Growing Upwith Difference

Diocese of Western Massachusetts,The Episcopal Church

One of my first memories of church revolves around a handshake: one very long,hard, and energetic handshake.

I was five or six and my family belonged to St. John's Episcopal Church inNorthampton, Massachusetts. St. John's is an imposing,century-old building with a tall granite bell tower. It sits on the edge ofSmith College, an elite women's school, and just on the edge of thedowntown core of Northampton, the heart of what is known regionally as the FiveCollege Area, after the many institutions of highereducation nearby. Parishioners at St. John's include more than the averagenumber of university professors, and the city is more liberal andleft-wing than the rest of rural, agricultural western Massachusetts.

On Sundays, I waited in line at the end of the service to shake the rector'shand, as the adults did. The rector was a young man namedJim Munroe, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who had been wounded in combat andattended seminary after his long convalescence. He hadarrived at St. John's a few years earlier with a reputation for his preaching,praying, and wonderful sense of humor. Already he hadendeared himself to our family with his uproarious laugh and the need to tellthe exact same four jokes again and again and think they werejust as funny as the first time he told them.

Other people in line, I knew, usually exchanged polite, restrained handshakeswith Jim. This was not for me. When it came my turn, Ipumped his hand enthusiastically. Up and down, up and down, I shook his hand forall I was worth, week in and week out. Jim was alwaysmore than willing to play along, laughing uproariously every time. But thisSunday morning in late August was different. Jim was sayingfarewell to the congregation before a sabbatical. It was the late 1980s and hewas headed to New York City to volunteer at a hospice forpeople with AIDS. Standing on the top step of our granite church, I asked Jimhow many Sundays he would miss. "Twelve," he said. "I'll beback just before Christmas."

"Well," I said. "I'll have to shake your hand twelve times as hard."

And I did.

And Jim laughed. Uproariously.

* * *

My entry point to the body of Christ and the Anglican Communion came a few yearsprior to that handshake on the other side of thecontinent. I was three months old and my parents took me to Christ ChurchCathedral in Vancouver, Canada, where they were living andwhere I had been born. Graham Witcher, a priest at the cathedral, asked myparents and the aunt and uncle who were serving as mygodparents if they would raise me in the life of faith. He asked thecongregation if they, too, would support my walk in faith. Evidently,everyone agreed because water was sprinkled on my head. I died the death ofChrist and was raised to new life through the waters ofbaptism. It sounds dramatic. I wish I remembered it.

Within a year, my mother, father, and I resettled in Northampton so my fathercould go back to school. Soon enough, our family had adeepening relationship with St. John's.

When I became old enough, I gathered with the children of the Sunday school inthe parlors of the church house. We listened to Mrs.Jones, the Sunday school director, welcome us and lead us through the Lord'sPrayer. During the week, she taught at a school for deafchildren so her enunciation was perfect, tending toward the over-exaggerated."Ow-er Fah-ther," I learned to say, drawing out each syllablecarefully. When we reached "Ah-men," we were off, a confused mass of childrenand teachers headed up the stairs to our classrooms.

Church involved my whole family. My father and mother served on the vestry andtaught Sunday school. When my brother was born, hewas baptized with a splash of water from the Jordan River that Jim had collectedon a recent visit. At Christmas, we geared up for theannual pageant. There were the costumes to be dusted off and lines to belearned. By age twelve, having worked my way from innkeeper toshepherd to wise man, I graduated to the role of narrator. Standing in thepulpit, I did my best to intone in my unbroken, twelve-year-oldvoice such weighty lines as "A decree went out from Emperor Augustus ..." and "Faraway in the East ..." It was a heady moment, standingwhere I had only ever seen Jim and other priests stand.

One spring, when I was nine or ten, my parents took me to the home of the deaconthree Wednesday afternoons in a row. Mel, a retiredbanker, had been ordained when he retired. One of his responsibilities now wasto teach us how to receive communion. Sitting on his livingroom floor, he carefully set out a silver chalice and paten and began to explainwhat Holy Communion was and why it was important. Thefirst time he taught us to sip from the chalice he used water. The next time,though, he poured a dark liquid in. "He's using real wine!" myfriend whispered to me, excitedly.

"I know!" I whispered back, equally excited, but also nervous at the thought ofdrinking real alcohol. I tried to play it cool, but I stillsputtered when the cup first touched my lips.

I do not remember any of the teaching we learned on that living room floor. ButI do remember that on my first taste of the burn of thealcohol, I thought to myself, "Ugh. Why would anyone want to drink that?" Butfrom that first Sunday and ever afterward, I did, dutifullytipping the chalice closer to my mouth, sipping, tilting it back, pausing, andwaiting until the chalice-bearer had completed serving the personnext to me before returning to my seat. It was just as I learned on the livingroom floor.

With First Communion behind me, on one Sunday a month I missed Sunday school,pawed through the closet of white robes, found onethat more or less covered my growing limbs, lit my candle, and prepared to serveas an acolyte. At first, it seemed a fairly important affair—exactlyhow to bow and when, on which verse of the final hymn to begin marchingout of the church, how to tell the water from the wine soyou did not wash Jim's hands with wine before Communion—but the seriousness didnot last long. There were just too many things thatwent wrong during a church service for it to be anything other than funny—andfun. The priest chugged the chalice wine at the end of theservice! My friend got caught by his mother picking his nose during the sermon!

The oldest lady in the choir snapped at us for whispering toone another during the prayers! At a late-night Christmas Eve service I liftedthe fully loaded offering plates high over my head as thecongregation sang the doxology. My mind was focused more on the presents I wasto receive than on keeping the plate parallel to the floor.Right around "above you heavenly hosts," a magnificent stream of bills,envelopes, and coins came pouring out, raining down over my headand shoulders.

As the years passed, I became aware that my Sunday school class was gettingsmaller. The number of available acolytes was shrinkingtoo. There were just fewer and fewer people my age in church. But when I turnedfifteen, the number of people my age in church surged. Itwas another rite of passage: confirmation. In a year-long course, I prepared forconfirmation with twenty-five other young people, many ofwhom had returned to church only at their parents' instigation. Once a month, wegot together to learn about Henry VIII and ThomasCranmer, the Wesley brothers, and Samuel Seabury. We looked at the Nicene Creedand thought about what it means to say "Light fromLight" or "Begotten not made." Once a month, I met with three other confirmandsand our two sponsors for dinner. We talked about what itmeant to be confirmed and what it meant to be Christians—and Episcopalians—inour daily lives at school. We did not, as I recall, reach anysatisfying conclusions.

Then, on an April evening, I knelt in front of the bishop of WesternMassachusetts, holding a small card with my first and middle nameson it. I felt his heavy hands on my head and the light touch of my two sponsors'hands on my shoulder. In his sonorous voice, the bishopintoned, "Strengthen, O Lord, your servant Jesse Andrew with your Holy Spirit;empower him for your service; and sustain him all the daysof his life." The congregation responded with a loud "Amen."

The duress under which my peers completed the course quickly became apparent.Most of those who were confirmed that eveningseemed to see the service as akin to a graduation. They were finished withchurch and never needed to return again. Of the four people inmy small group, I was the only one who showed up at church the next Sunday. Ihad to. By that point, I was helping to teach Sunday schoolto the three-, four-, and five-year-old class. I did so partly because I enjoyedit but partly because there was nothing else for high schoolstudents to do on a Sunday morning at church except sit through the service, andI was not quite ready for that. Less than a year after myconfirmation, I was the only person my age left on the acolyte roster and theonly one still in church on a regular basis. There were sporadicefforts to have a youth group with lots of fun activities planned—climb therickety wooden steps in the bell tower and look over the lights ofdowntown Northampton; play Sardines and hide under the pews in the church; havesleepovers in the parlors. But my peers were busy.They could find fun in other places.

There was one trip that managed to draw back some of my confirmation colleagues.With a handful of other parishes, Jim organized aweek-long trip to Washington, DC. We slept on the floor of the basement of asuburban parish and cooked meals in its kitchen. On the nightbefore our visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Jim sat with us and told ushow it felt when the grenade went off in his foxhole, killing thefriend who was with him. It was a riveting story for a group of teenagers and welistened intently.

But it was the coda to the story that I remembered most. Some years after hisdischarge, Jim was in Nairobi with a group ofEpiscopalians visiting a companion diocese. While walking through a park, thegroup was mugged. No one was hurt, but the experiencemade Jim flash back to Vietnam. For the next few days, he was paralyzed by fear,unable to do anything without help from his travelcompanions. The group continued its trip and arrived in one particular villageto a warm greeting from local church members. Jim describedhow he was wrapped in a giant hug by a woman who spoke only one word of English,"Welcome."

"In that moment," Jim said, "the fear and anxiety I had been feeling since themugging in Nairobi melted away and I knew that I wasloved and welcomed. The only thing she and I have in common is that we are bothChristian. But on that day, that was all that mattered. I'llnever see her again in this life, but she is a dear sister in Christ and I can'twait to see her in heaven." The story left me transfixed. I hadnever before thought that I had something in common with people in other partsof the world.

This was not the only time I learned that I might have something in common withpeople who seemed different than me. Thecongregation itself contained a good deal of difference. Sometimes I served asacolyte with a pair of identical twin brothers, each of whomwas profoundly deaf. At first, I was put off by the difficulty of understandingthem and working with them. Slowly, however, I realized theywere not much different than me. On the youth group trip to Washington, DC, theytaught me to swear in sign language. We became fastfriends.

Other forms of difference were more challenging. The state mental hospital inNorthampton closed in the mid-1980s and a whole host ofpeople who needed psychiatric care ended up on city streets with little support.Several made their way to St. John's with some regularity.Len sat in the very front row every Sunday. I knew it was impolite, but my youngeyes could not help but stare. He was overweight, his hairaskew, and his face never seemed quite right. He had a vacant expression, buthis eyes always seemed a little bit crazed. He was not likeme and he was not really like anyone else I knew. But somehow, maybe, he was. Hedid go to St. John's, after all.

St. John's hosted a soup kitchen in its undercroft every Sunday morning. Wepassed the guests on our way out of church. They werealso not like me. They smoked, swore, laughed too loud, smelled bad, and carriedall their possessions with them in a single bag or two. Buteven if they were not like me, I was learning, they could still be part of St.John's. Not only could they be, I realized, they already were.

When people for the soup kitchen were not coming to St. John's, we were going tothem. My first experience sorting cans of food at afood pantry and working for Habitat for Humanity came with the youth group. Inaddition to carefully enunciating the "Ow-er Fahther," theSunday school collected school supplies for children affected by hurricanes inFlorida or in new schools in Tanzania. When we marched intothe service at the offertory to join our parents, we often rolled wagons full ofcanned food for the food pantry down the center aisle while theushers carried the plates of money.

Carved in stone over the main entrance to St. John's were the words "Given tohospitality." Hospitality, I was learning, meant thateveryone was welcome at St. John's—even people I did not usually meet in my lifeoutside of church. They may have seemed different thanme, but they were still, somehow, part of my life.

* * *

There was one aspect of life in Northampton whose difference some people foundto be challenging. I learned this when my cousins cameto visit when I was about ten. Sandy rushed in the door and breathlessly told mewhat he had seen on the drive in. "Jesse! There were twowomen walking down the street." He paused to make sure the significance of whathe was about to say would sink in. "And they wereholding hands!" To a young boy raised in a rural farming community, this was apiece of exceptional news. But Northampton is known for itstolerance of same-sex relationships. When Sandy told me the news, I shrugged.

Growing up in Northampton—which I heard described more than once as the "SanFrancisco of the east coast"—meant that a major partof the difference I encountered while growing up involved sexual orientation.Classmates of mine in school had two mothers. There weresame-sex couples living in our neighborhood. They were friends we invited overfor parties and saw walking their dogs. They were ourfellow worshippers at St. John's. One woman in a lifelong relationship withanother woman sponsored me for confirmation. By the time Igraduated from high school, both the mayor and city council president wereopenly gay people. Homosexuality was not something foreign orunusual to me. Rather, it was the opposite—so commonplace as to attract hardlyany notice, except from a visiting cousin.

But the issue took a surprising turn the autumn after I turned thirteen. Thecity council proposed an ordinance that would legalize whatwere called "domestic partnerships." The law would allow same-sex couples tohave hospital visitation rights and share custody of children.The ordinance did not call the relationships marriages, and same-sex marriagewas not then seriously on the political horizon. But theordinance was an opening salvo in a debate that would take shape around thecountry a decade later. The ordinance ended up on theNovember ballot and the city was consumed with debate.

The opposition was led by Northampton's Catholic parishes and the oneevangelical church in town. They called their coalitionNorthampton for Traditional Values and ensured the ordinance received majorattention in the media. At the time, I had a school assignmentto research an issue where people had "taken a stand." I chose the ordinance,though it is no longer clear to me if I thought those opposedto or in support of the ordinance were the ones taking a stand. I followed thenews closely and clipped articles from the newspaper relatingto the proposal. A week before the vote, I interviewed Jim to ask him why hesupported the ordinance. "This is something we can do," hesaid, "to honor and include people who have often been excluded and rejected bysociety." On election day, I accompanied my father to thepolling station and interviewed a man holding a sign opposed to the ordinance."This is not just about same-sex partnerships and allowinggay people to register," he said. "This is about the values we have as acommunity. We need to remember Christian values."

To the surprise of those who took its passage to be a foreordained conclusion,the ordinance was defeated by a single percentage point.The church-led opposition was the decisive factor in defeating the measure. Ifinished my assignment and moved on to other projects. WhatI did not do, in retrospect, is consider the sharp divide the vote revealed. Jimwas a church leader and he—and many other clergy in town—supported the ordinance. Yet other priests and other churches did not. I hadheard both support and opposition to the ordinance defined inexplicitly Christian terms. What explained this division? Why was there noconsensus on the issue? At the time, I asked none of thesequestions. Whether they could register their relationships or not, gay peoplewere going to continue to be a part of my daily life. In someways, they seemed different than me and my family, but so did a whole host ofother people I was encountering at St. John's. Having peoplefrom different backgrounds and walks of life all together in one place was justwhat it meant to be the church.