Reverend Tracey Lind

Trinity Cathedral is one of Cleveland’s oldest and most historic churches. Its Episcopal parish is headed by the civic-minded and openly gay Reverend Tracey Lind, a compassionate activist who serves as Trinity's dean and senior clergy. Cool Cleveland spoke with her about Trinity's multi-tiered, customized church programs, its environmentally friendly and sustainable church, how she relates to the lyrics of the band U2, and Cleveland's desire for wisdom, God, and meaning beyond ourselves. The public book signing for Tracey Lind’s new book, Interrupted By God, (Pilgrim Press) is at Joseph Beth in Legacy Village on Sun 10/10 from 2-4PM.

Why did you want to become a religious leader?

I felt called by God; it’s knowing, in a sense, what I’m supposed to do with my life.

How old?
When I first knew I wanted to be a religious leader, I was a kid of 11 or 12, but I had to sort out whether I wanted to be a rabbi or minister, since I was raised in an interfaith family.

How difficult has it been for you as a woman in a predominantly male-oriented realm?
I don’t think it’s been that difficult; I’ve been a part of the second generation of women to be ordained. I came of age in the second generation in the '70s when the women’s movement was well underway and I suppose I’m one of the first women to lead a large church. People ask, "Where did you learn about women in power?" and I think I learned in dancing school, when I found out that a girl is not supposed to ask a boy to dance. It’s important to be a leader who empowers others from behind; it’s hard to be out front sometimes, to be strong and old.

What are your goals at Trinity?
There are a couple of different goals. Here at Trinity we have three constituencies. One is our cathedral congregation, the people who call this their spiritual home and worship here. Another are the people who live in this city and look to Trinity as a beacon of light, a place to gather, a place of art, music and a place that has an environmentally sustainable building. I hope that we are a piazza: a place for commerce, culture, collaboration and communication. I would hope that others might find this a spiritual home to get a book, buy a cup of coffee, or meet some friends and sit in the garden. Then our third constituency is the Episcopal Diosece of Ohio: 44 counties, 107 churces, and for them, this is the See City, this is the Mother Church where the Bishop resides, where the Diocisean offices are. I want this to be their second home; they have their parish church wherever they live, and we can be a model for education, outreach, teaching and gathering. One of our goals is to offer a very wide range of worship for people. On Sunday mornings at 8AM we have the early bird special, very small and quiet. AT 9AM the children are at the center of it, and it’s very informal and a lot of fun and very provocative. Then at 10AM we have Prayer and Praise, designed for the people who come here for lunch. For 20 years we served meals to people who are living in hotels or on the streets, and they asked for a worship service that wasn’t formal. At 11:15 we have the big main service with the orchestra, the choir and all the formality. Beginning in the fall, we have a program called Sundays at 5, it's a combination of Jazz Vespers, Choral Evensong, a very classic service that comes to us from England, plus a Gen X service that's a combination of audio and video in a very casual setting, and a bluegrass and gospel service. Another goal is to be the center of spirituality, as well as being able to bring provocative and thoughtful writers and thinkers into this space and provide a venue for them in order to reach a larger audience.

You’ve done some innovative programming, like studying the religious aspects of the lyrics of the band U2. Could you talk about how and why you put these programs together?
Because we believe people are hungry for God, and the church has an obligation to talk about God’s love for this world. Some people will hear it through traditional choral music or Bible study, others will find it through U2. For our generation, you and I, it was Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - they had what I call a theology of rock and roll. And Bruce Springsteen. U2 also has an incredibly provocative message. My curatator Kurt wants to start blogging to get the word out about this.

How does the recent green renovation and the retail aspect of Trinity Commons (Cafe Ah-Roma Coffee Shop, 10,000 Villages, and Sacred Path Books & Art bookstore) fit into your plans?
Let me tell you how it came about. The bookstore was a dream of Cathyrn Pinnaird, who wanted to have a place with resources for the journey, so we made room for the bookstore. When I came here, I roamed around the city, went looking for a cup of coffee and I couldn’t find one in the area. So they said, "What is your vision of an urban Cathedral?" I told them we’ve got these storefronts, and I'm thinking of the Cleveland State University campus' needs. One of my ideas is about a piazza-type place where people can rest, find refreshment and celebration. Maybe the church has to take that risk, and I think we’ve affected the redevelopment of this neighborhood. So, we added the coffee shop and there was another storefront that needs to be consistent with our values, but what do people need? Maybe a place where they can pick up gifts, and what about fair trade? So we formed a corporation and we invited 10,000 Villages to our location. They told us their business is not our ministry, so we found some funders who took some risks.

Then we looked at the art gallery and connected that with the Sunday School classrooms that are only being used 10 hours a week; I wanted to open them up and let the community make use of them, to generate energy and some vitality. The green part came about when we decided to put our money where our mouth is; take a risk. There are two prices: the price to our pocketbook, and the cost to the environment; they are economic and ecological. Ecumenical means the whole of the household, the collective; that's putting your money where you mouth is. And now we have a healthy workspace with nontoxic paint, natural light, recycled carpet, and a geothermal system that heats and cools. In that way, sustainability and community dovetails. And then you put WiFi here, in what will someday become the Euclid Corridor project. We’re also exploring turning Mather Hall into a hostel; wouldn’t it be great to have an alternative place to stay in Cleveland? What if every downtown church and every hospital in every neighborhood had a piazza like in Europe? What better way to use our interior and lobby spaces!

Why did you decide to put WiFi in your facility?
We didn’t put WiFi in, Café Ah-Roma put it in and I wish we [Trinity] could do the same because we’re in a web connected world. We’re launching a portal site in September that will be much more interactive. The truth is, we can reach so many more people on the Internet; we have over 4,000 unique visitors per month just during May. I think there’s also a danger in being disconnected.

Keeping connected with the community is the reason why we do our Cool Cleveland Art/Tech/Dance events, and we get hundreds of people attending.
Connecting people is important. A few years ago was a book called Your God is Too Small but I think it’s not that God is too small, it's that our faith communities are too small. We have a responsibility to equip people to live prophetic and faithful lives in the world. To empower people to become what Kierkegaard termed as “God’s spy.”

That sounds a little scary today.
I don’t mean it that way. Another major goal is to develop a strategy to engage with the community. On the one hand, serving lunch every Sunday for 20 years. Making thanksgiving baskets for the kids is another. But so is organizing and getting out the vote to change the way that schools are funded. Through NOAH [Northeast Ohio Alliance for Hope] we're interacting and working with the Quadrangle board to be in on the conversation for the Euclid Avenue Corridor project and the CSU plan. And speaking out against an unjust war is another kind of community engagement we're looking at. But we also want to be a convener for controversial subjects like school funding, human sexuality and multicultural dialogue where things can happen in a safe space. Another goal is to build community through art; music and performing arts at Trinity is a platform where we use the stage for performing arts at our brown bag lunch program every Wednesday at noon. We also have the Medieval feast in December, our community artist in residence, and our art gallery with moveable shows. We’re also working on a collaboration with YWCA, CASE Medical School and Trinity for a community strategy that incorporates music and art on youth develepoment. It addresses substance abuse prevention and safe sex.

It seems that with the rise of capitalism and international corporate control, people are more hungry for spirituality.

I think people are hungry for God; they're hungry for a just and loving way to be in this world. People are hungry for wisdom in a maddening world and they're searching for meaning beyond themselves. Because we live in a postmodern age and because modernity has ended, I don’t think we can offer the same answers that our forebearers offered. The truth and wisdom is still there, but we have to explore new ways to find it. I think evil is a reality, but how we address evil, how we talk about it and how we confront it needs to be examined. We are barraged with information and people who are looking for an anchor. The Third Frontier is here, and I don’t mean that the same way as Governor Taft means when he says it. Commercial space ships are here. We’re looking for ways to live on the earth more gently and more respectfully, and looking at how we can reinterpret some of that spirituality, to reinterpret those myths. To be fruitful, I think we have to revisit those words and ask what is God saying to us in the 20th century, as opposed to what He said to us many, many millennium before. How do we live with the rest of creation? I think people are searching for that.

To what do you ascribe the rise of fundamentalist religions in the past few decades?
I think the rise of fundamentalism is very scary. I think it is a reaction to a changing world where people don’t feel in control and are frightened of the change. I think fundamentalism offers black and white answers to complex questions; I think it short-circuits the conversation. There’s a tendency to fight fundamentalism with fundamentalism; it excludes people from the conversation to say there’s one way – my way, the one way to God.

Do you see a danger that American wars in the future may be construed as “Holy Wars” because the US military is mainly Christian, while the opposing forces may be Islamic or other religions?
That’s probably simplified. War is about control, natural resources, about scarcity, and limited definitions of evil, or morality of right and wrong. War is about power.

What’s your take on the controversy in the Episcopal church over gay ministers?
Well, I am one, so obviously I think we should be ordained. It should not be about our sexuality, it should be about the way we live our lives. I’m happy to be held to high moral standards and my sexual identity should not be the issue. It does not make or break me as a minister. I think the debate in the Episcopal church mirrors the debate in society, and I feel that the gays are scapegoats in the conversation about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s about power. If Trinity is any indication, then my being open and honest about my identity has only helped grow a congregation. Young and old, rich and poor, urban and suburban. People come in to Trinity from Akron and Huron and Ashtabula, so we can’t be doing all too wrong.

Is there an official stand on the issue that you are expected to take, and how do you reconcile your own views on that subject or other controversial topics?
That’s a long complicated question. As Episcopalians, we believe that individuals are their own moral agents, and we make moral decisions based on the three-legged stool, holding scripture, reason and tradition together in tension. And I would add that John Wesley said that experience or community also is taken into conversation. You could prove almost everything using the Bible, because it is not consistent on many subjects, but I choose not to go there. The Episcopalian church is in the midst of a debate, so we do things in community with the leadership of the Cathedral and the Diocese. There comes a time where you must decide, is this the ditch that I want to die in?

You pick your battles...
You learn to say this is when I speak, and this when I stay silent. I do that prayerfully, in conversation with the holy text, with the leaderhip of the church, and with friends and family.

I understand you have a new book coming out, ''Interrupted By God." What can you tell us about it?
It’s a collection of 24 black and white photographs. Then every photograph is followed by a chapter, possibly a story, usually a non-fiction story, a narrative with tales of folks I met in my ministry. It’s about the theology of interrogation and what happens when God interrupts our lives, usually from the edge and from the fringe, out of the corner of our eyes, when we least expect it. Because of that I go looking for God in those places; this one photo here is a garbage tree [an urban tree full of garbage]. However, I will tell you about it. For 12 years, I served as pastor at Paterson, New Jersey in a big old inner-city parish - it was an old Gothic church. We built up a community development organization that got up to a $2 million budget with a food pantry that fed 1,500 people a month, and an arts program. We renovated a house and turned it into cooperative housing, so now they are building low income housing. So I would walk around the neighborhood. The congregation was about 33% African American and West Indian, 33% white and 33% Hispanic, and one of our missions was to demonstrate that the things that divide us could be overcome in the oneness of God. We did a program with 200 sex workers with HIV referral and prevention and drug abuse prevention. I went out with my camera looking for God, and I came upon this tree, and hanging in this tree was a mop, a doll, a garbage bag, a pair of boots, and a bicycle wheel. And I’m looking at the tree and I’m thinking “That’s pretty cool,” and I’m pondering it. I thought I would make a portrait of this tree, and these neighborhood boys came up and asked "Why are you making a portrait of a garbage tree?” and I told them I saw God in this tree, and that God was in everything, including them. Then they said to make a portrait of me. The lady at the photo studio asked about it, and I invited her to the church, and she came down, and so did the kids. For a while, I called it Valley of the Dolls, and then I called it Dry Bones because of the prophet Ezekial, then I called it the Jesse Tree, which is that new life that will come out of a stump; so it kept meaning different things to me. One of the chapters in the book is about this tree and all trees, and what they mean to me. So I went back to Paterson reently, and I saw a new house in front of this garbage tree. And I saw that all things are possible. It’s about paradoxes and the edges of life.

Interview and photos by Thomas Mulready (:divend:)