Below is an expanded version of the "Eric and the Church Go to Therapy" column appearing in United Methodist Reporter (www.umportal.org) this January.  The columns are slated to run through May, so I'll be posting expanded versions online as I go.  Thanks for taking the time to read this.  I hope something in it sparks your imagination!

Chapter 1: Therapy

 

            “The fact that you’re even here tells me a great deal,” the woman says. She sits erect in a high-backed leather chair across from the sofa, hands folded on top of the notepad on her lap. She’s put together with the elements of a competent professional: gray suit, conservative hair, reading glasses perched atop her thin nose. But it doesn’t fit together quite right, like a vase of roses arranged by a beginning florist. Try though she might, she doesn’t instill confidence. I start to wonder how much this is costing me.

            “A great deal, yes,” she continues. “It tells me that the two of you want to work things out between you, and that’s a most encouraging sign. So tell me about how the two of you got together. Eric, why don’t you start.”

            My throat tightens. I suppose no one ever plans on ending up in triage therapy when they begin a relationship, much less when that relationship is between two parties whose identities are rooted first and foremost in God. Yet here I sit, in the imaginary office of an imaginary counselor, trying to somehow work things out with my very real partner, the United Methodist Church.

            The fact that our sessions take place solely inside my head are probably an indication that I could use a sabbatical, at the very least a vacation, individual counseling of my own, perhaps anti-psychotic medication, or any combination thereof. But it’s hard to find a counselor that both my church and I trust (mutual suspicion is one of our more hidden issues), and even harder to find someone who is willing to make time for me and eight million other people to sit down for some intimate conversation. In fact, I haven’t been able to find anyone who will even entertain that suggestion without first prescribing the aforementioned drugs.

            So I squirm under the patient gaze of my—our—counselor, and try my best to answer her question.

            “It wasn’t love at first sight, really. It was more…more—”

            “Infatuation?”

            “Yeah, thanks. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into at the start—not that I regret it, you know. I don’t. But— ”

            “Try to focus, Eric. How the two of you got together, remember?”

            “Right.”

            And so I tell her my story about how I became first intrigued, then infatuated by, and finally in love with the United Methodist Church. Our relationship sparked almost as soon as I set foot on my college campus, and after a month it was an all out blaze. I decided to become a pastor just after my twenty-first birthday (and no, it had nothing to do with alcohol). The price would be steep, but my love was such that the cost didn’t matter. Before me was a pact similar to what Laban made with Jacob: work faithfully for a certain number of years, prove yourself worthy of your beloved, live happily ever after.

            Of course, that’s not the whole story. Laban tricked Jacob into marrying Leah, Rachel’s ugly older sister. Before Jacob realized he’d been duped, the marriage was consummated and he was—well, you know. That left him with a choice: take what he had and make the best of it, or start all over to earn Rachel’s hand as well. 

            God, can I ever relate.

            This chapter is the story of how I fell in love with the United Methodist Church, and the surprises that awaited me when I lifted the veil at our wedding.

 

            My relationship with my church began with a search to belong, although I wouldn’t have articulated it as such at the time. I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman away from home for the first time, living in a town in which I knew not a solitary soul, inhabiting a room the size of a monastic cell in a dorm appropriately named Paine Hall. To make matters worse, I was a band geek, which meant arriving a week before everyone else so that we could participate in the hellish rituals Mr. Cooper passed off as rehearsals. When I wasn’t marching on the asphalt slab that served as our practice field, I was alone in my room, counting the cinder blocks by the fluorescent lights.

            Until I met Zeke. Zeke played the sousaphone, one of the tornado-shaped tubas that anchor a marching band. He was six-two, two hundred pounds (it took good size to march in that heat with that bass behemoth), and to my great dismay, knew without asking that I was a freshman. 

            “We’ve got this thing tonight,” Zeke said to me. My defenses immediately went up. I’d been warned more than once about the pressures of college, how it was all toga parties and beer chugging and so easy for the devil to get his claws into a good Christian boy like me. But Zeke was big enough to pulverize me without even taking off his sousaphone. I decided to listen. “We do a program for freshmen at the Wesley Foundation. It’s not a high pressure thing, just some games and food. Why don’t I come by your room in half an hour and you can go with me?”

            I was relieved that Zeke wasn’t inviting me to some sort of drunken orgy, but I had no reason to believe the Wesley Foundation would be that much better. I remembered receiving a letter or two over the summer from them, enough to know that they were a United Methodist student group, which meant I wasn’t interested. All I knew about United Methodists were that they were a bunch of liberals, most of them going so far as to drink alcohol, right out in public. That didn’t fit too well with my upbringing.

            But Zeke was big. Real big. And a sophomore, which meant he clearly outranked me. More importantly, Zeke didn’t seem to have an agenda. He acted as though he understood what it was like to be in my shoes, and really cared about what happened to me. I wasn’t ready to buy into Wesley Foundation yet, but I decided a little window shopping couldn’t hurt.

            My first date with United Methodism didn’t go so well. The cookout Zeke invited me to was good enough, plenty of standard college grill food topped off with enough refined sugar and caffeine to kill most mortals. I tried without success to strike up a conversation with some of my fellow freshmen, and was ready to leave when Zeke told us all to have a seat for the activities portion of the evening. The program began with a wretched skit called the Shake-O-Matic, which turned out to be a cross between a cooking infomercial and the pea-soup scene from Poltergeist. I managed to swallow my nausea enough to play a few of the games, all of which showcased my natural inability to do anything that required decent coordination. By the time I snuck out the back door, I’d resolved never to come back to Wesley.

            Only, I couldn’t seem to get away from it. Everywhere I turned, I ran into someone with a Wesley t-shirt. Once school started, someone would invite me to a Wesley event almost every day. My new friend Billy, a shaggy transcendentalist from a neighboring dorm, would show up at my door and ask me to walk over with him. Zeke came by my room after rehearsals to see how I was doing. Every day for the first three weeks, I talked to someone involved in Wesley, and at least twice a week I went to a Wesley event. Finally, after a weekend getaway for freshmen, I awoke to the strangest of feelings.

            I was in love.

            What did I love about my new United Methodist friends? It wasn’t the food, although that was a plus. It wasn’t the girls; Richie Cunningham look-alikes don’t do well with the chicks. It certainly wasn’t Wesley’s idea of humor (see aforementioned Shake-O-Matic skit). It was…what? Or, perhaps closer to the truth, who?

            God. Undeniably God—Father, Son, Spirit. Creator and Re-creator. Redeemer and, I would soon learn, Re-redeemer. Pentecost flame, even for someone who couldn’t find Acts with a table of contents and a compass. God had breathed a special kind of life into these people I was encountering, these Methodists. Despite their faults—and perhaps because of them—they shared a need for God that informed not just their church habits, but their entire lives. Through them, God’s arms reached around me in an embrace that shocked me with its grace and selflessness. 

            These people did things I had never seen before. They sang, not just with voice, but with hearts full of conviction—old hymns, praise songs (such as existed in the early nineties), choral pieces, didn’t matter. They prayed, often together, without shame. During chapel, people actually went to the altar to pray, and not because they needed to make a commitment to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and savior. They went forward because it was natural to kneel before God in the presence of others. They offered communion every week, and with real bread, even! They tutored local children from poor families. They visited nursing homes. They studied the Bible with intense curiosity.

            Did I mention these were college students? Eighteen to Twenty-three, most of them. Too young to know better, perhaps. Or maybe too enamored with grace to care what living their faith would cost.

            And I found myself as one of them. The more time I spent with the Methodists, the more I heard about God’s love, about grace, about forgiveness, about the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. I believed every word of it, and when my belief wasn’t so strong, someone always seemed to be there to carry me through the doubts and doldrums. After awhile, I became a Methodist myself, even though I hadn’t joined a local church yet. In the context of that faith community, my adult identity took shape, and along with it my sense of vocation. It took two years and seven trial majors, but I finally settled on a career dedicated to serving God and others. As soon as I did, I went to see my campus minister. 

 

            Bro. Dave fashions himself after the apostle Paul: a redeemed sinner turned maverick church leader, a compassionate friend who deals in both warm handshakes and brutal honesty.

            “So what’s this all about?” he said before I’d even settled onto the chair across from him.

            “What’s what about?”

            “You said you wanted to see me about something important. Now go ahead. Talk.”

            “I think I want to be a pastor.”

            “Mpf.” He folded his arms across his chest and raised his eyebrows. Not exactly the rapturous delight I had hoped for. “Why?”

            I stammered through my explanation, regurgitating things I’d heard some of my Methodist friends at Wesley say about the assurance of God’s spirit with my spirit and feeling my heart strangely warmed. When I’d finished, Bro. Dave stared at me like I had just revealed that I was the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette.

            I tried again, this time resorting to call language—something about surrendering to the tenacious voice of the Almighty. God had been trying to tell me for years that he wanted me to be a pastor, but I was too deaf to hear. Now he’d finally tracked me down and I was ready to surrender all, just as I am, softly and tenderly. 

            Same concerned stare. I began to wonder if I really was Marie Antoinette.

            “Why don’t you just tell me what you really mean,” Bro. Dave said.

            “I have to be a pastor,” I blurted out. “I don’t know what else to do.”

            “Oh?” I finally seemed to be getting somewhere.

            “Yes. I don’t know if I’ll be happy doing that, but I’ve studied everything from journalism to calculus to applied psychology, and I know I don’t have any prayer of being happy unless I give being a pastor a shot first.”

            Bro. Dave took in a deep breath and glanced up at the ceiling as if the Lord was imparting his word to him right there on the spot. I waited for the revelation, for the profound words of this modern-day prophet concerning the future God had for me.

            “It’s not what you think,” he said at last.

            “What’s not what I think?”

            “Churches. Pastors. The Process.” It was the first time I’d heard someone mention The Process. It sounded like a mafia induction. I pictured brass knuckles and a single, naked light bulb swaying above the chair I was handcuffed to. Bro. Dave looked back down at me and continued. “How much do you know about the United Methodist Church outside of this Wesley Foundation?”

            “A lot. Maybe not a lot. Okay, not much.”

            “Translated ‘nothing,’ right?”

            I gave a sheepish nod.

            “Eric, you’ve got a good heart. But you’ve got a lot to learn, and you aren’t very tough. Are you sure you want to do this?”

            “Yes.”

            “And you believe God has called you to do it?”

            “I think so.”

            He studied me for a moment, then gave a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you sigh.

            “Let’s pray,” he said.

 

            “Let me make sure I’m hearing you right,” our therapist says. “You fell in love with the United Methodist Church through a campus ministry.”

            “More or less. Through the spirit I felt and the people I met there, to be more precise.”

            “I understand. And you say you were attracted to the church by—” she flips through the pages of her notepad—“authenticity, prayer, dedication, service, and friendship. Am I correct?”

            “No.”

            Her hand freezes in mid flip. She stares over the top of her glasses at me, eyebrows raised in polite questioning.

            “Those are some of the characteristics of that community of faith,” I say. “But you don’t love characteristics. They’re just descriptors of something far more complex. What I loved were the people there—who they were, who I was when I was with them, how I knew God was with us.”

            “Sounds too good to be true.”

            “It wasn’t. We had our share of problems, although most of them stemmed from immaturity more than anything. We were just a group of people who really did try to love the Lord with all our hearts, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Do you know what I mean?”

            “Certainly,” she says, but I don’t believe her. I’ve tried to convey the depth of my first experience with United Methodism before, but the words are never sufficient. They inevitably reduce the beauty of a relationship to nouns and adjectives, occasionally a verb or two. Love like this demands more than the precision mechanics of prose. It cries out for poetry, maybe even a song. But such expressions tend to be frowned upon in diagnostic settings like counselors’ offices and evaluation team meetings. I start to try again, but decide against it when I see a look of sudden discovery flash across our therapist’s face.

            “You know, Eric, it seems to me that you fell in love with a certain feature of your partner. You admit that you didn’t know much about the church outside of your own community, and yet you committed to the relationship anyway. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit rash? It’s like deciding to marry a woman based solely on the shape of her nose.”

            I looked for some way of defending myself, slightly irritated that a figment of my imagination would have such keen insight. She was right, though. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into at the time. I didn’t know that the character of so many congregations would be shaped by frustration and power struggles. I couldn’t understand the wounds that caused pastors to isolate themselves. I didn’t realize that the community to which I belonged was on the fringes of United Methodism, a mere comma in a thousand page manual of bureaucracy, barely worthy of a pause. 

            “Let’s set that aside for a moment,” the therapist says. “You’ve told me how you became infatuated with the church, and how that grew into something deeper.”

            “Love.”

            “Yes, well.” She presses down a clean page in her notepad and poises her pen at the top. “If we’re going to finally come to a resolution in all this, I think we need to explore where the trouble for this relationship began. Can you take me back to that point?”

           

            I was sick, but that was nothing new. This was my third Board of Ordained Ministry retreat, and each time I’d come down with a nasty cold a day or two before the retreat, the unfortunate product of my weenie immune system and the massive anxiety such events conjured. To make matters worse, this was one of the biggies in The Process, the one where I interviewed for admission to probationary membership in the annual conference. I’d spent three years and several thousand dollars in seminary packing my brain with everything the powers that be thought I would need for success as a pastor. I’d jumped through hoop after fiery hoop to convince the BOOM that I was worthy of this calling. I’d stressed for weeks over my answers to the Disciplinary questions regarding my call to ministry and theological understandings. And it all came down to this.

            Interviewing with the BOOM was like being the designated hitter in a baseball game: hours of waiting spliced together by brief periods of intense concentration. The upside of such an arrangement was that it gave candidates plenty of time to hang out in the dugout and talk about our turns at bat. Instead of dissecting a pitcher’s delivery to see if he was tipping pitches, however, we tried to find anything in each other’s stories that would pass for encouragement.

            “So who was on your interview team?”

            “Maguire, Roper, Flint, and Davis.”

            “Geez, that’s a tough draw.”

            “Not really. Roper and Davis hate each other. You just have to get them arguing and they forget about you.”

            “True. Well, what did they ask you?”

            “Not a whole lot. They went over my written work and asked me to clarify some stuff. Flint got all bent out of shape about something I’d written about sanctifying grace.”

            “Not surprising. You know where she went to seminary, don’t you?”

            And so on and so forth. All the talking did little to calm our nerves, but it did give us a sense of camaraderie. We were at tryouts together, even if we secretly hoped it would be the other guy who ended up getting cut from the team.

            My own interview was anti-climactic, at least from what I remember though my Nyquil-induced haze. The team members were mostly affirming, and even insightful on occasion. I left feeling relieved that my personal judgment day with the BOOM was over, and relatively encouraged about the new career I was preparing to begin. I made a cup of lemon-honey tea (tolerable since I couldn’t taste anything) and wandered out onto the balcony to offer a prayer of thanks.

            No sooner had I leaned my elbows onto the rails than the door behind me opened. I turned to see Robert, who according to legend had been part of my conference’s BOOM since the time of the Inquisition. I might have described him as distinguished, were it not for the too-casual shoes and blue Duke sweater vest he wore, which amounted to failed attempts at informality. Still, Robert was one of many good-hearted people on the board who genuinely wanted each candidate to succeed. I decided I could manage being civil for another fifteen minutes before I hauled myself back to my room to crash.

            “You did well, young man,” Robert said as he took his place beside me. “I think you’re going to make us proud.”

            “Thanks.”

            “Not that we aren’t proud of you already, you understand. It’s just—how old are you anyway?”

            “I turned twenty-five last month.”

            “That so? Well, you’ve got a bright future in ministry, Eric. Someday, you may even be part of the BOOM yourself.”

            I stared into my teacup, pretending to consider the possibility. 

            “Who knows?” Robert continued. “You might make a district superintendent, maybe even bishop? What do you think about that?”

            “I doubt it,” I said. “I want to be a campus minister.”

            “Oh. You mean like a chaplain?”

            “A Wesley Foundation director, actually.”

            “Right, right. I remember you mentioning that in your interview.” He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back. “That’s a noble aim, to work with youth. I can see how a young person would be drawn to it. But you have to be careful about that. You’ve got too many leadership skills to get lost in that kind of appointment.”

            I bit the inside of my lip. Bro. Dave had warned me that, if I pursued a career in campus ministry, I’d have to do so against the will of the old guard. This was my first evidence of resistance.

            “I wouldn’t worry about a thing, though,” Robert said. “It takes awhile to grow into the profession of ministry, but you won’t have to do it alone.”   

            The door to the meeting hall beneath us opened as the last of the interview teams started back to their cabins. A dozen pastors and lay leaders filed out, their bald and graying heads illuminated by the night light above the door for just a moment before they passed into the darkness. Robert put one hand on my shoulder and solemnly extended the other over the scene below.

            “I want you to look at this,” he said in a low voice. “I want you to take note of these people, because you’ll see them at annual conference and district meetings and all kinds of other places. Congregations will come and go in your career. But these folks, especially the clergy, will be the constants for the rest of your life. You’re one of us now.”

            I dropped my head further. Robert must have taken this for contemplation, because he gave my shoulder a squeeze and left me alone to ponder the depth of the moment. 

            In fact, I was deep in thought, wondering whether it would be preferable to OD on cold medicine or climb over the balcony and jump to my death. 

 

            “Thoughts of suicide after your first fight?” the therapist says. She’s drumming the end of her pen on the notepad, slowly tapping out her annoyance. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

            “Hyperbole,” I say. “Jesus used it a lot.”

            “I think everyone here is familiar—”

            “Besides, it was a dramatic night. I felt like my identity was on the line.”

            “Why? You’ve already said how encouraging the people on the BOOM were. They seem to have treated you fairly.”

            “They did.”

            “Then why turn on them? Why consider it such an insult to be thought of as one of them?”

            I glare at her, angry at the memory, angry because she’s right. Even at the retreat, I knew how judgmental I was being. I had no reason to doubt the purity of the BOOM members’ hearts, and eight years of experience and maturity have made me appreciate even more the goodness of their intentions. Just because they were different from me did not make them bad people.

            Except that so much of their encouragement seemed geared toward making me into someone I could not ever be, even if I wanted to (which I didn’t).   I had not been nurtured in the United Methodist womb like many of them. I did not have emotional ties to structures or traditions or distinctive elements of polity or personality. All I had was the depth of my own experience with God and his people, which had been inextricably tied to the close-in relationships of a community that identified with the UMC. At the BOOM retreat, I began to understand that those relationships were not the priority of my denomination. Rather, they wanted me to remain largely unencumbered by emotional networks, lest my ties to people in one place limit my ability to serve wherever the Conference deemed appropriate. If I needed close friends and allies, I should look to my clergy peers. They were the ones who understood what ministry was really like, who could help me find the competence I needed to aspire to higher appointments.

            “I just wanted the freedom to be myself,” I say. “I wanted to be the best me God could make, not the best imitation I could muster of someone else.”

            “Do you think that’s what the UMC was asking of you?”

            “Absolutely. When I finally got to the point I’d been working toward, when I was affirmed as a pastor in the church, I found out that she chose me because of what she thought she could make me. That hurt. I hadn’t expected it.”

            “Surprises are common as a union approaches. Do you think you have commitment issues?”

            I hold up my hands. “These weren’t just things I found out about the church I fell in love with. This was another church entirely, one that existed in and around the other. I’d been warned about it, but never really seen before.”

            “Warned about what?”

            “The split personality. The lovely and the repulsive. The pure and the prideful.”

            “Rachel and Leah?”

            “Exactly.”

            “But—.” She leans forward as if ready to trap me in my own words, but plugs the thought with a professional smile. “I’m afraid I’m confused,” she says. “You’re here because you want this relationship between you and the church to work. Have you ever considered that perhaps it would be better for you both if you parted ways?”

            “It’s crossed my mind, yes.”

            “Then why stay together? Frankly, I think you have a long road ahead of you.”

            I nod.

            “Tell me then,” she says, this time more firmly. “Why not just give up?”

            “Because I’m Jacob, and I’m still wrestling with God. Because she’s Rachel, and too lovely to ignore, much less forget.”

            “And you think you can change her back into what you first fell in love with?”

            “You’re not listening,” I say. “At her best, she already is all those wonderful things, those wonderful people. The beauty is there, waiting to surface. I can’t let go of something that has given so much to me. I can’t let go.”

            She waits for me to continue. I don’t.

            “You really do love your church, then?”

            Surprise tears sting my eyes. “Very much.”

            She clicks her pen, positions it over the paper.”

            “Okay,” she says. “I’m listening.”