Tag Archives: Bishop Pike

Another Use for Vaseline in 2016

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Three gifts are mentioned in the story of the Three Kings, aka the Wise men, and the Magi: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Moments ago, on Epiphany, three seminary friends arrived at Steve and Nadja Shoemaker’s home on the prairie near Urbana, Illinois. It’d be a stretch to call Harry, Bob, and Don the Three Kings or the Wise Men. More like three wise guys, not from the East, but from the West and North – Corsicana, Texas; Prescott, Arizona; and Highland Park, Illinois – bringing a lighter touch to Steve, the patient with the terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

Harry, the musician among them, will lead them in his own freshly-written lyrics to the tune of the Epiphany hymn “We Three Kings” – a trio of bass and baritone voices – bringing laughter to the room Kay and I can hear all the way in Minnesota.

Many years ago, a similar thing happened in New York City where Episcopal lay theologian William (Bill) Stringfellow was in Surgical Intensive Care following near fatal pancreatic surgery.

Entering the room following the surgery, Stringfellow’s close friend Bishop James A. Pike exclaimed, “Well, I’m a bishop. I should do something!” He promptly disappeared. Moments later he returned with Bill’s attending nurse and a large bottle of petroleum jelly. He consecrated the jelly, declaring to the nurse with typical Pike humor that “this substance has now been set apart for uses other than those ordinary and familiar for Vaseline.”

“Taking a thumbful of this freshly made urgent, he came to the bedside and anointed me,” wrote Stringfellow, “signing my forehead with the cross, and saying:

“‘I anoint you in the name of God; beseeching the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all your pain and sickness of body being put to flight, the blessing of health may be restored to you. Amen.'” [William Stringfellow, A Second Birthday, Doubleday & Company, 1970]

The bishop’s prayer of unction for the sick was near verbatim from The Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church.

When the surgeon told the patient that his recovery was spectacular, Stringfellow replied, “That doesn’t surprise me at all. I was anointed by Bishop Pike! – what else would you expect?”

This Day of Epiphany, I hope the Three Wise Men, Steve and Nadja may enjoy the same fellowship, humor, and prayer all these years later. They bring no gold, frankincense or myrrh, but everyone in the Urbana gathering tonight knows that when the end is in sight, only the frankincense, the myrrh, and telling stories only dear friends call tell are appropriate. The third gift – gold – no longer matters, if it ever did!

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Epiphany, Jan. 6, 2016

 

I wish we were all that crazy

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Bishop James A. Pike (February 14, 1913 - September 1969)

Bishop James A. Pike (February 14, 1913 - September 1969)

It was a crazy week.I should rather say…I was a little crazy last week…in the sense that Bishop James Pike was a little crazy the night he walked down the hotel corridor in the altogether to knock on his friend William Stringfellow’s door at 4:00 in the morning.

According to the story, as told by Bill Stringfellow, the knock on his door awakened him from a sound sleep.

He opened the door to see the Bishop stark naked with a book in his hand. “Bill, you have to hear this! This is amazing!” The Bishop was oblivious to his nakedness. He plopped down in a chair and proceeded to tell his lawyer and his friend what he thought he had just discovered about Jesus in the wilderness. When he had shared the information, we wandered back down the hallway to his own room with his nose stuck in the book.

James Pike had become obsessed with Jesus in the wilderness. So absorbed in the Gospel accounts that he ate, drank, and slept them. His naked self was in those stories. Something about the wilderness temptations of Jesus consumed his total attention.

James Pike died sometime later in the Judean wilderness where the Gospels say Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights. The date of his death is known only as the month of September in the year 1969, about the same time that I met Bill Stringfellow.

Why do I tell this story now? I was a little like the Bishop last week with the story of Barabbas. I get like that sometimes. I’ve remembered to pull my pants on to take the dogs for a walk, but in every other way, I can identify with the completeness of James Pike’s attention to the biblical story. I’m a little ”nuts” – with apologies to everyone who knows better than to use that kind of pejorative language to describe a state of mental illness.

I write this today not to arrive at your door in the altogether to tell you what I think I’ve discovered about Barabbas. I write quite simply because I miss the likes of Bishop Pike and Bill Stringfellow. I feel the need to honor the sacred memory of two very strange saints, one of them (the Bishop) tried for heresy and the other (Bill) who defended him in the church courts. I’m grateful for the courage and idiosyncrasies that left the more conventional, less curious church bureaucrats and the House of Bishops mystified. Bill Stringfellow’s own words of tribute to his friend Jim speak, in hindsight, not only of the Bishop but of the Stringfellow himself. May the both rest in peace.

William Stringfellow (April 26, 1928 – March 2, 1985), lay theologian, lawyer, author, social critic, alien in a strange land.

“The death to self in Christ was neither doctrinal abstraction nor theological jargon for James Pike. He died in such a way before his death in Judea. He died to authority, celebrity, the opinions of others, publicity, status, dependence upon Mama, indulgences in alcohol and tobacco, family and children, marriage and marriages, promiscuity, scholarly ambition, the lawyer’s profession, political opportunity, Olympian discourses, forensic agility, controversy, denigration, injustice, religion, the need to justify himself.By the time Bishop Pike reached the wilderness in Judea, he had died in Christ. What, then, happened there was not so much a death as a birth.”

I wish we were all that crazy.

To learn more about Bishop Pike, click HERE. For William Stringfellow, click HERE.