Getting To Advent: Special Spiritual Friendship

Well, the fact is, chickens, I just haven’t had TIME to blog.
It took me twice as long to do all my domestic chores and simple things like cooking and errand-running for a long time, and I’m still walking with a slight limp. Then our church fair came around and I wanted to go through all my stuff to donate as much as possible. That took lots of hours. This autumn I have had lots of rites of passage and extra furrowed-brow hours working closely with leaders and then my sweet little beagle tore his ACL and needed extra TLC getting up and down stairs and such. You know how it is.

I am behind on answering your letters and for that I am still sorry. I just haven’t had the mojo lately and I never want to write with advice unless I can give you my full and most passionate attention. PeaceBang isn’t worth a used reindeer sweater unless she’s very committed to each question and issue posed by her pigeons. Thank you for your patience.

I am so so glad it’s getting to Advent. Advent is the time of the year when the Holy Spirit makes Her entrance most deeply in my heart, saying, “Sweetheart, take a load off. I’ll make the magic — you can stop trying to. I’ll bring the crisp, cold nights with the stars and the wonder. I’ll put the old songs into their heads, and stir their emotions with childhood memories both beautiful and painful, and I pierce them with yearning for me. I have a big-bellied Palestinian Jewish teenager named Miriam I’d like you to meet, and her Significant Other, Joseph. They’re waiting for God, too. Why don’t you all wait together? She could use a good foot rub, by the way. And Joseph needs something to do. Send him out to your garage and have him clean it out. It’d be good for him.”

I rush to the kitchen to get Miriam a chai latte, as I think she might like that. I worry that she’s nauseous in the mornings but she assures me that the morning sickness went away after the first trimester. She is in a comfortable rocking chair looking out the window at the New England landscape. I watch her, too respectful to get close. I just want to wait on her. However, it occurs to me that maybe she’d enjoy having some gossipy female company so I resolve to find a conversation-starter the next time we “set a spell” together. Maybe I can be some comic relief for her.

They’re not staying long.

The kids get excited and I can feel it at church. We have the tiny scramblers in the pre-school downstairs who I see only in passing, and our Sunday School squirts who I get to visit with a bit on Sundays. We start collecting mittens and gifts for other kids. Tomorrow we launch the Guest At Your Table program through the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. In a few days I’ll have some dearly beloveds around my table, feeding them turkey and fixings. It is a special treat to have a guest list of old friends, my year-old godson, and a new friend — a neighbor who has become very dear to me in the past months and whose compassion, understanding and support for me as a “fellow” single gal has been a treasure in my life. Friends are a precious resource, indeed.

I’m just going to say something about friendship. I know we all learn in seminary that we’re not friends with our parishioners. I understand that. We need to keep careful, healthy and respectful boundaries. But I think it’s time to speak well of the special spiritual friendship that we develop with many of our parishioners, and I intend to do just that. I am tired of the negative droning on and on about how ministers and parishioners aren’t friends, as if the whole arrangement is either strictly professional or strictly piously pastoral. It is not. If we spend a significant number of years among a people, we get to know many of them as friends. Yes, we’re always their minister and that colors the relationship and makes it unique. It does not disqualify it as friendship, however. It is, in fact, a thing that is more than friendship, not less. It is a friendship based on trying to live by the highest shared ideals, ideals tested over time by joys, sorrows, successes and failures. Just because I don’t socialize with parishioners in the same way that I socialize with my friends or share a much of my private thoughts and feelings with them doesn’t mean we don’t share something that could properly be called friendship.

I’ll explore this subject at more length later, but it just came up with a newbie so I thought I’d burble on a bit about it here.

Here’s me in my “uniform,” by the way. Black cami, cardigan, black pants. Hair up, make-up, onyx beads, big turquoise ring. Easy peasy. I just had some layers cut into my hair so it doesn’t look so pin-headed pulled back.