The Shadow of Your Wings
an excerpt

“When thy kingdom comes, thy will had best be done.”

I glanced again at the sampler hanging on the wall, still vaguely discomfited by the use of the Lord’s Prayer as an advertisement for estate planning. The ancient receptionist studied me with a pinched expression, as if the clerical collar around my neck was no guarantee that I wouldn’t try to walk off with the odd ashtray.

I gave her a cheerful smile. I had always gotten good grades in cheerful smiles.

The door to the inner office opened, and Jack Cavanaugh escorted a client to the door, shaking his hand and assuring him that everything would be fine. He was obviously a native of somewhere even further south, because the word came out as “fahn.” When he turned and saw me waiting, he eagerly advanced and told me that it was “nahce” to see me.

They had taken pains during our seminary education to impress upon us the idea that each church had its own character. Apparently, each church had its own characters as well.

Today was the last of three days that I would spend visiting the parishioners of St. Stevens, to whose ministry I had been called. For the most parts, those visits had done nothing to allay my fears about the congregation’s divisions, fears that had been stoked by the Bishop and by my former instructors. Then again, a job was a job. And, to be honest, there was something about the church itself that spoke to me.

St. Stevens is a “quaint” country church located just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in what Virginians call “the Valley.” It seats no more than 120, provided they are very close friends, but what it lacks in grandeur it makes up for in its setting and its history. Set on a bluff high above the Shenandoah, its white stucco gleaming against the mountains behind it, it is said to be one of the Valley’s oldest churches, and is certainly its most beautiful.

These days, it was probably also its most deeply divided. My first visit yesterday had been to the home of Andy Catlett and Don Sangster, the congregation’s most visible gay partnership. They had treated me warily, somewhat distrustful of a candidate who could have emerged with a unanimous calling by the Church’s Vestry. We had avoided the subject of homosexuality and stuck to safer topics, like the effect of this year’s drought on the Valley’s beautiful fall foliage.

My second visit was to the widow Ava Flemming. Mrs. Flemming was one of the Church’s doyennes, responsible for just over five percent of its yearly pledge income. She too had treated me warily, distrustful, just like Andy and Don, of someone who could have received the Vestry’s unanimous blessing. Unlike them, however, she deemed it necessary to broach the subject, albeit obliquely.

“So do you believe in biblical inerrancy, Reverend Curtling?”

I had taken a long sip of the insipid tea she had offered me and returned the teacup and its saucer to my knee while I collected my thoughts.

“Well, first of all, Miz Flemming, I have to tell you that I won’t actually be Reverend Curtling until month.”

Her head jerked back as if I had struck her.

“Do you mean to tell me that the Bishop has appointed someone who has yet to be admitted to the priesthood?”

“I was a curate at St. Andrews in Alexandria when I was called, ma’am, and served as youth minister. But my six-month curacy is not yet finished.”

“I’m quite sure that when my late husband was the senior warden of the Vestry,” she proclaimed, “only ordained ministers would have been permitted to seek the rectorship of a parish ministry at St. Stephens.”

I had no doubt that that was true. Robert Flemming had been senior warden during the early 1970s, when the entire congregation could have fit in the first three pews. So whenever they did need a new minister, it was usually only a retired minister who could afford the part-time pittance that the Vestry offered. It wasn’t until the real estate boom of the mid-1990s, when housing prices east of the mountains had led some to move even further out, that the congregation had become large enough to afford a full-time rector.

Still, my future ordination was a better topic than biblical inerrancy. Although I could not say that I had not been warned. Although the Vestry had very carefully chosen the members of its search committee to present a somewhat idealized image of the church, Bishop Lee had set me straight after the Vestry had forwarded its recommendation.

“To be quite honest with you, Samuel, I had hoped that St. Stephens would call someone a little . . . older.”

“Sir?”

“You’re at St. Andrews, now, aren’t you? A very liberal, open church.”

“Yes,” I agreed hesitantly.

“Not much discussion of Bishop Robinson, I imagine?”

He didn’t need to explain who Bishop Robinson was. At its 2003 Convention, the church had consented to the selection of Gene Bishop, who made no secret of his homosexuality, as the Bishop of New Hampshire.

“Not that I’ve heard, sir. But it has been four years.”

The Bishop allowed himself a hearty chuckle. Perhaps in seminary, Samuel. And perhaps in Arlington. At St. Stephens, it may as well have happened yesterday. I have a rather hefty folder of correspondence from the members of that congregation, some of them outraged at the decision, some of them outraged at the outrage.”

“No desertions?” I asked. It had become common for parishioners on one fringe or another to disengage themselves, or find themselves disengaged, from churches with which they found themselves in disagreement. “Nice steady, middle-of-the-road vestry, right? I mean, they seemed quite pleasant. So there must be a good-sized moderate group in the congregation.”

Bishop Lee absent-mindedly picked up a pencil from his desk and began chewing on the eraser.

“Remind me about your background,” he said.

“I graduated from William and Mary, and taught school for three years in Manassas Park.”

“Probably the only Phi Bete they had teaching seventh-grade math,” he interrupted.

Apparently he wasn’t going to need of a lot of reminding.

“I honestly don’t know,” I said.

A very small frown played across his face.

“And then?”

“I was called to the ministry. Three years at seminary, and then the last four and a half months as curate.”

“Which makes you what? Twenty-nine?”

“In December,” I agreed, perhaps a little too eagerly.

His frown deepened.

“Twenty-eight. It’s young for a rector.”

I knew that. None of my classmates, most of whom were older than I was anyway, had received a call this quickly.

“Do you intend not to appoint me, sir?”

A vestry could only recommend an appointment; final authority lay with the Diocesan Bishop. This one had another frown on his face. The eraser on his pencil was nearly gone.

“Honestly, Samuel, I’m torn. You have an excellent academic record. Obviously. Every church in which you’ve participated, as a member of the congregation, as seminarian, as anything, has been glowing in its reports.”

“And yet?”

“Frankly, I am afraid of losing you, Samuel. This is a lion’s den, and you appear to be Daniel without any friends. Burnout among priests is increasing, and I would much prefer you started out somewhere less, er, confrontational.”

“And yet?”

It still seemed to me that he hadn’t decided. Bishop Lee sighed.

“St. Stephens is an important church. Both historically and in the Valley. And I hope you will not take this the wrong way, Samuel, but I am almost more afraid of losing them.”

“Than me?”

He nodded. After a brief look out his window, he continued.

“In matters like this, I believe it is best to simply give the person most affected all of the information I have, and allow him or her to decide. But I want you to give this some very careful thought before you decide. To pray on it.”

“Thank you, sir. I certainly will. But I still don’t understand about the Vestry.”

“Ah, yes. The St. Stephen’s Vestry. Are you familiar with proportional voting, Sam?”

I racked my brain. Was I supposed to be? It sounded like something from PoliSci, which I hadn’t taken. The Bishop finally accepted my silence for what it was, ignorance, and rescued me.

“Essentially, it’s the idea that each voter gets as many votes as there are offices. So if you have four offices to fill, each voter can cast one vote for each of four candidates, or four votes for one candidate.”

“Seriously? Er, sir?”

I finally got a smile out of the Bishop.

“Yes. Apparently one of the parishioners was a political science professor . . .”

I knew it!

“. . . and he convinced the congregation that proportional voting at vestry elections was the best way to ensure the representation of minority opinions. This was, unfortunately, long before there were any minority opinions of any importance. The result has been that both ‘wings,’ as it were, at St. Stephens, have learned to game the system, and each year the Vestry gets two new liberals and two new conservatives. And so the Vestry is split, six and six.”

He smiled again.

“The nice thing, of course, is that no one ever misses a meeting.”

“But they must be horrible,” I protested.

I had a flashback to a student council meeting in high school, where we were trying to decide the theme of the spring dance. I could still remember the vehemence of the pro-Michael Boltons and the anti-Michael Boltons.

“To tell the truth,” the Bishop interrupted my reverie, “I hear they’re not at all bad. They know they’re not going to settle anything, and they simply agree to run the parish.”

“But a new rector,” I protested. “Surely that would be different.”

“Yes,” the Bishop said slowly. “And yet here I have a unanimous recommendation. I assume the controversy never came up in your interviews.”

“No. Not even close.”

“Neither side wanted to risk the other learning that you were with them, so to speak.”

“But what would make them think I was with them in the first place?”

“I believe that in this case, both sides see what they want,” the Bishop answered, fixing me with his gaze.

“A conciliator?”

He smiled again.

“Perhaps I should have said, ‘see what they want to see,’” he said. “The liberals see a young man who has cast off the yoke of his father and become a teacher and then a preacher.”

“And the conservatives?” I asked, knowing full well what his answer was going to be.

“They see your father.”

In the last few years, my father, a Fredericksburg, Virginia lawyer, had emerged as one of the spokesmen of those disaffected Episcopalians who were seeking to ally their churches with the diocese of Nigeria, or of some such other foreign country where gays and lesbians were treated with less respect and more actual persecution than was the case in the Diocese of Virginia.

“But I’m not –”

The Bishop held up his hand, stopping me in mid-explosion.

“I believe, Sam, that you have the best interests of the Diocese at heart, and that is
sufficient for me. I have made up my mind, and I simply ask you to pray before making up yours.”

It took me a week, spent in introspection and in discussion with some of my favorite instructors at the seminary. I went back to St. Stephens, swore the parish administrator to silence as I borrowed a key to the church, and prayed there as well, in the light that came through the stained glass window on the eastern wall, illuminating the white-painted walls, the hand-crafted wooden pews, and the rich red carpeting on the floor. Finally, I called Bishop Lee and accepted.

But that didn’t mean I was going to discuss Biblical inerrancy with Ava Flemming. I gave her the same mealy-mouthed platitudes I’d given David Selnet, who possessed enough bumper stickers proclaiming that he hadn’t voted for Bill Clinton to attach a new one every month; and to Robert Thompson, who was unwilling to drive the ten additional miles to reach the nearest Roman Catholic church which we both knew he ought to attend; and to Andrew and Betsy Cobling, recent converts from the Baptist faith who still weren’t quite certain why they had gone through the ceremony.

In contrast, visiting Jack Cavanaugh, the attorney with the slightly blasphemous reception area, was an absolute delight. It was late on Thursday afternoon, so after he shut the door to his office he allowed, in a confidential whisper, as to how it wouldn’t be out of line to have just a small glass of bourbon.

“This is the good stuff, Padre,” he said, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye. “Eighty years old. Do you know how many Virginians it takes to change a light bulb?”

“Actually, no,” I admitted.

“Five,” he said. “One to put the new one in, and four to sit around with a glass of bourbon and remember how good the old one was.”

I laughed. It was funny because it was true. Once you got out of Northern Virginia, a megalopolis that was only now touching Prince William and Stafford Counties, where I had lived before, you found a people with a unique sense of heritage, for whom the Civil War would always be the War of Northern Aggression. Jack Cavanaugh, for example, had a small Confederate flag on his wall, hanging incongruously next to an award he had received from the local chapter of the NAACP.

It quickly became apparent that Jack would be a go-to guy for information on St. Stephens. He was as conversant with the history as he was with the most recent gossip. I could have listened to him for hours, and it was with considerable regret that I realized that I had yet one more appointment, and that I wanted to get there before the sun had set.

“Sure you don’t want another?” he asked, gesturing toward my glass.

“Jack, I’ve already had two. I don’t want Mrs. Morgan to think her new rector is a drunk.”

“True,” he said with a laugh. “I will see you Sunday, Padre. At the early service.”

Mrs. Morgan was never going to think of me as a drunk. By the time I reached her house, knocked on the door, took a look at the pitifully mewling cats in the back yard, and peered anxiously through her windows, Mrs. Morgan had been dead for quite some time.