A Visit from the Bishop

A seminarian. A priest. And a bishop. Our seminarian, Lee Curtis; our priest, Patricia; and our bishop, Neil Alexander, making has last visit as bishop to St. Dunstan’s before he returns to teaching in October.

Of course, it’s been a topic of some conversation, anticipation of this special Sunday halfway through the Easter season. We were invited to renew our baptismal vows and to receive a special blessing from the bishop.

I arrived at the same time as Patricia and followed her into the darkened sanctuary. Patricia busied herself around, turning on lights; her purse, an old black box, a can of diet coke, and car keys sat in a pile at the foot of the altar. I already knew what was in the box, she’d told me in the parking lot, so I was hanging around to see. It was an ornate chalice and paten, a gift from Joe’s grandmother upon his ordination as a priest in the Catholic Church.  A special occasion chalice decorated with reliefs of Jesus and his disciples all the way around. (Joe was ordained in Alabama on Patricia's 13th birthday.)

Just then Sue Martz walked in, making a beeline to the flower arrangement on the altar, largely blue irises and yellow chrysanthemums that were dropping their petals in a circle on the floor. As we knelt down to sweep up the mess, Sue apologized away her beautiful handiwork, the arrangement, she said, would not meet Gilda’s high standards. She had just followed her favorite palette—yellow for the sun, and blue for the sky. Cheerful.

At that point, I should have been about an hour early for Sunday School, but I made the mistake of stopping into the library and picking up a book, and that made me about 10 minutes late. The bishop was already talking about convention this summer, giving us his insider view from the top about what to expect. Same-sex blessings, he said, would get a lot of attention and were likely to pass in some form. But to most Episcopalians, he noted, the topic doesn’t elicit much surprise—of course, we had the first openly gay bishop, ordained nine years ago and retiring this fall.

We listened to stories about “Rowan,” the Archbishop of Canterbury and casual conversations with the Presiding Bishop of Scotland. Neil reminded us of our incredible heritage as a church, breaking off from England shortly after 1776 (1789 technically speaking), about our heritage as a diocese.

The choir had started filing out and maybe four different conversations bubbled up across the room during the shuffling, an unofficial yet organic ending to class, as we moved together as if one body to the sanctuary. We rise randomly or sort of disband at will, I said to the bishop, by way of explanation. We were walking through the narrow hall that cuts over to the kitchen. I need not have said a word—he clearly approved, a man who has spent most of his life standing on quite a bit of ceremony.

I smiled at the way Neil does the Eucharist—“take this bread,” he follows quite literally holding, not just the silver tray, but the whole wheat loaf in his large hands.

Funny, I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes I might not be hearing 100% of what the bishop says, just because he is the bishop. Today, as he preached what will be his last sermon at St. Dunstan’s as the bishop, he reminded us that we should be “faithful in the doing of it” rather than always “wallowing in the mystery” of it all.

That always worries me when I get to that part of my Christianity, the conscience living a religious life, a life of faith. Being in it and figuring out what that means. Neil says it’s about the living of it—the practice to not only despise injustice but to do something about it. To feed the hungry, heal the sick, comfort the friendless, to love one another, in the passionate spirit of thanksgiving.