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| Photo credit Lois Keen |
On Monday I wrote these words in my handwritten journal: "I grew up in chaos. Chaos is normal for me. Or it has been."
I'm not sure what my normal state is now.
My maternal grandparents and my parents were alcoholics. The adults in my life were not reliable. Except for one - an aunt unrelated by blood who as I look back was the one stable compass point in my life. She was Catholic and lived in New York. I didn't see her very often. And while she was reliable, her home life was not, and I stayed with her from time to time. When I was with her we went to Mass every morning. I was not a Catholic. But I liked going with her.
Trust has not been my strong suit (for those of you who play bridge). Trusting God has been an absolute NO. "Your will be done" is not in my conversational vocabulary in conversations with God. I say it in the Lord's Prayer and it makes no impression on me.
Last Saturday morning, August 10, at 8:00 a.m., as I was reading Morning Prayer, someplace in my mind a thought was forming - "I just want to be able to do what you most need me to do".
It came while I was reading the lessons, not really absorbing them at all because at the same time I was fretting about not having full time, reliable, remunerative work and fretting more that I would end up being cut off from the institutional aspect of being a priest if I wasn't attached to a parish, and in the fretting I heard this still small voice of some part of me saying something like, " As long as it's something you need me to do. As long as I'm useful."
You see, I can't recall the exact words. They were a thought, a feeling, as much as they were words. The sense of them was that my intent was to trust God.
And I smiled.
I smiled, because I have never trusted God, so far as I know. So it was a surprise. And I was pretty proud of myself. And though I continued to fret, there was this second layer - first "adventure", now "trust" - and I wonder where it is going.
As the week has continued, I begin to see that I have been learning to trust for a very long time. Today I was able to trace it back almost thirty years to the days when I was working on issues from the past and part of my prayer life was to include my anger as a spiritual exercise, including yelling at God and throwing my Book of Common Prayer across the room or on the floor at God. That BCP is held together on the spine with surgical tape, a metaphor in itself that I find satisfying.
Anyway, it took trust to yell at God and call God names and still expect God to love me and stay in my life. It may have been the beginning.
To continue to trace the progress toward trust would take more time than I want to take today. However, just as I decided to live in watchfulness for adventure, I now live in watchfulness for the fruit of trust. Hence the title "The Telltale Heart". Clearly my heart, as the ancients understood heart, has been working on and harboring this for a long time and only now, at an advanced age, revealing itself to me.
Today I wrote this in the comments on someone's Facebook post:
" The church as institution is ambivalent, at best, about recognizing non-parochial work by a priest as priestly work. I keep coming back to the legends about David of Wales as I re-examine "call" in this in between season. He is said to have carried the church with him, metaphorically and physically, into the mines and factories and to bring the miners and factory workers into the churches where they were not much welcome, and to tramp in plain clothes all over Wales going into every cottage kitchen and taking bread from the oven and wine from the cellar and celebrating at the kitchen table facing the people. In this I see him saying, "This mine, this factory, this farm, this kitchen and every farm, mine and factory and kitchen table, are holy ground and the work is holy work and the people are consecrated to that work." This image drew me into the priesthood, and I have come back to it at this time when the churches and the institution is being invited (pushed?) out the door to see the holiness all around and to join God there. And I'm feeling my way to what my part as a priest might be. Twenty years ago I called it "giving away the priesthood". Today I might say "revealing, pointing out the priestliness in all lives". This is part of the work of a priest. It and I are works in progress."
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| Photo Credit Lois Keen |
I'm looking on these months as sabbatical. Given what I wrote on Facebook, what do I need a sabbatical to include in order to get the most out of it? One thing comes to me today: Conversations with bishops, canon for clergy in transition, and Church Pension Group on recognizing non-parochial work as institutional diocesan work equal with parochial work - not the exception. I will record those conversations and I will report them out in the way people on sabbatical record their progress.
Trust will have to advance another step to do this.
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