The Raible Rules

Just got home from a three-day ministers' retreat at Crawford's Notch, New Hampshire. The "business" of the meeting was to finalize the consolidation of the Maine Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association chapter with the chapter in New Hampshire and Vermont, in order to reflect the consolidation of the two denominational districts comprised of the churches our two UUMA chapters serve. So basically a lot of bureaucratic legalese and mumbo-jumbo as folks dotted all the "i's" and crossed all the "t's," but in the meantime I had a great opportunity to catch up with two of my Harvard classmates, Bruce Johnson and Gary Kowalski, and also to say goodbye to all of the other ministers in the two chapters, many of whom I was just getting to know when I got sick last February. It's a good group though, especially our little "cluster" here in Southern Maine...although it would be natural of me to say that since I know them the best. Still, it's not like the Pacific Northwest District, where I had known many of the ministers there for decades. Or even Mass Bay, which was likewise heavily populated with friends and classmates returning home (like salmon?) to "the Neighborhood of Boston.

One thing this retreat reminded me of is something I've come to think of as the "Raible Rules" -- not for Peter Raible (although he was the one who popularized them in the Pacific Northwest), but rather Robert "Daddy Bob" Raible, who was for many, many years the minister of our church in Dallas Texas, and who introduced these rules among the (then) Unitarian ministers of the Southwest Unitarian Conference. The go something like this:

1) the only acceptable excuse for missing one of our ministers' meetings is a funeral: your own.

2) when a fellow minister asks you to do something, the only acceptable response is "yes."

These standards of collegiality (attend every meeting -- ordinations, installations, business meetings and retreats -- and never say "no" to a request) were deeply ingrained in me during my internship and first settlement in Midland, Texas; and then reinforced by my long sojourn back in the PNWD. But I was also a little surprised (and delighted) to see how they have migrated all the way back to Maine, no doubt carried here by other clergy like myself who spent time in those two districts.

Anyway, seeing these colleagues again and spending three days with them eating, working, worshipping, and simply BEING together has reminded me once again how much I cherish this profession that God oddly chose me for three decades ago. In so many ways, I was and still am such an unlikely clergyman. Pastor. Cleric. Minister of the Gospel. Preacher I can live with, I think: in some ways I have always been a preacher. A prophet too, I suppose -- in that I was generally quite willing to say what others could not or would not say. pro phetes -- to speak for another. To speak for God? Maybe I'm not that much of a prophet after all.

And these three days were also another reminder of how much I will miss what I had started here in Portland, and how ambivalent I still feel about giving it all up and going into "retirement." Yet another thing that this cancer has taken from me. I am so SICK of sacrificing things to this cancer!