Memory and Meaning

I started seminary 30 years ago this September. Let me try to capture here the headspace I was in on July 26, 1994: I was finishing a one-year commitment working for Habitat for Humanity, and I had nothing but unprocessed thoughts about that experience. My sister and only sibling was getting ready to get married in August. I was in a long-distance relationship that didn’t feel right. I was getting ready to move into an apartment that was supposed to be renovated. I didn’t yet know that it would be and would remain unfinished throughout my lease (like, we’re talking nails poking out of the ancient hardwood floor and an unheated living room).

I’ve been thinking a lot about that headspace this week because of a turn of events last weekend that brought it all back. I’d arrived at divinity school at Harvard thinking I wanted to be anything other than a minister, and then I’d started falling in love with Jesus. Unable to square the circle among the illuminati surrounding me, where their knowing I was falling in love with Jesus would have reduced how seriously most would take me, I read about the work of Professor Gabriel Fackre.

Professor Fackre wrote about centering Jesus in the human theological interpretation of the world, and he taught not at Harvard, but at Andover Newton, another school in the consortium of which Harvard was part. I took the long T ride to see him and had a conversation that made it possible for me to stay in the United Church of Christ as I pursued ordination in his and my tradition.

This staying hadn’t been a foregone conclusion, although I’d been UCC all my life. In the early 1990s, the UCC’s peer mainline denominations were ripping themselves apart over matters related to gender and sexuality. Some were only barely comfortable with ordaining women, and others were mandating that only the straight be ordained. The UCC was So Done with that conversation, at least at the national level, that many who felt strongly about inclusiveness were flocking to the UCC to become ordained.

In itself, this openness was a wonderful thing, and I couldn’t at that point have imagined seeking ordination in a setting that was less welcoming to me or my peers experiencing a call. But it meant that conversations around the dining hall tables were about identity politics, not faith, and at that point in my life, I needed some basic spiritual formation. And I needed Jesus to be at that formation’s center, not a policy, no matter how right and just the policy might be.

I didn’t continue in relationship with Prof. Fackre simply because the T ride was too long for me to imagine cross-registration, and the movement of which he was part — Confessing Christ — included some who were less inclusive seeking a different kind of respite from identity politics than the one I was looking for. But when I joined Andover Newton’s faculty 11 years later, and he had retired, I wrote to him. We enjoyed an occasional and meaningful correspondence that continued until just weeks before he died.

Craigville on Cape Cod was Prof. Fackre’s spirit’s home. When I was invited to preach at that community’s Tabernacle, I leapt at the opportunity to experience being there and to pay homage to this role model’s history and my own. I didn’t anticipate how many connections I would discover there. For instance, the community surrounding the Tabernacle has a neighborhood of sorts with homes bearing names important to the community’s history of spiritual retreat for Congregationalists. Two such houses are named “Andover” and “Yale,” which are now two schools that work together to educate congregational clergy: prophesy!

Prof. Fackre’s family attended the service, which I hadn’t known to expect. When I told the story about how I met Prof. Fackre, I choked up in the pulpit for the first time in probably 20 years. I learned that Prof. Fackre was half Lebanese, as I am. In the intervening years, I’ve briefly studied Arabic, so if I’d heard his name for the first time now, I would have known how to spell it: فقر

Given this week in politics, a regular reader of this ‘blog might be wondering how I’m going to connect this spiritual sojourn with Kamala Harris. I’m not. But I am considering the whole idea of personal historic wholeness and memory, which have everything to do with being human in community.

• God doesn’t groove on unfinished business. Where I once left loose threads, God was following me with a crochet hook, weaving together my own history into a story that’s wider and deeper than I yet know.
• Coincidences might be just that: random occurrences that defy statistical rules. I think of them, however, as sneak peeks at how truly interconnected our lives are. God sends those sneak peeks to me at moments when I was wondering if I might be alone in the universe.
• There’s nothing new under the sun. When I hear reporters apologize for their overuse of the term “unprecedented,” I know that I’m not alone in thinking that overstating any human event’s uniqueness risks being proven wrong.
• Reflection really matters. When we charge through life without taking time to consider the meaning of what we experience, allowing experiences to change our minds, we come to feel like life is happening, rather than being lived. Not all have the luxury of reflecting while walking by the ocean, or even reflecting while not washing dishes, but a reflective approach to life is not about having time. It’s a state of mind.

Okay, yes, it’s true: I’m going to say something about Kamala Harris. I’m thrilled she’s the likely nominee to run against Donald Trump, as she’s among the few political leaders today who speaks in complete sentences I understand. She might win, or she might lose. I know what’s best for me is to get to higher ground and enter this fall with some critical distance: trusting God has a larger plan that I can’t know, and deepening my reflective practice so I’ll face this fall, 30 years after starting my theological education journey, rooted deeply in steady ground.

There’s meaning in all this.

I now will depart for a two week vacation and technology hiatus. When I return, I’ll start up a new series, “Now and Next,” about where ministers might see signs of where God is pointing us. Meanwhile, I pray for your reflection and my own that God might work through us to shape the world more into what God intends it to be.