunting eyes that you don’t want to remember. The smells—some pungent mixture of smoke, dung, and diesel that catches in your throat and mixes into your clothes. Then this jangle of sounds—constant horns from trucks, cars, and bicycles; atonal music blaring from loudspeakers; and the low rumble of strange dialects. Our little cab was a bubble of order amid this foreign land.

Kitty Davy had told me that Meher Baba grew up in Pune, and you could visit his house—called Pumpkin House. When I asked the cab driver if he could get us there, he wobbled his head, but I couldn’t tell if that was Yes or No. I tried to pretend I trusted him. On the cab’s dashboard was a statue of Krishna with incense in the ashtray. Riding through the streets I looked at the women hanging their bright saris on wash lines, the cows with their dull stare, and the children—always children with hands outstretched.

When we turned onto a side street for the house, there was no marker, only the number. I wasn’t sure we were in the right place, and there was no one around. I wondered if it was wise to leave the cab, but we couldn’t stay in limbo forever. We paid an inexplicable amount of rupees—which oddly enough looks like Monopoly money. We walked through a cobblestone patio and knocked on the front door. A short, plump woman in a green sari greeted us. Her hair was parted in the center with a red splash on her forehead. Pumpkin house? I asked. Yes, yes, she said, as she wobbled her head from side to side and ushered us in.

The house reminded me of a small version of our American ranch houses in the 1950s. There were photos of the master’s family everywhere. Walking around was kind of interesting, but only kind of. As always, I was done before Jo. I am either a quick study or lack sufficient curiosity because I always finish sightseeing quickly. I turned to go back to the courtyard and saw a doorway to a small room to my right.

I later learned that when Baba had his revelation at an early age, he would go into this room and bang his head on the stone now fixed into the floor. Apparently,