Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by MacFarquhar Larissa

Author:MacFarquhar, Larissa [MacFarquhar, Larissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

ONE OF THOSE GOD THINGS

After the terrible months in Senegal, Kimberly Brown-Whale was sent by the bishop to be the pastor of a church in Essex, Maryland. Essex was an unbeautiful sprawl across the Back River from the east side of Baltimore. Many of the storefronts on Eastern Avenue, the main drag, were boarded up; among those that were not, there were bars, and bail-bond outfits, and pawnshops, and used-car dealers. But the church was a big white clapboard building, a hundred years old, and this long history, and the parish’s sense of itself as a suburb of respectable working people, rather than a place where homeless men froze to death behind the shopping center, turned out to be a problem.

The congregation was divided. There was a traditional United Methodist service early on Sunday mornings, with a choir and an organ, and later there was the contemporary service, with recorded popular music and DVDs and PowerPoint. This division was not without animosity. The older members disliked the contemporary service—they felt it wasn’t really church—and they were alarmed to see, year by year, their numbers growing fewer, and the contemporary service growing more populous.

Kimberly had a lot of nervous energy. It was hard for her to sit still. She talked a blue streak. She had a loud and hearty laugh, and she laughed a lot. In church, she was always touching and hugging people, and when music played she swayed and clapped with vigor.

She was the first woman pastor the church had ever had, and some people weren’t pleased about it. There were nasty notes dropped in the collection plate or on the pulpit. There were letters sent. There were people who told her to her face that they didn’t want her there and they were going to ask the bishop to remove her. But in every church she ever worked in she had been the first woman pastor, so she was used to that. She thought: Can I love them into giving me a chance? Some people left because she was a woman, and other people were annoyed that those people had left and blamed her for it. But she didn’t feel too bad about that—she couldn’t change her plumbing, she said, and she hadn’t asked to work in this church, the bishop had sent her. Besides, conflict wasn’t always a bad thing. The church wasn’t a social club, it had a mission to win people for Christ, and it was her job to push that mission forward. Doing that was usually uncomfortable, but if she was just a people pleaser, she wasn’t doing her job.

She loved the work. She loved officiating at weddings, and even funerals, though the funerals got harder as she stayed longer in the parish and began herself to grieve for the dead. She felt it a privilege to be taken into a family at such profound and intimate moments. Even on ordinary days, every time she entered the church she felt lifted up.

She was always

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