Confessions of a Universalist Episcopalian. Part Two.

While there were other Episcopalians at Union besides me, I do not think that any were any other “postulants.” Serious candidates for the Episcopal priesthood typically go to Episcopal Seminaries. This was certainly the case in the Diocese of Tennessee where I was the one exception. General Theological Seminary, also located in New York City (in the Chelsea neighborhood), was the flagship Episcopal seminary at that time, and it could not have been more different from Union. The student body did not include women, (who of course could not be ordained at that time), and the students and many faculty all ate lunch and dinner together in a large dining hall with assigned seating, usually proceeded by a sung blessing. They also attended daily worship services in the chapel, often followed by small gatherings where afternoon sherry was served. I visited General several times and while spooked by the spiritual, monastery-like culture, I was very impressed by the sense of community. It is quite possible–perhaps even likely–that if I had attended General instead of Union, I would have become an ordained Episcopal priest. That I did not go to General I consider a blessing. I dodged a bullet. I believe that being an Episcopal priest–or a Protestant minister, for that matter–has got to be one of the hardest jobs in the world: Showtime every Sunday, low pay, dubious prestige, and ornery parishioners to put up with. Above my pay grade, as they say in Washington. This is not to imply that for many people it is not a rewarding career. Some are born to be religious leaders and genuinely feel “called.” A close friend from my Mexican summer adventure did attend General and went on to have a storied career as rector of several prestigious Episcopal parishes and toward the end of his career served as dean of General Theological Seminary. For those who stick with it and feel called it can be an extraordinary and rewarding life’s work. However, that was not the pathway for me nor for any of the friends that I made while at Union.

While it seemed to me that the students at General were already fully committed Christians with their eye on ball of becoming the rector of a big Episcopal church or similar job, most Union students were, like me, still in the spiritual search mode. We came to Union to better understand Christianity, to seek “Truth,” and to find God. The courses at Union were taught by distinguished scholars and intellectuals and some of the wisest people in Christendom. My hope was to find the Holy Grail of meaning and purpose, to build a spiritual foundation, and achieve some kind of enlightenment– only to realize that scholarly research will not get you there. Experiencing a spiritual presence in one’s life has more to do with prayer and spiritual practice than scholarly pursuits, which of course should have been obvious, but, hey, I was young.

Union had its strong points, however. Most of the faculty were brilliant. Fellow students were friendly and compatible, and many were focused on “church in the world” initiatives. Several remain life long friends.  During my four years at Union  many students were involved in social justice efforts, the Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam War protests. I was part of that group, and in the summer of 1966 worked with Embry (We had gotten married four months before.) with SNCC (the most radical civil rights group at the time) in Baker County in Southwest Georgia where we lived with a Black family, registered voters and worked in a fledging Head Start program (described in my book Civil Rights Journey). It was an experience of a lifetime.

 An enjoyable part of my early Union experience ironically were the periodic dinners that occurred when the Bishop of Tennessee made the trip to New York to visit his postulants, all of whom except me were at General. As was his custom, he would treat his charges to dinner at a fancy restaurant followed by a show or a visit to a jazz or blues club. I did not know many of the five or six General Seminary students that he treated, and they did not know me or understand how or why someone at Union Seminary should be part of the bishop’s special evening on the town. What made the experience even more puzzling for them was that the bishop would usually insist on having me sit “at his right hand” at dinner. It drove them crazy. I loved every minute. I think these evenings were as much for his benefit as for his postulants. Always seated at the head of the table, he would sip on the first of several martinis as he smiled and enjoyed the company of people who were in awe of him.

My first year at Union was not easy. Most important I had fallen in love with Embry Martin, whom I had met the spring of my senior year at Davidson College and who was a student at Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg Virginia. We were able to see each other only a few times my entire first year at Union. So that was difficult, but even more difficult was the field work experience I had that year. I was assigned to work every Sunday at an Episcopal church in the Lower East Side. The rector was egotistic and arrogant. He later admitted that he disliked me from the first time we met because I was from the South and all white Southerners were in his view evil people. He told me toward the end of my two years at his church  that his primary goal was to break me of my “naïve, adolescent enthusiasm,” and he came close to succeeding. Nor was I that impressed with the classes or the professors at Union. Being famous and writing scholarly books does not necessarily translate into also being a good teacher, though surely many were. Furthermore, there was nothing at Union that came close to the community life I had observed at General. I was beginning to have serious doubts whether being a postulant was a good idea. Nevertheless, having no better alternative, I reupped for a second year  and three years later in 1968 graduated.

The summer following my first year of seminary in 1965 was the most challenging. Embry had managed to get a job as a counselor at a day camp in a United Church of Christ parish in a low income, predominantly African American neighborhood in Boston. She and several other volunteers lived in a group home, and we got to see each other on weekends. That was the highlight. The lowlight was my job, which was to function as a chaplain at Boston City Hospital as part of what was called a “clinical training program.” I was assigned to two wards in this inner city hospital where I functioned as a Christian chaplain for anyone who signed up to be visited. Here I was–young and inexperienced and without a strong faith myself– and my job was to provide spiritual healing and comfort to people in great distress, including several on my watch who died. I performed my first (and only) funeral in the living room of a white, working class family in South Boston whose 23 year old daughter died of cancer. Every person I visited was desperately poor and most were very ill. One was a recent Puerto Rican immigrant who had broken both legs when he jumped off a bridge trying to commit suicide and ended up landing on two elderly women both of whom died of head injuries. He had been charged second degree homicide. Making matters even worse was that every day for a couple of hours I was part of a sensitivity training group that included six seminary students and two leaders, all men. I learned later that the purpose of the group was to break down the defenses of each participant and then to rebuild the Christian character of each person. The co-leader of our group, another ordained minister who was arrogant and opinionated, apologized to me at the end of the summer that while the group did a terrific job in breaking down my defenses, he was sorry that there was not enough time left to build me back up again as a better Christian. (I got an “F” on one of the required assignments to write an essay about death because I did not mention that Christians will all be with Jesus and everyone else will burn in hell for eternity.) I believe that it was at this point that I concluded that I had to get off the track I was on. If this was what Christianity was all about, it was not for me.

What happened next will be the subject of my next blog post.

 

 

 

 

Christmas Season 2024

As has been our custom, Embry and I are celebrating Christmas with our two children, their spouses and our four grandchildren. We are at our son Andrew’s house in Maplewood NJ just  outside New York City. Jessica and Peter drove down yesterday from Portland, Maine, with Josie, now a senior in high school. Her brother, Jasper, arrived at Newark International Airport from Vancouver, Canada, where he is a sophomore at the University of British Columbia. Andrew and Karen’s daughter, Sadie, is now a junior in high school. Her brother, Parker, is a sophomore. Everyone arrived about the same time, around six in the evening, with lots of hugs and laughter. I could not help thinking how blessed we are. Everyone is healthy. Everyone is happy about where they are in their own lives. And the love they have for each other—and for us– is palpable. This afternoon we will visit our niece’s family in Princeton where there will be more hugs and more laughter. I know that this is not always the case for every family.

Thank you for following my blog. Writing it is therapy for me, and knowing that there are folks who read it means a great deal. So, here is wishing you a happy holiday season. Enjoy the moment. Next year could be a roller coaster.

Confessions of a Universalist Episcopalian. Part One

 

(Note to readers: Time for a break from Trump and doom and gloom. In this essay and the several that follow I am writing a short autobiography focusing on the highlights and lowlights of my spiritual journey through life.)

From a young age, I had the feeling that I was called to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. My father was the senior warden of Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Nashville and my mother headed up the Women of Christ Church.  My junior year in high school she was elected president of the Women of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee. I attended Sunday school every Sunday most of my childhood and during my teenage years was very active both in the youth group at Christ Church and in the diocesan youth organization, “Episcopal Young Churchmen of Tennessee.” Even more important, the clergy at Christ Church visited me often when I was convalescing from polio when I was ten and then again when I was twelve and was recovering from a spinal fusion and confined to my bed. I was comforted and inspired by the clergy and wanted to be like them. During the summer of 1960 following my high school graduation I joined a dozen other high school Episcopalians from across Tennessee   to work in the highlands of a remote area in Mexico advancing the cause of the Episcopal Church in Mexico. The two young clergy who led the adventure were inspiring and charismatic, and I wanted to be like them too. This life changing experience was followed the summer of my sophomore year at Davidson College when I worked in an Episcopal “experimental” farming community at the base of Mt Yatsu, Japan’s second tallest mountain. Six or seven American college students, including my best friend from Nashville (and college roommate), were paired with an equal number of Japanese students to help build a road in an Episcopal missionary community called KEEP (“Kiyosato Episcopal Experimental Project”). Then the summer after my junior year in college I worked in the Lower East Side of New York City in a mission church of Trinity Church, Wall Street, teaching in vacation Bible school. My assistant was a Puerto Rican guy slightly younger than me, who was “vice president” of an infamous street gang, the Bopping Ballerinas. These experiences while not without some personal challenges were all character building, extraordinary adventures. Joining the Americans that summer were a group of college students from the UK, one of whom went on to become a very successful Anglican priest in the Liverpool area and has remained a best friend even to this day.

At Davidson, I attended the tiny Episcopal Church adjacent to the campus almost every Sunday and my senior year was elected president of the Davidson College YMCA, oddly at that time a position voted on by the entire student body and which carried with it dubious prestige. In part due to my position at the Y and my church involvement I was inspired to organize a civil rights march the spring of  my senior year (“The  March in Charlotte for Civil Rights”), which for the 500 plus people who participated (about 50 from Davidson College and others from HBCUs in the area and  many members of a Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Charlotte), was something most participants probably still remember. It certainly was such an experience for me though it caused quite a stir back home when a front page article appeared in Nashville’s conservative newspaper, The Nashville Banner, with the headline, “Bank President’s Son Leads Rights March in North Carolina.” To their credit my parents responded to condolences expressed by astonished friends at Nashville cocktail parties that they actually supported their son.

So, when it came time for me to graduate from Davidson, how could a bleeding heart like me not go to seminary? I was primed and ready. There was only one small problem. I was not sure that my Christian faith was what it should be or that I believed what Episcopal priests were supposed to believe. So instead of applying to an Episcopal Seminary, I decided to apply for a Rockefeller Fellowship, which at the time paid all expenses for college graduates, selected on a competitive basis, who were not sure what they wanted to do with their lives to give them one year to get a taste of what seminary was like. The idea I suppose was that some promising graduates might be enticed away from law school, business or med school to become Christian ministers. I was one of something like 25 or 30 people who got the award that year, the majority of whom ended up like me attending non-denominational Union Theological Seminary in New York City. At that time Union was the preeminent seminary not only in the United Stages but in the world. Unlike Davidson College and all Episcopal seminaries at the time, where students were all male, almost half the students at Union were women. A couple of years before I got the fellowship, Union had on its faculty the most famous Protestant theologians of the Twentieth Century, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. It was also the seminary that the famous theologian Deitric Bonhoeffer attended before he returned to Nazi Germany to oppose Hitler (and was martyred). I remember the first few weeks at Union I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Even though Tillich and Niebuhr had retired, the professors who were there had all written books, were brilliant, and were well known in their fields. Finally, I thought, I have made it into the Big Leagues! I was back in the Big Apple, which I loved, and with fellow students who were, well, pretty much like me. They had done well in college where they were student leaders and were looking for a pathway to try to make the world a better place. They were also, like me, somewhat lost souls.

A few weeks before I left Nashville for New York City, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee was visiting Christ Church. He was a good friend of my parents and a feisty, Old School kind of guy from the Deep South, who was a committed evangelical with a twinkle in his eye and a hardy laugh. At coffee hour following the service, he came up to me and asked what my plans were now that I had graduated from college. When I told him I was headed off to Union Theological Seminary, his jaw dropped and without missing a beat, he knelt and crossed himself saying “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost!” The following week he sent me papers to fill out, which I did, and that is how I became a “postulant”–or candidate for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.

The four years I spent at Union Seminary were the best of times and the worst of times, which will be the subject of Part Two of “Confessions of an Episcopal Universalist.”

 

 

 

The Howells Are Moving!

Yes, it is true. After a little over nine years at the Kennedy-Warren, the iconic apartment house next to the entrance to the National Zoo, we have decided to move to Collington, a continuing care retirement community of more than 300 apartments, villas and cottages in Prince Georges County about two miles from where the Washington Commanders play football on Sunday afternoons. While we have had nine great years here at the K-W, have made many new friends, and have loved living here, it is time to move on. We will be moving to a cottage a little smaller than our apartment here but still plenty big enough for us– with a living room, den, full kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sunroom and outdoor patio.

So why move now? Well, we are both getting up there in years. I will turn 83 in three months and next year Embry will join the 80s club. The whole purpose of a CCRC like Collington (also called a “Life Plan Community”) is to provide the infrastructure to promote healthy aging and to provide access to additional help and support when and if needed. Collington includes a long term care component for those who are not able to continue to live independently. It also includes a fitness center and lap pool, pickle ball courts, two dining venues, numerous meeting rooms and activity areas and is situated on a 125 acre parcel surrounded by forests with several miles of paved walking trails and a small lake. Fortunately, we both are in good health for our age, but the longer we live the more vulnerable people our age are to the challenges associated with aging. Consider moving to a CCRC as a way of trying to squeeze the last drops out of the lemon.

Besides I am a believer. If you know me, you know that my company, Howell Associates, for more than 20 years provided market research, financial analysis and marketing services to the senior living industry. Our primary clients were not-for-profit CCRCs. And when I started the company in 1981, the community to be called Collington was my first client. The Episcopal Diocese of Washington had been offered as a gift a 125-acre parcel by a shopping center developer and hired me (I did not have any employees yet) to determine if building a retirement community on the site was feasible. In those days because there were few CCRCs in the Washington metro area, I travelled to the Philadelphia area where the Quakers had built the first two CCRCs on the East Coast, Foulkeways and Kendal. I was very impressed and recommended that the diocese form a not-for-profit company to develop a new CCRC modeled after Kendal. I helped the diocese put together a development team, secure zoning and market the units. The 360-unit property opened in 1985. In the early 2000s Collington got into some financial difficulties and hired my firm to identify the reasons and recommend solutions. One of my recommendations was to merge or affiliate with another CCRC with a solid reputation. While I had nothing to do with the board’s decision, they chose Kendal, which now includes about a dozen affiliates and is considered by many to be the blue ribbon CCRC provider in the country. Collington honored me by asking me to serve as a volunteer board member, which I did for six years serving as treasurer. So, when the time came for Embry and me to consider the next steps, there was really no choice. It had to be Collington.

The actual move will not happen until late March, so we have three months to downsize and prepare for the move. The decision to make the move feels right though it is a major one, and most of our friends are opting for aging in place in their homes. I can understand their decision. There is no silver bullet to guarantee that people our age will make the most of the years we have left. The decision depends on many factors, many of which we do not control, the most important being our health. And it turns out that in our case it was actually Embry who was the primary motivator behind the decision to move now, not me, though I know it is the right decision and am enthusiastic about the move.

 In future posts I will let you know how it goes. Stay tuned.