I have snakes in my house. They're not pets, they're not in cages, I don't feed them, but they are there anyway. It's one of the Church Stories at my church; there are snakes in the parsonage.
They're quite harmless, actually, being garter snakes. Usually they're small ones that wander into the living room or into our basement TV room. We don't often notice them until one of our cats finds them intriguing and begins playing with them, batting them around. At that point, the snakes are immobile-- I think they freeze with terror, assuming they are about to be eaten. It would be helpful if my cats were so inclined to kill the snake, but instead they find them to be fascinating new play-toys. So much for the hunting instinct....
It's a great conversation piece-- how many people have snakes in their house? I usually tell it as one of those funny "I survived this" kind of anecdotes, but I find when I tell it, my parishioners don't laugh. Well, the men do, somewhat nervously, usually because their wives are indignantly telling them they ought to do something about it. The women are not amused at all. It's not that I like snakes, but I guess I've learned to live with them.
The thing is, I'm 43 years old, and aside from college and seminary, I have lived my entire life in a parsonage. In a house owned by a church. I've never lived in my own house, and I confess I dream of doing that someday. In a parsonage, you never know what you're going to get. It's been my experience over the years that people somehow believe that a pastor entered into their profession with a sense of martyrdom and took a pledge of poverty. Back East, where the parsonages came furnished, it was often true that the furniture in the parsonage was used stuff from church member's houses that they no longer wanted in their own houses. I often wondered why if it wasn't good enough for their house, why they thought it was good enough for the parsonage? Again, a sense that a pastor is called to a life of poverty and therefore doesn't care about such mundane things as matching furniture or furniture from a decade later than the '40s.
The worst parsonage I ever lived in was in Pennsylvania. (We lasted a year). The pastor was removed for "bad behavior", and so when he and his wife moved out, they were pretty ticked off. They took it out on the parsonage. The house was supposed to be furnished, but all the furniture was gone when we arrived. There were bits and pieces up in the attic of furniture that was literally falling apart and broken. The Church didn't offer to replace any. Before he left, the pastor had apparently locked his cat and dog up in one of the downstairs bedrooms for several days, where they obediently saturated the carpet with urine. When we moved in, we could not figure out at all where that horrid smell was coming from. We rented a shampooer and shampooed all the carpets-- still the smell persisted.
We did not feel welcome.
There was a broken window upstairs in the bedroom, and a fist-sized hole in the bedroom closet door. And that enduring pee-smell.
That was my worst parsonage experience. But over the years I do remember having to beg to have the plumbing fixed or yes, a urine-soaked carpet torn up and replaced. It was always met with the attitude that I was asking too much.
In one parsonage, we did have bats in the basement. I'd never heard of that before, but I've learned a lot over the years. One night, there was a bat in my church and as it was flying around the meeting room, I was frozen to the wall, my eyes kind of glossed over. A parishioner came to the rescue and killed it with a tennis racket. Maybe he then threw cold water on me.
One thing about living in a house owned by a church, you learn to adapt, I guess. You ask yourself, is it worth the trouble? Is it worth getting excited about? Many things were, and those were battles we fought-- I guess I got braver and more insistent when I had a baby in the house. But some things I had to learn to have a sense of humor about. Otherwise, I'd be on Valium.
So on Christmas Eve morning this past year, I rolled over in bed and looked down. I don't always look down before I get out of bed. Maybe it was God. But I looked down, and very calmly I chuckled and said, "uh, honey, there's a snake by the bed." My husband doesn't take to snakes as calmly as I do. He was out of bed like a shot and returned with a broom from downstairs with which he pummeled that little oblivious snake until he was certain it would never slither again. He scooped it up in a piece of cardboard and hurled it out the back door. Meanwhile, left in its wake for me to clean up was a mass of broom thistles that had seperated from the broom in my husband's passionate encounter with that little snake.
Yeah, it'd be nice not to have to live with snakes. But at least they don't hurt me, and they provide a bit of amusement for my three cats. I've learned it's as my father used to say, "par for the course." They should have a course in seminary for young and new pastors on Parsonage Living. I'd be a guest lecturer. My first bit of advice would be: Have a Sense of Humor; you'll never survive without it.
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