Tag: retirement

35 and counting…

Notes for a sermon preached at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Edmonton, Alberta
May 29, 2020, the Seventh Sunday of Easter

When the Rector asked me to cover services this Sunday, I said “Sure”, and than looked at my calendar and realized it was the 7th Sunday of Easter, only two days before May 31. 35 years ago, the 7th Sunday of Easter fell on May 31, when I was ordained a Deacon. (It was also the night that the Edmonton Oilers won their 3rd Stanley Cup, so I can take no credit for the street party outside afterwards.) When I realized what the day was, I told the Rector that I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my time in ordained ministry, and she quickly agreed.

Then I looked at the readings and came up against the closing portion of Jesus’ “high-priestly prayer” from John’s Gospel. As John tells it, these are the last words Jesus spoke to his disciples before his death, praying for those who will come after “that they may be one.” That’s us!

When I was involved in campus ministry as an undergraduate (U. of Alberta, B.Sc. ’69), the big thing was the Ecumenical Movement, after Rome had started to open its doors through Vatican II. I recall starry-eyed students – yours truly included – running around proclaiming unity, singing “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” and expecting organic unity among the churches – soon! By the time I was ordained, I knew that organic unity was a pipe dream, but I still had some hope for all Christians to be one. I still hold that hope after 35 years, but the history of these years has been very mixed in this respect, even within the Anglican Church.

There’s been a lot of change. For some people, the best change is no change at all. Others say we have not changed nearly enough. What I do know is that change is inevitable. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus held that “impermanence is the characteristic feature of the world,” which certainly rings true for me. It has certainly been true in the Anglican world in recent years.

It’s hard to proclaim unity among Christians when our own church has seen divisions, mostly arising from changes in the church which some people reject. One predates my ordination, the ordination of women to the priesthood and later to the episcopacy. The Anglican Church of Canada first ordained female priests in 1979, and some clergy and laity responded by moving to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. It was an issue for some of my classmates during my time at seminary. It remains an issue for some today, even at Holy Trinity. For me, it has been one of the most positive changes in our church in the past half-century, bringing a new wholeness to our understanding of Christian ministry.

Another change which I regard as positive, but which has led to division in our ranks, is in gender and sexuality issues. As we have moved toward fuller inclusiveness in welcome, ordination, and marriage, some people who disagreed have gone elsewhere, including establishing a parallel Anglican Church. Some others stay, but reluctantly.

A big positive: the development of a closer relationship with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. Again, some saw this as negative, but for me, it was long overdue. When our two churches sat down to talk, we quickly discovered that we agreed on almost everything and had done for centuries. We used different theological languages, and came at church order from different directions, but these proved easy to deal with. I was privileged to be a delegate to General Synod 2001, and to take part in the great celebration of the signing of the Full Communion agreement. I doubt that I’ll ever forget seeing our Primate and the Lutheran National Bishop dancing together around the arena in Waterloo. Our two churches have been enriched by this relationship, a visible sign of being one as Christ prayed for us.

Shortly after my ordination, we began to be aware of the issues around Residential Schools, a subject about which I had been woefully ignorant. As lawsuits began to pile up, there was some real fear that our whole institutional structure would collapse if we didn’t properly address the matter. Our Primate gave an apology to the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples’ Sacred Circle in 1993, opening the door to the work of healing and reconciliation. Since that time, we have become more aware of our colonial history and its effects on indigenous people. Healing and reconciliation will take years – well beyond my lifetime! – but we are on the road towards being one with our indigenous brothers and sisters.

One place where change has been at best mixed is our response to sexual abuse and harassment within the church. In times past everything was left up to Bishops’ discretion, but it became clear that this was inadequate, at times leading to greater harm. (The pattern of moving offending clergy to other parishes is not solely the province of the Roman Catholic Church. It has happened in the ACC. Most dioceses now have policies and procedures in place, but they lack consistency across the church, and a tendency to protect the institution before the victims persists. The “#ACCToo” issue is the most recent and visible example, dealing with how our national office handled a draft story intended for the Anglican Journal, potentially identifying victims when confidentiality had been assured. An open letter circulated around the national church, gathering hundreds of signatures, calling for accountability and for care for the complainants. The Primate responded in an interview on CBC News. I found her words less than helpful, but I do understand that the situation is still unfolding. Assurances that steps are being taken to ensure that it won’t happen again are not enough when people have been hurt. We have made some positive changes here, but much remains to be done.

That’s a bit of a downer, but now let’s look at one of the most positive areas of change – the growing understanding of the church as “missional.”

I served in three parishes before retiring. Two of those had long histories, and their understanding of the church had been deeply shaped by history. One was characterized by the “chaplaincy model,” seeing their role as ministering to people like them – mostly of British heritage. The other had played a big role in local history, and people looked back to the glorious past when the church was full and there were 200 children in Sunday School. I’m not criticizing them, rather observing that their sense of mission had been formed through many years of ministry practises that seemed to me to no longer fit the societal situation.

What I have experienced in other places and very much at Holy Trinity is a growing sense of the church as missional – existing for the benefit of others, not just those who are “on the list.” There will always be echoes of our history, but I don’t find it driving our agenda. The agenda continues to evolve. In some ways, the pandemic has been a blessing, forcing us to find new ways to be the Church, but God’s mission is still the same, as Jesus handed it to his disciples on the night before his death.

The church of 2022 is facing some huge challenges. With the Holy Spirit as our guide, we may move forward contributing our share of God’s mission in this world. Things won’t ever again be the same – but that’s always been true.

It has been a joy and a privilege – and at times a great challenge – to be part of the changes of the past 35 years. I do not expect to see the next 35 to their completion. But I am certain they will happen, and I believe that God will be glorified in God’s people.

May we all be one.

Amen.

Old habits…

Six years into retirement, one might think that I had lost many of the habits of the full-time cleric. Last weekend proved me wrong. While holidaying, we took the time to attend church on Sunday morning. It was a lovely little church in a charming setting, with a small but friendly congregation. So far, so good!

I was puzzled to see that the liturgy as mapped out in the bulletin that day was to be a mash-up of two different rites. Trying to please everyone? Who knows, because what happened was a reasonably straightforward use of a single rite. The priest (who I assumed had put together the day’s liturgy) blithely ignored most of what was printed in the bulletin.

Without going into a lot of detail, let’s just say that I was disappointed in the service. My spouse heard me sigh several times during the long rambling sermon. The liturgy stopped and started several times, while the celebrant appeared to be either trying to find his place or deciding what to do next.  My “trainer mode” clicked into full ON, unasked and unwanted but apparently unavoidable.

I meant this post not to criticize someone else’s work (he might just have been having a bad day), but rather to reflect on my reaction to it. Being critical this way doesn’t help the experience of worshiping, but it seems that it doesn’t take much for my critic persona to emerge. When I was in full-time ministry, it served me in good stead at times, because I was the usual object of my own criticism.

At a course on clergy self-care some years ago, the leader told us that clergy need to find their own means for spiritual feeding. The traditional triad of prayer, bible reading, and worship work well for lay-people as spiritual disciplines, but less so for clergy, because they are too closely tied to our professional lives. Since retiring, I have spent most Sundays in the choir rather than pulpit and altar. In that time, I have found it increasingly easy to worship wholeheartedly in our parish church. Even so, at times I find myself worrying about liturgical details that are Not My Problem. Also, other people’s sermons can at times trigger “trainer mode”.

Those things came back in spades last Sunday. I am left wondering: will the “professional preacher and presider” in me ever go away? will I ever really be able to relax and just participate in a service of worship in the spirit in which it is offered? We’ll see.

In the meantime, even after six years out of the saddle, I know that I haven’t quite let go of the priest-persona. The other question is, of course, whether I want to do that. But that’s a question for another day.

The clay and the potter

In the fall of 2008 I was going through a vocational crisis. One of the ways I used to deal with it was to go on an week-long solitary retreat. I booked time at a retreat center that offered a hermitage, and began preparing myself. I got a lot of advice from friends about how to spend my time, some of it helpful, some not so much, but all were well-meant.

Perhaps the best advice I was given was from a friend who just handed me a book, with the words “I think you might find this helpful.” Truer words were never spoken. The book was “Let Your Life Speak,” by Parker J. Palmer. Over my time on retreat, I read and re-read this little book, devouring and meditating on every word. I wrote to Parker afterwards, thanking him for the book, and telling him that it might just have saved my life — at least in the vocational sense!

More than ten years have passed. The crisis came and went over the ensuing year or so, and in due time I retired. Retirement poses its own vocational issues, some of which I have written about previously on this blog. I have come to a place where I seem to have things more or less in place for a decently comfortable and engaging retirement. I like to tell people that “I am as busy as I want to be,” adding that sometimes I really don’t want to be busy. That’s really quite OK — for the most part I find myself content with life as it is now.

I decided recently to re-read Palmer’s book on vocation, for reasons that are not immediately apparent to me. I’m reading it slowly this time, perhaps because there’s not such a sense of crisis, and I’m finding things I either didn’t notice then or had forgotten. This morning this passage struck me:

Making pottery … involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter’s hand, telling her what it can and cannot do–and if she fails to listen, the outcome will be both frail and ungainly.

Let Your Life Speak, p. 16
48313072 – pottery.

The point he’s making here has to do with vocation being more a response to our true inborn nature than to an external call. If we are clay, we are called to be as “clayish” as we can be. What struck me today was the role of the potter, allowing the clay to live into its true nature, working with what is available, and not cursing the clay for not being something else.

I’ve been on both sides of the table in dealing with vocational issues. I’ve wrestled with my own sense of calling, and I’ve walked with others in the same process. I recall one young man seeking ordination who responded to the question “Why do you want to be a priest?” by saying “Everyone says I should be.” Well and good–he had great gifts. But he was unable to say with any clarity how he experienced this supposed call in terms of his own self-perception. When we asked him “What else could you do?” he came to life, describing some of the academic work he had been doing, and the possibility of a doctoral dissertation coming out of it. It was very clear where his “clayness” lay. As the potter in this situation, my colleagues and I had to try to point the candidate towards his true being, and to encourage him to live into it.

I have worked with more than one superior who had very clear ideas about what constituted a good subordinate. I found these relationships difficult, because sometimes I found myself devalued for not quite being what they wanted, and also for having gifts that they did not seem to value. To use the clay metaphor, I sometimes felt like a piece of wood that refused to become a pot.

As a retired priest, I am less accountable for my time and work than before. Even so, I hold my current license as an honorary assistant at the pleasure of both the parish Rector and my Bishop. There is more freedom in this situation to live into my own unique clayness than I experienced when in stipendiary ministry. I wish for all my colleagues in ministry, as well as for all people dealing with vocational questions, that they may find similar freedom in their life and work.

An Interesting Number

Many Math. majors (like me in a former life) will have heard the “proof” that all numbers are interesting.

  1. Assume there is a non-empty set of natural numbers (i.e. 1,2,3,…) which are uninteresting.
  2. This set must have a smallest member.
  3. Being the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting.
  4. Since a number cannot be both interesting and uninteresting, the assumption in 1. must be false.
  5. Therefore, all numbers are interesting.

But then, to riff on George Orwell (cf. Animal Farm), all numbers may be interesting, but some are more interesting than others.

70Today I encountered a number which for me is very interesting, the number 70. What’s interesting about it? Only that age 70 sounds to me a lot older than age 69. Maybe it’s the change in the first digit, something that’s only happened to me 6 times before. Age is a physical reality, but it’s also a mental and emotional reality.

A friend once said of a mutual acquaintance that he had been “born 80 years old.” Even in middle age, he presented as tired and crotchety, often harking back to earlier days. I hope no-one ever says that of me, although I recall that someone once described me as “stuffy.” My rather warped sense of humor tends to hide when I’m in a public role. People who know me better know that my wit sometimes gets the better of me.

passing-days-3292952 greyI’ve now been retired for about 5 years (Since June 23 or July 31, 2013, depending on how you reckon it.) I’ve enjoyed most of those years, especially the last two or three. It’s good to be free to make your own decisions about what to do with your time, without too many occupational restrictions. I had some plans when I retired. Some have borne fruit, others have been deferred, still others have been put away permanently, and some new things have arisen. I’m not making many new plans at the moment, except for our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations in just over a year.

When I was in school and looking forward to the great challenges of University and adult life, anyone older than my parents seemed absolutely ancient. I’m much older now than they were then, and I don’t feel old at all … at least not most of the time!

The interest of this particular birthday is that it the first one in a long time that has turned me to thinking about the future. Not the past — there’s still plenty of time for that — but what is to come. If my parents’ and grandparents’ lives are any indication, I should have 15 years or so to look forward to. I don’t look forward today in the same way I looked forward at age 16, which was filled with both eagerness and anxiety. Rather, I welcome each day as it comes, with new light in the window, and both new and old things to do.

Life continues to be good.
Thanks be to God.

Doing it again

Today I had the privilege of preaching and presiding at the Eucharist at Holy Trinity (aka “HTAC”). I had been scheduled to preach for a while, but other commitments took both our Rector and our Assistant Priest away from the parish. So…

Yours truly got to do what I used to do most Sundays for a quarter of a century. They say that riding a bike is easy once you learn how to do it, and once you have learned, doing it again is simple. You just get in the saddle and pedal.

That’s rather how today felt. HTAC is not “my” parish, at least not in the sense that St. Matthew’s Cathedral and St. Augustine’s-Parkland were. There, I was the Rector, expected to be present and available every day, and to do what had to be done at pulpit and altar most Sundays. Most Sundays at HTAC, I’m sitting in the back row of the bass section in the church choir, and happy to be there.

Today was different. I prayed with the choir before the service as usual, but today I led the prayers. I sang the psalm with the choir, but today from the presider’s desk. I proclaimed the Gospel and preached, and then went to the altar to preside at the sacrament.

These things happen every Sunday at HTAC. But today I assumed roles that other people usually take. And (I have to confess) it felt good.

Readers of this blog may have intuited that I wasn’t really ready to retire in 2013, but rather that the situation was forced on me. Today reminded me that I still feel most alive when I’m ministering in the pulpit and at the altar. I still believe that this I what God made me for, but I recognize that other people have similar calls, and that I have to let go as I am able.

I am truly grateful for today’s experience. I hope that my ministry today helped at least someone. That’s all I can expect, and all any ordained person can hope for.

Thanks be to God for this day. I have posted the text for today’s sermon under “Sermons and theological discussions.” Read it HERE.

Holy_Trinity_Anglican_Church_Edmonton_Alberta_Canada_01A
View from the Northwest – 100 Street and 84 Ave.

4 years — and not counting

number4_PNG15034Tomorrow is the 4th anniversary of my retirement. I left my last parish on June 23, 2013, taking 5 weeks of accumulated vacation time before the mandated date: the first day of the month following one’s 65th birthday. So, August 1 is the date I left the employ of the church and began collecting the various pensions that continue to support me and my wife. Four years have gone by remarkably quickly, although as I look back, the first one seemed very long. I wasn’t really ready to quit, plus I had some “unfinished business.” Some time into the second year, I realized I had finally let go of the stuff that had been occupying my mind, and I was able to relax and enjoy my freedom.

The freedom of the retired person is the freedom to choose how you’re going to spend each day. I can listen to the traffic reports most mornings, and feel grateful that I don’t have to be anywhere in particular. The clock isn’t running, and the telephone is no longer my master. Not that I’m sitting around doing nothing — I have several activities I have chosen to do — but it’s my choice, not an employer’s dictates.

I am grateful to be in good health. To be sure, I’m a step or two slower than I used to be, and I do have the occasional “senior moment,” but my doctor said that everything looked good after my last physical.

Four years into retirement, and I’m enjoying myself. Again, it’s not that there weren’t times of great enjoyment in my time in parish ministry, but there were also some very “interesting times,” which I would not choose for myself (or anyone else for that matter). I don’t need to dwell on those experiences again.

For the moment, I’m as busy as I want to be. There’s plenty of time to do crossword puzzles, read novels, and play hearts online. I’ve been thinking about picking up my guitar again after a long hiatus. There are projects still waiting for me to get to them — digitizing many of my 300+ LP’s, scanning and saving many of my film-based photos. There’s over 10,000 of those, so it’s a big job just deciding what to preserve. I think about it from time to time, but it should be done: they hold a lot of stories. When my mother died, many of her stories died with her. Her photo albums had very few captions.

I have some commitments outside the house: the condo board, two choirs, Education for Ministry, occasional Sunday supply at other churches, Thursday morning study group at Holy Trinity. Plenty! And all of my own choosing.

Life is good. Thanks be to God.

round tuit

 

 

On the journey to…

A sermon this morning on Genesis 12:1-4a (the call of Abram) started me thinking about various times in my life I have stepped out of what might be expected, and gone where the call has led.

The first was not of my own volition, but my parents’. When I was only three years old, they decided to pull up roots in England and transplant our family to Canada. We settled in Drumheller, Alberta, a far cry from the great metropolis of London where I was born. I don’t know exactly how my parents felt about it at the time, but it became clear over the years that being so far from family and old friends was difficult for both of them, especially my mother. My early years in this country were marked by a sense of being “not quite at home,” a feeling that has stayed with me throughout my life.

The second such event came when I left teaching school to return to Edmonton, and to do… I wasn’t quite sure what! All my spouse and I knew was that we couldn’t stay where we were, and the opportunities were far greater in the city where we had both attended University. Some family members were horrified that I would give a seemingly secure and respectable job to search for something different.

That move led to a graduate degree, a job with our Provincial Government, and us settling down as a family. But God had other ideas. After nine years in that job, we again pulled up stakes and left for Saskatoon for me to enter theological college. I had no real idea where this was leading, except for the conviction that I was called to go down this road.

The road led to ordination and the call to be the pastor of a small-town parish. It was a great adventure, but not without its problems. After a few years there, I moved on to a suburban parish, where I stayed almost thirteen years. In time, I felt the need to move on: I accepted a call to become Dean and Rector of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Brandon, Manitoba.

This was another move into the unknown: a new parish, a new city, a new province, and a new diocese. I didn’t realize at the time just how big a move this would be. Local customs are different, even at the relatively small remove of a couple of Canadian provinces. But we persisted, through some great years, and some not-so-great, until my retirement in 2013.

Each one of those moves required a measure of faith. In every case, I had the sense that I was going where I had to go, except perhaps the first one, when I had no choice in the matter.

In two of the places where I served the Church, I had conversations with people whose whole lives had been centered on that place. Many of them were puzzled why I might want to live somewhere else: “[town] has everything a person needs.” That may have been true, but going elsewhere was not contingent upon needs, but upon a call, just as Abram heard God’s call to leave home and family and travel to “a land which I will show you.”

I have been on this journey all my life, and now God has brought me to a place where I might reasonably hope to live out my days in peace and reasonable comfort. Sometimes, though, I find myself wondering…

Under Authority

Notes for a sermon on Luke 7:1-10, preached on May 29, 2016 at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (early service)
and Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (English service).

ACofC logoELCiC logo

About 15 years ago, on a beautiful Sunday morning in July, I walked with the rest of the Diocese of Edmonton’s General Synod delegation from the Waterloo University residences to the university arena. There we joined with other Anglicans and Lutherans from every part of Canada, and many people from the area around. We joined in a grand and joyful celebration, during the course of which Archbishop Michael Peers and National Bishop Telmor Sartisan signed what is now known as the Waterloo Declaration. Since that time, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada have been in Full Communion. [Pastor Jason’s] [My] presence here today is one of the fruits of that relationship. Trinity Lutheran and Holy Trinity Anglican have been working at building a relationship based on Waterloo.

The years leading up to that day were a time of dialogue between our churches, beginning with discussion among theologians, moving out into the dioceses and synods, and eventually into congregations. In my first charge, I was delighted to share a celebration of shared communion with the neighbouring Lutheran congregation. A few years later, in a different community, after the release of the proposed Waterloo Declaration, I participated with parishioners in a study of the proposed text, along with counterparts from the Lutheran congregation from just down the street.

We had very good discussions over four weeks, but things came to a head when a man from the Lutheran congregation said that this was all very interesting, but what difference would it make to their church? I told him that if their Pastor received another call, and they were in the call process, they would be free to call me if they so desired. “But… but… you are not Lutheran!” was his spluttered response. Aha!

So… what is this all about?

One several levels, it’s about authority, which is one of the underlying themes of today’s Gospel reading. It appears to be a simple story: Jesus is interrupted (something that happens all the time in his ministry) and asked to go to heal the slave of a centurion. Without actually meeting the slave or his master, Jesus effects the healing from a distance. A miracle!

We could leave it there, rejoicing in Jesus’ mastery over the forces of evil and disease. But let’s take a closer look at the story, and especially at the centurion, the second most important character, even though he never appears.

He’s quite a surprising character. The fact that he paid for the synagogue in Capernaum sets him apart immediately as a friend to the people whose land his army is occupying. He is a soldier with a heart, who cares deeply for his sick slave. He recognizes Jesus as a holy man who can help him. He knows enough about Jewish customs and beliefs not to risk defiling Jesus with his physical presence, or asking him into his house. What he has done has already pushed the boundaries of ordinary expectations.

Jesus’ response also pushes those boundaries. His ability to heal the sick is not constrained by space, ethnicity, or social status. Rather, he reaches out to someone beyond his community who recognizes Jesus’ authority, when the centurion declares:

For I also am a man set under authority…

Although he is set under authority, and wields it over others, the centurion’s power is limited. He can’t heal his slave without appealing to Jesus’ authority. Jesus likewise is “set under authority,” doing the will of his Father in heaven in bringing healing to this world.

“Authority” has a particular meaning in the New Testament. It is associated with power—the ability to do things—but it is more than that. Having authority implies the legal or moral right to exercise power, which means that the power and the right come from elsewhere. The centurion has authority under the rules of the Roman Empire and its army. Jesus’ authority comes from God alone.

After the Resurrection, Jesus committed his authority to proclaim and to build the Reign of God to his disciples. We read in John 20:21

Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’

We are the inheritors of Jesus’ authority, and so we are called to exercise that authority in the knowledge of its source. It comes ultimately from God, through Jesus, through the apostles, down the ages in the Church with all its historical twists and turns, to us today, in this building in this city in this year.

Authority brings responsibility. Power can never be left idle. Having the ability to do good demands of us that we actually do good. Power must also be exercised rightly. The moral or legal right to do things does not mean that whatever we do is the right thing.

It is no accident that the Church has devoted a huge amount of energy over the centuries to the matter of authority. It goes back right into the New Testament, beginning in Acts, when the eleven remaining apostles added Matthias to their number, only after making certain that he had the right history. Later the Church in Jerusalem needed to check Paul’s credentials before agreeing that his mission could continue. First Timothy contains a detailed list of qualifications for a bishop.

In today’s Church, as both Lutherans and Anglicans have received it, we give great attention to authorizing people to the ministry of word and sacrament. For both communions, these are crucial matters. Article VII of the Augsburg Confession says this:

The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

You can find almost the same words in Article XIX of the (Anglican) Articles of Religion.

We spend a huge amount of our institutional energy in trying to ensure that the people who lead our congregations—both lay and ordained—are properly authorized. Some people may view that at as a waste of time, but I would submit that it is of utmost importance. Jesus was “under authority.” He left his church under the same authority. We are under God’s authority, called to help build God’s kingdom in this world.

May all our doings, corporate and individual, display our commitment to doing our Lord’s will.

Amen.

NMP & Holy Saturday

I started writing this in January, and am only now revisiting it on Holy Saturday, a day of very special significance in the Christian calendar, but which is typically ignored &/or misunderstood. More about that later…

When my spouse and I were about to retire, she and I attended a retirement dinner given by her employer. One of the other guests, who had retired a year or two earlier, said that the best advice she could give to new retirees was for them to remember that most things henceforth would be NMP:

Not. My. Problem.

For those who have been in administrative or supervisory roles, that’s a hard lesson to learn. For clergy, it can be even harder. We develop relationships with people, and establish ways of operating in our charges that create emotional bonds with people and places. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be doing the work we are called to.

However…

When we leave a place, we have to leave behind all the pastoral and administrative relationships that we developed in the years in that place. That’s a hard thing to do, for both us and the people to whom we have ministered. Some do it well, some not so well, but there will always be people who are hurt by the process.

An  example:
During the first year in one charge, a parishioner whom I had only met in passing at that time came to talk to me. His wife had told him that their marriage was over. He had had a very close relationship with my predecessor, who still lived in the community while employed in a different ministry. The man was deeply bereft, not just because his wife was leaving him, but because his former pastor had told him to come and see me. He told me, “I thought that X was my friend, and he told me to go away.”

It’s easy for people to confuse pastoral relationships with ordinary friendship. When the pastoral relationship ends, as it inevitably will, does the friendship end?

My predecessor had done what he and I both knew to be the right thing by referring a pastoral issue to me, but the parishioner could not see it that way.

When clergy leave a place, the situation is reversed. Some people slough off the relationship like they do an old coat. “That priest is gone, now we’ll start to connect with the next one.” Others — like the man above — find it harder to disconnect, because the relationship has become entangled.

My predecessor knew for himself that that my parishioner’s issues were NMP.

I’ve tried hard to hold to this, and have mostly succeeded. I do confess to having failed a time or two, because something hit me hard and I reacted emotionally. It’s very easy to do this in real life, and even easier to do it via social media. I have asked forgiveness on at least one occasion, but it would have been much better for all concerned if I had never had occasion to do so.

Everyone is human. Everyone makes mistakes. But not everyone learns from their mistakes. When something is NMP, please don’t try to make it yours all over again.

Back to Holy Saturday…
This is the day when the Church recalls that Christ lay dead in the tomb. It comes between the profound shock of Jesus’ Crucifixion and the astonishing joy of the Resurrection. It is a day of emptiness, of grief, and of waiting. To be sure, looking through the lens of Easter tells us what we await. But let us remember that Jesus’ disciples grieved on that day without knowing with any certainty what the next day would bring. All they knew was that their Master was dead, and they could not see the future.

Leaving a place or a career can often be very much a “Holy Saturday” experience. It is disorienting. It brings grief. It leaves us longing for a lost past and hoping for an unseen future. And as in every grief process, the griever can make wrong decisions while the future reality unfolds.

 

What’s Missing?

I haven’t posted much in the past year, ever since passing the 1st anniversary of my retirement. Some, maybe most, of the issues that were on the top when I first left full-time ministry have evaporated, or at least receded into the background. It’s now two years since I retired, and I’m feeling more in tune with what a newly-retired colleague once said: “I have discovered that God made me for retirement.”

I have several places to serve in the community, plus frequent-enough opportunities to preach and preside at worship. There’s not a lot of pressure in my life, and that’s just fine with me. My health is pretty good, we have enough income to live on, and we have reasonable reserves for the future. All told, life is pretty much OK.

And yet…

It feels like there may be something missing. Many days I accomplish almost exactly nothing that anyone else might consider useful. I’m going to take more time in the next while to think and pray about where I’m headed. I know I need to read more: there are several books on my shelf with bookmarks in them, mostly pretty near the beginning. That’s a start.