Rev. Ruth

I got a call from my daughter Ruth on Saturday, the first time we had spoken since she returned from Colombia, S.A., a few weeks ago. She had gone to Medellin in particular because that is the city where she was born twenty-seven years ago. We adopted her when she was six months old and suffering from malnourishment. I remember our time in Medellin as a nightmare of Colombian bureaucracy and poisoned air. The city sits in a bowl among mountains, and in those days the atmosphere was a barely breathable carbon monoxide soup. The day we were supposed to leave Medellin for Bogota to pick up her U.S. visa, we learned that the embassy would be closed in observance of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Say, what? I spoke with an official there who said that the closure was out of respect for the local customs and that she would ordinarily be glad to come in and handle the visa for us except that her daughter was being confirmed that day. A big party was planned.

Ruth tells me that Medellin is now a tourist destination, a pretty cool place. While she was there, I saw an article in the New York Times Sunday Travel section saying the same thing. The city has come a long way from the 1980s when the drug trade was about to take over the economy. There are still dangerous parts of the country, of course, because a civil war continues. I confess to having worried about her while she was gone, but every now and then I’d get a text message from her saying something like, “Spending the day at the beach. Having a great time.” She’s a gregarious young woman and met a lot of people, it seems, who took her around to see the sights. She was in good hands.

When she called, I asked her, “What’s up?” And she started to giggle. “I’m the Rev. Ruth Arnold,” she laughed. And what did that mean? I asked.

“Well,” she said, “my friend in Albuquerque” where she went to college “wants me to marry her and her fiancé next June and they said I could go on this website, Universal Life Church Monastery, and get ordained. So I did.” She laughed and laughed.

I looked up the website while we were talking, and there it was. I loved the headline, so reminiscent of the early McDonald’s burger stands: “Over 20 million ordained since 1959.” I should have known about this option back in the late 1980s when I was turning my life inside out to get the Episcopal Church to agree to ordain me. I noticed on the ULC website that I could still become a Doctor of Metaphysics, which has a certain appeal. (How many certified metaphysicians do you know?) But my daughter clearly loved the fact that she got ordained in fifteen minutes on line, whereas I had spent eight years in order to become a . . . deacon. She’s right. It’s pretty funny.

But, you might say, that’s different. You’re ordained in a real church by a bishop in Apostolic Succession, a direct line straight back to Jesus himself.

Right.

I’m going to fill out this application for my metaphysical degree. Won’t take a minute.

Uh-oh, I hear Bishop Ken stomping down the corridors of the other world heading my way. I’m in trouble. Hit “Send” now!