Bugel has officiated at straight weddings, gay weddings, medieval-themed weddings, funerals and all sorts of other ceremonies. “I’m a facilitator,” she says. “It’s not about control.”

by Jess McCuan    .    photos by Brent Fleury

Harriette Bugel likes to say that her religious tradition has gone from the noisy (Southern Baptist) to the quiet (Quaker). But in fact, after 20 years as an ordained minister and clinical social worker who married a Buddhist and helped hundreds of people through wrenching domestic violence and mental health cases, her views about religion are much more complicated than that. “Was what I was taught in Sunday school true? No,” she says matter-of-factly. Does she still believe in God? Yes. Now, at 47, she’s reinvented herself as a chef and caterer, but she hasn’t left religion behind. The Fairview resident still officiates at weddings and funerals and simply sees herself as more of a “food therapist” these days, someone who ministers to people through artful, thoughtful meals. “I’m still a social worker, I’m still a chaplain,” she says. “Now, I just do it on my own terms and in a slightly different venue.”

Most women put tremendous time and effort into planning their weddings. Harriette Bugel spent hours planning a ceremony for her divorce. She had of course hoped for the best in 1993 when she married Kevin Liske, whom she had met at a contra-dancing class in Raleigh. Their wedding ceremony (which took place a few years after their common-law marriage) was an eclectic affair. It attempted to accommodate several disparate family religious traditions and involved, among other things, guests joining hands for a spiraling Israeli folk dance. When it came time for the couple to part ways in 2004, Bugel, who had spent more than a decade presiding over unusual weddings and ceremonies, couldn’t just bring herself to sign a paper and say sayonara. She and Liske orchestrated an “unwinding” ceremony, in which around 80 of the original 300 or so wedding guests did a similar spiral dance and watched as the couple burned their vows in a fire.

Two memories from Bugel’s early childhood seemed to foreshadow what was in store for her later in life. Growing up in Nashville, Bugel liked to emulate her grandfather, a church pastor, by playing “church” in her house. In her church, she was the preacher. Harriette also liked to play nurse—her mother had been a nurse during World War II, serving in a combat hospital in southern Italy—so when young Harriette had time, she set up a MASH unit in the driveway and roller-skated between her patients.

Holy Roller When she lived in Atlanta, ordained minister Harriette Bugel agreed to pose for a shot that ended up in a vintage motorcycle calendar. Photo by Heath Patterson. Bugel’s family attended a Southern Baptist church in Nashville, and sometime in the ‘70s, Harriette remembers her older half-sister wanting to go to seminary. But she heard the message loud and clear that “God certainly does not call women,” Bugel recalls. In the early ‘80s, though, after Bugel finished college with a music degree, doors for women in the Southern Baptist tradition seemed to be inching open. By the time Bugel graduated with her master’s in divinity from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1988, she had little trouble being ordained as a minister in July that year.

Still, just as doors for women ministers were opening, they seemed to just as quickly slam shut. At the Southern Baptist Convention in the summer of 1989, church leaders passed a resolution stating that the church stood “publicly and privately for racial justice and equality”—a step forward, considering the Southern Baptists’ disagreement with Northern Baptists over slavery in 1845 was one of the reasons the denomination was formed in the first place. And yet church conservatives seemed to step backward on women’s issues. In 1989, the Southern Baptists’ Foreign Mission Board rejected Greg and Katrina Pennington as missionaries because Katrina had been ordained as a minister. Southern Baptists didn’t officially ban women from being pastors of churches until 2000. In the meantime, though, Bugel, who was on track to be a campus chaplain at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, started hearing that women pastors were losing their jobs. She spent a year at NC State and liked the gig just fine. But after she met Liske and moved to Atlanta, she decided to go back to school for a master’s in social work. “It really did seem like the way to make some money,” she says of her switch, “and then I didn’t have to deal with the church politics business.”

But church politics can stick with you no matter what field you’re in. At an interview for a social-work internship with a Baptist organization, Bugel says her interviewer felt the fact that she’d been ordained would stir up trouble. “There would be discussions they didn’t want people having,” she says. “To hire me affirmed somewhere that God could call a woman as a minister.” Then later, at a hospice facility, she was reprimanded for simply talking with the chaplains there. Bugel was floored. “Excuse me—how am I not who I am?” she says.

All the while, the Rev. A. Harriette Bugel (her first name is Anne) officiated at straight weddings, gay weddings, medieval-themed weddings, funerals, memorials, baby blessings, ordinations, baptisms and every other sort of ceremony you could think of. Her unusual combination of skills means that friends sometimes ask her to provide hospice care, personal health care and later, grievance counseling—after she officiates at the funeral for the person she cared for. “I’m a facilitator,” she says. “It’s not about control. That’s the tradition I grew up in.”
Now that she’s a full-time chef, running her own catering and chef-for-hire business, True Color Cooking, the ceremonies have gotten really interesting. She might wake up early on an event morning to buy ingredients, plan a menu and cook. She specializes in gluten-free and organic cooking, so the dishes might include wheat-free appetizers, cakes or muffins. (She happens to be gluten-intolerant herself). Or she could be creating an elaborate food sculpture in a landscape of asparagus trees and brussel sprout bushes next to a flowing river of blue M&M’s. Then, for the afternoon ceremony, she steps into her metaphorical phone booth, slips out of her chef’s outfit and into a formal dress and lets her hired catering crew take over while she speaks or officiates.

Bugel seems to like getting lost pondering big thoughts. As a trained theologian, she can spend days ruminating on various Biblical doctrines or pontificating on whether God is a male or a female. She also likes to dance. She first came to the Asheville area in high school for summer music camps and attended her first LEAF festival in Black Mountain sometime in the mid-‘90s. She’s been to nearly every LEAF since, often doing contra-dancing, sometimes teaching workshops. In one workshop, she showed people how to “trance waltz,” doing traditional waltz steps to meditative Middle Eastern Sufi music. She still considers herself part of the Southern Baptist tradition, but she doesn’t attend church regularly. “My favorite thing to do on Sunday morning is waltz,” she says, explaining that friends who know her well in Asheville know she’s most at home on the dance floor. “There is an incredible amount of power and energy and community, and in fact, communion, in waltzing.”   

To learn more about Harriette’s catering business True Color Cooking, go to www.truecolorcooking.com.