Who Are YOU?

Questions of a Simple Parish Priest

An Introduction

Today I am 81 years old.

For more than fifty years I have served as an Episcopal priest in parishes and communities in Massachusetts, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Along the way I have baptized babies, married lovers, buried the dead, fed hungry people, argued with bishops, annoyed politicians, gotten myself into trouble more than once, and stood at the altar Sunday after Sunday trying to say something sensible about God.

And all the while I have been asking a question.

Who are YOU?

That question began much earlier, with the little urchin in the photograph above, growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts called Brickbottom.

At 81, I have decided to begin telling his story—and mine.

I am writing a memoir called Who Are YOU? Questions of a Simple Parish Priest. It isn't finished. Neither, apparently, am I.

So rather than wait until every chapter is polished and every comma properly behaved, I have decided to begin sharing portions of the manuscript here as I write it.

These are working drafts. Memories may be corrected. Stories may grow. Some things may look different to me tomorrow than they do today. That seems appropriate somehow.

I expect to post another installment about once a week.

This is not intended to be only my search for an answer.

Perhaps somewhere along the way, something in these stories will remind you of a moment in your own life when the ordinary became something more—when another human being, a place, a piece of music, an unexpected kindness, a terrible loss, a silence, or perhaps even God seemed suddenly to address you.

And perhaps you have asked the question too.

Who are YOU?

Here is the Prologue.

---

PROLOGUE

The Question

Who are YOU?

This is the signature question of my life.

Beneath that question lies another.

Are YOU?

That is the more honest question.

For years I thought this book was going to be my memoir.

Then I thought perhaps it was theology.

Then perhaps the story of a parish priest.

Now I think it is something else entirely.

It is the story of a Question.

Not a question about God.

A question addressed to God.

Who are YOU?

What follows is the story of how that question has given life and companionship to a parish priest, his family, his friends, and his parishioners.

Not an answer, but life.

I continue to ask the question.

Who are YOU?

When Moses stands before the burning bush, his question is often understood to be,

“What is your Name?”

That was Moses' question.

Mine has always been different.

Mine is,

Who are YOU?

And if I may dare to press the point...

Are YOU?

That question has carried me through childhood.

Through grief.

Through ministry.

Through joy.

Through failure.

Through friendship.

Through marriage.

Through darkness.

Through forgiveness.

Through cancer.

Through hope.

Sometimes the answer came wrapped in silence.

Sometimes in laughter.

Sometimes in the embrace of another human being.

Sometimes it flashed across an old oak pew in the colored light of a stained-glass window.

There YOU were.

Then...

off YOU went again.

Leaving me smiling.

Leaving me wondering.

Leaving me just hungry enough to keep looking.

I have come to think of this book as a cathedral.

Not because it is grand.

I am, after all, only a simple parish priest.

But because cathedrals are not built all at once.

Stone by stone.

Window by window.

Prayer by prayer.

Story by story.

Walk into a great cathedral and you do not absorb it in a single glance.

You wander.

You pause.

You return.

You discover a chapel you somehow missed before.

You notice how the afternoon sun transforms a window that looked ordinary in the morning.

That is how memory works.

That is how grace works.

That is how this book is built.

Each chapter is another stained-glass window.

Each person another shaft of Light.

Each story another glimpse of YOU.

When I was a little boy, my grandmother—Ma—crocheted afghans.

The rhythm of her crochet hook fascinated me.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

Like breathing.

Like praying.

Like the tide along the coast of Maine where she was born.

Sometimes she'd send me to Grant's Department Store for another skein of yarn.

Sometimes I'd bring back exactly the wrong color.

Back I'd go.

She never seemed irritated.

She simply smiled and kept crocheting.

Only years later did I realize she wasn't merely making afghans.

She was crocheting me.

Thread by thread.

Story by story.

Prayer by prayer.

The same hands that stitched blankets for cold winter nights stitched courage into one frightened little boy.

The same voice that spun yarns in her Downeast Maine accent quietly taught me how to tell stories of my own.

I can still hear that accent.

The words rose and fell like the tide.

Even the word yarn was music.

Not one syllable.

Three.

The melody lingering in the air.

Sometimes punctuated with an “Ay-uh...”

As though the story itself had just surprised the storyteller.

Perhaps that is why I tell stories the way I do.

One thread leading to another.

One memory catching another.

One “Oh...one more thing...”

Until somehow an afghan appears where once there were only scattered skeins.