Renewal of Vows

 

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.