By the Rev. Barbara Mraz (originally published in the November-December 2016 Evangelist)
When Linda and Vincent Lemming were told that their son had talent, he was nine years old, and it was in regard to his musical gifts. However, most of us at St. John’s know that this is only one facet of this extraordinary man’s abilities.
Born in 1982 in Harare, Zimbabwe (until 1980 the segregated British colony of Rhodesia), Craig was educated in Dominican and Jesuit boys’ schools. He had been encouraged to sing from age six by Sister Margaret, one of his teachers. And sing he did. In chapel, in concerts, in classes. He admits to being “a fabulous Virgin Mary” in a school pageant. “Music was my lifesaver in high school,” he says. “It was my way to get through those difficult adolescent years.”
Censor!
Graduating from high school at age 18, Craig worked for a year for a cinema with officials from the Zimbabwe Department of Censorship where he watched films coming from various countries. Craig was told what scenes had to be censored for the film to be shown locally– swear words, sexuality, inappropriate political messages. “There were very restrictive standards, but it was there that I fell in love with film. If you have seen Cinema Paradiso, that was my world!” A favorite memory was Mother’s Day when he was able to get an entire theater reserved for his mother to watch the new movie version of her favorite book, Angela’s Ashes.
Boston
In the last two years of high school, when school wasn’t in session, Craig toured with the Zimbabwean choir called Tabatana, twelve young men who toured England, Scotland, and the United States. In New York City, Craig auditioned for a noted choir master and eventually was awarded a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He was one of only five nonwhites in a class of 200.
“Coming here was a huge cultural shock. I was nineteen years old, an immigrant, and I had to come to terms with who I was. My father was Roman Catholic, my mother Anglican. I was trying to understand being bi-racial, bi-sexual, bi-denominational, and being from a working class background in southern Africa, with parents who weren’t keen on my being in another country or on my pursuing a career in music. And all of this was happening in the very prestigious, elite and competitive environment of a conservatory in Boston! I had to work three times as hard to learn what I needed to learn and how to sing in German, Italian, French, and English plus learning the craft of singing in the classical tradition. The exams were juried in the different languages. If you failed at all, you were out. So this, plus three jobs, made for constant work.”
Craig also got a church job during this time singing at King’s Chapel, a Unitarian Church which uses the 1662 Book of Common Prayer! He adds, “Here also I encountered my first ordained woman celebrating the Eucharist as well as my first openly gay man who was an ordained minister. It was life-changing.”
Perlman, MacDonald, Marsalis and Ailey
Craig then worked for the Celebrity Series of Boston as an educational associate: “I had the privilege of bringing magnificent artists into the inter-city schools, people such as Audra MacDonald, Itztak Perlman, Wynton Marsalis, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I would make the arrangements, pick them up at the airport and drive them. These schools had high concentrations of students of color and when these artists would begin to perform you would watch entire lives being transformed.”
Indiana: Master of Music
Craig went on to graduate school at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington: “Here I was radically welcomed into a wonderful group of faculty, clergy and students who met weekly for a Eucharist and dinner. The conversations were magnificent and one of my mentors showed me how I could rethink who I might be as a priest. She was LGBT- affirming and pushed back the boundaries for me. Also, this was home because it was Protestant AND Catholic. Here amidst the cornfields these Episcopalian people celebrated who I was.”
Craig then came to St. Paul where he served for five years as tenor, concert production, and tour manager for the early music group, The Rose Ensemble.
Seminary
With the help of Phillip Baird, Jered, and Keely Morgan, Craig discerned a call to the priesthood—something he heard for the first time at age fourteen. He says this about his calling: “What draws me most to the Priesthood is standing on sacred ground as a witness, a companion on the journey, an usher, when another creature of God is crossing a threshold. All of the sacraments are holy thresholds. It’s an immense privilege to be with people in those moments of joy and grief, in the fullest parts of their humanity. To help them not only make memories, but to make meaning of their existence. And it is Scripture which brings to life the brokenness of humanity and also the magnificence of what it means to be a creature of God.”
He will finish at United Seminary this year as well as serving as the program director of Circle of the Beloved; Episcopal Service Corps, which he established in the Twin Cities.
He adds, “It was my discovery of the life and work of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Right Rev. Barbara Harris, and the consecration of The Most Rev. Michael Curry that really convinced me I could do this. I don’t think I had really thought it possible before then.”
Clearly, scores of others did.
“For seven years Craig Lemming has been my Zimbabwean adopted son and I, a stand-in father, for his wonderful parents.
“Craig will not be a ‘professional’ priest; rather, he will be a priest of the highest understanding of that order, in the tradition of worker priests of the Oxford Movement. He will exemplify the best liturgical traditions of the Anglican Church and I who will witness this will be forever grateful and proud.”
—Phillip Baird
“Craig leads this new ministry with faith, grace, integrity, and the steady hand of wisdom. His own life manifests the theme ‘kinship across lines of difference’.”
—The Rev. Susan Moss
