Reflection
for Ascension Day 2018
Renewal of Vows
Yesterday,
eleven days from my last day of work as the Rector of All Saints and
ten days since the beginning of my retirement, I drove alone two and
a half hours each way to attend a diocesan service of Renewal of
Ordination Vows. It was a time to remember the promises we Priests
made when we were ordained and entered into a different order of
life. The last line from the Ordination Vows after the answering all
the things that “I will” do, is the Bishop saying; “May the
Lord who given you the will to do these things give you the grace and
power to perform them.”
At
the service Bishop Skirving preached and presided. His sermon had a
few moment on how the disciples, looking up into the sky, like in
Dali's painting of the Ascension, moving away from their sight, had
to make the transition from living with Jesus being with them in the
flesh and the Risen Christ living with them fully in the Spirit in
their daily life together.
“Looking
up to the sky” triggered my remembrances of going to see the Total
Eclipse of the Sun last year and how it was a metaphor for my
retirement. There is a long lead up to the Total Eclipse- you know it
is happening but you treat it like clouds just passing over – until
that moment when the totality is achieved. The darkness is eerie as
all sound stop- the birds stop singing in awe as did the people
around us. It is a time when no words work and for a few moments it
is a collective intake of Holy Breath. Like all moments of awe there
are hints of awful. When the light comes back slowly, there is an
awareness of the brightness of everything and how precious it all is.
I
found retirement like that; while having known for months that the
day would come I was not really fully prepared for the moment the
birds would stop singing. While no longer employed by a church, I was
still a Priest even though my thirty-four record of fully and
faithfully performing those vows was at times more spotty than I had
hoped on that day in 1984. I remember the day after the Ordination to
the Diaconate how empty I felt entering into that state of being and
worrying how I might have made a mistake and I wasn't up to the Call
I had heard years before. That darkness passed and I had to keep
returning to the Light over and over again.
The
first day of my retirement I had that same empty feeling like a
cavity inside me of the unease of faithfully living as an Ordained
Person in retirement without the structure of a job to help keep me
faithful. The feeling passed as I am coming into a deeper awareness
of what my Call might look like in this time and place of my life. My
prayer for today is “May the Lord who given me the will to do these
things give me the grace and power to perform them.”
Retirement
Renewal
of Vows with Bishop preaching
Ascension;
remembering transition times
no
longer old being but becoming signs
of
God pulling us into deeper searching.
Reminded
me of watching eclipse of sun,
knowing
a darkness will be coming soon
but
then all the birds stopped singing tune
as
awe filled dark emptiness began its run.
Later
light came, highlighting new meaning
seeing
all as gifts, ready to be again blessed
to
be used in so many ways I never guessed
as
old beings gathered up in divine gleaning.
New
retirement moved from being my plight
of
darkness to new meaning God does plight.
