The Phoenix Experience

Rev. Rolfe Gerhardt

What a joy to be back here!  Susan and I really appreciate this opportunity to visit and the chance to say “y’all” without getting cold New England stares.  Up in Maine we are distinguished from the people who were raised there by being known as “people from away,” so it is nice to be here in Atlanta where almost everyone is “from away.” 

And it is nice to have an opportunity to reflect on four important years in my thirty-nine years of ministry which comes to an end in thirty-nine days.  While my ministry comes to an end, my work-life does not.  Prior to coming to Atlanta, I was deeply engaged in building mandolins in San Antonio, Texas, but mid-life changes put that aside.  I came here with total focus on ministry, but the urge to craft just wouldn’t go away, and shortly after I left Atlanta, I started seriously designing and building again.  Out of the “ashes” of my previous Unicorn brand came my current brand “Phoenix,” and it was a “phoenix experience” where something I thought was dead not only came back to life but grew into a major second career.  Forty days from now I will be a full-time builder with a shop window looking out on the tidal part of the beautiful Saint George River until I totter off to some retirement complex in a place whose name will probably not begin with “Sun.”

Most ministers do not make a career shift at retirement; most continue ministry in a casual or volunteer fashion.  But then most ministers have not served the particular churches I have where at retirement I can truly say, “I have seen about all there is for a minister to see (and some that shouldn’t have been seen), and I have learned about all the lessons a minister can learn (and some that I hope others won’t have to learn).  Most ministers when they reach this point won’t have had my kinds of experiences.  At one point in my career, when I was talking with the Settlement Director about seeking a new church, he asked, “Isn’t it time you took an easy one?”  I didn’t know what he meant at the time; if I had, I likely would have said “no!”  I deeply believe that we are designed to be evolving, growing persons, and the easy experiences do not help us.  Certainly, they will never include the phoenix experience.  So, with that in mind, let me bring in some background to my years here in Atlanta to set the stage for what I would experience here.

I was headed down a typical engineering/business career path when the minister of the Universalist church I was attending as a college undergraduate suggested I consider the ministry instead.  And I did.  So, it seemed then that one whole career path died, and another was born---possibly a phoenix experience except that my other career now has gone down that engineering/business path.  Now I know that my life was never going to be so simple as to have a clear choice.  What I finally realized is that I need to craft, create, engineer, and build a business and I need to ponder, question, grapple with the meaning of life, help others find their meanings, and energize the values and justice our society needs.  It wasn’t a matter of making a final choice; it was a matter of trying to fulfill all the parts of me that were not to let me rest with a simple life.

If I were a Buddhist, I would say that the illusion that has most afflicted my life is that I want a simple life.  That illusion took me to my first church: the First Universalist Church in Pittsfield, Maine, a small town in the center of the state.  Unless you have actually lived in a small rural town, you can’t imagine how complex life there actually is, especially for a minister.  First of all, you are expected to know exactly how things have always been done and do them that way.  I mean, you are supposed to know that the huge book that sits open on top of the pulpit is not just to raise your manuscript high enough to read---you are supposed to know that it is THE CHURCH BIBLE, and the readings and the sermon are supposed to come from it every Sunday.  That’s after you have marched into the sanctuary every Sunday at the head of the robed choir singing “Holy, Holy, Holy.”  I bet you didn’t even know that I could do that kind of thing.  It was learned behavior, and the lessons got better.

For someone who had never even seen a dead body, I was suddenly doing over twenty funerals a year.  And I had to learn what inspirational thing you are supposed to say time after time, not just to the same small group which had three people in it die in two weeks but to those who gathered when a forty-two year old man died one fall after I did his wedding to a twenty-three year old woman in the spring.  Before you go down the wrong track with the cause of death, he was asphyxiated parked in a car with a sixteen-year-old who was due to be married to someone else in two weeks!  What do you say when life gets that complex?  I learned what to say, but I also said, to myself, that it must be time to go somewhere else because overall I was totally out of synch with the style of ministry and mindset of a traditional small town church.  I felt stifled from not being able to ponder and question among so many who felt it was pretty well spelled out in that book on the pulpit.  So I went forty miles up the road to a non-traditional small city church.

Looking back on it, my first two years of ministry were a phoenix experience where part of me died---my innocence, my dreamy notions of how wonderful ministry would be, my expectation that I would fit anywhere I chose to be because Unitarian Universalists are all liberals---those notions died, and perhaps my real ministry was born.  Or, at least, started to be born.

So I went to Bangor for my second church, a small city with a church that had a history of thoughtful liberalism going back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and other members of the famous Transcendentalist Club.  I could ponder and question and think and share that in sermons and preach about the issues of society and justice.  It was the kind of freedom that brought many of you to this church.  And it was in that second church that I learned what liberals are really like, how complex the ministry they need.  My first hint was in a story from the early days of that church---150 years ago.  At one point the minister, Frederick Henry Hedge, went on sabbatical to Europe.  He was a notable liberal minister, but something changed in him on this trip.  He visited a number of Europe’s impressive cathedrals and experienced the incredible pageantry of their ceremonies.  So, he returned to Maine and to the stark simplicity of that church and its service with a sense that something was not quite right on Sunday morning.  It had been the practice of that church that when hymns were sung, the congregation would turn to the back of the church where the choir was situated for their leadership in the singing.  The minister felt that it was an affront to the dignity of the pulpit for the congregation to turn their backs to the pulpit during the service.  He explained this, and then he asked the congregation to stand for the first hymn.  They stood.  Some faced him as he requested.  Some turned around to face the choir as they always had.  And some turned sideways.  That’s how we were 150 years ago!  So I knew there would be no simplicity in ministering to that congregation.  But another experience capped it.

A famous American artist, Waldo Pierce, grew up in that church, but he was long gone when I was there.  At one Board meeting, however, we had to consider a letter from Waldo Pierces descendents asking that the church either hang the painting on its walls or return it to the heirs.  What painting?  In the attic, it turned out, there was a large Waldo Pierce oil of the crucified Christ with the most agonizing expression anyone had seen before Mel Gibson.  Pierce was famous for his blood, sweat, and earth style, his way of capturing the feelings of down-to-earth life, and this painting was almost terrifying.  So, here we are at a Board meeting.  We have a painting by the city’s most famous artist who was a member of the church, but the painting depicted an agonized crucified Christ which is hardly inspiring to intellectual Unitarians and may confuse visitors who would see it hanging in the church.  I thought about it, and I imagined that Waldo’s quirky sense of humor painted this just to see what the church would do with it.  It originally did hang somewhere in the church, and I don’t when it went into the attic.  But this is the sort of thing that liberals don’t handle well, so the Board voted to return it to the heirs.  Oh, there are lessons to learn in our churches, and to learn more of them; I went south, really south.

San Antonio, Texas---a Hispanic-majority city overlaid with a cowboy culture, and about three hundred Unitarian Universalists in the midst of it.  It was a new world to someone who had never been West or South, and I spent thirteen and a half years in that fascinating and playful world.  My predecessor, Bill DeWolfe, called it a “kindergarten of Unitarian Universalism,” and it was so---both because of the playful style of life there and because of the steady flow of fifty to a hundred people new to our religion who went through that church each year.  And I mean “through” because the city was so mobile that the church numbers to this day are almost exactly what they were in the 1960s but most of the faces have changed.  And I learned from this what a great joy it is to introduce people to our unique religion.  I loved the energy, the excitement.  Over and over it came home to me how important it can be to have a religion that is dedicated to freedom and thinking for yourself.  Of course, I was not quite prepared for where that can take you when one of your church members is the Treasurer of the American Communist Party.  Certain government agencies felt that was entirely too much freedom and thinking for yourself, and we had to deal with that.  And some of ministerial colleagues felt the same when they learned that some church members were active military people engaged in the Viet Nam war on the ground and in the air.  If Waldo Pierce’s painting presented a quandary to our liberal values, the military presence in the San Antonio church moved us closer to a paradox.  At first I countered the criticism of my ministering to military people by saying, “Well, who do you want in the military?  I want all the UUs I can get because they will think before carrying out orders.”  But it went deeper than a smart reply.  I had to learn to minister among wildly divergent and conflicting views.  The part of me that liked to make judgments had to die and be reborn in the true nature of liberalism---open, generous, accepting.  Yes, another phoenix experience---a very formative one.

But something else died in that church that left nothing but ashes.  I had a naïve trust in people, and, honestly, that did need to die.  After ten years there, I trusted the president of that church with the information that I was considering other churches.  I didn’t leave at that time, but that president shared the confidence with others who then formed a secret board that met monthly to find ways to encourage me to leave.  All it would it have taken for me to get the message would have been for one honest person to sit down with me and talk openly, but I needed to learn that such honesty is extremely rare.  And so I came here.

From the city of “manana” to the city of “why wasn’t it done yesterday!”  From a large middle-size church which was the only liberal institution in the city to a medium middle-size church with the highest ratio of children to adults of any Unitarian Universalist group and only one of a half-dozen liberal congregations in the area.  From a church that was settled into its organizational life to a church that was still in flux.  But, oh what an interesting flux!  When the Chinese created that famous curse---“May you live in interesting times!---they had no idea how profound that could be for my time in Atlanta.  This church perplexed me, inspired me, frustrated me, invigorated me, stressed me, and made me feel more alive than at any point in my career up to then.  Here I began my struggle to combine thoughtfulness with spirituality.  Here I saw how effectively and deeply Unitarian Universalists can live their values.  Here I learned the nuances of organizational power for there were skilled teachers in every seat out there.  It was here I learned that when I sat at my desk in the office, my personality type actually shifted from an introverted feeling type characterized by empathy and idealism to an extraverted thinking type whose T-shirt reads “born to wear combat booties.”  But this was exactly what I needed in order to be an effective minister in the rest of my career.  You have my honest thanks.

It was just fascinating.  The highs were incredibly high and the lows incredibly low, but there was something worth learning in every minute of it.  For example, here I was among some of America’s business leaders---people in high positions in Fortune 500 companies with heralded business acumen---and the church treasurer would come to the board meeting with the report scribbled on the back of a supermarket shopping list.  And that was okay.  Then a later treasurer would come to the meeting with pages and pages of detailed figures and lead us through them step by tiny step.  And that was okay.  You see, it didn’t matter how it was reported as long as there was money in bank.  And then one day there wasn’t any money in the bank.  The bills couldn’t be paid!  The minister couldn’t be paid!  That happened one summer, and I had learned enough of the Atlanta style to announce that since I couldn’t be paid while on vacation, I had no money with which to vacation, and therefore I had to come back to work.  Such a contrary action totally shocked the leadership to the point where I was back at work only a few days before the money appeared.  It was here that I learned to think outside the box when it came to organizational power.  And did that ever pay off in my next church!

So much to learn here.  I remember when we were considering building the Chalice House, and the get-it-done types on the board said that we’d have it in place in six months.  It sure looked that way until Larry Camp, the civil engineer, brought in a flow chart that showed how it couldn’t take less than sixteen months.  Wisely, he was put in charge of the project and actually brought it in under budget.  That was exciting.  And so was the religious education program run by Joannie that made the additional building necessary.  It was the best program I have ever seen.  And I loved working with Joannie.  We disagreed and argued and even fought almost weekly, but it made everything clear and made everything work so well.  There was nothing we couldn’t argue about and discuss, and we learned really well from each other.  That was exciting.

But beyond exciting to inspiring were three things I will always remember.  They all concern living our values.  I came here with the stereotype in mind of the aloof suburbanites living insulated from the afflicted and oppressed of the city.  That impression died when I discovered how some of these comfortable suburbanites were so deeply involved with soup kitchens and other efforts to aid the homeless and afflicted of Atlanta.  I don’t mean involved just by donations but by being there, sleeves rolled up helping month after month, year after year.  It was all done quietly as if this is just the natural Unitarian Universalist thing to do.  At least that’s how Jerry Lohla did it.  And the second part, similar, was the church’s outreach to the AIDS ministry in Atlanta.  Again, the normal suburbanite thing would have been to distance ourselves from the problem and let officialdom handle it, but this church was there in person and with financial support.  And then the third thing: the last great civil rights march in America here in Forsyth.  Ten percent of the membership of this church gathered early that morning to get on buses to go on that march.  Every bus in the region was called into service for the twenty thousand who marched that day.  We marched eight across into Forsyth along a corridor of State Troopers and National Guard protecting us with about two hundred from the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups doing their feeble but vehement best to intimidate us.  One picture is impressed on my mind.  As we were leaving the courthouse area, a burly, red-necked-looking State Trooper stepped from the side into our ranks.  He looked like the pictures of the State Troopers who a generation earlier had clubbed civil rights marchers.  But he reached out and shook the hand of a little Black boy a couple of rows ahead of us.  Times had truly changed.  Something horrible of the old South had died, and right in front of me there was a new spirit rising from the ashes of the old.  The phoenix city was again the place of rebirth, and I was honored to be there along with so many from this church.

Just four short years here, but they were extremely significant and memorable years.  Like every minister here before me, I would go on to do the best work of my career.  And you would go on to become the best church of your history.  Not right away; there were a few crazy years before things settled down.  But they did settle down, and look at you now---a phoenix church in a phoenix city!  I am sure that will be echoed at your fiftieth celebration.  Thanks for being you and having me here to share it!