(Proper 8)
Romans 6.12-23;
Matthew 10.40-42
Not surprisingly, at the moment quite a number of people are asking me, “How do you feel?” I think they’re referring mainly to my impending retirement. And I’m not sure how to reply. I’m not sure really what I feel! I’ve lived so long in this one place – and it’s been so good. It’s 32 years since we moved into St. Cuthbert’s Vicarage. I remember waking up one morning and thinking, I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my life. Now I’ve lived here nearly twice as long as anywhere else.
It was a strange thing recently to have to clear the house which had been my family home for 55 years. I took long enough over that – with my mother in a residential care home for the last years of her life, and then keeping the house on for my own use. But eventually I realised it wasn’t the place for me to go back to. When the sale went through, things moved very fast because the house had to be cleared out over Palm Sunday weekend and Easter. This is not the fortnight when a priest has the most time on his hands. Still I have boxes and boxes from that house in Hartlepool – and I haven’t had the chance to look properly into them, or to decide what to do with them. Except that I know that most of them will have to go! The fact that my parents themselves had put so much into boxes in cupboards is the clue. Why do we keep things? How will we use them? I’ve got that question to face with everything of my own possessions that are stored up in the Vicarage – only more so!
A theme that’s run through a lot of what people are saying to me at the moment is summed up in a card I was given the other day. “Wishing you best wishes on your retirement. Enjoy and make it a great time doing all the things that you want to do…”
That’s something that I’m looking forward to: “to do all the things that I want to do.” Except that this is more than a retirement! This weekend is also the anniversary of my ordination: yesterday, 44 years since I was ordained priest in Durham Cathedral; today, 45 years since I was ordained deacon. So for me this is always a time for thanksgiving and reflection. And these are not things that I will be giving up. There is a requirement that after retirement I should take off at least six months from exercising my ministry as a priest. I realise that will mean something of an abrupt stop. I’d like to retire with a sense of completion – with everything set in order and the job done; but it’s not. I’m all too conscious of the things we’ve worked on so long that are still not sorted out. How do you stop a roof from leaking after spending so much time and money on it? How is it that you can fix the boiler and find that then the radiators don’t work? Do we simply fix the electrics as they are at St. John’s? – or grit our teeth and take the pain of finding more money and filling in faculty application forms so that we can improve and future-proof them? These are the questions that I have raised – and now I have to leave them behind! I realise how wearing and wearying they are, but now I have to hand them over to churchwardens and those who will work with them. So please be supportive of those wardens! – it’s not an enviable task.
But no one’s task is ever over! I’m going to find that out for myself in taking on home ownership at the age of 70, having to make decisions for myself, having to sort out all those practical things without phoning up the Diocesan Surveyor. A friend of mine who has retired into a new-build (as I will) wrote to me that it was great to be able to decide just how she really wanted to have things for the first time. I’m not so sure! For the moment, I look ahead to see looming issues of snagging and then probably quite a long-haul as I work out just how I can make myself comfortable – to change a freshly-built house into a home.
But this is all rather a long digression. This time of leaving and moving is also the time when I look back on those things that have made me what and who I am as a priest. That doesn’t get given up, whatever the future may hold. The six months’ pause in ministry isn’t an imposition by those who make the rules up. It’s a time to stop and reflect on the person I am, formed for better or worse by God’s grace. To see what I value. To understand something of what I can be and do when freed from the requirements of what I have to do whether I want to do them or not. One of the practical parish questions we’ve considered is, who is going to put the bins out? Actually I haven’t minded putting out the rubbish and recycling, but what will make a difference is knowing that I don’t have to do or organise it each week! All the administration which has increasingly tied me to a desk is necessary stuff – and there’s something satisfying when you manage to keep things in relatively good order. Perhaps that’s why we talk about “the office and work of a priest in the Church of God.” But now all those files from my computer have been handed over on two USB drives – one for each parish. I face the question: so what am I? - cut loose from parish, PCC, meetings and admin?
Partly that’s answered by what I might plan to take with me as I prepare to move. What are you going to do with all those books? – has been one of the questions I’ve been asked. The answer has been, I’m not planning to use all those bedrooms in the new house for beds! Hopefully quite a lot of the books can go with me, for me to return to or even to get round to reading properly for the first time. I’ve wondered about taking all the files I stored up from eight years in university settings to see what sense I can make of them. But I suspect that they should go. I need to do fresh thinking. I hope there’ll be time to reflect – and that I’ll have the discipline to do so. And that needs to go along with making time to pray. For that I think I need a new Spiritual Director, someone who will accompany me on the way – probably someone who has had the experience I have had of a long parish ministry and then the adjustment to retirement.
With all this, alongside the necessary time to unwind and put aside so much that has sometimes tired me out, there’s the need to be ready for fresh questioning. I’m conscious that so far I haven’t referred to today’s set readings from Scripture. That first one is really troubling. Abraham believing that God is calling him to offer his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. He gets as far as to tie him to an altar on a pyre of wood with his knife raised in his hand before he hears the call of the angel to stop. It raises the question, how much do we convince ourselves of what is right before we can discover there really is another way? Someone writing the other day in a publication called “The Jewish Journal” dared to question the conventional interpretation that this is about Abraham’s willingness to give everything up in obedience to God’s will. Don’t we need, instead, he asked, to remind ourselves of the meaning of the name “Israel,” given first to Jacob and then to the nation who would be his descendants, “Israel” which means literally “he struggles with God.”
God calls to us – and he calls us to
the struggle. There
are things which we need continually to wrestle with – though I hope to do so
under less pressure in the future. I’ve found myself going back to the words of
T S Eliot in his poem, Little Gidding. Little Gidding is a place which
has been important to me since I visited it as an undergraduate, over 50 years
ago – a “thin place,” where you feel that God is very near, but also a place
where people have built religious community and understood that ours is a
journey to make alongside one another. Eliot concludes his poem, the final part
of a long poem in four sections:
We
shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
