Divested

Just got back from my final Vestry meeting at Holy Apostles. (I could have run for a second term, but pleaded imminent sabbatical as an excuse for not pursuing it.) I had a chance for some final reflections and mentioned that I was glad I hadn't known that the Vestry was also the board of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen as I would not have run, since I lacked the necessary skills. I still may not have the skills but I've learned an immense about non-profit organizations, about budgeting, about how boards work. I've learned also how much work goes into keeping a church going, and how many people work behind the scenes on all sorts of committees - and that the church is in a good place as far as that is concerned, with qualified and dedicated volunteers to serve on them.

It's hard to believe I've been a Vestry member for three years, until you think of how much has changed in these three years. I agreed to be nominated in part because I wanted to see a church go through a leadership transition, and that I have definitely seen. The clergy and most of the staff have changed completely. The physical plant has changed too - the Soup Kitchen serves food in the church now, and the Mission House next door has more spaces for more activities. The unsightly trailer that used to stand next to the church is gone.

But I've learned also to see that - well, not that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, because things have definitely changed. In particular, several parishioners have moved to other parishes, and new parishioners have arrived to take their places. Several of my fellow Vestry members resigned before their terms were out, and have been replaced by new people better able to work with the new regime. If I had spent the last three years away and walked in of a Sunday I'd be struck by the changes in the chancel, and by a more racially integrated congregation, and one with (a few) more families with young children. I'd wonder if it was "the same place."

What I've learned to see is that change isn't easy - something has to be given up to make space for the new thing - but it's normal. It is, indeed, the life of an institution. CHA's a different place than it was five years ago, but still a good place. And a good thing that is, too. If places did not survive changes of leadership, which means changes in personality (and personalities) as well as in vision, they would not survive. What keeps it going, what gives the new a chance to take hold and go new places, is a certain amount of inertia - or is it momentum?! - in the physical place, the community, the liturgy. (And, I should add, as an Episcopalian, the polity.)

I rode the subway back to Brooklyn with one of my fellow Vestry members (who is running for a second term), and we talked about the past, present and future of the place. He said he couldn't make out whether I was happy at changes or cynical about them. Maybe both, I said; I'm resigned.

Out of commission

A happy transition at church today - the "commissioning" of four new vestry members and a new warden. 

And it was fun to watch it from the side, rather than be part of it, as I have been for nine years: a three-year term on vestry, and then thrice two years as one of the church's two wardens. 

We've been through a lot in that time, from the calling of a new rector to the zoom-diaspora disruptions of the pandemic to a current capital campaign updating our physical plant, and it was nice to have a ring-side seat ... though really the wardens' place is inside the ring! At a diocesan wardens' conference and then again at last summer's CCD (College for Congregational Development), I learned that my ride has been unusually smooth. In demographically challenged or less well-run congregations, and without the kind of managerial support we are afforded by the professional staff of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, there's more and harder work for wardens to do. 

I had an earlier stint in the lay leadership, a term on vestry from 2010-13, as we went through an earlier clergy transition. Reading my reflections on the end of that chapter (thank you, blog!), I realize I've metabolized all the transitions we witnessed then, as, indeed, I've already metabolized those of this longer stint. 

At that point I reflected that successful change is made possible by the continuity in what isn't changing - space, community, liturgy, polity - whether those are better understood as inertia or momentum. I'd like to think my wardenship has contributed to steady momentum! (Space, community and liturgy have all shifted over these nine years, too.) As we confirmed at CCD, Holy Apostles is doing well as Episcopal congregations go, and the imminent completion of the rebuilt Mission House will open further new doors. 

In any case, I've done my time. Grateful others are there to take on the work. 

Vested

I'm not sure quite how it happened, but I've been elected a member of the Vestry of the Church of the Holy Apostles. I'm not even sure what a vestry does - although I know that it's part of the pride of the Episcopal church's inclusion of laity in decision-making, the term still has a Trollopian quaintness about it for me - but I understand this will be an interesting time to be part of the "lay leadership" of the church. We have a new rector/associate director of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen (CHA is enmeshed with HASK), and all other senior positions - the associate rector's as well as that of the director of HASK and the main administrator - will turn over in the next year. Turn over or change: both parish and soup kitchen have been hit hard by the economic downturn... I'm happy to be of help in addressing all this (if I can indeed be of help) but I'm also glad in my capacity as a scholar of religion to have a chance to see this kind of change from the inside.

Elevated

Had a chance to participate in a vestry and wardens tour of the construction in the Holy Apostles Mission House this afternoon. The room I'd bid farewell to in February, Mission House 1, was still there. All the interior walls over the building's three floors have been removed though, and a shaft for the elevator which defines the project has been cut!

Come and have some breakfast

We had a vestry retreat today. The facilitator's theme, appropriate for a morning gathering, was "Come and have some breakfast." She read, then distributed, the story of Jesus' final post-resurrection appearance n the Gospel of John, when he shares bread and grilled fish with some of his disciples. But she used a 1971 translation into contemporary language, The Living Bible, that made it unfamiliar - in part by putting it in the first person.

Later Jesus appeared again to the disciples beside the Lake of Galilee. This is how it happened: 

A group of us were there—Simon Peter, Thomas, “The Twin,” Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, my brother James and I and two other disciples. 

Simon Peter said, “I’m going fishing.” “We’ll come too,” we all said. We did, but caught nothing all night. 

At dawn we saw a man standing on the beach but couldn’t see who he was. 

He called, “Any fish, boys?”

“No,” we replied. 

Then he said, “Throw out your net on the right-hand side of the boat, and you’ll get plenty of them!” So we did, and couldn’t draw in the net because of the weight of the fish, there were so many! 

Then I said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” At that, Simon Peter put on his tunic (for he was stripped to the waist) and jumped into the water and swam ashore. 

The rest of us stayed in the boat and pulled the loaded net to the beach, about 300 feet away. 

When we got there, we saw that a fire was kindled and fish were frying over it, and there was bread. 

“Bring some of the fish you’ve just caught,” Jesus said. 

So Simon Peter went out and dragged the net ashore. By his count there were 153 large fish; and yet the net hadn’t torn. 

“Now come and have some breakfast!” Jesus said; and none of us dared ask him if he really was the Lord, for we were quite sure of it. 

Then Jesus went around serving us the bread and fish. 

This was the third time Jesus had appeared to us since his return from the dead.

The first-person switch is justified by identifying (as no scholar would) the author of John's gospel with John, "the disciple Jesus loved," the brother of James, son of Zebedee. For the final story of John, it provides an incredible intimacy. But weirdness, too. Why do the disciples listen to the stranger on the shore? Is it only the unexpected haul of fish that leads one of them - the one Jesus loved - to recognize him? But he doesn't swim to the shore as Simon Peter does, and doesn't address Jesus as Jesus, which, he tells us, none of the others dares to either. Jesus also apparently doesn't speak to them by name (at least until after the breakfast, when he addresses Simon Peter). The intimacy of breakfasting together around a fire at the break of day is wrapped in a kind of stunned formality, or a performance of formality, as if a meeting of strangers. (It's sort of the obverse of Emmaus.) I don't get what's going on - less chatty translations make it no clearer. NRSV: 

Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. (21:12)

But I find I like it. The enormity of resurrection fits better with awed anonymity (even if it's play-acted) than with overfamiliarity... and anchored in the sharing of a meal. 

One of those days

Chockablock with good things, but chockablock nonetheless. A class visit to the Rubin, Hinduism and Buddhism. A class observation for the first year program, all about poetry slams. A meeting of a university-wide committee charged with thinking about general education, which I've somehow ended up chairing. A discussion of issues of rape in mishrashim of Dinah and Augustine's response to the sack of Rome by two of my colleagues. A vestry meeting at Holy Apostles. I need a digestivo!

HASK not

During our monthly vestry meetings, there's often an event or a music rehearsal going on in main . church building next door. Today nothing was planned, so everything was prepped for tomorrow's Soup Kitchen.

Holy Apostles

Today the Vestry of the Church of the Holy Apostles had a lovely, rare experience - a "retreat" in our own church! This was made possible by a visitor whose "ministry" it is to reacquaint communities with the beauty of their spaces, and our space - quiet as almost never during its busy week - was more than happy to play along. Sharing what we knew and then, after 45 minutes wandering in silence through the space with sketch pads and meditations, what we discovered, we came to know the space we so love in new ways, and to a fuller appreciation of how others deepen and broaden than love. It was illuminating (ha!) to spend time with our stained glass in a church we'd just learned had been painted in "five shades of white" after a fire in 1990 (I imagine there was no white at all before that), and deeply moving to be reminded of all those members and friends across the decades and centuries who had known and loved this space before and, it felt, know and love it still.

Aspiration

This is the Church of the Holy Apostles. Like many an older New York church, its spire used to be the tallest thing in the neighborhood... no longer! The new Hudson Yards district is rising just to its northwest.

Times a'changing! What I really want to tell you that is that Holy Apostles has a bright future because its Vestry (of which I'm a member) has unanimously chosen a brilliant new rector... but that's all I can say.

UPDATE: It's official! Holy Apostles has called the Rev. Anna Pearson to be our new rector.

Vested

I'm on the Vestry of the Church of the Holy Apostles again. It's a great honor and respon- sibility as the church searches for a new Rector, and at a time when the witness of the churches, especially those who put the care of the vulnerable and celebration of the divine gift of diversity front and center, needs to be heard more than ever in this land.

Mission House 1 RIP

Our church is embarking on a construction project. Actually, it's been in the works for years, and on the to do list for decade. Long referred to as "the elevator project," it's grown to involve a renovation of the whole "Mission House" which abuts the church on the south side, all of whose spaces will now not only be ADA accessible but handsomely redesigned. 

 

The upstairs meeting rooms which host meetings of community groups of all kinds will finally be able to serve the whole community. Bigger changes are afoot on the ground floor. Since our main ministry is the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen and Food Pantry, a small vastly overstretched kitchen supported by dingy storage spaces down a steep staircase in the cellar and temporary refrigerators is being replaced by a large state-of-the-art kitchen; the elevator will dramatically improve access to subterranean food storage too. 

Above is a view of the meeting space on the ground floor, which in recent years has been encrusted in loudly humming industrial refrigerators. Nevertheless, it was where church committees, including the vestry, met, where brigades of meal-assembling volunteers worked, and where sacred and secular activities in the church were staged. This is where choir and altar party get ready to process each Sunday. Long before, this was the space historian Heather White has helped us know was a kind of LGBT Center avant la lettre, hosting meetings and teas and even dances in the year after the Stonewall riot.

 

But today was the last time! When we return to the rebuilt Mission House, most of this space will be part of the new kitchen, or hallways connecting the elevator to various other spaces. The space known simply as "Mission House 1" will be gone.

Even with the dark noisy refrigerators gone it's not a terribly attractive space. It was always the people who made it the heart and nerve center. I sensed the memory and energy of some of those people in my last look into the space this morning. I even improvised a kind of dance of parting. 

 

Farewell Mission House 1. Thank you for holding us.

Presentation in the temple

Some changes in my life at the Church of the Holy Apostles. My term on the vestry finished, I've been "installed" as one of the Wardens (!). And my ushering days are over too: I've finally joined the choir! What joy this morning to be singing Johannes Eccard's motet "Maria wallt zum Heiligtum."

Zoom out

It is getting to be a bit much to be doing everything by Zoom these days! So I was amused to notice my eye misread a line from a psalm

during the service of Compline with which the fall's first Vestry Meeting of the Church of the Holy Apostles ended. I imagined it said

the LORD who made heaven and earth bless you out of Zoom!

Oases

We had a vestry retreat today, our first chance to gather with the new rector for a more relaxed and open-ended discussion since her arrival four months ago. An excellent moderator furnished by the diocese helped us reconnect to the bigger questions of mission and vision which had animated the long search process. Though all progressive churches are facing challenges, the sense of possibility was thrilling. We've got something great going in our progressive tradition and in the Soup Kitchen's incredible witness, with much talent and commitment to keeping them strong. The term "oasis" came up several times

In the background, though, creeping out into the open during informal breaks and lunch, was the desertifying moment we're in. People described being nearly crippled with dread about the upcoming midterms. I'm in a low-level panic all the time said one. Another described the "old ladies" she quilts with as being on edge in a way she's never seen. Oases are emerging all around. And we pray that the better angels brake the pace of the destruction of the world we love, roused by this moment of urgent need. For as long as these cruel bullies are unchecked there's literally no worst case scenario.