Number 1067, Number 10, and Number 1

OK, so this better be good.  I can’t promise you anything, really, except that it will be true.  And that I’ll finally be able to work in the Olympics next time.

During our 21 years of marriage, there has never been a week when I was more acutely conscious of my identity as a pastor’s wife than this past week, when I became a bishop’s wife.  To be precise, wife of the bishop who has been assigned Number 1067 in the American Succession (going back to Samuel Seabury in 1784). In the state of New Hampshire, his number is considerably smaller:  Number 10.

But, the thing is, I will never know him by either of those numbers.  In my life, he holds a special place:  One and Only.

Many of you reading this, I know, attended the Consecration this past weekend in Concord.  It was something all right, wasn’t it?  The word for this special event is now just becoming a part of my vocabulary, and I understand that it has a very particular meaning within the history of the Church, going way back.  But I still can’t resist tossing out some other terms that people — including some friends of ours who may not have been completely in the know about these matters — used in the days leading up to the event, instead of the proper one:  Coronation, Inauguration, Conflagration, Episcopal Extravaganza.   The expression “pulled out all the stops” (referring to a pipe organ) would also be one way of describing what the people who planned this event, and there were many of them , did collectively to create it.  The whole thing was a complete feast for the senses; that is for sure.

No two individuals in the Center for the Arts, where it took place, experienced the service in exactly the same way.  I can’t pretend to be a William Faulkner scholar, but I understand that part of his greatness as a writer lies in his ability to portray the multiple perspectives of various characters as they view and experience a single event.   This, truly, accounts for much of the richness of life as far as I can tell.

In my describing what my particular perspective was for my husband’s Consecration, in no way do I want to imply that mine is any more significant or valuable than anyone else’s.  It’s just that it’s the only one I know.

I can’t tell you how many people were seated in the auditorium, but I can tell you that there were already an awful lot of us who assembled on the lower floor for the procession.  In fact, if all of the people who were in some way participants in the Consecration became instead part of the audience at, say, a high school orchestra concert, those kids playing the instruments would think they’d really made it big!  We were directed to line up in two different lines, two abreast…but I won’t go into the details of all of that.  For me, as I looked around at so many members of the clergy (most of whom I didn’t know) and so many singers in robes (some familiar faces here, from home), it was kind of like a dream.  No husband in sight – plum gone – but all of his colleagues in their garb, as far as the eye could see!  Was I being initiated into some kind of different life, entering a new country?

Fortunately, I stood next to my older son while walking into the auditorium and I gained some strength from taking his arm.  And then, contrary to what I expected, there was my husband again– taking a seat in the front row, right next to me and the kids, with his parents on the other side of him.  He held my hand for a time, almost as if we were at the movies; but when he got up, it wasn’t to go get popcorn, it was to go through a mysterious and ancient process of transformation.  He was examined and took solemn vows before a select panel (that can’t be the right term) of bishops, and then he was surrounded by many more bishops until he emerged, a bishop himself.

Exactly where did this leave me, the spouse of #1067?  Transfixed by what was happening on stage, and also anxious — frankly — about the empty chair next to me.

I’m not saying I didn’t have a role to play.  Late in the service, the kids and I went up to present the new bishop with various new accoutrements (don’t ask me to name each of them); perhaps we could say “tools of the trade”.  When asked to greet us as a whole family, the audience provided enthusiastic and lengthy applause.    And the next day’s picture in the newspaper of my husband reaching to greet me with so many beaming bishops behind us makes me proud and happy:  of his new distinction, of all he did to get there — and also of all five of us, both as separate individuals and as a family together.   Which is a different kind of achievement.

About a week before the Consecration, I read David Remnick’s absorbing profile of Bruce Springsteen in The New Yorker.  While there’s no explaining in full the incredible longevity of the Boss, Remnick does try to get at some of the elements that have made him so on top of his game for so long.  And he made sure to talk to Patti Scialfia, Bruce’s wife of 21 years and a member of the band for a whopping 28.  She was, no doubt, accustomed to being asked questions about her husband while, through the years, maintaining a focus out of the spotlight on the well-being of their three children as well as on the integrity of her relationship to the star.  OK, so maybe it’s just a coincidence that these two were married just a year after my husband and I said our vows.  And yes, there are some significant differences:  starting with the fact that I have not exactly been a member of my husband’s band throughout our marriage, doing back-up vocals.  And continuing with the fact that while my husband sings adequately in church….you get the idea.

But the point I want to make here is really just that the life of a marriage, and the life of a family that grows from that marriage, is really its own universe.  And how it all works can be about as mysterious as the world of ancient rituals.  Last weekend, after the service was over and the friends and relatives who came back for lunch with us (that was wonderful) dispersed, the new bishop and I knew that we simply needed to be together for a while.  We went for a swim, we talked some, but mostly we just reminded ourselves that all of what had happened that day – splendid and moving and life-expanding as it was – would not fundamentally change who we were, and who we would continue striving to be, for one another.  Especially from all of you out there who have ever been married, might I hear an “amen” for that?