Back in Bisbee and Happy New Year!

This was written December 10 and for one reason or another I didn't post it.  I am posting it now to celebrate four months in Bisbee, and also to wish all my friends here and in North Carolina and everywhere a Happy New Year.

I also would like to note that Dan Wikler and his wife Sarah and their son Sam were in Bisbee for 10 days and we loved seeing them and having dinner with them Monday evening. Dan and I have known each other for over 20 years and he is now at the Harvard School of Public Health holding a chair in population ethics.

Also, we saw my brother Steve and his wife Cristen over the holidays twice, the second time they brought their son, Greg with his new fiance Katia.  The fact that Steve and I are drawing close again is one of the best things that has happened in my life in a long time.

We've been back in Bisbee four months now. It feels good, really good.  Carole is finally beginning to get over the trauma of the move and of leaving friends and our wonderful house in Durham, NC. 

I also feel the loss of friends and place there too.  I watched "Loggerheads" the other night, a movie that takes place in three parts of North Carolina, the coast, the Piedmont, and western Carolina (Asheville).  I got homesick for that beautiful state once again.  We actually lived longer there than anywhere else in our 41 years of marriage. 

We have so many good friends in Durham and especially our friends at Pilgrim United Church of Christ.

Community means everything to me and community is palpable here in Bisbee.

On Thanksgiving our small church, St. John's, served dinner for the community and over 200 people came, a record for us. 

Some are homeless, some were lonely, but mainly all of us in differing ways simply wanted to be together with others in town, laughing, eating, and talking.  People show up to help each year, people who don't go to our church but who love some of the things we do.

We also said goodbye to a good friend, Jim Tilley, who died at the Tucson VA a month or so ago.  We had a big dinner celebration at the Homeless Shelter and once again, the town showed up.  Jim was a long-time HIV patient who was known by everybody, it seems.  He had a career in the Army and as a civilian working at Fort Huachuca, before he moved to Bisbee about 10 years ago.

Carole and I met him through our mutual love of dogs.  When we visited in Bisbee last Thanksgiving and talked with Jim he told us that his health was declining rapidly and that he didn't expect to live very much longer, but he made it for a year.

Another friend, James Burke, visited Jim at the VA shortly before his death, and got up in bed with him and let the doctor take some pictures, with everyone laughing.

We went to the swearing in of the new mayor, Jack Porter, December 2. Jack and his wife Pat are two of our best friends in Bisbee.  Jack served on the council with me and continued when I finished my second term in 2004.  He won a big vote in November, almost 65 percent.  I predict he will be a very successful mayor. 

It was strange to be back in City Hall with old friends, remembering the 4 years I sat up front with the Council and what we all went through to address a 100-year old decrepit sewer system.

I can honestly say that, of the many jobs I have had in my life, serving as Bisbee's mayor was the most enjoyable, most transforming, and most frustrating of any other challenge I have faced.  It is such a satisfying feeling to work with a community you love and to accomplish things with others.

The most common thing people say to us, all over town, when we have met them, is "welcome home." For a small town with a certain amount of tension and anxiety about newcomers, to be welcomed by people who have lived here all their lives is such an honor and such a tribute to the kind of town Bisbee is.

I'm enjoying St. John's and the vicar, Fr. Seth Polley.  He has had an interesting career.  His first assignment as the rector the Cathedral in Panama City, after the Americans left and so he had a very small congregation in a huge Episcopal church. 

Lori Keyne, his wife, an accomplished organist and harpsichordist, is a full-time music professor at Cochise College and director of a bi-national choir with Mexico. They have a beautiful young daughter, Catalina.

Tuesday, December 9, we watched "Tender Mercies" at church and it was wonderful.  About 12 of us were there and most had not seen the movie. 

One of the members of our congregation is Fr. Ben Somerville and his wife Mary Anne.  Ben retired as rector from St. Stephen's in Sierra Vista and he attends our church because of the rule that departing ministers must move to a new church.  We are very lucky to have them with us.

I first met Ben about 10 years ago while he was still the rector at St. Stephen's.  He participated in Shalem, a spiritual formation program attached to the National Cathedral, or at least it was back them.  I was an admirer of the late Gerald May's writing on spirituality when he was so central to that program. 

And I also was close to Judith Walker, who was an ordained Disciples minister who was active in the Disciples church at Hiram College in Ohio.  She was married to Jim Case, a math teacher there.  Judith wanted to become ordained in the Episcopal Church in this diocese but tragically discovered she had lung cancer and died after a brief illness. Ben was her guide through that difficult time and was wonderfull.

I will never forget her telling me that she asked Ben what spiritual classics she ought to read before her death and at the same time confessed her desire to read all of the Nero Wolfe books again. 

Ben said that she had read enough about God and that he wouldn't be surprised that God would take joy in her reading what she wanted to.  And so the town scrounged around to find as many of the Nero Wolfe series it could.  She was up to 35 when she died, as I recall.

And Tom and Jean Buechele, our good friends from Hawaii and who lived in Bisbee during our first 10 years here came back for a visit to their AZ friends. Tom was the vicar at St. Johns before Seth Polley.

I always say that Carole and I are lucky in pastors and so many of the people I truly admire are in the ministry, many of them at Pilgrim UCC in Durham (Bill Smith, Ron Johnson, Lori Pistor, and Ginger Brasher Cunningham) and Mick Drown at Trinity United Methodist in Albany, and Tom Buechele and Seth Polley and Ben Somerville here in Bisbee. 

As someone whose passion and work has been focused on politics I find it curious that I never get too far from a good friend who is a minister. I think it is because the ministers I have known talk about and think about the "Things Invisible" of "Love, death, the cruelty of power, and time's curve past the stars" as Carol Bly put it in the last essay of her book, Letter From the Country.

I call it life itself.

I have spent my life investigating my doubts about faith and yet never spending much time away from the questions that circle the "things invisible."  I have found that the people I care for the most are people who live with those questions about things invisible as central in their lives.  Many that I have known have been ministers, all in churches that represent what we call progressive Christianity that doesn't stop thinking and questioning.

That same probing question can come from other places, of course, but the people I am close to, or wish I were more close to, are people who live with that sense of wonder and awe at the gift that is life itself, and many of them are people of the cloth.  

Finally, and speaking of gifts, on that same night, December 9, Carole and I celebrated our 41st Anniversary.  As I watched "Tender Mercies" that night, and later as the group talked about the film, I watched Carole across the table, thinking, what a great gift I have been graced to share over so many years.

Thanks be to God.

Comments

[Bill Smith]

Dan and Crole: Your card and note have just arrived in the mail, and I appreciate so much being reminded of the Copper City Web site, so we can read your postings. Last night we watched Virginia Tech(78) take away Wake Forests(71) #1status, which the players consider a relief, and then saw UNC(94) defeat Clemson(70),for the 54th time since 1926 in Chapel Hill. Am I making you home sick, or do you get games from over here there?...We also have watched the Cardinals beat our Panthers and the Eagles, and will have a Super Bowl party to see what happens then. I hope that Kurt can pull it off!..We had a fine inauguration party on Tuesday in our Solarium, all of us standing with wet eyes as Obama was sworn in, and again as we sang "The Star Spangled Banner" joyfully. The Quakers joined in with the rest. Actually, Quakers were in the majority present. What a good time it is to be alive! LOve to both of you, Bill

[Chris and Cindie Blessing]

Dan and Carole,

It's so good to hear that you're back in Bisbee. I look forward to meeting up with you again. Cindie and I now in Malaysia, after 4 years in Latvia. Life is good, and Asia is a thrill.