When you’re a minister, everyone looks to you and your family for moral leadership. Because they attribute moral leadership to clergy, they expect it from you, and also your family, whether you and your family can provide it or not.

I am both a minister and an educator, an associate professor of theology at a small college and seminary while also serving as Vicar of St. Andrew’s Anglican Church. Having grown up in a small fundamentalist church, I had been ordained an Episcopal priest but left the denomination when it ordained an openly gay bishop. I could not reconcile this with the teachings of Holy Scripture and the Holy Tradition of the Church. As a result, I had a fight with my own bishop and then resigned as rector of a large Episcopal parish in New York City. But since I had become somewhat of a hero to other conservatives who had left the denomination, I was offered a teaching position at the seminary and the vicarate of this small mission in the American Midwest.

This was a big change for my family as well as myself. Fortunately, my wife, Keiko, has always been in high demand, since she is a superb pediatric nurse. She had no trouble finding work when we relocated here. My teaching position pays well enough and I receive a small but adequate stipend as vicar, so given these sources of income, together with my wife’s salary, we are quite financially fit as a family. And thanks to a good real estate broker, we got a nice deal on our old place in New York. Because the Anglican diocese received the mission’s old vicarage in the legal settlement over the schism, we reside there rent-free now, although the house needs a whole lot of work. This arrangement has been an act of Providence for us, though, because our older daughter, Akiko, 16, is approaching college age and our real estate deal has solved that financing problem with more than enough funds to spare. We also have a younger daughter, Mitsumi, 7, and two sons, Michael, 13, and Gabriel, 11. They’re wonderful kids, the perfect family for a traditional Midwestern preacher and his wife.

Or so we thought.

The truth about raising children is that there’s a very close relationship between intelligence and their tendency to engage in mischief. Once they take their first steps, almost immediately they begin to make the connection between walking and getting into trouble. Keiko likes to remind me that it’s because children have almost an unlimited capacity for exploration that they can get into these situations. Their little minds are always getting bigger as they take in the world around them, seeking to learn the relationships between everything and everything else. They begin to notice the obvious sequences of cause and effect, the more abstract ones of antecedent and consequence, and the more dubious relationships of perception and reality. But perhaps the most important are the relationships between how they feel about what they do for, to, and with one another.

Most of the trouble that our kids get into are the usual antics that parents typically experience as theirs grow up, but every now and then they do something at the remote frontiers of acceptable behavior, like the time Akiko let a couple of her friends talk her into spending the day skinny-dipping with them. The idea of such an extreme exercise of personal liberty in the Great Outdoors easily seduced my daughter who had thus far grown up in the world’s largest megalopolis, a densely populated expanse of steel and concrete skyscrapers.

Little did she know, Akiko’s adventure at the lake that day would begin a time when such acts of simple mischief and youthful self-discovery would transform into an extended conflict for our family. All of us would encounter a rapidly changing world challenging our beliefs and ideas about right and wrong, sacred and profane, male and female, child and adult. We would rethink those beliefs and face a hard empirical test of a more abstract theology. We would also experience much in the way of tears and laughter, joy and sorrow. But I must relate, also, that while it all seemed a nightmare for Keiko and myself at the time, we smile a lot when recounting it now.

It would have been well enough if that had remained Akiko’s and her friends’ secret, but it didn’t. Like other teen girls, they had their various sleepovers. Akiko even hosted a few of her own at the vicarage. Yet neither Keiko nor I suspected what happened at their Friday night sleepovers, since they took great care to avoid discovery. However, their secrecy proved no match for her brother Michael’s somewhat greater curiosity, capacity for even more creative mischief, and newly raging hormones.

At 13 years, Michael was just beginning seriously to appreciate the opposite sex. This happens in every boy’s life (and in every girl’s as well), and it was no surprise to either Keiko or myself that a preacher’s kids have the same hormones as any other teen-agers. Moreover, its timing had coincided with our relocation to the Midwest, so we had figured that he was taking advantage of the move to recreate himself. But we had not expected the extent to which Michael would achieve that.

Keiko later would tell me that in retrospect there were signs of this deeper secret when Michael was much younger, but she had no reason to suspect anything then. Young siblings develop their own interpersonal dynamics growing up, and their world of play constitutes for them a reality often far removed from what their parents perceive them doing. Apparently, Akiko had engaged her brother in games of dress-up when they were both still of pre-school age. She apparently got a thrill from dressing him up like a girl and he had his very first taste of silk and lace at her urging. All she now remembers about it is that, “He looked so cute in my dresses and maryjanes!” and that, “Dressing dolls up was not as much fun as dressing my brother up!”

Akiko also nicknamed her brother “Mikki.” We had thought for a long time that was what he wanted to be called, instead of “Mike.” Later, we learned that she had given the name to his feminine alter-ego, her “Secret Sister” that Keiko had at first believed to be our daughter’s invisible friend.

What I had difficulty believing was that within our son, our beloved son, Michael, grew the spirit of a vivacious young woman. Mikki would both threaten and support Michael. He would eventually answer her call to give up his masculine self and stay with another broken and frightened young woman whom he would come to love most deeply. Michael would sacrifice the man that he could have been to become the woman Mikki, who he needed to be not only for his own sake, but for another’s well-being, too.

However, this would not be without consequences. Our daughter, Akiko, attempting to help her brother, would misjudge herself to have hurt him and his chance to become a husband and father. This would wound her deeply in her own conscience and her most difficult lesson to learn would be that of self-forgiveness.

Somehow, through all this, our family would hold together even as it seemed to come apart. We would need to redefine the very idea of family. We had to take to heart what St. Paul wrote in his First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:13: “But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (ASV)

The Rev. Dr. Edward MacDonald
Vicar of St. Andrew’s Mission