A week of signs

Christian Century, May 9, 2001 by Richard Lischer

In his memoir Open Secrets, Richard Lischer tells of his search for a pastoral vocation in "New Cana," a small town in southern Illinois. When he reconnoitered the site of his first call, the bleached November landscape reminded him of an Ingmar Bergman movie--"Swedish winterlight exposing rot and depression in rural Lutherans." He was fresh from graduate school, a child of the '60s who had "skimmed Augustine's City of God but devoured Harvey Cox's bestseller The Secular City." Two minutes on the lonely road in New Cana proved to be a "clarifying experience. The spiritual heroics of the secular city had passed me by."

Open Secrets is the story of how, as Lischer puts it, "I apprenticed myself to a community, and this odd little warren of friendships, stories, rivalries and rumors turned out to be my ministry itself."

THE FIRST WEEK in my new parish brought a tumble of pastoral duties. Although I had yet to preach my first sermon or celebrate my first public Eucharist, I brought communion to one of my parishioners in the hospital. His name was Alfred Semanns and he was dying of complications resulting from admission to the dingiest American hospital I had ever seen, Prairieview General. Its only ward reminded me of a dorm I had slept in as a boy at summer camp. There were 12 beds, one nurse, and no private or semiprivate rooms.

Alfred and I had the place pretty much to ourselves as I prepared for the momentous event of my first Eucharist. Only the community rightly celebrates communion, and when private distribution is necessary the pastor should bring the consecrated elements from the community's Sunday meal. But Alfred was sick, dying, and through his daughters and son he had asked for the Eucharist. He apparently didn't mind that it was a stranger who would bring him the Bread of Life.

I brought my kit, which included a tiny paten and a screw-together chalice, a seminary graduation gift. We made the confession and absolution together and recited Psalm 46, "God is our refuge and strength; a very present help in trouble." His gruff voice betrayed no emotion as he recited the words, which he uttered like a man breaking rocks with a sledge.

We were making Eucharist on a hospital tray on wheels. I poured some wine into my little chalice and set it before him, but when I reached farther into the kit I discovered to my horror that I had forgotten the wafers. "I don't have any bread," I said. Then, as if he were deaf as well as dying, I repeated myself more loudly, "No bread."

Alfred looked deeply into my face and sighed. His eyes quickly surveyed the ward, as mine had done a split second earlier, in hopes of spotting a stray scrap of bread on a lunch tray. No such luck. He said in his same rough voice, "Well, why don't you get some bread ... Pastor." He stressed the last word of the sentence in order to remind me of something about me. "I'll be here."

The hospital kitchen was closed until 5 P.M., so I drove into town to the nearest Lutheran church where I humiliated myself before one of the old men who had helped install me and borrowed a few communion wafers. I then sped back to the hospital and entered as though nothing had happened.

Take eat. This is my body given in death for you, I said for the first time in my life. Receive this host. Jesus is the host at every sacramental meal, no matter if it is celebrated at the high altar of a great cathedral or in the deserted ward of a country hospital. Jesus hosted our little meal, too, and did not forsake Alfred. I was his stand-in on this bleak occasion, but I had proved less than hospitable. With ten years of theology under my belt, and a passing acquaintance with many mysteries and much knowledge, I had scrambled awkwardly to produce a scrap of God's body for a dying man.

ON WEDNESDAY, one of Billy Semanns's daughters (75 percent of my parishioners were named Semanns) was waiting for the new pastor. She was ready to have a proper wedding. This word was only relayed to me by telephone, as Billy himself, who was perennially between jobs and wives and lived alone in a camper east of Prairieview, had had nothing to do with the church ever since someone from Cana had asked him for a financial pledge. That had been 14 years ago.

"The church is only interested in my money," he had complained, implying that this church, like all the rest of them, was preying on his vast wealth in order, say, to build a marble campanile in the parking lot or to support the voluptuous lifestyle of a missionary in East St. Louis. According to the grapevine, the previous pastor had offended him by saying, "Billy, you don't have any money. What would we want with you?"

The daughter and her intended arrived at the parsonage promptly at five, he having taken off a few minutes early from his job as an asphalt man on the county's roads. Leeta and Shane were 17 and 18 years old respectively. Aside from the family's trademark smile, she bore no resemblance to my imaginary picture of her oafish father or to anyone I had already met in the family. She was darkly, even beautifully, beetle-browed, a feature that lent determination to her young face from the first hello. Shane was a serious sort of young man with close-set eyes and a curly page boy that was already thinning on top. Thirty seconds into the interview she seemed strong, he seemed weak. Together they were so nervous that they couldn't even slouch. Teenagers simply do not sit as straight as those two were sitting in front of my desk.