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.
Summer Nights
Facing the West,
I watch the sun drop into the Pacific,
watch the sun light San Francisco as it falls,
its last rays glittering on the towering eucalyptus that frame my view.
Suddenly – a wave of grief:
a balmy summer night
on the shore of Lake Michigan,
my brown summer arms
swinging from the top of a Ferris Wheel.
I sniff languid air,
float above the beat of music,
young people dancing at my feet.
Suddenly –
I return to the darkened room
in which I sit.
The memory, gone.
The grief: remains.
Mary Elyn Bahlert, 5/2020
Showing Up
Over the years of my life, I have come to value something that is rarely mentioned. Although this quality is not often mentioned, it is of inestimable value. At least it has been in my life. Many years ago, I committed to memory the “gifts of the Spirit,” and sometimes before I go to sleep at night, I say them to myself: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” And to that holy list I would add: “showing up”.
I remember the day of my mother’s funeral in Milwaukee. Jeff and I had accompanied my mother’s body back to Wisconsin to have her honored there, a funeral, and to have her buried there, alongside my father. Like many important memories of days and times in my life, “snapshots” appear in my mind of that day, a cold, cold February day, bleak in that way mid-winter days are bleak in the Midwest. I can sense myself sitting there in the sanctuary, aware of the folks who were sitting there along with me, my mother’s casket before us. Jeff’s mother and brother Randy were there, along with many of my friends, and some of my mother’s friends – those who were still alive, my mother having passed her 80th year, her friends, also. Some of those gathered were friends of my mother and some were my friends, there to be present to me.
Clearly, I remember myself walking away from the grave as the small group of us had gathered at the graveside for a few words to be said, and as we walked away so that her burial could be completed by the waiting workers. My friend Vicki walked beside me, and she said to me: “you had neat parents.” Her comment was so simple, and yet I have not forgotten her presence beside me, and I have not forgotten the words she said. With those words, she was telling me that she, too, had loved my parents, and that they had been a part of her life.
I remember Vicki’s presence that day and I remember the presence of many others. I remember reaching out to Joanne to join me in throwing some earth onto my mother’s casket at the burial. I remember my mother-in-law, Betty, taking my left arm as I walked down the steps to the gathering in the church basement that followed the funeral. I remember Jeff, who read the words I had written in honor of my mother, and who had traveled with me to be with her friends and mine on that day.
I will always love the people who were present that day. They showed up. My cousin Rudy and his wife Mary, now in their late 80’s and early 90’s, attended the funeral. I remember them especially because Rudy and Mary carry with them the value that I have come to love: they showed up. They were there at my wedding to Jeff, the first day of spring, when the guests traveled through another snow storm to be present with us. They were there when my father died after his long struggle with colon cancer. They were there on the day that Jeff read a short story of his at the little church in Kiel that his grandfather had pastored, many years before.
Last week, when I was in Wisconsin, I made sure to drive out of my way to see Mary and Rudy in their home. I wanted to show up for them, as they had shown up for me and for so many I loved, over the years. As we talked and talked, our conversation remembering so many that have passed, and including those who are still with us, I made sure to remind Rudy and Mary, as I have before, in other visits, that I have not forgotten that they had showed up.
Rudy and Mary personify that blessed quality, “showing up.” To me, they do. When I told them – again – they told me that they had visited my mother when she was living alone in the apartment on Appleton Avenue, alone after my father had died, alone in the place she lived until Jeff and I moved her to be closer to us in the Bay Area. I had not heard that story before.
I haven’t read accolades about “showing up.” I doubt I will, in this time of Artificial Intelligence and driver-less cars. Some of the simplest, most concrete things in life will not be mentioned.
But I remember all of you. I think of you often. I see your faces, those who showed up for me at just the moment I needed you to show up. Thank you.
Cousin Rudy and Me, circa 2014, Kiel, Wisconsin
