Keys to the Kindom

In 2 weeks and 2 days, I will hand in these two fat keys to the director of operations at our church. It will be my last day of the 3,597 that I have served as a senior minister of First Church Berkeley UCC. It will also be my last day of being a settled pastor.

These two keys open a lot of doors. All the offices, the kitchenette we created out of a closet in our narthex after the Great Fire of 2016 burned down our program building, so we could continue to heat up soup and wash up plates of cheese and crackers after our Afterparty (what we call coffee hour at our church).

These keys open the bride’s room just off the sanctuary, which has seen no brides for the last decade since Californians all seem to prefer to get married outside, and who can blame them? Closer to God.

They open the bride’s room closet, which gets turgid with the detritus of worship–candle nubs, empty matchbooks when all you need is one goddamn match, grape Welch’s slowly fermenting into hooch–until an efficient and committed deacon rolls up their sleeves and transforms it back into a reliable apothecary for worship witchery.

The keys open the Tower Room, where many have taken a secret nap on the IKEA sectional while the dust of centuries (or century, at least) drifts gently down onto the sleeper Rip Van Winkling away. And they open the small house on campus where we are quietly doing good works that would earn us an angry tweet from the current resident of the White House.

I used the keys this week to get into the aforementioned bride’s room. Apparently we had failed to save last year’s Palm Sunday palms to turn into new ashes. I sweatily hunted for old ashes critical to our annual Ashes to Go appearance on the UC Berkeley campus, as well as our own church’s service that evening.

Our enterprising associate pastor had bought ashes online with free 2-day shipping (I love you Hannah! But this is too good not to tease you about), only to discover that they came in a foil-sealed packet marked “guaranteed fresh” from a country of origin known for contaminating all kinds of things with carcinogenic pollutants.

My other colleague Kelly and I joked to each other, “We can impose ashes on people and say ‘From dust you came and to dust you shall return…maybe a little sooner than you would have because of what we just smeared on your forehead!”

Vintage 2025 ashes were in fact found (praise Jesus!) in the bride’s room (thank you deacons!), and that afternoon Kelly and I walked to Sproul Plaza in the chill. We smeared the shape of a cross on the uncreased foreheads of about 40 undergraduates who wandered by and wanted them, a majority of them doubtless never acknowledging their mortality except for this one time a year. A minority probably think about death a little too much.

Later that evening, we gathered in Unity Hall, our new community space, lit by dozens of candles. We sang Taize song after song, and marked a much wider variety of foreheads for death. As I touched these people so beloved to me, and looked in their eyes, I thought “this may be the last time I see them this side of the veil.”

It’s a sobering thing to say goodbye to people, especially when you can’t punctuate it with a falsely hearty “see you soon.” Pastoral ethics demand that when a pastor leaves their parish, they really leave. It’s the only way to let folks truly grieve (or, ahem, celebrate your departure 🙂), to nudge them to do the necessary work of letting go of needing and depending on you, and to make more room for loving and trusting others (and themselves!) in the future, be it a new incoming pastor, or an existing staff member, or the people they share the pews with.

I know other denominations have different rules for leavetaking, and even in the UCC there are churches and pastors who don’t adhere to the strictest interpretation of these ethics. But I have known what it’s like to follow a pastor who didn’t or couldn’t let go, and how hard that made moving on for everybody. So even if I don’t much like it, I’m committed to submitting myself to the standard I keep for others. If you want to know more particulars, especially if you are a pastor or a lay leader facing a pastoral transition soon, I’ve written about it recently here for the Daily Devotionals, and spelled it out for my own community here.

A good goodbye means not pretending; softening the blow with milquetoast promises you can’t keep. It also means acknowledging the enormous range of feelings of what you have meant to each other.

I’ve moved through a lot of feelings since I started this transition, a transition that started a while ago. I got pretty depressed about 4 years ago, and I knew it was situational depression because whenever I had a clean sabbath or went on vacation, it mysteriously evaporated.

But I couldn’t yet leave my job, or I told myself I couldn’t anyhow, because of various reasons practical, spiritual, and (of course) financial. So I soldiered through. My depression never reached dangerous levels. I was slower than usual, and prone to crying for no reason; more impatient and snappish; less creative. I got my job done pretty well – and still, more often than not, with real savor and joy. But the consistent light and heat, the passion (or at least ego and ambition–the poor man’s passion!) one needs for the long haul in pastoral ministry had gone out of me.

So I’ve been working on my goodbye, at least internally, for a long time. That’s why it surprised me how intensely I’m still feeling what it will be like not be a pastor anymore. I mean, it makes sense. You can only pre-grieve so much. You get there when you get there.

I’ve been so relieved at the thought of walking away from the endless responsibilities of ministry – the tiresome whirl of night meetings, working nearly every weekend no matter what secular fun I was invited to, functionally being on call 24/7, financial and other institutional catastrophes, failing furnaces and overflowing toilets, the emotional load of remembering and tracking dozens or hundreds of stories, family systems, moods, expectations, crying needs – that my relief eclipsed until now the bespoke magic of this particular calling. It’s like no other. “The best gig in the known universe,” one friend put it. “An odd and wondrous calling,” says another.

Being a pastor allows me to be both professionally nosy and endemically bossy. I get to ask people intensely personal questions. I regularly get to talk to a room full of people for at least 15 uninterrupted minutes about whatever is on my mind, and particularly about what I think they really should do next!! And they pay me for the privilege!

Pastoring gives me access to the most intimate spaces. I saunter into a psych ward, the bedroom where someone lays dying, the ER bay, visiting room at the prison with undeterred confidence, knowing I belong everywhere. The Roman collar is also a key.

Being a pastor has allowed me to circumvent small talk and go straight to real talk, profound soul-meeting, time and time again. To get to the marrow of life immediately, no lines, no waiting, no fronting.

Of course, I can still visit the sick and shut-in and those in prison as an ordinary citizen. When I join a new church as a pew-sitter, I can invite the homeless guy wandering by to come and eat at coffee hour, or linger in worship to sit with someone who is obviously having a bad day. But it won’t carry quite the same authority – an authority not intended to puff me up, but rather to confer importance and value on the person I am showing up for. That authority that says, “you matter so much that someone who stands in for God for a living is giving you their time, their compassion and their full attention.”

I’m also realizing, belatedly, how very good this gig has been for me all along, and still is. I was bullied as a kid; I had a rough early family life, and I was, horror of horrors, a middle child, and a well-behaved one. That means I got lost. My needs didn’t matter that much, and my parents tended not to worry about me even when I needed them to because there were so many other things and people to worry about.

I have been greatly healed by the many loves in my teenage and adult life: a series of best friends, including my husband. But even as I’ve been gutted by conflict in church, by snippy comments or long accusatory emails, by rampant casual sexism or ageism, by the machinations of bullies and endless projections by anxious church members; I’ve also been healed by the love of many people I’ve been blessed to serve. By the respect they gave me. By the authority they granted me. By the keys they gave me to this kin-dom.

Even my bullies, in a weird way, have honored me by opposing me. If they thought I wasn’t a worthy foe, they wouldn’t have dared bother, amirite? Their enmity was a kind of grudging acknowledgement of the power they thought I had.

The architecture of these last 33 years has provided a welcome scaffolding I didn’t have for my first 22. From the soaring sanctuaries, the academic robes and stoles of many colors, the microphones of varying quality (I will be happy if I never have to wear another lav mic EVER! Says the preacher who can’t seem to make mic wires and long hair work together amiably), the raised chancel, the oil for anointing, the sacraments and the magic words that accompany them…being entrusted with all these precious tools, precious spaces, precious people: well. They have built my whole life.

A life I’m now walking away from. Into the unknown. I’ll be doing a few different things for this next chapter of living. I’ll write more in depth about them at some point, but for now, a quick listicle:

~I’m opening a legal ketamine clinic with my friend Rob Cole, MD in Walnut Creek – we’ll work primarily with cancer patients and survivors, people with end-of-life anxiety, and select others struggling with emotional or spiritual issues, big decisions, life review and more,

~I’ll be running some small retreats at this oasis in the beautiful Sierra Foothills,

~I’ll be doing a small amount of clergy coaching and church vitality coaching, and a bit of guest preaching,

~I’ll keep writing UCC Daily Devotionals, books, articles and other things

~And I am ready to help people get their own book projects born! I am available for hire to help you: conceive and structure your book, set deadlines for drafts, offer notes on drafts, write a book proposal if you hope to publish traditionally or help you navigate the tools for self-publishing,

[If you’re interested in collaborating on any of these things, you can always reply to this newsletter or fill out the form on my website]

But most of all, what I want to do next is REST.

That rest looks like: wandering somewhat aimlessly in city neighborhoods new to me, and in the woods with wild creatures. I’m craving a higher ratio of trees to people.

That rest also looks like: travel to lots of places I’ve never been, and also waking up in my own cozy bed committed to enjoying the world, mindful of EB White’s cheeky aphorism,

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Rest, counterintuitively, also looks like resistance, the engagement that will allow all of us to be less restless because we know we are Doing Something to Fight. For me that means getting into the streets even more often to protest wearing my Roman collar (the collar still means something even if I don’t have a business card to go with it). How people, how Christians especially, how **white Christians especially especially** show up right now really matters to what happens next in the Great Unfolding.

In order to have all these good things, I have to walk away from other good things (and people)--including the architecture of what my life has been for the last 33 years, an architecture that sometimes stifled even as it gave me spine.

My last chapter was often hard, and very, very good. That part of my life feels truly complete. I hear God saying “well done, good and faithful servant.”

Also, who am I kidding? Once a pastor, always a pastor. I’ll just be pastoring in a much bigger arena. Stepping up whenever the next nudge from the Holy Spirit whispers into my ear.

How about you, Loves? What restlessness or rest is the Spirit calling you into? What architecture are you being nudged to step outside of to move more freely through the world?

Christlove,

Molly

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