During the Christmas break in the middle of my second year at Union Seminary, Embry and I were married on December 28,1965 in the Davidson College Presbyterian Church. Since her father was president of the college, everyone in the small town was invited, and the huge church was comfortably full. Her uncle, an ordained Methodist minister, political radical and college professor living in West Virginia, performed the ceremony. The bridesmaids and groomsmen numbered fifteen or sixteen. The reception consisted of punch and cookies as people lined up at the president’s home in a receiving line, which took well over an hour. Not a drop of liquor was served and in two hours everyone had departed. My, how customs have changed from those days! We spent our honeymoon week in her parent’s lake house a few miles away.

Having Embry with me made an enormous difference, and the second semester of my second year at Union went well. Embry enrolled in Barnard College and went on to graduate two years later, majoring in math. As a Southerner, she was a curiosity to her classmates, who were mostly from New York City. The first semester of 1966 we lived in the dorm for married Union students in a room overlooking Broadway at 120^thStreet. Teachers College and The Julliard Music School were across the street, and it was not that unusual to hear a budding music student practicing an aria as he or she waited at the bus stop outside our window.

But a nagging question remained: What to do next. Some of the classes were excellent, others not so much, and my doubts about becoming ordained continued. Toward the end of the second semester, elections were held for class officers of the Union student body for our senior year. Several people talked me into running for president of the student body. With mixed feelings I accepted the challenge and delivered a speech which compared to my opponent’s speech seemed uncomfortably short and, I was told later by friends, somewhat melancholy. The following day I announced that I was withdrawing from the election and would not be attending Union my senior year.

It felt like a huge bolder had been lifted from my shoulders.

Now the fact is that I was not dropping out of seminary. I was just taking a year out to participate in a new program called MUST (“Metropolitan Urban Service Training”), a Union program set up for people like me confused about career choices. There were six seminary students, all men, and two leaders–one clergy and one non-ordained Union alumna– and the rules were that you had to work in a secular job and affiliate with a church, which you were expected to attend regularly. Every week there would be a group discussion about our experiences and how our jobs were going, and there were no expectations as to the outcome. Without question this was my best and most consequential year at Union. Embry and I joined a small, racially diverse Episcopal church on the edge of Harlem called St Mary’s Manhatanville, whose rector had a profound impact on me. Slightly balding, a tad overweight, in his mid 40s and originally from the Midwest, he described himself as a humanist first and a Christian second. His low key message of unconditional love and the call for social justice was genuine and honestly and humbly communicated in a way that applied to all humans, not just Christians. Often with  smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye, he smoked a big cigar, and never took himself too seriously. It is fair to say that he changed my life and was the impetus for my eventually landing on my feet as a “Universalist Episcopalian.”

Embry and I traveled that summer all over Europe using the small inheritance I received from my grandmother. This was the infamous summer of 1967 when Newark and many American cities were burning and calls for revolution were in the air. It was not unlike the times we are in today when the fear of change also is in the air, and no one knows where we will land.

Before the MUST program began in September, I had a scheduled, routine meeting with my bishop, who was in town for counseling and treating his postulants to dinner and a show.  When I announced that I planned to take a year out to participate in the MUST program, his jaw dropped just like it had when I told him I was going to seminary two years before, and his face turned a bright red.  “That’s it, Howell,” he exclaimed. “That is the last straw! You have got to admit I have been patient allowing you to attend a heretical Protestant seminary, but this is too much. I am not throwing you out, but for every year you have spent at Union, if you want to be ordained, you will spend a year at Nashotah House.”

 Nashotah House is the ultra-conservative, Anglo Catholic seminary in the deep woods of Wisconsin. He knew it was a deal I could never accept and had given me an honorable way out. He gave me a firm handshake, a slight smile, then a gentle pat on the back, and I think I noticed a faint tear on his cheek. We both knew this was probably the last time we would meet. The following week I wrote a letter to him resigning from being a postulant in the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee. Sadly, I never saw him again. In 1980 he died quite young, at age 68, following an illness which forced him to retire at age 65.

The MUST year was for me one of the best in my life. We lived off campus on Riverside Drive near 125^thStreet in a modest apartment building showing its age. Our tiny studio apartment had two windows opening onto a fire escape and airshaft. But it was ours and we loved it. We also loved our Siamese/Russian Blue cat whom we named Minette. Embry loved Barnard. And most important we loved each other. We visited museums, walked in parks, ice skated in Central Park, got free tickets to concerts at Lincoln Center, and had many friends. Crowded potluck dinner parties with friends from Union and others we knew in New York happened on many weekends and often lasted until after midnight. And, most of all, I was freed from the angst and introspection that seemed to plague so many Union students.

I had four different secular jobs–an “editor” (actually, more like a proofreader), a sales manager at Macy’s in the toy department during the Christmas holidays, a clerk-type job I can barely remember, and finally a six month job working for Shelly’s All Stars, an afterschool playgroup. Driving one of Shelly’s huge station wagons, I picked up kids from their fancy private schools in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side and drove them to museums, gyms, or to Central Park to play ball or hunt dinosaurs before driving them home to their parent’s elegant apartments. To keep them occupied on the way home, I invented the imaginary character of Freddie M. Freenball, a mischievous kid who had miraculous adventures in New York City, who was the hero of stories I told as I drove them home and then retold years and decades later to both of our children and to all four grandchildren.  I loved the work and loved working with Shelly. I was tempted to keep the job with Shelly but decided to return for my last year at Union while Embry completed her senior year at Barnard. That was in 1968, the year that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and the War in Vietnam was raging.

My last year at Union was very different from the first two. For electives at Union, I took two planning and urban development  courses in the masters program at the Columbia University School of Urban Planning and miraculously was able to land a field work position working for the New York City Department of City Planning two days a week. My senior thesis at Union was about creative playgrounds in public housing projects in the city. By this time, Union had given up on me. I got an A on the thesis and no comments from the faculty. By the time we were supposed to graduate, all of Columbia University plus Barnard had shut down due to student protests and threats of violence. Embry received her diploma in math (and a Phi Beta Kappa membership to boot) from a secretary working in the math department. Union was also shut down though the seminary managed to have a small, low key graduation service at Riverside Church.

By this time most of my friends were moving in different directions. Except for my (brilliant) roommate before Embry arrived, who went on to get a PhD from Yale and later taught religion at a prestigious college, almost everyone was moving away from a career having much, if anything, to do with the Christian Church–working in the Peace Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, teaching, social work, government, med school, or law school. Only a couple of my Union friends got ordained and neither lasted very long as a minister.

So, what to do next? What would Embry do? Since Embry now had with a bachelor’s degree in math, at least she had some marketable job skills. In January of 1968, she had landed a job as a computer programmer for a large corporation in Midtown and loved it. She was one of the original programmers at the forefront of the digital revolution, though of course at the time she did not know that and it seemed like just another job at a big company (and she had no idea as to what the company actually did.) But at least she had job skills. I had none. Who would hire somebody like me? The year I spent in the MUST program informed me what kind of job I might expect to get–a counselor/driver or an editor/proofreader or maybe a salesclerk at a department store. What kind of career path would that be? And what would be the place for church and Christianity in our lives?

 We had to figure out something. What we did and what happened next will be the subject of Part Four of “Confessions of a Universalist Episcopalian.”