Miles was buouyed, emotionally and spiritually, by his Wrigley Field experience. None of the mounting problems that were weighing him down had been solved. Rachel was still alienated both from her husband and her father, Brian still faced the very real prospect of a substantial prison sentence, and Miles himself had no more clarity on the direction of his life and vocation. Nevertheless, he enjoyed welcome relief from undue anxiety, and felt expectantly optomistic, confident in the myserious ways of providential grace. As a seasoned pastor, however, he would have been the first to warn anyone else in similar circumstances that the mountaintop, while a wonderful place to visit, cannot sustain life indefinitely. One must journey back into the valley to, if nothing else, lay in provisions, and recover from the hallucinogenic thin air of the heights.
For Miles, the descent from his latest trip up the mountain began the following Sunday. A couple of oblique coffee hour comments from members of the vestry portended some angst brewing in anticipation of the regular August meeting two nights hence (always the third Tuesday evening of the month). As they were both reaching for the same lemon bar on the table bearing the usual assortment of post liturgical finger food confections, Bruce Mueller casually remarked, “By the way, Father, I’ve finally gotten written requests from AlaTeen and Smokers Anonymous. I know the vestry packets have probably already been mailed, but I’m hoping we can approve them Tuesday night.” Bruce chaired the Facilities Use Committee, which was responsible for, among other things, overseeing arrangements with outside groups for the use of parish buidlings and grounds. Miles simply nodded his assent; he did not want to get into an extended discussion of the matter. A few moments later, this time as they were both reaching for a paper cup full of lemonade, Kara Lessard, also a member of the vestry and chair of the Program Committee, gently grasped his elbow. In sotto voce tones she made her feelings known on what Miles knew was the same subject, although one not familiar with parish politics might not have grasped the connection. “Father Miles, I eMailed Donna with something for the vestry packet. I’ve done a rough schedule of parish events and group meetings for the coming program year, and what rooms they’ll be needing to use. I’m hoping that if everybody has this information early we can avoid some of the conflicts we’ve had in the past.” Again, Miles smiled and indicated his thanks and avoided going any deeper.
An experienced parish priest learns to perform a delicate intuitive calculus on such comments. They never exist purely unto themselves, but are chained to an intricate maze of similar and complementary and expanded and amplified and nuanced and contradictory remarks. And the priest is invariably at or near the end of the chain. Depending on the source, and the precise content of the comment, it needs to be accorded a greater gravity than would inhere in a strict and narrow construction. Miles quickly began to dread Tuesday’s vestry meeting. An issue that had quietly dogged him for two or three years, despite his repeated attempts to ignore it, was apparently going to make an unscheduled and uninvited appearance. The presenting problem was that of balancing the use of St Alban’s physical plant between functions that originate from within the life of the parish, and the growing demands of various outside groups—Twelve Step and other “recovery” organizations, to be specific—that were allowed to use the facilities, either without charge or with a very nominal rent, as part of the “outreach” ministry of the church, because, while not directly church-related, or even overtly Christian, their general aims were consonant with what church communities normally consider to be included within the scope of their mission. What had begun as one Alcoholis Anonymous group using one room one night per week during Father Lawrence’s tenure had ballooned to over two dozen weekly meetings, both in the evening and during the day, of those addicted to, or codependent with someone addicted to, not only alcohol, but various sorts of drugs, overeating, pornography, and sexual acting out. Inevitably, conflict waxed and waned. Miles was genuinely ambivalent on the matter; he was sympathetic to the core concerns of both sides. Ambivalence, in itself, did not necessarily create a pastoral problem. If anything, it allowed him to demonstrate even-handedness and universality of caring. In tandem with what could quite reasonably be described as apathy, however, something much more volatile emerged. In truth, Miles found it difficult to work up a respectable lather over any aspect of the conflict. He cared genuinely, but not intensely. It was this apathetic ambivalence, he was beginning to realize, that underlay the perception of weak leadership that Bishop Landry had revealed to him in their uncomfortable encounter the previous month. As he returned to the sacristy to stow his cassock (the weather had significantly cooled since the previous Sunday) after the coffee hour, he once again had the opportunity to regret his appointment of Lance Kemper as the senior warden. By custom, the senior warden of a parish is not only the ranking lay leader, but is also supposed to be a confidante and supportive advisor to the rector. The personal chemistry Miles had hoped for, however, never gelled. He knew Lance, who was in his late forties, and editor of the Lake Country Herald, a suburban competitor to the major Chicago dailies, to be outspokenly a member of the “open” faction—supportive of accomodating the “Twelve Steppers” in any degree possible.
Later that afternoon, as he reclined on the den couch with the Sunday Tribune, Miles realized, on a deeper level, that he straddled a generational vortex not of his own making, but which was at the very heart of the conflict. Born in the late 1940s, he was very much a “baby boomer.” Those who were his chronological senior carry a memory of the way “church” was “done” in the halcyon days of the ’50s and ’60s, with a smorgasbord of age and interest-focused programs. These were allied with the twentysomethings and younger thirtysomethings who were raising families and who otherwise easily fall prey to Little League, soccer, ballet lessons, and the like. They lust for meaning. They want to reclaim the church for the church, and leave the Twelve Steppers to their own devices. The sandwich generation, “boomers,” are driven by a social conscience forged in the cultural crucible of the late sixties and early seventies. To them, the recovery groups are an important symbol of their idea of outreach—social responsibility. The overall anxiety is compounded by the fact that, not only has the parish operating budget become dependent on the modest rental income from the outside groups, but regular giving for the year is running an alarming twenty percent below budget and attendance is flagging as well.
Miles blames himself for this, and remembers the severity of Chase Landry’s mandate to bring down the level of anxiety at St Alban’s. Heretofore, he had excelled at precisely this task. With wisdom both innate and acquired, Miles studiously avoided making any but the most minor changes to the ethos and fabric of St Alban’s Church for a full two years after his arrival. Austin Lawrence had, fortunately, left the parochial infrastructure well-maintained and smoothly running, so there was no demand, real or perceived, for a bold stroke on the part of the new rector. To inherit such a position as Miles did is a double-edged sword. It is a blessing not to have to engage in crisis management or create new administrative systems. But that very stability that is so welcome from one angle is bothersome from the other side. When the time does arrive for a leader to initiate change, the system is so closed, so attached to its own homeostasis, that inordinate leverage is required to effect movement.
Such leverage, much to his advantage, Miles found not so much in any innate charm as in his utter dependability as a pastor, combined with an intentionally-acquired knowledge of how social systems operate in organizations like churches, all combined with the unforced transparency of his personality. He had an ability, therefore, to inspire trust across generational and socio-economic lines. If people had the sense that they were being taken into his confidence more than was actually the case, it sprang from no chicanery on his part. And when people were in crisis, Father Coverdale had trained himself to be at his empathetic best. This quality works serendipitously for a parish priest if the right people go into crisis. Six months into Miles’s cure, the Junior Warden’s four-year-old grandson was struck by a car while riding his bike and suffered a massive closed head injury. Miles sat with the parents, twenty-six-year old Tom and Kara Lessard, the better part of three days as doctors tried every measure available to them to relieve pressure on Andy’s brain, but, in the end, it didn’t work, and he held their hands and prayed as the life support systems were turned off. Another half-year later, Terry Lovejoy Mueller—granddaughter of St Alban’s patriarch Elton Lovejoy—came with her husband, Bruce, in desperate concern for their daughter Melinda, who was distant, withdrawn, and sallow beyond the norm for a fifteen-year-old. Miles was able not only able to intuit the signs of anorexia, but to calmly talk Melinda into cooperatively entering an eating disorders treatment program.
For most of the hundred years since it was first named, Grove Lake was a quiet farming and low-key resort community in the lake country northwest of Chicago. Even in the post-World War II explosion of suburban growth, it remained just off the fringe of the Chicago metropolitan area. It was nearly 1970 before the urban behemoth could be said to have pulled the Village of Grove Lake securely into its orbit. St Alban’s mission was established in late 1920s as a chapel-of-ease for the affluent Chicagoans who maintained summer cottages on the scores of miles of lakefront within a ten mile radius of the center of town. The church was an early casualty of the Great Depression, and after the summer of 1930, the doors of the small brick chapel were padlocked for four years. Regular worship resumed thereafter, with a priest driving in from Elgin to the southwest, or Arlington Heights to the southeast, once or twice a month. On the other Sundays, services were conducted by Dr Elton Lovejoy, a licensed Lay Reader, who was also the local veterinarian for creatures both domestic and agricultural. Dr Lovejoy was an immigrant from the moors of Yorkshire, and his younger brother was a Church of England clergyman, a village priest in the Diocese of Durham.
St Alban’s muddled along in this fashion through the war years until its first full-time resident priest took up his duties on Christmas Eve 1946. Father Giles Wentworth was a single man in his thirties—undoubtedly homosexual, many would later opine, though no one was given to such speculation at the time. He was inveterately outgoing, and singularly gifted in what was probably the one thing needful at that stage in the history of St Albans—fundraising. He parked himself in the cocktail lounge of the Grove Lake Country Club (membership in which was arranged and subsidized for him by the Vestry of St Alban’s) and adroitly picked the pockets of the aging lake resort set, both parishioners and non-parishioners alike, just before they faded from the scene. On St Alban’s Day 1954, the Bishop of Chicago consecrated a stone-faced neo-gothic structure seating 350, on a two-and-a-half acre parcel just inside the village limits on the main highway through town. The membership of the parish at that time, if they all decided to come to church on one Sunday, would still have left the structure half-empty. But Father Wentworth proved prescient in his insistence on building for the needs of the future, not the present. He never got to see himself vindicated, however. On the night of the day the new church was consecrated, Giles Wentworth drove his car into the Fox River in Elgin and drowned. Everyone presumed gin was involved, but such presumption was always unspoken.
By the late 1950s, the trickle, later to become a torrent, of Chicago commuters began to take up residence in Grove Lake, utilizing existing housing stock at first, then discreetly erecting boutique subdivisions, miniaturizations of the large-scale developments going in closer to the city. The Milwaukee Road added the village to its daily commuter schedule and built a proper station—though not without the protest of several citizens of longevity, who did not wish to see their town be absorbed into the Chicago megalopolis. St Alban’s grew slowly but steadily during these years. A Guild Hall and Sunday School wing was added in 1960. The next year, a full-time assisting priest was added to the staff. When the golden era of the mainline churches came to an end even as they flexed their collective muscle most aggressively as part of the general protest against the Vietnam War, growth at St Alban’s slowed, but never stalled. The rector during those years, Larry Cole, was decidedly out in front of his parishioners in his participation in the protest movements of the time, but they suffered him with good humor, partly because they were well conditioned to be deferential toward the clergy, and partly because Father Cole was just a nice guy.
By the midpoint of the second Reagan administration, about the time Father Miles Coverdale became the fifth rector of St Alban’s Church, it was one of the top ten parishes in the Diocese of Chicago, with nearly nine hundred baptized members on the rolls and average Sunday attendance of just under four hundred. Miles’s predecessor, Austin Lawrence, had been elected Bishop of Iowa, leaving his nearly retired assistant, Charlie Sage, to hold the fabric of the parish together during the interregnum. Father Sage was a gifted counselor and pastoral visitor, but he was a mediocre preacher, administrator, and liturgist. The lay leaders of the parish released an audible gasp of relief when Father Coverdale moved his books and pictures and certificates into the rector’s study on the first Tuesday in August.
After two years, Miles felt it to be the right time to move toward a more proactive position of pastoral leadership. The pea under his mattress was liturgical—which is to say, it was a quite intimate spiritual issue for him. Since his conversion experience in college, corporate worship had been the life blood of his personal prayer. And the template which defined his ideal of corporate worship was the vigorous Anglo-Catholicism of Father Locke in Wheaton, his college mentor, and St Mary’s Chapel at Nashotah House. Against this measure, the liturgical practice which he inherited from Father Lawrence was tepid fare. It reflected the slowly emerging re-homogenization of Sunday worship in the Episcopal Church in the wake of the ferment leading up to the revision of the Prayer Book in 1976 (which, in turn, was fueled by, as much as anything else, the convulsions in the Roman Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council)—contemporary (as opposed to the venerable Elizabethan) English, simple and accessible congregational music, no chanting of prayers by the priest, no incense, and a generally relaxed, almost casual, attitude toward ceremonial of any sort. The essential mystery of the Eucharist, of course, still happens under such a regime, but not, by the lights of Miles Coverdale, in a way that does justice to its profundity. He would have preferred something more along the lines of “High Mass with an attitude.” In the fullness of time—after two years, that is—the rector of St Alban’s began to ratchet up the liturgical ambience of the place. He proceeded slowly but deliberately, and had the backing of such families as the Lessards and the Muellers (and others of the Lovejoy clan who remained in the parish) and everything happened in due course and virtually without conflict.
The Lessards and the Lovejoys, then, were two very influential families at St Alban’s, and as a result of his personal ministry to them, they had been habitually inclined to give Miles’s ideas and proposals every possible benefit of the doubt. Now the Lovejoys (under the Mueller name) and the (younger) Lessards were in opposite camps, and the priest who had been their pastor and friend for a dozen years was caught in the middle. He fretted about the vestry meeting all during his Monday sabbatical, and wished profoundly that the Cubs were playing at home that week, when, in fact, they had moved on to St Louis. By the time he tapped his ceremonial gavel on the conference room table to begin the meeting, he had conjured a serious resolve to be unflappable, to carefully modulate the tone of his voice, to be careful about letting both sides of the issue have something resembling equal time, and to exercise his own moral authority in such a way that would represent what the group-process gurus at the management seminars he attended from time to time called “win-win thinking.”
The first few items on agenda were routine, and were dispensed with quickly, beginning, ironically enough, with adoption of the agenda itself. Miles could sense Kara Lessard’s anxiety over the fact that, according to the arbitrary rules of alphabetical order, in the section of the agenda falling under the heading “Committee Reports,” the report of the Facilities Use Committee preceded that of the Program Committee. Bruce Mueller would have the first word on the subject, forcing her to play defense. The draft minutes from the previous meeting were approved quickly. The treasurer presented a report typical for summer, which is always a low ebb for church finances, so it therefore did little to allay anxiety with respect to outside rental income. To Miles’s relief, Lance Kemper did not use his privileged floor time in his Senior Warden’s report to advance his position on what everyone knew would be “the issue” of the meeting. Miles’ own rector’s report was manifestly brief.
When it was Bruce Mueller’s turn to present the report of the Facilities Use Committee, he avoided anything that could have been construed as pugnacity, but he was a strong advocate for his cause. “As most of you probably know, since out last meeting, we’ve received formal applications from two groups that have been waiting a long time for us to find a spot for them—Smoker’s Anonymous and AlaTeen. These are both really strong programs that are presently meeting in people’s homes, which, of course, limits the number of people they can accommodate. I would really hate to see us not be able to help them out.”
When Bruce finished speaking, there was silence. Miles knew, however, that Bruce’s hope was to get vestry approval at this meeting for Smoker’s Anonymous and AlaTeen to be added to St Alban’s list of tenants, and although it was not strictly his duty, as chairman of the meeting, to come to Mueller’s rescue, his inner pastor trumped his inner parliamentarian. “Would you like to make a motion, Bruce?” But even as the words were leaving his lips, Miles felt a twinge of anxiety. Would his coming to Bruce’s aid be construed as favoritism toward Bruce’s position? Would it create damage in his relationship with Kara that he would have to repair later?
“Thank-you, Father,” was Bruce Mueller’s reply. “Yes, I would like to move that we approve the applications from Smoker’s Anonymous and AlaTeen.” At that point, the duty of the chairman was clear. “Is there a second?” Lance Kemper did not hesitate for a moment. “I second the motion.”
“Is there any discussion?” the chairman inquired, realizing full well what the answer would be, although, once again, there was a four or five second period of silence during which Miles began to wonder whether the question would proceed to an immediate vote. But, as he might have guesssed, Kara Lessard spoke up. “Well, I really do hate to be the ‘bad cop’ on this, I really do. But, you know, it’s just like when we talk about the budget, and somebody wants this or that item to have more money put into it, but they don’t say where they’re going to get the money from. You’ve got to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul,’ you know? So my question is, Where are we going to put these groups? In the sacristy? In Father Coverdale’s office?” She lifted a sheaf of papers that lay in front of her on the conference room table. “I’ve got a report here that’s already on the agenda, but I can tell you right now what it says. It says we’re maxed out. I would love nothing better than to accommodate every Twelve Step group in the county that needs a place to meet, but we just haven’t got the room.”
Another awkward silence—this time broken by Lance Kemper. “Kara, if I thought you meant that literally, I could see your point. But I find it difficult to believe that, in any given week, there aren’t two rooms available for a couple of hours. I mean, we’re not talking about a coporate boardroom, for Pete’s sake, we’re talking about a table and a few chairs. What about the Youth Room? Why can’t AlaTeen meet in the Youth Room? They are teenagers, after all. And we certainly don’t have a youth group that meets every night of the week.”
“That’s easy to say, Lance,” Kara retorted, “but Steve tells me it would cramp their style to have others on their turf.” Steve Wilson was the half-time staff member in charge of youth ministry. “We made a commitment to the kids when we hired Steve that they would have space they can call their own—be able to decorate the way they want, and to come and go they way they want. Besides—yes, AlaTeen are teenagers, and that’s my point: They’re going to act like teenagers, and sooner or later there’s going to be problems, and our own kids are going to get the short end.”
“Well, we really can’t say that, can we?” opined Wanda Jennings, a legal secretary in her day job, now serving the first year of her first term on the vestry, and speaking openly for the first time in a meeting. “We just don’t know. Maybe it would work out and maybe it wouldn’t. We just don’t know.”
Meanwhile, Miles felt his eyes start to glaze over, and hoped it wasn’t evident to anyone else. Intense boredom was setting in. He just wanted this meeting to be over. He wanted to be home, watching the news, drinking a beer. Even walking Belle would be preferable to this.
Bruce Meuller rejoined the exchange, reiterating how desperate the two groups in question were. The volume of his voice, however, was overpowered in Miles’ head by the memory of Chase Landry’s stentorian tone from their last meeting: “What I’m hearing is that you’re not giving any leadership at St Alban’s, that you let conflict fester, and that you take both sides of an issue, depending on who you’re talking to.” Bruce’s contribution was followed by one from Frank Williams, a retired history professor whose voice still betrayed his Welsh upbringing. But the rector’s attention was so stretched that he was scarcely aware of what side of the question the professor was advocating for. Three other members also weighed in passionately, though not really saying anything new.
“Father, I move the previous question.” It was Michael McKittrick, a physician in his early sixties, serving his third tour of duty on the vestry.
That motion temporarily snapped Miles out of his torpor. “It’s been moved that we end debate. Is there a second?” Lance Kemper wasted no time answering that call. Miles continued, “OK, that’s a non-debatable motion. All in favor, please signify by saying ‘Aye.’” There was a determined chorus of response, but Miles knew immediately that it was far from unanimous. “All opposed?” Led by Kara Lessard’s sonorous alto voice, those who wanted to keep talking expressed their wishes. It was a divided house, so the chair was forced to ask for a show of hands. When six arms were raised to indicate an ‘Aye’ vote, Miles wondered why this had to be the first meeting of the year—in August, no less—at which all twelve members of the vestry were present. For an instant, he silently held out hope for an abstention, but none materialized. It was six in favor, six opposed—and this was only on a motion to end debate, not even on the substantive question itself.
It was not a complicated calculation, and Miles made it in a moment. The moorings of his neutral position as a “non-anxious presence” were collapsing beneath him. It was his duty now to cast a tie-breaking vote. He could exercise his right to abstain, of course, but since, when there is a tie vote, the motion is presumed to have failed, abstaning would be the functional equivalent of voting No. He could not remain detached. He no longer had the luxury of being bored. He would have to come down on one side or the other. Upon later reflection, he would realize that to vote Yes would be construed as aligning himself with Bruce Mueller and the “open” contingent. To vote No would be perceived as an endorsement of Kara Lessard and the “no vacancy” position. Under the pressure of the moment, however, even such relatively obvious deductions did not bubble to the surface of Miles’ consciousness. His pastoral default mode led him to conclude that, as a general principle, when a group is faced with an important decision, it’s better to allow people to talk than to deny them that opportunity.
Yet, in the more than two hundred vestry meetings at which he had presided during his ministry, Miles had never had to cast a tie-breaking vote. It was uncharted territory for him. There was no script, either conscious or sub-conscious, for him to follow. He found himself looking down at his agenda sheet on the table in front of him for what seemed like a minute, though it was in fact only about six seconds. “I, uh…I guess I just want…I just want to be sure that everybody’s had a say and nobody feels steamrolled. So I guess that means I vote No. The motion to end debate fails. Of course, it would have anyway, even if I hadn’t voted. But…the motion fails. We keep talking.” Then, before anyone had a chance to say anything, Miles added a coda: “Of course, please don’t interpret my vote as expressing an opinion on the question that’s on the floor…that of approving agreements with Al-a-Teen and Smokers Anonymous. Which we now have the opportunity to keep talking about, if anybody has anything to say. Does anybody have anything to say?”
Miles knew immediately that, despite the good intentions that underlay his vote, his comment on it constituted one of the most infelicitous remarks ever to come out of his mouth. He uttered it, and it just sat in the middle of the conference room table like a stack of dirty dishes. Sure, he wanted to call it back and have another shot at crafting something more elegant, but—aside from the impossibility of doing so—what would he say? There was no obvious way out of the quicksand into which he was slowly sinking.
Meanwhile, as Miles was indulging himself in these morbid reflections, no one said a word. Wasn’t the last thing he said, “Does anybody have anything to say?” Hadn’t he just spent a pocketful of political capital for the sake of keeping the conversation going? And now nobody has anything to say? Surely someone would speak up if they were only nudged. “Wow. Are we really all talked out on this?” Silence. Maybe levity would cut the fog that had descended onto the room. “Going once…going twice…I guess it looks like we’re ready to vote, huh?”
As he was voicing that observation, Miles was suddenly stabbed with the realization that the vote on closing debate was a preview of the vote on the question itself. But he had to think and act at the same time. “OK, all in favor of approving the agreements with Al-a-Teen and Smokers Anonymous as proposed by the Facilities Use Committee, please signify by saying…oh, why even bother; we pretty much know where this is going…please signify by raising your hand.” There were several smiles and a couple of chuckles over the rector’s assessment of the futility of a voice vote. Bruce Mueller and Lance Kemper and Michael McKittrick and the same three others who had voted in favor of “calling the question” raised their hands. Miles felt like the widow in a silent film melodrama, tied by the villain to the railroad tracks, with the locomotive bearing down. Only the good guys in the white hats were not charging over the hill to come to the rescue.
“All opposed, same sign.” Kara Lessard and the same five others who had voted to keep talking, but then had nothing more to say, raised their hands. “Does the chair hear a motion to adjourn?” Miles’ attempt to lighten the atmosphere, and buy himself some time, through humor was appreciated by all. It did not, however, change the reality that lay before him. He looked back down at his agenda sheet, took a deep and slow breath, sent a short but earnest silent prayer heavenward, and addressed his vestry. “Look, folks, I’ve got to be honest with you.” (As if he would ever be expected, by himself or others, to be duplicitous—yet, it felt important to say.) “I just don’t have passionate feelings about either side of this debate.” (This was more than a mild understatement, but he hoped the members would not realize that.) “I don’t have some superior wisdom that I can now reveal and break the knot.” (He never would have claimed such, but for most of his career, it felt as though that were true.) “I apologize to you if it seems that I’m AWOL on this. Bruce—(doesn’t the judge announcing a decision in a civil suit usually address the “loser” first?)—I honor the time and effort and good faith you’ve put into this. Kara, the same goes for you. We’re not enemies here. We’re on the same team. As you can probably tell, I wish I had some way out of this. But I’ve got to cast a vote, and as I examine my conscience in this moment, the most honest thing for me to do is abstain. Because I really do not have an opinion one way or the other. I actually think both sides are right, for whatever that’s worth! I don’t want to just cop out on this, I really don’t. But I have to abstain. And I know that means the motion fails. But you have to trust me—and Bruce, I guess I’m aiming this mostly at you—you’ve go to trust me that, if the motion were that we not enter into these proposed agreements, I would still abstain, even though that would mean, if effect, that the teens and the smokers would now be camping out with us. It’s just a parliamentary quirk the way things have worked out.” Miles knew that was a rather lame and contorted observation and wished he hadn’t said it.
The rest of the meeting was subdued. Kara Lessard reported for the Program Committee, assisted by the four page handout containing facts and numbers and diagrams that Miles—though he would never say this to anyone—found mind-numbing. The report was purely informative, and did not require a vestry decision. Yet, it had the unavoidable effect of seeming to rub Bruce Mueller’s nose in the sourness of his defeat. This added to Miles’ already considerable discomfort, and he suspected that Kara was not enjoying the experience either.
When the moment of adjournment finally arrived, the members of the vetry departed with much less than the usual amount of post-meeting banter. Miles quickly retreated to his study, where he took the opportunity to check his electronic mail—not a strictly necessary task at that moment, but one that removed him from the occasion of having to perform further damage assessment and spin control. He just wanted to get home as quickly as possible, preferably without talking to anybody en route.
A few minutes later, as Miles ventured out into the parking lot, he spotted at least thee separate conversations going on between various vestry members. He knew he ought to find that alarming, but it was difficult to summon the emotional energy. He knew he ought to have extracted a pledge from both Bruce and Kara to meet with him informally as soon as possible and find a way forward that both could embrace. He ought to have done that even before tonight’s vestry meeting and, barring that, he should have arranged that meeting publicly even as he was announcing his abstaining vote. There were, in fact, a great many things left undone that he ought to have done. In the parlance of the General Confession from the liturgy of Morning Prayer that had been imprinted on him in his youth, he was a “miserable offender,” and he felt as though there was indeed “no health” in him. But in that moment, he could no sooner have done what needed to be done than he could have flown straight to the full moon that illumined the parking lot of St Alban’s Church.
