What book are you reading right now?
Blue Highways
Author: Mary Elyn Bahlert
I am a spiritual seeker, a seeker who has "taken a drink from many cups." I love to accompany others on the deeper journey to witness to their True Self. Now a writer, photographer and poet, I have retired from full-time ministry as a pastor in downtown Oakland, CA.
Night now
Bedtime comes earlier in our house now than it did at the beginning of the COVID sheltering that started in March of 2020. As the sheltering began and as we all adjusted ourselves – our schedules, our social activities, most of our activities – Jeff and I adjusted our daily schedule, as well. Some of the adjustments were in response to the sheltering – but most not. We simply shuffled into the time of sheltering – “for how long?” we might have wondered – and our daily routine shuffled itself into something new.
We both woke to the alarm at 5:30 AM and started the day sitting together in the living room of our beautiful Craftsman house, talking, looking at the news articles online, checking our emails. And the day started with a nice cup of coffee, made fresh, cup by cup. After a while, Jeff would leave the front room where I still sat to cross the yard behind our house to his studio, where he’d spend the early morning. Each day had its own rhythm, broken only by online classes and meals together, a ZOOM call with a friend, walks in our neighborhood, and in our case, friendship time in the backyard. A few of us would sit in a circle – sometimes wearing warm coats and with scarves tied around our necks – with a small group of friends who had ventured out for some face to face time with other human beings. “We’re still alive,” we seemed to be saying to one another by our presence. In the early evenings, often, Jeff and I would get into his car and drive somewhere, a local place. Over the months, as COVID sheltering went on – did we ever think we’d be sheltering for months and months and months??? – we drove in the early evening, as the sun set, into many neighborhoods in Oakland, finding and exploring places we’d never been before, although Oakland had already been our home for many years.
Were the days long? As I piece together my memories of that time, it’s hard to remember whether time seemed to go slowing, and it’s hard to understand how we did it, those days and weeks of early sheltering dragging on, month after month. Every day, we listened to the NPR News Hour as the losses of COVID were numbered and sometimes named. Every Friday, Judy Woodruff honored five of the week’s dead by recounting the stories of their lives in a few sentences. Things were tough in Italy, in New York City, in China, we learned. After a time – when the sheltering went on and on and on – she stopped the practice of telling life stories of victims.
All along, Jeff and I went to bed early, often chatting before we fell asleep, and as often as we could as we lay awake, saying our good night to one another: “Night now.”
Another long and strange day had ended with those simple words.
*
Over the years, those simple and gentle words have guided us to sleep. When our nephew Rainier came to live with us when he was a student at San Francisco State University, he listened and watched us carefully. His folks had divorced when he was a child, and he had grown up without some of the simple joys of witnessing a couple. And so, while he observed us, he too, took on some of our simple traditions. “Night, now,” he’d say to us.
When we visit Rainier and his family in Seattle now, he makes sure to end our days together: “Night now.”
“Night now” comes as a comfort to us, even now.
before sunset on View Place
“You learn something new every day.”
In my memory, the words of wisdom: “You learn something new every day,” were spoken by my mother. Many times. Just recently I asked my sister, Suzie, in an email, if she remembered these words of wisdom. Yes, she answered: she remembered Dad saying them. Many times.
So much for memories. At any rate, the mantra, “you learn something new every day” has not left my memory, regardless of the source. As I’ve gotten older, and since my twenties, as I fashioned my own life in the world, my memory is accompanied by my own judgement. “…Yes, I do learn something every day, something about me, about how I manage to live my life in the world, something about my inner life, something about how life in this world works” – an important companion to me in my own journey.
I expect that my mother was thinking that we learn some new fact, some interesting detail, every day. I am grateful for the way she was interested in life, in other people, in new events, in changes. Always interested in Milwaukee, her – and my – hometown, she would send me clippings about new happenings in the city, even when I had moved across the country to the Bay Area of California. I could count on her hand-written notes to reach me, along with several newspaper clippings from the Milwaukee Journal. I read every single one she sent.
In my thirties, and as my inner life grew, I turned to therapy and body-work to grow in understanding – “consciousness” of myself, of how I ticked. Most of my companions, beginning with my days in seminary and later, among my colleagues, used the same tools to grow, to “learn something new every day.”
Along the way, I’ve come to be grateful for my mother’s – or my father’s – words. They’ve given me a mind that is interested in life, in the world, in other people. And those words, lived out in my experience, have opened doors to understandings that I had never imagined.
This morning, I worshipped in a small church a distance from our home in Oakland as I accompanied Jeff, who was filling the pulpit. He surprised me when he told a story about me as an illustration. I’ve recounted before that holy moment: when the idea occurred to me that I might be a pastor – at a time in my life when I had not ever seen – or even heard of – such a woman as pastor. “By faith, Abraham started his journey, not knowing where he was going…”
I learned something new today, and about my own journey. Thank you, Mom (or Dad…).
Surely even the trees learn something new as they grow… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert
Called by God
I suppose it is a strange phenomenon, having grown up in a family with a particular distaste – and history, according to family lore – for Church, for me to think I might want to go to seminary. We held my atheist Uncle Johnny – whose life was always bent on helping others – in high esteem. And although my mother ascertained that I should attend Confirmation Classes at the closest Evangelical Lutheran Church in the neighborhood, a Missouri Synod Church, and I had there memorized Luther’s Small Catechism (I am forever grateful), yet there I was, thinking about becoming a pastor, with no experience of what a pastor was all about. I was about 19 when the idea entered my mind.
Of course, I had never seen – or even heard – of a woman pastor. Still, I had the thought: “I could be a Pastor.”
And so I set on the journey of finding a Church Community. I had run away from the fundamentalism that was the theology in the Missouri Synod Lutheran denomination, almost as soon as I’d heard it. That didn’t make sense to me. But were there other places, were there other way to look at Church, at the faith, at life? Maybe so.
I started the journey toward finding such a place where I often begin journeys: at the library. I read about denominations, discovering ideas and understandings I had not heard before. Several – almost 10 – years later, I found myself in a United Methodist Church, where I learned that there were folks whose faith was lived out in social justice, not in right doctrine.
Within a few years, I made my way to seminary – at last! – and within three years, I was ordained and sent to my first appointment within the Methodist system. I had a lot to learn, about church itself, how the inner workings of a church happened (!), and I learned what church community was in real life – or was not. I’d married my husband, Jeff Kunkel, during my last year as a seminary student, and our lives were complicated by being part of a clergy couple. Then, and even now, those in authority had an often difficult time finding an appropriate slot for us both.
And so, after several church appointments, and after leaving a conflicted church situation, we found ourselves as a “clergy couple” in Tracy, CA. Even now, I think of the people of that congregation as my first congregation, in the way I connected to them, and in the way they connected to me. Life in Tracy was less urban than I had been accustomed to living, so there was that adjustment. Still, I remember those two years with fondness for the people there.
Jeff and I were part of a group of clergy from the area who met monthly to have lunch together, to simply be together with other clergy. I was the only woman – as I was the first woman pastor at the congregation in Tracy – but I went to the meetings and expected to be treated as an equal among peers. That’s my way. I don’t remember not being treated as an equal.
One of the clergy in the group was the Pastor of a large Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. One day, as the clergy were gathering, he and I stood together, chatting. We were friendly, and I told him that I’d been confirmed in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. With a glint in his eyes, he asked me: “So when did you fall from grace?”
Without skipping a beat, I said: “Called by God.”
At that, he did not lose his kind and open expression, but simply smiled at me. I’ve always thought of that moment as a time when some Spirit – greater than me and yet in and with me – had somehow moved.
We sat down with the other clergy, and the gathering began.
