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.
I married a man and a cat. Schatzi had been in Jeff’s life for several years when he and I were married in 1984. Part Maine Coone, she was a beautiful creature with long gray fur. After we were married, she took to sleeping at our feet, making room for me. Schatzi will always be my favorite cat (sorry, LiLi).
Schatzi was my first cat, and she became my introduction to cats. She was a good role model. I’ve discovered since that not all cats have the same people-loving, generous disposition that Schatzi had. If I pushed her too far, she warned me gently, stretching one leg, claws showing, in my direction. I always paid attention! I studied her closely. One day I announced to Jeff: “this cat doesn’t have any eye-lids!” Welcome to cat-hood!
When I took long naps on the green couch in our living room, Schatzi would lie next to me, her back stretched out along my body, an extra layer of warmth. When we had visitors, Schatzi made sure to find her way to the center of the action. While she was a house cat, she was allowed outside if she chose, and being female, she didn’t ever go far from home.
In December of 2000, I recall a Sunday during the liturgical season of Advent when I recounted three things in my sermon that had happened to me during the prior week: I’d received a phone call that my friend and colleague Bruce had died of a heart attack, a doctor’s appointment with my mother had revealed that she had terminal cancer, and the cat had spent the week sick, lying close to the heat register in the dining room of our flat off Grand Avenue in Oakland. As she passed me after church, Phyllis turned to me and said: “I can’t get that cat out of my mind.”
A few months later, Mom passed, in February of 2001, at her beloved home at Mathilda Brown Women’s Residence in Oakland.
Schatzi stayed awhile longer that year. She seemed to know that I was grieving, that I needed her cozy and comforting presence. In the autumn of 2001, Schatzi spent her last night with us on the floor of the kitchen, not able to move, not able to eat. Jeff lay on the floor next to her, all night long.
LiLi, our current feline housemate. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert.
These days, O’Hare Field in Chicago is just another airport. Since many flights have changed over the course of the years we’ve all been living with Covid-19, Jeff and I fly into O’Hare and drive to Wisconsin on our trips “home.”
Flying into and out of O’Hare Field is a sort of home-coming – and a home-leaving – to me.
O’Hare Field stands in my mind as a character of its own. O’Hare Field holds a particular place in my memories. I was in my late teens before I flew in an airplane, and I was in my early 20’s before I met O’Hare Field. As I walked through the terminals – everything so much bigger than in Milwaukee, 80 miles to the north – and I observed the people in that crowded, crowded airport – I was transported into another life, a life filled with a kind of diversity that I had not seen in my coming up life.
I loved it! I loved all the different people, people traveling from other parts of the world, distant places that I was not sure I would ever see. Turks, their heads held proud, covered, and women, long skirts around them as they herded their children from one gate to another. Strangers with their eyes focused ahead of them, focused on where they were going, eyes and hearts reflecting where they had been. I didn’t imagine my life at that point, a life that would include trips to foreign places, distant places that I was not sure I would ever see! And I have seen some – many – of them.
And so my world was opening, before I knew it was, before I was aware. The life that someone had dreamed for me – maybe I dreamed it myself – was beginning to lay itself out before me. I’ve lived most of my life in the Bay Area, a long way from Milwaukee, a long way from O’Hare Field. I often say that the weather is more interesting back in Wisconsin, but the people are more interesting here, the diversity of people who land here in the Bay Area from around the world.
So many of the stories from my grade school years seem to include Nancy, who grew up in the same neighborhood as I did in Milwaukee. Nancy and I are still connected, all these years later. And I always remember that Nancy and her sister, Diane, did not have parents, but that they lived with their Grandma and Grandpa in a lovely house on Medford Avenue, two blocks from our rented flat.
One day, as Nancy and I hung out together, we sat in the kitchen of that house with her Grandma. And although I don’t remember Grandma at all – was she talkative? Was she friendly to me, a friend of Nancy’s? Was she busy, always busy, or did she take time to sit down? That day, she told us about how she met her husband, Nancy’s Grandpa, who sat in the front room of the house. She had walked with a girlfriend to go roller skating, and there she met him, tall and handsome. Oh! he was so funny! Grandma recalled.
I looked toward the room where the old man sat. Handsome? Funny? How could that be? I tried to imagine him that way, but I couldn’t. And Grandma – how could I imagine her as a young woman, out with friends, having fun?
I guess all this means is that it’s a good time for me to be humble. Surely the young people who pass on the street next to our house here in Oakland must look at Jeff, look at me, and have a hard time thinking that we were young, once, too. One day, Jeff was walking to the house from his studio behind the garage, and he heard the young woman who lives next door to us describing her neighbors to a friend: “and there’s a nice retired couple next door.” We’re like Grandma, now, old and remembering when we were young. And grateful, grateful to be here, to “have our health,” as the old-timers used to say. Indeed, we do have our health and I suppose we’re old, now, too.
A nice old couple in Istanbul with a friend, May, 2023
Several years ago, Jeff and I initiated scholarships in our names at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where we both received our BA’s in the 1970’s. Later, each of us would make our way to seminary, Jeff to Garrett Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me, to Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. How our journeys connected to form the journey of our bonding is another story, for another time.
I graduated from UW-M in the winter of 1973 and was hired almost immediately to train as a Claims Representative for the Social Security Administration. In a way, that’s when my life as an adult began, when my world began to open, to grow, and finally, to flourish. I left government service to enter seminary at the end of 1981, which marked my move from the Midwest to California. Sometimes even now, I have to stop to remind myself that I am in another place, that most of my life has been lived at a distance from my personal roots. And in my case, that is fitting.
As Jeff and I look to our past and our future, we both have held the value to serve – and to give back. I listen when I hear someone else use that expression: “I want to give back to the community where I came from…” And so, after I retired, I endowed a scholarship in my name, to be given annually to a student who is the first generation of their family – a student of color – to go to university.
The Office of Planned Giving at UW-M connects with the two of us at least once every year. Through our connections, we think of the University representative as our friends. Often, when we return to Wisconsin to visit family or to return to the places we still hold in our hearts, we have a visit. In the course of COVID-times, of course, we’ve had to meet online, to continue the connection.
This spring, Jeff and I met the new woman who is assigned to the Office of Planned Giving. Over the internet, we introduced ourselves. When it came time for me to talk about my scholarship, to explain what it meant to me, I had a surprise: tears. (Maybe the tears surprised her, also)!
I’m not a crier. I don’t think of myself that way, although I have, over the course of a lifetime, cried many tears. And I suppose there is something deeper that is touched in me, that I have this privilege, that I’m able to give back, that I want to give back, that I want to offer to open the door for another young person, whose times and life will be very different from mine, to be able to walk through that door.
As always, as I am often am these days, I am grateful.
Like my life, our spring garden has flourished! photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 6/2023
During Junior High, besides my studies in school, I attended weekly, Saturday morning classes at an Evangelical Lutheran Church. For two years, the teacher of our Confirmation Class was a Deaconess, probably the highest position a woman could serve in that particular denomination. In the third year, our teacher was the Pastor of the congregation, Reverend Hoffman. Because I went to a public Junior High, I was expected to study for three years in preparation for Confirmation as an adult member of the congregation. My good friend Nancy, who lived with her grandparents in the neighborhood near my house and the church, also attended the classes.
One year, we studied the travels of St. Paul, whose work figured highly in the denomination. We looked at large maps that hung from the wall of the classroom, and the Deaconess used a pointer to chart out the travels of Paul as missionary to those faraway lands, in what we now call the Middle East. And, over the course of the three years of weekly classes, we memorized Luther’s Small Catechism. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth…” and: “What does this mean?”
Nancy must have had a hard time sitting through those three hours of study on Saturday mornings, in addition to a week of public school. She expressed her having a hard time by acting out in some way. One Saturday morning, the Deaconess had had enough of Nancy, and so she sent her home, early. Later, as I left the building to walk home the two blocks to Medford Avenue, I met Nancy, sitting on the front steps of the Church. She had no intention of going home early to her grandparents’ house!
***
My family were not church-going people, and so, I was not a church-going young person. I survived – easily – the grueling “examination” before the Congregation, led by Pastor Hoffman, the week before we were to be confirmed. It was a large class of Confirmands, and the Pastor would call out a name and ask a question about the studies we had completed. The following week, on Palm Sunday, we were confirmed as adult members of the church. We received our Certificates of Confirmation, and a little box of envelopes for our tithes.
My family were not church-going people, and I was not a church-going young person, and so I attended church one or two times on my own before I stopped going entirely. A year or two later, I received a visit from the Deaconess, who had the charge to learn why I had “fallen away.” I recall bits of our conversation, my explanation that it seemed to me that the Hippies, with their talk of “love,” were expressing something like the Church’s teachings. I recalled that at one time during Confirmation Class, the Deaconess had used me as an example to the class of someone who would never drift away from Church! Now, I’d apparently failed her. I never did receive the visit from the Pastor, the next in line to question my failing faith.
Several years later, while I was studying at University, a surprising idea came to mind: “why couldn’t I be a Pastor?” I tell people now who inquire about my journey that I had not seen or even heard of a woman pastor! It would be several years before I found my way to a United Methodist Church with a thriving young people’s ministry led by a charismatic, politically involved Young Adult Minister who gently “took me by the hand” and led me into the Church. The Reverend Harvey Stower, had invited me, by his gentle guidance, to have a relationship with Jesus, and to show my faith by my life and actions in the world. And on one occasion, he asked me a question – no one had asked before: “Do you ever think about seminary?” His question allowed my unspoken yearning to come to the surface. His example of ministry, his work for justice, always, his walk with Jesus, was far-removed from the memorization and testing I’d encountered in Confirmation Class.
Still, I’m always grateful for the sound sense of theology and Biblical understanding I’d received during those three years of classes in the Lutheran tradition. As I grow older, looking back, I see that my life has had a trajectory of its own. Often, I was too anxious to trust that trajectory. But here I am, a fulfilling life of service behind me, and a deepening spiritual journey, still. As I like to say, “I’ve taken a drink from many cups.” I’m grateful.
A respect for all faiths: The Blue Mosque, Istanbul, 5/2023, photo by meb
