Like Felix

Friday was my Endorsement panel. Remember those essays I wrote a couple months back? Well, Friday was when I had to meet with members of my candidacy committee so that we could talk about those essays and then they could make a decision as to whether or not I'm ready (according to some abstract criteria) to move forward in the ordination process. I am elated to say that they gave me the thumbs up - without hesitation, it seemed. So that's my good news for the week!

Anyway, as I was sitting around the seminary, trying to relax before my meeting, I was re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Severed Wasp. Even though I've read this book many times and remember it well, things still continue to surprise me and hit me in incredible ways, especially when I'm least expecting it. There is a scene when Katherine and Felix meet for dinner, and Felix ends up telling her both the way that he got into ministry and the relationships that have been a part of his life in that ministry. Especially before my Endorsement panel, but also in light of my own evaluation of both my sense of call and my own faith experiences, the following passage was an incredibly well-timed piece of providence:

[Felix said,] "I got a job as a waiter, since I didn't appear to be making much of a living with the violin, first in a crummy hash house. I was good at it - people liked me, because I listened to them, even when they swore at me. That's how I discovered I had a gift for the ministry. I moved on to a better restaurant and ended up, although I find it hard to believe, at the Pierre. I used to bring breakfast to a Dutch couple who were there for the winter; they were textile people, traveling to various mills, but they made the hotel home base. They read a lot - all the tables and chests were piled with books and magazines - theology mostly - and they'd give me articles to read, I used to come talk with them in my off-hours....And then, on one of their trips, they were killed in a car crash. For a long time I asked myself if it was just punishment - not for them, but for me. I could never bring myself to answer yes to the question, though I went on asking it for a long time. Then, when the will - they were very wealthy, but they had no children, no close family. They left most of their money to various charities, but they left a trust fund for me - almost as though they'd known they were going to die. The only string was that the fund was to be used for theological education. It could be any denomination; it didn't even have to be Christian. They wanted me, simply, to give my life to God, and I found that I wanted that, too....

"When I was in my mid-fifties" - Felix took a small bite of prosciutto and melon - "I was dean of the cathedral in San Francisco. On the surface, things were going well for me. I was well thought of, I really was, well thought of enough so that I was shortly elected Bishop of New York, though nothing could have been further from my mind at the time." He let his fork rest on his plate. "What was in my mind was dust, dry dust. I preached brilliantly - you should have heard me, Katya - and I heard confessions and did a lot of counseling and helped people - I really did - and rather casually took part in diocesan politics, because I was good at that, too. But I was lonely. Trying to give one's life to God can be a very lonely business, especially when God often seems to be absent. I knew his presence when I was in the pulpit; I was on fire with his presence. And then: emptiness."

Katherine watched Felix absently pick up his fork....

"As I said, I was lonely. Admired and surrounded by people, I was lonely. I know - everybody is lonely. But I didn't understand that, not then. I didn't understand that it was all right to believe only part of the time all that I base my life on. Sometiems when I was counseling someone I heard myself saying the right things, but the better the things I said, the less I believed afterwards, the emptier I felt, the lonelier. I took my faith and I gave it away, gave it to people who needed it, and then it seemed that there wasn't any left for me."

Ok. I understand that I leave the passage at a bleak point. And that's not at all what I want to convey about the importance of this passage to me and to my life. I just found comfort in the fact that this fictional character has a lot to say about the way that a "sense of call" can be a series of odd and providential events and that others can sometimes sense your call better than you yourself can. It also feels good to have a faith-based author give so much validity to a character's experience of incomplete faith - that L'Engle here seems to be saying that it's okay to be a faithful person - and a faithful pastor, at that! - who doesn't always feel that way.