A few hours after posting my last blog, I was fired. It wasn’t the first time I’d been fired from a church job; it was actually the fifth! So the psychological pattern that would follow was well-known: shock from being broadsided, anger and desire for vengeance, long aftermath of depression and self-doubt. But this one placed a poison deeper into my psyche because it happened within days of my turning 65 – that marker which society has chosen to designate the traditional end of one’s professional contribution. Age 65 normally marks the time when in one’s life when achievements are celebrated. To reach retirement age and be met with a callous firing forces me to call into question the effectiveness of my church music career (although not my career as a musician).
One might think I could have been (should have been?) prepared for whatever my retirement would be as a church musician, but I had deliberately postponed that internal conversation thinking, instead, that I would remain in full employment within the church until I was 70, and only after that engage solely in part-time employment, self-employment, and volunteer work. So when this hit me, it threw me into shock.
Apropos the title of this blog series I’m writing, I take this opportunity to make a personal reflection on what has and has not worked in my career in church music, injustices suffered, mistakes made. I can only speak from my own perspective. While it might be tempting to throw stones at my perpetrators, ultimately that would not prove cathartic nor helpful. Instead, I choose to look at the system itself, namely The Church, and the role it has assumed, historically, in the total control of people’s lives, spirits, emotions, and psyche.
I’ve always been interested in psychology and sociology. The way people think and act, and the way social structures are made and inter-relate, are useful handles in grasping how to move through the world. I studied psychology while in graduate school at Yale, and worked avocationally as a therapist for five years. Until I moved to California, where the accreditation laws are radically different from the East coast states, I had assumed I would have a split career: professional musician and therapist. My goals with each of these professions were the same: transformation of the “other.” Long before I got involved in mind-body awareness, or became a meditation teacher, I recognized the importance of understanding systems in order to function in the world.
Although the title of this series is about my 50 years working as a church musician, the overarching subject is the system known as The Church. (I used a capital “T” because The Church functions exactly like a corporation.) While five firings seems like quite a lot, leading one to question whether I was pursuing the right vocation, I believe the overarching issue is the authority of The Church. Those who have fought and died for the Church (the martyrs that Christianity loves to parade) can be balanced by those who have been killed because of the Church (the countless lives ruined, or even ended, in the name of Christianity). To an outsider of The Church institution, blame is often laid on the power of its clergy; but it is The Church, itself, which gives its clergy such power. Not denying the role the Church has played in knitting together whole societies and nations, its one-time role as Mother of the Arts (a role which it has abandoned in favor of the Arts supporting the Church), it is important to ask whether the institution, steeped in patriarchy and control, can change – especially as it becomes increasingly clear that if it doesn’t it will die.
It is time to pull the subject of firing out of the burning cinders of shame. Online statistics show that more than 40% of all Americans have been fired at least once. Among professional church musicians, I would be willing to guess that number is more like 80%, although those stats are nowhere to be found. Every one of my mentors, and most of my colleagues, has either been fired or pushed out of their position at least once. The list of famous composers that have been fired by the Church would shock most lovers of music, headed up by none other than J. S. Bach, himself (fired from Weimar in 1717).
There is something paradoxically empowering about getting fired. It can mean that you are your own person, confident in your gifts in spite of authority’s attempts to define who you are and how you should behave. People who get fired tend to question the way things are done, refusing to be just another cog in someone else’s wheel. And in the words of my fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, “That you have enemies you must not doubt, when you reflect that you have made yourself eminent.”
In my case, had I been fired for musical incompetence, I would have certainly ceased this line of work immediately. But I wasn’t. I was fired for more intangible reasons, having more to do with my personality than anything else. I was often fired because I didn’t fall in line, too much of an individual. My background and education, including a seminary degree, became more of a liability than an asset. I was loathe to be controlled by clergy-authorities.
The first time I was fired, it was for my refusing to sleep with my boss, the rector of the church where I was serving in Washington, DC. He was 60 and I was 26. Every day at the office became a battle of trying to figure out how to avoid him. But because he was a “cardinal rector,” he felt he had the power to call the shots, including demanding that I was to spend two hours a day talking with him, playing squash with him at his Club on weekends, and dining together (with or without parishioners) at least once each week. Dodging his innuendos began to wear on me. This was my first real job. Was this how the job market in the Church was supposed to play itself out?
That experience would end up giving me great compassion for the innumerable women that have suffered similar fates in the workplace. Long before the Me Too movement, clergy and corporate bosses assumed they held the right to take advantage of employees, effectively denying them their God-given right to determine their own future and own their own bodies. Powerful bosses who believe that they can have sexual gratification from their employees perform the most egregious act of psychological violence. This is the very definition of sin – making yourself God. After six months of attempting unsuccessfully to seduce me, the rector fired me because “I just didn’t seem as warm as he thought I would be.” Shaken but still standing, I took my severance money and got as far away as I could: I went trekking in the Himalayas of Nepal.
After this firing, and because I was still quite young, I swore off continuing to work for The Church, fearing that I could never trust it again with my life, talent, and livelihood. I took the train from Washington, DC up to New York City to meet with a highly respected colleague, friend and mentor, Alec Wyton. Alec was one of the Founders of the Association of Anglican Musicians (AAM), had served as Director of Music at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, was a well-regarded composer, was the coordinator of the commission that produced The Hymnal 1982, and had “retired” at this point to be the Music Director at St. James Church, Madison Ave. He was a titan in the music world. Over lunch, he strongly encouraged me to remain in the profession, saying that I shouldn’t allow one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel. I was dubious but took his advice and wisdom cautiously. Shortly after that lunch, Paul Halley, the then Organist and Master of the Choristers at St. John the Divine, asked Alec whom he should hire as his Assistant Music Director at the Cathedral. Alec gave him my name.
So, at 8 a.m. one morning in the Spring of 1985, I got a phone call out of the blue from Paul Halley inviting me to go up to New York to audition for him. We chatted for a bit, and I agreed to visit early the next week to meet him. I stayed with an old friend from grad school, Chuck Pilling, who was living on the Upper West Side. I had never been to St. John the Divine before and didn’t really know where it was nor what to expect. Chuck said, “Just get off the subway at 110th and walk East. You can’t miss it.”
Taking the #1 line up to 110th, I dutifully traipsed down Cathedral Parkway until I neared the corner of Amsterdam Ave., the street the Cathedral sits on. On that corner is a gothic-styled building known as Chapter House (part of the Cathedral Close). It looks so much like a church that I actually thought it was the Cathedral. Hmm, I thought. So this is it? It looks kinda cute. (It seats about 250.)
But then I reached the actual corner of 110th and Amsterdam and gazed northwards up the street. The massive hulk of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest gothic-style cathedral, loomed over me, and it literally took my breath away. (It seats 8000.) I walked up its stone steps and through the entrance at the west end of the nave. The architecture of all cathedrals is designed to impress, and nothing quite matches the feeling of entering the great gothic cathedrals of the world. This one was no different. If I had any doubts, upon taking the train up to New York, as to whether or not I wanted to stay in church music, walking through the doors of St. John the Divine dispelled that reservation.
It was Holy Week, and Paul Halley was in rehearsal for the annual presentation of Bach’s St. John Passion, traditionally performed on Good Friday at St. John the Divine. I sat in the back of the Cathedral, soaking up the ambiance, the Bach music, the clarity in which I could hear Paul speaking 300 feet away, the light, and the magic. At the end of the rehearsal, I went up and introduced myself.
Paul Halley is one of the most charismatic, wildly talented, good looking, friendly, brilliant, fun, and kind people I have ever known. Everything about Paul set him apart from our other colleagues, even down to the audition, itself. I had come prepared to play some music, of course; but Paul told me that he had no doubts that I could play brilliantly. He was more interested in my musicianship. And to discover that, we both went up to the organ console, and he asked me to acquaint myself with the instrument (truly one of the great organs of the world), not by playing repertoire, but by improvising to the sounds as I was discovering them. The entire audition was an improvisation! A conversation over lunch followed.
I left New York having been offered, and accepted, the job, and giving church music, and The Church, itself, another chance.
A few weeks later I was aboard a flight to India and Nepal, putting the horrific experience of working at the church in Washington, DC behind me. Little did I know how the psychological damage of that, my first full time employment on American soil (following my year at Westminster Abbey), would shape my relationship to authority, to my profession, and to the Church.
To be continued.