For my entire life I have been seeking “community” one way or another. We are not put on this Earth by God just to be alone among all the others God created. We are put here to be “in community” with one another… Life Together is what “Life” is about.
The Church, God’s Beloved Community, has been that place where my longing for Life Together has found soil in which to grow. For that I am grateful to God and to the communities of Faith in which I served throughout my “active” ordained ministry. Each one of the six parishes where I served gave me a sense of Life Together. Each was a different manifestation of Life Together. Each taught me more about living in God’s Beloved Community.
Perhaps because my tenure at St. Thomas the Apostle in Dallas was nearly 25 years, that parish did more to reveal the reality and the complexity and the delights of Life Together for me than the other parishes in which I served. Life Together takes time to come to fruition. It does not happen easily or quickly or even in a few years. It happens over time…my long tenure at St. Thomas the Apostle provided the time I needed to live into that which I had always been seeking: Community.
How does a country boy from North Louisiana, raised as a Methodist for 14 years before finding the Episcopal Church, become a person who seeks community above all else in life? I was a misfit as a teenager…doing everything I could to be different from my peers. I did not blend well into High School life. Perhaps some of that was because deep down I did not think I fit. My “secret,” even secret to my self that I was a gay person probably prevented my feeling that I fit in with those wonderful High School peers. If they had known then what I then hardly knew myself, they would have “rejected” me. Keeping that secret prevented me from fully belonging to that community of people as a teenager.
College would be little different. An all male college (wonder why I selected such a place) would in today’s world have given me a safe place to “be” my real self. It did not. In 1965 the men attending an all male college were not letting each other know that some of us were not the same kind of males that we were “supposed” to be, according to our families of origin, to the Church, according to the Civil authorities and to our Fraternities which were essential parts of that college. My “secret” stayed my secret and, again, prevented my finding real community at college. It simply was not safe to let that secret out in that environment.
So, the country boy from Louisiana graduates in 1969 (an interesting year to graduate!) and enters Seminary in New York City. There, finally, was a place where my secret was no longer a secret. I found myself among students who did not care if one were gay or straight; among faculty who did not care either; in a city that had just had the Stonewall riots the same Summer I entered Seminary. Finally the “block” to being my real self began to crack and I slowly began to be myself where it was safe to do that. I believe for that reason, the community I found at Seminary became for me the model of what I was looking for: a place where one could be oneself; where ones brothers could be themselves; where we worshipped together at Morning Prayer and at Eucharist and at Evensong every day. At last I found “the beloved community.”
Upon my graduation in 1972, had I had the courage to do what I wanted to do, I would have tried my vocation as a monk because, I believed, that monastic life would continue for me that “beloved community” which I had finally discovered in Seminary. My inability to further disappoint my mother (who did not want me to become a priest) kept me from trying my vocation as a monastic. She wanted me to be either a dentist or an FBI agent…probing being the common factor in either profession! Instead, I was ordained.
I confess to you readers that parish life did not afford me the same sense of community which Seminary did. Parishes are communities of faith, of course, but they are profoundly different from the community of Seminary life and, I suspect, different from monastic community life. Parishes are made up of many sorts of people who have very different ideas of what they expect from Life in Community. Because of those differing ideas, they never seemed to be, for me, that place where Life Together in the Beloved Community manifested itself. Being a priest in a parish is not the same as being a brother among brothers in a Community of Faith…it should be, but it is not. Priests do not “belong” to the Community of Faith in which they serve as curates or rectors. They belong to the Diocese. We are sort of “on loan” from the Diocese to do the things priests do among those who are the Community of Faith…the parish members. Because of that, I never felt like I was really a part of the communities of faith where I served.
Until I served the nearly 25 years at St. Thomas the Apostle. The length of my tenure there finally allowed me to glimpse again that “beloved community” I had known in Seminary…sorta.
But, then, I retired. I was literally terrified about leaving what community I had finally found when I left St. Thomas the Apostle. I had to leave it. Rectors cannot “hang around” where they served. In God’s gracious mercy, I found “life in community” near my home in Irving, Texas at Redeemer Parish. That wonderful group of people opened their hearts to this frightened priest and welcomed me into their community…no longer as “rector” but as the man who sat on the second pew from the front of the church on the left side, sang hymns off key, listened to sermons, and got to know them as they got to know the real me…with no “secret” preventing me from being the real me. They even convinced me to start attending a weekly Bible Class on Tuesday at 10 a.m. (better than some of my Seminary classes). Redeemer became for me a Community of Faith which I sorely needed. It will always be that and I will always be grateful to those people.
Now, Father Christopher, has invited me to be among the people of the parish where he now serves as its 5th Rector. Not many priests have two communities of faith where they may grow more deeply into Christ.
I consider myself doubly blessed by Redeemer, Irving and St. Thomas the Apostle, Dallas.
— The Reverend Stephen J. Waller
