Originally appeared in Skirt Magazine
May 2001

My mother is a Father. My father is a Father too, but my father was a Father before I was born, even before he met my mother. My mother has been a Father since my freshman year in college, the year that she was ordained a priest in the Episcopal church.

Of course, she doesn’t refer to herself as “Father;” she thinks that whole paternal/priest thing is hopelessly outdated. But I get a lot of mileage out of that bit about my mother being a Father, so I’m keeping it.

When you’re a minister, people die and have crises and get sick without regard to your vacations or days off, and they need you, and you go. And even when everyone is hale and hearty and happy, you go. You go to services and socials and workshops and retreats and seminars and private parties hosted by your parishioners. My mother is the associate rector at a medium-sized church in a medium-sized, Southern university town. Her congregation is full of the kind of people who are working on their fifth graduate degree in French Romanticism between stints in the Peace Corps while raising a couple of agreeable but precocious kids. It is a busy church, and my mother is a busy priest. When I call her, I expect to talk to her answering machine. When I visit, dinner together means slapping on a name tag and bringing a covered dish.

People I have never met will approach me at these events, greet me as though I were family, press my hands together warmly, and assure me that my mother is wonderful, that she means everything to them. She’s my mother, from whom I’ve inherited a habit of disorganization and a fondness for detective novels, word-play, and peppermint-stick ice cream. But she belongs to all of them, too. It is nearly impossible to go anywhere in her town without running into a parishioner. We’ve run into them on vacation in Maine, and on a street corner in SoHo for that matter. She is accustomed to pastoral moments at Sam’s Club and the bagel shop. It’s hard to have a private life as a priest.

As both my parents are priests, you might think I'd be in jail by now, or a tobacco lawyer. When people hear the word “priest”, they have certain expectations: cardigan sweaters and prayer hours and a family burdened by the oppressive weight of piety. They haven’t met my parents. All the really off-color religion jokes I know come from them.

As a kid, I almost never went to church, which I suppose was odd, but it didn’t strike me that way at the time. Church was Daddy’s work. Other children didn’t go to work with their fathers, so why would I go with mine?

I never went to church because halfway through Yale theological seminary my mother gave up on the Episcopalians over their refusal to ordain women. And so every Sunday my mother and sister and I stayed happily at home in our pajamas. It was, I like to think, a gesture of dignified reproach to the church, and as you can see, it worked.

Like a good Christian, my mother forgave the church when at last it saw the error of its ways. I can’t remember exactly when she stepped back into the fold, but after all those years of our quiet Sunday strike, I was surprisingly unsurprised at her plans to pursue ordination. I was all for it, in fact.

“Have a good time at church,” I’d say warmly, still in my pajamas as she walked out the door on Sunday mornings.

Me, I still don’t go to church. As I’m no good at sitting still and not talking, it’s always been the church part of church that’s been the sticking point with me. To their credit, neither of my parents have ever once pressured me to go.

But at the same time church has always been a fact of my life, the structure of Sundays and Easters and Christmases that have always been working days in my family. Somehow, I’ve learned a handful of hymns and the rituals of the Episcopal service, and the lingering coffee-and-dust scent of a parish hall is as familiar to me as home. I suppose I’ve always felt like an honorary member of my parents’ faith, with the freedom to wander in and help myself to its comforts if I ever need them. And when my son was born, I was surprised to find myself wondering whether I didn’t owe him that same chance. After much debate, we decided to have him baptized by my mother’s hands, in her church.

“Can I feign a coughing fit when that part comes where I promise to raise him in the faith?” I asked, not wanting to make a promise I was unlikely to keep.

“Think of it as a metaphor,” my mother advised, which is her all-purpose suggestion for taking the broad view on theology, doctrine, and the Book of Common Prayer.

The service was on All Saint’s Day, on a beautiful sunny November morning. The church was filled with light and bright flowers and hundreds of people and we certainly must have sung “For All the Saints.” I don’t remember. What I remember was that my mother had only that week been released from crutches she’d been confined to for months with a broken foot. She still walked with a limp, but when she stood before the assembled congregation—her friends, teenagers she once baptized, couples she married, people she has counseled through grief and loss and tough decisions—her arms were free to lift up my son.

Date posted: 03.08.04

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