[Dialogue] 8/27/11, Spong: Meditation on Turning 80 in London

Fri Aug 26 12:30:33 EDT 2011

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Meditation on Turning 80 in London
I marked the 80th anniversary of my birth in Green’s Restaurant, Duke Street in London this summer.  What I thought was to be a quiet, romantic dinner with my wife Christine was jarred a bit when we arrived at the restaurant and were told “Your table for five is ready.”  Five, I thought, who are the five?  I looked at my wife for clues and was told that this was her party not mine.  So we went to our table, sat down and waited to see who these invited guests would be.
In about five minutes the mystery began to clear up when two of our closest friends, Liz and Geoff Robinson appeared.  I had not thought of them since they live in Wellington, New Zealand.  Liz has directed each of my book tours to New Zealand and Geoff is the news anchor of Radio New Zealand and thus the best recognized voice in that country.  We have together hiked the Milford Track on New Zealand’s South Island and vacationed on the tip of the North Island in previous years.  I was vaguely aware that they were going to be in the UK this summer, but did not know that our dates would overlap so I was as amazed and delighted to see them.
About 15 minutes passed before the mystery of the final guest was solved.  The door opened and in came Karen Armstrong, a close friend and a former nun, whose books have catapulted her to be one of the best commentators on religious matters in the Western world.  Her sensitive treatment of Islam has turned her into almost a rock star in Iran.  We have known and loved Karen for more than a decade and see her regularly in London and in New York.  She travels extensively and finding her home on this particular day was a long shot.
So now my birthday dinner guest list was complete and the party lasted until 11:30 pm.  There was no one else in the restaurant when we finally departed.  The waiters seemed perfectly content to let us continue as long as we wished, but they did look relieved when we finally left. That dinner gathering was the beginning of my meditation on what it means to reach 80 years of age. Age is a gift that I believe must be embraced and even cherished.
Frequently the joy of life is not fully appreciated until the years begin to creep up.  When I was a young man, my focus was always on the future.  I worked hard at each stage of my life to prepare me for the next.  There came a time, however, when I realized that I was not preparing for life, I was living it.  That is a crucial distinction
I have had three quite distinct and exciting careers.  I was a priest, then a bishop and then an author-lecturer.  Each was a full time occupation.  I loved them all.  In my 21 year career as a priest I lived in four distinct and wonderful locations.  My first church was located quite literally between Duke University and the Erwin Cotton Mills in Durham, N. C. and its congregation straddled both worlds.  The two leaders of my vestry were Dr. Herman Salinger, head of the Department of German at Duke and a published poet, and Milton Barefoot, known as “Piggy,” who was a child of the mill community and was then working  as a gas pump regulator for the State of North Carolina.  Both were wonderful human beings.
My second location was in the farming belt of Eastern North Carolina – the town of Tarboro in Edgecombe County. This rural community was filled with good people, but racial tensions were high in those days as segregation was dying and a new way of life was struggling to be born.  Among my responsibilities as a 26 year old priest were Calvary Church, a wonderful community of dedicated white people, and St. Luke’s Church,  another wonderful congregation of dedicated black people located just one block away in that deeply segregated world.  I loved both of these congregations.  The people of Calvary helped me to grow in many ways and the people of St. Luke’s took me in and loved the racism out of me.  I was never the same after serving those two churches.
My third location was Lynchburg, Virginia, where I shared that town with an up and coming Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell. Once again the significant issue in that town was a deep racism.  St. John’s Church where I was privileged to serve, was also across the street from Randolph Macon Women’s College and for the first time I embraced how powerful a force the presence of an institution of higher learning can be in the life of a community.  It was in Lynchburg that I also learned that congregations are made up of people who are not only willing, but quite capable of learning anything that I knew.  The people at St. John’s were politically conservative, but biblically uninformed.  They were, however, not mushrooms meant to be kept in the dark and covered with manure, and so with them I learned a valuable lesson.  It is not lay people, but the clergy who are overwhelmingly afraid of truth, insight and biblical scholarship. Lay people do not need to have their God or their religion protected by frightened clergy.
My final priestly location was St. Paul’s Church in the heart of Richmond, Virginia.  It was then and remains today the greatest church experience I have ever had.  In this congregation the people were leaders in business, finance, law, medicine and government. Yes, they also were politically conservative, but they were open to new possibilities and I loved that congregation passionately.  Here people flocked to an adult Bible class that I taught, eager to learn if the church was willing to teach. Being a priest was a deeply satisfying, enormously fulfilling life.  Perhaps in the terms of personal meaning, it was the most satisfying of my three careers.
In 1976 I was elected bishop of Newark and began my second career.  A bishop is an administrator, a conflict manager, a personnel officer, a fund raiser and a figure head.  I say this not to be pejorative, but to state a fact.  The bishop of a diocese is also, I learned, the articulator of a vision for the church in that area.  In the diocese I served I was, by dint of my office, the chairman of the board of a major urban hospital.  I had to learn about health care, medical politics and more legal issues than I knew existed.  The office of bishop required talents I did not have and knowledge for which I had no training. I embraced a steep learning curve.
How does a bishop measure success?  That is hard to do.  The thing I’m proudest of is that ten of the clergy who worked with me in this diocese at some point in their careers went on to become bishops.  Six of our clergy went on to become cathedral deans across America and others served in parishes that occupy critical places in the life of the church and this nation.
When I retired from this office in February of 2000, I moved immediately on to my third career in academia.  I taught at Harvard, at the University of the Pacific, at Drew Theological School and at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California.  I began to write a weekly column first for Beliefnet, then for Waterfront Media, then for Every Day Health and now for TCPC.  I was amazed at the expanse of that column.  We, and I say we because my wife Christine organized and facilitated this phase of our lives,  began a lecturing career that carried us not only across America, but to the United Kingdom at least annually; to Australia and New Zealand nine times; to Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Thailand, Canada and Indonesia
Throughout my career I took a crash course in institutional politics and worked to put institutional Christianity on the side of the full inclusion of people of color, women and gay and lesbian people in both church and society.  I rejoice today that my nation has an African-American President, my home diocese of North Carolina has an African-American bishop and  half of our clergy are now female, including our extraordinarily gifted woman Presiding Bishop.
I am proud that when I retired as the bishop of Newark I had 35 out of the closet gay and lesbian clergy serving with high effectiveness and 31 of them lived openly with their partners.  I rejoice today that my church has two gay-partnered openly elected and confirmed bishops.
In those three phases of my life, I was always planning ahead and looking forward.  As I grew older, the present became increasingly where I wanted to live, not the future.  Meaning was found, life was lived and relationships were treasured in the present.  My family became more and more important to me.  Freeing people to be whole and to offer the gifts they have to offer, whether modest or impressive, became an essential mark of life.  Faith became existential not theoretical.  God became a living presence, not an external being.  Christ became a principle lived out fully in history by Jesus of Nazareth.  Christianity became a universal experience that crossed all boundaries.  Staying connected with old friends became an increasingly precious part of life.  Repairing broken relationships, where possible, became a priority and where it was not possible it helped simply to acknowledge my part in the brokenness.
I have never been one to speculate on the content of life after death, but I do trust it, feel it, and seek to live into it.  The only way I know how to prepare for life after death is to live deeply, richly and fully now, scaling life’s heights, plumbing life’s depths, risking love, affirming others and accepting differences. It is by living fully that I prepare for death.
St. Paul was wrong, death is not the last enemy to be defeated.  Death is a friend to be embraced.  Death adds zest and passion to life by forcing us to live and investing each moment with ultimacy. I thus never want to miss an opportunity to tell my wife how much I love her.  I live for the moments when my children or grandchildren call or when we visit.  I love to hear about their victories and defeats, their struggles and joys. I want to live every moment of the life that I have, but I also want to relinquish that life with grace and dignity when it is time to do so.
These were the streams of consciousness that flowed through my mind as I reveled in turning 80 years old and celebrating that with my wife and three special friends in London on Duke Street in the summer of 2011.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Nick Bagnall of Omokoroa Beach, New Zealand, writes:
Question:
As a cleric, you can’t be expected to understand the technicalities of architecture and engineering, but crashing planes into skyscrapers would never be enough to cause them to collapse straight down.  Those three buildings were demolished by pre-set charges.  When the American people finally realize that, they will also realize that the entire deficit was manipulated by the (privately owned) Federal Reserve Bank.  Both invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were deliberately manipulated for the oil barons.  We have made the world a playground for the rich.  Men invented money and it is usury which is constantly making the rich richer and the poor poorer.  When that situation applied in France a couple of centuries ago, the result was calamity for the wealthy.   Can you hope that God will intervene to change things?
Answer:
Dear Nick,

I’m sure that there are people who think like you do, but I have never been asked to respond to them in my column.  Your comments reflect the rampant conspiracy theories that tell me more about the author of the letter than the situation you describe.

I see no evidence that pre-set charges caused the collapse of the World Trade Center.  I do not believe the deficit was manipulated by the Federal Reserve Bank.   Were they also responsible for Greece, for Ireland and for Portugal?  While the oil interests certainly had a stake in the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I regard that as quite simplistic to assume that my nation is so weak as to be manipulated in that fashion.

I think you have taken germs of insight and have turned them into “off the wall,” almost paranoid conclusions.  Are you unable to convince anyone else of the truth of your assumptions because everybody in power is part of the problem or because your assumptions are simply not true.  People who feel victimized tend to find someone else to blame. I do not regard that as a healthy exercise in rationality.

~John Shelby Spong

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