[Dialogue] spong

[KroegerD@aol.com]

October 19, 2005 
Surveying Fifty Years  with the Class of 1955 
Nothing forces an awareness of the passing of time into one's consciousness  
quite like a school reunion. Recently my classmates from our seminary days  
gathered to recognize the 50th anniversary of our graduation. We began our life  
together as sixty men (no women were then allowed), all seeking ordination to 
 the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. Today those of us who are still 
alive  are all retired. A survey of our ranks reveals that four of our survivors 
have  become widowers, several have undergone a divorce and one has been 
deposed. We  now wear hearing aids, use walking canes, endure various stages of 
macular  degeneration and have added a few pounds to our waistlines, just to 
mention a  few of our distinguishing marks.  
It was September 1952, when the members of this class first arrived at the  
Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary of Virginia, located just outside  
Washington, D.C. It would be our home for the next three packed years. World War 
 II, the defining moment in our lives, was only seven years in the past. 
About  half of our class had served in that war. Peace, however, was still 
illusive.  The Korean War was in progress and racial tensions were rising. The  
desegregation ruling, Brown versus the Board of Education, would come down in  May 
of 1954, and would be among the future events destined to shape our careers  
dramatically. That decision would be joined by such later soul-moving  
transitions in our consciousness as Vietnam, urban riots, the corruption of  Watergate 
and the reality of terrorism. Despite this foreboding future that  awaited 
us, the years of our training, '52 through '55, were a time of great  optimism.  
The members of our class sought ordination as religious idealists. We ranged  
in age from 21 to 57. Many of us had come to our desire to be priests after 
time  pursuing other careers. For some of us the Master in Divinity degree we 
sought  was to go alongside other graduate degrees in different fields. My new  
classmates included a retired army colonel, an executive from the Ford Motor  
Company, an attorney, a duck farmer and a tennis coach, just to mention a 
few.  
After graduation and our ordinations we would serve in many positions. Among  
our class's alumni would be the London executive officer for the entire 
Anglican  Communion; a college president; a member of the faculty of the seminary 
where we  were trained; the founder and head of a counseling center in St. 
Louis; a top  executive in the Congregational Church; first a teacher and then a 
headmaster at  one of the best-known Eastern prep schools; the founder and 
director of a  prominent think tank for congregational life known as The Alban 
Institute; an  influential member of several diocesan staffs, and bishops in 
Idaho, Maryland  and New Jersey. Most were, at least for some part of our working 
careers,  ordinary parish priests. All of us were destined to live through and 
to be  affected by enormous changes in the life of the church.  
We would know the exhilaration and the tension of the Civil Rights Movement,  
which quite literally transformed both the face of this nation and the life 
of  the church. It gave us a number of great black bishops. We also learned 
that  faithfulness in our witness could be both dangerous and costly and in the  
process discovered something about who we are.  
We watched the church move out of its sexist past. In our graduation year of  
1955, the women in the Episcopal Church were still called the "the 
auxiliary!"  Girls could not be acolytes, nor could woman serve at any level of church  
decision-making. No one discussed ordination. Today 40% of our clergy are 
female  and fifteen women serve as bishops in places as diverse as Vermont, 
Indiana,  Rhode Island, D.C., Utah, New York, Boston, Oregon, Virginia and Nevada.  
If there were homosexuals in our class none of us knew it. That issue, to my  
knowledge, never came up either in the classroom or in private conversations. 
 Perhaps we were in some kind of denial that there was such a thing. We were 
not  an issue-oriented group. All we really wanted to do in this optimistic 
post-war  world was to preach the gospel to which we were committed, pastor our  
congregations and build up our churches.  
Gathering fifty years later we looked back on our careers from that  
perspective of time. The triumphalism with which we left this theological  training 
center was missing. We had watched the steam run out of the post-World  War II 
religious revival. We had been battered by a rising tide of secularity  that 
moved the church out of being a central part of people's lives onto the  
periphery. We had lived to see the birth of the twin terrors of contemporary  church 
life: the rise of a new and hard fundamentalism that was and is a retreat  
from reality, and the onset of a steady decline in the mainline churches that  
was and is a source of despair. We had observed our sister Roman Catholic Church 
 take a journey that seemed jolting in its severity, as it moved from the 
open,  reform minded pontificate of John XXIII into increasingly regressive 
papacies  until it enshrined the bitter, inquisition-minded Cardinal Joseph 
Ratzinger as  Benedict XVI. It had also moved from affirming the attitude of John F. 
Kennedy,  who promised Americans in 1960 that he would not allow his religion 
to interfere  with his oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United 
States, to the  present stance of that Church's bishops who in 2004 
threatened to excommunicate  any Catholic politician who would not uphold their 
abortion position.  
We had watched the public voice of Protestant Christianity shift from the  
deep involvement in social issues of people like Martin Luther King, Jr., John  
Hines, and William Sloan Coffin to the harsh and reactionary piety of Jerry  
Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Charles Colson. We had endured the  
agony of seemingly constant revelations of the priestly abuse of minors and we  
had lived through the fear that some parts of Protestantism might seek to 
impose  its views on this nation by means of an aroused electorate. Finally, we 
had  watched religion inspire terrorism. That is an enormous amount of change 
for one  career to absorb.  
Were we after fifty years discouraged? I saw no sign of that at this reunion. 
 What I did see was an enthusiasm about our ministries, a mature grappling 
with  the reality of our lives and a sense that our professional careers had 
been  quite worthwhile. When I asked how many of us, knowing what we now know, 
would  make the same career decision today that we made so long ago, there was 
absolute  unanimity. We would all do it over again. I suspect that is a rare 
conclusion  for any graduating class of any profession.  
What is there about the priesthood that attracted us so long ago and that  
still appeals so powerfully even now? The answer seems to me to fall into  
several parts. First, we were and are intrigued and compelled by the Reality we  
experience as Transcendence and Otherness and that we tend to call by the holy  
name, God. We can no more define that Reality today than we could fifty years  
ago, but we do not doubt its presence. Indeed, we recognize that all of our  
definitions of God are and always will be woefully inadequate, but the 
ultimate  meaning of the faith that we profess is even more passionately held today 
than  it has ever been before. One person observed: "The older I get the more 
deeply I  believe, but the less beliefs I have." Many of us now know that the 
mystery at  the heart of Christianity is far beyond creed, dogma and doctrine.  
The second element in the priesthood's appeal is that it allows the ordained  
ones to enter the lives of the members of their congregations in deeply 
personal  ways. A pastor is frequently invited to journey behind the façade that 
people  wear into the depths of their hidden humanity and to be present not just 
in  their joy, but in their "trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other  
adversity." This awesome privilege and significant responsibility is deeply  
treasured but it must also be handled with enormous care and absolute integrity.  
 
The third element in the priesthood's appeal lies in this profession's  
ability to be intellectually expansive. This is not inevitable, but it certainly  
is possible. What other profession requires its members to stand before an  
audience weekly to address issues of personal and corporate life from the  
vantage point of a belief system. That is what a sermon is and we preached at  least 
once just about every Sunday for 50 years. In addition, clergy offer their  
congregations, dioceses and conference centers classes on the Bible, the 
Creeds,  Church history, Ethics, Liturgy and a host of other topics for which we had 
to  become informed. Many of us lived constantly inside libraries during 
those fifty  years always reading, searching, thinking, and wrestling with the 
formulas by  which we perceived truth, testing that truth and reformulating it. 
No other  profession I know of has such a rich opportunity for growth. We were 
teachers to  many, including ourselves.  
Finally, we shared with our congregations the great transition moments with  
which life presents us. The joy of birth is met with the liturgy of baptism. 
The  onset of puberty is met with confirmation, the Christian rite of passage. 
When  two people fall in love and pledge themselves to each other "before God 
and this  company," we stand with them to see the hands shake, the voices 
quiver and the  smiles radiate. We stand beside the sick in hospitals. When people 
make their  exits from what William Shakespeare called "this mortal coil," we 
are also there  sharing the fear, the grief and the tears, not just with the 
deceased, but also  with the bereaved. Priesthood is an enormous privilege. I 
am glad I walked this  particular path. I sense that my classmates from 50 
years ago are also glad they  did. Perhaps the greatest human accomplishment that 
life can bestow on any of us  is a sense that our days have been fully lived, 
our purposes deeply engaged and  an ultimate meaning has been embraced. To 
see these qualities in my classmates  after all these years is to know them anew 
in myself. Perhaps that is what a  class reunion is all about.  
— John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Dr. Michael Mangan from Dayton, Ohio, writes:  
My question for you concerns prayer that is directed to those other than the  
ultimate God. People pray to humans who have moved on to whatever happens 
after  death - to Jesus of Nazareth, to Mary his mother, and to the vast litany 
of  saints, many of whom have been declared patrons of causes, events and  
professions. All of these are, or were, human beings who have passed over the  
threshold of death. Does not this type of prayer assume the immortality of the  
individual human spirit or soul? What are your thoughts on the existence,  
activity and power of the individual soul/spirit after death? For example, I  
admire the writings of Thomas Jefferson but I don't try to contact him in his  
"other world" for enlightenment. Why should I pray to St. Cecelia to help me  
play the right notes or to St. Jude for some lost cause, or to St. Mary to  
intercede for me with her son? Do these individual souls still exist and do they  
have any power or inclination to relate to us? Why should I pray to Jesus of  
Nazareth if he has returned to the Divine? If God is indeed Being, Life and  
Love, do not all human souls melt back into this Absolute after death? In a  
larger sense if the individual spirits of the saints remain intact, does not the  
soul of every human endure eternally as a unique spirit? This has become a 
major  stumbling block on my path to the Divine. Can you help?  
Dear Dr. Mangan,  
Your questions have much to commend them. My bet is that you grew up in a  
Roman Catholic background where the Virgin, St. Cecelia, St. Jude and other  
saints were important parts of your culture. You also seem to be in contact with  
some eastern religious thought with your idea that all souls melt back into 
the  Absolute after death.  
The bottom line is that no one knows what happens after death and the world  
is reeling today somewhere between the death of traditional religious language 
 and the need to process contemporary religious experience. I am not sure 
where  we will end up.  
I suspect praying to saints began because they were so human and God, even  
Jesus seemed so distant, so unreal. It was not long after these practices were  
adopted that cults devoted to Mary and various saints developed and they in 
turn  spawned cottage industry in medals, icons, etc. I think most of that 
represented  a superstitious past that is dying.  
My only word to you is that I am so busy living that I don't waste much time  
trying to figure out what happens after life. I believe in life after death 
but  I can't define it. I believe in life before death and I intend to live it. 
I  commend a similar pattern to you.  
— John Shelby Spong  
 
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