A Brief Account

by Dwite Espe Brown

Contents of the Brief Account

• San Francisco
  
• Japan
  
• Easter Communion
  
• Preaching
  
• China
  

San Francisco

My father was born in San Francisco in 1910. His father was from England; his mother was from a German family in the United States. My mother's parents were from Bohemia. She was born in 1906 in South Dakota into a Bohemian-speaking home; however she spoke only English to me. Father and Mother were married in 1939. I was born in 1941 in Sacramento, California.

Mother had a tumor from the age of eighteen, and became terminally ill with cancer early in her marriage. When she was carrying my younger brother in 1945, she was offered an abortion because of her health, but she chose to carry her child even if doing so would shorten her life. My brother was born prematurely. I have no other brothers or sisters. Mother died in 1948.

My parents were both raised Protestant. However when I was little, they were Unitarians. The Unitarians reject the Trinity. My father said that in the Unitarian Church, each man makes his own creed. I took him seriously, and spent the first half of my life, until I was around thirty, searching for the meaning of life, so that I would know what to believe. I have spent the second half of my life immersed in Christianity.

My father taught me to think for myself, but at the same time he made it clear that thinking people do not become Christians. He believed that Christians indoctrinate children when they are young. When my mother died, my father put my brother and me in an orphanage, to keep us away from Christian relatives or foster parents. In 1951 my father married a woman whose parents were both from Denmark. She and my father had no children of their own.

I went on a National Merit Scholarship in 1958 to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a small liberal arts college that had a "great books" humanities course. I was hoping to find the meaning of life, but I was disappointed. My professor did not like my unusual questions, and ridiculed me in class. I left Reed and went instead to San Francisco State College, where I completed a Bachelor's Degree in philosophy. I found it dry, and did not like it. Of course it was secular philosophy, with no mention of God or even of life.

Japan

In 1962 I spent five months in Japan because I wanted to see a non-Western culture. I lost my scholarship trying to understand Western Civilization, and I reasoned that non-Western people had the same human nature, but a different way of dealing with the human condition, that I wanted to see.

Back in California I lived for three years across the street from the San Francisco Zen Center, where a Soto Zen Buddhist priest from Japan taught Americans the traditional sitting meditation. I liked the serenity. It was however physically impossible for me to sit for long periods because of a childhood injury, and I could not undergo training in zen. The experience of finding life in an old tradition prepared me to look at Christianity for the first time.

I met my wife Judith in 1967 at the Zen Center. We were married there in 1969 in a Buddhist wedding. Judith was also raised without Christianity. Both her parents were born in the American community in Manila, and Judith spent her childhood in the Philippines after the war. She was baptized in 1975. Today she is an iconographer and an illustrator of children's books for Bethlehem Books (Ignatius Press).

My brother is today a Buddhist priest, a past president of the San Francisco Zen Center. He is also a well-known author of cookbooks.

Easter Communion

My conversion to Christianity began in 1968 when a friend invited Judith and me to the Easter Vigil at an Episcopal church in San Francisco. The beautiful liturgy attracted me, but then the priest did an unusual thing. Noticing that we did not come forward for communion, he came to us in the pews. He offered us bread, saying "the Body of Christ," and I had to make a quick decision. I took it, reasoning that refusing Jesus would be worse than breaking the rules. Judith took it too.

I was attracted to Christianity, but I was afraid to commit myself to something I did not understand, and I wanted to study it carefully. In 1969 I entered the Master's degree program at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, a consortium of ten theological seminaries. I enrolled in the Episcopal school, and took half my classes there, and the remainder at the Jesuit, Dominican and Franciscan schools. Protestant worship did not interest me. I liked liturgical worship, and I was looking for the life that I supposed Catholic Christianity had carefully preserved and handed down through the centuries.

I was converted reading the Gospel of Mark in Greek. The ancient language made me feel close to Jesus, and I began to admire and trust him. Setting aside my hesitation, I was baptized in an Episcopal church at the Easter Vigil in 1970. The Berkeley Gazette printed a short article on the church page, reporting that I fell in love with Jesus. The following month our oldest son Aryae was born.

Preaching

During my second year at the Episcopal seminary, one of the professors took me by the arm and said, "The faculty think you should be ordained." Acting on their advice, I did a third year of study for a Divinity degree. Some people took offense because I had entered the seminary before I was a candidate for ordination. When the faculty awarded me a top preaching prize at graduation, the alumni association held an emergency meeting during dessert at the banquet, to add more money to the alumni preaching prize.

Having two years to wait for ordination, I answered an advertisement in the bishop's newsletter, and worked in a peace education program of the Episcopal Diocese of California (San Francisco). Because of the political passions aroused by the Vietnam War, I made more enemies in the Episcopal Church. At the end of the two years, the bishop told me no parish would employ me, and sent me for career counseling. I went to graduate school in 1974, and learned computer programming for the first time. I liked it very much. I was nevertheless ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1975. I baptized my wife and son, and we moved away from the diocese.

Over the years I have often returned to ponder the questions that my ordination raises. I think the reason I was ordained when I could not work in the diocese, was that I had entered the peace program in good faith at the bishop's invitation. The more interesting question is God's purpose. What was my call?

I was called to serve the Lord Jesus by being ordained, a call that was ratified by a diocese and a bishop of the Episcopal Church, for whatever that is worth. Jesus does not always call to a career however, but sometimes he says, "Follow me." It does not seem unreasonable to me to think that this latter call, which was good enough for some of his disciples, is also my call. If that is so, then there is always a question of where the Lord will lead in the future.

My career in the Episcopal Church never recovered from its bad start. I was briefly in charge of a congregation in the small town of Weaverville, where as a young convert, I was a poor match for retired Episcopalians. The Episcopal bishop of Northern California put me there in 1976 for part-time pay. Our son Avram was born there in 1977.

Since most Episcopalians like their worship in good taste, and do not like religious enthusiasm, my eager preaching offended important people in the congregation. They thought I was young -- I was 35. Once when I preached that we should follow Jesus, a man said I was like Jim Jones. (Jones was the leader of the cult in Guyana, where 900 people committed suicide.) And when I preached what I thought was a reasoned and careful sermon expressing doubts about abortion, people were contemptuous. I did not know what to do, and I left that congregation.

It was impossible for me to obtain another position in the Episcopal Church, and I needed a way to support my family. In 1980 I began graduate study in computer science at the California State University, Chico, where I became an instructor. Our son Elijah was born in 1981. In 1984 I obtained a Master's Degree, and for seventeen years I have taught computer science at Lassen Community College in rural northeastern California.

China

The college declared bankruptcy in 1985 (it is a state entity, and the story is interesting, but it is not important here). I almost lost my job, but even though I kept it, I looked to see what God was calling me to do. I took a year's leave of absence from the college in 1987-88 to teach English in China, with a group of Protestant "tent-maker" missionaries.

My wife and two younger boys and I lived that year in the city of Guiyang in southwest China. We had no opportunity to go to church, and we discovered how much we missed communion. A visit to the (patriotic) Catholic Church in our city made a deep impression on us. While we were in China my father died.

Upon our return from China, we began attending the Catholic Church where we live. The parish priest confirmed us at the Easter Vigil in 1989. At that time I did not know of the existence of the Pastoral Provision, that allows some married Protestant clergy who convert, to be ordained as Catholic priests.

When I learned about the Pastoral Provision, I spoke to the bishop of the diocese where we live. That began a ten-year discussion that ended in the diocese saying no, last year. They have never done it before, and I suppose my case is too unusual to be the first one.

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