Gratitude and Thanksgiving

I was leading a small group conversation at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks last night on the topic “Sit Out or Dance.” It was about risks we have taken, and times we grew from taking “the leap.” And times we crashed.

Many in Alaska have come here to get away, to explore a frontier, to find something we longed for and weren’t finding. Sleeping out night after night in the woods and fields around my home in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, the last years of high school, planted a seed of longing in me. Awakening under the stars, feeling a wind pick up across my face, drops of rain falling on my sleeping bag, retracting into the bag as a cold front moved in with the first frost of the year, shivering as snowflakes blanketed a doubled mummy bag, I felt alive and filled with hope.

This hope, what I call it now is a sense of mission, has been a little more scarce for me in recent years. My “dance” began to feel like a free-fall off a cliff. The irony doesn’t escape me that when I first came to Fairbanks (2000) and fell in love with a friend named Joanne, I was amazed how depressed and lonely she had become, how she had allowed her talents and dreams to get buried in the small town cemetery of Fairbanks. She had no idea what a wonderful person she was, which (both of us then believed) the marriage she’d left and the community averse to change colluded to steal from her.

So, was it taking a risk or taking advantage? I can see that it might make someone question my motives, my wisdom, my professionalism, that I dated a still-married (separated!) person, also a member of my congregation. Maybe it wasn’t a brilliant vision of Joanne free and clear, living a life of joy and gratitude (with me as her husband). Maybe it was poor judgement.

While my story line doesn’t understand it to have been clergy misconduct, it did eventually cost me my career, despite my having married (2003) Marin Kuizenga, a woman much better suited to my dreams and lovingly sturdy in the face of my subsequent struggle to right myself. It also cost me my sense of hope, of mission. Did I grow up, or did I lose my bearings? Life became very emotional and complex. And that was so, despite coming onto the path of my greatest joy and amazement, becoming father to Matteo (2005).

It’s partly the small town. I lost my bearings. I entered the tunnel that Joanne used to be in. I took on the judgement of the congregation which banished me. Whenever I was asked on the playground or at the coffee place “so, what’s up,” it seemed I had to tell the whole story about Jesus, Lutherans, Fairbanks, Joanne, Marin, my Mom, Matteo all as a prelude to why I wasn’t being a pastor anymore, finishing with when I’d find out if I was going to be again, and any other new wrinkles. I chose the tunnel, I guess. My hopeful “risk” had become a depressing liability.

It’s partly the “Lutheran” guilt thing, as well. I’m sorry that a community living out a transforming mission of hope, which is what I always aspired to lead my Lutheran church friends toward, just wasn’t there. I guess folks felt betrayed by me. From upon the pedestal, to the dirt. The Scarlet A – wear it! But what about my side of the story – did the Synod Council, which was making the decision to keep me on ice, at its October meetings for three years running – did they ever hear my side? A couple of pastors – Kathy, Duane – who knew my heart, were among the only people from the church who encouraged me, and spoke to my bishop during the three-year wait. That’s after 25 years of service – they gave me the 25-year pin the day they made me resign.

It’s partly the “far-away in Alaska” thing, too. I didn’t see friends, and I also didn’t write to friends, or call them. I was going year by year. I thought the Lutherans would come around. I thought they could see that I was mostly a brainy liturgy geek, good natured, winsomely politically incorrect, but obviously poorly matched to a conservative congregation. That I loved Jesus. I kept going to the Wednesday Clergy Bible Studies because I really enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of biblical interpretation. And I was going to tell my friends how things worked out, after they were resolved. “Guess what, I got a speeding ticket, and they took my license though I wasn’t even inebriated, now I’m married, have a little boy, got my license back, and serve a sweet little Church on the hills outside Petaluma.”

Well, the ruling finally came to pass this June. It meant something.

For the ELCA it meant that they dumped a risk for a big lawsuit – if I ever re-offended, and someone sued, they’d stand to lose a bundle. Lookup the ELCA in Wikipedia, and scroll down to clergy sexual abuse – this huge lawsuit came down in April 2004, a month before the anti-Jeff contingent at Fairbanks Lutheran pushed the ask about my 2000-2001 relationship with Joanne. Significantly, it came days(!) before an official affirmation (after 3 months of congregation interviews) of my continuing leadership there.

For me it meant the end of waiting, hoping it would all “go away,” which began with a long, heartfelt letter to the bishop telling my story, just weeks after resigning my call, in 2004. I still don’t totally understand how a kind-of clueless pastor who’s a little traumatized by family history of bad marriages (my parents’, my sister’s – who took her life over it) manages to find a partner, especially when he’s pushing 50, and totally stressed out by a new job... Besides, try convincing someone to marry you at 50 while abstaining from sexual contact. Uh huh – gay. Anyway, that’s my Lutheran pastor story line, and it ended abruptly, June 2007.

For my family it meant that I needed to start working on the next thing. We’ve been happy that I’ve had the time to be primary care-giver for Matteo the first three years of his life. I was happy that I could provide daily walks for my Mom, and manage her dog, Patches, for daytime hours with her. But we’re also running out of money. And it’s time to turn the page. (Reading this from Denver, Marin reminds me that we’re “expecting” in February, and that we need to talk about THAT page, too.)


Another irony – the week after I returned from Mom’s funeral (suddenly with a little more free time on my hands), there were people from the Anchorage UU at our service at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks.

The UU’s are a theologically, socially, and politically progressive group. They welcome affectional minorities, the refusal to do which (roundabout) is what leads the Lutherans to skewer human sexuality in general and my own oddball search for a spouse in particular (not to mention that other Christian theological perversion, Catholic celibacy and its stepchild, pederasty). Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we’re free at last!

Additionally, Unitarian Universalists aren’t classical Christians, because they participate in the consensus of many early followers of Jesus who for decades loved and emulated Jesus before the Church started writing him into godhood, manufacturing heresies, and killing heretics. The Jesus Seminar opens a lot of new doors for inquiring Christians, or you could read Jesus A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan.

There, I’ve said it. If loving Jesus but questioning the theological basis of his divinity makes me a UU (or a Jew, for that matter), so be it. Another risk, another day. If Jesus was willing to die for the truth, I gotta be willing to give up a career for it. Besides, it’s too late to backpedal: the only thing that comes up when I google myself are two sermons I preached at UUFF, now on their website. Wonder if the Lutherans googled before they shit-canned me?

Here the circle of this entry comes back around to what I said to my friends at the UUFF last night as we talked about risks we’d taken in our lives. I said, with the Lutherans providing a pension and great health care for me and my family, and with the huge percentage of thoughtful Lutherans who like good worship (and it’s odd, poetic language) but balk at fundamentalist biblical literalism, I would NEVER have left the Lutheran Church on my own. So, if God wanted a way to make me get on with my life in a more congenial religious universe, she found it, with a vengeance.

Anyway, to close another circle: the Anchorage UU’s are possibly in need of an interim pastor while their pastor, presently rendered an illegal alien (she’s a Canadian national) by the Patriot Act and unable to re-enter America (from British Colombia), wrangles with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. In the meantime, the Regional UU’s in Seattle, and the National UU’s in Boston have okayed my working for the Anchorage folks if anything ever becomes of it... Marin and I talked about a part time commute, if what I earn pays for airfare, childcare and then some.

But if not now, I’m in a process for becoming certified in the UU community as a professional leader, which would be really fun, both the process and the possible outcome, pastoring a community again.

So, in the days leading up to our national holiday for rendering thanks, I want to share my gratitude for a circuitous journey. Alaska finally is a new life for me. A family, a child, one on the way, a community of warm, thoughtful people who like us, and even a possibility for using my skills and passion to lead others. In these darkening months of arctic winter, the peach-colored sun shines shortly but brilliantly from the far horizon, cutting tree-trunk shadows of contrasting blue across the snow, and I am thinking it’s maybe time to get that sleeping bag out and explore the sky and the weather once again...