Learning the Primary Task

Perhaps 25 years ago when I was answering mail for my grandmother, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist and reporter, I opened a letter that said, “Jesus loves you Celestine Sibley.” I read it aloud thinking she might appreciate the no-doubt well-intentioned note and was a little taken aback at her response.

“Imagine that,” she seethed, “someone thinking they can speak for Jesus!” And until her death 10 years ago, it was just such practical pronouncements that helped to shape my own opinions. She was my main guide, the person who taught me how to notice the world.

So when I heard my grandmother’s voice coming out of the mouth of my priest Patricia Templeton just minutes before the 103rd Annual Council of the Diocese of Atlanta was about to begin, I smiled. The background is this: For a few years now I have really wanted a special cross that I could wear all the time on a necklace. Something modest with a longish chain, that could be tucked discretely under my shirt but that I could finger as a reminder to behave better, something tactile to center a prayer. The style that I’ve been coveting in the Monastery Greetings mail catalog I get is the Jerusalem cross, which looks something like a waffle or a grill.

In my shopping fervor at council, I left the St. Philip’s cathedral bookstore with a Jerusalem cross, not quite the size of a silver dollar. And I put it on right away, the bookstore ladies assuring me that it went fine with my pearls against the black backdrop of my shirt. I bought a couple of books, too. At the St. Dunstan’s/Grace Calvary table in the meeting room, I showed Patricia my purchases.

She made no real comment but as we were winding our way back to the hall through the tightly packed sea of round table tops and chairs, she turned to me, indicating the cross, and said one word: “Shiny.”

“Very,” I agreed, still well-pleased with my purchase.

She then said that wearing it on the outside could make me an evangelist. Not the knocking-on-doors, Jesus-loves-you, thumping-the-Bible-on-a-street-corner kind of evangelism, she quickly said when she saw my expression. But that was exactly what my grandmother’s voice would say.

That my priest is so similar in thinking to my grandmother is not particularly surprising. My grandmother had known and loved Patricia from the time Patricia was on her high school paper, through her career as a journalist, as a Peace Corps volunteer, and finally a priest. I think she even took a little pride in Patricia’s accomplishments.

Patricia’s remarks about the shiny cross reminded me of the first lunch we had before I started coming to church again a few years ago. Being a smart-mouthed, know-it-all liberal, I felt compelled to share with Patricia my uncertainty about the literal possibility of some of the miracles pertaining to Jesus.

“Doesn’t matter,” she responded with complete certainty. “It’s the example of his life that counts.”

So when the Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was answering questions from the delegates, lay people, missionaries and priests, I didn’t give it a second thought when she said she thought it was more unusual that she was a scientist who became the head of the Episcopal Church rather than the fact that she was a woman. In my world, women do great things. My doctor is a woman. My priest is a woman.

In her deep, resonant voice, Bishop Katharine spoke to us about the need for inclusion, the need to follow the example of Christ, about not fueling issues with angry rhetoric. She said she strived to be a “non-anxious presence” as the head of the church, but she also quite firmly stated, “I’m called to do what I’m called to do and your reaction is your problem.”

As the day wore on, we delegates from St. Dunstan’s were both uplifted and overwhelmed by the speakers who spoke of great need and great works being done in the church to address HIV orphans, sex trafficking, hunger, poverty, mental illness, disenfranchisement, ignorance. Our group included Maggie Harney, the priest who runs Martha and Mary’s Place at St. Dunstan’s; Renee Kastanakis, a vestry member and lawyer who heads up our sustainability efforts; and Laura Withers, an 19-year-old member of St. Dunstan’s who has the most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard and who is also a freshman at Emory.

By the time we found our seats for the evening Eucharist with Bishop Katharine, we were tired, short on caffeine but full of expectation. Others from St. Dunstan’s had arrived to share in the feast—Nancy Dillon, Beverly Hall, Laura’s mother and sister, Vicki Ledet and Meg Withers. Peachy Horne, who rules the gardens surrounding our church, smiled at us and waved like the queen from across the nave, which was packed with hundreds of bodies.

Finally, the service started, with solemn pageantry and awe. We listened to Bishop Katharine’s voice filling the hall and sounding something like I imagine to be the voice of God. She preached to us: “The church’s primary task is to help us care for, heal, and reconcile the world. We do that by becoming like the one we worship, into whose family we are baptized, and whose members we become as we share in his body at this table. We become what we eat here, we become the living water with which we are washed, we become what we worship, we become whom we emulate.”

“John speaks of how this begins: ‘no one has ever seen God; it is Jesus, God in the flesh, who has made God known.’ As we become part of the body of Christ, we share in that mystery and that ministry.”

When communion came, quite by accident, several of us women from St. Dunstan’s found ourselves kneeling at the altar taking bread and blessings from Bishop Katharine. By the time we were back in the pew, tears were streaming down my face. The example was so profound and so easy to see in our Presiding Bishop that for a moment I saw the example all around me, in every face, every bowed head, filing up to the altar to share in the feast.

And I felt my grandmother’s presence in Patricia’s warm hand that covered mine, accepting the strange mystery as I silently wept until each person in the cathedral had received the Eucharist.

The next morning before council started, I exchanged my big Jerusalem cross for a dainty one, smaller than a silver dime that I could wear discreetly under my blouse. I was sitting in the hall fooling with the chain when Patricia arrived. I showed her my purchase and she approved. “I’m all for evangelism,” I said. “But I don’t want it to be the door-knocking kind.”

“There are better ways,” she agreed. What she did not say, what did not need to be said, was that the best way is by example.

P.S.After the service this morning at the back of the church, Patricia reached in her pocket and pulled out a dime-sized, silver Jerusalem cross—the one I had been looking for all along.