Search by Michelle Huneven

Author:Michelle Huneven [Huneven, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

21

Face-to-Face

We began our Skype interviews in Belinda’s dining room with Doris Gray, by asking how she preferred to be addressed.

“Reverend, or Pastor Gray for the present,” she said.

I took a note: Formal.

Charlotte then asked for a five-minute summary of her career. Reverend Gray sat at her desk, self-possessed, in her wire-rimmed glasses, her back straight and shoulders squared. Soon we all were sitting up straighter, just from looking at her.

Starting out as one of only a handful of Black women ministers in the denomination, she said, she’d been given many privileged opportunities: She’d been invited on task forces and committees and panels that focused on diversity and race issues; she’d also been named to coveted leadership roles, some of them before she was sufficiently equipped with the necessary skill sets. “But I pride myself on coming up to speed and performing ably in every instance,” she said. She’d risen high in the association; she’d preached and lectured all over the country, and in other countries as well. “Of course, many people assumed that I was placed into these positions to represent my race, and they were ready to make allowances should I fall short in my performance. I made sure not to fall short. But dealing with such condescension was a challenge. My first congregation had such low expectations of my abilities, they were astonished that I could do the job at all, let alone do it well.”

She was sixty-four years old. The same age as Tom Fox!

In fact, she had gone to seminary with him. “We were study partners in New Testament,” she said. “We did a joint report on the Gnostic Gospels. We had a lot of fun being tall and UU together. Folks called us The Terrible U’s because we were both so progressive, so over Christianity, and so irreverent at that small Texas seminary.”

Like Tom Fox, she said, she had “one more big career move” in her.

We’d each been assigned a line of questions for the candidates and she answered them as if it was her (somewhat wearisome) task to articulate answers long known (to her). She didn’t smile once in the first fifteen minutes, and when she did (at Adrian saying, “And that chastity sermon, I mean, damn, woman!”) it was such a relief, all we wanted was to make her smile again.

Imperious and intimidating, I wrote, and v. compelling.

My questions were theological: What was her theology, how did she come to it, and how would it fit in with the variety of beliefs among AUUCC members?

“I do have a theology,” she said. “Theo meaning God and -logy meaning the study of. The study of God and the different beliefs in God.”

She paused for a moment to let that sink in. Charlotte and Belinda glanced at me, acknowledging that I had said something very similar.

“My parents very carefully raised me in the liberal strains of two religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity. I went to synagogue and church. By the time I got to college, I was chafing at both, and if the Hare Krishnas had found me then, they might have bagged me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.